Chapter 3: The First Jest

Chapter 3: The First Jest

Elara pressed the record button. A small red light blinked to life on her camera, a single, defiant eye against the encroaching darkness. On the tiny LCD screen, the scene was perfectly framed: the crackling campfire in the foreground, and beyond it, the silent, watching houses of Beasts O’ Field Court.

“Audio levels are good,” she announced, her voice sounding thin and technical in the profound silence. She was hiding behind the camera, retreating into the familiar comfort of her craft. If this was all just a film, a project, then it was manageable. It was controllable.

Kian held the deck of black cards, fanning them out like a poker hand. His face, illuminated by the fire’s dance, was a mask of manic excitement. “The stage is set! The audience is assembled!” He gestured to the vacant, black windows of the twelve houses. “Now, for our opening act. Who shall have the honor?”

His gaze fell on Chloe, who shrank back, pulling her blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Not me, Kian. Please.”

Kian’s smile didn’t falter. “Darling, fear is the most honest emotion. It would be a powerful performance.”

“Leave her alone,” Liam’s voice was a low growl. He stood between Kian and his sister, a solid, immovable wall of pragmatism. The absurdity of the situation—the impossible cul-de-sac, the non-existent Ford Chimera in the driveway beside them, the twenty thousand dollars in cash sitting in his truck—had scraped his patience raw. He just wanted this done. “If someone has to do it, I will. Let’s get this freak show on the road so we can get out of here.”

He snatched a card from Kian’s hand without looking at it. Kian recoiled, offended. “There’s no need for such… brute force, Liam. This is art, not engine repair.”

“Just tell me what to do,” Liam said, ignoring him and looking at Elara.

“Sit on the log,” she directed, focusing the lens on him. “Face the camera. Read what’s on the card. That’s it.”

Liam settled onto a fallen log they’d dragged near the fire. He was a stark contrast to Kian’s artistic flair. His broad shoulders were tense, his kind eyes narrowed with suspicion. He held the oversized card in his grease-stained hands, looking for all the world like a man being forced to read a eulogy he didn’t believe in. Elara zoomed in, the frame tight on his face and the strange card.

“Ready when you are,” she said.

Liam took a steadying breath and began to read. His voice, usually so calm and measured, was strained, the words alien in his mouth.

“A Priest of the Sun walks into a shadow.”

He paused, his brow furrowed. The words hung in the cold, still air. There was no setup, no familiar rhythm of a joke.

“He says to the shadow, ‘I have brought you a gift.’ The shadow asks, ‘What is it?’”

Again, he hesitated. The fire crackled, spitting a shower of embers into the air. The sound was unnaturally loud, like applause from a single, dry hand. Liam’s eyes scanned the final line on the card. He cleared his throat and finished.

“The Priest of the Sun holds up his hands and says, ‘A second shadow.’”

Silence.

The words echoed, not in the space around them, but inside Elara’s skull. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a punchline. It was a statement of impossible logic, a riddle with no answer. No one laughed. Chloe let out a small, choked gasp. Even Kian’s ecstatic smile had frozen on his face, replaced by a look of rapt confusion.

Then, the world seemed to respond.

The campfire, which had been burning brightly, suddenly sputtered and sank. The flames hissed, shrinking away from the darkness as if slapped by an invisible hand. The ring of warmth contracted, and the cold of the woods rushed in, seeping into their bones. Elara shivered, her hand unsteady on the camera.

Through the viewfinder, she saw the shadows cast by the houses warp and stretch. They deepened, their edges sharpening from fuzzy gray to an inky, absolute black. The shadow of the mustard-yellow house with the derelict Ford Chimera seemed to bleed across the dead lawn, merging with the car’s own shadow until it formed a single, monstrous shape with jagged, unnatural angles. They weren’t just patches of darkness anymore; they felt like holes cut in the world, voids that pulsed with a life of their own.

“What was that?” Chloe’s voice was a trembling whisper. “The fire…”

“Just a downdraft,” Liam said, but his own voice lacked conviction. He stared at the card in his hand as if it were a venomous snake. He hadn't just read words; he had recited an incantation.

Kian, however, was recovering his composure, his artistic delusion reasserting itself. “Brilliant!” he declared, his voice a little too loud. “The acoustics of this place are phenomenal! Did you hear that resonance? It’s a natural amphitheater! The Patron knew! Oh, she’s a genius!”

“Shut up, Kian,” Elara snapped, her eye still pressed to the viewfinder, panning slowly across the arc of silent houses. “Something’s not right.”

Her lens moved from one rooftop to the next. The peeling paint, the dark windows, the sagging gutters. One, two, three… She counted them, trying to re-establish a baseline of reality. Four, five, six… The houses stood in their perfect, unsettling symmetry. Seven, eight, nine… She had a clear memory of them pulling up, of seeing the court for the first time. A perfect, dozen-strong audience. Ten, eleven… twelve.

She stopped panning. But her gaze, beyond the camera, kept going.

It was Chloe who said it aloud. Her voice was small, terrified, a child asking a question she already knew the answer to.

“Liam… how many houses did we say there were?”

Liam was on his feet in an instant, his head snapping up to scan the cul-de-sac. Kian’s artistic pronouncements died in his throat. Everyone stared into the darkness at the edge of the firelight.

“Twelve,” Liam said, his voice hard as iron. “I counted them when we got here. Twelve houses.”

“Count them again,” Chloe whispered, pointing with a trembling finger.

Elara raised her camera again, the machine a shield between her and the impossible. She aimed it past the twelfth house, a faded blue one at the far end of the curve. And there, nestled between it and the oppressive wall of the forest, was another one.

It was a deep, bruised purple, a color none of them had seen before. It wasn’t new or out of place. It looked as though it had been standing there for fifty years, peeling and rotting in perfect harmony with its neighbors. It looked as though it had always been there.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

Thirteen.

A wave of vertigo washed over Elara. The ground beneath her feet felt unstable, illusory. They hadn't just come to a remote place to perform a strange task. They were in a place where the rules of reality were being calmly, quietly, and horrifyingly rewritten. The performance had begun, and the stage itself was now part of the act. They were trapped.