Smaller Lives
by John Leahy
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Wyatt Price started attending the Survivors’ Circle three months after the world stopped screaming.
He parked across from Our Lady of Hope Episcopal and sat in his car with the engine running long after the rain had fogged the windows. The church looked abandoned from the outside. Half the stained-glass panels were boarded up, and the old stone facade wore black scorch marks around the bell tower from the riots during the Break. Across the front steps someone had spray painted GOD CLOSED HIS EYES. The parish had painted over it badly enough that you could still read every letter beneath the gray.
He stepped out into the cold rain and crossed the street. The basement entrance sat around the side of the church beside a sagging wheelchair ramp. A handwritten sign taped to the metal door read:
SURVIVORS’ CIRCLE
THURSDAYS
Someone had scratched out the last sentence with a key. Wyatt stared at it for a second too long. Then he opened the door. The smell hit first—a miasma of burned coffee, dust, damp carpet and industrial bleach. Underneath it all lingered another scent he could never fully place. Something metallic and sour that always reminded him of hospitals after the Break.
Six people sat scattered around the room. Nobody looked up immediately. A woman in her fifties stood near the coffee table stirring powdered milk into a Styrofoam cup. Broad shoulders. Silver-threaded black hair tied back severely. The kind of face that looked carved rather than aged.
“You Wyatt?” she asked.
Her voice carried the roughness of too many cigarettes and too many grief conversations.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Elena.”
She crossed the room and shook his hand firmly. No pity in the gesture. Wyatt appreciated that.
“You can sit anywhere,” she said. “Coffee’s terrible but free.”
Wyatt chose a chair closest to the wall. Bad instinct, maybe. But after everything that happened during the Break, most people preferred exits nearby. The others glanced at him now and then with the cautious curiosity of shelter animals. A heavyset man in a denim jacket nodded once. The young woman beside him kept her sleeves pulled over her hands despite the overheated basement. An older priest sat silently near the back corner staring at the floor. And across from Wyatt sat a man in dark sunglasses. Indoors. At night. The man hadn’t moved since Wyatt entered. Elena sat down last and rested a notebook on her knee.
“Alright,” she said. “Let’s start.”
Nobody answered. Elena looked around the circle.
“Same rules as always. No judgment. No interrupting. If somebody needs to step outside, they step outside.”
Her eyes settled on Wyatt.
“And if anybody hears anything unusual, we say it out loud.”
The air in the room changed. Not dramatically. Just enough. Wyatt saw shoulders tense.
Elena continued.
“Jackson, you wanna begin?”
The heavyset man rubbed his jaw.
“Not much to say.”
“You came anyway.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Guess I did.”
Elena waited.
Finally, he spoke.
“I heard my daughter again.”
Nobody responded. The unresponsiveness was worse than any reaction. Jackson stared at the untouched coffee in his hands.
“She was singing in the kitchen.” His voice sounded flat, exhausted. “That stupid song from Frozen she used to play on repeat when she was six.”
The young woman beside him closed her eyes. Jackson swallowed.
“I knew it wasn’t real.”
Silence.
“But I still answered her.”
Nobody moved.
“What’d she say?” Elena asked.
Jackson laughed once. No humor in it.
“She asked why I left her alone with it.”
The basement became very still. Wyatt looked down at his hands. Jackson exhaled shakily through his nose.
“Anyway. Didn’t go into the kitchen this time. So that’s progress, I guess.”
“It is,” Elena said.
Jackson nodded like he didn’t believe her. Elena turned toward the young woman.
“Selena?”
Hearing her name startled the girl.
“Oh. Uh.” She tucked loose dark hair behind one ear. “I blacked out again.”
“How long?”
“Maybe fifteen minutes.”
“You lose time before or after?”
“A little before.”
Elena made a small note in her notebook.
“Any voices?”
Selena hesitated too long. That answered the question.
“Yes,” she whispered.
The man in sunglasses shifted for the first time.
“What’d they say?” Elena asked.
Selena’s fingers tightened around her sleeves.
“They asked if I missed being beautiful.”
Nobody spoke after that. Wyatt noticed burn scars peeking above her cuffs. Small circular marks running up both wrists like fingertips pressed into flesh. His stomach tightened. Elena nodded slowly.
“Thank you.”
Selena stared fixedly at the carpet. Elena glanced toward the man in sunglasses.
“Dario?”
The man said nothing. Elena waited. Finally, Dario spoke in a voice rough as broken concrete.
“He’s new.”
Wyatt realized a second too late that Dario meant him. All eyes turned toward Wyatt. He felt absurdly visible.
Elena gave him an easy out.
“You don’t have to talk tonight.”
But Wyatt heard himself say:
“No, it’s okay.”
The words surprised him. Talking had never come naturally before. Before her.
“My name’s Wyatt,” he said quietly.
“Hi, Wyatt,” the group murmured.
He almost laughed at the normalcy of it. Like an AA meeting at the edge of hell.
“I was… possessed.”
Nobody flinched at the word. Interesting.
“For how long?” Jackson asked.
“A month.”
That got a reaction. Selena looked up sharply. Even Elena’s expression changed.
“A month?” Jackson repeated.
Wyatt nodded.
“Thirty-one days.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jackson muttered.
The priest crossed himself. Elena leaned forward.
“Did they classify you as Category Four?”
Wyatt blinked.
“Yeah.”
A silence settled over the room that felt different from the others. These people weren’t just curious. They were frightened.
“You don’t have to discuss details tonight,” Elena said.
“It’s alright.”
No, that wasn’t true. Nothing about this was alright. But the pressure inside him had been building for weeks now. Like a confession waiting for a church.
“There was a name,” he said.
Selena whispered:
“They always had names.”
Wyatt nodded slowly.
“Eshra.”
The fluorescent lights flickered. Everyone noticed. Nobody commented. Jackson shifted in his chair.
“What did it do to you?” he asked.
Wyatt opened his mouth. Stopped. What had Eshra done to him? That question depended entirely on whether you believed demons could only destroy.
“She made things quieter,” he said.
Nobody understood. He could tell.
“She made the fear quieter,” he clarified.
Jackson frowned.
“What fear?”
“All of it.”
Wyatt rubbed his palms against his jeans.
“I used to rehearse conversations before making phone calls. I couldn’t order coffee without feeling like I was embarrassing myself somehow.” He gave a weak laugh. “I once drove twenty minutes out of my way because I recognized somebody from work walking into the same grocery store.”
Selena stared at him with uncomfortable recognition.
“And then she arrived,” Wyatt said.
“How?” Elena asked.
Wyatt remembered the exact moment. His apartment glowed blue from laptop light.
2:13 AM.
Another sleepless night spent scrolling through panic videos from the early days of the Break. Possession compilations. Mass hallucinations. Clips of people speaking in dead languages while blood ran from their noses. Everybody watched those videos back then. Like touching a bruise over and over.
“I was online,” Wyatt said. “Reading message boards. Looking at footage.” He paused. “The screen froze. And words started appearing.”
He swallowed.
“DO YOU WANT TO BE SEEN?”
No one moved.
“I thought somebody hacked me.”
“What happened next?” Elena asked.
“The lights dimmed.” Wyatt’s voice lowered. “And I heard someone standing behind me.”
A cold ripple moved through him at the memory. Not fear. Something worse. Longing.
“She knew things,” he whispered. “Private things. Things I’d never told anyone.”
“What kind of things?” Jackson asked.
Wyatt looked at him.
“The kind you only admit to yourself at three in the morning.”
Jackson didn’t ask again. The basement hummed around them.
“She told me loneliness wasn’t being alone,” Wyatt said. “She said loneliness was being invisible.”
Selena looked like she might cry.
“And then?” Elena ventured.
Wyatt smiled before he realized he was doing it.
“And then people started noticing me.”
The room went quiet again. Not because they didn’t understand. Because they did. Excellent. Carry on.
“It was gradual at first,” Wyatt said.
He could feel them listening now in a different way. Not just politely waiting for him to finish. Measuring him. Trying to decide whether he was another survivor or something worse.
“She never took over completely in the beginning. It wasn’t like the videos.” He glanced toward Jackson. “No floating furniture. No backwards-head spider walk.”
“Give it time,” Jackson muttered.
Elena shot him a look.
“What?” Jackson said, holding up his hands. “You all saw Houston.”
Nobody responded. Nobody wanted to remember Houston tonight. Wyatt leaned back in his chair.
“At first she just… talked to me.”
“In your head?” Selena asked.
“No. That’s the weird part.” He frowned. “It never felt like my thoughts. More like somebody standing very close behind me.”
Dario spoke suddenly:
“They like proximity.”
Everyone looked at him. The man rarely said more than a sentence. His hands trembled against his knees.
“They stand close,” Dario murmured. “Closer than breath.”
A long silence followed.
Elena said, “Go on, Wyatt.”
He nodded.
“She talked constantly those first few days. Asked questions. About me. About people.” He laughed weakly. “She thought human beings were fascinating.”
Jackson snorted.
“That makes one of us.”
“No,” Wyatt said before he could stop himself. “I mean she was really fascinated. Like we were… I don’t know. Fragile little animals she’d never seen before.”
The room grew still again.
“She asked me why humans apologize so much.”
Selena blinked.
“What?”
“For existing,” Wyatt said.
He remembered lying awake in bed while rain tapped against the apartment windows.
You diminish yourself constantly, Eshra had whispered. You say sorry before you speak. You lower your eyes when people interrupt you. You make yourself small so others won’t feel threatened.
Her voice had carried no mockery. Only curiosity. Like she genuinely didn’t understand why a living thing would willingly reduce itself.
“I told her that’s just how people are,” Wyatt said.
“And what’d she say?” Jackson asked.
Wyatt hesitated. Then:
“‘That sounds exhausting.’”
Selena let out a short laugh before quickly covering her mouth. It was the first genuine human sound in the room. Even Elena smiled.
“She sounds nice,” Selena said before realizing how terrible that sounded.
Jackson stared at her. “You serious?”
Selena shrank. “I didn’t mean—.”
“No,” Wyatt interrupted softly. “You did.”
The room tightened again. They all understood what she’d admitted. Elena folded her hands.
“Did Eshra ever hurt anyone?”
The question landed like a stone dropped into water. Wyatt looked down.
“Yes.”
Nobody spoke.
“She made me hurt someone.”
Selena hugged herself tighter. Jackson’s expression hardened.
“What happened?”
Wyatt swallowed.
There was a guy at work.
The memory surfaced with sharp clarity. Troy Reese. Senior accounts manager. Forty-three years old. The kind of man who interrupted people before they finished sentences and smiled while doing it.
“He embarrassed me during a meeting,” Wyatt muttered. “Nothing major. Just…” He shook his head. “You know those people who can make you feel stupid with one sentence?”
Jackson nodded .
“Yeah.”
“Well.” Wyatt rubbed his hands together. “After the meeting, Eshra asked me why I tolerated him.”
The lights buzzed .
“She said predators test weakness. That humans smell fear the way animals smell blood.”
Dario murmured under his breath in Spanish.
“I told her he was just an asshole. That’s all.”
“And?” Elena prompted.
Wyatt stared at the floor. “She asked if I wanted him to stop.”
Nobody moved.
“I said yes.”
His voice was very soft.
“So she helped me.”
Jackson frowned.
“How?”
Wyatt looked up at him.
“I knew things suddenly.”
Pressure built behind his eyes as he remembered it.
“Private things about Troy. His browser history. The affair he was hiding. Gambling debt.” Wyatt swallowed hard. “I don’t know how she knew. She just… did.”
Selena whispered:
“Oh God.”
“I confronted him after work.” Wyatt laughed once, bitterly. “Actually, no. Confronted sounds too noble. I cornered him.”
The memory returned in flashes. Parking garage lights. Concrete echoing beneath footsteps. Troy backing away while Wyatt recited secrets nobody should’ve known.
“I told him if he ever humiliated me again, I’d send everything to his wife.”
Jackson stared at him. “Did you?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
Wyatt closed his eyes. “He started crying.”
That silence felt uglier than the others.
“I’d never seen anything like it before. A grown man, collapsing in front of me.” Wyatt shook his head. “And the worst part?”
Nobody answered.
“It felt good.”
Rain hammered the church roof. Upstairs, old pipes rattled.
“She liked that,” Dario said.
Wyatt looked at him. The man in sunglasses sat perfectly still.
“They feed on permission,” Dario murmured. “Not sin. Permission.”
Elena watched him.
“That’s enough, Dario.”
But behind those dark lenses, Dario kept staring toward Wyatt.
“They never break the door down,” he whispered. “You open it because you want something.”
The basement had gone cold. Wyatt realized Selena was staring at him with frightened fascination. Not because he’d been possessed. Because part of her understood.
“You loved it,” she said softly.
The truth arrived before he could stop it.
“Yes.”
Jackson pushed back sharply in his chair.
“Jesus Christ.”
“What?” Wyatt snapped. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Jackson blinked.
“You think if something walked into your head tomorrow and took away every fear you’ve carried your whole life, you wouldn’t miss it afterward?”
“That thing wasn’t helping you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they destroy people!”
“So do loneliness and shame,” Wyatt shot back.
The room fell dead silent. Even Wyatt looked surprised by the anger in his own voice. Elena intervened.
“Alright. Breathe.”
Nobody moved. Wyatt dragged a hand over his face.
“I’m sorry.”
Jackson murmured under his breath.
“You don’t have to apologize for telling the truth,” Elena said.
Her words hit Wyatt hard. He looked at her. For the first time, he noticed how tired she seemed. Not physically. Spiritually. Like somebody who’d spent too long holding broken people together with bare hands.
“You were possessed, too?” he asked before thinking better of it.
The room shifted subtly. Elena put on a faint smile.
“No.”
The answer surprised him.
“I was a trauma nurse in Denver during the Fire Masses,” she said. “I worked seventy-two hours straight the week the pediatric ward burned.”
Nobody spoke.
“I watched a seven-year-old boy calmly explain to his mother that the thing inside him wore his face like clothing.” Her eyes drifted somewhere far away. “Then he asked her why humans cried so much.”
Cold crept across Wyatt’s skin.
“Elena—.” Selena began.
“I’m alright.”
But she didn’t sound alright. She sounded like somebody standing very far from shore.
“What happened to him?” Wyatt asked.
Elena looked at him for a long moment.
“He begged us not to take it away.”
Nobody in the room breathed. Jackson looked sick.
“Those frequencies Pentacle used…” Elena continued. “People think exorcism was clean because it came from machines instead of priests.” Her gaze settled on Wyatt. “It wasn’t.”
He remembered. God, he remembered. White containment rooms. Metal restraints. The sound. Not audible exactly. Something felt inside the teeth and bones. A frequency that made reality vibrate. Wyatt’s stomach turned.
“She screamed,” he whispered before realizing he’d spoken aloud.
Elena nodded once. The room had become utterly still.
“She sounded afraid,” Wyatt said.
Selena looked horrified.
“She was manipulating you.”
“Maybe.”
“She was.”
But Wyatt could still hear Eshra’s voice during the extraction. Not rage. Not hatred. Fear. Raw animal fear. Please don’t let them erase me. The memory hit him so hard he nearly doubled over.
“Wyatt?” Elena said sharply.
His breathing had quickened. The room felt distant. The fluorescent lights too bright. The walls warped at the edges. And beneath the smell of coffee and bleach came another scent. Rain on hot pavement. Perfume. Ash. A voice brushed against the back of his mind.
You remember me.
Wyatt froze.
No. No no no. Not here. Not now.
“You okay?” Jackson asked .
Wyatt stared at the floor. His pulse thundered. The voice came again, warm breath against his ear.
I remember you, too.
The basement lights flickered once. Dario stood.
“Oh no,” he whispered.
Nobody moved. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with a sick electrical hum. Wyatt stared at the floor, breath shallow.
You remember me too well now, Eshra whispered.
Not inside his head. Around it. Like a voice speaking through water.
“Elena,” Dario barked, backing toward the wall. “She’s here.”
Jackson stood halfway from his chair.
“Wyatt?”
Wyatt barely heard him. The room had gone strange around the edges. Shadows stretched too long beneath chairs. The corners of the basement looked deeper than geometry allowed. And underneath the buzzing lights came another sound. Breathing. Slow.
Patient.
Selena’s voice trembled.
“I can feel something.”
Elena reached calmly into her bag. For the first time, Wyatt noticed fear creep into her face.
“What is that?” Jackson asked.
“Portable Pentacle relay.”
Jackson paled. “You brought suppression tech?”
“I hoped I wouldn’t need it.”
The lights flickered violently. Eshra giggled. The sound moved around the room without direction.
“You still build tiny walls and call them salvation.”
Selena cried out. The coffee table rattled across the floor. Jackson swore and backed away. Wyatt stood without realizing he’d done it. Warmth flooded through him. Not possession. Recognition. Like seeing someone beloved emerge from a crowd after years apart.
“Elena,” he whispered. “Please don’t.”
“Wyatt, sit down.”
“She’s not hurting anyone.”
The priest in the corner finally spoke for the first time all night.
“They never do at first.”
Everyone turned. Father Burr slowly raised his head. His eyes looked ancient.
“I performed three exorcisms before the Break,” he said quietly. “All failed.” He looked toward Wyatt. “Do you know what frightened me most?”
Wyatt said nothing.
“They knew exactly what people needed to hear.”
The temperature in the basement dropped. Everyone’s breath fogged. Then the lights went out. Darkness swallowed the room whole. Selena screamed. Someone knocked over a chair. Jackson cursed somewhere to Wyatt’s left. And in the dark, Eshra spoke beside him. Not in his mind. Beside him.
“You were happier with me.”
Wyatt shut his eyes. Because she was right. God help him, she was right. Before Eshra, he had drifted through life apologizing for existing. Afraid of conversations. Afraid of people. Afraid of himself. With her, the fear disappeared. Not numbed. Removed. Like cutting static from a radio signal. A pale red emergency light flickered near the basement stairs.
And she stood there.
Tall. Impossible. A silhouette shaped roughly like a woman but subtly wrong in every proportion, as though human anatomy had been remembered imperfectly by something ancient. The shadows around her moved independently. Her face remained blurred somehow, difficult for the eye to fully hold.
But Wyatt still saw beauty there. Terrible beauty. The kind found in storms and collapsing stars. Selena began sobbing quietly. Jackson crossed himself over and over. Dario pressed himself against the wall murmuring prayers in Spanish. Only Elena held her ground. She raised the Pentacle relay with trembling hands. The device emitted a low harmonic pulse. The room vibrated. Eshra tilted her head. Curious. Then she looked at Wyatt. And suddenly nothing else in the world mattered.
“I waited,” she said .
The sound of her voice hollowed him out.
“You called for me every night.”
He had. In dreams. In silence. In those moments before sleep when loneliness became physical pain.
Elena stepped forward.
“Wyatt, listen to me. Whatever connection you think this is—.”
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly.
Her expression hardened.
“No. You don’t.”
The Pentacle relay pulsed louder. A high metallic whine filled the basement. Eshra recoiled. Her pain hit Wyatt like a knife through the ribs. He gasped. Jackson stared at him in horror.
“Oh my God,” Jackson whispered. “He’s linked to it.”
Eshra reached toward Wyatt. Not touching. Inviting.
“You know what they built after the Break?” she asked.
No one answered.
“Smaller lives.”
The shadows pulsed around her.
“Quieter thoughts. Drugged sleep. Careful conversations.” Her gaze never left Wyatt. “Humanity survived by becoming less alive.”
The relay screamed louder. Selena covered her ears. Dario slid to his knees praying. But Wyatt could barely hear any of it now. Because part of him already stood beside her. Part of him always had.
“She made me feel seen,” he whispered.
Elena’s voice cracked.
“She made you dependent.”
“Yes.”
The honesty stunned the room silent. Wyatt laughed, tears burning in his eyes.
“That’s the worst part,” he said. “I know exactly what she is.”
Eshra smiled. Or maybe the shadows around her did.
“And you still want her,” Elena said.
Wyatt looked at her. Then at the others. Broken people sitting beneath fluorescent lights trying to convince themselves the world had returned to normal. But it hadn’t. It never would.
“I think,” Wyatt said, “some doors don’t close because people don’t actually want them closed.”
The relay overloaded with a shower of sparks. Darkness slammed back into the room. Someone screamed. And then—
Silence.
Real silence this time. Heavy. Absolute. The basement lights flickered back on. Buzzed overhead. The room was empty except for the group.
Wyatt was gone.
Two weeks later, The Survivors’ Circle met again. Nobody sat in Wyatt’s chair. Selena wore long sleeves despite the heat. Jackson had started smoking again. Dario refused to remove his sunglasses. Elena looked ten years older. According to the official report, Wyatt Price suffered a psychotic break and wandered into the city during a dissociative episode.
No body was ever found.
But church security cameras captured him leaving the basement at 11:43 PM. Calm, smiling, in a black suit nobody remembered him arriving in. Beneath a streetlight Wyatt paused, lighting a cigarette with a wooden match. Then he looked directly into the camera. Frame-by-frame analysis later revealed something impossible.
A second shadow walked beside him.
Too tall. Too thin. Moving with graceful, unnatural elegance. The video corrupted three seconds later. Authorities blamed electrical damage. Nobody from the Survivors’ Circle believed that. Especially Elena. Because she had reviewed the footage herself. And just before the corruption began, the audio captured a second voice laughing beside Wyatt.
Female. Warm. Intimate.
Want another gripping story from John Leahy? Read “Flowers” in Horrific Scribes August 2025.