Dawn over Blithe Hollow brought no relief. It cast only a cold, sol-gray light across the site of the massacre.
At the edge of the clearing, the grass still smoked where the Succubus's form had collapsed in a final, rattling gasp. Blood—purple, dark alien ichor mixed with the bright crimson of fallen deputies—pooled in the frozen mud. Sheriff Miller lay near the base of the trees, breathing still, but his eyes locked in the vacant, glassy emptiness of thrall-state. Norman and Courtney sat by the stone embankment, binding their wounds in silence, because survival this time had exacted a price no one wanted to speak aloud.
And there was Ken.
He stood alone in the center of the clearing. The Nyota ya Uhai clutched in his hand no longer radiated a warm, golden glow. The filigreed decorations on the book's cover had blackened, and parts of its pages had turned to charred ash where he had bartered his soul fragment to awaken Martin's remnant. A piece of him had died. A massive, protective shield had burned to cinders in his chest.
"Is it over?" Courtney asked in a raspy voice, looking up, her face distorted by pain. "Is it really over, Ken?"
Ken didn't answer right away. He looked down at the mutilated book. The binding shuddered in his grasp. This was no spell, no standard surge of energy—it was a hidden, twitching pull. It felt as though the book's last charred segments had sucked in the gravity of another reality. The air in his throat shifted abruptly. He didn't smell fresh pine and damp moss anymore; he smelled waterlogged wood, decaying leaf mold, and the suffocating scent of churning red earth.
"Ken?" Norman's voice came from further away, like he was shouting through a glass wall. "Ken, under your feet—the ground..."
Ken looked down. Beneath his boot, the frozen mud suddenly stretched and warped like a melting mirror. The violet pulse hadn't died with the Succubus; it had shifted. A frequency left behind in space by Martin's dying, malicious consciousness before it finally dissolved—one final, spiteful parting gift. A tear in the fabric of reality.
Before Courtney could lunge forward to grab his shoulder, the ground gave way beneath him.
No scream. Just a sudden, dizzying fall through the dark, vacuum tunnel of space and time, where the cold wind carried human screams and the screech of a chainsaw.
The earth was hard. And unforgiving.
Ken slammed face-first into the damp, black leaf-mold. The air here was much heavier, suffocating, permeated by an inexplicable, ancient stench of evil. The scent of a place untouched by human hands for decades—or if it had been, whoever touched it had died screaming.
Coughing, he propped himself up on his elbows. Blood throbbed in his temples. The Nyota ya Uhai was still clutched tightly in his left hand, but its cover now vibrated with a sinister, pale ash-red luminescence.
"Where... where am I?" His voice rasped into the dense, ghost-ridden fog.
He slowly knelt up. The bullet wound in his leg still ached from the police shootout, but adrenaline drowned out the pain. He looked down at the book in his hand. The pages were fluttering by themselves at an accelerating speed, and the scorched margins pointed in a single direction: toward the cabin.
And deep, ominous silence was shattered by something in the distance. Not the howl of an animal. Not the mocking laughter of the Succubus.
Instead, a mechanical, metallic, ear-piercing roar that would drive anyone insane:
The cold, screaming shriek of a chainsaw.
A few dozen paces away, rising from the dense thicket... a building stood.
A rickety, isolated, two-story woodland cabin. Its windows were dark, like extinguished eyes. The porch boards had sagged, and the front door hung ajar, as if someone—or something—had just stepped inside, or was waiting for Ken to cross the threshold.
Ken stood up, the book glowing faintly in the dark. The pages turned faster, and the air around him grew colder, smelling of fresh copper and rotting flesh.
From the open doorway of the cabin, a pair of dead, milky-white eyes peered out from the shadows, watching him.