"Ah…it's that nightmare again." Rei realized. It was the the same nightmare he experienced as a six year old back in England. He used to live alone with his father.
This nightmare was an old memory for him.
Manchester, England, 11 years ago
The graveyard's air smelled like rust to Rei
He felt fog hung low and thick, he saw that it had covered the iron gates behind them. He could hear the children laughing behind him.
Four children wove between crumbling headstones, He could see their breath in the cold.
At the back, six-year-old Rei stood silently, his eyes were eyes fixed on a polished grave titled: Aiko Ashbourne. His mother.
"Oi, Rei," he heard one of them say, "Think your mum's ghost talks to you or what?"
He didn't answer. His small hands tightened around the crumpled paper flower he always left on his mother's grave. He glanced and found that others had darted off, they dared each other to touch the oldest graves. One by one, they vanished in the fog.
Then…He couldn't hear the laughter anymore. Just silence.
Even the wind had gone.
Rei blinked. The fog had thickened it wasn't natural now.
He turned around. No one.
"…James?"
Nothing.
That's when he heard it.
A whisper, it was barely audible, curling through the mist like smoke:
"Rei…"
He looked, No one.
Again:
"Rei…"
Scared, He backed up toward his mother's grave. That's when he saw it.
A figure.
Crouched.
Grinning.
No face. Just a long, too-wide smile stretching out of a hooded silhouette, its teeth glistening like it was cracked porcelain.
The Grinner.
Rei froze. He felt his chest as it tightened. Tears in his eyes without falling.
Rei's heart started beating hard as he saw The thing tilting its head, slowly. Like it was puppet. And then, it spoke:
"You remember her pain.
Do you want to see theirs too?"
Rei didn't know why, but he nodded.
The moment he did, the world cracked.
Flashes. Screams.
A girl drowning in a frozen lake.
A boy locked in a cellar, begging for his father.
A woman clutching her unborn child as fire swallowed her bedroom. Dozens. Hundreds. All around him. Their final moments.
His right eye burned , it felt like bullets piercing through his eyes. He screamed in pain.
The figure stepped closer and whispered, just once:
"Then carry them. So they are not forgotten."
Darkness closed in.
Rei woke the next morning in the dew-damp grass, near his father – Alaris Ashbourne, and local police
The others never spoke of that night again. Some transferred schools. One refused to visit graveyards.
But Rei remembered. He always would.
Because now, when he looked into the eyes of the dead…
He saw everything they couldn't forget.