Part 1

I didn’t believe in any of it. Not really.

Demons, rituals, salt circles… all that stuff felt like folklore—old cautionary tales wrapped in mystery. That’s probably why we laughed when Dev pulled out that weird old book.

It was Friday night. Me, Dev, Jay, and Alina were hanging out at Jay’s house. His parents were away for the weekend, and we were deep into one of those nothing nights—lazy, tired, half-buzzed, half-bored. Dev had been digging through a box of his dad’s things in the basement when he found it. This heavy, leather‑bound book with cracking edges and pages that looked like they’d been stained by time—or something worse.

The title said:
The Lesser Key of Solomon.

Most of it looked like junk: faded Latin, weird symbols, dramatic warnings. But Dev turned to one of the marked pages, finger tapping an underlined name. “Orobas,” he said. “Says here he tells the truth, protects people. One of the good ones.”

Jay laughed. “A chill demon? You gotta be kidding me!”

Alina rolled her eyes, already over it. I don’t know what made me say it. Boredom, too much beer, sheer curiosity? But I said, “Let’s summon him.”

We weren’t being serious. It was something dumb to kill time, maybe get a few clips to post later. We lit tea candles from the junk drawer, sat on the cold concrete floor, and Dev read the words out loud.

We skipped most of the steps. No protective circle. No fancy herbs or incense. Just candlelight and bad decisions.

And… nothing happened. That just made us laugh harder. We took turns whispering, got hoarse trying creepy voices. Eventually we shrugged it off and went to play Mario Kart.

Twenty minutes in, the basement door creaked open. Jay swore he’d shut it tight.

“Janky hinges,” he said. He went and locked it, and we laughed like we were trying to convince the house we were brave.

Then we heard a soft knock upstairs. Just once—gentle, almost polite, and somehow sharp enough to thread directly into our nerves. A minute later came the sound of a pan hitting the kitchen floor.

Jay went up. Came back frowning. “The pan wasn’t near the edge. The cat can’t reach the counter.”

Alina said, “Draft,” the way you say “I’m going to believe this until I can’t.” I wasn’t convinced. The air felt heavier. Not cold, exactly—wrong. Like a held breath we hadn’t noticed until it started to ache.

Something slammed into the wall behind us. Hard. Deliberate.

We all jumped—even Dev. He grabbed the book, flipped back to the page, traced the cramped notes in the margin with his finger, slow like he’d never seen them before.

“Listen,” he said, voice thinner than usual. “Here: ‘If summoned without circle or seal, he may wander freely. Though not of harm by hand, he grows stronger through fear and time. He may torment, mislead, and draw harm from the world to you, to reveal the truth. At the final hour, when shadow becomes flesh, he may touch. He may take. Protection lies in circles of salt and in the light. He cannot cross either unless broken. If he does not possess a soul until daybreak, he shall return to his realm.’”

Jay barked a laugh that sounded like he was trying it on and found it didn’t fit. “Nice. Real funny.”

We all heard it at once. Breathing. Right next to my ear. Damp, uneven. Close enough to fog a mirror.

I spun. Nothing there. Nothing, but the hairs on my arms were trying to crawl off.

Dev’s voice cracked. “We didn’t bind it! It literally says—no binding, no control.”

A bulb popped in the stairwell. Then another. The room flinched with each sharp report like someone snapping their fingers to a rhythm we couldn’t predict.

Alina screamed. Jay cursed. I said nothing, because I was busy not losing my mind.

We scrambled. Dev googled binding rituals, thumb shaking on glass—hilarious except not at all. I ran upstairs, grabbed a bag of salt and a flashlight and a fistful of courage I had to borrow from a part of me I didn’t like. We poured a ring on the basement floor—messy, uneven, hands bumping, eyes flicking to shadows the whole time—then huddled inside it.

The lights started dying, bulb by bulb. Always just outside the circle.

Pop.
Pop.
Pop.

Darkness pressed closer, curious, patient.

I held up my phone flashlight. It flickered. The battery was full. It shouldn’t have.

Dev read again, barely above a whisper. “He may not touch the soul unless it slips from light into dark. Or into dream.”

“Don’t fall asleep,” Alina said, and her voice broke.

“I doubt that’ll be a problem,” Dev said, but he didn’t sound sure.

It was 4:25 a.m. We just had to make it until sunrise. How hard could that be?

The next hour stretched like a bad rubber band.

Scratching. Not constant—reminding. A chair skidded on concrete by itself, a long, slow scrape that sounded like someone drawing a line through us. Something moved in the corner, just outside the light. When I looked straight at it, it was gone. Not gone—wasn’t.

Then the smell hit. Sharp, sour. Gas.

Alina coughed. “No, no, no—”

The burner upstairs was on. The knob was gone—snapped clean off.

We didn’t want to leave the salt circle, but we also didn’t want to explode. We went up together, slow. One person facing the stairs, one facing the kitchen, one holding the light on the others. The way kids play flashlight tag when they still believe rules can keep you safe.

Jay found the valve under the counter. Turned it with pliers. I pocketed the broken knob like evidence we could show the morning.

The phone lights flickered again. We ran. We didn’t pretend walking would help. We ran like the air was going to run out.

Back in the basement. Back to the salt. We didn’t talk. We breathed like we were trying not to be heard doing it.

The small window went from black to bruised blue. The first color of maybe.

Silence. No more knocks, no more pops. The candles guttered low. The air softened. I felt the first shy warmth of light on my cheek and realized I had been clenching every muscle I owned.

Alina stood, stiff. “It’s over, right?”

Dev didn’t answer. He hadn’t said anything in a while. Then he stood, too.

“I’m going home,” he said.

“What? Wait—Dev—”

“I’m tired. I just want to sleep.”

He said something else, very soft. Jay’s head snapped up. “What did you say?”

Dev blinked. “Nothing. Good night.” He turned and went up the stairs.

We didn’t follow. We told ourselves the door opened and closed because he pushed it. We told ourselves the sound we heard was him.

We cleaned. Or tried to. Gathering broken glass, snuffing candle stubs with shaking fingers, brushing salt into tidy arcs that didn’t feel like protection anymore.

Jay froze, staring at the floor. “The circle.”

There was a break. A heel scar through the salt, smeared and thin. A gap.

Dev had been sitting near that spot.

We stared at it. Didn’t speak. Didn’t sweep it shut.

Dev didn’t answer our calls.

We kept telling ourselves he needed sleep. Space. That he walked out and went home.

But none of us saw him walk out. We remember the door. We remember the way the light came in like a guest. We remember deciding not to check the yard because if Dev wasn’t there, the morning would have to be different.

What if Dev never made it out of that basement? What if we let something else walk away?

I didn’t sleep that day. None of us did. I sat on my bed, curtains open, blinds up, lights on, phone face‑down and face‑up and face‑down again. Every few minutes I texted Dev—You good? Answer me. Answer me.—while telling myself to stop being dramatic.

Alina broke first. She called his mom.

“Is Dev home?” she asked, trying for casual and hitting brittle.

A pause. “No, honey. He told me he was with you all night.”

Alina ended the call and looked at me. “I’m going back.”

Jay met us at his porch looking ten years older. The morning made the house look normal. Houses are good at that. The ordinary sits on top of the nightmare like a clean sheet over a stain.

We went to the basement. It smelled like candles and damp concrete and something I didn’t have a word for. The salt was a white question on the floor, broken line still visible. The book lay where Dev had dropped it, splayed like something dead.

Alina picked it up with a dish towel like it might bite. “We should… put it somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Jay said. “Like a kiln.”

He flipped through pages. The margins were full of someone’s handwriting. Not Dev’s—older, cramped, decisive. Names, sigils, little compass roses, circles inside circles. The Orobas page was marked with a faded ribbon and… something else. Tucked in like a bookmark: a Polaroid.

We all leaned in. It was grainy, sepia‑rotted. Four people in a basement that could have been this one fifty years ago. Two men, two women, all young, all smiling in that way people do when they think they’re invincible. One of the men looked like a younger version of Jay’s dad. The rest were strangers. On the back, in blocky ink: OROBAS—TRUTH TELLER. / 1979.

“Your dad?” I asked.

Jay swallowed. “He never mentioned…”

Alina slid the photo back like it burned. “We need to find Dev.”

We checked his house. No answer. We checked his job. He’d texted his manager at 6 a.m.: Taking a sick day. We showed the manager the message; she frowned. “He never uses ‘taking’ like that,” she said, like that mattered. I didn’t know if it did. But it made my skin crawl.

We went back to Jay’s and did something stupid but necessary: we watched the doorbell cam footage. Jay scrubbed through the morning. 6:02 a.m.—the basement door. The camera caught the top of a head, then shoulders. The figure never looked at the camera. It walked down the path with a careful, even gait. No limp. No hurry. Dev’s hoodie, Dev’s jeans, Dev’s backpack. Dev’s not turning around when we called after him, which we never did, but the vision of it still made me feel like I had.

“Zoom?” Alina whispered.

Jay zoomed. The face was shadowed by the hood. Pixel fuzz. A mouth. A chin. It could have been anyone it wanted to be.

The timestamp slid past 6:03. The figure reached the sidewalk and… didn’t turn left toward Dev’s place. It stopped. Tilted its head like it was listening to something we couldn’t hear. Then it took three steps forward and vanished out of frame.

“You have the street cam?” I asked, even though I knew he didn’t. We only get to see so much of our lives.

We sent the clip to the group chat. Dev didn’t respond.

That afternoon, my phone buzzed. Dev: all good. just sleeping. phone dying. ttyl.

The grammar hung wrong. The lack of punctuation was punctuation. Dev always used dots like breadcrumbs when he lied. This message didn’t try.

Alina replied immediately: Where are you?

No answer.

Jay typed: What did you say to me in the basement?

We watched the typing bubble stutter and die. Then: nothing. good night.

It was 2:14 p.m.

Jay didn’t type again. He just stared at the words until the screen timed out and showed his face, pale and drawn, in miniature.

“What did he say?” I asked.

Jay didn’t look at me. “He said, ‘Open,’” he whispered. “I thought I misheard. But I asked. And he said he said nothing.”

“Open what?”

Jay swallowed. “Does it matter?”

The book sat between us like it wanted to answer.

We tried to be normal. We failed. The day stretched and sagged. We didn’t tell our parents anything true. We didn’t call the police because: We did a ritual and then our friend became a shrug is not a sentence that helps. We didn’t sleep.

Night fell the way it always does—too quickly when you don’t want it and too slowly when you do. By ten the house had put on its shadow clothes and the rooms had grown new corners.

At 10:27 p.m., Dev texted a photo.

It was a close‑up of a page from the book. Not the Orobas page. A different sigil—twisted, more complex, like a maze drawn by a hand that didn’t need to lift the pen. Under it, in that old blocky ink: OROBAS—HORSE. TRUTH. NO BLOOD.

And, below that, in smaller, messier script: NOT ORO. KEEPS THE NAME. WEARS.

I felt my mouth go dry. Alina typed: Where are you? Again, again. Dev, answer me. Please.

Dev sent one more thing. A voice message. Seven seconds of static. Then, in the middle, a whisper that wasn’t Dev’s. A voice like the idea of a voice. Like a throat learning how to use a mouth.

“Open,” it breathed.

Jay threw his phone. It clattered across the floor and slid under the couch. No one reached for it.

The house made a sound. A soft tap on the front window. Then another. Then a third, spaced like it was walking its fingers along the glass.

“Back to the basement,” Alina said. “We finish it. Properly. Seal. Circle. Incense. Everything.”

“We don’t have—” Jay started.

“We have a grocery store,” she snapped. “And a hardware store. And a church.”

We moved. Lists steadied us. Alina scribbled items like we were hosting the worst party in history: salt, chalk, charcoal, white candles, mirrors, a silver bowl, rosemary, iron nails, clean water, lighter, matches, a bucket of sand. Jay grabbed his car keys. I grabbed two headlamps and three power banks and the knob I’d pocketed that morning.

We didn’t say the word sunrise again. We said midnight like it owed us a favor.

By 11:52 p.m. we were back in the basement, the world upstairs dim and ordinary. We cleaned the floor with vinegar and ragged towels. We drew the circle as slow and perfect as our hands allowed, chalk dust turning our palms ghost‑white. We laid the salt thick. The candles went at the cardinal points. The book sat in the center, opened to its lie.

“Who reads?” I asked.

“Not me,” Jay said quickly. “I don’t want it in my mouth.”

“I’ll do it,” Alina said. She looked at me. “If anything talks… don’t talk back.”

We stepped into the circle and set the bowl down. The water inside shivered like it knew it was being watched. Alina struck a match. The candles took their light like they’d been waiting.

She read. Her voice was steady, the way the line on a heart monitor is steady when the heart wants to live. The Latin sounded like stones in a river—worn, old, stubborn. The invocation coiled and uncoiled in the air. I don’t know when I started shaking. It might have been when the first candle guttered although there was no draft, or when the basement door breathed like a sleeping thing.

“Orobas,” Alina said clearly. “If you are truth, be truth. If you are not, be gone. We bind you to the seal and compel you—”

The house sighed, long and low, like it had been holding something heavy and finally put it down. The lights in the basement clicked off—every one—though the breaker hadn’t moved. Our candles flared, tall and bright, and then thinned as if pinched by invisible fingers at the wick.

From the far corner of the room, just outside the circle, something shook itself like a dog coming up out of water. Then nothing.

I didn’t breathe. I didn’t blink. The silence was a hand around my throat.

A shape moved. Low to the ground at first, then standing. A person‑shaped darkness, edges wrong. It stayed exactly at the ring of salt, toes not crossing. It tilted its head the way the figure on the doorbell cam had tilted. It chose a face.

Dev’s face looked at us, pale in candlelight. Not Dev. Everything technically where it should be—eyes, nose, mouth—and still… wrong. Like someone had printed him slightly off register.

“Open,” it said. Not a plea. An instruction. The mouth didn’t move like mouths do.

“Truth,” Alina said, voice shaking only at the end. “Tell your name.”

It smiled with too many teeth it didn’t have. “Orobas.”

The book’s page rustled though no one touched it. The Polaroid slid an inch by itself, as if shivering. The candles burned steady and hard.

Alina lifted the bowl. The water trembled.

“Not Orobas,” Jay whispered. “He wouldn’t—”

“Truth,” Alina repeated. “Name.”

The not‑Dev made a thoughtful sound, as if searching a pocket for change and finding a wasp. “We wear what is spoken to us,” it said. “You called a door ‘door’ and then asked why it opens.”

“Name,” Alina said for the third time, like a hammer driving a nail.

The thing considered the circle. It looked down at the salt like a person might look at a river. Then it bent, slow, and placed its palm on the floor just outside the line. The skin there smudged, as if someone had rubbed an eraser across a drawing. The hand left a little wet ring when it lifted again, a perfect quarter‑moon like a condensation stain, except the floor was dry.

“Open,” it said softly. “Or sleep.”

My legs felt hollow. My headlamp ticked once, trying to decide if it was a light or a memory of one. Midnight clicked over on my phone with no alert, just the quiet agreement of numbers.

Alina’s voice got very small. “If you are what they say—truth—then tell me this: Did Dev leave this house?”

The not‑Dev tilted his head in a way Dev never would. “Yes.”

“Alive?” Her voice might have been a thread.

It smiled, delighted. “Yes.”

Alina took a breath that didn’t help. “In his body?”

A pause, like the intake of a tide. “No.”

Jay made a sound like a laugh that forgot it was a laugh. He pressed his hand to his mouth until his knuckles went white.

“Where is he?” I asked, before Alina could stop me.

The thing looked at me. Dev’s eyes—brown, warm, familiar—looked at me without any person in them. “Here,” it said happily. “So close.”

The radio upstairs turned on by itself. A burst of static, then a song we all knew from when we were fifteen and invincible. Too loud. Too cheerful. It cut off with a pop like a pulled plug.

“You can leave,” Alina said, voice recovering its spine by sheer will. “You have not crossed. You have no claim. The sun took you. The circle denies you. We deny you. Go.”

“Open,” the not‑Dev said again, patient, as if teaching a child how to use a door handle. It pressed one finger to the floor. A tiny crack appeared in the concrete just outside the salt, hair‑thin, running toward the drain in the middle of the room like a line on a map.

“Jay,” I said, very quietly. “Did your dad ever finish this basement?”

Jay shook his head without looking away from the crack. “Always said he would.”

The thing crouched, set its palm flat again, and leaned in until its face was inches from the salt. It sniffed, curious. The candles flickered out at the east and west and held at the north and south, so our shadows doubled and then decided against it. The air smelled like a penny on your tongue.

“Open,” it whispered, and for a moment the word wasn’t a word—it was a feeling. A door you’ve always wanted to go through. A light in a room you can’t find. A hand you almost took.

My foot moved before my brain did.

Alina’s hand closed on my wrist so tight it hurt. “No,” she said, and I realized she was crying, very quietly, like a leak. “Don’t look at it when it talks. Look at me. Me.”

I looked at her. Her mascara had bled, black crescents under her eyes like bruises. She looked furious and exhausted and so alive I could have kissed her.

The not‑Dev laughed, delighted. “Truth,” it said. “Good. You will be very hard.”

It leaned back. It watched us like we were the TV. “Day,” it said finally, in a tone that might have been a shrug. “We can play longer.”

“Until sunrise?” Jay managed.

“Until a sunrise,” it said, amused. “Not always yours.”

Alina lifted the bowl. “By the names written and the seals drawn, by salt unbroken and light unquenched, by the breath that is not yours, we bind you to the circle, to stand and not step, to answer and not ask—”

The not‑Dev cocked its head as if listening to a distant conversation. Then it spoke, over Alina, voice suddenly Dev‑perfect. “Guys,” it said—Dev’s cadence, Dev’s humor, Dev’s impatience. “Stop. I’m fine. It’s me.”

The bowl sloshed. I almost turned. The back of my neck crawled with the need to. Alina’s nails dug crescents in my wrist.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Come on,” the voice said. “Jay. Dude. Open the—”

The north candle went out.

The darkness stepped closer by an inch because darkness measures itself in inches when it wants to be kind.

Somewhere upstairs, water ran for exactly three seconds and stopped. The crack in the concrete made a tiny ticking noise like someone cooling a pie on a wire rack.

“Okay,” Alina said to the air, to herself, to us. “New plan. We hold. We wait. We don’t talk. We don’t sleep.”

“How long?” Jay asked, hoarse.

“Until sunrise,” I said, and the word felt less like mercy this time and more like a dare.

We stood in the bruised light of two candles while the thing that had our friend’s face smiled and didn’t blink. We watched the minutes climb like a reluctant animal. We listened to the house practice being a mouth.

At 3:11 a.m., the radio upstairs turned on again. A voice read the local headlines in a cheerful, grainy voice that was almost a song. “A twenty‑four‑year‑old man was pronounced dead at—” it said, and then cut off. No station, no location, no names. Just the shape of a sentence. The silence after tasted like metal.

At 3:34, Dev texted the group: open the door

Jay’s phone lit the bottom of his face like a campfire. He put it face‑down without responding.

At 4:02, the not‑Dev’s eyes rolled back for a heartbeat—white, blank, wrong—and then settled like a coin in a fountain.

“You called me truth,” it said pleasantly. “Ask.”

Alina’s voice was steady again. “What happens if we open the circle?”

It smiled. “I touch. I take.”

“And if we don’t?”

“I touch later.”

“Later when?”

It looked past us at the tiny window, where a slice of sky was still stubbornly black. “When shadow becomes flesh,” it said, almost tender. “You read that part.”

“What did Dev say,” I asked, because I hated myself, “to me at the end?”

It didn’t even pretend to think. “Nothing,” it said. “Good night.”

A thin pale line crept into the window. That almost‑color of almost‑morning. The kind of light that makes birds change their minds about singing.

The not‑Dev stood up very slowly, like a polite guest leaving at the exact minute that means you had a great time and you should invite them again. It stepped backward, exactly one pace for every degree of light.

“Open,” it said once more, quiet as a promise. It tapped the crack in the floor with the tip of one finger, fond. Then it was a shape. Then a smear. Then nothing.

The candles burned steady and short. The bowl was still in Alina’s hands. The book lay open to the word TRUTH like a joke.

We waited until the light was honest before we broke the circle. Every grain of salt back into the bag, careful, careful, careful. We washed the floor with water that made our hands ache. We opened the window and let the cold in, because the cold felt like something we could name.

Dev didn’t text. He didn’t call. The house was too quiet. The sun rose like it had been doing it forever without us.

Jay found the basement key in the laundry room, tucked behind the detergent, where you’d leave it if you might want to lock a door from the outside.

“Guys,” he said, voice frayed. “My dad. I think—my dad did this ritual. In ‘79. His handwriting is all over this. Why didn’t he tell—”

I didn’t know what to say. None of us did. We were all busy calculating how many times we’d mistaken silence for safety.

I packed the book into my backpack and didn’t tell them why. I told myself it was because I had the steadiest hands. I told myself it was because I didn’t want it in Jay’s house a second longer. I didn’t tell myself the truth: that the Polaroid had started to bother me not for what it showed but for what it didn’t. Four people smiling, yes. A chalk circle, yes. No break in the salt. No gap. And yet the photo was taken outside the circle, slightly above, like by a fifth person who didn’t cast a shadow.

At 8:13 a.m., my phone buzzed. Unknown: we are very close now

I blocked the number. It messaged again from a different number with the same sentence, like a tic. I blocked that one, too. I turned my phone off and the message wrote itself in my head anyway.

We tried summoning a demon as a joke. Something answered.

Maybe it told the truth.

But not the kind any of us wanted.

That night, we planned to go to Dev’s place—because we couldn’t not. We’d bring the book and the salt and the candles and the determination that had survived the longest hour of our lives. We’d try to bind what we’d called, to negotiate with something that didn’t have to keep bargains unless we made it want to.

We’d do it right.

At 9:41 p.m., the doorbell rang. Three soft knocks like a memory of knuckles.

Jay and Alina stared at me. I stared at the door. The porch light threw a patient yellow shape across the mat.

I checked the peephole. The porch was empty. The sound came again—three knocks, closer, as if the door had moved nearer to the person knocking rather than the other way around.

My phone lit: Dev—open

It didn’t occur to me to be brave. Only to be precise.

“No one opens,” I said. “No one speaks.”

We waited. The knocks stopped. Something skittered along the siding like nails. The radio in the kitchen clicked, wheezed, and gave up.

At 10:06, the power died in the entire block. The darkness outside matched the darkness inside. We stood together in the hallway, headlamps off, phones off, breath loud.

Alina’s whisper brushed my ear. “We need more salt.”

“We need a priest,” Jay said, and I wasn’t sure he was joking.

“We need Dev,” I said, and the thing in the walls sighed like I had finally gotten something right.

Outside, the sky blackened in that way it does before it decides to become morning or a storm. Inside, the house listened.

And down in the basement, something tapped once—on concrete, soft as a fingertip on glass.

We went down anyway. Because we had to. Because the only thing worse than opening a door is never opening it and wondering forever what had its hand on the other side.

We turned the corner and stopped. The salt we’d swept up, carefully bagged, meticulously erased, lay on the floor again in a perfect circle we had not drawn.

Inside it, written in damp on dry concrete, a single word: truth.

We didn’t step closer. We didn’t step away.

Somewhere very near and very far, a voice like a smile said, “Open,” and the wind rose.

—End of Part 1—

Part 2

The salt circle wasn’t ours.

We’d swept it up, bagged it, scrubbed the floor until our fingerprints squeaked. Now it lay on the concrete again—perfect, bright, exact—as if a careful hand had poured each grain through a very patient funnel.

Inside it, written in damp on dry concrete—no water source, no footprint trail—one word: truth.

We stood on the threshold like idiots. The house breathed with us. The wind complained in the gutter. The basement air had that unplaceable smell again, like pennies and wet matches and a hospital waiting room long after midnight.

“Don’t step closer,” Alina said, soft and ragged. “Don’t step anywhere.”

A soft tap came from the floor, polite as a fingertip on glass.

I don’t know which of us realized it first, but we all looked at the same cracked hairline that ran from the drain toward the far wall. It was wider than it had been—only barely, but enough that the human eye’s obsession with symmetry sat up and took notes.

“It wants us to open,” Jay whispered, as if speaking quietly would trick the room. “Or it’s… showing us where it already is.”

My pocket buzzed. Dev: open

I put my phone face‑down without looking. “We need help.”

“Who?” Jay asked. “The police? A priest? A contractor?”

“Your dad,” I said.

We didn’t go upstairs yet. The circle on our floor that wasn’t ours felt like a set of eyes. We backed up the stairs without turning our backs and locked the basement door for the first time in the history of that door being a door.

In the kitchen, we stood around an island that had seen birthday cakes and late‑night cereal and the time Jay smashed a glass and tried to hide it behind the toaster. None of those moments mattered to it. Houses remember the wrong things.

Jay’s hands shook as he dialed. “He’s going to say I’m being dramatic,” he said. “He’s going to tell me to come home.”

His father answered on the second ring. Jay put him on speaker. “Dad?”

“Jaybird,” his dad said, warm. “You sound like the basement again.”

“What?”

A long silence. Then, carefully: “Are you in the basement?”

“No,” Jay said. “We were. Now we’re in the kitchen.”

Another silence, heavier. “Have you found my book.”

It wasn’t a question. Jay looked at me, at Alina. I set the book on the counter like a confession.

“We need you to come here,” Jay said.

“I am already in the car,” his father said. “Don’t open the door for anything you didn’t call by name. And, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘open.’”

He hung up.

It took him eleven minutes to arrive. The lights on the block were still out, so the headlights cut through our front windows like knives. Then his knock—three sharp, normal knocks, a human rhythm. Jay let him in and his father took one look at our faces and skipped the small talk.

“Show me the basement,” he said.

He was older than the Polaroid by decades but something in his walk was the same: a steadiness that did not depend on courage so much as on commitment. He smelled like coffee and rain and Old Spice. The ridiculousness of that almost unstrung me.

We stood at the top of the basement steps. He stared down into the dark like a man checking the depth of a lake he used to swim in. “Flashlights off,” he said. “Let your eyes adjust.”

No one moved.

“Please,” he added, softer. “It makes you see what’s actually there instead of what your fear wants to be there.”

We didn’t turn them off. He did. Darkness swallowed the stairs, then thinned around the edges, then settled. The circle was visible, a pale mouth on the floor. The word inside it had dried to a ghost. The crack glinted the way hair does when a flashlight finds it across a room.

“I told myself I’d burned that book,” Jay’s father said. “I told myself I’d never have a son who needed to know why.” He took a slow breath. “We did this. In ’79. We read the page that said truth because we were idiots who thought truth was a shield in itself. We called and… something came that wore the name.”

“Orobas?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe something that tasted like Orobas enough to claim it. It’s not a lie if you call yourself what they called you, is it? It’s only bad manners.”

“What happened,” Jay said. Not really a question.

“There were four of us,” his father said. “We did it properly, actually. Circle and all. It still got in. We’d made a mistake in the east—chalk too thin. You have to respect sunrise.” He swallowed. His knuckles were white around the banister. “It didn’t take anyone right away. It touched. It learned. It wore. It wanted… permission. It wanted open.” He looked at Jay. “We gave it.”

“Who did it take,” Alina asked, gently, as if there might be an answer that didn’t have a face.

“My friend, Mara,” he said. The name came out like a bruise. “She didn’t scream. She just… went out, like a candle. We thought we could bring her back.” He closed his eyes. “We couldn’t. Not then.”

He flipped the basement light switch on and off. Nothing. Of course. He nodded like that agreed with something that was already in his head. “It’s wearing your friend now,” he said softly. Not cruel, not speculative; factual and tired. “Not… in him. On top. Like a layer of thought. Like clothes.”

“How do we get Dev back?” I asked. The question showed up without my permission. It was, for once, the only thing I had a right to ask.

Jay’s father looked at me. “You don’t talk to it. You don’t negotiate with it. You make a sunrise.”

“In the basement?” Jay asked, incredulous.

“In the circle,” his father said. “Sunrise is not the sky. It’s a ratio. It’s the light moving from east to west, stronger than shadow. It’s the thing bodies recognize without your opinion.” He set a canvas tool bag on the top stair and pulled it open: chalk, a steel bowl, iron nails tied in red thread, four cheap mirrors, a mason jar full of something that looked like coarse glitter. “It feeds on permission and fear. You starve it of the first and you bore it of the second. And then, when it’s hungry and arrogant and tired of you, you pour daylight right in its mouth.”

“What’s in the jar?” Alina asked.

“Salt and sugar and iron filings,” he said. “My grandmother called it day sand. You heat it until it goes to glass and draw a line with it. Nothing walks across melted day without thinking twice.” He gave a quick, humorless smile. “Maybe three times.”

Alina pointed at the crack. “It’s wider.”

“It will widen,” he agreed. “It’s how doors happen. They start as misunderstandings.”

We brought everything down. The circle on the floor wasn’t ours, but we let it be. We drew our own around it—double, thick, careful. We chalked an east on the wall with a shaking hand and, at his instruction, wrote the date and time under it so we couldn’t lie to ourselves about where we were. We set a mirror at each cardinal point and tilted them just so. We poured salt along the line of the crack until it was a white scar. We set the steel bowl in the center on three bricks and put the jar of day sand beside it like a patient.

“Phones off,” Jay’s father said. “Not airplane mode—off. If it can talk to you, it will try to sound like what you need. Don’t let it pick a register.”

We turned them off. The quiet was like cotton stuffed in our ears. Jay’s father handed each of us an iron nail on a red string. “Throat,” he said. “Wear it.”

We did. The nail was cold and heavy. It felt like the opposite of jewelry.

“I’ll read,” he said, and this time no one argued. “You two back me. You speak only to me. If it uses any of your voices, you don’t answer. If it uses anyone else’s, you don’t answer. If the sky falls down the stairs, you don’t answer.”

“You’ve done this before,” Alina said.

He didn’t admit it. He didn’t have to.

We stepped into the outer circle and lit the candles like a choreographed move. Alina had brought a roll of aluminum foil from the kitchen to make reflectors. Jay had found two work lights in the garage and an extension cord that snaked down the steps like a vine—even powerless, the ritual of setting them up soothed something in our monkey brains.

“Ready,” Jay’s father said, and when he said it, the word meant something.

He began in Latin, the kind that sits in your bones because people used to build their fear into it on purpose. The cadence was less church and more chisel. The house listened.

At the third line, a drop of water fell from nowhere into the steel bowl with a sound too loud for its size. At the fifth, the radio upstairs stuttered to life and sang a single syllable from a love song like a broken bird and then shut off. At the seventh, the not‑Dev stood quietly at the edge of the inner circle, as if it had always been there, waiting for the correct cue.

It looked like him in the ways a face looks like someone in a dream: true in parts, wrong in the ratios. The eyes were too still. The mouth didn’t forget to twitch. The hair didn’t land wrong so much as deliberately.

“Open,” it said. Not quite to us. To the air. To the idea of the door.

Jay’s father didn’t break rhythm. He finished a paragraph and switched to English, simple and clean.

“You were not called tonight by name,” he said. “You were not invited by name. I revoke any names you claim and return them to their owners. By salt unbroken, by iron worn, by first light moving east to west, by the truth that does not need a mouth, I bind you to the circle and forbid your touch. You are unasked. You are unwelcomed. You are unwitnessed.”

Dev’s mouth laughed. The sound didn’t. “Old,” it said, delighted.

“Older than you,” Jay’s father said. He didn’t blink. “Tell me: did you walk out of this house at dawn.”

“Yes,” it said, and the word slid around in the space between us like oil.

“In Dev’s body.”

“No.”

“In Dev’s skin.”

Dev’s face tilted. “Yes.”

“Where is his breath.”

The thing considered and smiled with borrowed lips. “So close.”

Jay made a sound and I grabbed his wrist so hard he winced. He nodded like the pain was helpful. It was.

“Truth,” Jay’s father said. “What are you if you are not Orobas.”

It grinned wider, like a kid who has a good secret and is rude about it. “We are wearers,” it said. “We are the bone of a door, the part that keeps shape while the wood swells.” It touched the air above the salt with the very tip of a finger. The candle flames leaned back like grass under a heel. “We are what you call when you open badly.”

Alina’s voice surprised me with how calm it was. “Do you have a name that belongs to you.”

It cocked its head. “Not one we can keep,” it said, almost wistful. “We have the names you say to us. You are generous with them.”

Jay’s father lifted the jar of day sand and poured a careful measure into the bowl. He struck a match, touched it to a twisted scrap of papertowel, and fed flame to the filings. They glowed dull at first, then brighter, then brighter, blooming into a white so clean it hurt. The bowl hissed. The mirrors caught the light and threw it east to west to east in a loop, a little sunrise in a basement.

The not‑Dev flinched, one step back without moving a foot. “Rude,” it said.

“Truth,” Jay’s father said evenly. “Do you have Dev’s middle name.”

It opened its mouth and nothing came out. It closed it, tried again, and Dev’s mouth made the shape for R and then stopped. Its borrowed face wrinkled in distaste, like chewing foil.

“He kept it,” Jay’s father said, almost proud. “Good boy.”

The not‑Dev smiled again, uglier. “He will sleep,” it said. “He will open. He is tired. You are very boring.”

“Good,” Alina said. “Be bored.”

The filings melted into a thick white glass in the bottom of the bowl, still glowing. Jay’s father lifted it with welding gloves like a magician and, before I could decide whether this was brilliant or insane, tipped it so a thick tongue of molten day slid toward the crack.

“Careful,” he breathed, to the light itself more than to us. He poured a line over the salt on the crack until the white fused to white and turned clear as it cooled, a seam of glass that looked like a frozen lightning strike.

The not‑Dev’s eyes flared too wide. It hissed without breath. “Old,” it said again, not delighted this time at all. “Old. Ugly. You make ugly things.”

“Beautiful,” Jay’s father said.

The mirrors pulsed together: east to west to east, brighter with each lap. The tiny sunrise grew until it was not tiny at all.

“Truth,” Jay’s father said over the hiss and the glow. “If you are only wearing, then where is the wearer beneath.”

“Here,” it said. “So close.” It pressed its palm against the invisible wall of the circle and left five little damp crescents in exactly the places human fingers would leave them. The damp soaked in like the concrete was thirsty.

Jay’s father nodded as if a point had been proved. “All right,” he said, and his voice did a thing I have never heard a voice do—flattened, clean, like the edge of a blade. “If you keep only what we give you, then we will give you back nothing.”

He looked at us then. “Time to be very boring,” he said.

“I am extremely good at that,” I said through my teeth, because fear needs something to chew on.

“No lies,” he said. “No show. Just this: we speak truths that are not for it. We make a room it cannot sit in.”

He started.

“I never told Mara I loved her,” he said, steady. “I thought if I said it, I’d owe her a version of me I didn’t want to be yet. She died thinking I liked her, and that was true, and also not enough of the truth.”

The light got a fraction brighter without any change in fuel. The not‑Dev leaned away, subtle, like from a smell.

Jay swallowed. “I have my dad’s temper,” he said. “I hide it under jokes. I want people to think I’m kind because I am afraid that if they see the temper they’ll realize they were wrong about me.” His voice didn’t shake. “I am kind. I also have a temper. Both are true.”

The white in the bowl bloomed. The mirrors answered. The circle felt… stronger is the wrong word. Clarified, like we’d filtered something out of it.

Alina’s throat flexed. The iron nail on her red string knocked against her collarbone. “When I was thirteen I stole money from my mother’s purse,” she said. “I bought a lipstick and threw it away because I didn’t actually want the lipstick. I wanted to know if I could get away with something.” She looked at the not‑Dev like it was a piece of furniture. “I can. That doesn’t mean I should.”

It stepped back again without stepping.

My turn. The truth I had in my mouth wasn’t the one I expected. It was small and embarrassing and right.

“In tenth grade,” I said, “I told everyone I hated choir because I thought liking something made it vulnerable and I didn’t want the cool kids to know what to aim at. I loved it.” My face burned. “I stand in my kitchen sometimes and sing very quietly on purpose in case someone hears me. I want to be heard. I’m afraid of being heard.”

The light didn’t flare so much as… settle deeper, like roots.

The not‑Dev jerked its chin toward the stairs. “Bored,” it said, like a toddler at a museum. The house upstairs made a new noise in response—pipes talking to one another, refrigerator deciding to cycle, wind fingering the eaves. The voice that had been Dev’s once said, from nowhere, “Open,” as if announcing something clever.

“Every time you tell the truth,” Jay’s father said quietly to us, as if we were alone in a room that was not full of a wearing thing, “you make a place it cannot stand. Keep going.”

We did. We talked. Stupid, small truths fell out and thick, heavy truths no one but us needed to know: the lies we told to make ourselves easier to love, the things we stole that weren’t things, the resentments we fed like pets and the ways we were mean because we were afraid and the ways we were brave that no one had applauded so we stopped counting them. Some of it was funny and some was a fist to the throat and every bit was a brick in a wall that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the kind of room you can survive a night in.

The not‑Dev tried on voices like jackets. It used Dev’s. It used my mother’s. It used a boy who’d broken my heart in eleventh grade and a teacher who’d told Alina she was “too much to be taken seriously” and a woman who once asked Jay if he was lost in the expensive part of a store. Every time it spoke we did not answer and the iron at our throats kissed skin and burned a little line that felt good.

When it realized we were not going to give it what it asked for, it did what all bored monsters do: it sulked. It stopped talking. It watched. It learned us in a way I can’t stand to remember.

The white glass in the bowl had gone clear and hard but still hot; the mirrors were bright without needing the filament of electricity that fed the work lights. The little sunrise went around and around and every time it crossed the eastern mirror where we’d written the date and time, the chalk brightened.

“Almost,” Jay’s father said, and the word tasted like water.

The not‑Dev looked up toward the tiny window. Morning was still somewhere else, but the sky was gray instead of black. It smiled without humor. “Not yours,” it reminded us.

“We made ours,” Alina said, and she didn’t sound smug. She sounded certain in a way I wanted to live in. “You do not get to pick.”

It made a sound like a sigh and a scrape at once, as if dragging something heavy toward itself on the floor of a dry river. Then it leaned forward and pressed one finger against the inner edge of the inner circle.

The chalk smoked.

“Stop,” Jay’s father said, but the word wasn’t for it. It was for us. “Don’t flinch.”

We held. The finger retreated. A tiny hole remained in the chalk, almost nothing.

“Think it can cross a hair,” Jay whispered.

“Doors start as misunderstandings,” his father said. “We will not misunderstand.”

He tipped the bowl again and the last of the molten day kissed the hairline. It sealed with a hiss like a shushed secret. The not‑Dev’s borrowed face twitched.

“Open,” it said, almost weary now. “You will, later. You will be tired and you will want what is easiest and you will call it mercy and it will be you being what you always were. Open.”

“Truth,” Jay’s father said, ignoring it. “Where is Dev.”

It looked back at us without blinking. “So close,” it said again, and the words were the same and the tone was the same and something underneath was different.

“Under what,” Alina asked.

It smiled, and for a terrible second it almost looked like Dev’s smile on an actual morning when he’d slept and eaten and said something true for the sake of it. “Under you,” it said, delighted again. “He is so close. He is under you.”

The drain in the middle of the floor thumped, once.

We all looked at it. The not‑Dev looked at us looking and its satisfaction was the ugliest thing I have ever seen.

Jay’s father’s voice was very soft. “Don’t you dare.”

I don’t know who moved first. It might have been all of us at once. We shifted not our feet, not our hands—our attention. We chose not to step. We chose not to lower our eyes. We chose not to make the drain important. We watched the mirrors and the light and the chalk line and the glass seam. We watched the chalk word EAST like you watch a horizon for a boat you know is coming because you sent a letter that said Please come back and it would be very rude of the boat to ignore you.

The not‑Dev cocked its head, curious, and then—because boredom is hunger—angry.

It lunged.

It couldn’t cross the salt. It smashed into a wall nothing in the world could see and it was like watching a person run full tilt into a glass door in a viral video, except this thing did not get to be funny. It got to be loud. The candles blew sideways without going out. The mirrors clicked on their nails like teeth. The chalk line brightened to a fat luminous ribbon and then held.

“Truth,” Jay’s father said over the noise. His eyes were wet and he wasn’t trying to hide it. “Dev, you can stay.”

The air changed. Not by temperature. By… expectation. Like a room you walk into where people were talking about you and they love you and you know.

It stared at us. It shook its head a little, like clearing water out of ears. “You’re boring,” it said again, but the words didn’t reach the same corners.

“Stay,” Alina said into the air that had Dev’s name in it. “Please.”

“Stay,” Jay said, and his voice cracked right down the middle. “Man, please.”

“Stay,” I said, because the word felt inside‑out and right. “We’ll wait.”

The not‑Dev laughed and it sounded smaller than it wanted to. It put both hands on the floor and pushed, hard, like a person trying to climb out of a tight sweater. Something moved under its skin. The mirrors showed the movement wrong; its reflection in them lagged a fraction behind itself and the fraction grew.

“Open,” it said, but it sounded like it had a mouthful of snow.

“No,” Alina said. “Stay.”

The sky at the window sighed on the far side of gray. The east mirror brightened where the chalk said EAST. The white in the bowl that had been glass was just glass now. The clock on my dead phone stayed dead. Time didn’t care about the phone. It cared about light.

The not‑Dev’s borrowed eyes rolled back. It shuddered. It pressed its palm flat against the inside of the line again and this time it left a human handprint—five swirls, five lines—against the air. I saw the crescent scar on Dev’s ring finger from when he cut himself on a soda can in sophomore year. I didn’t know whether to throw up or sing.

“Sunrise,” Jay’s father said, and in any other context it would have been ridiculous: a man announcing a concept to a basement. Here it was a lever thrown.

The mirrors caught the first honest color. It was a cheap dawn, unnatural as an alarm clock, but I have never been so grateful for anything fake that meant real. The light went east to west. It went again. It went again. The chalk line glowed. The glass seam shone. The white word inside the wrong circle—truth—flared and went out like a match pinched to darkness.

The not‑Dev sagged. It looked up at us with Dev’s face and for one second—one—the face was Dev’s. He was there like a hand pressed against a thin window. His mouth made a shape.

“R—” he said, and the rest didn’t come out because the thing wearing him screamed.

I didn’t know a scream could be quiet. It didn’t blow our hair back. It didn’t shake the walls. It just took up all the room sound would have used and then left none for anything else. The mirrors shook without rattling. The chalk line got very, very bright and then went back to being chalk. The iron at my throat burned a little star.

The thing peeled.

There isn’t a better word. It didn’t explode or flee or fall apart. It came off. Like old glue. Like a wet shirt. Dev’s shape slumped within the shape of the not‑shape. The not‑shape folded like a horse, which is a stupid sentence until you see something stand wrong and you realize your brain kept a set of flashcards you didn’t know about labeled horse‑shaped. It was too many joints and a long face and teeth it didn’t own.

It bumped the circle with something that was not a hoof and the circle held. It pushed against the glass seam with something that was not a mouth and the seam held. It said “open” like a person who has tried the same password too many times and knows the account is locked.

The light came around again and again and again. The not‑Dev—no longer Dev at all—shrank from it, not like a vampire from a movie, not dramatic, just… unwillingly. It stepped backward a step and then another into the corner where the dark clung hardest and then it wasn’t a person shape at all, it was a big wrong horse with no smell and then it wasn’t that either, it was a fold in the air and then it was a black seam that ran up the wall like someone had badly patched drywall. The seam made a tiny sound like a mouse behind a cabinet and then there was no seam. Only wall. Only our circles. Only our stupid, perfect mirrors.

Dev collapsed.

We didn’t break the circle. We wanted to. God, we wanted to. But we waited until Jay’s father said, very quietly, “Now,” and then we broke the outer line and not the inner and stepped in and Alina put her hand on Dev’s chest and said “Stay” like it was a command she had a right to give and his ribs rose under her hand.

He opened his eyes. They were Dev’s. Messy and human and complicated. He vomited into the steel bowl because that’s the kind of night it had been. None of us minded.

He looked at us and then at Jay’s father and then at the circle and then at the bowl and whispered, “I don’t like horses anymore,” and laughed and cried at the same time until his face went blotchy and real.

We sat there until the real sunrise made the basement window honest. We didn’t talk. We listened to a house be a house. The radio didn’t try any more voices. The refrigerator decided on a normal cycle. The wind found a different street to bother.

When we were sure Dev’s breath wasn’t going to change its mind, we broke the inner circle and washed the floor and swept the salt into a jar and labeled it used because the idea of throwing it away made my back teeth ache. We put the mirrors face‑to‑face and slid them under the stairs and didn’t look into them one last time, because we are not idiots. We poured water over the glass seam to hear the lovely knuckly sound it made as it cooled the last places that still remembered being liquid light.

Jay’s father picked up the book with two hands. He didn’t look at it like a relic or like a bomb. He looked at it like a photo album from a branch of the family you don’t visit anymore because they bring casserole to funerals and gossip at the graveside.

“What now,” I asked.

“Now we don’t keep this,” he said.

We took it to a church that smelled like lemon oil and old wood and benevolent boredom. The priest looked at the cover and didn’t ask questions aloud. She led us to the back, past boxes of canned goods and a closet full of manufactured autumn. In a concrete utility room she set a heavy iron pot on a trivet and a lid beside it, both black with use.

“I do not share this with many,” she said. “But apparently you already know the recipe: salt, iron, light, and refusal.” She looked at Jay’s father. “You again.”

He winced and smiled. “Me again.”

We put the book in the pot. She sprinkled salt on it like seasoning. She dropped in three rusty nails. She clicked on a halogen work lamp that should have made the scene ridiculous and didn’t. We didn’t set the book on fire. That’s for stories where the bad thing needs oxygen. We cooked it. We made it boring in the hottest way you can be boring.

When it was done, it wasn’t a book. It was a brick that smelled faintly like time. The priest wrapped it in an old altar cloth and put it on a shelf with other bricks that had once been other things.

“What if someone needs it,” Jay asked.

“They won’t,” she said, and the way she said it told me the shelf would be taller tomorrow than today.

We walked out into a morning that had not been purchased by any ritual we could name. The light was ordinary. It was the best thing I’d ever seen.

Dev slept at my apartment on the couch because sleeping at Jay’s house seemed rude to him and sleeping at his own seemed rude to himself. He woke twice, gasping, and each time all I had to say was “Stay” and he did. I sat up in a chair not far away, iron nail warm at my throat, and watched the streetlight give up and the sun offer to replace it.

Alina texted when she got home: I threw away every candle in my house and bought a headlamp. Then: And a plant. Then: And a horse plush so I can stab it with pins like a twelve‑year‑old and laugh. A photo came through: a cheap stuffed horse with a red nail necklace. I laughed until I cried and then cried until I laughed.

Jay called at lunch. “Dad left a note on the fridge,” he said. “It says, ‘Fix the east wall. Respect sunrise.’ I think that’s… it.”

“What about… you know. Truth.”

Jay took a breath. “I told my mom I have Dad’s temper,” he said. “She said, ‘Yes,’ and handed me a bag of compost to take to the community garden.”

“Oh,” I said dumbly. “That’s very… mother.”

“Yeah,” he said, fond and exasperated at once. “It is.”

We met that night to do the last thing we had to do. It wasn’t magic. It was work.

We filled the crack a second time with the day glass Jay’s father called his grandmother’s recipe and Alina called DIY holy epoxy. We rolled paint over the patch because houses like to forget scars. We installed battery work lights on the east wall on a timer and laughed until our sides hurt when they came on at 4:25 a.m. every day like punctual rooster ghosts. We poured a thin line of salt along the baseboard and topped it with caulk because some things only work if the person who needs them to work can’t vacuum them up by mistake later.

We did not draw a circle on the floor again. I did not want to teach the house how.

Dev stood by the drain and looked at it the way you look at a grave of someone you don’t know, with respect and a deliberate lack of intimacy. “I thought I was out,” he said quietly. “At sunrise.”

“We thought you were, too,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the and-then we’d written. He didn’t need a ghost version of what had almost happened.

“Did I—did it—hurt you,” he asked, not looking at me. The iron nail on his red string glinted.

“No,” I said, and the truth wasn’t a lie because hurt and harmed are not twins. “You were kind of boring.” I bumped his shoulder. “You know that, right?”

He huffed. “I am very boring. I have receipts.”

We stood there a while longer. The house did not mind.

The next day, Alina went back to class and turned in a paper late with a note that said A demon wore my friend, can I have an extension which she then crossed out and replaced with Family emergency and the professor circled and wrote Of course with a smiley face that made Alina roll her eyes and put a hand on her chest like she’d been surprised by kindness. Jay’s father fixed the east wall of the basement with spackle and jokes and a level and wrote EAST on the two‑by‑four under the drywall before he closed it up because he is the kind of man who learned a thing once and refuses to forget it again. I made soup and burned it and we ate it anyway because the point was not soup.

That night, my phone vibrated. Unknown number. I stared until it stopped. Then again. The third time I answered.

I expected static. A voice that was my mother but in the wrong key. Dev saying open in his own mouth. I expected clever.

It was the priest. “We are having a rummage sale,” she said briskly. “I need people who are good at selling things that nobody wants with a straight face. I hear you have experience.”

“I am an excellent liar for the sake of good causes,” I said. “I am also a terrible liar, and I am working on it.”

“Good,” she said. “Saturday. Bring change.”

We did. Dev manned the table with the denim jackets. Alina sold a set of chipped teacups to a woman who said her granddaughter liked to have tea parties with worms. Jay convinced a man who only came for the free donuts that he needed a set of old flares because you never know. The priest floated like a benevolent shark. The day was ordinary and loud and everyone wanted a bargain and no one knocked three times on anything that didn’t have a price tag.

Sometimes at night I still hear a sound that isn’t anything. A soft tap on glass when there isn’t glass. A sigh in a pipe that isn’t on. A knock in a hallway that’s very patient. I don’t answer. I go to the kitchen and sing quietly on purpose while the cheap work light on my east wall clicks on at 4:25 a.m. and throws a fake dawn that’s good enough for me.

We don’t talk about that Friday the way some people talk about their near‑misses, as if danger is a party trick you can get better at. We talk about it like a weather pattern that moved through us and left the air different. The book is a brick now. The circle is chalk dust under paint. The crack is a seam with history baked into it. Dev is Dev. Alina is Alina. Jay’s father is a man who writes EAST in places you can’t see, and I am a person who finally says out loud that I like to be heard.

We tried summoning a demon as a joke.

Something answered.

We called it by a name it could wear; it asked us for a door. We told the truth to build a room it didn’t want to sit in and then we made it a sunrise it couldn’t argue with.

It left.

Sometimes the house still listens at the windows like it hopes to hear a word that tastes like permission. Sometimes the wind knocks politely.

We don’t open.

Not anymore.

End!