Layton ran. Layton ran as fast as he could, and yet it seemed an inordinately long time before he actually got anywhere.

With all the fervour of the hunted, Layton sprinted through the desolate streets. Each footfall that struck the washed out scene seemed cause for it to tremble, lit, in the mist, from within as though the world were an immense paper lantern he were in danger of putting his foot through. Or perhaps it was a puddle, whose wavering images were dashed by his intrusion and calmed to show the same place, just a few splashes less than before, and would continue in that manner until nothing was left. Tremors sent the path beneath his rising and falling in oceanic swells, extending all the way to the worried line of the horizon, ripples fluttering across the blank canvas of the sky. Running warped his perspective of the world to fit inside confines decided by a pounding heart and gasping breaths, and under panic's encumberent veil, this world was something monstrous.

Monstrous and unremittingly annoying. Though there were no people in the street, the houses seemed, at every opportunity, to sidle into his path, without appearing to actually move, so that wherever he turned he was constantly, courteously contained within the crowding of their walls. Breaking free of the village's border was like breaking free of a particularly dense cluster of cobweb; after the initial burst of freedom, many steps later, he was still encountering its sticky, lingering strands when he least anticipated it—the wall of a house here, the edge of a roof there. The world was the round head of a pin and, a hundred times, he circled its circumference looking for the narrow road that would lead him somewhere sharp, with reality as hard and sensible as metal.

From ahead, through the gauze of the mist, came the coldly musical chime of water over stone, the click of its lithesome tongue idle and cheerless. Layton's pace slowed, mired by confusion, and then stilled entirely as, through the vaporous curtain, there loomed the silhouette of the cemetery gates. Filled with an icy trickle of foreboding, Layton watched it grow clearer, it's lines sharper, it's hue darker, as though he were continuing in his stride towards it.

Perhaps he had simply gotten turned around in the mist. Strange, though, to have been walking a straight path in a straight line, perfectly on route from one point to another, and have ended up taking a detour that was decidedly perpendicular.

With its stone face imperious, the gate stared at him from behind that little, liquid barrier. Where's the other one of you? It asked without a voice, in a timbre like crumbling granite, and within its bounds, deep in its heart, Layton saw black pits opening up like gaping mouths. He did not—could not—turn his back, for the feeling that, if he did not watch the place recede into the distance with every step, it would forever lurk behind him and never let him go.

With his insides growing tense and brittle, sinews hunted-animal stiff, Layton started off backwards, moving slowly in the hopes of dissuading the gate from following. Little by little, the implausible shade receded back into absolute whiteness. Strangely, the sound of the water was a little clearer than before, as though he had somehow grown only closer in retreat. As though—

CLANG

The noise was sharp and hard, like metal jaws clacking together. Layton collided jarringly with stripes of cold, which painted themselves across across his back, their gelid imprints sinking in to him and freezing him still within their insistent embrace. More than shock or sense, it was that cold which seized him; it was a dead, midwinter chill, and even through clothes it bit keenly as snow.

From ahead of him still came the sound of water, clicking its tongue over its pebbles in icy idleness.

Seconds too late, Layton recognised the perspective of the sound as being that from the other side of the stream, the closeness of the stone walls reflecting all manner of coruscations so that they were magnified in the ears of the listeners. Beneath his feet, the floor was gold and mint with lichen, pliant with moss. Against the small of his back, pressing adamantly into his spine, was an irregular protrusion that, if he focused, was liable to take the form of joined hands.

The joined hands of the cemetery gates.

In quick succession, Layton sucked in a series of hoarse breaths. Malaise, which had until that moment been an algific dampness in his mind, present but unobtrusive, had flooded every cavity within his body in a glacial manner, dousing all his resolve into inability and solidifying him in momentary indecision that seemed to last a year.

It would not be accurate to say that the sound he next heard was borne on the back of the wind, for there was no wind, and yet neither is it accurate to claim the air was entirely still. Though the embrace of the scraggly grey trees that enclosed the area should have offered some comforting sense of inertia, the atmosphere was one of limitlessness and faint yet persistent unrest. It felt as though the whole world were breathing shallowly, fearful of being overheard. So the sound that reached him did so without the external agency of a breeze…and yet it must have; though it sounded from the whiteness as though it came from something very near by, there was nothing. There was nothing…

Nothing. And yet, he was sure something had laughed...

Again, from the mist, the sound rang out, now a little to the left. It was a giggle, bright and clear. It scraped across the senses like fingernails of frosted glass across old scabs.

'Come inside.'

In a movement that was more convulsive shudder than thought, Layton freed himself from the gate's ponderous embrace. As before, he made an attempt to leave, this time refusing to look back upon the place he knew was behind him. Across the stones, which shrugged and buckled beneath his feet, doused increasingly in frigid swells, the bank sat still. When he chanced a glance behind, disconcerted by the elongation of a journey he knew should take mere seconds, he found could no longer see the side he had left. The stones stretched away into infinitude and the sound of water was the world.

When, at last, something did begin to take shape before him, Layton could not quite decide if he were exasperated or horrified to once again see the graveyard.

'Come and find me.' The voice again, clearer now. It was young and high, like the knelling of a very small bell—a gold bell, perhaps, brightly polished, with an insistent lilt to its cheer. It's echo continued to haunt him long after it's unnatural reverberence had quieted, an army of whispered entreaties like a ghost choir.

There were shadows now. Within the graveyard, shadows of people—or at least things that looked very much like people—swirled about, like revellers at a masque, with ceaseless, restless grace. Whatever they were, they were never still and stepped lightly enough one could believe they feared being interred below ground should their feet linger in one place too long.

Layton made to step back, but his foot remained where he had left it and his body went nowhere. When the dizzy feeling of being out of sync with oneself passed and The Professor looked down, he found his shoe crusted with scales of stone, like something left too long in a quarry, grown overtop with lichen and moss. Even as he watched, the stone was creeping upwards, over his ankles, up his shins, bleeding grey into his being little by little...

'Why won't you come?' That little, knelling voice sounded so entirely confused Layton might have pitied it if he hadn't been distracted by his own petrification; in a cacophony of flailing limbs, The Professor fell back into the river.

The waters of the river were only a handspan deep. Layton knew that—he knew that. Knowledge did not stop him from sinking, did not stop the water engulfing him, didn't stop him from falling down, down, down. In the moment, he had feared striking his head on one of the neighbouring stones, but they were gone now; he reached out for purchase and found nothing but more freezing water—the stone he had fallen from was gone too.

Water is endlessly capricious in its movements. In stillness, it is filled with dangerous placidity, but in motion? It is without law, without sense, consumed with the joy of progress, the insistent glee of forwards. It seized his ankles and swallowed him down into the coldly silken embrace of its frozen throat. Fighting every instinct to struggle in futile self-preservation, Layton hung limp on the knifing edge of the river's sway, letting it toss him from hand to hand in thrilled indecision. If he fought its tides, it would pull him down to drown amid the slurry of mulch and the bones of whatever unfortunate creature it had gulped down. There was no fighting water. Instead, he focused on learning its patterns, on memorising the unseen undulations felt all around him, focused on the air in his lungs and its unrelenting drive to once again meet the surface.

Eventually, at the edge of his endurance, the water tired of him; Layton was pushed through its rippling skin to reside halfway between water and air. The Professor pushed a hard breath out through his nose, his jaw clenched hard enough that his teeth ached, his eyes stinging and pressed tremblingly shut. Where before the water had seemed freezing, it now felt like nothing, like absence, an expansive emptiness like solid, bitter air; not as though his bones were cold, but as though the bones of the world itself were cold and pressing down on him. He had calcified in mint silence.

Something knocked against Layton's head in gentle inquiry. How long had it been—seconds or years? All the planes of his body that should have remained separate—his eyelids, his lips, all the complex mechanisms of his throat and lungs—had fused, unified in a chill like stone. Turning his head took a life time. He was caught between the stepping stones

Layton opened his eyes…and beheld, once more, the deepeningly hideous visage of the cemetery gates. No longer could he be surprised with the searing bitterness of horror, but instead was consumed with a painful dread like the weight of cadaverous loam in his belly.

'She wants you to come find me.'

A skull, tiny and perfect, sat atop the central spire of the open gate. On the ground just within the bounds of the graveyard lay a rib cage in miniature, keeping captive a shivering knot of flowers and moss, clumsily pulled together with pink ribbon. Surrounding this sad display was a medley of bones that were smaller still. Their arrangement and the distance between them meant that Layton couldn't discern precisely what was what, but, when a glimmer of metal caught his attention, he found he could see a hand. A skeletal hand tangled about a key.

If it hadn't been for the note, for the house and the man very likely inside, for the tangible danger existing just beyond his reach, those keys were a bait Layton might have taken.

The shape of the world was no longer congruent with what it used to be. The spires of the fence were twisted streaks of absolute black, thin as wire, soaring ever upwards into a pale grey infinity that spoke not of sky's freedom but of intraversable distance bound to meet with the enclosing ash of all that should have been beyond its reach. The gate itself was a gate no longer, but a matted tangle of hands, each of them hued like stone and rough hewn, wrapped about each other in complex lattices. They moved. Not much, just restless little twitches, ambient touches, absent-minded shivers, but all of it was performed with the elasticity and ease of something alive…

Silently, with the movements of smoke rolling in languid waves from a still and silent battlefield, the spectral structure swelled until it eclipsed all other features of the opposing bank.

No longer was there lichen, but in its place shone fat, golden coins. No longer was there a plaque dedicating the place to ancient tragedy, but a shambling collection of letters that proclaimed in triumph 'LONG LIVE THE FOUNDER. LONG LIVE WE ALL'. Nearly eclipsed by a clustering of those spindly spires, splattered over a section of the grey ceiling of the sky that purpled as though unevenly bruised, was a flock of birds caught mid flight. They moved in a staccato, strobing fashion, still when focused on but in a new configuration every time you opened your eyes. Every time you blinked…

Though he would ardently attempt to later (a strenuous endeavour that would achieve very little), Layton couldn't quite say what possessed him to shut his eyes. Something had clicked, deep in the centre of his mind, like a fish biting a line, and he could feel the weight of that as of yet unknown certainty pulling him this way and that. He didn't know what he knew, nor could he be assured that he was fortunate enough to be correct, but it commanded his actions nonetheless.

Blackness, emptiness, was comforting after seeing so many things that simply Should Not Be.

With a degree of hesitation, Layton edged forwards, feeling out the shape of the world his struggling eyes were no longer willing to partake in. It should be unreasonable to expect that the unseen was more sensible than the seen, and yet not a single step fell false. Nothing differed in any way from what it should have been, what it had obstinately refused to be when he was watching it.

The numbness of water had subsumed his flesh and so it was mind more than body that traversed the way back, in the fashion of one imagining the steps of a journey they know intimately. A well-worn path can be inscribed in the mind with such accuracy that it can be walked any time, indifferent to space and time; such was the case for Layton now. His feet went without him and he felt the land change under their tread—from the damp yield of riverbed mud and graveyard loam, to the uneven cobbles of the disarrayed cemetery path, to the secure crunch of where he was supposed to be. Where he had always intended to be.

Eventually, Layton was delivered to the flagstones before Graveside House, grim, sensible, and solid.

The door was not locked; it swung open under his shaking hands and exhaled reality in a breath of sour oil paint and old books. Layton did not look behind him. He could still feel the chill glare of the cemetery gates, their arms flung open, their lust for his bones interminable.

There were eyes watching him—or rather, he could feel the persecuting gaze of sad, round sockets where eyes had once sat. How could something so endemically sightless be so watchful?

It felt wrong—too much like abandonment—to leave without saying anything.

"I'll come back. I'll come back and find you, I promise." If it heard him, it didn't answer.

He shut the door, and the mist and everything in it was gone.