Ortego returned home to a quiet house. He found a note on the kitchen table written in Foster's quick, slashing script:
Working late. Food in the icebox. Don't wait up.
The familiarity of the disappointment was a dull ache. He ate alone, the silence of the house pressing in on him.
He finished his homework in the living room, half-hoping to hear his brother's key in the lock.
It was past ten when he finally went upstairs, pausing outside Foster's closed door. He thought about knocking, but decided against it. The heavy silence from within felt like a wall.
Inside his room, Foster was not working.
He was standing in the middle of the floor, caught in the no-man's-land between his two identities.
The crisp, polished aura of Andrew Garfield had faded, leaving behind the raw, weary edges of Foster Ambrose.
His gaze fell upon the desk. The bottom drawer, where the past was buried, seemed to pulse with a faint, malevolent energy.
He hadn't looked at it in weeks. He had been too busy building his new life, playing his new roles.
But tonight, the silence left by Ortego's absence, the weight of the vacant lot and the dead mechanic, it all drove him back.
He needed a reminder. A jolt of the truth to ground him in the madness.
He pulled the drawer open.
There it lay, its cover stained a dark, rust-brown, the texture stiff and terrible to the touch. The blood-stained notebook. The testament to his three deaths.
He picked it up, the familiar chill seeping into his fingers. He didn't open it at first, he just held it, feeling the phantom pain of the railings, the taloned hand, and the gunshot.
He was acclimating, yes, but the memory of those endings was a cold fire in his soul, contained but never extinguished.
Finally, he opened it. He expected the blank pages, the stark emptiness that had followed the bloodstain. He planned to just feel the crust of his own dried life, a morbid touchstone.
His breath caught in his throat.
There, on the first page, opposite the great brown bloom of the bloodstain, were words.
They were not printed. They were scribbled in a frantic, desperate hand, the ink a faded black.
A hand he recognized as his own—Foster Ambrose's hand:
The gate is not a door.
The book is not a shield.
The heart is the key.
He stared, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing. These words… they had not been here before.
He had opened this notebook a dozen times, in the dead of night, in moments of despair and determination.
It had been blank. Empty. A pristine tomb for his suffering.
Had he been so traumatized, so oblivious, that he had missed this? Or had they… appeared?
A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck.
The air in the room grew thin. The words seemed to squirm on the page, his mind went into a frenzy.
_The gate is not a door. The wrought-iron spears I had been impaled on. Twice._
_The book is not a shield. This very notebook, stained with one of my deaths, is it not a reminder, my shield against forgetting?_
_The heart is the key. That taloned hand, ripping it from my chest._
This wasn't a random scribble. It was a summary. A verdict.
It was Foster Ambrose, the original, speaking from beyond not one, but three graves.
With a choked cry of revulsion and terror, he flung the book away from him as if it had burst into flames.
It skidded across the floor, coming to rest under the desk, the pages splayed open, the words glaring up at him from the shadows.
He stumbled back, his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic, living counterpoint to the remembered sensation of it being torn out.
He pressed his back against the cold wall, sliding down to the floor, gasping for air.
The acclimation, the careful construction of his new life—it was all a sandcastle before this tidal wave of primal fear.
The deaths were not just in the past. They were here, in this room, writing on the walls of his soul.
And the thought that he might have to experience them again, that this might be a cycle without end, closed in around him, a coffin of pure, undiluted dread.