The Eternal Embrace

The words of the invocation died in her throat, an off-key chant that scratched at the tension-thick air. Lara felt an increasingly oppressive pressure in the room, almost as if the ceiling itself wanted to crush them.

The flames of the three candles had gradually taken on a greenish hue, and they no longer danced; they had stretched upward, rigid and pointed, like three spikes of fire aimed at the ceiling.

"Lara, for God's sake, stop!" hissed Alex, her husband, from the opposite side of the table. His face was a wax mask in the dark, his eyelids wide open. His eyeballs bulging outward. "You're taking this too far, stop it all!"

But Lara couldn't stop. She needed to rid herself of that weight. Of that guilt that clawed at her soul and suffocated her every moment of joy.

She hadn't been able to truly smile since that cursed day, because she knew, deep down, that she was the one who had killed him.

The nights had become a succession of insomnia and fragmented images: the dull thud of crumpling metal, the metallic taste of phantom blood filling her mouth every time she closed her eyes. She lived in a state of perpetual mourning that had drained all her energy, convincing her she no longer deserved even the air she breathed.

If only she hadn't drunk so much that night... if only she had seen the van coming from her right... The crash. The blood. The shreds everywhere. She still couldn't understand how she had emerged unscathed, while almost nothing whole remained of Dario.

It's my fault, her mind screamed, a ferocious snarl that came alive only when she felt happy.

Lara knew that, after what she had caused, she no longer deserved a single moment of joy.

Forgive me... Dario! she screamed in her head.

"Dario, please!" she then cried out loud, ignoring Alex. "Give me a sign!"

The answer came.

It was a terrible wail. A low, guttural howl emerging from the floor, right under the table where the candles burned, which now sparked with an even brighter and more sinister green.

The salt they had used to draw the circle jolted, and some grains hovered in the air. The wood beneath their feet seemed to ripple and vibrate as if alive. Then it turned blood-red.

A glass of water on the dresser trembled, rippling the surface. Then it shuddered violently until it crashed onto the compact crimson slab that had replaced the floor, shattering into shards of glass. A deep gurgling accompanied the liquid as it vanished into the ground. And so all the offerings they had prepared met the same fate: the locks of hair, the bowl with the pig's blood, the deer's eyeball, the rainwater collected near Dario's grave; everything crawled across the table until it plummeted onto the bloody floor, snatched by invisible hands. A thick blanket of steam hit the room, accompanied by the acrid stench of sulfur. A powerful effluvium, capable of setting lungs on fire and irritating them like a disease.

Then came the roar.

A deep, guttural bang. Violent. It sounded like water being sucked down a sink drain, but a thousand times sharper.

The sound of an indestructible fabric being torn apart by an incomprehensible force.

The wall in front of them, behind Dario's photograph, bent. It wasn't an illusion. The plaster stretched inward like skin pulled taut over a bone, then cracked. From a thin vertical fracture, which slowly widened, emerged a pulsing, greenish glow.

The shadow of something was cast across the table. Where only a moment before invisible presences had feasted.

"My God..." Alex gasped, springing to his feet. The chair he was sitting on fell backward with a sharp crack that echoed in the room.

A wave of frost poured from the crack. Then the sound of a relentless whistling wind, growing louder and sharper. A wail as sharp as a blade.

It took only a moment.

An implosion of sound and pressure. The greenish flames of the candles were sucked toward the crack and extinguished instantly. Dario's photograph was hurled away, the frame's glass shattering against the opposite wall. The circle of salt scattered like dust in an explosion that threw frost everywhere.

Darkness and silence fell upon the room, tomblike. Had the ritual gone well or badly? There was no way to tell for sure.

That night, no one slept.

Alex, after checking every switch and every fuse, surrendered to the inexplicable. His thoughts went to their two children. Anguish drowned him like thick black sludge in his throat.

He would have sworn it. He had seen something cross that dark threshold and enter the house. And what if that thing was evil? What if it targeted his two children? The mere thought was about to drive him into madness.

It felt like an omen.

Lara, on the other hand, was a statue of ice. She sat on the bed with her knees pulled to her chest and her gaze lost in the void. Had her brother heard her call? Had he appreciated it? Or perhaps he hated her and her entire family? This last question made her skin crawl.

She forced herself to find a logical explanation: a structural failure, a shared hallucination triggered by stress. But she was lying to herself. In the claustrophobic dark of the bedroom, guilt had already begun to mutate into a creeping paranoia. She strained her ears at every creak of the pipes, convinced that the darkness of the sewers was coagulating to judge her. She knew something had happened during the ritual. It hadn't gone as she wanted, but it had triggered something. And that rift in the kitchen wall was the proof.

It was still there. A thin, black line, a dark wound on the skin of the white wall. It seemed dormant. But Lara knew it wasn't. She felt that wail in her bones. That chill of death deep in her soul. She couldn't help but wonder all night if she had awakened something that shouldn't have been awakened. She felt trapped. There was no turning back now, and she knew it. The old hag who had taught her the ritual had been clear: "Be careful what you summon. If it's a good entity, it will watch over you. If it's evil... remember there will be no way to send it back. Not before it vents its wrath."

But Lara hadn't even considered that last hypothesis mentioned by the old woman. Dario was her brother. They used to play together as children.

In the period leading up to the accident, things weren't exactly going great, but she was sure Dario still loved her. She kept repeating to herself that he couldn't really be mad at her. He had to know it was all an accident. He would surely forgive her.

The first horror occurred at dawn. It was heralded by a choked scream.

Alex and Lara immediately recognized the source: Clara, their eight-year-old daughter.

Her screams echoed throughout the house, making them jump up. The two ran into her room. The little girl was standing on the bed, terrified, pointing at the ceiling.

"Uncle... upside down... he was staring at me!" Clara warned, sobbing.

Alex turned on the light. He looked where Clara was pointing. "There's no one there, sweetie, it was just a bad dream."

But Lara saw something he didn't. The plaster on the ceiling, right where the child had pointed, was interrupted by a thin, dark slit, radiating an icy cold. She grew pale at the sight. But she pretended nothing was wrong. The panic clamped her stomach like an iron fist. If she had spoken, if she had admitted to Alex the horror she had unleashed, her entire world would have collapsed. So she began to convince herself that by ignoring those slits, perhaps, they would close back up. After all, what else could she do? A defense mechanism, a wall of pathetic denial erected to protect her already fractured sanity; she didn't have the courage to explain to her husband that Dario had really returned from the grave and that, perhaps, his intentions weren't so benevolent after all.

In the following days, the manifestations became more aggressive.

They were no longer timid apparitions.

The rifts in the walls multiplied. They were wounds opening in the walls without healing.

The second event happened while Lara was making coffee. Another one of those rifts opened in the west wall of the kitchen. Curiosity was too strong, and it cost her dearly.

She leaned in to peer inside.

She saw multitudes of heads thrashing in a cauldron of boiling, gurgling blood. Lugubrious wails rose upward, reaching beyond the rift. Deafening screams of pain. Agonized groans begged her for help. The chorus of distorted whispers clawed at her mind. And the smell... that stench of rotting flesh. Acrid and pungent blood.

Lara nearly fainted.

She dropped the mug, which shattered on the floor. She fell flat on her back trying to turn away. Then she scrambled on the floor, crawling backward a few steps. She couldn't believe her eyes. What did that window that had opened in her kitchen wall look out onto?

She shuddered.

Pure horror washed over her, stealing her breath. She began to tremble uncontrollably, while a nervous tic warped the side of her mouth. She spent the rest of the morning curled up in a corner of the couch, flinching at the sound of the refrigerator, obsessively looking over her shoulder. The house was no longer hers; it was an infected organism, and she felt like the bacterium that had made it sick.

She sought refuge in her studio, her safe haven. She needed to relax and think. There had to be something useful to fix this, she told herself.

Seeking a solution and trying to calm her nerves, she tried to work, to sink her hands into the clay to find a foothold. A lifeline for her shattered mind.

Modeling and sculpting wasn't just a job; it was her greatest passion. She sank her hands into the fresh, dense clay, venting all her tension into it. Working the material was no longer an act of creation, but a desperate attempt to maintain control over something tangible, since reality itself was slipping through her fingers. It was like stepping into the shoes of God for a few moments. She would create something, perhaps in her own image and likeness. Every time, she felt she had a supernatural power in her hands. And she was more than proud of each of her creations. True works of art.

But this time, she felt a strange sensation. The clay seemed to rebel. The bust she was modeling warped under her fingers, assuming bizarre poses, the mouth opening in a silent scream, the eyes compacting into actual eyeballs and then falling out on their own, splattering on the floor. And then that agonized expression on the statue.

Am I losing my mind? Lara asked herself.

She could no longer tell what was real and what wasn't. Her mind could no longer decide if what was in front of her was normality or absurdity.

Lara, in a fit of rage, forcefully shoved the piece of clay against the wall.

And the wall swallowed it.

A rift opened in an instant and sucked in the clay statue. Then it remained there, still, almost like a half-closed eye watching her.

Lara had the feeling that something was staring at her.

"Why are you doing this to me, Dario? Please... forgive me..." she screamed at the wall. But nothing else happened.

Late that afternoon, Alex came home with several cans of plaster. He said he would take care of closing all those cracks that were opening up in their house. They must have been the result of abnormal settling tremors, he kept nervously repeating. But deep down, not even he seriously believed that statement.

But true terror was yet to come.

The peak of tension arrived that evening. Alex was in the living room, busy repairing the broken frame of Dario's photo. Lara entered the room and froze in the doorway, the blood freezing in her veins.

On the wall, three feet from her unaware husband's head, another rift had opened. Without warning, it immediately turned into a circle of vibrating darkness. And from that hole in the world, something slowly emerged.

A hand.

Long, pale, with fingers as thin as spider legs. Nails black as obsidian and sharp as needles. It wasn't the hand of a ghost. It was solid, real. It stretched out slowly, silently, toward the back of Alex's head.

Dario's voice echoed directly in her head, no longer an echo, but a cold, possessive command.

He can't protect you. Come with me, Lara. It's time to come with me. The other realm awaits you.

Lara tried to open her mouth to scream, but no sound escaped her lips. She felt them sewn shut, as if with needle and thread. Then she felt the pain of it, as if she were experiencing the whole sewing process on a delay, right in that very moment.

She froze.

The hand horribly brushed against her husband's neck. Those horrifying fingers seemed to swarm like insect appendages as they drew closer.

Time solidified.

Lara's scream was like a punch thrown against a cotton pillow. A sound that couldn't pass her lips, sewn shut by invisible string. She only saw the pale, arachnoid hand emerging from the rippled wall, the fingers twitching in the air just inches from the back of Alex's head.

Come with me, Lara.

Dario's voice was a blade of ice in her mind. It was that psychic violation that broke her paralysis.

"ALEX!" The scream tore through the apparent quiet of the room.

Alex jolted, dropping the frame. He whipped around, his eyes wide, searching for the source of the terror in his wife's voice.

"Hell! What's wrong with you?"

In his gaze, there was nothing. The wall behind him had become solid, flat, innocent again. The massive rift had closed the exact second he turned around.

"Behind you..." Lara stammered, pointing with a trembling hand. "There was..."

"There's nothing there!" Alex snapped; his fear morphed into anger. His helplessness into frustration. "Enough with this nonsense, Lara, I can't take it anymore! You're losing your mind. Dario is dead! Do you understand that or not? You won't see him again. Deal with it, we have two kids to think about!"

He took a step back, a gesture of irritation, moving away from her, from her madness.

But his heel didn't meet the wooden floor.

For a fraction of a second, a dark stain, a puddle of nothingness, opened beneath his foot.

An instant trap.

Alex lost his balance as if the world had been ripped out from under him. He flailed his arms, searching for a handhold that wasn't there.

His cry chased the silence from the house, but it was cut short by a dry, wet sound. Terrible. The sound of a bone fracturing. Of blood gushing.

His head struck the sharp edge of the massive oak table. The very one they had placed the ritual offerings on the day before.

Offerings Lara had carefully prepared without really knowing who they were for.

Alex's body crumpled to the floor like a puppet with cut strings. Motionless and disarticulated. One forearm had snapped under the weight of his body, bending back on itself and resting in that unnatural position.

Lara couldn't help but stare at him; her voice had turned into a death rattle. Next to Alex's head, a pool of dark blood slowly began to spread, staining the wood. And on the floor, where his foot had tripped, there was nothing. No hole. No proof. But soon the blood disappeared too. It was greedily sucked up by the wooden floorboards. Then everything became still again. Silence settled like ash over the entire house.

Lara couldn't believe it. It was just her word against the physics of a domestic accident, tragic and perfectly plausible.

You scared him, a voice hissed in her head, a voice that wasn't Dario's, but her own. You killed him too.

The funeral was a blurred nightmare.

Words of condolence, hands on her shoulder, pitying looks. Everyone thought Lara was destroyed by grief and shock. She was. But beneath the grief lay a layer of pure, icy terror. Apathy began to devour her. She couldn't mourn Alex's death in the light of day, because her mind was too busy processing the monstrous absurdity of his murder. At night, she wandered the hallways brushing against the walls, whispering apologies to a brother who couldn't or wouldn't listen to her. The mourning had morphed into a total infection of the mind. She tried to deceive herself, clinging desperately to the police's logic, repeating that Alex had simply slipped, that the black puddle had been an optical illusion triggered by stress. But the wails in the walls prevented her from believing her own lies. The terrible realization crept into her mind that this was only the beginning and that, as the old woman had told her: "There is no turning back."

The police closed the case as a tragic accident.

Lara didn't say a word about the wall. How could she? It seemed to her that only she could see those rifts in the walls. How was it possible that none of the officers had noticed them?

Now she was alone. Alone with her kids and those rifts in the walls.

And, upon reflection, she realized she didn't really feel that alone. She felt watched from every place, from every angle. Where would the next rift pop up? And when? She had the urge to tear her hair out, almost to counterbalance the pain in her chest. And Clara? And her son Roberto? It was only a matter of time... what if they were next?

A black vise tightened around her throat.

In the following days, the house was turned into a fortress but also a prison. Lara sealed every crack, covered the mirrors, left the lights on even during the day so there wouldn't be a single shadow. She moved in a constant state of hyper-vigilance, her heart leaping into her throat at every creak. But the rifts in the walls didn't stop. They grew bolder. No longer just thin tremors, but massive, gaping wounds in reality, from which agonized groans and wails echoed. Damned voices. The sizzling of heavy chains. Horrendous screams of pain that shot straight down her spine.

Was that where Dario was? Condemned to eternal suffering? Was that where he wanted to drag her? Lara bit her lower lip until it bled.

She began to hear her dead brother's voice more and more often. Whispers slithering from the walls, calling her from the kitchen sink, blending with her own voice when she spoke.

Sometimes she thought she heard multiple voices coming from her children's mouths.

A week after Alex's death, the tragedy repeated itself, in an even crueler way.

Roberto, the four-year-old, was playing on the carpet in his room with his toy cars. Lara sat in the doorway watching him, refusing to leave him alone for even a second.

"Look, mommy!" the boy laughed, sending a little red car speeding down a ramp made of books. The car zoomed fast and ended up under the bed. "Uh-oh."

"Hold it right there, mommy will get it," Lara said, but Roberto was already on his hands and knees, faster than her.

"I'll get it! I'll do it!" He crawled under the bed.

Lara leaned over to watch him. She could see his little legs kicking as he stretched to reach the car.

Then, she heard that wail. Low, deep, coming from the floor, under the bed.

"Roberto, come out! Get out from under there right now!" she screamed, panic tightening around her throat in a black grip.

But there was no answer. An unnatural silence fell, broken only by a soft whisper, so faint it was barely perceptible.

"Come here, little one. I have a better toy for you," the voice whispered.

Lara threw herself to the floor, shoved her head under the bed.

The red toy car was there, abandoned halfway. His rosy little legs were gone. In the middle of the floor was another of those slits. The frost pouring out of it had taken her son's place.

Lara stared into the emptiness under the bed for a full minute. She shuddered. Then she recoiled and looked around the silent room. She screamed her son's name. She ran through the entire house, opening closets, looking behind curtains, her voice growing higher, increasingly desperate. But Roberto wasn't there. He had simply vanished.

Swallowed by the floor.

When the cops left the second time, they didn't have looks of pity. They were looks of suspicion. A husband dead in an accident. A son vanished into thin air. Lara was becoming the prime suspect. An unstable, negligent widow.

That day, something in Lara's mind snapped irreversibly. The excruciating pain of losing her son pushed her definitively beyond the threshold of reason. She stopped washing, stopped eating. She spent hours sitting on the floor, stroking the little red car and muttering to herself, weaving delirious conversations in which Roberto and Alex were still alive and sitting next to her. The paranoia had become absolute: every shadow cast by the furniture was a threat, every creak was the heavy footstep of the demon she had once called brother.

She only had Clara left.

She felt ashamed of herself. For just a moment she thought of crossing one of those dark thresholds to go get her son back. But she couldn't do it. She had seen with her own eyes the world of suffering that dwelled in that place. She knew a good mother should have accepted even that to save her son, but she couldn't do it.

The terror was stronger.

So, not knowing what else to do, she decided she would protect Clara tooth and nail, with animalistic ferocity if necessary.

They slept in the same bed. She didn't even let her go to the bathroom alone. The house had become a single, small fort: the master bedroom.

But you can't escape a horror that doesn't need doors to enter.

The final attack happened a few days later, during a thunderstorm. Outside, the sky was a bruised purple, slashed by greenish lightning. Inside, Lara was giving Clara a bath. And she was casting feverish glares everywhere, her heart racing, expecting something to emerge from the walls and catch her off guard at any moment.

The little girl, pale and silent for days, played listlessly with a plastic boat.

Lara sat on the edge of the tub, exhausted, her wide eyes darting frantically across every single tile.

The lights flickered. Once, twice. Then they went out.

The bathroom plunged into darkness, broken only by the lightning that intermittently lit the room with those intense green flashes.

"Mommy, I'm scared," Clara whispered.

"I'm right here, sweetie. I won't leave you."

But she wasn't alone with her.

She heard that terrible wail again, loud now, almost a roar. The tiled wall above the tub began to vibrate. In a flash, Lara saw the grout between the tiles crack, the ceramic bend like rubber and turn pitch black.

A rift quickly tore wide, becoming a hole.

Then Lara's face contorted in horror as she saw an entire section of the wall open like a dark maw, revealing the hellish landscape.

Dario's wail filled the room, thunder drowning out the storm. Almost a howl.

It's almost time. Only she is left. Then it will be your turn, Lara.

The water in the tub began to jolt. A trickle rose, then a stream, then a violent torrent was sucked toward the portal. A vortex formed. The plastic boat was the first to vanish, swallowed by the hole leading to that other realm.

Then it was Clara's turn.

"MOMMY!"

Her scream was cut short as the vortex grabbed her, dragging her away.

Lara lunged forward, her fingers clawing at the air, trying to grab her daughter's hand. But it was too late. She saw her face warped by terror for one last instant. Those blue eyes, so vivid. They now looked like large, glossy white marbles. Those eyelids so wide open they looked pulled back by hooks.

Her little face was the last thing the hole sucked into the darkness.

Then the tiles rose back from the floor and all repositioned themselves in their place. The wall reappeared as if nothing had ever happened. The only proof that it had all been real was the usual slit illuminated by that dark green glow that remained there, motionless. Silent.

The bathroom was exactly the same as always. The tub was completely empty and practically dry.

As if Clara had never taken a bath there. As if Clara had never existed.

Lara remained on her knees on the wet floor, all alone. She sobbed. Tears streamed down in rivers to her chest. She had lost everything. Her husband. Her children. There was nothing left to protect.

But the crying was brief. Her mind, unable to bear such an unimaginable burden of agony, blacked out. The pain abruptly shut off, replaced by an airless void, cold and sharp. She was no longer a mourning mother; she was no longer a grief-stricken widow. She was just an empty shell permanently inhabited by madness.

The wail resumed, this time from all the walls around her. The whole house vibrated, calling her. There was no longer any pleading in Dario's voice. There was only an inescapable anticipation. Icy.

From the wet floor, Lara stood up. The tears now dry on her cheeks were like an invisible film. The trembling in her hands vanished, replaced by an unnatural calm that stiffened her. The pain was an ocean, and she held it all compressed in her chest. Now she let herself slip into that apathy, the antechamber to a sordid madness. The house was no longer hers. It was an outpost of another world, an open wound between two realities. The rifts pulsed and vibrated on the walls, windows forever open to a place of eternal suffering. Cries of pain and constant groans poured from the portals, the sound of a dead world. The echo of hell.

Lara crossed the threshold of her studio. The scent of wet clay and turpentine was the only trace of familiarity she had left.

In the center of the room, the large block waited for her, motionless.

She wouldn't cry anymore. She wouldn't scream anymore. She would fight. In her own way.

She began to laugh. A dry laugh, devoid of any semblance of joy, which echoed in the studio blending with the echoes of the afterlife. Madness gave her a monstrous energy, a glacial detachment from material reality.

Her hands, usually so precise and delicate, moved with a mechanical fury. She wasn't sculpting. She was building a trap. An effigy. A decoy body. If Dario wanted to return to this world, she would give him a shell.

She worked for hours that merged into a single, long moment of feverish creation. She didn't stop to eat or sleep. Adrenaline and pain were her only nourishment. Beneath her fingers, the clay took shape. Dario's broad shoulders, the way he tilted his head, the tuft of hair that always fell over his forehead. She recreated every detail with obsessive precision, not out of love, but out of rage. Every muscle she modeled was a memory, every line of the face an accusation.

As she worked, the house went mad.

From the open rifts, an icy wind began to blow, swirling fetid dust and overturning her tools. Small objects from Dario's world began to fall onto the floor: gray stones, dry black leaves, bone fragments. Mutilated limbs. The wail became a deafening scream. The barrier between the worlds began to disintegrate.

Then, finally, it stopped.

In the center of the studio, illuminated by the cold, greenish light piercing through the portals, stood a life-size statue of Dario. It was perfect. Terribly, painfully perfect.

The instant Lara took a step back, exhausted, the chaos ceased.

The wind died down. The sounds faded. An unnatural, heavy silence fell over the room like an iron blanket.

All the rifts opened to reveal large, greenish eyeballs turning curiously toward the statue. A dark energy, a mist of dust and whispers, flowed from the ground, rising like sick steam, to then concentrate into a single stream that poured into the clay effigy. The statue trembled. Its dark gray color intensified, becoming black as obsidian. Fine cracks formed on its surface, only to reseal with a grinding sound, like bones knitting back together.

Slowly, the statue's head moved.

The eyes locked onto Lara. And at that moment, she heard that horrendous voice again, no longer a distorted wail, but a cross between the warm, real voice she remembered and a guttural, dark grunt.

"Lara..."

The statue took an uncertain step, detaching itself from the pedestal with a dull thud.

"I'm sorry," the voice said, cracked with a pain that seemed sincere. "I didn't want... all of this. I just wanted to come back to you. Forgive me."

The statue held out its clay arms. It wasn't a threatening gesture. It was an invitation. An offering of peace.

And at that moment, the dam inside Lara broke. Her rage, her determination, it was all swept away by a tidal wave of grief and guilt. She only saw her brother. Her little brother asking for forgiveness. The only thing she had wanted to hear since the day of his death.

Tears streamed down her face. With a sob that shattered her chest, she took a step forward. And another.

She threw herself into the statue's arms, burying her face in its cold, dense shoulder. For an instant, it was truly like hugging Dario. She felt the shape of his muscles, the firmness of his body. She closed her eyes, flooded with relief and forgiveness.

"I don't know if I can forgive you, Dario, you took everything from me..." she murmured against the clay.

It was then that she felt the arms tighten.

The grip was no longer that of an embrace. It became ironclad, inhuman. The clay making up the statue turned as hard and cold as stone. Lara tried to pull back, but it was already too late.

The embrace became a vise that crushed her ribs.

The statue's face, previously so full of remorse, had morphed into that of a demon. A murderous glare. Bared teeth. A sardonic grin.

It squeezed the breath out of her.

Lara thrashed, her nails breaking as she vainly tried to scratch the statue's slimy skin. She tried to scream, but only a choked hiss escaped her lungs. Her last look was for the lifeless eyes of the sculpture she had created, two pits of gray staring at her as her life was forcefully ripped away.

The rifts in the walls closed one by one, leaving the walls smooth and white. Silence wrapped around everything like a veil.

In the center of the studio, the statue of Dario and the body of his sister Lara remained locked in a dead embrace. Eternal.

THE END

© 2026 Gabriele Cassese. All rights reserved. Reproduction, even partial, is prohibited.