He sat down and watched the beach.
The water rolled in slow, measured breaths, each wave smoothing the sand like a hand across a page. Nothing seemed out of place. The gulls kept their distance, the light held steady, and strangely, he didn't feel that sense of distorted time that had dogged him since he arrived.
His head was clear. Clearer than it had ever been since he got here. The fog that usually lived behind his eyes had lifted, and with it came a calmness he hadn't felt in a long time. Rational. Present. He wanted to stay there as long as he could, as if stillness itself might anchor him.
Then it flickered — that thought. The one that kept slipping through his fingers every time he reached for it.
He slapped himself across the face, hard. The sting was necessary. This time he held on. He wouldn't let it elude him again.
And it came.
The last two folds.
They snapped into place with a clarity that almost hurt. They had been conveniently left out of his memory, tucked away like pages glued together. He remembered them now. Both of them.
A burst of laughter tore out of him before he could stop it. It wasn't joy. It was the sound a man makes when he realizes the joke's been on him the whole time. Mesmerizing, how he was being toyed with. Part of him almost found it funny. The rest was busy masking whatever emotion was supposed to come next, because he truly didn't know what came next.
The feeling was so clear. He remembered everything right down to waking up there. Then his mind was pulled — yanked, really. It felt like another life, dense and distant, and just before he could grasp that side of his memories, just before his fingers closed around it —
The fold shattered.
The beach peeled away without sound. No wind, no warning. One blink to the next. The fold had changed.
He wasn't surprised. Wasn't moved. He was almost growing accustomed to it now, to the way reality unmade itself and offered another.
He looked forward.
Graves.
They stretched out as far as the eye could see, row after row swallowed by a pale, directionless haze. And for headstones: human sized gnomes. Ceramic, painted smiles cracked and peeling. Pointed hats chipped at the tips. Some tilted, some sunk halfway into the earth, all of them watching.
The way they kept on watching creeped him out. He knew they weren't alive — they couldn't be — but their eyes seemed painted purely to disturb a person. Glossy black dots with too much white, tilted just wrong enough to feel deliberate.
At this point he felt a form of disgust indescribable. As if every gnome looking at him was an arrow piercing through his skin, each stare a needle threading straight into his nerves.
He closed his eyes, breathed, and ran.
He ran through, jumping and avoiding as many as he could, but there seemed to be more and more and more. The rows multiplied when he wasn't looking. For every one he dodged, two more took its place. The disgust transcended into physical pain. His stomach twisted, ribs tightening like a fist. He could almost vomit his lungs.
Then he noticed it was getting dark.
The sky had slipped into evening without his permission. A flat, sourceless dusk. And as he took another step forward, everything went pitch black.
For a second, relief. Blindness was better than their stares.
Then the glow started.
The eyes and the painted smiles glowed. Not bright enough to see by. Just visible enough. Pinpricks of off-white and dull red floating in the dark, detached from any shape or ground. Now all he could see was their eyes and smiles, and it disturbed him even more.
Almost like he had a previous fear for them. Like some buried part of him recognized this and had been screaming since the first fold. Now he was stuck where all he could see was them.
The physical pain he felt from this skyrocketed. It climbed his spine, settled behind his teeth. He started running and running but no matter where he ran there was always more. The glowing faces parted around his feet and closed behind him. A tide of grins.
He crashed to the ground and stayed sobbing. Dirt in his mouth, palms scraped raw. "Stop," he begged, to them, to anyone. "Please, stop."
And as he seemed to reach the upper height of desperation, the gnomes started showing signs of movement.
Each one slowly creeping towards him.
A scrape. A shuffle. The soft clink of ceramic on packed earth. Hats tilting as they leaned.
What followed was a period of insanity.
He was scared out of his mind. He tried to stay logical, tried to downplay them to inanimate, tried to tell himself the fold was just playing tricks on him. But as he kept trying to calm himself, his fear kept seeping up, cold and rising like floodwater.
He had history with this. A phobia like no other, not even the near death experiences he had previously put him up like this.
The glowing eyes crept towards him, closer now. A half-circle tightening.
And then his eyes blanked.
And so did his mind.
He was frozen. His body not a movement. His mind not a thought. Just the glow, and the grins, and the sound of ceramic sliding through dirt, inch by inch.