by Vincent Bernabeo
(Fragments from the recovered journal of Dr. Thomas Raines, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Pacific Coast University)
March 2
Headache again. Behind the eyes, like someone’s pushing outward.
I nearly passed out in the middle of class today. I was talking about Nietzsche—the abyss gazes also, etc.—and I could feel something stir at the edge of my vision. A shadow in the corner of the room that seemed to breathe when I did.
After class, I sat in my office for a long time, listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights. There was a pulse in it, like a message trying to get through.
I’ve been waking up to nosebleeds.
March 5
Strange thing—I remember a childhood I never had. A house in Vermont, snow on the porch steps, a sister named Lena. I could smell the woodstove and feel her hand in mine.
I’ve never been east of Nevada, and I’m an only child.
March 7 – Email (unsent draft)
To: Dr. Irene Lau (Dept. of Psychology)
From: thomas.raines@pacu.edu
Subject: Neurological referral?
Hi Irene,
Sorry to bother you outside your own classes, but I wanted to ask something, off the record. I’ve been having… lapses, I guess. Gaps in time. Came home last night with mud on my shoes. My car was parked across the street, engine still warm.
It sounds stupid to even be writing this, but I feel like I’m being walked around by someone else.
Anyway, thought about setting up a scan, but don’t want to come across as paranoid.
Probably just stress.
Best,
Tom
March 9
He came to my lecture.
Sat in the back row, gray coat, eyes like wet paper. I didn’t notice him until halfway through. Every time I looked his way, the pressure inside my skull eased, like someone was adjusting a valve.
When class ended, he was gone, but there was a note under my laptop:
“You are one of us. The body is a door. Don’t be afraid to open it.”
March 10
I found his name: A. Virelli. He’s been emailing me. Says he’s been “tracking resonant frequencies” in certain individuals. He talks like an academic—references to “neural strain,” “psionic inheritance,” and “conscious migration.”
He says our kind can step between minds, steer the machinery. But it takes a toll. The stronger you push, the more you burn out.
He says there’s a way to survive it.
March 12
I tested it. Not on a person—on a crow outside the library. It was perched on a railing, watching me. I thought of what Virelli said: “Follow the pulse behind the eyes.”
I stared until I could feel its heartbeat. For a second, I was in there—black feathers, hollow bones, the wind like silk against skin.
Then the bird fell from the railing, twitched once, and went still.
I felt dizzy for hours afterward. One of my students found me slumped on a bench, said I kept whispering, “It’s not me.”
March 14 – Email from A. Virelli
Thomas,
You are learning the small tricks, the parlor amusements. But they will eat you alive if you keep treating them as curiosities. The body is a vessel. The mind is a current. The strong learn to flow between them.
We are not born this way—we are accumulated. Every mind you touch leaves an echo, and if you take too many, the chorus becomes unmanageable. But with time, control comes. You will see.
– A. V.
March 16
I can’t sleep. I keep hearing the crow. The sound it made when it hit the ground—it wasn’t a caw, it was a human sound. I hear it behind my own breath now.
And there’s something else. When I close my eyes, I see faces—hundreds, maybe thousands. Men, women, children, flickering like photographs underwater. All of them staring at me.
One of them—I swear it—looks like me.
March 18
Virelli appeared outside my apartment tonight. No email. No warning. Just standing under the streetlight like he’d been there for hours.
He asked if I wanted to learn how to stop dying.
His voice didn’t come from his mouth—it was in my head, like my own thoughts spoken back to me.
I followed him down to the beach. The tide was out, the sand dark and rippled. He told me the trick was in surrendering. “Death,” he said, “isn’t an ending. It’s an exit. You just need to know where to go when the lights go out.”
Then he asked me to imagine stepping out of my body, to feel the tide pull me into his.
For a moment, I felt his heart beating inside my chest.
March 19
I woke up on my couch. Clothes soaked through, smelling of kelp and seaspray, like I’d fallen into the ocean.
No memory of coming home.
There’s a note on my phone, typed in the Notes app:
“He’s inside now. You opened the door.”
I don’t remember writing it.
March 20
My lectures are going poorly. Students say I pause mid-sentence and whisper to myself. One of them records me, an auditory learner. She told me I was quoting something in a different language, so she sent me the clip to see if I could explain.
It’s not my voice.
Screens flicker when I’m near. Files and documents are erased, others appear that I have no recollection of, signed in names I don’t know.
March 22 – Email from A. Virelli
You are not losing yourself, Thomas. You are gaining more selves than you can count. That is what immortality truly is—not the persistence of a single flame, but the fire consuming its own ash.
When you are ready, you’ll stop thinking in singular pronouns. “I” is a lie.
– A. V.
March 25
I saw my reflection today and didn’t recognize it. For a moment, I thought it was him. But then it smiled, and I realized it was both of us.
The headaches are constant now. When I blink, I see other rooms—a motel, an alley, a hospital ward. Each one filled with fragments of lives I’ve never lived and in each one, a shape that looks back.
I tried to call my mother, but her voice didn’t sound right. Like someone else was using it.
March 27
The dreams are sharper now.
In one, I was drowning but I could breathe underwater. Faces drifted up around me, pressing close, mouthing words I couldn’t understand.
When I woke up, my lungs hurt. The sheets smelled of salt.
March 29 – Fragment from a handwritten letter, unsigned, recovered from Raines’s apartment
Thomas,
You must understand—every time I shed a body, I take something of it with me. Love, fear, hunger—it all sticks. After centuries, it becomes difficult to remember which of them were mine.
Do not pity me. This is the cost of continuity. You’ll see soon enough.
April 1
Campus police found a man on the cliffs this morning. Unidentified. They say he jumped.
When they showed me a photo, I recognized him immediately.
Virelli.
Or someone who used to be him.
The coroner said he’d been dead for days.
April 3
Things are slipping. My hands tremble. The veins are darker, raised, like something inked beneath the skin.
People avoid me in the halls. Irene from Psychology crossed the street when she saw me.
One student cried after class. Said she could hear me thinking.
When I touch my temples, I feel a pulse that isn’t mine.
I tried to write an email earlier and the words kept changing. “We are awake now,” it said, before I deleted it.
But when I reopened the draft folder, it was still there.
April 5
Students say I look younger. My hair’s darker. But the mirror doesn’t show youth—it shows someone else coming through the surface. The face looking back isn’t mine, not exactly. It’s like it’s assembling itself out of borrowed pieces, smoothing over what used to be familiar.
The mirror hums faintly when I stand in front of it. The reflection lags by half a second, like it’s deciding which version to become.
Maybe that’s what happens when the passenger settles in—the body adjusts to match the one behind the eyes. Not a mask, not even a copy. Just the residue of the one that’s driving.
I think I’m remembering other deaths now. Falling, drowning, burning, wrists slashed and bleeding out. Each ends the same way: I wake up somewhere else, someone else.
April 8
There’s a whisper that comes when I close my eyes. Not threatening—almost tender. It says: “Don’t be afraid. You’re home now.”
Sometimes I think it’s him. Other times I think it’s me, finally understanding.
Identity is just a room we rent for a while, until someone else moves in. Maybe that’s what he meant all along—that the real immortality is forgetting who you were.
I don’t know whose memories these are anymore. The sister. The crow. The faces in the tide. They’re all mine now, I think. Or maybe I’m theirs.
I can feel the next door opening already.
[End of Journal]
[Notes]
Recovered from the encrypted drive of Dr. Thomas Raines, located in his on-campus office following his disappearance on April 9. Security footage shows his office light flickering for over three hours after midnight, though motion sensors detected no presence.
Audio files recovered from his cell phone contained overlapping voices. Forensic voice recognition identified over a dozen unique vocal signatures, none conclusively matched to Dr. Raines.
AUTHOR BIO
Vinnie Bernabeo’s fiction blends literary depth with popular appeal, bringing blue-collar realism into contact with the dark, strange, and uncanny. A father of three balancing work, family, and writing, he draws on years in public works for insight into the labor, politics, and overlooked heroism of everyday communities. Having lived in Southern California, the Midwest, and the South, regional identity shapes his voice. He holds an MA from CSU San Marcos and is completing an MFA at Emerson. His upcoming crime novel, The Gunsmith, explores violence, inheritance, and redemption in San Diego’s underworld.
