The Candle That Refused the Dark

Chapter 1::Beneath the Bone

The staircase didn’t creak.  

That was the first thing James noticed as he descended.  

Concrete stairs, poured twenty years ago and left to the elements, should have groaned, cracked, or at least whispered dust with every step. These didn’t. Each footfall landed with the muted finality of a door closing behind him. The blue glow that lit the walls grew brighter the deeper he went—not electric, not fluorescent, but something older. Something that remembered light before London had streetlamps.

He counted floors.  

Or tried to.  

After the first twenty steps the numbers stopped making sense. The landings disappeared. The walls smoothed until they looked machined rather than cast. The air grew colder, then warmer, then colder again in slow, nauseating waves. His breath fogged, then cleared, then fogged once more. Time felt soft here, like wet clay.

He kept walking because stopping felt more dangerous.

The older versions of himself had not followed. Their voices had faded almost immediately after he took the first step—thirty-one candles guttering out one by one, a quiet round of applause for the only fool who hadn’t run yet. Now it was just him, the torch in his right hand (whose beam seemed weaker with every metre), and the slow, wet heartbeat of the city above.

Eventually the stairs simply ended.

Not at a door.  

Not at a floor.  

Just… an absence.  

The last step dropped away into nothing, and James stumbled forward onto a level surface that felt like polished obsidian. He caught himself, palms slapping cold stone. The torch beam swung wildly, revealing nothing but more nothing for several heartbeats—until it found the wall.

A single door waited.

Not the fire door you’d expect in a commercial basement. Not metal. Not painted.  

It was wood—dark, almost black, carved with patterns that twisted the eye. Celtic knots that weren’t Celtic. Spirals that turned into faces that turned back into spirals. The wood looked wet, as though it had been pulled from a river moments ago, yet there was no moisture on the floor.

Above the door, set into the stone lintel, was a single line of text in a language James didn’t recognise. The letters glowed the same faint blue as the staircase.

He didn’t need to read it to understand the warning.

Behind him, the staircase had vanished.  

Just smooth wall. No seam. No outline. As if it had never existed.

James swallowed. His throat clicked.

He reached out slowly, fingertips hovering an inch from the handle.  

The handle was brass, shaped like a human hand curled into a fist. The knuckles were worn smooth, as though thousands of palms had already touched them.

He hesitated.

Somewhere far above, very faintly, he thought he heard a scream.  

Not human.  

Not animal.  

Something between.

The sound died quickly, swallowed by the rain and the city and the metres of concrete.

James closed his eyes for a moment.  

He thought of his sister, Ellie, the last time they’d spoken—three years ago, Christmas, a stilted video call where she’d asked if he was still “chasing ghosts with that camera” and he’d laughed too loudly and changed the subject.  

He thought of his parents’ car on the M25, the police officer’s careful voice on the phone, the way the world had tilted sideways and never quite righted itself again.  

He thought of the Deliveroo rider who’d smiled in the rain tonight and said “Stay dry, mate” like it was still possible.

He opened his eyes.

The brass fist handle was warm.

He gripped it.

The door opened without sound.

Beyond it lay a room that should not have fit beneath a thirty-four-storey tower.

The ceiling was impossibly high vaulted like a cathedral, lost in shadow. Pillars of black stone rose at irregular intervals, carved with the same spiralling faces as the door. The floor was the same polished obsidian, reflecting the blue light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

In the centre of the room stood a mirror.

Not a normal mirror.  

It was tall easily three metres framed in the same dark wood as the door. The glass was not silver-backed but something deeper, darker. It drank light rather than reflected it.

James stepped inside.  

The door closed behind him with a soft click that echoed for far too long.

He was alone.

Except he wasn’t.

In the mirror, he saw himself thirty-two, wet coat, tired eyes, torch in hand.  

But the reflection didn’t move when he did.

It stood perfectly still, watching him.

James raised his right hand slowly.  

The reflection kept both arms at its sides.

He took one step forward.  

The reflection stayed rooted.

Then the reflection smiled.

It was a small, careful smile. The kind people give when they’re about to deliver bad news.

James felt ice slide down his spine.

The reflection spoke.

Its voice came from everywhere—the walls, the floor, the air itself. The same voice James had heard all his life, but stripped of warmth. Clean. Precise. Almost kind.

“You came,” it said.

James’s mouth was desert-dry. “What are you?”

“I’m what happens if you keep choosing the same thing.” The reflection tilted its head slightly. “Seventeen times we stood at that door. Seventeen times we walked away. Seventeen times the city ate us a little more each morning.”

The reflection took one step closer to the glass.  

The surface rippled like dark water.

“Tonight is different,” it continued. “Tonight someone finally stepped through.”

James’s torch beam trembled. “And now?”

“Now you choose again.” The reflection lifted its right hand slowly, deliberately and placed it flat against the inside of the glass. “Look.”

The mirror darkened.

Then it brightened.

And London appeared.

Not the London of rain-slick streets and sodium lamps.  

A different London.

Skyscrapers of glass and steel twisted into impossible shapes spirals, thorns, living things that breathed. Between them drifted lanterns that were not lanterns but floating eyes. The Thames ran red under a sky the colour of bruised plums. People moved through the streets, but their movements were wrong—too fluid, too sudden. Some had wings made of torn newspaper. Some had faces that kept changing. And everywhere, the same thin red line across the sky, now pulsing like a heartbeat.

“That’s what happens tomorrow,” the reflection said quietly. “If you leave now.”

The image shifted.

Another London.

This one was quieter. Softer.  

The Shard was gone. The Gherkin was gone. In their place stood low brick terraces, gas lamps, horse-drawn carriages sharing the road with electric cars. Big Ben still stood, but its clock face showed no hands only a slow swirl of golden light. People walked smiling, unhurried. Children played in streets without fear. The air looked clean enough to taste.

“That’s what happens if you stay,” the reflection said.

James’s voice cracked. “Stay where?”

“On the other side.”

James looked at the reflection. Really looked.

The eyes were wrong. Too bright. Too steady.  

The scar above the eyebrow was gone.  

The lines around the mouth were softer, as though this version had never learned how to frown.

“You’re me,” James whispered.

“I was you,” the reflection corrected gently. “Before the seventeenth loop. Before the curse learned our name.”

The mirror rippled again.

Now it showed Canary Wharf normal Canary Wharf rain still falling, lights still flickering.  

But something was moving between the towers.

At first James thought it was birds.  

Then he saw the wings weren’t feathered.

They were skin.

Long, stretched, veined.  

Figures that had once been human leapt from building to building, faster than should have been possible. One landed on the side of HSBC tower and clung there, head tilted at an impossible angle. Its face opened not like a mouth, but like a flower made of teeth.

James recoiled.

The image snapped back to the smiling reflection.

“It’s already started,” it said. “The first wave. By morning the news will call it mass hysteria. By afternoon they’ll stop calling it anything because the anchors will have changed too.”

James’s knees felt liquid. “Why me?”

“Because you still remember what it felt like to want something more than survival.” The reflection’s smile faded. “The others—the previous versions they forgot. They chose safety. They chose to walk away. And each time the curse grew hungrier.”

James looked around the impossible room.  

The pillars.  

The faces in the stone.  

The ceiling that disappeared into nothing.

“What happens if I step through?” he asked.

“You become the eighteenth version,” the reflection answered. “You get to try again. Different choices. Different mistakes. Maybe this time you save someone. Maybe this time you don’t lose Ellie. Maybe this time you don’t sell the watch.”

“And the city?”

“The city keeps turning.” The reflection shrugged a very human gesture that somehow looked wrong on this too-perfect version of him. “Some versions burn. Some versions thrive. Some versions simply… forget there ever was a before.”

James stared at the mirror.

The reflection stared back.

Then it asked the question James had been dreading since he first touched the brass fist.

“Do you want to see what happens to Ellie if you walk away tonight?”

James’s heart stuttered.

He didn’t answer.

The mirror answered for him.

The glass darkened once more.

Now it showed a terraced house in Manchester Ellie’s house, the one she’d bought with her husband two years ago.  

The front door was open.  

Rain poured in.

Ellie stood in the hallway, phone pressed to her ear, face pale.  

She was speaking to someone, but the words were silent.  

Then she turned.

Her eyes were the same colour as the red line in the sky.

She opened her mouth.

Teeth lengthened.

The image froze there Ellie mid-transformation, caught in the exact moment before she stopped being Ellie.

James made a sound he didn’t recognise.

The mirror cleared.

The reflection was still smiling, but now there was pity in it.

“Or,” it said softly, “you can choose the other door.”

It gestured with its chin.

James looked behind him.

Where the entrance door had been, there was now a second doorway identical wood, identical carvings, identical brass fist handle.

One led back to the staircase.  

One led… somewhere else.

“Two doors,” the reflection said. “One choice. Same as always.”

James felt the torch slipping in his sweating palm.

He looked at the smiling reflection.

He looked at the two doors.

He looked at the mirror, which now showed nothing but his own terrified face normal, thirty-two, still human.

The scream came again closer this time.  

From above.  

From the city.

Something heavy landed on the roof far overhead.  

The whole room shivered.

James took a breath.

He walked toward the second door.

The reflection watched him go.

Just before James’s hand touched the brass fist, the reflection spoke one last time voice soft, almost tender.

“Good luck, James.”

“This time… try not to hate us when you see us again.”

The door opened.

Beyond it lay darkness.

But not empty darkness.

There was light ahead warm, golden, the colour of streetlamps on autumn evenings.

There was laughter.

There was music.

There was the smell of coffee and rain-damp wool and possibility.

James stepped through.

The door closed behind him.

And the room beneath the Skeleton Tower waited, patient as ever, fo

r the next version of James Carter who would come looking for answers.

Above ground, in the rain-soaked streets of Canary Wharf, the first of the changed ones lifted its head and sniffed the wet air.

It smelled new blood.

It smiled with too many teeth.

And it began to hunt.