> *"Memories are the ghosts of the mind; but if you feed them, they take on flesh and bone."*
— Dr. Aris Thorne, Notes on 'Collective Hysteria and Grief'*
The apartment hallway was as hot as if someone had left an oven door open. The yellow, peeling paint on the walls had blistered from the humidity, and the linoleum on the floor had softened and warped into waves from the heat. Elara was disgusted by the metallic, sterile scent she brought from the lab, mingled with the smell of sweat clinging to her. All she wanted was a cold shower, perhaps a vodka on the rocks, and at least ten hours of dreamless sleep... provided she didn't see that smiling dead mouse in her dreams.
Her fingers trembled as she fumbled for her keys in her bag. A cocktail of caffeine and nicotine coursed through her veins like a kind of electric current. She had rejected Miller's calls and removed the battery. She wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone right now. Especially not someone who would treat her like she was losing her mind.
She paused when she reached her door.
The scent that hit her nose set off every alarm bell in her brain at once.
This wasn't the musty, sweaty smell of the apartment building. This wasn't the chemical smell of the laboratory, either. This was the smell of fresh rosemary, melting butter, and seared meat. The smell of a perfect, home-cooked dinner.
Elara's stomach churned. No one should be in the apartment. She didn't even have a cat. As for the landlord, he never stopped by except to collect the rent, and he wasn't the kind of man soulful enough to cook.
She reached for the doorknob. It wasn't locked.
The metal handle was warm in her palm. She pressed it down slowly. The hinges creaked with a familiar whine, having gone ungreased for three years.
It wasn't any cooler inside than it was outside. In fact, that stifling heat seemed even more concentrated within. But it wasn't the temperature that was shocking; it was the light. The yellow light of the kitchen illuminated the hall, and the sound of clattering dishes drifted from within. The rhythmic strike of a knife against a cutting board: *Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.*
Elara set her bag down slowly. Her right hand went reflexively to the pocketknife in her back pocket, but she didn't pull it out. Her steps were silent. She had grown used to living like a stranger in her own home for years, but now, there was an actual stranger in her house.
When she reached the threshold of the kitchen, her breath caught in her throat.
He was there.
Mark.
The Mark who had stepped out to buy cigarettes one Tuesday morning three years ago and never returned. The Mark whose file the police had closed, claiming he "likely left of his own volition," while Elara searched for him in every morgue and every hospital record.
He was standing by the stove. He was wearing that faded "Nirvana" t-shirt he loved so much. His hair fell to the nape of his neck, exactly the length she remembered. His shoulders were relaxed, and he was turning the meat in the pan with a naturalness that suggested three minutes had passed, not three years.
Elara waited for her brain to provide an explanation for what she was seeing. A hallucination? Stress-induced psychosis? Perhaps she had been affected by the gases in that mouse experiment?
The man turned around slowly, very slowly, as if he felt Elara's gaze on his back.
His face... My God, that face. It was perfect in every detail. That tiny scar above his left eyebrow, the wrinkles that formed at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, that rogue stubble.
He set the wooden spoon down on the counter and smiled. It was the smile Elara had seen in hundreds of dreams, only to wake up weeping.
"You're late, honey," Mark said. His voice was like velvet. Smooth. Perhaps a bit *too* smooth. There was a slight background hiss in his tone, as if it were playing from an old cassette tape. "The chicken is about to dry out."
Elara couldn't speak. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. Logic screamed, "This is impossible," while her heart thrashed, crying, "He's back." She wanted to take a step, to run and hug him, to breathe in his scent.
But then her eyes drifted to the floor.
The kitchen light was directly above them. As a simple rule of physics, shadows should fall vertically at one's feet. Elara's shadow was exactly where it should be, beneath her feet.
But Mark's shadow...
Mark's shadow, defying the light source, stretched not backward but *forward*, toward Elara. And that shadow did not mimic Mark's posture. Mark was smiling with his hands resting on the counter, but that dark stain on the floor was flickering like something in its death throes, its edges blurring and then sharpening again.
"Mark?" Elara said. Her own voice sounded foreign and cracked to her.
"Yes, baby?" Mark tilted his head slightly to the side. The movement was so sudden, so mechanical, that the hair on the back of Elara's neck stood on end. His neck muscles had contracted much faster than a human's could.
"You... you aren't real," Elara whispered. She braced herself by leaning a hand against the doorframe. "You died. Or you left. This isn't real."
Mark's smile didn't falter for a millimeter. He didn't blink at all. Those hazel eyes were fixed with a glassy sheen.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Elara," Mark said. He took a step away from the counter and began walking toward her. There was no weight to his stride. It was as if gravity were merely a suggestion to him. "I just made dinner. Just the way you like it. With rosemary."
As he drew closer, Elara began to catch another scent beneath the smell of the food. That familiar, nauseating sweetness. Vanilla. Burnt sugar. Strawberry syrup.
The scent from the mouse.
When Mark entered Elara's personal space, she didn't pull back. Fear had been replaced by a strange mixture of scientific curiosity and rage.
Mark reached out and touched Elara's cheek.
His fingers were warm. This wasn't human warmth. It was the heat of a feverish patient, of someone burning up. But his skin wasn't dry; it was slightly tacky. Elara felt that the mark left on her cheek was less like sweat and more like a thin layer of syrup.
"You're very tense," Mark said, stroking Elara's cheekbone with his thumb. His pupils didn't contract in response to the light in the room. They remained fixed like pitch-black, bottomless wells. "Let it go. Just... let go."
In the background, from outside, from very far away, the music of that damn ice cream truck began to play. *Calliope.* A broken, distorted, slowed-down melody.
Mark's chest was rising and falling, but the rhythm was wrong. He didn't exhale when he spoke, nor did he inhale when he was silent. His ribcage simply expanded and contracted like a piece of machinery.
Elara grabbed his wrist. There was no pulse. Only the vibration of that thick fluid flowing through the veins beneath the skin.
"You aren't Mark," Elara said, her voice coming out stronger this time. She fixed her eyes on those fake hazel eyes.
Mark's smile slowly faded. But it didn't turn into a sad expression. His face became a neutral, blank mask. His lips parted, and from between those perfect teeth, a thick, pink thread of saliva hung down.
"Who is Mark?" the entity asked. Its voice was no longer like velvet. It was as if two different voices were layered on top of each other; one was Mark's voice, the other was the sound of cracking ice.
Elara pulled her hand away and stepped back quickly. Her back hit the hallway wall.
"Get out of my house," she said, her hand going to the pocketknife in her back pocket.
The entity tilted its head to the other side at an angle that should have been anatomically painful, nearly ninety degrees. Its shadow on the floor was now completely formless; it was climbing the wall, darkening the ceiling above Elara's head.
"But Elara," the entity said, using Mark's face to mimic that innocent expression. "We haven't had dessert yet."
The lid of the pot in the kitchen began to rattle loudly from the pressure inside. But it wasn't steam leaking out; it was a pink mist.
Elara flicked open the knife. The sound of the metal tore through the silence.
"I don't like sweets," Elara said through gritted teeth.
The air in the room suddenly grew heavy. The entity seemed to be struggling to maintain its human form; the skin on its face was rippling slightly, as if the "thing" beneath wanted to surface.
The uninvited guest intended to stay for dinner. And unfortunately, chicken wasn't on the menu.