text: [Themes: horror, supernatural, action]
  
  If the neighbors next door are around, one of them would do. You walk up to the nearest house, blue-trimmed and nice in stark contrast to Greg's, and knock at the door. At first, there's no response, and you're waiting impatiently under the yellow porch light. A young girl answers the door; she must be around ten. You put your foot in the doorway and lean forward, touching the flashlight to her arm. She stands still for a moment, then closes the door. Just in case something goes wrong, you walk back out to the street, casually returning to Greg's. A light goes on. A minute passes, and it turns off. A man steps out from behind the door and walks over.
  
  "Kess?" you inquire.
  
  "Yeah."
  
  Now that he's got a mouth, you want your answers. "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 do 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. Say what you need to now. I've got to get this done as soon 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. Sifting through the disarrayed contents of Greg's house, you search for the keys to his four-seater vehicle. Kess finds them first, on a surprisingly tidy nightstand in the bedroom. You climb into the passenger side, the engine turns over, and he begins driving.
  
  The car gets onto the freeway and heads North, away from town. 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."
  
  The drive is broken up with Stanley's brief, sporadic reminders that he doesn't appreciate having his mind sequestered away. It's interesting how much you appreciate downtime on the only eventful night since last year. The sky hovers above, the roads sits below, and the whole world flits between. Kess cruises 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.
  
  He pulls around an inclined bend to the right, drifting to the side of the road. 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. Kess stands beside you, pointing indecisively at one corner of the building and another, trying to remember further details. At last, you follow him into the main entrance. You stop to listen for signs of occupancy. Hearing nothing, the two of you walk purposefully down a hall, using phones for illumination. Kess immediately locates the anomaly in a gray, featureless crate of a room, with white scratchings on otherwise indistinguishable walls. Something black burbles, suspended, in the corner. 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?
  
  As you stare at its stark presence, a sound chimes off the walls somewhere outside.
  
  > investigate the noise
  If that noise means someone is approaching this room, they're less than ten seconds away. There's no point in going through with Kess's plans just to be interrupted. With a quick nod, you smooth yourselves against the wall, looking out around the corner. The shuffling of many legs fades into earshot. In the dull light they carry, you see two men and a woman, probably in their twenties. The woman is holding opposite ends of something rectangular, which you can't make out in a passing glimpse. They're definitely headed this way, and neither of you have a viable weapon.
  
  > announce your presence
  "Hello?" you inquire at them. The footsteps all come to a sudden halt, without reply. A light beams in your direction. You and Kess step out into the hallway, surveying the crowd of three. The tougher-looking guy on the left has a denim jacket; his counterpart is wearing a hoodie. The woman between them is wearing black jeans and holding an unlabeled book. Kess shoots you a look that suggests diplomacy wasn't his first choice.
  
  "All done with the sight-seeing?" asks the one with a hoodie. "We've got things to do." The other guy fishes a knife from his coat, with some difficulty, holding it at his side. Damn, you'll have to talk your way out of this somehow.
  
  > say "Careful, friends. We're not what you think."
  "So what are you, then?" the woman asks. Her buddies shift around expectantly.
  
  > say "We're ghosts."
  In response, the woman throws something to each of you. You snag it from the air without thinking. Kess lets it clatter, chipping as it hits the floor. You open your palm to see a small figurine, of green painted stone, and shaped like a head. Then, some force draws at you and you're snapped out of the body as invisible reigns tighten; the statue siphons the loose spirit.
  
  You overhear nothing, but with Kess being outnumbered, you could guess he's stuck in a statue now, too. Your prison is absolutely silent, with no windows to see out of, and no parol. A year passes, or maybe just a month. Then another, and another. You've been listening to your own memories for so long that every single one feels overplayed, but there's nothing new to tune in. There's no chink, no exploitable deformity, in these walls.
  
  You begin to pray for release, even oblivion. Then, after some incalculable tract of time, the walls suddenly give way, and you hurtle through the boundary...into a familiar black nexus, sacrificed as part of some dark liturgy.