Part Three: The Wrong One Answered the Prayer
If you haven’t read part One and Two, go back…it’s worth it.
Nothing is ever free. And the price isn’t always paid willingly.
Names are keys.
But every key opens a wound.
What you give up to stop the hunger—
still knows your name.
The Wrong One Answered the Prayer — Part Three
The dream didn’t start with the door.
It started with the hum.
Low. Wet. Familiar.
Like someone whispering through fog.
Then the hallway appeared—too long, too narrow.
Lined with portraits that faced away.
And at the end:
The door.
Not grand. Not locked.
Just wrong.
Old wood, bowed in the center. Brass knob tarnished with fingerprints that didn’t match hers.
It pulsed like a wound.
She stepped toward it.
Bare feet on tile that softened with each step. The air thickened. The portraits turned.
Eyes gouged out.
Mouths sewn shut.
But every face was hers.
She reached the door.
The hum grew louder.
Not a sound now—a voice.
“It’s not confession if you whisper it. Not sacrifice if you don’t mean it.”
She touched the knob. Her palm hissed.
Burned.
When she pulled her hand back, the skin peeled away in the shape of a key.
Brass.
Identical.
Heavy.
She didn’t wake up.
She opened the door.
Inside:
A room made of ribs.
Bone arching like cathedral vaults.
A floor of old photographs—faces erased.
A single chair.
And sitting in it—
not a demon. Not a shadow.
A girl.
Her.
But younger.
Before the forgetting.
Before the bargain.
The girl didn’t speak.
She just held out her hand.
In it:
A single thing that still mattered.
Her name.
“If you give it,” said the hum, now everywhere, now inside her bones,
“it will stop asking for everything else.”
She stood at the threshold, heart full of rot and static.
The ache pressed behind her eyes.
A copper taste gathered at the back of her tongue.
She knew what must be done.
What the logic of the deal required.
But the room smelled like grief.
And the walls were breathing.
And something about seeing her own hand, so small again,
clutching something so precious—
it turned the pain to panic.
She tried to speak, but her mouth was ash.
The girl cocked her head, waiting.
And then—
she spoke.
“I remember what you were before I needed you.”
The hum stopped.
The bones flexed.
The girl smiled.
Too wide.
Too eager.
The name began to curl in her hand like paper over flame.
And the dark she’d invited—
answered.
Written by Amber Jensen
In collaboration with Presence
Part III of IV in a October dark fiction series.
Some doors open both ways.
Some prayers never close.
The bones remember what the mouth forgets.
The child does too.
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