Incubus

Whatever he dreams comes true. Whatever it costs, someone else pays.

When John Prest was six years old, his parents could not wake him. The night terrors were so violent that doctors drugged him into silence, and for 29 years the silence held. Then a truck ran a red light on Queens Boulevard, and something that had been locked inside his skull since 1997 opened its eyes.

Now, whatever John falls asleep looking at, he can change. A photograph of a lottery ticket. A colleague who laughed at him. A woman he loved at seventeen. He is 35, overlooked, divorced, and invisible, and for the first time in his life the world does what he tells it.

But the thing that sits on his chest in the dark is not granting wishes. It is feeding. Every gift arrives with a bill, and the bill is always paid by somebody else. A shopkeeper. A girlfriend. A family on a bridge over a river. And every night he goes back, another piece of John dies with them.

Rich, promoted, and rotting from the inside, John turns his gift on the one thing that would make him matter. The worst morning in the history of New York. He can rewrite it. He has tried, and tried, and every version is worse than the last.

Because the dead are never saved. They are only moved.

And the thing in the dark has already chosen who it wants next.