Editor’s Frame. The following entries were discovered among scorched papers in the study at Ashcombe House. No postmarks were found with the envelope described. No body was recovered. The final page bears a clear candle-burn at its edge.

Entry I

The letter arrived without sound. I heard no bell, no knock, no crunch of gravel outside my door. Yet when I returned to my study, there it lay upon the desk, an envelope pale as bone, fragile as though it had drifted through centuries rather than hours.

My name was written in a hand I knew too well: my own. It shimmered faintly in the candlelight, as if traced in dried blood. I broke the seal with a tremor in my fingers.

“You will not believe me, not yet,” the letter began, “but I am you….fifty years hence. I write not to comfort, but to warn.”

The words spilled with unease: of mirrors that lie, gates that swing open of their own accord, a house that conspires against its keeper. The candle sputtered low as I read, and when the dark swallowed the corners of the room, I thought I heard my name whispered from them.

Entry II

I swore I would not read it again. Yet tonight the letter called me back. The words were the same, yet wrong, alive somehow, shifting beneath my gaze.

“When the iron gate swings open on its own,” it told me, “remember me.”

As I copied the line into this journal, the windowpane rattled, though no storm stirred. A long sigh crept through the room. I pressed my ear to the page and heard it faintly: my own voice, older and ragged, whispering through the fibres. Lately, I have noticed the handwriting of my days changing, notes misplaced, signatures that look almost like my own but slower, as if another hand were practising being me.

Entry III

Sleep frays me. On awakening, I sometimes catch an unfamiliar breath in my chest, a quiet reply to the things I think, so slight I could call it imagination, were it not for the different rhythm my hand takes when I set pen to paper. The mirror wept tonight. The glass bloomed with mist though the air was dry and cold. My reflection lingered when I turned away, smiling though my lips were still.

I fled to the letter, desperate. The words had altered again. “Do not look too long into what pretends to be you,” it warned, the script darker, wet. I slammed it shut and seized the candlestick. Its iron burned my palm, raising a blister that throbs even as I write—a cruel seal, binding me to this coil of fate.

Entry IV

The letter spoke of a gate, and when I looked through the window tonight, I saw it: the garden gate swayed gently in the stillness. The ground was locked in frost, the hedge unmoving, yet the iron creaked with a slow rhythm, as though unseen hands pushed it back and forth.

Perhaps it cannot be changed. Perhaps I was always meant to stand here, writing what I have already lived.

Entry V

The letter bleeds. The ink seeps fresh each time I touch it, staining my fingers red as wine. Tonight it bore a single line: “I am closer than you think.”

And closer it is. The gate creaks again. The mirror mists. The candle trembles in its pool of wax. I feel a hand upon my shoulder, though the room is empty.

Entry VI

I see the truth at last. The letter was never a prophecy, it is my own hand, scratching forward through years, forever circling back. I write because fifty years hence, I must. I receive because fifty years ago, I must. The loop tightens with every word.

Yet tonight, there was more. When I turned to the final page, I found words I had not written, though they bore my hand. They bore today’s date.

“Put down the pen. Turn around.”

The ink glistened wet. My candle died. In the sudden hush I felt the last of the distance between now and then collapse. I am both sender and receiver; I am my own pursuer. For years a voice had lived in the margin of my days …. patient, exacting, the mannered echo of my better sense …. and tonight, in the dark, it stepped forward. The breath at my shoulder was not a revenant from another century but the approach of a self I had never learned to contain. The circle did not close with malice; it closed because I yielded to the hand I had written into being.

Editor’s Note: This was the final entry. No subsequent pages exist. The gate at Ashcombe is said to sway though no wind touches it.