text: [Themes: horror]
  
  You step out of the car and make your way up to the side of the house, walking over small twists of metal that seem to have fallen off a nearby piece of "lawn art". You duck under a window and take a peek from below. You see furniture: a television, an armchair, and a table, all swept to one side of the room. In their place, candles take the arrangement of a seance pattern. Greg, the old man, sits in the middle of the circle, forming words on his lips that you can't hear from outside. You lower your head out of view. What exactly is he trying to accomplish, you wonder, never having seen this before. But Greg always puts his best foot forward to anything he tries to accomplish, so unless he became senile in the last few years, he's not following a D.I.Y. occult recipe.
  
  Trying the front door would be fruitless, given what he's up to. You could break in through a window or drive the car into the house. That's certainly one way to make an entrance.
  
  > drive the car through the house
  Given the layout of the house, there's a good chance you can just run Greg over. This could be a lot easier than dealing with whatever mess he's creating in there, if his ritual is working. It's basically impossible not to get the police called on you, though, so you'll have to find Greg sooner than later. You start the engine, reeling the car back to the end of the cul-de-sac. Stanley struggles feebly for control, but his attempts are easily quashed. You stomp on the pedal, aiming for the living room window in the front of the house, with drawn curtains. You plow through it, losing momentum, but drag on through the falling wood and drywall until you hear the thud of metal against flesh.
  
  You step out of the vehicle, dazed and whiplashed. The brunt of the damage fell upon the fender, leaving your body alive and the car operational. That was a risky move. You turn on a light and glance under the car at Greg's lifeless corpse. A red mist-like substance jitters and swirls, clawing at the air with whip tendrils, only to recede in defeat. It's not a normal possession, that's for sure. Good thing he died before that found its way over.
  
  "Kess," you call out, "there isn't a lot of time. I'm sure one of the neighbors saw me launch the car into the house. Show me where you are so I can bring you along in a convenient container and deliver you to a habitable body. Then I want to talk." You walk around the rubble, seeing nothing for a few minutes. Perhaps he's no longer here. Then, a ghastly white fog emerges from a flashlight and circles to indicate its presence before returning. It occurs to you there are others in this hell house. "One more thing. If you aren't Kess, I'll personally return you to the Otherside. Come out again to confirm who you are." It does, and you grab the flashlight. You hear the sirens of the police coming down to investigate. By the sound of it, there are two or three cars. They pull up to the scene with guns drawn. Convenient, if handled correctly.
  
  > walk outside to the officers
  "I'm glad you're here," you say, walking out of the newly-formed building hole. Officers instruct you to drop the flashlight and put your hands above your head. You comply, and one walks over to handcuff you. You manage to touch her wrist with a finger, and dart out along the boundaries where the skin connects. The woman you inhabit expects nothing, and is easily taken over. You finish handcuffing Stanley and grab the flashlight. You feign interest in its design, handing it off as a curiosity...easy contact. The search for suspects takes a little over two hours to fully wrap up. Stanley, being the only living suspect and owner of the car is booked for murder. It's a neat trick.
  
  Neither of you are required to stick around with the coroners. After waiting for most of the officers to get a head start, the two of you get in your respective vehicles and drive off. You go slowly, letting the cops fade into the distance ahead, then sidetrack onto the freeway. You pull off at a nearby trail, followed by Kess, and get out to talk.
  
  "I need to know how to push out a conscience," you bluntly state. "The original. So I can live in this body through and past sleep, if you wouldn't mind sharing."
  
  "Thanks for the body, by the way. I'll have to go find something to accomplish that myself. I'll be leaving you to do the same, Viktor. After all, there's only so much time left in the night, and I can't risk wasting it to train you on the few things I learned at old Greg's mad house," Kess replies. "I suppose if you promise to pay me, wherever I go, so I can live a stable life without work, that would be fine by me. Just for a lifetime, mind you." He twitches a bit. "Damn host has some fight in him. Say what you will; I need to get this done as fast as possible."
  
  There aren't many options. It's a promise to work for Kess in exchange for a permanent secret to immortality — the kind you thought you'd get when you first became a ghost. There's no guarantee of success, especially when his host has a lot of willpower. The alternative is to likely end up haunting a trinket for yet another year. All activities that delve into dark mysticism tend to carry the risk of oblivion when they go wrong, which is something you're not looking forward to.
  
  > agree to the deal
  "Fine," you reply. The two of you get in his patrol vehicle and drive, with Kess at the wheel. The car gets onto the freeway and heads North, passing by town. The patrol radio squawks orders to return to the station as it's silenced. After the first ten minutes, your mind departs from immediate concerns. Your thoughts start to linger on well-trodden grounds of uncertainty. Will you be vested in life, in lives, jumping from host to host ad nauseam? Will you ever feel that the inherited families are your own, or will you file them away as relics of the old hosts?
  
  Kess interrupts the silence with his own thoughts. "So Viktor," he begins, "let me tell you how things are going to work. We're going to drive up to Hyacinth Beach because I heard about it in one of Greg's ravings. We'll be away from the sand, up higher and into hills where there's some old military bunker. I know that area should have a portal somewhere that connects to the Otherside."
  
  "No way. How do you know you even exist after you cross through it? All I know about it is black nothingness. We were there with the witches when we saw it."
  
  "As if I'd forget a crucial moment in my life. I don't plan on finding out if there's an afterlife behind the curtain. It's possible to separate the host into the portal." Kess replies. "I know the actions required."
  
  He continues to spasm on the drive, even flinging an arm off the steering wheel before regaining control. The car jerks accordingly, and after the third murder attempt on his host's account, he pulls over so you can take the driver seat. The rest of the drive is uneventful. It's interesting how much you appreciate downtime on the only eventful night since last year. The sky hovers above, the road sits below, and the whole world flits between. You cruise along for another half-hour before pulling into a residential network of streets. There's a medley of developments both new and historic along the downhill route.
  
  You pull around an inclined bend to the right, drifting to the side of the road as Kess indicates. The moon beams down from the clear sky, throwing muted light across the grass on a nearby hill. You march towards it, revealing the corner of a forgotten concrete bunker as you crest a minor mound.
  
  "No!" Kess blurts, slugging himself in the head. "Get the fuck out of me!" His arms strain and pull inwards, erratically, making it difficult to pin him down. When you attempt to do so, your host's conscience doubles down on their exorcism attempt, and you're forced to release him. Your headache grows to a roaring cranial pain; you struggle to occupy the body. Kess fights even harder, falling to the floor and writhing. You scream internally. She fights a little less. You scream louder, and her edge faulters. You overpower her conscience, secure control, and rise to a stand. Kess is sprawled across the ground, but he looks stable. He raises a hand. You pull him to a standing position.
  
  "Ok, it should be in that bunker," he says. "Follow me!" You jog with him to the perimeter, looking it over. It seems unoccupied. He motions for you to follow, and he leads through a series of rooms, using flashlights for illumination. He scours dozens of them before he finds the correct one: a gray, featureless crate of a room, with white scratchings on otherwise indistinguishable walls. Something black burbles, suspended, in the corner of the room. It has a wispy outer atmosphere, always curling and reaching. The heart is an inscrutable black canvas, wider and taller than any person, roiling inwards. It really is a fragment of the Otherside. How did it get here?
  
  "Go ahead and stand in front of it. I'll chant," Kess offers.
  
  > begin the ritual
  You move towards the physics-defying smear near the corner. It offers no smell, no sound, and no sights within. It only consumes. You open your mouth to ask what to do next when hands thrust you forward. You stumble from the force, enough to touch the blackness. Your fear spikes, your heart runs wild, and then the body slaps to the wall on the other side. It rolls down, lifeless, both souls absorbed within.
  
  "That's what you get, you damn ghost! Fuck you," spits Kess's old host. His craze continues for a while, but it's all irrelevant to you now.