Moisture in the air becomes dry choking in his lungs, relentless suffocation like a mother smothering her dearest child with his softest linens. His hands feel heavy, oppressive, as the fluids in his body do, as the candle on his floor did. He's seen it all in twisted dreams between twisted sheets; candles lining the hallway of a man grasping for lost time, and when he looks in the mirror every morning, day, night, he swears to the gods above that his features look a little more like that man's.

He can feel them crawling away from the inside out, creeping beneath his skin above his storage box and above the mangled hole where he watches the 20th wait for her salvation to arrive. Their sneaking and clawing never stops burrowing under his flesh, especially when he stumbles from the portal to hell and knows someone else is in this prison with him.

Their faces are a blur and their motive is unknown, but their wailing depicts their mood clearly enough, and almost makes him feel bad when he scrambles for a medallion or can't keep his fingers tight enough around a candle to light it.

Sometimes he sits for a long, long time on the drab, foreign fabric of his infected couch and stares at the portal that summoned the thing like the plaster will crack and erupt and suddenly it will be himself coming out of the walls; suddenly he is the intruder having dwelled in the walls this whole time as an unholy hell-spawn, locked in a room with a portal to his own mind for his own good to keep his corrupt essence from spilling out of the walls and refrigerators and clocks and closets and chairs and shoes and windows and hallways of every other person on that dreadful list of Sacraments and beyond because maybe if he sits long enough and stares at the dripping candle piling wax onto his graying carpet, he can keep himself from finding out what is on the other side of the walls that he lurks behind and aches to claw his way out of like he watches himself do every single time a candle goes out or a medallion breaks or the air turns to moisture and dry suffocation.

The medallion clinched tight in his hand shatters and shards of it tumble onto the sofa.

He thinks he should just keep his head down and stop thinking so much.