You linger, just for a while, held by the unaccustomed beauty of the music. You watch the faces of the dancers, and wonder if it is joy that holds their mouths wide, burns their eyes bright. You cannot tell.

You decide you would rather choose your own steps, and so you turn away. At first, your feet seem heavy, not quite your own, but as you continue to walk, your steps become easier.

You believe that you are lucky, that you have continued to escape fates you would rather not own, and so you do not concern yourself with the rain that has begun to fall.

But the soft trickle becomes a pelting, and you duck into a crevice in the hillside. The interior of the hill opens up before you like a dark cathedral. A staircase, worn into the rock by millennia of pilgrim feet, rings the edge of the space and spirals downward.

You walk down the stairs, and as you do, memories unweave inside your head. The best and worst moments of your life play out, with a clarity they did not have when you first experienced them.

But there is something else. Perhaps. A second set of footsteps on the stairs. A whisper, a bare rustle in the dark. Easy enough to dismiss, to pretend that you do not feel the weight of a presence in the darkness behind you.

The spiral of the staircase becomes tighter, inexorable. The following tread impossible to ignore. The steps come a half-beat after yours, a shadow’s echo.

You pause, hoping whoever—and, oh, how you hope it is a whoever, here in the dark under the hill—will continue on past you, but the steps pause as well.

Surely, you think, if it had meant to hurt you, surely it would already have done that. Knowing would be better than imagining an expanding catalogue of horrors.

Do you turn to look back?

Yes or No?