The Light Fades

November 17, 1871

The candles no longer burn for me.

When I strike a match, the flame flares blue, then dies — snuffed out by air that feels too heavy to breathe. The darkness in this house has thickened, no longer an absence but a thing that moves, slow and deliberate, pressing close to the skin like wet cloth.

Even without the mirror, I hear him now. His voice no longer hides in reflection or dream. It vibrates through the floorboards, the walls, my ribs. Sound that isn’t sound — just the shudder in my bones when I stand too still.

“The light feeds me,” he says.

“The debt deepens.”

I asked what he meant, though I already knew. For the first time, he laughed. Not cruelly — not joyfully — but hollow, distant, echoing as though from inside a deep well. The kind of laughter that doesn’t end so much as fade into the air.

The mark on my wrist now reaches halfway up my forearm, branching like veins of frost beneath the skin. When I touch it, my flesh feels warm — alive — but underneath, something colder moves, a slow current pulsing against my heartbeat.

Sometimes, when I walk past the covered mirror, I see the faintest blue light leak from beneath the cloth. I think it’s coming from me.