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Table of Contents:

Chapter 1. The Town’s Air Between Hope and Dread

Chapter 2. Red and Turquoise Lights Underwater

Chapter 3. Empty Room on an Isolated Hill

Chapter 4. Rain on Cobblestones, His Unseen Gaze

Chapter 5. Dr. Grundlos’s Voice, My Hollow Feeling

Chapter 6. Midnight Empty Room, Chlorine and Grief

Chapter 7. His Energy Reaching Me Before Dawn

Chapter 8. Salad Bar Talk and Electric Embarrassment

Chapter 9. Marika’s Warning, My Secret Looking Forward

Chapter 10. A Small Gift Changes How I Breathe

Chapter 11. Wet Ferns, His Touch on My Arm

Chapter 12. Footsteps Where No One Walks

Chapter 13. Lentil Steam, Burned Bridges, His Name

Chapter 14. Herb Garden Kiss Where Anyone Could See

Chapter 15. Half-Clothed at the Forest Edge

Chapter 16. Rotting Floorboards, Konstantin’s Sudden Arrival

Chapter 17. Full Supernatural Union Changing Reality

Chapter 1. The Town’s Air Between Hope and Dread 

The train window burned against my cheek, summer heat pressing through the glass like a fevered palm. Outside, the Brandenburg countryside blurred past—endless fields of rape and wheat broken only by dark stands of pine that seemed to lean toward the tracks, as if listening. I had not wanted to return to Finsterwalde. But wanting and needing were different creatures entirely, and need had won, dragging me back to this town that sat at the edge of the ancient forest like a last outpost before the world turned wild.

My phone screen still showed the last message from my university advisor: “Take all the time you need, Casilda. We’ll be here when you’re ready.” But I knew I would never be ready. Not after Jan. Not after finding him beneath his dormitory window, his body arranged at angles that bodies shouldn’t know. The counselor had called it a tragedy, but I knew better. It was an escape—one I had contemplated myself during those long nights when my mind felt like a room with no doors.

The train shuddered to a stop at Finsterwalde station, and I hauled my suitcase down from the overhead rack. The platform shimmered with heat mirages, making the few other passengers look like ghosts dissolving at the edges. Already, I could smell it—that particular mixture of pine resin, coal dust, and something earthier, older, that belonged to the forest. It stirred memories I had tried to bury beneath four years of city life and academic ambition.

The walk to my parents’ apartment took me through the town center, past the shuttered textile factory where half the town had once worked, past the Vietnamese restaurant that had somehow survived when everything else closed. The buildings seemed to huddle closer in the heat, their facades peeling like sunburned skin. A few elderly women sat on benches outside the grocery store, fanning themselves with sale flyers. They watched me pass with eyes that recognized but didn’t welcome.

The Plattenbau building where I’d grown up stood at the town’s edge, five stories of prefabricated concrete panels that had been painted a cheerful yellow sometime in the nineties. The paint had faded to the color of old bones. I climbed the stairs—the elevator had been broken since I was twelve—each step echoing in the stairwell like a countdown.

My mother opened the door before I could knock. She looked older, grayer, as if my absence had accelerated time. “Casilda,” she said, and in that single word I heard everything: disappointment, worry, a kind of grim satisfaction that I had failed and come crawling home.

“Hi, Mama.”

She stepped aside to let me in. The apartment smelled exactly as I remembered—cabbage and floor polish and the faint mustiness that came from keeping windows closed against the summer heat. “Your room is ready,” she said. “I didn’t change anything.”

“Thanks.” I dragged my suitcase down the narrow hallway, past the photographs of better times—my high school graduation, my acceptance letter to university proudly framed, my grandfather before his heart gave out last spring. His death had been the excuse I’d given for leaving university, but we both knew it was only that—an excuse.

“Are you hungry?” my mother called after me. “I made rouladen.”

“Maybe later.” I pushed open my bedroom door and was immediately thirteen again. The same narrow bed with its blue coverlet. The same desk where I’d studied for exams that would take me away from here. The same view of the forest, a dark wall beyond the last row of buildings. Even my old posters remained—The Cure and Bauhaus, their gothic aesthetic now feeling less like teenage rebellion and more like prophecy.

I unpacked slowly, placing my few belongings—mostly black clothes, some books, my laptop—into drawers that still held artifacts of my former self. A dried corsage from a school dance. Movie tickets from the single cinema that had closed three years ago. A photo of Jan and me at a university party, both of us smiling with the confidence of people who believed they had escaped their small-town fates.

My mother appeared in the doorway. “Dr. Grundlos called yesterday. He said you can start the therapy group whenever you’re ready.”

I folded a shirt, not meeting her eyes. “How did he know I was coming back?”

“Small town,” she said, which explained everything and nothing. “He’s a good man, Casilda. It might help to talk to someone.”

“I’m fine, Mama.”

She made a sound that could have been agreement or dismissal. “Your father will be home at six. He’s looking forward to seeing you.”

After she left, I stood at the window, pressing my palm against the glass. The forest seemed closer than I remembered, as if it had crept forward while I was gone. The setting sun painted the treetops red, and for a moment I imagined I could see movement between the trunks—shadows that didn’t match the trees casting them.

That evening, I forced myself to walk through town. I needed groceries, I told myself, though really I needed to remember how to exist here. The streets were nearly empty—most people retreated indoors once the sun began its descent. Only teenagers lingered near the döner shop, their laughter sharp and brittle in the thick air.

At the small Edeka supermarket, I filled a basket with vegetables, hummus, the ingredients for the simple vegan meals that had become my refuge. The cashier, a woman my mother’s age, studied me as she scanned my items.

“Casilda Martens,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “I heard you were back.”

“Just for the summer,” I lied.

She nodded slowly. “The town has a way of holding onto people. Even when they think they’ve left.”

I gathered my groceries quickly, eager to escape her knowing look. But as I walked home through the gathering dusk, her words followed me. The shadows between buildings seemed deeper than they should be, and twice I turned, certain I heard footsteps matching mine. But the street behind me was empty except for the first bats emerging from their roosts, their ultrasonic cries just at the edge of hearing.

Back in my room, I put away the groceries and sat on my bed, listening to the familiar sounds of my parents’ evening routine—the television news, the clink of dishes, their quiet voices discussing the day. Outside my window, the forest had become a solid black wall, and I found myself straining to see into its depths, though I couldn‘t say what I was looking for.

I had come home to heal, to find some kind of peace after Jan‘s death and my own unraveling. But as I lay in my narrow childhood bed, listening to the night sounds of a town I‘d tried so hard to escape, I felt something else entirely. Not peace, but a strange anticipation, as if I were waiting for something I couldn’t name. The forest seemed to breathe beyond my window, and I breathed with it, already caught in its rhythm.

Chapter 2. Red and Turquoise Lights Underwater 

The swimming pool building squatted at the edge of town like a relic from another era, its brutalist concrete facade softened only by the neon sign that flickered between turquoise and death. Inside, the chlorine hit me like a slap, sharp and chemical and somehow comforting in its predictability. I had come for the late-night swim session, desperate to wash off the day’s accumulated weight—my mother’s careful silences, the town‘s oppressive familiarity, the heat that clung to my skin like shame.

The woman at the reception desk barely looked up as I paid my three euros. “Changing rooms are to the left,” she muttered, though I remembered perfectly well. Some things about Finsterwalde never changed.

The pool itself was nearly empty, just an elderly man doing a slow breaststroke in the far lane and a mother coaxing her young daughter through swimming lessons in the shallow end. The lighting was pure 1970s ambiance—underwater spots that shifted from red to turquoise to white in a hypnotic cycle, turning the water into something otherworldly. Steam rose from the surface, fogging the high windows until the outside world disappeared entirely.

I slipped into the water and felt my body sigh with relief. The cool embrace was exactly what I needed—something to shock my system back into the present, away from the endless loop of Jan’s last message, the sound his body had made hitting the pavement, my mother’s eyes when I told her I was dropping out.

I swam laps methodically, trying to empty my mind with each stroke. The elderly man left. The mother gathered her protesting daughter and headed for the changing rooms. And then I was alone, or thought I was, until I surfaced at the deep end and found someone else in the water with me.

He seemed to materialize from the shadows near the diving platform—tall, pale, moving through the water with an unsettling quietness. The shifting lights played across his face: red, then turquoise, then white, each color revealing different angles of sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes. His dark hair was slicked back with water, and when our eyes met, I felt something shift in my chest, like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know existed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low and somehow rusty, as if he didn’t use it often. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t,” I lied, treading water, unable to look away from him. He wasn’t my type—too thin, too pale, too still. I had always preferred men like Jan, golden and laughing and full of life. But something about this stranger made my pulse quicken in a way that felt more like fear than attraction.

“I work here,” he said, as if that explained his sudden appearance. “Night maintenance. I check the chemical levels, clean the filters.” He paused, studying me with an intensity that should have been uncomfortable. “You’re new.”

“I’m not new. I grew up here. I’ve been away.”

“Ah.” The red light cycled on, turning the water between us into blood. “Welcome back, then.”

We floated there in silence for a moment, the pool’s circulation system humming beneath us. I should have swum away, continued my laps, but I couldn’t seem to move.

“I‘m Casilda,” I heard myself say.

“Konstantin.” He spoke his name like an apology.

“That’s an old-fashioned name.”

“Yes.” The lights shifted to turquoise, and for a moment his eyes seemed to glow with their own inner light. “My mother had romantic ideas about the past.”

“Is she from here?”

“She lives in the nursing home now. Dementia.” He said it flatly, but something flickered across his face—pain or hunger or both. “I should go. I have work to do.”

But he didn’t move, and neither did I. We stayed suspended in that strange blue light, two bodies in water that suddenly felt too warm, too thick. I became hyperaware of every sensation—the chlorine burning slightly in my nose, the way my swimsuit clung to my skin, the current his subtle movements created.

“Do you swim here often?” I asked, immediately cringing at the cliché.

“Every night.” He tilted his head, studying me. “The water helps me think.”

“About what?”