Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 1
Mark of the Damned
Alex Moonn
This is the story of how I died long before my heart stopped beating.
Fall, 2000. Takeshi Nakamura is twenty years old and believes everything in the world has an explanation. With his friends Yuki and Kenji, he carries a camera into the Yamashita mansion, abandoned since 1923, when an entire family was found dead inside. The idea was to prove there was nothing there but an old house. Ten years later, he writes to prove there was a life before that night.
English edition, available on Amazon.
Read an excerpt
I took the camera back. I kept filming. The figures didn't move, but something inside them did — a contained agitation, like water simmering under a heavy lid. Then one of them — the patriarch, I recognized him by the mustache — slowly turned his face toward the camera. Not toward the camera. Toward me. Through the camera, toward me. The distinction was real and terrifying.
I felt the hand.
Fingers. On my right shoulder. The right weight, the right pressure, the unmistakable anatomy of a human hand, except for the cold — not the cold of the air, not the cold of a chilled object, but the cold of something that had parted ways with warmth so long ago it no longer remembered what being warm felt like. The fingers tightened. Not violently. With the kind of firmness you use to hold something you believe belongs to you.
I turned around.
English edition, available on Amazon.
