I thought my obsession was a secret. But the house was watching. And the thing inside her was smiling. It had been waiting for a heart as rotten as mine.

My town was a corpse. I lived in its rot. My skin smelled of gasoline and loneliness. My world was a small, dirty box. Then, she filled the hole in my head.

Anya.

She moved into the bone-house next door. A structure of splinters and shadows. She was a wound made beautiful. A cut against the grey. Her hair was a violation of the light. Her walk was a promise of dirty things.

I became a spider in my window. My camera was my only eye. Click. Her neck, bent over a book. Whirr. The shape of her hip under a thin dress. She knew. Oh, she knew. I saw it in the slight pause before her door, a tiny invitation. A game for two.

But the night peeled everything back.

The little house would swell in the dark. It breathed. Its windows were wet, blinking eyes. And the sounds… not whispers. Moans. A low, wet chanting. My name, tangled in the sounds of lust. Elias… join… come inside…

I’d watch her through the glass. The rooms behind her were a labyrinth of flesh. I saw the librarian, Mrs. Gable, on her knees. I saw the butcher’s thick hands on his own daughter . They were not people. They were animals wearing human skin. And I wanted to be an animal too. I imagined Anya beneath me, her perfect mouth split open in a scream that was my name. The fantasy was a hot wire in my brain, burning away the man I used to be.

The need became a physical pain. A throbbing in my teeth. After seven days of this sweet torture, I broke.

The moon was a sliver of bone. I walked across the grass. The air was thick, tasting of metal and sensetion. The front door was open. A dark, smiling mouth.

I stepped into the wet heat.

The inside was a cathedral of meat.

It was vast. A throat. The walls pulsed. The light came from a black fire that gave no warmth. And the town… they were a single, heaving organism. A knot of limbs and sweat and open mouths. There were no rules. Only hunger. A father buried inside his daughter. The mayor’s wife consuming the choirboy. It was a beautiful, terrible mess. Their ecstasy was a song that vibrated in my bones.

And at the heart of it, on a pedestal of living rock, was the God. A statue of polished void. It had no face. It was a perfect, empty hole. It demanded filling.

Writhing at its base was Anya. Her body gleamed with sweat and offering. And on her, in her, was the faceless God itself. Not stone. A living shadow. A formless thing that pulsed and moved, penetrating her with tendrils of pure darkness. Her back was arched, her eyes rolled back in a rapture beyond pain. She was not just with it; she was part of it. A bride to the void.

She turned her head. Her eyes, black as the God inside her, locked with mine. She smiled. A wide, split-grin of ultimate knowing.

I ran. I vomited on my own doorstep. I fled that town in a car that stank of my own fear.

But I did not escape. I took the emptiness with me.

Now, every person I see is a lie. Their faces are blank, smooth canvases. The woman at the grocery store has a featureless oval for a head. The child on the swing has no mouth to scream. The world is a procession of faceless things. The only real face was the empty one of that God.

The whispers are my only comfort now. They are inside my skull. They show me the truth. My love for her was never pure. It was a filthy, crawling thing. And it recognized its home.

I am driving back to Oakhaven now. The road is black. I am hard with anticipation.

I will walk into the wet, hot dark of that house. I will strip away my skin. I will push into the mess of limbs. I will find my Anya. I will lose my face in the worship of the void.

I am going home to my first love. We will be a beautiful, rotten mess together.

Forever.