“There is a dark basement in our memories,” Minho murmurs to him. They are lying in Taemin’s bed, the covers pulled over them, holding each other close. The morning light falls through the open curtains, chasing away the darkness. The house is silent. His father will sleep in drunken stupor for hours yet.

“You’ve forgotten,” Minho says, “but it’s sending you those images from your subconscious. If we ignore the darkness, it becomes thicker and more powerful. Taemin, I think it’s making life more terrifying for you than the memory is.”

“It’s because I don’t know where they come from that they’re so scary,” Taemin whispers. “I thought I was going crazy.”

“Let’s remember the basement, Taemin. I’ll be with you. Don’t be scared.”

And there is the forgetting door, standing real and cold in front of him. It is painted wood, and the glass pane in it is rippled, so that he cannot see through it to the darkness beyond. Instead, he catches a glimpse of his own face. Hollow-eyed, twisted, distorted.

He has known this door for all his life. This innocent, white-painted door in the hallway behind the kitchen that leads to the basement.

It turns out his mind learned to lock away pain behind the second door after all. Locked it so completely that he had even forgotten the act of forgetting. Forgotten there was ever anything to remember.

Only the images that came to him in dreams. They were not invented, after all.

His mother’s ghost whispers Bible verses through the hallway. They rustle around the corners of the room and slip between the cracks in Taemin’s skin.

Go; behold, she breathes. I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.

A rush of cold air hits him. It smells like spiders and despair. He stands on the edge of the stairs that lead down into the blackness, and a shudder runs through him.

But Minho is holding his hand, and so Taemin stands tall as he takes his first step into the dark basement. Then the next. He keeps going and going, descending deep into the earth.

Wolves to the lamb, the wind whispers as it follows, swirling at his feet in its twisting, taunting way.

But he whispers back, “Lambs to the wolf.”

And his nightmares come alive.

For years he has been haunted by images of dead birds trying to fly, and Taemin has never understood why this was. But now, down in this concrete basement, he is surrounded by bird corpses – the exact images of his dreams. There are not as many as he thought – maybe five or six – but they spread out around him like a sea of horror, duplicating and blurring in his vision.

A soft sob escapes Taemin as he remembers. Oh, he remembers…

---

Taemin lies in a sea of dead birds. He sees his father haul Minho through the door and slam it shut behind him. The sound resonates through the concrete basement, and Taemin’s whole world goes utterly black.

He lies still, trembling, every hair on his body risen in fear. Eventually he is able to move. He crawls towards the staircase and pounds on the bottom of the door. He screams silent, voiceless screams. He throws himself at the door and claws at the wood until his fingernails are torn and bleeding. But nothing happens.

Minho is gone.

His father is gone.

His mother is gone.

He is left in the dark.

Alone.

He screams more. Fights more. All useless. Eventually his tears dry up. Eventually he curls up by the locked door and draws his small body into a tight, tight ball.

Time passes strangely after that, a tumbling roll of being that ceases to make sense. He can’t tell day from night. Sleep from wakefulness. Life from death.

Some unknowable length of time later, Taemin becomes aware that the birds are talking to him. From the black depths of the basement they whisper and chatter their truth to him. They use their minds, their broken fluttering wings, to communicate, to ease his fear.

They understand that his wings are broken, too.

He crawls from the door over the concrete floor, gathers them all into his lap, and picks them up. Their bodies are cold and stiff in his hands. Like seashells, he holds each ruined bird to his ear and listens to what it has to say. Their feathers make cold patterns on his skin. And after he is done listening, Taemin tosses them each into the air.

Yes! Yes! The birds crow as they fly.

And death, like the dark horror who calls himself his father, is inescapable.

---

But he is not alone. Not anymore. And it is not dark, and the birds are just birds, just dead bird