What I Mistook for Me

There is a thing that grants your worst secret wish and calls it a gift. It is not a demon, not a haunting, not a visitor from anywhere. It came from inside a person, and for most of a lifetime that person was Daniel Holt.

Daniel served eleven years for a killing. He came out changed, and he built a life so small and so careful that nothing in it could ever go wrong again: a rented half-house at the edge of a fading mill town, a quiet job, a routine that is mostly the patient avoidance of himself. What he could never explain, even to himself, is the company he kept on the inside. A second voice. An old friend who first lived, when he was a boy, in a toy.

When his mother dies and he goes back to clear her house, he finds that toy in a box of his childhood things. He picks it up. And the voice that narrated his whole life is simply, finally gone, leaving a silence he does not know how to stand in and a guilt he no longer has anything to share.

He should be free. Instead, around him, the town begins to change. Small mercies. Strokes of luck that look a little too much like answered prayers, and ruin that looks a little too much like something deserved. Daniel knows the shape of it because he lived inside that shape for forty years, and he understands, with a cold and lonely certainty, exactly what has gotten loose and why no one will ever take his word for it. He is the profile. The man with the record. The last person on earth anyone would believe.

Written in the hushed, dread-soaked register of Charles L. Grant, the slow domestic menace of Michael McDowell, and the cold philosophical chill of Thomas Ligotti, What I Mistook for Me is a standalone story in What You Already Wanted, a collection of quiet psychological horror novellas. It asks the oldest, most intimate question a person can be asked: was I ever the author of my own life, and if not, what does my remorse even belong to?

For readers of Catriona Ward, Paul Tremblay, and Andy Davidson. Horror that never lives in the gore. It lives in the wish, and in whose wish it was.