It begins with the dreams: a cabin, a chalk circle, a woman who is and is not Iris. It continues with the laudanum he takes for sleeplessness, and the sleeplessness he takes the laudanum for. By the time he reaches Harvard there is something patient living just beneath the architecture of his thoughts, quieting each alarm before he can register it. He studies the symbols because they interest him. He traces them because his hand already knows them. The journal fills with entries he doesn't remember writing.
The Hush moves in two directions at once — east and west, waking and dreaming, man and vessel — until the distance between them closes, and what looks like arrival turns out to be completion of something that was already, always, underway. The horror is not in what comes for Aldric. It is in how thoroughly, and how willingly, he opens.
Currently in revision.