Page 125 of Into the Dark, We Go

He stood before me,wearing the same navy-blue suit and tie he’d been buried in. Now it clung to his mimic’s frame, damp at the hem, as if it had just climbed out of the grave. He was barefoot and disheveled. A thin scar ran along his knuckle. But his face—it was unrecognizable, hidden behind a stag skull, the dead sockets glistening.

It stood like him, wore his skin, his suit, his scars, but it wasn’t my father, it wasn’t the man who had come to mydefence so many times, who’d reassured me that nothing was permanent, that someday we’d be happy and unrestricted and free. No, it was a memory someone else had dressed up and sent to mock me. To haunt me. To claim me.

The deity.

I scrambled backward until my spine collided with weathered bark.

The entity took a step forward.

"Why are you afraid?" it asked in a voice that was so much like my father’s that its timbre shattered my already weeping heart. It echoed in my head like a thought I hadn’t meant to think. It came from nowhere and everywhere. I felt it in the roots of my teeth. In the marrow of my bones. The tree at my back hummed when it spoke.

Another step forward.

"It’s not real," I whispered, eyes squeezed shut.

?old breath on my skin, like leaning over a stone well and feeling the chill rise up from the dark.

"Go away!"

The temperature dropped and a breeze snaked around my ankles. I opened my eyes. In the exact spot where my father had stood, Nick now appeared—barefoot and shirtless, his pale chest exposed. His face was hidden behind the same ghastly stag mask, but I recognized his frame, his body, his tattoos.

He moved closer, each step slow and unnaturally deliberate, as if he were learning to walk in borrowed skin.

The mask’s empty sockets seemed to lure me with a magnetic force I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t look away.

"You came," it said, now in Nick’s rich, velvet voice, and my belly warmed, instantly comforted.

The mask leaned in from the darkness, thick and heavy like jelly. The skull hovered inches from my face. At this distance, Ishould have seen eyes, a glint, a flicker. But there was nothing. Just blackness. Like the mask wasn’t hiding anything at all.

Its putrid, sour scent reminded me of death, and I tried not to vomit. I turned away, unable to bear the sight as my tears flowed unchecked.

It’s not Nick. It’s not Nick. It’s not Nick, I repeated over and over, stuttering, desperate to drown out the crushing fear, desperate to wake up, to claw my way back to reality.

Its hand reached out slowly. I watched, transfixed, as it drifted past my face. Only when its fingers touched my back did I feel how cold and inhuman it was.

This was it.

My body trembled violently, my mind shutting down, emptied of everything but the raw, primal terror of dying.

I gasped as the fingers pressed into my shoulder’s open wound, where a fresh cut had torn through the burn. It pulsed like it had a heartbeat of its own. My vision blurred and distorted, the world around me trembling, like I was seeing it through shattered, grime-smeared glass.

The hand withdrew, and the creature wearing Nick’s likeness rose to its full height, towering over me. I watched as it dragged stained fingers across the mask, smearing my blood in uneven streaks. The fingers moved down its neck and bare chest, marking itself with my pain. Then it went limp.

It wasn’t looking at me anymore. It was staring at the grimoire clenched tightly in my hands.

I felt like I’d ingested something toxic, trapped in a psychedelic nightmare.

My thoughts were a tangled mess of what-ifs and maybes. What if I gave it the grimoire? It could spare my life. But what if it didn’t? What if this were all just a twisted game?

But then something shifted. A stark, terrible clarity cut through the haze in my mind. I realized I was essentially already dead. There was nothing left to lose. Nothing to go back to.

I lifted my gaze to the deity, still standing before me, waiting. The moon hung high above, an unblinking, cold eye watching everything like an unhelpful God.

"Take it," I said, forcing the words out.

It didn’t move.

My feet dragged, but I forced myself to stand and stepped forward all the same.