Page 25 of Claimed By the Mothman

The opal on her finger pulsed. It flickered green, then red, then a third color she didn’t have a name for.

The hum in her chest surged. In her blood now. In her lungs. Her skin itched with pressure.

She got up from the bed and walked to the front door in a daze. Opened it and walked through. Didn’t lock it. And walked. Letting her feet decide.

She hadn’t turned left. She hadn’t turned right. She’d just moved. And now—

Now she was standing in a corridor.

The carpeting here was older. Softer. A radiator to her left hissed in long, serpentine bursts.

And there, at the end of the hallway, loomed a pair of red doors.

They pulsed softly, like a heartbeat. The hum surged behind her ribs, up into her throat, to the tips of her tingling fingers. It throbbed in rhythm with the doors, like she was being called.

She took a step forward. Then another.

Nell.

The carpet under her feet darkened. She didn’t look down. She didn’t want to know if it was just shadow or if the floor itself had begun to bleed. Dark tendrils curled from the walls, which were leaning in slightly, eagerly. Watching.

Yes,the Voice said.This is what you were made to remember. This is what you are for. Now. Come. Come. Come.

The ring on her finger flared—the opal gleaming hot.

Her fingertips brushed the handle of the door and turned it.

—

In the days since the garden—since she’d bumped into him, flushed and breathless, bright with discomfort—something inside Sig had begun to unravel by degrees.

He pressed the tension into his rituals: the aeration of soil, the naming of plants. He whispered lullabies to the shadows when the building stilled in the nighttime hours, pretending that sleep was something he could attain.

But still, the unraveling continued.

The Doom had begun to echo again, the familiar thrum in his bones of the sound that came before endings. His body knew something was shifting, and it was preparing for its purpose.

We are not saviors,the Elders had warned him.We do not interfere. We witness. We become the shape of sorrow in the sky.

He remembered the first time he felt the Doom. It was a collapse deep in the mountains. Seven children, never to be found. The village had wept for days, weeks, months. Sig had wept long before. His body had changed for the first time then, too—wings flaring, eyes burning. He hadn’t known what it meant, only that the Broodhome Elders had pressed their foreheads to the floor when he returned.

For a century and a half, he had done what he was meant to do. He heard the thrum of the Doom here, there, across the world, across the hallway. And he stood still and let it happen.

Over and over and over again.

He had stopped visiting the common areas. The lights flickered red when he entered, and stayed that way until he left. The vents hissed behind his back. The radiator in 6B made a sound like teeth grinding whenever he walked past.

Even the residents noticed. “Sig’s been different lately,” someone whispered on the stairwell. “Restless. Last time he was like this, that family in 7B disappeared.”

Mr. Caracas, who once yelled at a tree for existing too loudly, had met Sig’s eyes in the common room and extended the TV remote.

"You want to watch something else?" he said.

Sig took it with trembling fingers. Set it down without changing the channel.

Caracas didn’t look away from the soap opera. Just muttered: “It’s close, isn’t it.”

Sig remained silent. Caracas’ eyes flicked over to him.