As the stuffed animal in the mirror lands in the center of the circle, the mirror ripples. I stiffen, but Nico doesn’t react. “You don’t see that?”

  He doesn’t. “The circle looks new. The room’s a little cleaner—”

  “The monks in the robes, the Michelin-starred hellscape special of… “ I drift off before I can call the creature in the circle my friend. It’s not him. It can’t be.

  But it’s clear that Nico doesn’t see any of it. And so I stare in horror as the arms and legs of the stuffed animal begin to twitch, and then Wrath begins to drag himself forward. The ripples spread wider, distorting the room beyond.All I can see is the butchered body of the stuffed animal I’ve had since childhood.

  Then it pulls itself through the mirror - and it’s so much worse up close.

  The thing that comes out the other side is half stuffing, half sinew. Wrath is a patchwork monster, one button eye trailing loose, gouges of skin and muscle missing, and trailing wisps of bloody cotton.

  Then it opens it’s mouth, and it’s Wrath’s voice coming from this mangled construct.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Wrath?”

  “What they did? What you did?”

  I kneel down, closing the gap between us as he continues to struggle forward and out of the mirror. His legs don’t work - he’s only able to pull himself forward by one clawed hand. I peer behind him onto to see the shreds and missing skin where his legs should be. Bloody smears trail on the floorboards behind him.

  “I didn’t…”

  “All of you did,” he rasps. He points a claw back accusingly, and I see through the mirror that the group of robed individuals are still there, and so is the stuffed animal, only now it is whole and brand new. Still in the center of the circle, only now the group chants in a low bass and the candle flames rise in response.

  A woman steps out, her robe cut to her figure, dark red and black hair a thick curtain around her.

  “Mom?”

  But what she says next can’t be heard through the mirror. Only the vibration of voices carry across. I stare at her, at the juxtaposition of the Wrath doll on this side and her over there. She doesn’t notice us, doesn’t know she’s being observed, but she looks just like I remember. Beautiful. Deadly.

  I’ve seen more of my mother in the past two hours than in the last decade, and all it brings back is the mind-numbing terror that I’d tried to forget. She is the architect of my nightmares-so why do I still wish she loved me?

  “Where do demons come from?” Wrath groans, pulling me back.

  “From the Broken Hells,” I respond automatically.

  “Where do they belong?”

  I’m slower to respond this time. “The… Broken Hells.” A part of me already knows what comes next.

  “Then why am I heeeeeeere…”

  I scoot closer to him and take his hands in mine. Just like my Wrath, there’s no malice in his movements, and he clings to me.

  “Who did this to you?”

  He looks past my shoulder and shudders. I turn around, and see… everything frozen. Nico, the ash, the room, all of it stopped in a single moment around us like a painting. There’s something suddenly two-dimensional about the rest of the room, much like the painting in the room before.

  But when I look back, he’s not looking to Nico or the room, but at the sky beyond. And even though the sky beyond the stars is black, in the deepest parts of night it seems like something begins to move. Writhing and beginning to squirm, something more consuming than shadows.

  “They used to say you are made from stardust.It was meant as a warning.” Wrath whispers. “You don’t see it yet.”

  This isn’t my Wrath. I know it’s not, and yet, it sounds like him. It looks like him. And he’s as gentle with my skin as my Wrath.But this… I look up and around the room trying to understand.Is this the house? The Doom Clock?

  “What did they do to you?”

  “It will be done soon,” he says. “It has been done already.” He starts to cough, and it racks through his body again and again until he spits out a mouthful of blood and hair. “Why don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t know what you want,” I say, squeezing his hands.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “This is too early,” he says, as though realizing it. His eyes, cloudy until now, seem to clear. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Wrath, what?”

  “The trick is that the illusion is the most real of all.”

  “Wrath—“

  He reaches up, and with the tip of his claw faintly traces something against the center of my forehead. The lines sweep and curl in on each other, and something below me stirs, as though waking. Without being sure why I do it, my hand reaches up, presses the button back into it’s socket. I cup my hand over it, and seawater rushes through my veins. When I pull my hand away, the damage to the socket is gone, the button is replaced, and the skin around it malevolent and tough as it is meant to be.

  Wherever my hand presses, Wrath’s body begins to mend. I cup the cotton-streaming holes where his legs used to be, and they start to reform.

  “There it is,” Wrath murmurs, still pained.

  My blood, my skin, everything goes cold. Not just cold, but the absence of warmth. Of knowing what warmth is and losing it forever. It surges through me, rushing like jet streams of icy seawater through my body. A faint smell of the ocean surrounds me: deep waters and decay.

  Even as the remainder of the damage is reversed, though, Wrath’s skin goes from the healthy red I know it to be to concrete gray. The color bleeds from him and stains the floorboards. And then Wrath is still.

  “The Doom Clock… is only the first step,” Wrath whispers one last time, and then he’s gone. Just like that, the demon is no longer there, just the stuffed animal remains. I reach for sadness, for grief, but all that exists is fathomless water. Churning, writhing.

  The stars burn brightly with color and light, and tones I didn’t notice before are now so much more obvious. Deep mahogany wood flooring. Some of the blacks in the room give way to royal purples and midnight blues.

  “-but otherwise…” Nico’s voice breaks the silence, abrupt after so long. His face twists into shock, like the stunned moment after a car accident. Tear streaks are visible down his cheeks though no tears remain. He rocks in place.

  “What happened?” I ask gently.

  His mouth opens, he’s always so quick with a retort, but it gapes at me before he shakes his head. His expression closes off, and he wipes at his face with the back of his shirt. Silent. Boiling over with some memory or moment that he doesn’t want to share.

  No surprise.Would I want to tell him about Wrath, about what I’ve just seen?

  The Doom Clock is only the first step. What did Wrath mean by that? And was that really Wrath? He said it was. Would a hallucination know if it wasn’t real?

  I look at my hands, still spread out from where they were tracing the wounds on Wrath’s body. No trace of his blood. I draw them back, then push myself back to standing. I don’t answer, not at first.

  “The clock hasn’t chimed in awhile,” my voice hurts to use.

  Nico doesn’t say anything either.

  I think of the eye from the last room, of the overwhelming, destructive presence as it landed down on top of me. Where that was strong and overt, this was insidious. Drawn from whatever it had seen. The Doom Clock made this, I realize. But as a warning, or a challenge? I could not say.

  “It’s not an actual clock, is it?”Even still, I know that question is not right. It’s not what I actually mean.

  Nico needs a minute to find his voice. “It’s supposed to be an art piece.It looks like a grandfather clock covered in a tarp,” he gestures vaguely at items from around the nursery, which were covered in the same way.“But from one side, the tarp is open and you can see that there’s nothing inside.It’s just a piece of carved marble evoking the illusion.It wasn’t until later that people realized something was…wrong with the collection.

  I nod. Looking one way and actually being another, that’s a recurring motif in my life. “And the Order stole one? It was the strongest - the most terrible - wasn’t it?”

  He hesitates.“I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone does.The Order was supposed to be wiped out right after the first World War. They woke something they should have left sleeping, and it devoured them.Vaporized them leaving only their empty clothes and shoes behind. They’ve been gone for over a hundred years.”

  That… wasn’t possible. My parents weren’t that old, and I hadn’t been living in Morecroft Manor for near that long. Whoever Nico was, and wherever he got his information from, he definitely had some gaps.

  Speaking of gaps, how did my parents get involved? Why steal it from The Order in the first place? Did they steal other things, like Wrath had suggested. To what end?

  Save the world? End it? In either case, why would they leave it behind with only me left in the house?

  As we stand there, each caught up in our own thoughts, there is a very audible, and ominous, squeaking sound. Like a door opening.

  There, against one of the previously solid walls in the attic, a door is now visible. Seven vertical boards nailed together with two boards near the top and bottom. It slowly grinds forward, hinges squeaky with decades of disuse but once started, the door itself seems too heavy to stop, and it squeaks all the way until the door is completely open.

  “I don’t understand,” Nico says.

  “Oh good, something new and different for you.”

  A trail of cold slides along my neck and I slap at it, but when I turn, there’s nothing there. Unnerved, I hurry for the door, though there’s nothing visible within. Just a long dark hallway, and another door at the far end.

  “Come on.”

  We head out of the attic and into the new hallway and it’s longer than it appears at first. We walk for a minute, then two. Then five. Ten. The path never changes, and there’s just enough light to see that there are no branching paths. Just the long, narrow corridor.

  Eventually, though, the light at the other end of the tunnel resolves itself into yet another door, though not nearly as handmade as the last. This seems more solid, and only the tiniest amount of light manages to squeak through the corners and seams.

  It’s not a wood door, though. It’s smooth marble.

  I can tell it’s a door, even though I don’t know how, because until it begins to slowly open, there’s nothing that suggests it’s anything more than a dead end. No handle, knob, or anything to identify it. But the faint glow we saw before in the distance is revealed to be an overwhelming surge of lights, like the way the Hollow Hills Stadium lights up on football nights and can be seen from one end of the valley to another. Maybe I think that because I can faintly hear the sound of cheers, or maybe screams, piped into the space from under our feet.

  I throw my hand up, and it’s like I can see the individual beams of light between my fingers. It does nothing to stop the blinding power that washes us out. Even as the door continues to open, the light somehow seems to be more, growing brighter and brighter by the second until it swallows us up entirely.

  Then the next thing I know, we’re in a new room that is nothing but endless white in every direction. It’s still bright, but not painful like it was a moment ago.

  And then I see the Doom Clock for the first time.

  “Oh…”