What Remains?

By~ Santanu Ghose

 

Callum’s aunt had always been strange. She lived alone on John Street, just past the edge of Worksop, in Nottinghamshire, where the town started to forget itself—where back gardens gave way to trees, and narrow terraces turned to moss-choked stone. Her house was the last on the row, its windows forever dark, as if even daylight refused to go inside.

After her body was found—split open in the woods beyond the canal, no blood, no footprints, no logic—Callum inherited the house. And with it, The Lodestone Codex.

He didn’t tell Jamie about the book at first. Just asked if he’d come help sort the place out. Jamie said yes, because Jamie always said yes when it came to Callum. They’d been each other’s constant since Year Ten (something like class 8 or 9 in India): best friends, first kisses, first fights, and something deeper after that. Something stronger.

But when Jamie followed Callum down into the basement and saw what was etched into the floor, he stopped cold.

It was a circle, nearly two metres across, carved into the concrete. Inside it, a star. At the very centre, dried blood. And beside it, drawn in rust-coloured chalk, a crude stick figure with arms bent wrong.

The basement smelled like damp stone and rot.

It was the kind of place you’d expect to find rusted tools and dead rats, not hand-drawn occult symbols carved into the concrete with obsessive pressure. The pentagram inside the circle was jagged—not artistic. Desperate. Beside it, a crude stick figure with limbs bending the wrong way.

“Tell me this is a joke,” Jamie said, his voice a whisper.

Callum didn’t answer right away. He crouched by the symbol, his fingers hovering above the jagged lines.

“It’s the same one from the Codex,” he said finally. “The Circle of Return,” almost to himself.

The book was black, leather-bound, and deeply wrong. Half the writing was in Latin. The other half—messy English notes—felt like the scribblings of someone losing their mind. Jamie had wanted to burn it. Callum had read it cover to cover.

“She was trying to bring someone back,” Callum said. “She never finished it.”

“Maybe that was a good thing,” Jamie muttered.

But Callum wasn’t listening. He was already lighting candles in the four corners of the room.

“Callum—”

“If it works,” Callum said softly, “we can understand death. Maybe even conquer it.”

Jamie wanted to leave. Every instinct screamed at him to run. But Callum was scared, hurting, and Jamie loved him too much to let him face this alone.

So, he stayed. Because love makes us stay.

JAMIE, 19, holds the torch, nervous. CALLUM, 18, crouches near the symbol, fingers just above the lines. They had found the book—The Lodestone Codex—buried in the crawl space of Callum’s late aunt’s terrace house.

Callum pricked his finger, let the blood drip into the centre of the star. He whispered the words from the book. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the air thickened, grew heavy.

The circle darkened, like something was soaking up the light from beneath. The stick figure twitched. Not the chalk drawing—the thing beneath it, pressing up against the floor like cement was glass.

Jamie stumbled back.

A shape began to form inside the circle. Tall. Bent. Limbs too long; long limbs bent too many times. No face. Just a black shimmer where a face should be. A human shape gone wrong. It slams against the circle. The lines flicker. The lines glow.

“That’s not her,” Callum whispered; gasped.

The thing slammed itself against the inside edge of the circle. The lines flickered. Again.

Jamie grabbed Callum’s arm. “We have to stop it.” His voice hoarse and dry.

But the figure wasn’t looking at them. It was looking at the sigil beside the circle—the anchor. The stick figure. That was the weak point. That’s what the book had meant.

And then the thing smiled.

And stepped through.

---

Three days later, they were hiding in a motel near Retford, almost 10 miles from the smoking wreck of the house on John Street.

The papers blamed a gas leak. No one knew what really happened.

Jamie couldn’t sleep. When he did, he dreamed of the thing with no face—wearing Callum’s voice. Watching.

He woke up gasping, drenched in sweat. Callum sat beside him, silent, calm in that strange, shaken way people get when they’re past fear.

“I’m sorry,” Callum said.

“You should be.”

“I thought if I could understand death,” he went on, “I wouldn’t be afraid of it.”

Jamie looked at him, still trembling. “You nearly brought something through.”

“I know. And it wasn’t death I saw. It was absence. It was nothing. It didn’t love. Didn’t want. It just… was.”

Jamie pulled the sheets around them. “So, what now?”

Callum reached for his hand.

“I don’t want to chase the dark anymore. I don’t want to open doors that aren’t meant to open. There’s no book, no ritual, no power stronger than what we have right here.”

God gave us life. Not so we’d fear death— but so we’d live. Love. Be.

Jamie studied him, wary. But there was no madness in Callum’s eyes anymore. Just guilt. And something softer.

Hope.

Something stronger.

“I used to think I needed answers,” Callum said. “But I don’t. Not anymore. Life isn’t a puzzle. It’s a gift.”

“And love?” Jamie asked. “Yes, love like this… that’s the only real magic,” whispered Callum.

And he kissed him.

It was quiet at first. Then deeper. More urgent. Not an escape. A remembering. That they were alive. That love was still theirs. That even after all they’d seen, they were still here.

Jamie kissed back—deep and slow. Be-ing real. Because to ‘Be’ is to be alive.

They shed their clothes like skin they no longer needed. They worshipped each other in touch, in sighs, in murmured names. There was no magic in the room—no symbols, no books, no ancient forces. Just two boys in a motel bed, wrapped around each other like the world might end if they let go: To be alive. To feel skin against skin. Soul against soul.

To worship what they almost lost—and what they found in each other.

When it was over, they lay tangled in the warm silence, sweaty, breath slowing, hearts still racing. Quiet.

“I love you,” Callum whispered.

“I know,” Jamie replied, brushing a thumb over Callum’s cheek. “And maybe that’s enough.”

They stared at the ceiling. No shadows now. No marks. Just cracked plaster and the hum of night.

The air changed. Again. This time a breath of freshness was filling the motel room as a new dawn shone through the curtains.

Two hearts were beating as one with a fire that burned brighter and with more heat than the one that burned down the house, with enough warmth to keep the two boys warm in each other’s love all their lives.

That's what remains. 

~The End