The flame

Journal Entry – October 30, 1871

The eye no longer sleeps.

It watches even when the candle burns out.

This morning, I found the pouch on the windowsill, though I swear I left it beneath the floorboards. The coins lay arranged in a perfect circle — every mark facing inward, all but one. The half-eye glared up at me, the etched pupil now darkened with something that wasn’t shadow. When I blinked, it gleamed wetly, as though freshly carved.

The mirror across the room fogged, though there was no warmth in the air. For a moment, a shape stood behind me — too tall to be real, too still to be alive. Its reflection reached for the pouch, fingers long enough to span the whole windowpane. When I turned, there was only the scent of burnt cedar and iron.

Later, as I poured whiskey for the last of the night’s drifters, one of them stopped mid-sentence. “You’ve got something in your eye,” he said. His tone was uneasy, almost reverent. I wiped at my cheek, but he shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “Inside it.”

I smiled the way I always do when men say foolish things, but my reflection caught in the glass behind the bar — and for an instant, the flame’s reflection flickered where my iris should have been.

The coins hum louder now when I touch them. Not noise — vibration. A call from beneath the soil, deep and steady, the same rhythm I once mistook for my heartbeat.

Something below Cherryvale is stirring.

And I think I’m what’s waking it.

— K