Between Worlds

Marcus couldn’t breathe.

He was surrounded by darkness, thick and suffocating. The threads wrapped around his entire body, squeezing, pulling him deeper into whatever existed beneath the basement floor.

He tried to scream, but his lungs wouldn’t work. He tried to move, but his body wouldn’t respond.

This was it. This was how he died.

Then, suddenly, the pressure was gone.

Marcus gasped and fell forward onto solid ground. Not dirt. Something smooth and cold, like glass.

He opened his eyes. He wasn’t in the basement anymore.

He was standing in a vast, empty space that stretched forever in every direction. The floor beneath his feet was black and reflective, like a frozen lake at night. Above him, instead of a sky, there were threads. Thousands of them, maybe millions, all red and glowing, stretching across the darkness like a web with no end.

“Where am I?” His voice echoed strangely, like the space was both enormous and cramped at the same time.

“Between,” a voice answered.

Marcus spun around. A figure stood behind him, but it wasn’t Thomas. It was himself. Another version, but this one looked different from the corpses. This Marcus was see-through and flickering, like a projection that couldn’t quite hold its shape.

“Between what?” Marcus asked.

“Between moments. Between deaths. Between all the times you die.” The other Marcus smiled, but it was wrong. Too wide. “This is where we all exist when we’re not in the basement. This is the space the thread builds in.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m you. From cycle eighteen. I died in 1675. Been here ever since.” The projection walked closer, its feet not quite touching the ground. “Every version of us ends up here eventually. Some sooner, some later. But we all arrive in the end.”

Marcus looked around at the endless space. “How many are there? How many versions?”

“Twenty-five. Always twenty-five. That’s the magic number. But we don’t all exist in the same when. Some of us are from the past. Some from the future. Time doesn’t work right here.”

“The future? You mean there are versions of me that haven’t been born yet?”

“The thread doesn’t care about linear time. It exists across all of it at once, plucking versions of the same soul from different eras. You’re from 2025. I’ve met versions from 2075, 2125, and even 2525. All of us connected, all of us the same person wearing different faces.”

Marcus felt sick. “So this never ends? Even centuries from now, the thread is still...”

“Still building. Still feeding. Still trying to complete itself.” The 1675 Marcus gestured at the threads above them. “This is what it’s making. A network across time. Each of us is a node in the web, and when all twenty-five nodes are active, the web becomes something more. Something aware.”

“That’s the hand you’re talking about. The thing with twenty-five fingers.”

“The hand is just the physical form. The real structure is this.” He pointed at the web. “We’re building a god, Marcus. A being that exists in all times at once. And we’re the sacrifice that makes it possible.”

Marcus backed away from him. “I won’t help it. I won’t be part of this.”

“You already are. You’ve been part of it since the moment you were born. The thread doesn’t choose randomly. It chooses the same soul across iterations. The same pattern of consciousness. We’re all you, and you’re all us.”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it? You’ve felt the deaths, haven’t you? Felt Emma’s last moments. Your father’s. Mrs. Garner’s. Those memories don’t just disappear. They’re building up inside you, creating a library of suffering that the thread can access.” The 1675 Marcus tilted his head. “By the time you die, you’ll have experienced dozens of deaths. And all those experiences will be added to the collective. To us. We’ll feel everything you felt. Know everything you knew.”

Marcus thought about the weight of the memories already in his head. Emma’s confusion. His father’s despair. Mrs. Garner’s terror. If he absorbed twenty-one more deaths before day seven...

“I can’t do that. I can’t carry that much.”

“You don’t have a choice. The thread feeds whether you want it to or not. It’s feeding right now.” The projection pointed behind Marcus.

Marcus turned and saw them. Ghostly images hung in the air like TV screens floating in the darkness. Each one showed a different scene of death.
The teenager, Jason, bleeding out on the pavement.

The old man clutching his chest as his heart gave out.

A woman in a car, threads wrapped around her eyes, crashing into a telephone pole.

A child in a house, threads filling her lungs, drowning on dry land.

All happening in real time. All happening because Marcus had entered the basement.

“Make it stop,” Marcus said. “Please.”

“I can’t. Only you can.”

“How?”

“Complete the cycle. Feed it the full twenty-five. Then it releases everyone who’s dying right now and resets for the next iteration.”

Marcus watched a man fall from a ladder, threads wrapped around his ankles. He watched him hit the ground and lie still.

Eleven deaths now, according to the count in his head. Fourteen more to go.

“What if I refuse? What if I just stay here?”

“Then they keep dying. The thread has split into hundreds of connections now. It’s attached to everyone within two miles of your house. They’ll all die slowly and painfully over the next three days. Two hundred, maybe three hundred people. Women, children, everyone.”

“But if I complete the cycle, only twenty-five die?”

“Only twenty-five die permanently. The rest get released when the cycle resets. They’ll wake up confused, maybe traumatized, but alive.”

Marcus looked at the screens again. He watched a mother shielding her baby as threads crawled toward them both.

“So I have to choose who dies. I have to pick twenty-five people and kill them to save the rest.”

“Not pick. The thread has already picked. It’ll take the easiest targets first: the weak, the sick, the isolated. You just have to let it finish.”

“And then what? I become part of this place? Stuck here forever?”

“Until the web is complete. Until all twenty-five nodes are fully active across all time periods.” The projection flickered. “Could be decades. Could be centuries. But yes. You’ll be here, conscious, experiencing every death from every cycle. That’s the price.”

Marcus closed his eyes and tried to think.

Emma’s voice echoed in his memory: Make it stop. Please make it stop.

His father’s last words: Don’t become that thing I saw.

Mrs. Garner’s final thought: What did that boy do to me?

He couldn’t save everyone. But maybe he could keep the damage as small as possible.

“If I complete the cycle, everyone else lives?”

“Everyone else gets released. Sent back to their bodies. The thread only keeps what it needs.”

Marcus opened his eyes and looked at his other self. “How do I do it? How do I complete it?”

“Go back to the basement. The physical basement. Let the thread guide you. It’ll show you who to take. Make it quick, make it merciful, and by sunset on day seven, it’ll be done.”

“And the people dying right now?”

“They’ll stop dying the moment you commit. The moment you accept your role.” The projection reached out and touched Marcus’s chest. “Just say yes. Say you’ll complete the cycle. The thread is listening.”

Marcus thought about his mom in the hospital. About Jake and his other friends. About all the normal people in his town who’d done nothing wrong except live near him.

He thought about the alternative: three hundred deaths instead of twenty-five. Slow, agonizing deaths as the thread fed on anyone it could reach.
“I’ll do it,” Marcus said quietly. “I’ll complete the cycle.”

The projection smiled. “Good.”

And then Marcus was falling again, pulled back through the darkness, through the earth, into the basement.

He hit the dirt floor hard, and it knocked the wind out of him. He lay there for a moment, gasping, then sat up and looked around.

The basement was the same. Twenty-four corpses in a circle, the hand floating above them. But something had changed. The threads weren’t pulling him anymore. They’d let him go.

And in his head, he heard a voice. Not words exactly, but intent. Understanding. The thread was pleased. He’d accepted his role.

Marcus stood up on shaky legs and walked to the tunnel entrance. His phone showed 8:23 AM. Day four. He’d been gone less than two hours, though it felt like days.

He had texts from his mom. From Officer Chen. From people he didn’t even know, asking if he was okay, if he knew what was happening in the neighborhood.

Marcus turned the phone off and started walking back through the storm drain.

When he came out into daylight, the industrial district was in chaos. Emergency vehicles were everywhere. Police barricades blocked the roads.
Helicopters circled overhead. News vans were setting up, and reporters were talking into cameras.

Marcus stayed in the shadows and watched.

A reporter was doing a live broadcast: “...unprecedented medical emergency affecting the Riverside neighborhood. At least thirty people have fallen ill with similar symptoms: seizures, respiratory failure, and cardiac arrest. Authorities are investigating potential environmental contamination or a bioterrorist attack. We’re told the CDC is sending a team...”

Thirty people. Not eleven.

While Marcus was in the between-space, the thread had kept feeding.

He felt them in his head now. All thirty deaths. Their final moments, their confusion and fear, all stored in his memory like files he could open whenever he wanted. He would never be free of them.

Marcus turned away from the news vans and headed toward the residential areas, staying off the main streets, cutting through alleys and backyards.

The thread pulsed on his finger. Not urgent anymore. Patient. It knew he’d agreed to help it. Now it would guide him to the final victims and show him who to take to reach exactly twenty-five.

Thirty down. Negative five to go.

Wait.

Marcus stopped walking and looked at his hand.

Thirty deaths meant the thread had overshot. It had taken more than it needed. But the projection had said it needed exactly twenty-five. Not more, not less.

Which meant five people should come back to life when the cycle was complete.

Five survivors.

Maybe that was how it worked. Maybe the thread always took more than it needed, and the extras got released. They got to wake up with no memory and live unusually long lives, like Margaret Price and the others.

Or maybe Marcus had been lied to.

Maybe the projection wasn’t really him from 1675. Maybe it was the thread itself, wearing his face, saying whatever it took to make him cooperate.

He pulled out his phone and turned it back on. He scrolled through his recent calls until he found the number Sarah had called from.

It rang four times, then went to voicemail. He tried Jennifer’s number. Same thing.

David’s number connected.

“Marcus? Thank god. Are you okay?”

“I went to the basement,” Marcus said. “I talked to... something. It said it was me from 1675. It told me to complete the cycle.”

David swore. “That wasn’t you. That was the thread. It talks to people in that space, wears familiar faces, tells them what they want to hear.”

“It said if I complete the cycle, everyone else gets released. Only twenty-five people die permanently.”

“That’s partly true. The thread needs twenty-five deaths to complete a cycle. But there’s something it didn’t tell you.”

“What?”

“The deaths don’t have to be from this cycle. They can be carried over from previous cycles. From survivors.”

Marcus felt cold. “What do you mean?”

“The three of us, me and Sarah and Jennifer, died in 1975. Our deaths counted toward that cycle’s total. When Michael failed to complete it, we got released. But we’re still marked. Still connected. If you complete your cycle, the thread can claim our deaths after the fact. It can pull us back in.”

“So I’d be killing you too.”

“You’d be killing everyone who ever survived. Everyone across all the cycles who managed to escape. Margaret Price, David Lowell from 1925, and dozens of others throughout history. We’d all get pulled back in. All those extra years we lived would be taken back.”

Marcus leaned against a brick wall, feeling sick. “How many people are we talking about?”

“We don’t know exactly. Maybe fifty. Maybe a hundred. All of us who died and came back, all of us living on borrowed time.”

“So if I complete the cycle, I’m not saving anyone. I’m just killing more people.”

“Exactly. The thread lied to you. It always lies.”

Marcus looked at his hand. The thread sat there innocently, pulsing its gentle rhythm.

“Then what do I do?”

“You starve it. Let it take you on day seven without feeding it. The cycle fails, and all of us stay free.”

“But people are dying right now. The thread split. It’s attached to hundreds of people in my neighborhood.”

David was quiet for a moment. “How many have died so far?”

“Thirty.”

“Jesus. Okay. Okay, here’s what you do. Don’t kill anyone else. Let the thread take whoever it’s already attached to. It’ll feed until it’s satisfied, then stop. It won’t be exactly twenty-five, so the cycle will fail. You’ll die on day seven, but everyone it killed this cycle will get released.”

“Everyone except me.”

“Everyone except you.”

Marcus closed his eyes. “What happens to me when I die? Where do I go?”

“The between-space. The place where you saw the projection. You’ll be trapped there with all the other versions, experiencing every death from every cycle forever.”

“That sounds like hell.”

“It is hell. But it’s the price for stopping the cycle. For keeping the rest of us free.”

Marcus thought about his mom. She’d already lost Emma and her husband. If he died too, she’d have no one.

But if he completed the cycle, he’d kill possibly hundreds of people across time.

There was no good choice. Just different degrees of bad.

“I need to think about this,” Marcus said.

“Don’t think too long. You’re on day four now. Three days left.”

Marcus hung up and kept walking.

He didn’t know where he was going. He just knew he couldn’t stay still. Moving helped him think.

The thread pulsed on his finger, trying to guide him somewhere. Trying to show him the next victim. Marcus ignored it.

He walked through his town, seeing it with new eyes. All these people, living their normal lives, not knowing that something ancient and hungry was feeding on them. Not knowing that a teenage boy was the only thing standing between them and death.

He passed the school where he’d spent the last ten years. He passed the park where he’d learned to ride a bike, and the library where he’d checked out his first book.

All of it was about to become a memory. Either because he’d die and leave it behind, or because he’d destroy it trying to fight the thread.

Around noon, he found himself at the hospital. He stood outside, looking up at the window where his mom was probably sedated and grieving.

He wanted to see her. He wanted to tell her goodbye. But what would he say? How could he explain?

His phone rang. Unknown number again.

He almost didn’t answer, but something made him.

“Hello?”

“Marcus, it’s Jennifer. The real Jennifer this time, I promise.”

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t. You can’t. The thread can fake anything: voices, texts, even people’s faces. But I’m going to tell you something only the real me would know, and you’ll have to decide if you believe it.”

“Okay.”

“Sarah lied to you. She’s been compromised. The thread got to her years ago. It’s been speaking through her, using her to manipulate survivors into making the wrong choices. Everything she told you was designed to make you complete the cycle.”

Marcus laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Sarah said the same thing about you. That the thread speaks through you.”

“Of course she did. Because we’re all compromised, Marcus. All of us survivors. We’ve been connected to the thread for so long that we can’t tell anymore where we end and it begins. Our thoughts aren’t fully our own. Our advice can’t be trusted.”

“Then why are you calling?”

“Because even compromised, even partly controlled, there’s still a part of me that’s human. That remembers what it was like to be in your position.
And that part wants to tell you the truth.”

“Which is?”

“There’s no good ending to this. No matter what you choose, people die. The thread wins. It’s been winning for centuries, across countless cycles, and it’ll keep winning long after you’re gone.” Jennifer’s voice was sad. “But there are degrees of winning. Small victories inside the larger defeat.”

“Like what?”

“Like this: the thread wants to complete itself. It wants to become whole, aware, and powerful. Every cycle that fails delays that. Every time someone starves it instead of feeding it, the timeline gets pushed back. You can’t stop it permanently, but you can slow it down. Give the next version more time. Give humanity more time.”

“By dying without feeding it.”

“By dying without feeding it. Yes.”

Marcus looked up at the hospital window. “What about the people who are dying right now? The ones the thread is attached to?”

“They’ll die whether you feed it or not. The thread doesn’t release people mid-cycle just because you refuse to cooperate. Once it’s attached, they’re marked. The only question is whether their deaths count toward the total or not.”

“So they die either way.”

“They die either way. I’m sorry.”

Marcus felt something inside him break. Some last piece of hope that there was a solution, a way to save everyone.

There wasn’t. People were going to die. The only choice he had was how many and who.

“I need to go,” Marcus said.

“Wait. One more thing.” Jennifer paused. “When you die, when you go to the between-space, look for me. Look for all of us. We’re there too, in a way. Pieces of us from when we died the first time. Find us, and we’ll help you endure it. You won’t be alone.”

“Thanks,” Marcus said, though he wasn’t sure if that was comforting or terrifying.

He hung up and stared at the hospital. Then he turned and walked away.

He had three days left. Three days to decide how to die.