Chapter 3: The Language of Nightmares

The faces pressed against the window like drowning souls beneath ice, their mouths moving in silent unison. Joey couldn't stay here—couldn't remain trapped in this room while the barriers between him and them grew thinner by the second. The apartment that was supposed to be his sanctuary had become a prison, and the walls themselves seemed to pulse with malevolent awareness.

He had to get out. Had to run.

Joey scrambled to his feet, snatching his keys from the table with shaking hands. The faces in the window turned to follow his movement, their hungry eyes tracking his every step. As he reached for the door handle, their whispers rose in volume, becoming a chorus of desperate pleas and threats that seemed to echo from inside his own skull.

"Don't leave us, Joey. We've waited so long."

"The guilt will follow you wherever you go."

"You can't run from what you are."

But Joey was already turning the locks, his fingers fumbling with the deadbolt. The metal felt ice-cold against his skin, as if the very air in the apartment had dropped twenty degrees. Behind him, he could hear something that sounded like glass beginning to crack—not breaking, but bending, reshaping itself into something that could no longer contain what pressed against it.

The door opened with a click that sounded like a gunshot in the supernatural tension. Joey bolted into the hallway, slamming the door behind him and immediately feeling some of the oppressive weight lift from his shoulders. The building's corridor was dimly lit by flickering fluorescent strips, casting everything in sickly yellow light, but it was blessedly empty of faces and whispers.

He leaned against his door, gasping for breath that seemed to burn his lungs. The panic attack was building—he could feel it coming like a storm on the horizon, that familiar tightening in his chest that had plagued him since childhood. But at least out here, away from the window and the watching eyes, he could think clearly enough to—

"Leaving so soon?"

The voice came from the far end of the hallway, near the stairwell. Joey's blood turned to ice water as he looked up and saw a figure standing in the shadows between the flickering lights. Tall, impossibly tall, draped in what looked like a heavy coat or cloak that seemed to absorb the already dim illumination around it.

This wasn't one of the pale faces from his window. This was something else entirely—something that radiated a presence so dark and oppressive that Joey's knees nearly buckled. The figure's head was covered by a deep hood that cast its features in absolute darkness, but Joey could feel its attention like a physical weight pressing down on him.

"Yur emit ton si ereht, yeoJ."

The words hit Joey's ears like broken glass, each syllable wrong and backwards, making his brain hurt as it tried to process sounds that seemed to come from a throat not designed for human speech. But even as his conscious mind recoiled from the alien sounds, some deeper part of him—the part that had been touched by twenty-one years of supernatural contact—began to translate.

Your time not is there, Joey.

No. That wasn't right either. The words were backwards, reversed, as if spoken by something that understood human language but could only produce it in mirror image.

There is not your time, Joey.

Joey pressed himself against his apartment door, his heart hammering so hard he thought it might burst. The figure at the end of the hall hadn't moved, but somehow it seemed closer, as if distance meant nothing to whatever it was.

"Ew evah neeb gnitiaw os gnol rof uoy ot dnatsrednu."

The backwards speech made Joey's head spin, but the meaning was becoming clearer, translating itself in his mind like a horrible revelation:

We have been waiting so long for you to understand.

"What do you want from me?" Joey whispered, his voice barely audible in the narrow hallway.

The hooded figure tilted its head, a gesture that would have seemed almost curious if not for the waves of malevolence radiating from its form.

"Uoy era eht yek, yeoJ. EhT yek ot eht ssybA."

You are the key, Joey. The key to the Abyss.

As the words resolved in his mind, Joey felt a memory surface—not his own this time, but something older, darker. A flash of understanding that came from the same place that allowed him to translate the demon's backwards speech.

The car accident. The night his grandmother and brother died.

He was twelve years old again, sitting in the back seat during a thunderstorm that turned the world into sheets of rain and flashing lightning. His grandmother was driving, her knuckles white on the steering wheel as she navigated the flooded streets. His eight-year-old brother Tommy sat beside him, scared and crying because of the thunder.

Joey had been angry about something—what was it? A cancelled trip to the arcade? A fight with a friend? The reason seemed so petty now, but at twelve it had felt like the end of the world. He'd been sulking, saying cruel things, pushing every button he could find.

"I hate this family!" he had screamed at his grandmother, his voice shrill with pre-teen rage. "I wish I was anywhere but here! I wish—"

The truck had come out of nowhere, running the red light, its driver drunk and oblivious. But in the split second before impact, Joey had seen something else in the rain-streaked windshield—a pale face pressed against the glass from the inside, watching with hungry anticipation.

They had been waiting for that moment. Feeding on his anger, his guilt, his twelve-year-old tantrum that had distracted his grandmother at exactly the wrong second.

"Sey," the hooded figure said, its backwards voice cutting through the memory. "WoN uoy rebmemer. WoN uoy ees tahw uoy era."

Yes. Now you remember. Now you see what you are.

Joey slid down the door until he was sitting on the cold hallway floor, his legs no longer able to support him. The guilt that Dr. Henley had tried so hard to help him process, the survivor's syndrome that was supposed to be a normal part of trauma recovery—it wasn't misplaced at all. His words, his anger, his perfect timing had created the conditions for the accident.

He was responsible. He had killed them.

"Dna taht tliug," the figure continued, beginning to move forward with steps that made no sound on the worn carpet, "si tahw skaerb eht llaw neewteb sdlrow. Ruoy niap, ruoy mahs, ruoy tcefrep, lufrewop tliug—ti si eht yek ot eht ssybA."

And that guilt is what breaks the wall between worlds. Your pain, your shame, your perfect, powerful guilt—it is the key to the Abyss.

As the figure drew closer, Joey could see more details that his mind didn't want to process. The coat wasn't fabric at all, but something that looked like shadow given substance. The hood didn't cast darkness over the figure's face—the hood was darkness, a void in the shape of cloth that seemed to draw light into itself and devour it.

"Ew era ton stsohg, yeoJ. Ew era ton snoisiV ro snoitanicullah. Ew era sgneb morf eht ssybA, dna ruoy tliug si ruo htap otni siht dlrow."

We are not ghosts, Joey. We are not visions or hallucinations. We are beings from the Abyss, and your guilt is our path into this world.

The translation came easier now, as if prolonged exposure to the backwards speech was teaching his brain to process it automatically. And with that understanding came a terrible realization—if these things weren't ghosts or mental illness, if they were actual entities from some other dimension, then everything he'd been told about his condition was wrong.

The therapy hadn't failed because he was resistant to treatment. The medication hadn't worked because there was no chemical imbalance to correct. For twenty-one years, he'd been trying to cure something that wasn't a sickness at all, but a supernatural connection forged in guilt and tragedy.

"Uoy tonnac nur morf su, yeoJ. Ew era trap fo uoy won, sa uoy era trap fo su. Ruoy tliug si ruo rewop, dna ruo rewop sworg regnorts htiw yreve gnissap yad."

You cannot run from us, Joey. We are part of you now, as you are part of us. Your guilt is our power, and our power grows stronger with every passing day.

The hooded figure was close enough now that Joey could feel the cold radiating from its form, a chill that seemed to penetrate straight to his bones. But even more terrifying than the supernatural cold was the realization that running had never been an option. These things weren't pursuing him—they were already inside him, had been inside him since the night of the accident.

He was their anchor in this world, their key to whatever the Abyss was. And every moment of guilt, every sleepless night, every therapy session where he'd tried to work through his "misplaced" responsibility for his family's death—all of it had been feeding them, making them stronger.

The hooded figure stopped just a few feet away, its void-like face turned toward him with what felt like satisfaction.

"WoN ew nac nigeb ruoy ecnanep, yeoJ. WoN ew nac eraPerp uoy rof ruoy eurt esoPrup."

Now we can begin your penance, Joey. Now we can prepare you for your true purpose.

As the words settled in his mind, Joey understood that his nightmare was entering a new phase. The faces in the window, the whispers in his apartment—those had been just the beginning. Now, with his guilt fully awakened and his connection to the Abyss acknowledged, something far worse was about to begin.

The figure raised one shadowy hand, and Joey saw that its fingers weren't fingers at all, but tendrils of living darkness that writhed and twisted with anticipation.

His penance was about to begin.

And deep down, in the part of his soul that had been shaped by twenty-one years of guilt, Joey Miller knew he deserved every moment of what was coming.