AN EMPTY LOT

AN EMPTY LOT
DR. LERT KANCHANAWONG'S POV (Age 26):

"That wasn't a memory."

She didn't even blink at my frantic questions about the murder. Instead, her voice just scraped against the dead quiet of the room. "You were looking at leftover rot. A sickness chained directly to Thanawin."

My entire medical background rejected the concept immediately. Part of me wanted to demand clinical proof or order a psych evaluation right then and there. But my bruised trachea wouldn't let me string a sentence together. The old woman just kept staring up at the dark ceiling with those blind white eyes.

"Those shadows are not inside your head. They are made of rotting energy, and they will absolutely end your life."

"End my life?" Panic ripped through my chest, forcing my airway open. "That is biologically impossible! We are talking about things from half a century ago. A trick of the mind cannot crush a human windpipe. It cannot stop a beating heart!"

A hallucination cannot leave a bruise. I knew that. I went to medical school. But my ribs were throbbing with real, agonizing pain.

"Your heart would have stopped beating on this floor five minutes ago," she stated flatly. "If my guardian had not eaten that lingering energy, you would be dead right now."

The old woman let out a long, dry breath. "I normally refuse to explain this side of the world to regular people. But I am giving you this warning because we will probably never cross paths again."

I gripped the floorboards. "What do you mean? Are you sick?"

She ignored me again. Her face stayed completely blank.

"People in your modern world refuse to see what is standing right next to them," she continued in that same eerie, hypnotic rhythm. "There are things born purely out of energy. Some are made of good intentions. Some are made of absolute filth. Some of them have been crawling on this earth long before humans ever invented the words for good and evil."

The old woman slowly got to her feet, her joints popping loudly in the silence.

She waved a hand at the empty space next to her. "People only spot these entities when their own souls carry too much weight. That kind of baggage builds up from all sorts of things. Blind religious devotion, disgusting amounts of hate, or just wanting something until it literally eats you alive. It drags right across the border from your previous lives. A shaman is basically walking around with a mountain of that dead karma on their back, which is exactly why we run into things that regular humans walk right through."

She dragged her feet over to a small wooden shelf. Her hands fumbled in the dark until she found a new candle. A match flared. She placed the burning wax on the low table separating us, and the orange light immediately made the deep wrinkles on her face look like black craters.

"That kind of weight sharpens your eyes," she murmured across the table. "Look at the thing that was standing behind my chair. It is incredibly old. So massive that a trained shaman could stare right at it and only catch a blurry black shadow."

She turned her blind eyes back to my face. I felt that horrible, suffocating sensation of being watched again.

"You are just a modern doctor. You want to know why you saw it so clearly." She pointed a crooked finger at the puddle of melted wax on the floor. "You entered the bloodstream of your past life. And I burned a very specific candle to bridge the gap between your soul and mine. Now that the wax is gone, you are blind again."

I stared at her face. I slowly looked at the empty air behind her chair.

The giant mound of gray, dripping meat was gone. The room was just a regular room. The clinical, logical side of my brain was desperately screaming at me to call her a crazy old fraud and run out the front door.

I couldn't get my legs to work. Thanawin's invisible grip was still locked around my neck. That phantom pain was all the proof I needed that the old woman was telling the truth.

"You can decide what happens next," she told me from across the dim room. "Fight him. Help him. Put a knife in his chest. You can even try wrestling with the timeline to alter the past. But get this through your head right now. You did not earn this curse."

She leaned slightly closer to the flame.

"It is a rot. And it belongs entirely to Thanawin. Even the blood you spilled and the sins you took onto yourself are chained directly to his soul. But no matter what path you take, every single choice you make is going to end with your death."

I stopped breathing. My heart slammed violently against my ribs. I wanted to yell at her. I am a surgeon. I deal in variables, risk assessments, and survival rates. There is always a treatment plan. You do not just tell a person they have a zero percent chance of survival regardless of their actions. It defied every logical equation I lived by.

"I am not going to help you," she said. Her tone was completely dead. "I refuse to let myself get dragged into this mess. A lot of people are going to die while you try to fix this, and I will not be one of them. A broken timeline does not care about what is right or wrong."

She didn't give me a single second to argue.

Before I could even push myself backward across the floorboards, she raised her weathered hands. She slapped her palms together in one sharp, deafening clap.

A freezing gust of wind violently ripped through the sealed room. It rattled the wooden walls and completely snuffed out the candle and the oil lamps in a fraction of a second. The orange light vanished. Total, pitch-black darkness swallowed the room. The air was sucked out of my lungs. I couldn't breathe. I was choking on the cold void.

"Doctor. Hey, Dr. Lert."

A hand clamped down on my shoulder and shook me violently. The heavy darkness just shattered.

Harsh fluorescent light stabbed directly into my retinas as I finally sucked a huge, desperate gasp of air into my chest. The rotting smell of corpses and old wax vanished in an instant, replaced by the burning chemical sting of industrial bleach and rubbing alcohol.

I wasn't sitting on the weathered floorboards of a wooden hut anymore.

I was slumped against a cold wall. The floor underneath me was covered in sterile white linoleum tiles. I blinked hard, trying to clear the blurriness from my eyes. A woman in clean blue medical scrubs was kneeling right in front of me.

"Nurse Queenie?" I croaked.

My throat was completely raw. I recognized her immediately. She was a triage nurse from my early internship days at the hospital. But seeing her face made my head spin. Why was a hospital nurse inside the shaman's house?

"You passed out," Queenie said. Her forehead was deeply wrinkled with concern. She reached out