12th August, 1997
It was upon the damp and dusky evening of the twelfth of August in the year 1997 that my fateful decision was sealed by a single word—yes. The day had been cloaked in a veil of incessant rain, each droplet cascading from the heavens like beads of mercury from a broken thermometer. The roads shimmered under the glow of gas lamps, distorted through the rivulets that flowed along the cobbled gutters of our quiet little town. A fog loomed low, thick as cream, settling over rooftops and hedgerows with an air of foreboding.
A letter had arrived two days prior, the paper brittle, the ink flowing with an elegance long forgotten by modern pens. The sender: Theodore Langston—once my closest companion during the halcyon days of grammar school. We had not spoken in fifteen years, our last parting tinged with vague regrets and distant promises to remain in touch, promises that time quietly drowned. And yet, here was his letter, inviting me for a gathering of old friends at his log house beyond the edge of town, nestled near the forgotten wood.
I was reluctant. For years, I had buried the past beneath layers of work, routine, and polite isolation. The face of Theodore had grown hazy in memory—his laugh, his gait, his peculiar fondness for Gothic tales and clockwork trinkets. And so I deliberated. Was it truly he? Could this be some elaborate jest or a cruel mimicry?
But the rain, in its persistent melancholy, stirred a kindred restlessness within me. Perhaps I needed to unearth the soil of memory. Perhaps this visit would grant some quiet closure. I whispered a simple yes to no one in particular.
The road to Theodore’s abode was narrow and wound like a serpent through patches of swamp and clusters of ancient oaks. The rain did not let up; it slashed sideways, rattling the window panes of the carriage like skeletal fingers. Upon arrival, the sight of his log house stirred a strange nostalgia. Its wooden eaves drooped with moss, and the porch light cast a sickly yellow hue across the wet earth. It looked half-forgotten by time, like a relic still waiting for its rightful age.
I alighted from the carriage and approached the door. No one greeted me. I knocked. Once, twice. From within, faint strains of music—Bach, if I was not mistaken—floated outward, distorted by the thick wooden panels. I tried the handle.
It opened with an eerie reluctance.
Inside, the house was dimly lit, the hearth aglow with embers, shadows flickering like wraiths against the walls. And there he sat—Theodore Langston. Older, paler, but undeniably him. He rose, smiling faintly, as though we had last seen each other only yesterday.
"You're early," he said.
"Where are the others?" I asked, brushing rain from my shoulders.
He paused.
"There are no others. Only you were invited."
The room, for all its rustic charm, felt wrong. Too quiet. Too curated. Taxidermy adorned the walls—an owl with glass eyes that followed my every movement, a fox mid-snarl, a raven perched on an iron sconce. Old books lay in haphazard piles, and a grandfather clock ticked with unnerving irregularity.
We sat. We spoke of old schoolmates, of shared laughter long buried beneath adulthood's rubble. He poured wine—a rich, red vintage whose name escaped me—and recounted tales of his travels to Moravia, to Scotland, to the Carpathian wilds. His words were soaked in solitude.
Outside, the wind howled like a dying beast. Eleven o'clock crept upon us. I rose to leave.
"Thank you for coming," he said, his hand cold as marble.
I returned home, the wine and the rain conspiring to lull me to sleep. My dreams were unsettled—a fox gnawed at the floorboards, a raven pecked at my eyes.
I awoke to hammering at the door. The clock read 6:02 a.m. The sky outside still wept. I opened the door and met the stern gazes of two constables in dark uniforms, their hats wet, their breath steaming in the chill.
"Mr. Alastair Wren?"
"Yes."
"You are under arrest for the murder of Mr. Theodore Langston."
Their words shattered the morning air like brittle glass.
They bound my hands and led me through the rain, now seeming to wash away all sanity. I protested. I demanded explanation. I pleaded that I had left him alive, that I had only spoken with him hours before.
They remained silent.
In the station’s dim chamber, lit by a lone bulb that flickered like a dying star, they revealed their evidence. A housekeeper had discovered Theodore’s body the following morning. His throat had been slashed with a surgical blade. No sign of forced entry. A single wine glass with my fingerprints. No other footprints but mine.
"But I spoke with him," I insisted. "I left him well and breathing!"
"The coroner estimates he died before 6 p.m. yesterday."
My mind reeled. The conversation, the gestures, the wine—phantoms, illusions? The rain had been too relentless to imagine I had dreamt it all. But who, then, had I spoken with? What had I drunk? Whose house had I entered?
Each weary day dissolved into the next, indistinct as fog upon a mirror. The rain, that eternal mourner, did not cease its lamentation. It pattered against the narrow panes of my cell like the tapping of skeletal fingers—ceaseless, relentless. The air grew close, thick with the fetid breath of rot and forgotten despair. In such a tomb as this, time became a ghost, pacing the stones beside me. And I, once certain of my innocence, found my thoughts turning inward like the fronds of a dying fern.
Treacherous became the theatre of my own mind. I began to ponder whether some phantasmal malady had overtaken me, whether perchance I had committed that most unthinkable deed and, in the throes of some noctambulist delirium, buried the horror beneath the surface of remembrance. Was I not the master of my own faculties? Or merely their captive?
Upon the fifth eve of my incarceration, slumber, that cruel comforter, offered me no solace. Instead, it ushered me into the same recurring dream. I stood once more within the accursed parlour of that house beyond the town, and upon the mantle clock—a monstrosity of oaken craft—perched a raven, black as pitch and twice as watchful. It turned its beady eyes upon me and spoke, in a voice hoarse as ancient wind through a crypt, my name:
"Alastair... Alastair..."
Its utterance was not an invitation, but a summons.
The walls of my cell, slick with creeping damp, bloomed with mould—green, grey, and the colour of old bruises. My cot was a board; my sustenance, a mockery. And yet, amid such squalor, they brought me parchment and ink. For what purpose I know not. Pity, perhaps, or bureaucracy. But I did not write to protest, nor to plead. I wrote in the hope that words might become a lantern to illuminate the abyss within me.
On the seventh day, a priest was brought to my confines. An elderly man with eyes dimmed by years but still alert with knowing. He had once known Theodore—the Theodore, he claimed. His visit was not to comfort, but to confess.
"Your friend," he said, leaning forward, his voice no more than a candle's flicker, "was drawn to the unspeakable. He fancied that time could be bent, that death could be parleyed with. He dabbled, sir. In arts old and profane. Séances. Rituals. The preservation of moments through unnatural means."
I stared, unmoving.
"He believed," the priest continued, "that the dead might still speak—that they might linger, echoing in some dark corridor of existence. He vowed he would find a way to remain."
A chill, colder than stone, passed through me then.
What if—dear God, what if—the man I had supped with, whose voice had filled that hollow chamber, whose glass had clinked against mine in that toast to old friendship... what if he had not been among the living?
Was the wine real? Was the fire warm? Or were they but trappings conjured from the residue of a man whose spirit refused to submit to the grave?
What if I had entered not a house, but a mausoleum of memory?
And now I sit, ink-stained and solitary, awaiting trial. The hours stretch like shadows at dusk. Outside, the world is awash with rain. The sky has not smiled in days. The constables speak of evidence, of logic and law. But I have seen the eyes of a raven whispering my name. I have tasted wine that turned to ash upon the tongue of dawn.
The clock in the hall outside my cell ticks still. Its rhythm is not that of time, but of inevitability. The same ticking I heard in that log house. The same ticking that followed me here.
Was that simple word—yes—the portal to something far beyond the known laws of man and nature?
I cannot say.
But I remember his parting words. Soft as dust:
"Thank you for coming."
Perhaps I never left.
Perhaps I remain—forever seated in that cursed parlour, across from the dead, sipping from a cup I cannot drop.
Perhaps that, too, is my punishment.
React
