Marcel LeCourt’s house was exactly as he had expected: simple, plain, modest – the exact dwelling of the reclusive suicide. As the hot-wired pickup pulled up about a football field’s length away from the modest house on the outskirts of Arkham, Mystica pulled up the left sleeve of his white jacket and snuffed his cigarette out in the flesh of the crook of his arm, savoring the searing sensation. It was all he needed to let him know he was still alive; still trapped in the body of David Martin. But tonight, that would all end.

Beside him in the driver’s seat, Zahra Nassar adjusted the rear-view mirror, turning it toward herself to examine the dark brown roots of her hair emerging beneath the dyed pink locks hanging in her face. She brushed a long strand of bangs out of her eyes and poked hopelessly at her scalp. This was her distraction from it all – the horror of what was sure to happen. He had explained it to her, albeit vaguely, on the ride here.

“You are to wait,” he had said, eyes darting to and fro across the barely-paved back road that led to LeCourt’s home, “until someone emerges from the house. Regardless of who it is, you are not to question it. You are to simply wait until they enter the truck, and you will drive. No questions until you reach Boston. At that point, you are to say the codeword. I do hope you remember it. For your sake.”

He had said this last phrase with a certain gravity to his voice – that baritone that haunted her dreams sunk further, drowning into a bassy ocean that threatened to swallow her consciousness whole. She had asked him what was so important about LeCourt, but he hadn’t answered. He’d simply glared at her with those damned icy blue eyes. They always had this aspect to them, like they could see her soul, bare and naked in the ice of the new year; hope clinging to the side of the raft of her imagination, threatening to sink into that sea that waited in his gaze. It was something simultaneously murderous and ultimately romantic, but refused to say “I love you.” And she knew no one ever would. Especially not this thing that slept in the skin of David Martin. The man he was masquerading as was lost – twisted into an amalgamation of human and monster, dancing in a constant 1-2-3 waltz with the devil himself. David Martin was in a coma, and this…thing…had taken residency in the vacant room. And he was ready to check out.

Amid the fence-posts of the trees separating their position in the truck from LeCourt’s property, they could make out the distant shadow of a figure moving along the edge of the house, only becoming truly apparent to them when it passed by a window. It was shaking – moving suspiciously with its head lashing to and fro in desperate motion.

“LeCourt, no doubt,” Mystica muttered, observing the shade with great interest. “He’s paranoid. Not that I’d blame him.”

Zahra did not respond immediately. Rather, her gaze was caught somewhere in between where they sat in the dunky, beaten-down pickup and the garden path where LeCourt moved like a phantom in the night. Her almond eyes bounced between the shadows of the branches of the trees blocking their not-so-apparent sting operation from LeCourt’s view. He was oblivious to their position, but they had perfect sight. At least, Mystica did. Zahra was somewhere else, seemingly in love with the distance between them all. Three souls in maybe three square acres, though miles apart.

“He can’t be more than five years older than you,” Zahra said dreamily, still lost in her fantasyland.

“It’s more like I’m millennia older than he is,” Mystica replied dryly, watching in earnest as LeCourt fled back into his house, but not before the professor took a series of suspicious glances around his dark yard, eyes locked open in steely glare like a watchtower sentinel. Then, he was gone, wrapped up in his illusory safety inside the walls of his stately, cabin-like headquarters.

“But the body you’re in,” Zahra continued, “the mind you’ve accidentally absorbed. It’s how you know this guy. He’s only a few years older than David Martin, right?”


“Correct,” Mystica answered, sober in mind. “Your point being?”

“I mean, if LeCourt’s had that many more years to live…he seems so sensitive. Why hasn’t he married?”

There was a moment of silence as Mystica sat, perplexed by Zahra’s interrogative. He had begun to notice she, like David, was one for sentiment – those who saw some sort of invisible beauty in the dark and deranged, as though madness had a budding flower that only needed the morning light or shimmering moonlight to bring it to glorious, colourful fruition. This nature in Zahra Nassar and David Martin was naïveté to the Sleeping God. He was unfamiliar with these moments of reflection; these hours of thought and meditation on the inherent goodness of the human soul. He, or it, was much more tactical and logic-based. The only thing that truly mattered to the amalgamation of all things chaotic was the end. Truly Machiavellian, Mystica only saw the end goal, and the often messy, gore-laden means were inconsequential.

With a slight chuckle, Mystica turned his gaze to his pretty, yet naïve compatriot and replied in a hoarse, almost cruel whisper.

“Women don’t desire sensitivity; they desire confidence. And confidence is something Marcel LeCourt has lacked in spades within his soul from the moment he crawled out of his mother’s womb.”

Zahra, taken aback by the misogynistic, all-encompasing response from the Collective Consciousness, could not respond, at first. The way Mystica had said it, in that horrid, almost diabolical cackle of a lack of volume, had hurt her somewhere deep inside – stabbed her like a hot blade through pig fat, melting away the unimportant parts and striking at the heart of the matter. Somehow, he had made her feel so very, very small and inconsequential. He had fired shots at the entirety of the human condition, while at the same time only insulting one gender. That was hatred; to sanction the entirety of life off to the appreciation of selfishness. It was only then that Zahra Nassar understood what exactly she was working with: the great, sleeping mind of the damned.

“I’d keep the engine running,” Mystica snickered, still running high on the adrenaline that pumped through his stolen veins. “Follow my instructions.”

And with that final admonition, he was off, slipping out of the passenger door. After gently closing it brhind himself, he walked a few steps down the road, then stopped, clearly thinking. With his icy blue eyes locked on the house, Mystica chuckled to himself before stepping off the barely-paved road and into the thickness of the woods that ran alongside the concrete like a lion stalking a gazelle. Before Zahra could even process the scene fully, Mystica had disappeared into the copse of the trees, which welcomed him in like the warm arms of motherhood. The fingers of the leafless branches scraped at his face, leaving little scratches along his cheeks and temples, but he was unbothered by the injuries. This body would not be his own, in time. What use was there in worrying over vanity when this face would not be his within mere moments.

Amazing, what could happen in the course of an hour. He pondered this fact as he moved along the path upon which the trees guided him. In the span of the next sixty minutes or so, so many different options could emerge from this singular event. This, he knew, was where timelines were created. As the pressure of causality pressed down on the atoms of reality, there would arise an instant where the little bits of time-space would be pulled in two separate, polar opposite directions. And in that moment, there would be created two separate instances of chronology. On one end, an outcome, on the other axial atom of reality, an entirely separate outcome. But this – the moment he would come face to face with Marcel LeCourt – would determine the reality in which they must persist. He turned his face upward toward the porch light of LeCourt’s house.

“A new soul,” Mystica whispered.

And the shadows welcomed him home.

Home...

---

Darkness. Locked in a state of perpetual motion. The steel twisted all around. A symphony of life’s destruction. The meat in the midst of the machine, slowly being torn to bits by the forces of physics. This earth was not meant for him. This earth was not meant for anyone of his kind. Darkness.

Then, the great, booming voice from beyond the black veil, speaking in monotone, overlapping itself on the backend of the whispers, all coming from everywhere and nowhere. Eternity. Darkness.

“No. Not this one. This one is different.

You shall live.
Live in me.
Live in us.
My brother is awakened?
Ah, then I have slept for too long.
Come, little one. You have potential.
Linked to this damned, unfortunate soul.
You will become something greater than before.
Greater than you could ever imagine.
Let us see what this broken body can become. Bearing new soul.



…wake up, Sebastian.”