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Sigils of Fear

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The bell in the western tower had not rung for sixty-three years. At midnight, it rang once.

The woman looked up from the circle she was drawing. Dust slipped from the ribs of the ceiling. Beyond the roofless windows, the ruins stood against a sky without stars. She waited for a second stroke, her charcoal suspended an inch above the floor. None came.

“One is sufficient,” she said.

It was difficult to tell whether she sounded relieved.

The chamber had once been a place of worship. There were saints without faces in the alcoves and fragments of prayers carved beneath their feet. Someone had stripped the altar of its name. The woman had covered what remained with an open book, three shallow bowls and a row of candles. Nothing on the pages resembled a prayer.

She wore black, though it was the sort of black that had passed through many other colours. Gold thread outlined the sleeves. Little charms hung from her wrists: a key, a tooth, a bell with its tongue removed. Her hands were steady as she completed the first circle.

She examined it, then drew a second circle inside it, leaving a narrow space between the two. In that space she placed thirteen marks. Twelve were identical in size. The thirteenth she left unfinished.

Not yet.

Her thought seemed almost as distinct as her voice.

She set a bowl of water at the northern point, an iron nail at the south and a mirror at the east. At the western point she placed nothing. The book instructed her to leave that position empty. She had checked the instruction three times, as if she disliked obeying it for reasons other than uncertainty.

A movement disturbed the darkness inside the great archway opposite her. The candles bent towards it, their flames stretching into thin golden needles. She watched without rising.

“Before the third bell,” she said, “we must decide where the line belongs.”

There was no answer. She did not appear to expect one.

She reached for a silver knife and cut the first sigil into the stone. It was shaped like an eye with the pupil missing. The second resembled an open hand; the third, a door seen from above. Each mark made a faint sound after the blade left it, as though a small piece of glass had been struck somewhere underground.

At the fourth sigil she stopped. Her fingers hovered above the stone.

If the order matters, the old account is wrong. If the order does not matter, someone wanted me to believe it did.

She carved the fourth mark anyway.

The water in the northern bowl darkened. A single bubble broke its surface and released the smell of rain on hot earth. Outside, wind moved through the ruined cloister. Inside, the hanging charms remained perfectly still.

There were two kinds of sigils in the book. The first could be read from the centre of the circle. The second could be read only from beyond it. The woman copied both with equal care, but she had turned the book upside down before beginning. On its final page, someone had drawn the same pattern twice and crossed out neither version.

An instruction is not an explanation.

A sound came from the archway: three soft taps, followed by two. She closed her eyes. The taps repeated, precisely spaced. Her lips moved with the count, but she did not speak it aloud.

She had heard that rhythm before. The knowledge passed across her face without settling into anything recognisable as affection or disgust.

“Too early,” she said.

She placed both palms flat on the inner circle. The sigils filled with amber light, one after another. The line between them remained black. A tremor travelled through the floor. From somewhere beyond the arch came the noise of stone scraping against stone, then a deep, wet breath.

She withdrew her hands. Nothing followed them across the line.

That seemed to matter.

The bell rang a second time. This time the sound arrived from beneath the floor instead of the tower. The woman turned to the book, counting pages with her thumb. She stopped at a passage written in a different hand and covered it with her palm before reading the lines beneath.

“Fear is not proof,” she murmured.

It might have been an assurance. It might have been a warning.

She took the iron nail and drove it through the circle at the southern point. The floor split with a dry crack. For an instant the room beyond the arch appeared to grow larger: distant columns emerged in the greenish gloom, impossibly tall and broken at their tops. Then they were gone. The nail stood perfectly upright though the stone around it had crumbled.

The woman considered the damage.

A door can be sealed from either side. That does not tell you who holds the key.

At the western point, where she had left a space, a shadow began to collect. It did not spread across the floor. It rose from it, slowly gathering height, as if the missing object were being assembled from absence. Its outline suggested a figure, then a tree, then a cluster of limbs folded tightly together.

She looked directly at it.

“If you have a shape,” she said, “keep it.”

The shadow obeyed, or happened to become still.

For the first time, her hand shook. She pressed her thumb into her palm until the shaking stopped. The gesture was practical, almost irritated.

There is no advantage in appearing uncertain.

She could not have said to whom the appearance mattered.

A second breath entered the chamber. The candles burned blue at their bases. The open book lifted at its corners, although no wind crossed the altar. Something in the mirror began to move, too far behind the silvered glass to resemble a reflection.

The woman stood. She took the mirror from its stand and turned it towards the archway. In the glass the chamber appeared empty. No woman, no candles, no circle. Only the floor remained, and upon it a dark stain where the thirteen sigils should have been.

She watched the stain as if expecting it to answer a question she had not decided to ask.

It can still be left unfinished.

She lowered the mirror.

And then what?

The difference between those thoughts seemed to trouble her more than the thing in the doorway.

She returned to the circle and knelt at its centre. From a small pouch she removed a narrow strip of parchment. It bore a name, or the remains of one. Most of its letters had been carefully scraped away. She placed it over the thirteenth mark, the unfinished one, and laid the silver knife beside it.

The shadow at the western point unfolded. Long shapes rose from it and curved through the green light. They might have been fingers, roots or the beginnings of something too large to enter the room. The woman did not look away. She raised her arms towards the arch.

There was nothing triumphant in the movement. Nothing pleading either. She held her palms open and waited, as a person might wait for a weight to be placed in them.

The third bell did not ring.

Instead, a thought entered the silence, utterly clear.

She has left the line open.

The woman flinched. Not at the words themselves, but at their certainty. She glanced towards the circle, then back to the darkness. Her expression tightened, as though she had finally heard something she had spent the whole night trying not to anticipate.

No, she thought. I have left a choice.

The answer came without breath, without lips, without a voice travelling through the chamber. The marks on the floor shone brighter. They had never been merely decorations. The pattern carried thought as readily as light, and it did not care which side a thought began on.

That explained how her private deliberations had been so easy to follow. Every hesitation, every calculation, every sentence she had never spoken had crossed the archway through the open line.

The parchment lifted from the floor. Its surviving letters rearranged themselves. The woman stared at them, and the smallest change came over her face: recognition without any visible comfort.

“Now,” she said.

She brought her hands together. Every candle went out. In the sudden darkness the sigils were the only things that could be seen. Some faced inward. Some faced out. The final mark ignited at the western point, not under her knees but at the very edge of the archway.

The woman looked up, directly into the place from which the chamber had been watched.

For a moment she seemed terrified. Then her expression changed into something that might have been resolve, welcome or the careful imitation of either.

She extended her hands again.

Only then did you understand the shape of the darkness at the edge of the scene.

The long, curling limbs had not been creeping towards the woman.

They had been rising around you.

The green light was behind you.

The archway was before you.

You had been looking at her from the other side all along.

And she had been listening to your thoughts.

The last sigil burned between you. Its lines curved towards the chamber and towards the place where you stood, so that from either side it looked like an open door.

She smiled, just once.

“Come,” she murmured.

Or perhaps:

“Stay.”

The third bell rang.

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Thank you for reading Sigils of Fear, an original story from The English Nook.

Discover more fiction in English and Spanish: Short Stories / Cuentos Cortos.

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