The rain hadn't stopped for hours. It didn't fall—it attacked the earth, hammering the windows so hard it seemed determined to claw its way inside. Thunder growled across the sky like a beast, low and endless, shaking the bones of the house. I stood at my bedroom window, hands trembling on the rotting sill, staring into the storm.
I didn't need a mirror to know what I had become. A corpse in waiting—pale, hollow, half-forgotten by time itself. My strength had withered. My appetite was long dead. And now, the final cruelty: my memories, slipping through my fingers like dust.
Sometimes I forgot where I hid my journal. Sometimes I forgot who the people in my dreams were. Their faces melted and ran together like oil paintings left out in the rain.
But tonight felt different.
The storm was not a coincidence.Tonight, something was coming for me.
The doctor.
The one they said could help. Reverse the decline, maybe. Slow the decay. But what hope could there be for someone like me? Someone whose sins were too heavy for a dying mind to carry?
I turned back to the window—and froze.
Through the sheets of rain, a black carriage creaked up the muddy lane, its wheels half-swallowed by the sodden earth. The horse pulling it was a gaunt, dark thing, muscles twitching under the whip.
The carriage stopped at the foot of my crumbling estate.
The driver never looked back. He cracked the reins once, and the horse reared, tearing the carriage away into the storm like a spirit escaping Hell.
And then he stepped out.
The man.
He was tall, draped in a long black coat that brushed the filthy ground, his boots shining like polished onyx. A wide-brimmed top hat shielded his face from the rain—but not enough. Beneath it, I glimpsed a pale waistcoat, leather gloves black as tar, and the faintest flash of his face.
Blonde hair.
Blue eyes.
Eyes that tore a hole straight through the storm—and straight through me.
He looked up at the house.
No—at me.
For a heartbeat, the world stopped. The rain, the thunder, the sickening beat of my heart—everything froze.
Because I knew that face.
It was him.
Not just a resemblance. Not just a trick of memory.
It was Jack.
Or at least... something that wore his face like a mask.
I stood paralyzed, gripping the windowsill so hard the old wood splintered under my hands.
Slowly, he began to ascend the steps toward my door, each movement deliberate, like a man approaching a grave he had been waiting years to fill.
I should have felt terror. I should have run, locked the door, screamed.
But instead, I felt... peace.
He had come for me.
By the time he entered the house, the rain had softened to a whisper, like the world itself was holding its breath. I watched him peel off his coat and hat, placing them with eerie precision over the arm of a cracked chair.
His blonde hair fell in neat, familiar waves. His skin was pale, almost translucent in the firelight. His eyes—those blue eyes—burned with something between amusement and pity.
He smiled, and my heart clenched.
"Good evening, sir," he said. "You must be Roger."
His voice—it wasn't just familiar. It was identical. A perfect mimicry of a voice I had once trusted more than my own.
I swallowed. My mouth was dry as bone.
"I am," I managed. "And you are... the doctor?"
He inclined his head. "Dr. Jackson. But if you prefer... you may call me Jack."
Jack.
The name splintered against my ribs like ice.
I nodded stiffly, forcing my hands to unclench.
"Of course," I whispered. "Jack."
He moved like someone who already knew the layout of my home. He didn't fumble, didn't hesitate. He moved through my world like he had been here once, long ago, in another life.
He examined me clinically, taking my pulse, asking perfunctory questions about diet, sleep, symptoms. I answered as best I could, though my mind kept slipping—kept fixating on the impossible resemblance.
Then, as he leaned in closer to check my vision, he paused.
His gloved hand hovered near the hollow where my right eye used to be. His fingers twitched once, like a man restraining a terrible impulse.
"You lost this... in an accident?" he asked, his voice almost a whisper.
I nodded. "Long ago."
"I see," he said. But his tone told a different story. It was not sympathy. It was recognition.
Later, he prepared tea for both of us, moving with ritualistic precision. We sat in the parlor, firelight painting grotesque shadows across the walls. He barely spoke. But his eyes never left me.
He studied me not like a doctor, but like a butcher eyeing a carcass, deciding where best to make the first cut.
That night, I lay in bed, pretending to sleep.
In the gloom beyond my eyelids, I felt it again—his presence.
He was there. Watching.
Waiting.
And for the first time in many, many years, I understood.
My illness was not an accident.
It was judgment.
And Dr. Jack… was not here to cure me.
He was here to finish what I had started long ago.