Page 311 of Sinister

“What’s happening? What’s going on?” I demand as I glance from Sin to the stranger.

“You have fulfilled your bargain. It is time I fulfill mine,” the stranger says as he steps forward.

I back away until I hit the cold wall, at which point he touches my forehead with two fingers.

A burst of light explodes behind my retina, and a whirlpool of lost information fills my brain. At first, it’s haphazard pieces, but soon the puzzle gains contour.

My lips part, and a harsh gasp escapes me.

Images roll in my mind. What I’d read in that journal had been mere tidbits of information compared with the images I see.

It’s like a video playing right before my eyes.

I see him—Elroy. But it’s not him, is it? It’s . . . Sin. My Sin.

I see everything, us growing up together and falling in love before tragedy struck. Then the images become bleak and hopeless, marred by my own lost sense of self. Slowly, my—is it really mine?—life at the convent takes shape.

All the exorcisms, all the caring for the sick.

Until he appeared. Valerion. The stranger standing in front of me right now.

We made a deal. Five souls in exchange for meeting Elroy and my baby again in a future life, all the while having the memories of the previous.

Yet something else happened.

I . . . couldn’t fulfill my side of the deal.

Soon after, I fell ill. Consumption.

I became so weak I could barely leave my room. Yet I wouldn’t give up. So instead, I trudged my way to the tunnels, and with the last of my strength, I painted.

Because those terms I agreed to were . . . tricky.

I, Agatha, would have to deliver those souls. I, Agatha, would have to find evil souls and devise their demise. Yet if I, Agatha died, then everything changed.

I might get reincarnated in the future, but without my memories. I would still have a pending bargain, but I would be unable to remember the terms, or why I committed to them in the first place.

So I did the only thing I could.

I tried to tell my story through my journal and through paintings, as much as my frail body would allow me to.

For days on end, I toiled in the tunnels, adding as much detail to those paintings as I could—for the future.

But before I could finish, I gave my last breath.

My next life, just like I anticipated, I could not remember anything.

I saw those paintings in the tunnels, and they moved in strange ways, but without my memories, I could not fulfill my bargain—not even when I shot and killed Snowden. His soul was already damned, so it would not count.

Without being able to remember the past, I would forever be locked in a vicious cycle of being reborn, with no memories, going through life without knowing what I was meant to do.

But there was one thing that changed that.

Sin. His bargain.

While my bargain asked for a reunion with my baby and my beloved as well as our past memories, he simply asked for his person, his fated one.

Me.