PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
This is not written for those who seek comfort. Nor for those who believe that darkness has a name and can be bargained with. I, who have set this down, no longer belong to the world of the living — not in the sense in which you understand life. My fingers still trace letters, but my mind long ago abandoned the chambers of the flesh, leaving behind only an echo — a throbbing, viscous echo of what happened in the house on Calle Nueva, during those days when summer in Barcelona smelled of rotting mussels and brimstone.
They told me: "You witnessed possession." A lie. Possession is a paltry theatre for priests with aspergillums. What took root in Lorna had no need of a soul. It needed a conduit — a skeletal structure capable of withstanding the pressure of non-Euclidean angles, a larynx that could reproduce frequencies for which human ears have no hearing. She was not a vessel for the devil. She was a door. And I, the fool, was holding the handle.
You will ask: who am I? Dr. Paul Vitre, psychiatrist, materialist, a man who laughed at holy water. Now I write this in a room where every wall is covered with eyes — painted, cut out from newspapers, burned into the wood. They do not look at me. They look through me, toward that place where the universe coils into a snail and oozes mucus. If you are reading these lines, then the door is still open. Or, worse still, it has already opened on your side.
I should not begin with Lorna. I should begin with the smell — with that sweetish, fishy reek that crept from the cracks in her apartment's foundation three days before she ceased to be human. But I am getting ahead of myself. This prologue is merely to let you know: all that follows is the truth. Not the truth that saves, but the truth that dissolves bones. If you have fear — close the book. If you have no fear, then it already lives in you, and these pages will only give it a name.
So then. I shall begin with the first day, when I saw her eyes. They were blue. So blue that behind them one sensed a night without stars.
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