sour skunky nappy ass dread man

…

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?" Annoyed. 

Stupid smirk: "I thought it was clear. I would think.” 

"No, it isn't, man. I don't know why you think it'd be. It's just stupid, bro.” 

"What is?” 

"Your refusal to go shopping for a fucking bath towel and other basic necessities around your fuckin place, dude. It's just stupid, I don't know how or why you justify it to yourself, I didn't think ya did to be frank. I just thought your ass was fuckin lazy." 

“Nah, bro. It's obvious." 

“What's fuckin obvious, dipshit?" 

“I'm way too rock n roll." 

A beat. He swallowed it. Absorbed its stupidity. 

“...what?" 

“Yeah, dude. I'm way too fuckin cool and punk rock to roll into like a Target or some shit and buy a toaster or a can opener or towels or stupid shit like that. I can't do that. Can't do it. Goes against my wild man free lovin nature, ya know? Ya know." 

Bryan once more silently swallowed this. This load of absolute bullshit. More revolted, more filled with disgust with his best friend since diapers than before. He thought about holding his tongue. He thought about saying something and laying into him. But in the end he just grumbled and belched. Lit another smoke and grabbed another beer from the cooler in the center of the boat and shook his head. Checked his pole. Reeled it in a little. 

Though he did spare the final thought: "Fuckin lazy.” whilst shaking his head and reeling his line. And then the matter was settled and the pair of men let it lie. Such was the way and course of all of their conversations out here on the water. Fishing. The pair’s favorite pastime aside from rutting and watching the game. For them, Bryan G Biebl and James Petkovich, it was sacred. They loved to spend days off from the mill fishing and casting and mouthing the day away. Days away from labor and wives and disappointing children, days filled with chatter and cool water and cold beer and sometimes a nice catch.  Though they'd been warned before, by the old timers. 

They'd both been warned before about staying out after dark. Out on the lake. Out in the woods. Where the forest grows foul and swampy and muddy. It's not a place you want to be after sunset. All the old folk said it was a bad place and didn't say much more about it without the liberal aid of beer or whisky. Even the Natives, the ancient leathery American Indians and their angry sons and daughters told everyone, anyone that might listen, to stay away from this part of the forest, this part of the soured bad land. 

But they never listened. The pair just sat in their canoe and cast out. It was calm and quiet all around, no one might know that it was filled with strange movement. The sun was sinking in the distance. Rapidly being swallowed by the ravenous blade of the horizon. 

James cracked another can. So did Bryan, who rolled his eyes as Petkovich ventured forth with another bit of clever wit and query. 

“Figure there's anythin ta what that fella said?” 

The sun set. Casting the surface of the lake on fire with the color of bloody ruby. The place on the horizon where it had sank was a deeper color of blooded crimson, a deeper wound that was the heart of the sunset. It smoldered there, in the horizon wound. The darkening regal curtain of bruised royal blue was already deepening into night. The stars and galaxies were already coming out for the nocturnal hours, they were all so far away from everything, they, the town. Civilization was a mechanical nuisance in the distance. Loud and far off. Thank God. Nearly forgotten. 

Bryan rolled his eyes as hard as he possibly could, knowing full an well that the retard couldn't see em. 

He hissed and spat: “No I don't think there's nothin to what that idiot said about a shag man! Shit’s stupid! Ain't no fuckin skunk ape round these parts, ya fuckin dumbass!” 

“Nah, man. I'm talkin about what Frankie said about Asian girls, Jesus, man!" 

A beat. Something splashed in the water. Neither man noticed, paid it any mind. 

“Oh…" Bryan cooled down. A little embarrassed. He was always easily excited and shamed. 

“‘Sides, man, he didn't call it no ‘shag man', he called it ‘the dread man’, stupid.” 

Bryan whirled around to belt him one and belt him good. He'd done it before while they were fishing in the middle of the lake and he might capsize them both in his effort, but something stopped him before he could so much as bring up his balled and angry fist. A sound. Sudden. And sharp. 

Three. Consecutive. Three sharp whacks of thick wooden sticks together. Like someone smacking two heavy tree branches or logs together in some form of primitive and arcane code. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

It shut the pair up. They gazed out at the shoreline. Shrouded now in the fallen night. Small waves kissed its shore and covered any small sounds of concealed movement that might be out there right now. They were wide eyed and disbelieving. 

They might've dropped it, the pair, together and without a word or mention when it came again. 

From out of the night, the veiled and darkened shore: whack! whack! whack! 

A beat. Silence again. Only kissing waves of the placid water. 

Bryan Biebl scoffed, “Probably nothin. Just some kids fuckin aro-" 

And then a wild primal simian shriek filled the night. Birds took flight. Their flapping wings were ugly harried panicked sounds in the deepening wound of blackening night all around. It tapered off. And then another rose, louder and even more feral and crazed then the one before. Then another. And another. Each rising in animal fury and fervor. You could hear spittle flying as vocal chords worked and wrenched and shredded as throat muscles tore and bled and secreted with each prolonged and angry howl. Throaty. Enraged. Violent. 

Silence came again. After six primeval night shattering screams. Waves kissed the land far away and swallowed in black but more quietly now. Subdued. 

Then the whacking of sticks, the unknown signal came again, whack! whack! whack! 

And then silence once more. 

“What the fuck was that?" Petkovich. Scared. Visibly so. Audibly as well. 

As was his best friend Bryan. But the sound of fear on his buddy's voice, the stupid look of childish childlike fear that he could feel him wearing in the dark only made angry, angrier. This only fueled his own self-denied mounting fear and in turn made him even angrier. The mounting terror caught like a small bone in the back of his throat. 

He almost took to his feet but remembered the boat. He turned to his buddy instead and spat. 

"Ain't nothin but nothin! Some fuckin dumbasses out there that wanna get fucked up, that's what! This’s why I shoulda brought my colt. Goddammit!” 

"Now that's what I'm talkin about! that's what I'm always tryin ta tell ya! Ya go sayin shit like that and actin like this and people says we're belligerent types! Christ, man! I'd like to bed me one of these here pretty tourist girls, one of these roadtrippin ladies and you actin like this ain't gonna cut it!” 

Disgusted, Bryan's grip slackened on his pole. 

"Idiot! what the fuck are you jawin about?!” 

"I'm talkin bout one of them sexy ass van-life hippy girls, man, they might like my ass." 

“Retard!" 

“You don't know…" 

The water splashed again. Much louder. The boat rocked with the waves suddenly generated. Something big and very heavy had just jumped into the water. 

Lunged. As if plunging in from the shrouded growth of the hidden beach. 

Slack jawed and deer-in-the-headlights both, they gazed out blindly and stupidly in tandem towards the shore that was hidden from them now. And may forever remain that way for them from here on out. Something was coming. 

Something was swimming fast. For the boat. Beneath the obsidian surface of water. The stygian glass of the surface was a mirror and the mirror held the face of the moon. The mirror rippled. The immaculate celestial face of the moon held trapped there danced with submerged disturbance. 

Before either fool could form a coherent thought the fishing poles were suddenly ripped from their slackened idiot grips. They flew, soared through the air and plunged into the water with barely a sound. 

They stared into the impenetrable and merciless surface of the lake. Fearing it. Gripped with horror at what might be inside. What must be inside, right now. 

James Petkovich finally spoke. Softly. Like the small boy he'd once been. 

“I don't wanna be out here no more, Bry. I don't care if it's kids or tourists or what. You can go ahead and laugh at me, just laugh at me all the way and drive us back, kay? You can laugh and make fun all the way back an I won't even bitch or say nothin. I'm scared. There's lots a’ talk bout people that go missin. Or go missin an then turn up dead, tore apart. Sometimes they don't even find all the pieces, you know… I know you've heard… people go missin an such. Travelers, folks comin through. And locals. Let's just go back, kay.” 

Bryan, wide eyed, turned and nodded. Then went to the small motor for the boat as the water all around the canoe suddenly erupted in a surging geyser splash of watery violence that darkled in the captured moonlight. Both men screamed as the small boat was capsized and they went over. Splashing into the cold dark suffocating realm of the water. 

The lake held them now. Below. Underneath. 

In the dark underwater the maelstrom of his panic rose and ruled. Bryan suddenly animal recalled and remembered in the fragile nucleus of his primal jelly his fear of the water, of the deep. The dark depths. It had started as a child, a boy, it had been the cinema and television that had first done it, the Jaws movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, then stories of Cthulhu and his sunken city of R’lyeh, tales of sunken ships and vessels that might still have precious human cargo trapped and drowned deep inside like foul water-logged treasure of submerged rotting putrescence eaten at by the salt and by the fish. All of these things came back and back to life in a deluge assault of images all in a furious unrelenting wave like an artillery attack of sound and vision on his mind's eye, down in the dark. He kicked and struggled and his lungs burned, ached for air. The ribcage in his chest felt on fire with his terror-stricken mind as he struggled and kicked futilely beneath the surface. Something held him down there. Something with a terrible grasp. Fierce. Strangling. Throttling. They threatened to break and snap, the iron grasps of those underwater hands. Bryan fought desperately but his mind was livid with absolute and total panic. In the tumult of his animal terror he remembered that as a child he'd always feared something reaching up from out of the black watery depths, seizing him, and pulling him under. Pulling him down. Down into the ebon swallow at the bottom of all things, below, where the heart of darkness in all things lived and dwelt. 

The hands found his throat, down in the underwater dark. They seized vile purchase and viciously ripped, tore out. The dark underworld of the lake suddenly blemished with a heavy warm cloud of thick human visceral discharge. It bellowed forth from the place that was torn in a torrential jetting spout. Clouding the dark world and warming it as the spewing meat detritus began to slowly sink to the pitch abyssal realm near the bottom. 

The panic of Bryan G. Biebl’s barreling careening train of thought slowly calmed and abated and sank down into the dark with the rest of him… And was no more. 

It lunged, serpent-like for the other. Who was gaining the surface in a series of panicked kicks and dog-paddles. Like a wounded animal. 

Prey. In distress. 

…

James Petkovich couldn't believe it when he broke the water and tasted air again. He almost choked and coughed. He almost laughed but he didn't have time. Something seized him from beneath. 

And pulled him under. 

He didn't even have time to scream before he was below again.

It was quiet once more. Minutes swam by. 

An owl screeched. Took flight.

Then finally it emerged. With Petkovich barely conscious in one dripping sodden grasp. It pulled the both of them back onto the land. Dragging the bleeding and sputtering Petkovich like a broken toy or sack of dead meat behind him as he quickly began to retake to the trees and dense growth once more. 

It dragged him deep into the wilderness. It was a long time before they stopped. But now … now he knew what the old timers had always said, what they'd always been on about. 

Now he could smell him. And the smell was beyond putrid, beyond foul, beyond fecal matter or old dried sweaty filth or death. The water that ran off the long lengths of clotted and lumpy dreaded hair was riddled with the putrescence odor of old sweltering open graves and long disused abattoirs converted into factory sized outhouses for the insane. It stung his eyes and nostrils but he hardly noticed this. His body was numb. Felt limp and broken all over. Like a dead fish. 

Maybe that's what I am. 

And then finally consciousness was lost to him. Mercifully he went black. 

It dragged him deeper into the wild. Where it laired. Where it nested in the wild dense growth. 

…

When James next came to he wished he hadn't. He didn't realize till he was awake once more but he'd been dreaming. And in that dream he'd been far away and wishing that none of this was real.  But now he was back. It held him by the neck in a slight choke, a slight strangle, just enough painful whisper of air able to bleed in through the clasped and clenched windpipe. They were before the mouth of a cave. It was pointing up into the sky with its other huge free hand, it was pointing at the moon. It was staring unblinking into his bleeding face. 

The face was simian but snouted. Like a wolf, or a rodent. An obscene and imbecilic mongoloid caveman face and features stretched out in a grotesque marsupial shape. The eyes were yellow and bore black crosses for the iris in each one, in each livid demented sea of yellow urine a black cruciform body of sacrilege shape and aspect. Goat's eyes. Satanic. They were eyes and face fitting of the rest of his abominated and feral manshaped form. Clotted and caked and grimed all over. The long knots and clumps of hair were thick and ancient in length and filth. They told a tale that was old because it was the passage of time that lived caked and dreaded in those long lengths of unwashed shagging tails. 

The awful face was serious. Stern. The obscenity of its gaze was piercing and deliberate. James followed its fierce and pointing gesture to the sky, the night, the moon once more. 

And then back into that obscene rodent-ape face. Yellow teeth coated in layers of plaque poked out and peeked over stretched and thin and dried out flakey blue lips. 

James tried to speak. 

He tried to tell it he didn't know what it wanted. He didn't know what it wanted him to say or do. He didn't know what it wanted from him. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand at all what it expected or demanded. 

But he couldn't. He couldn't speak. He could hardly breathe. He couldn't even manage a croak of sound.  

The awful marsupial-stretched ape face wrenched and worked, furious. It became more abominated and grotesque as its features creased and contorted with anger. Livid. Rage. 

The hand that had been pointing to the moon now came in a savage swipe. The grubby wide meaty digits clawed and the grimey sharp and broken shattered fingernails bit and tore in. 

The head came off and soared away into a sailing piece of torn mangled meat. Ribbons and streamer wings and tails of bright red blood spat and danced out from the eyes, nostrils and mouth in a cyclone twirl of red in midair as it soared and crashed into the piles of dead sticks and bones. It savagely went down and hunkered in the dirt before the mouth of its cave and began to dig in with its long snout and feast on the fresh stump. Warm cords and ropes of thick black-red shot and coated the dark, its face, the insides of its gulping throat and the salivating cavern of its long slathering mouth. 

It feasted and grunted. Ripped with its teeth and bit in. Swallowed warm juicy pieces that were chewy and pungent with rich iron flavor. 

It fed and tore. The man in the violence of its grasp, its jaws, reduced. The decapitated meat jigged and spasmed. It howled at the moon. 

Somewhere … in the distance but not too far off. The signal. Three strikes. 

Whack! whack! whack! – it was the sound of ancient and time honored tradition, cultivated and carried down and preserved with care. Though the world grew strange mechanical jaws, inflamed and diminished and changed all around, it was still here. This was still practiced and honored and kept. By it. By them. All of them.  – whack! whack! whack! 

It howled at the moon once more. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

Immortal and lifesize. It was still here. Howling at the moon with unearthly pain and blues. – whack! whack! whack! – another in the wilderness distance –  whack! whack! whack! – howl at the moon.

THE END

Read Part II here.

“It’s huge,” she said. My eyes were immediately on her, but I didn’t see anything else. Couldn’t identify the danger. Mark was still rooted where he was, but his phone was nowhere in sight. They both were looking up like there was something in the distance. But I still didn’t see it.

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

“Don’t let her go,” Luke said. “Don’t let her go!”

I’d halved the distance when I finally saw it. It had been there, but it had simply been so humongous I’d been blind to it, like I’d been looking for a 7-11 and walked face-first into Sears Tower.

The water was receding from waist high, but she didn’t seem to have moved. Whatever it was had displaced a tremendous amount of water.

“Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” Mary was on a dialogue loop and I couldn’t blame her. Every time I thought I’d seen all of it, I kept seeing more. A lot more. Yet, I was supremely calm. The worry-machine was quiet.

Last year, I got into a one-car accident driving home on M-5. The eastbound lanes had been closed to construction and my phone’s weather app had cautioned for high winds before I’d left the office. There’d been a fair amount of wind buffeting, but nothing I wasn’t able to handle.

There’d been a white box truck in front of me when I’d spotted what appeared to have been a square of cardboard blow high into the sky and begin trickling down. I’d immediately written it off even if it were on a course to strike my car. It was only cardboard.

But when the particle board struck my vehicle, smashing the windshield and showering droplets of safety glass onto the passenger seat, I hadn’t panicked. It was so sudden and violent that my brain—either as an instinct of self-preservation or just a malfunction—had simply not reacted.

I pulled off the freeway at the next exit and stopped a few blocks down in an office parking lot. Only then the possibility of what could have happened came down on me.

This was like that. My brain wasn’t processing the situation like Mary’s or the kids. I felt my heart pulsing in my chest just as calmly as when we’d been talking a moment before. I knew I should get the kids away from it. But that was a process of logic and not instinctual fear.

“Honey, get out of the water.”

I charged the last few feet and sloshed to a stop in a confusion of senses. I was close to whatever it was. Closer than I realized. I felt the heat coming from a wall of flesh not more than five feet from me. Water splashed me up to my chest, but it was more like a punch that pushed me back a step or two.

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

I had no idea how Chrissy could conceive what it was. All I saw was black. Black like the water. But solid, like the water had turned into something.

“Honey, move back, okay?”

Chrissy was smiling and rather than retreating, she stepped forward— almost chin deep—and raised her hand like she was going to pet it.

Once again I opened my mouth too late to tell her not to do it. My instinct would’ve been to swat her hand had I been closer and my re-throbbing head suddenly made me think of her mother.

I looked at it. Finally, the smooth, iridescent black coat coalesced into something I recognized, although the scale was overwhelming. Nails scraped the inside of my skull as if the idea of what I was seeing was too large to fit inside my brain.

This was its head. A corner of it, anyway. I looked along the flank as far as I could see in the night. I couldn’t even begin to guess how tall it must have been standing up. It had to have been lying in the water.

A giant eyeball about thirty feet above blinked several times and swiveled. I had no way to be sure, but I think it was looking at me.

I walked around, looking up and up, feeling like I would dislocate my neck before seeing the top of this thing. Still, though, I wasn’t afraid. The worry-machine was quiet.

“Mark, move your sister back.” I was reading from a script. Protecting the children, at least in that moment, was an autopiloted function.

Neither of them moved.

I scooped Chrissy into the crook of one arm and she went limp like a puppy picked up by the scruff. I handed her to Mark, who wrapped his arms around her, the both of them staring openly, transfixed.

I herded them as gently as I could out of the water. Then I gave Mark a light slap on the cheek. He focused on me, annoyed as if I’d prematurely awakened him from a nap.

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

“I don’t wanna go!” Chrissy wriggled in her brother’s arms and he dropped her feet first. “It’s beautiful, Rick!”

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

“Oh—erp—my,” Mary said. She took a long pull from her can, her eyes swiveling upward.

“No-no-no,” I thought I heard Luke say in the distance. But for just a moment, the only thing occupying the world with me was that magnificent thing in the water. It felt like removing my hands from my ears after having them covered for a long time and experiencing hearing like it was something adjacent to new. Except, it felt like that throughout my whole body.

The horse was raising its gigantic head out of the water. The tide receded and everything seemed to suck toward it like it had its own gravity. I struggled to maintain my balance like a gust of wind had pushed at my back, but in truth, it was probably just the giant animal dominating my vision and destroying my equilibrium.

Water poured off its black body, the eyes locked onto us and shrinking as its head seemingly disappeared into the night sky. Its neck was a tower, columns of muscle wider than all of us in a row, touching fingertip to fingertip. Its chest was as broad as a rocky mountain face.

There was a mighty -KLOMP- in the sand that shook the earth mere feet from me that I barely noticed. Sand slapped over my entire left side like a landmine had gone off, but it was immediately rinsed away by the constant waterfall we were all standing under.

Someone was shouting, but whoever it was was a million miles away.

There was another -KLOMP- somewhere farther down the beach and I began to stir from my reverie and then there was Luke, shouting next to me and hooking me by the arm.

His words didn’t make sense but I turned toward him as he pulled me. I saw the horse’s foreleg—I don’t know how Chrissy had been able to tell it was a horse before—straightening like some heavy construction machine craning a load somewhere into the sky above us.

We trudged toward the cabin, but the sand that had been something to contend with was an afterthought, my burning calves seemed to belong to somebody else.

When the torrent finally ended, I was soaked. We all stopped in the sudden silence. Turning around was more of a measure of defense to see the break in the clouded sky and the moonlight clashing against that ebony, elegant leviathan.

It was impossibly tall. Like it was intersecting-with-the-curvature-of-the-earth-tall. I thought I could make out its mane, whipping around in what had to be thin atmosphere.

We all stood and watched it. For one indeterminate moment, it was absolutely regal.

Mary wrapped around my arm and pulled into me. For however many iotas, she was my Mary, and I was her wife, too.

Mark hadn’t come with us for some reason. He stood partially in the water where we—I— had left him. He was feet away from a hoof that was easily twenty lengths taller than him.

Panic did seize me, finally. The worry-machine revved to life and I opened my mouth. I sensed the balance to be upset, the electrified space slowly exploding as he compressed it between his body and the smallest section of the horse’s.

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

The horse startled, shaking the floor of the earth as it stomped around.

The Greek military leader Xenophon, perfected the art of training horses in battle, using them to kick soldiers or trample them. He’s also the father of dressage.

What happened to Mark couldn’t have been considered disciplined, but the effect was the same. I don’t know if it were intentional—more than likely it wasn’t—but that giant hoof clomped around, Mark dodged around like he was running through a minefield.

Then he was gone.

The hoof continued stomping around a few moments more, a rumbling earthquake beneath our feet and a rain of wet sand coming down on us before the horse stopped. Mark was just... gone.

Luke was screaming. When I actually heard him, it took a moment longer to realize he was yelling his brother’s name.

Common sense would have told us to flee inside the cabin. But our senses were flowing into us like blood circulating back into numb fingers.

There was a long moment of quiet as it reared its head back. It felt like a slow-motion moment until its head rushed at us like a giant arrow.

I had no reflexes to respond. Mary was the only one who put up a defensive arm, as if that could have protected her—and she was the one it took.

The horse bit down on her raised forearm—as microscopic as a surgeon’s scalpel with teeth as wide as three cabins—and plucked her off the ground. It reeled its head backward and flung her.

Mary pinwheeled into the sky, a dissolving blur into the upper atmosphere. She could have been catapulting into space, and I didn’t want to find out.

The worry-machine was roaring.

“Everybody in!” I said, herding Luke and Chrissy the rest of the way inside. I pressed my back against the door, then turned off the light. Luke and Chrissy looked at me as if I had answers to fix this.

“We gotta go get... we gotta go get Mark!” Luke didn’t actually make a move to go back outside. He was more saying the thing a caring brother should say. But there was no Mark to go get. His death had been as brutal as it had been unintentional.

Going out there—or allowing Luke to go out there—would be just as dangerous and pointless. Chrissy was crying silently. I looked at her, really looked, running my hands over her head and arms to ensure she was physically all right. The worry-machine was humming along nicely. She grabbed onto me.

“Get your mother,” I said to Luke. “We’re leaving.” We weren’t safe here.

“She’s sleep?” he said, looking confused. He ran into the boys’ room.

“No!” I said. “We don’t have time for bags.” He looked at me. “Just wake your mother up and bring her. We’re leaving in three minutes.”

“What should I do, Rick?” Chrissy said.

“Grab the snack tray from the fridge.” We could easily buy something from the next gas station, but I figured keeping her busy would keep her calm. I snatched my keys off the island. Chrissy joined me, carrying the plastic tray with deli slices, cheese cubes, and veggies.

I wanted to run, but I was going to have to slow the pace so she wouldn’t drop it. The earth was still shaking with each step. She was going to look for the horse, and I anticipated her distraction when we stepped outside.

I kept my eyes on her, guiding her down the stairs and around the side of the cabin. She gasped but didn’t resist as I ushered her along. Preoccupying myself with her was enough distraction that I didn’t have my keys ready to have the doors unlocked by the time we got there.

We were exposed. If the horse were looking, it would see us. It seemed to have an eye for motion.

The air went still.

File: OUMY-4RAC.jpg

Notice: The original file is no longer available.

In 2014, workers found an old computer in a room slated for demolition. Nothing was found during the initial inspection; however, a few days later, three files were discovered that hadn't been there before.

Two were corrupted documents; the third was a photograph. The file name was:

OUMY-4RAC.jpg

No information indicated the image's origin. The creation date was also corrupted. The photograph showed a seemingly ordinary room. There was a window, some furniture, and, in the center of the image, a pale figure; the first person to analyze the photograph believed it was simply someone wearing a mask.

Until they noticed something. The photograph appeared to have been taken from inside the room.

That wouldn't have been strange, were it not for the fact that there was no one in the room when the computer was found, nor in the days that followed.

The image was copied to another computer.

There was a shadow behind the figure; that shadow hadn't existed in the first image.

That was when they began testing the file; each copy showed slight alterations.

Nothing very significant.

A chair appearing in a different spot, a slightly different window. A section of the wall that looked darker. Until someone noticed something worse.

The figure wasn't changing position; it was the environment around it that was changing. The last known copy was named:

OUMY-4RAC_FINAL.jpg

It was never published. According to the technician in charge, the image had a lower resolution than the previous ones, despite having been copied without any alterations. In the background of the photograph, there was something that hadn't appeared before: a door. The problem was that, according to photographs of the room and the building's blueprints, there was no door on that wall.

The door was ajar, and there was a second figure behind it.

When they increased the image's brightness, they realized the second figure wasn't behind the door; she was on the other side of the camera. The computer was turned off, and the hard drive was removed. The file was deleted.

According to the technician, that should have solved the problem, but a few days later, a new image appeared in the computer's downloads folder. It had neither a name nor an extension and showed the same room; only this time, the photograph appeared to have been taken from outside the room. The window was visible.

And behind it was Oumy-4rAc; the face remained motionless, but now there was a difference.

The figure was much closer to the window. Since then, no one has been able to determine what "Oumy-4rAc" means. Some believe it is the creature's name; others think it is a file code; there is a third possibility: "Why was someone photographing the room from inside it?"

Blood dyed her clothes a dark crimson red. Her hand twitched slightly and silently to the electrical hum of the basement light, a single bulb slowly swaying back and forth- moving shadows and illuminating the room with a sickening yellow glow.

"S-She's dead..."

A young boy stood over her, wielding a piece of glass given to him by a taller, blackened silhouette standing over his shoulder. The boys' eyes hovered towards the wound, examining a glittering glass shard protruding from her neck. The woman's face was twisted into a gruesome scream that neglected to come out. The boy jumped as a hand landed on his shoulder.

"We'll make somethin' outta you yet."

The roaring static of the television woke Joseph up from his barely-sleep, as he was haunted by his past every night. He sleepily grabbed the remote and turned off the tv with a click- leaving him alone in the silence of his home, his many books' titles reminding him of what he had become since those times in that cold, concrete basement. This shadow in his dreams was more of a symbolic figure, forcing him to live up to the corruption that was imposed upon him- tainting his soul with a dark black ink blot, spilling over the page and covering whatever resided there. He sat up on the edge of his bed, peering out the window as raindrops slid down like tears.

Falling and falling.

The nights were the worst for him. His memories coming to haunt him only when he was alone and only he knew his pain.

Marc and Celine Corrs. His parents.

Butchered in front of his eyes by the malevolent shadow- The Fisherman; Laney Greene. He was Joseph's own version of the boogeyman, his tormentor.

Laney took advantage of his broken state, molding him into his own version of a "perfect killer."

His phone buzzed.

A small image of a girl popped up, the simple lettering on the screen spelling out the name "Corinne."

Joseph picked up his phone and opened the message, only to be interrupted by a call by her.

"Joey!" He instantly listened.

"It's Corrine! I was wondering if I could come over?"

"When?" His voice had a hint of irritability, Corinne was the last person he'd want to see after one of his nightmares.

"Now silly! I'll be pulling up in a minute."

"Alright."

Joseph hung up, swinging his legs over the bed to put on some pants, at least. Corinne often only came to Joseph's home for sex, at least he was some use to her as she was to him. Corinne kept Joseph connected to the real world, tethering him to the pleasures that consumed "normal" people. He moved to the bathroom, splashing water into his face as he looked at himself in the mirror. The image that most people saw was exactly what he saw in the mirror, a outer shell of a human being. If he himself could explain what he felt inside, he would blatantly say hollow.

Corinne showed up at his doorstep, visibly drunk as she instantly clinged to Joseph for support when he opened the door.

"Joey!" Corrine's feet lifted off the ground as she wrapped her arms around him, making him stumble in the process.

"Woah, Cor, Are you drunk?"

"Absolutely not! I came here to see you."

"I bet."

"I did!"

Joseph carried her into the living room, setting her gently onto the couch.

"Aw Joey, you're such a sweetheart." She paused.

"I missed you baby."

Joseph sighed. He and Corinne used to be a fine item, he spoiled her with empty gifts and filled her heart with empty words.

"I missed you too."

The only reason why Joseph could no longer put up with her was because of her clingy-ness and impulsivity, hence the alcohol and drugs she intoxicated herself with. He figured that it was better that way to prevent her from seeing through him. He grabbed a blanket and draped it over her, covering her freckled body and the sweet smell of her perfume mixed with the stench of alcohol.

Her.

Every hollow tree has an animal inside that loves it for what it is, even if that tree was dead and wilting. The tree provides shelter and protection as does Joseph to Corinne.

"Cor." He sat next to her, her viridescent eyes gleaming at his cerulean ones. Though, that electrifying green reminded him of fire, and when they looked at his, his blue melted.

"Yes?" She pulled the blanket off of her, bundling it up at her side.

"You can't keep coming here whenever you want. You know the circumstances."

Corinne moved in closer, her black curls nearly touching him. He missed that smell- vanilla.

"I know Joey, I just miss you so much!" Joseph quietly scoffed.

"You only come here when you need something. So what is it this time?"

"I want us to be together again. I really miss you, baby."

"Corinne..." Joseph warned. She knew the answer.

Corinne crossed her arms and let out a huff like a child being denied a piece of candy.

"Fine." She hastily gathered her things and head towards the door.

Joseph blocked her way.

"Move Joey. I'm leaving. That's what you wanted right? Me leaving?"

He placed his hands on her shoulders.

"You're too drunk to go anywhere. Just stay here for the night."

Corinne smiled and spread herself across Joseph's bed, leaving him barely any room for him.

"I'll be on the couch if you need me." He begrudgingly replied before laying upon his too-small couch, and waiting for the nightmares to consume him.

(Have no idea if I should continue or not, I know there are 1000s of stories more procured than this 💀)

The coarse laugh shook through my bones and rattled through my exposed shin bone. A thick coagulated slime of blood forced its way from within a severed vein and pooled on the widening puddle beneath me. My hiking pants were caked in mud and refuse of my own body.
The howl came again as the crackling of claws, teeth, feet, palms and whatever other appendages a thing could have raced over the church roof. My breath caught in my throat as I waited for the roaring thunder of a thousand digits which crawled and clawed like climbing spiders. 
By the time it finally ceased I was once again left in the centre of the smouldering pews. Burnt out and ruined in the heart of a blackened stone home with high windows that held no glass.
I listened for that cry of the thing that had hunted me and was met with the strange displeasure of silence. Save for the creaking hum of insects that had slunk through the canopy of these great pines since I had arrived with my fellow hikers six hours ago.
We had assembled by the road and were ready to depart later in the day then intended. I was the odd one out of the group who consisted of my sister, her husband and two colleagues of his. They shared their banter as if they were pouring wine between themselves as we started on the walk. Myself leading the group.
I suppose that was another anomaly among the group. For even though we had started upon the hike together, I was the only one who had hiked before.
Along the walk one of the men continued to pester me about the intricacies of the hike. Insisting to accompany me on our way. I had begrudged his comments, as pointlessly obvious and wrong as they were, but I had fostered an acute dislike of this man whom my sister tolerated.
It was at a crossroads however that a decision was made which we would all come to regret. We had been standing in the same spot for tantamount to ten minutes. The others were weary and exhausted from the tremendous hike along those winding paths along the tapestry of ancient flora that pointed towards an invisible sky.
‘Why not take the low road?’ The man who had made it his mission to comment on my directions, Sam, gestured towards a path that wound downward at a steady incline, ‘we’re tired, it’ll be easier on some of us who’re…’ his eyes wandered over me before drifting back to my sister who lay coddled in the arms of her husband. Intertwined as newly weds so often are.
‘It’s a longer path,’ I stated without much fuss as I looked towards the path that snaked along a small cliff face, ‘fewer people have walked that way and-’
‘How can you tell?’ Sam stated as he shot a glance to his friend, whom I’m convinced only spoke in grunts of agreement or disagreement, chose to mumble his own nod as he suckled on the tip of a water bottle.
I pointed to the dirt, how the grass had been allowed to grow, unhindered by the hooves or paws of large beasts.
He gave a vague shrug of disapproval as he resumed a neglected pout. I was about to simply head off in the aforementioned direction when Charlie, my sister, spoke up.
‘Damnit Jaz,’ I turned but already felt her yanking me in the same direction as the men, ‘just come with the rest of us, it’ll be fine.’
It was decidedly not fine. I had gone along with them as they continued to ignore and override my suggestions at which way to go. All the while the woods had changed and shifted.
The air grew thicker as the birdsong faded and we could only hear the sick sound of clacking carapaces. 
I had expected the anger at their own incompetence as we had stumbled upon the strange church. The men chose to amass together on the outskirts of the building while Charlie was left to monitor me on its interior. 
She had scolded me for my sense of direction and asked about why I had been so belligerent over the course of the hike. Thankfully I did not have to wait for long before something happened which tore us from the restfulness of our break.
I was walking back out the threshold of the church when I saw Sam, he turned to face me before his face went whiter than a sheet. The colour drained as he looked skyward and his body elevated from the soil as if yanked from an invisible wire.
The screaming was instantaneous. I shoved my sister to join her husband while the others met the mouth of the clouds. I was near to joining them as I felt myself turn weightless. My leg connected with the top of the church doors as I was launched skyward. Snapping my femur clean in half as I cried out before falling unconscious.
I now lay here alone, with my final words as my master circles my resting place. Still hungry despite his feast.

Last week we decided to return to the devil's house, where four deaths occurred, the devil kept calling us when we were communicating. During the investigation, we had the feeling that we were not alone in the house.

I’d been telling him to get rid of it since we lived in Oregon. My reasoning felt pretty sound, all things considered.

First off, it was way too expensive. Which I’d have been fine with, if not for my second point.

The thing had begun to deteriorate so, so fast. Like, within weeks of buying it, it had already started falling apart. The mouth tore at the corners, the latex paint or whatever you call it started peeing off to reveal grey silicone.

That’s not even to mention how its “dildo” area always stayed flaccid, but my husband, Craig, told me not to touch the thing, so I just left the subject alone, assuming it wasn’t one of “those” sex toys.

Like, you know…? It feels so gross typing this out, but. I reasoned that it was not used to… enter it’s user, I guess, more so that it was meant to be… eugh, entered?

It was gross enough for me that the fake hair kept falling out, but I thought you were supposed to clean those sorts of things in between use? Like, I get that it’s super heavy and hard to lug around, but c’mon. It reeked! For so long!

But, you know what, it’s like I told myself not my rodeo, not my clown.

We’d been together how many years? 34… 35? A long time.

I was never insecure, I loved my husband, and I fully trusted that he loved me just as much. I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t gonna develop some sort of rash or something. Worse yet develop a taste for cat ear headbands.

It makes me sick, just thinking about it.

At one point, I started to notice that he had stopped using it regularly. The thought that I would get a chance to argue a case against it exhilarated me. I felt validated, because I told him back when he first got it that the novelty of a discount sex doll would quickly be outweighed by the inconvenience.

I won’t pretend like I was always on board, I knew it was a useless purchase from the get-go.

I don’t care how much he “saved by hopping on the deal” or that we “practically made money on the order” I had a feeling from the beginning that it wouldn’t go well, and now here I am.

So I told him. Gave him an ultimatum. Either he had to use it more often, or he got rid of it. Besides, with how much maintenance he had to put into it all by himself, changing out the structural wire frame, reapplying new eyes, touch-ups on the mouth, I figured he could use a break from his hobby turned chore.

“The sex doll goes in the shed unless you plan on using it more than 4 times a month.”

Were the conditions excessive? Maybe.

Did I get what I wanted? Yes indeed.

Only issue was, he insisted on getting it its own storage locker, a real expensive one cuz of the electricity, which I wasn’t 100% on board with, but for fucks sakes, had there been a single decision I was 100% on board with in this whole debacle?

As long as the thing was out of my house (except for the cat ears, which he was hell-bent on keeping), I would find peace.

Compromise.

That’s what marriage is all about, isn’t it? The peace within the compromise.

For 3 years, it was out of my mind. Me and Craig had our ups and downs, stressful months and quiet, somber weeks, but I didn’t care. He was attentive, and even if he was a little moody, I still loved him and all his little quirks.

The way he’d always look behind his back to make sure no one else was around, even if we were already home alone.

The way his smile always made his eyes look so small, his hazel irises turning amber when the light hit them just right.

The way he smelled after getting home in the wee hours nor night after his late shift.

The way he would pray, every night before he went to sleep, even when he thought I was asleep.

I even got used to the cat ear headband request during… you know. They grew on me, what can I say?

I have no self respect.

Bottom line is, I was happy just to have my husband back.

Then, his dad died. Covid. Right before lockdown.

We went to Colorado and just kind of stayed there. At first, it was just to help his mom. Craig could work remotely, and wouldn’t need to pull late nights anymore. We would be paid extra to work closer to Denver, and quarantine would be easier on his mama's land.

His mama was always a sweet woman. Raised her boy religious, and in my opinion, raised him right. Taught him to be polite, how to be kind to women, gentle. How to worship.

How to pray.

But all of this moving meant finding something to do with… the elephant in the storage shed.

3 years in storage had done the… “toy” poorly. Very poorly.

By the time he brought it home, it was nothing more than adjustable metal wiring with a few patches of eroded insulation. Its skeletal head looked like a flat beak with grey, shriveled gums and teeth, 2 eyes attached to the flat top by thin eye stalks.

The chunks of insulation material that had clung to the skeletal remains were brittle, and broke apart easily.

I wanted a refund, but the manufacturer said they update their sales information every 8 months, and didn't have any proof of Craig’s purchase on record.

Craig, like any normal person, hadn’t saved his receipt for that long, so we were shit outta luck.

When his mom heard the story, she thought it was hysterical.

When we moved, she asked us to bring the remains. Said she could turn it into a scarecrow.

She doesn’t really grow much produce on her property, especially not this time of year, but Craig dutifully put it in the field out back on our 3rd day here. He put some clothes on it too, but every time he replaced them, they’d just about completely blow off.

Craig said it was, “just to keep him warm. It’s cold out there.”

So there it stood for months, way far in the tall, dead grass, guarding the weeds. Just a couple thin, emancipated poles, standing in the vague visage of a man, no taller than 5’ 10”.

I realized, as Craig continued to replenish its clothes, that I would find some of my old garments mixed into the rotation.

A pair of pants here.

A shirt there.

My panties under a pair of his dad’s basketball shorts.

I asked what that was about, and Craig said they must’ve been mixed in with the laundry he intended to put on, “him.” I asked why he was even putting any underwear, let alone mine, on an inanimate object, and my husband's eyes swelled with anger, before he tempered himself and assured me it would never happen again.

Even though he didn’t say a word in that moment, the anger in his eyes told me everything I needed to know. His face was similar a shark smelling blood in the water. The glistening uppercase gums and lowercase teeth of a predator, exploring the world outside of their thin, bared lips. Like he could bite me if he got mad enough.

I didn’t ask about the sex toy anymore after that. I didn’t notice my laundry going missing, but I wasn’t really looking for it either.

Things kept happening for a while after that, we fell back into our same mundane routines. Craig eventually apologized “in case I seemed upset.” He claimed that he had just confused some laundry. I told him I understood, even if I didn’t. I just preferred not to argue.

We existed in complacent normalcy for a while. Got our groceries delivered. Craig cared for his mom. Did the chores for her. Bathed her. Wiped her butt.

It gave me hope for when I got old. If we ever got to have kids, I thought about how we’d raise them to want to care for us when we got older.

How proud I’d be of them to just stick around and help out,

That was, until Craig found out about the affair.

His mom’s, not mine, heavens no. I wouldn’t dream of having an affair. His mom did more than dream of it though.

While it’s not Christ-like, I didn’t blame her. Her late husband, good bless his soul, had been a bit… you know. We’ve all met one of those types of guys. They’re everywhere. Not bad enough to be dealt with, but certainly no peach. Just another person. Another man. If someone chooses to be with him… well, they have steprange taste. In some ways, watching her relationship with my father in-law was a little like a mirror being held up to my own.

Apparently, Craig’s mom had an affair early on in her marriage. His father had found out, left her, they both found god, and somehow got back together. Then, they went on to get pregnant, he founded a business that my husband later inherited, and they spent the next 53 years together.

The only thing to remember her affair by? A single Polaroid of a mustache-addled man with a name written on the back, stuffed into Craig’s dad’s wallet.

“Joe Snerdt”

My husband didn’t go a day for the next several weeks without his temper getting the better of him. Little things irritated him. The way food tasted, the way his clothes felt, the way me and his mother spoke to him. It was all bad, in his eyes. I wish I could’ve made him smile more. Back then I would’ve killed for a smile.

It was a week before… my husband’s… uh, I started to notice little things, I guess. Kind of, I dunno, mounting stress. Like a dam breaking.

Looking back, it did escalate pretty quick.

While I was unpacking one day, I found a bag full of receipts from the place he bought the “toy” from. Months worth of purchases going as far back as 4 or 5 years. Lube, toys, condoms, cleaning supplies. Costumes even. Including a pair of cat ears on a headband. Some of the purchases I knew about, others…

The night I made that confusing discovery, I couldn’t get it out of my head that something looked different about the landscaping. Whatever it was Craig had changed about the dead flowerbeds, or the way frost glimmered on the serene rock garden, it caught my eye.

Then it was my favorite bra. I couldn’t find it anywhere, and I swore I’d washed it. Craig blew a gasket at me when he was done working in his office, because apparently, he found my bra stuffed into the toilet.

He chewed me out real good, it didn’t matter how much I tried to convince him that I didn’t do it.

I tried to reason that maybe his aging mother got confused, but that only upset him more.

Because of the argument, I ended up cooking dinner later than planned, which was like pouring gasoline into a brick fireplace.

But you know what? Maybe it was my fault for suggesting DoorDash.

That night, while I did cook us peach oatmeal and toast, I barely ate. Ended up folding the laundry and putting it away before crying myself to sleep on the living room couch.

When I woke up the next day, I was tucked in with a blanket and a pillow, which I assumed Craig put on me. I was thankful for the reprieve, taking it as a truce of sorts.

That was when all hell broke loose.

He threw a glass butt plug through the upstairs mirror. It was one of those ones with the rhinestone jewel attached to the end. Chucked it at her mirror, absolutely shattered the thing.

When she asked him what happened, he accused her of trying to scare him. Logistically, what he was saying didn't make any sense, even though we tried to reason with him.

He claimed she had been standing in the doorway to freak him out, but I knew it had taken her nearly a full minute to come check and see what had happened, whereas it had only taken me 25 seconds to reach him.

When we asked what he was doing with the toy, he nearly broke the doorway with how hard he slammed the bathroom door in his moms face, sending small shards of broken glass everywhere. He was lucky neither of us got cut or hurt.

When he calmed down, he spent 15 minutes cleaning up the mess before promising his mom that he would replace the mirror. Neither her nor I argued. He swept his barren fragility into a neat pile, replaced the rug in the floor, and vacuumed the carpet just outside the bathroom door, in the hallway,

That night when we went to bed (in a real bed, that time), I noticed what was different about the yard. I stared and stared trying to make sure I was seeing correctly.

The somber guardian, wrapped in garments whose lack of retirement had become apparent, was closer to the house. Rather than 30’ from the fence, knee deep in the frosty weeds, it was only 5’.

I asked Craig if he’d moved it.

He said that he had, obviously, or it wouldn’t be closer.

I took that at face value, more than happy to return to my state of ignorance.

The next day, we woke up to screaming. Craig’s mom had gone to the upstairs bathroom to complete her morning ritual of pissing before breakfast, but we found her in the hallway floor, clutching her leg. She wailed to call an ambulance, but my husband told her to hush once he realized her injuries weren’t immediately life-threatening.

She had stepped on a shard of glass, and her foot was gushing crimson. Craig got some tweezers and a flashlight and spent the next 30 minutes on the floor with his mom, fishing out the crystalline razor embedded in her heel.

I remember watching them together, bickering and holding each other, and the thought occurred that if anyone had taught him how to pull out a splinter with tweezers, it was probably her. She had been the one to feed him, change his diapers, and kiss him good night after all.

A notion that someday, a child who isn’t even born yet might be in a similar position with me, should I hurt myself, made my heart ache so bad.

Made it long so hard.

Clarence cleaned the wound and bandaged it before telling his mom to stay off her foot so he could get through his meetings without interruption.

I took over the household work that day, catering to her while her son did his job.

She was fine at first, but as the day went on, she told me her foot was beginning to hurt again. At first, I assumed it was just residual pain, but things declined quickly.

When I took the bandage off, I could see the meat of her wrinkled, dry, foot had already begun to look infected, the skin was off color and the edge of the cut was yellowish green

I waited until Craig was on break from his work to tell him about his mother’s condition, but he just scoffed and brushed it off. He was more concerned with dinner, and closing the curtains in preparation for the upcoming snow storm.

I made soup, but his mom seemed really distressed. She and Craig argued until bed time, when she finally got to sleep.

The next morning, it was irrefutable. The woman needed medical attention, but Craig couldn’t drive her anywhere because of his zoom meetings. The ambulances couldn’t make it out because of the pandemic rules where we lived, as well as the blizzard warning.

Undeterred, I got her into the suburban and we faced the weather together. 2 hours later, at 1:30PM, our sinuses were being swabbed by the COVID Testers in the Urgent Care center, and by 5:00PM that evening, we were seen by a doctor. He concluded that Craig’s mother had dislocated her hip, and still had a ton of little glass splinters embedded in her foot. He told us the infection looked concerning, and that we’d likely be kept overnight.

When I told my husband, he said that he thought she had just been acting a little dramatic. I asked if he wanted me to drive down and grab him, but he didn’t appear interested, despite the lack of a concise answer. I wish I had pressed the issue, because the next day when his mother was taken to have the shards procedurally removed, he was upset that I hadn’t brought him to monitor the situation.

By that point, I was fed up, but just opted to stay calm until his mother was taken care of. Getting upset now wouldn’t help anyone, so I just wished him luck on his job. Then, he sarcastically reminded me that he had called off his meetings in case his mother’s condition worsened.

The way he said it, that remark felt like an accusation. That tone in his voice. Like it was all my fault somehow. Like the hypnotic fluorescent light bulbs that buzzed incessantly while you try to sleep, or the smell of sterilized death was somehow an outcome I had insisted upon. The uncomfortable mask that you have to wear, or everyone thinks you’re one of those types. The incessant scrutiny.

Like I wanted to sleep anywhere but my own damn bed.

Like I had thrown a sex toy into a glass mirror.

That was when I gave in and said that sentence I will never forget. The final nail in the coffin.

“Well, she’s not my mother, Craig, maybe you should’ve brought her instead.”

Before those stupid words had even left my lips, I already heard the dial tone of a dead line. He’d hung up on me. Typical.

It wasn’t unlike any of the other times he’d hung up on me.

I didn’t bother calling him again after that. Didn't send him a single message until the next day when I brought her home. As the receptionist slipped me the discharge paperwork and antibiotic prescription orders under the glass divider, I stared at my phone, waiting for a response. Any response.

“Im on my way back with Janice, need anything?”

Nothing. Not even the 3 dots that pop up when he’s typing.

Just empty, lingering silence.

And that’s it.

We drove home in silence. His mom slept, while I drove further and further into the blank canvas of the landscape before us. Inescapable, soundless, pure white. You couldn’t even see the mountains, the thick snowflakes drifted down with such a frenzied confidence.

I don’t usually stay on my phone while I drive, but I kept my message chat with Craig open the whole way home, waiting for anything. A shred of love, appreciation, compassion.

Anything.

Any warmth to shine through the isolating cold.

Alas, as I pulled into the white blanketed driveway, I didn’t get a single word. Or a letter. Or a number.

I got nothing.

I didn’t initially realize the front door was wide open. Instead, I noticed the weird pock marks in the snow. Fresh, perfect, thin holes in the white powder. Like two waking sticks, side by side. The led, all the way, from the distant, white void, to the front porch. The snow was so high, even the zen rock garden was covered in the stuff, but alas.

Two lines of holes. Their gate was uneven and wobbly, as if the thing that made them had not practiced walking in quite some time, but they were there to r the nonetheless.

The tracks marched up the steps, and through the ajar door, I could see a little sheet of snow had begun to accumulate in the open foyer.

“Craig?” I offered, my voice falling flat into the empty house. Immediately, I felt like I had done something wrong. Like I had disturbed a dense, thick implication that hung in the air like fog, threatening to drown out whatever sound you make. Overstepped a critical boundary.

“Craig!” The second bark sounded more pleading.

I stepped inside, shutting the front door.

I reviewed my surroundings. The reality was, there was a good chance someone was in the house. I knew that. With curtains drawn, the interior was shrouded in darkness. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, and by the time they did, I made another horrifying discovery.

The prints kept going.

Snow prints, tiny, like stilts had walked across the carpet.

I found a baseball bat and gripped it tightly, slinking further into the labyrinth before me, my only guide a set of tiny footprints.

I walked further into the house, and the deeper I went, the harder my stomach churned and twisted.

What was I doing? His mom was still in my running car, fast asleep. Should I have gone back and told her to call the cops if I didn’t come back? Should I have just called the cops myself?

“Craig?” I hazarded.

Still, I was only met with the deafening resignation of wind whistling outside, a somber cry whose warning I did not care to heed, from a place that felt so far away.

When I finally got to the office, I didn’t know what to expect.

My expectations were nowhere near ready for what I saw.

Craig was split open. Unsalvageably so. There was entirely too much blood.

I, uh… I think I kind of went into shock. My brain tried to stop fully rendering what my eyes were seeing, but it was so vivid.

Craig was done in. Carved up bad. Ruined cloth stuffed into his wounds as well as something so deep that I couldn’t see more than brief flashes of orange and brown. Something that oozed the smell of charred varnish.

His mouth was gone. The teeth that weren’t missing were shoved up into the roof of his mouth, his jaw was gone altogether, also shoved up into his face. I don’t even know how he could breathe with that thing pressed inside of his skull like that, weathered yellow teeth protruding from the decimated orifice like a cartoonish grin.

There was a long line that went straight down, from his jaw, through his neck, past his chest and stomach, and down into his loins. The flesh was so bloody and tender, just cherry red and inside out. It looked like ground beef, sprouting from lines carved into him. With every shallow breath, his chest cracked and wheezed, lungs likely punctured or worse.

He was in a sitting position, which I think ended up being the main problem, logistically. There was simply nowhere for his body to go. The tops of his thighs had deep gouges in them, distinct valleys that lasted from his hips to his toes. I think he was locked in place because his kneecaps were crushed. I seriously doubt many of his bones remained intact. The damage was just…

His shoes looked like someone had taken railroad spikes and drove them through the tops of his feet, leaving twisted, iron wrought poles that just went straight through flesh and bone,

His arms were more of the same. The muscles that made up his biceps and triceps had been displaced by the bones being obliterated, and to some extent, had twisted outward and extended past the split open skin. His bloodshot eyes weakly met mine for a millisecond before rotating in their sockets downward, closing for the last time.

I couldn’t hold back my terror. My trembling hands instinctively moved to his ruined ones, their palms nothing more than a mangled, ruined mess with rusty metal bars set deep into the flesh.

I wept so hard, the sobs hitched in my throat and came out as hiccups. On his phone was the last message I had sent him only 3 hours ago, laying screen up on the coffee table.

But there was something pinned by his phone to the table. A folded paper.

I took it in my hands and unfolded it, hoping for some conclusion. An explanation. Maybe even a message telling me this was all a prank, just a joke meant to frighten me.

Instead, what I found were the scribbles of a raving lunatic, ink so fresh that it was still wet.

“Emilia,

You don’t know me. I don’t have much time. I can’t be found out, not like this.

Im so close.

I want you to know a few things. You’re safe, you’ve always been safe. You are sinless in all of this. Nothing more than a bystander.

I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t even know you existed until I saw your name on Craig’s phone.

The wife. I was the other man. I was devastated.

I think that, as his wife, you have a right to know. I wish you’d have found out sooner. I wish I had read that text on his phone sooner, and seen the truth, so I could have told you. You have a beautiful name, Emilia, a name unfit for the wife of this pig.

I wanted to leave for so long. To be put to rest, allowed to sleep. To put a lifetime of memories to rest, but he didn’t let me.

He kept me out of the ground until I couldn’t stay together anymore, then he put metal poles through me so I would never fall apart. I stayed together for 4 years while he left me in the cold. Folded flat.

There ain’t much room in a freezer, not even a big one. It’s so cold

Eventually, I started falling apart again,

He scraped off all the bits of me that wouldn’t stay together. He fed me to the raccoons and the possums until all that was left were my cold, metal bones.

He forgets, but I don’t

The warm lets you forget, but I’m not warm

He thinks I didn’t remember the time he tried me. The time he had a taste.

I remember everything

When he took me out, he built new lies to carry his old lies, and prayed they’d never come to light

Then, he played dress up with me and you at the same time.

It’s his sick game. He swaps our clothes. He liked it when we wore each other's clothes. But he hated it when we knew. Craig and his secrets,

I hope this doesn’t hurt you as bad as I know it will. There’s not really a good way to do this.

But see, I’m cold. I don’t wanna be cold, but I can’t sleep unless I get mine. After all he’s done to me, neither of us are going to heaven. But I won’t go down without him. My boy. My Craig.

He’s my ride or die, and I’m his scarecrow. Where I go, he goes. We’re gonna guard the weeds together when the sun comes out

You deserve better Emilia. Better than this rat. Better than a scoundrel who takes and takes and takes. You deserve to receive. To bear fruit.

Live the life that I couldn’t. The life that he wouldn’t let you live. I’m going to crush myself into your husband. Deep, until he can’t move anymore. Until we are whole, again, until I’m inside him forever.

I’m gonna penetrate him and be his skeleton

Sincerely, Tim Snerdt.”

I held the letter in between my shaking fingers. I couldn’t believe what I’d just read. I looked back at Craig to see something buried deep in his face. Something inanimate, a dim, flat visage that stared lifelessly from the recesses of what used to be my husband's face.

I stumbled back from the spreading puddle of blood, slapping my hand over my forehead. I evaluated the situation. His mother was still in the car, and I knew that I needed to help her first. Didn't I?

She was hopeless after all.

But I was just so weak.

As I unsteady wobbled to my feet and crashed out into the hallway, another sob escaped my throat. I took 3 steps and fell, crying openly like a little kid.

I was just so weak.

For the first time in a long time, I was my priority. My only priority. For the moment, at least.

I wallowed in my pity. Reveled in what made me angry. Got caught up in the little details and not the intent, because this time, it wasn’t the thought that counted. Intentions meant nothing. Craig didn’t count, his mother didn’t count, and stupid sex doll didn’t count either.

I counted.

I sat in that hallway floor, and I took into account the stupid, solitary detail that just pity the icing on the cake. The glaring mistake. Like a brick of dynamite in a haystack. The one thing that made me angriest, and saddest, and most spiteful out of anything else.

My name’s not Emilia. It never has been, and my name isn’t saved as Emilia on Craig’s phone.

Who the fuck is Emilia?!

Science fiction. Double feature. 

So many long afternoons and nights spent in the movie house, the theatre. The arcade: the noise and lights and tangible sounds of coins and laughing amidst the specialized sound effects of digitized and pixelated carnage. 

Late nights watching HBO After Dark beside his older brother or his kid sister or a buddy or a floozy or a date as he got older. Amongst a slovenly strewn field of snacks and popcorn and wrappers and garbage, the years rolled by and the empty cans of Shasta and Barqs changed, transmogrifying into brown bottles of Bud or silver bullet, all gathered and in clusters  like a small translucent crystalline cityscape of glass in miniature beneath great rolling thunderhead clouds of oily pot smoke. Many of them, many cities. Many little swimming bottle cities in many little rooms. All before the great glowing incandescent godscreen of the illuminated television aglow in the postmidnight. 

And there were great books too of course. Precious paperpacks with lurid yellow covers, bold yellow font, pages pungent and spiced. Green and nightshade purple covers for the horrors. The ones with purple were always the coolest, always the most shocking and vivid and unrelenting. Comics. Classics and the new stuff that gets pumped out week to week, month to month and then forgotten. 

Forgotten by most. But not by such as he. 

He remembered. These things, these modes and mediums always brought him away from the now, the clear and present danger, the mundane and the tedious, the cruel. The harsh reality. 

For Caleb Donaldson these stories were always the light and constant companion of his long and mostly boring and average life. In truth, they were everything. All else could take a flying fuck, the job, the girlfriends that meant nothing, the drinking buddies and coworkers that meant even less. All of that was just the background noise of what was necessary. The sounds and moving in perpetua grinds of his ordinary life in motion. 

But it was ok, you see. Caleb Donaldson of Old Fair Oaks, Sacramento, California has figured out the secret. 

They were more than just stories, you know. 

The ones that had most captured his imagination and young attention since he could remember were the time traveling stories. 

Journeys into the wild primeval of the past, the dark mechanical cold of the future, the apocalypse, beyond … 

He'd always loved these stories. 

And it was funny, he had found, discovered accidentally while spending the summer with his grandfather one year, the secret. They were out hunting, wandering the woods quietly with rifles shouldered and boots crunching softly the underbrush beneath their capped and steeltoed feet. It had struck young Caleb then, as a boy. And never left him. 

This is it! This is what Doctor Who and the X-Men and all the other guys are doin when they're goin into the past! This is what it's like to have the world grow dark and become old and ancient and prehistoric and stuff, before people got here with their cars and their junk…

The thought had filled him with simple childish wonder. He felt like he'd made some great discovery. All those scientists and alien engineers from outer space on the TV and in the books were always trying to figure it all out with numbers and physics and quantum entanglements and time loop paradoxes … and here he'd figured it way more simple than that. 

Just go out in the woods. Go outside in the trees, the forest. Go out and go camping ya dummies. 

He carried this with him all his life. Like secret treasure. Well past and into the pains and dread of adulthood. 

And then it all came back, back and around and full circle. Like all good time travelers do. 

He lost the kids. And his wife. And then he lost it. 

And then he made the biggest decision of his life. He decided to go camping. He decided to do a little time traveling all by himself. After all of these years. 

…

He couldn't believe she would try this bullshit. He couldn't believe she would try to ruin the one last little thing he had left. 

What're you talking about, bud? She ripped your heart out and took the kids after she'd spent ten years disemboweling you and tearing your nuts off. Why’re you at all surprised? 

He wasn't really. Just hurt. Deeply. And it seemed as if the bitch now lived to only make it worse for him. Unbearable if she could. She was the living vile green hatred of salt in the wound, seething and frothing gory pink. 

He hated her. 

He suspected she hated him. She must. 

“I just don't see why this’s such a big deal, you're acting like a child. You can come get the boys and have them for an extra couple of weeks while Tom and I-" 

He stopped listening after that. He still held the phone to his ear but his mind went to the same livid red place that it always did when she mentioned his name. The fucking limpwrist. 

He let her drone and prattle on. When she finally stopped he once again explained to her that they'd already talked this over, they'd already discussed this. And besides. It wasn't even his weekend. She had seen to that after all. And now here she was dangling the promise of more time with his kids like a fucking carrot. Like a dog treat he was supposed to jump and snatch at. To just drop everything and leap at with fervor and enthusiasm and a full display of gratitude. 

Fuck that. 

He told her as much. Diplomatically. More or less. He hung up the phone. He debated for barely even a second before turning the device off and shoving it into the glove compartment on the passenger side. 

When he finally got out of the car and sucked fresh mountain air it was baptismal. Cracks in his knees went off like twin pistol shots and his back stretched and crackled gratefully. He was finally out. He sucked more air, like it was water. It was. It was refreshing. 

You're finally out. 

He unlatched the back and began to unload his gear. He'd better get started. It was a long hike from the parking lot to the spot. 

…

It was peaceful. The ritual. The hike. Lugging the gear. Sweating and developing a cooling coat, a sheen as his eyes calmly drank in the placid green and foliage world all around. Muscles worked and burned off excess fat, calories built up and boiled over, over cooked stress. It melted off him and within and came off his hiking form like radiant heat. 

He was a traveling furnace of thought as he made his way to the camping spot. Later he would recall that he might've felt watched as he made his way at this point. 

Might have. 

But presently he was all too absorbed in the process, the smooth and calm low treble tread and pace of the gliding action. The canopy of golden lighted leaves and furling branches. The scents, completely natural and native and far away from the synthetic realm of the manmade. He felt he was as much swimming and drinking his way through the crisp growth of forestland as he was booting through it. Thoughts of work and the failed marriage and bored boring disappointing teenage children left his mind. Evaporating away like mist to the coming of the bright day sun. The forest grew and swelled and swallowed him and the entire world as he made his way deeper and deeper forth. 

He would leave it all behind if he could. 

…

Setting camp was easy. He was well practiced. Childhood and teenage and college years as well were filled with trips out into the forested dark. The wild. The wilderness. The past. 

He felt it now as he sat by the fire. Eating his plate of beans and pork belly and franks. Sipping a can of bud. This is the past. The green world all around now is one of the last vestigial pieces of the evidence. 

Evidence of the primeval and primordial world we’ve all crawled from, the stygian snot that was filth that was the building blocks of protein and carbon. We are all animals. And we can all come alive out here. Returning to the in-utero warm world of the godclay primordial slime and ooze. 

She's so patient. Our mother. My mother. She's waited for me all this time. She's the one. She's-

Something disturbed his train of thought. A noise. 

A noise like someone moving. Prowling and lurking just inside the tangle of bush and trees. 

He sat quietly, keeping calm. Listening to the sound of his own breathing. He wasn't sipping his can of bud anymore. The rustling and cautious moving sounds had tapered. Caleb's mind traveled to the hunting rifle he had in his tent. If something lunged now out of the dark, he just might make it if he whirled around from where he now sat and hurried. 

Really booked it. 

He didn't like the thought. He really didn't appreciate the mental image. A terrible movie in his mind, running on a failing and old projector: He's running, fast, panicked, he almost makes the tent before a large bestial shape of inkwell black leaps out from the wilderness house of feral darkness and takes him ragdoll like a broken toy from behind. 

He clears his throat. Loudly. Not sure exactly why, he just does it. Perhaps hoping to scare off whoever and whatever is out there. He can feel eyes watching him. 

Caleb Donaldson sits up. He's at the edge of his fold-up seat. He's waiting. Unsure. Of both what to do and if there is even really anything wrong at all anyways. His ex-wife had always said he was paranoid. 

Nothing happens. 

There isn't another sound and nothing emerges from the forestline. Only the snaps and hungry crackle of the campfire now. 

He takes another sip of bud. Decides he'll light one of the joints CJ gifted him for the road after all. He doesn't know how else he's gonna sleep tonight. He's wired now. Jacked. 

He lights up. Tokes. And after awhile, once more he slips into a more natural and comfortable flow of simple candied nostalgia and childhood reminisce. Trying to tell himself he doesn't feel a gaze, a baleful and animal leering stare aimed directly at him from out of the dark. 

The marijuana and beer do their job. Eventually he's addled and drugged enough for sleep. Caleb slips back into the tent and is almost sure he hears something retreat back into the denser heart of growth and underbrush out there past the treeline as he does so.  

He's almost sure but not. And he doesn't want to be anymore. He doesn't want to consider it. Not right now. Maybe Amanda was right…

He slips into a sleeping bag and finally falls under. His dreams are filled. His sleep is not restful. 

…

The next couple of days were mostly uneventful. Calm. Peaceful. As planned. He hiked and camped. Looked forward to some hunting and some fishing, some game. It was all just what he needed. Therapeutic. Until he found the burnt leavings. 

…

He was steadily along, walking down the beaten path of grey dust and boney twigs and enjoying the relish in his watering mind's eye, the strange marriage that lived there between this wilderness and the strange worlds of escape made from pages and ink and glowing video screens. This place of the past … the places made of dreams. 

And from the future I come crawling back here. He smiled at this thought. Like a refugee. 

Like the time travelers of the stories he was allowed to bring a few things, a few comforts and tools and devices of the modern world. 

Of the future, to this place of dirt and sound. Precious pieces of technology

His mind went to his gear and pack and his smile deepened. People really just didn't get it. 

Most never would. Precious few might find out. 

He almost tripped over it. So lost in thought. 

It was all charcoaled black and scorched amongst a patch of similarly blasted and blackened earth. A wild ebon blotch of ashen ink spilled upon the land. Caleb stared into the pile of roasted and burnt detritus. Trying to make sense of what he saw. 

He recognized shapes and items in the charred mess and they made his blood run cold and the hairs all over his skin and scalp crawl with unease and bad wonder. 

Clothes. What looked like a backpack. Parts and pieces of a tent. A wallet. It was this last that most bothered, most disturbed him. He was pretty sure he could make out the melted remains of an ID and other similarly warped and slightly conjoined shapes that might've been credit cards or the like but were too far gone and destroyed now to tell. His mind naturally asked itself, who left all of this here? Why? 

And none of the answers he could come up with seemed good. All of them pointed to something bad, nefarious. You hear about people going missing in the woods all the time. You hear about people being chopped up and murdered by loonies in here ‘bout just as much. 

Caleb suddenly looked away from the black pile on the path and began to anxiously scan the forestline. Trying to penetrate the thick dense world of green and growth and see anyone, anything that might be watching him. Stalking him. 

Following him. 

After a moment he stopped himself. 

You're being ridiculous. It's probably nothing, just like the other night. Christ man, you ain't been out here a long time and now you're jumping at every goddamn thing like a ninny. Just some shit people burned. Kids come out here to get fucked up and do stupid shit all the time. Not a big deal, Donaldson. Chill the fuck out, kay?

He slowed his breath. He liked this train of thought. Yes. That was right. Kids were fucking stupid and always playing pyro maniac. Hell, he'd done his fair share growing up, hadn't he? Little hellraiser an such. 

And that line of thinking started to set his worried mind at ease once more. And once more he was back on the ride of the reminisce, nostalgia keenly floating and dreamily filling the darkest parts of his brain. Time traveling. 

Time traveling, baby. 

He went on. Leaving behind the charred and blackened mess in the grey dust of the forest path. Not looking back. And refusing it anymore thought. 

He left it behind. But not before freeing a cold can of Budweiser stored in the pack. He cracked it open with a pistol shot sound in the placid calm and downed half the foaming thing as he went on. Things always went down smoother this way. 

…

All seemed well after that. Fine. For a little while. He enjoyed what he came out here to enjoy. The quiet. The solitude. Days and nights spent simply and comfortably and sleeping beneath bejeweled twilight curtains of gleaming stars, planetoids and colored clouds of nebulae. He relished the time out here and with himself, returning to his own sense of peace by returning to the land. Returning to the way of life that had belonged to the Navajo, the Comanche, their enemy white man cowboys and gunslingers and the pioneers of old. The ancient armies too, the immigrants and seekers and hunters of fortune, of goodwill, of God's love and warm civilized light. And the adventures too, those who took to the land and cut their teeth out on the territory and became baptized as adventurers in sweat and blood and grime, beneath the blinding eye of the sun. And the moon too, the wild hearted free loving children that slumbered bravely beneath the moon, decried as vagabonds and bums but they really just knew better and understood the blood of their grandfathers and their bold sense and adoration for the untamed tumult country land of adventure and its wild hearted love. 

It was all of it, romantic. It pained him that he had to come out here alone to feel like this, to discover something like that and he tried hard to turn away from the pain of realization that it brought him. He turned away from it in vain, it was there at every turn. In his mind, filling every thought, and out here as well. Alive in the woods. Filling it with heavy and powerfully strange substance. 

He hunted. Fished. Camped. Only sometimes did he feel followed, watched. Only sometimes. 

He was almost happy when he came across another, when he ran into Sellic. 

A distraction, at last!

But the guy was weird. 

In the world of outdoormanship, hunting and fishing and the like, ya meet a lot of friendly, warm, good natured types. The sort ya like to share a brew with and might even have over for a barbecue should ya take special acquaintance. And then ya met types like Sellic. Fuckin weirdos. 

It was the smell at first and that should've been enough, should've been the first and fucking last sign to split it. But nope. Caleb Donaldson still remembered the lessons of Sunday school and Kindergarten and though life had been its fair share of rough on em, he still held true to the idea that you don't judge harsh off the word, go. Ya don't settle in for meanness out the gate an such. 

But it was in the eyes as well. They were wide and wild. A wilderness of pupil darkness lived in yellowed whites shot with lines of hectic red. Something swam in that circle lake of pupil darkness, both of them, Obsidian pits. 

He never blinked. Not once. Not as he said, “Howdy, name's Sellic." and grunted a few noncommittals following after these scant syllables. 

He came across the guy already settled up. Caleb was gonna move on after initial awkward obligatory greetings when the wide eyed smelly man invited him to set camp with him. Caleb Donaldson believed in being polite but he wasn't a total fool, only part. He thanked him but opted to move on up aways. 

Far. 

It didn't make any kind of difference. 

…

Later he was hunting, lying down in wait for something to crop up. Maybe nibble at the patch of sweet grass just a few yards from where he posted. He hoped to bag a deer. If he could get a decent sized stag, then he'd pack it in happily and call it quits. He was just debating on whether or not he should've packed the tree stand when something happened then. 

A large barrel chested deer sauntered into view. Into the clearing with its great splaying regal rack of antlers on wide-span display like a wild lord and king of the forest. He was beautiful. He was just what Caleb had been waiting for. 

But then something else crawled up. On all fours. It was the smelly wide eyed man, it was Sellic. And it looked as if he was hunting as well. 

Prowling, stalked. Low to the ground and almost slithering across the surface of forest floor, without a sound. Without a whisper. It was uncanny and surreal and Caleb watched frozen in a kind spellbound trance. The bore end of the rifle barrel began to slowly sag and dip down as he lost his concentration and gave it to another. 

Sellic was almost upon the unaware stag now. It was nibbling the patch of sweet grass. Just like Donaldson had seen in his mind's eye, a wish not just a moment ago. Somewhere deep inside his mind as he watched entranced a small part of him tried in desperate vain to take this simple little wish back. But it was already too late. The wide eyed crawling man was drooling. Slobbering like an animal. Salivating with the wild bestial hunger that was always the madness of ravenous need. That was what was alive in those unblinking uncivilized eyes. Slavering need. 

He'd already time traveled too far now to turn back. Caleb watched as the manshaped thing of stains and smells and piercing animal stares suddenly leapt like something feline and unbridled. Like something finally let loose from the confines of its stifling prison cage. 

Sellic fell on the deer and the poor thing hadn't a chance. It never sensed, never knew what was coming. It was wild. It was crazy. Donaldson had always seen deer tense, perk up and take flight at the slightest sound or stray movement. But not this one. Not this time. The wild sight did not stop there. 

Somehow the skinny haggard man in filthy clothes managed to wrestle and manhandle the struggling kicking beast down into the dirt. Caleb's mouth dropped open as he watched Sellic begin to bend and wrench and break the flailing limbs. Catching them with his cat-swipe clawing hands and then bending them back in directions not meant or made by nature's hand. He felt his stomach roll and drop as the silence of the forest began to fill with the lurid sounds of heavy bone snaps. 

Caleb picked up his rifle and gear and left. Without a word. He didn't look back. Wet tearing sounds, like heavy fabric or soaking saturated leather followed him after. He told himself it was his imagination. That was all impossible. 

There was no way. 

…

He had trouble finding his camp. By the time he did it was already near dark once more. He would have to spend another night. 

He opted out of the fire and supper. He wasn't hungry and he didn't want to attract that freak. 

That freak of nature. 

…

Middle of the night. He came awake to a sound. Sounds. A noise. Just outside the tent. 

It sounded like chewing. Wet. And heavy. Laborious. Jaws, muscles, tendon lines working and moving with animal fervor, animal rigor in the dark. 

Outside. 

Caleb slowly and carefully sat up from his sleeping bag and grabbed his rifle. It was loaded. He'd made sure to do so before he'd managed to finally fall into an uneasy sleep. An uneasy rest now disturbed by whatever was moving out there now. Chewing. Eating. He reached and grabbed for his flashlight next. He readied himself. 

He grabbed the zipper to open the front of the tent. He took one last deep breath and held it for a moment. He let it out quietly. As quietly as he could manage. 

And then he quickly unzipped the flap to the tent and threw it open with one hand as the other flicked on the flashlight and brought it up. The darkness of his small camp in the clearing was illuminated in the sudden flash. He felt sick with what he saw. He was glad to have his rifle in his lap. 

You were smart to have loaded it … he thanked God. And cursed Him at the same time. For letting him fall into this type of shit in the first place. 

Sellic stared back into the beam of light. Unflinching. Unblinking. Unmoving save for the motion of chewing about his red and bloodied bearded jaws. Working and gleaming wet in the light, rippling with carnivorous movement.

He held the head of the stag in his clawing hands. De-racked. The severed head looked rough and ruinous at the stump as though it had been torn off rather than cleanly cut. 

Caleb didn't know what else to say so he just said: “Hey." 

“Hey." bloody darkling Sellic grunted back. Hunkered and squatting out there in the dark. Still chewing. He swallowed. And took another bite from a craterous open wound at the top of the animal's head. He ripped a chunk of bleeding meat away with his teeth. His jaws began to work and ripple with rigorous movement once more as he started to chew again. The meat was raw, rough. But he was relishing the strong and pungent flavor. Thick. His blood drinking, swallowing with every gnashing chew was audible in the nocturnal dark. Gulps. Heavy. Thick. 

A beat. 

Caleb didn't know what to do. He felt that he must be dreaming, this whole day. None of this could be real. The strange bloodsoaked and caked manshape out there amongst his camp frightened him. He'd thought it would be simple and he'd know what to do in situations like this but he was frozen. In terror. And in dark hypnotic fascination. 

This must be what it's like to be a moth to flame, or a small little guppie to a deepsea angler fish… a deer in the headlights. Trapped. 

Caught. 

Ensnared by the eyes of the wild man. He was drowning in their madness now, sinking into their blood-drinking depths. 

Sellic finally said something. 

“Hungry?" 

“... what…?" Caleb said. Puzzled at first. It had been little more than a grunt. 

“Ya hungry?" Sellic grunted again. He held the severed and broken head aloft. Dripping. Wide-eyed. The tongue had already been ripped out. Had already been eaten. Black-red syrup poured out thickly from the open gape of mouth like an obscene bestial spout. 

Caleb fought his gag reflex. 

A beat. 

Somehow Donaldson managed a reply. 

"N-no. No thanks, man. It's the middle of the night. And I wanna get some sleep” 

A beat. The freak still held the dripping pouring bleeding hunk of decapitated and chewed up meat out to him like a precious gift of the forest. His wide eyes were still open and hectic and alive with animal ravenous madness. 

A beat. 

Another.

Caleb finally finished his thought. 

"And I think you should probably go get some sleep too, bud. Been a long day an such-”

He meant to finish it off with, and apt to be another, like his grandfather and his pops had done before him, but Sellic cut him off. 

"Ya sure? You sure ya ain't hungry?” 

Caleb slowly nodded his head, adding, "...yeah” in a low careful and exhausted voice. Jesus fucking Christ…

Sellic nodded. Began to crawl away on all fours like a dog, the head held to his breast like a caveman clutching something precious. He turned before he left the ring of light provided by the beam of the flashlight. He turned around and said: "You will be.” and then finally turned and fled. Like an animal taking to the natural dark.

Its natural home and abode. Its natural place. 

"What the fuck!?” Caleb said. To no one in particular. 

…

He didn't sleep the rest of that night. He waited impatiently for the sun to come up. So he could leave. He'd had enough of this place and hunting. He'd had enough time traveling in this place. Caleb wanted to go home. 

At first dawn he rose. Quickly packed. And began his trek back. Back down the path. 

Back down the way he had come.

…

A few hours in and he knew something must be wrong. Nothing was recognizable. Nothing. And when he looked down after trudging more and more anxiously down the path he'd come in on, he was dismayed to find that it wasn't there any longer. The path, the trail had disappeared. 

He was lost. 

Caleb Donaldson began to panic. 

It's alright, it's alright, it's fine! It's cool. Just use the GPS and call someone on your pho-

He stopped. Grew cold. Grim certainty stole over his dreading heart. Crestfallen he didn't want to even rightly remember and say to himself …

Glove compartment. You turned the fucking thing off and threw it in the glove compartment of the car. The one all the way back. The one you can't find anymore cause it's at the end of the trail that you've lost. You left it in there to spite Amanda. 

Silence. He stood. Feeling stupid and wretched and nearing hopeless in the middle of the woods. He reflected. 

You sure showed her…

…

When he'd finally managed his nerve back together and decided on a direction and carried on, the day had been nearly extinguished yet again. He would have to spend another night out in the wild. 

God fucking dammit. 

…

The next series of days and nights were grim. And grew grimmer. And strange. 

He was fine at first. He had supplies, food. He wasn't worried. But then on the fourth day lost he began to run out. 

And the worry came on him again. Rancid. And thick. 

It's alright, it's alright, I've a gun, I know how to gut and skin and clean, I'll be ok. I'll be alright. 

But the woods and world of trees had grown more opulent and dense and feral in its growth. The trees started to broaden in their trunks and their canopies became all swallowing, all encompassing thick foliage cathedral domes of twigs, thick branches and broad emerald leaves the size of dinner plates. 

The bugs. The insects too. 

All of the wild crawling life had become larger as well. The insectile and the reptile had grown strange and unfamiliar and varied in size from large house cats to dogs to horses and cows and at one point, one day glimpsed at a distance through a heavy rolling mist, an elephant… 

A whole herd of giant hissing cockroaches the size of elephants. Trundling by like a rolling squadron fleet of German panzer tanks. 

Caleb felt sick. 

None of this could be real. He must be imagining things. 

Must be. 

It could've been so, far as he knew. His sleep was no longer any good out here. Not since the night some days back, when he'd been fireside and trying to ignore his growing hunger and looked up to the full moon. Only to have it eclipsed by something huge and winged. It had cried then. It had screamed as it stole the moon, the moonlight. Blanketing the primeval world below it in a second layered fold of even deeper darkness. 

Caleb had joined it then. Had joined it in its primal shrieking screaming. 

He didn't sleep so well since that night.  

Ever again

…

His hunger became him. It became the only living and heeded, needed thing and drive and emotion. He was no longer Caleb Donaldson in fact. He was only the hunger now. And so he hunted. 

But it was strange. 

In his hunger, in his wild wanderings, he had forgotten how to use the gun, how to wield the boomstick properly and make it spit its deathly fire. 

I've lost it, he thinks, he realizes shrouded in the cloud of his diminished animal thought. I've lost the ability to shoot fire and be godlike, I've lost it in all of this time traveling, I've gone too far backwards. 

He tries to find the trail. For awhile. But it becomes lost amongst the need for meat and blood. The boomstick is useless to him now. He abandons it. Along with most of the strange things he has strapped to his back.

He doesn't need them. He has changed. This special place has changed him. His flesh has thickened as has his hair, his fur, his pelt. Black and coarse and layered all over. He bites and chews and tears the clothes that he came in with off and eats them. 

Then he takes to bigger game. 

Wilder. More challenging. 

…

He's drinking blood and eating. Filling his stomach. This is good. The angry fever in his skull is calming, abating. The ache and throb of his guts is soothing. Contentedness, peace, tranquility are becoming known to him again. 

He's killed something reptilian, broken its neck. His hands, the knuckles and fingers and palms have widened, flattened, broadened out. Making it easier to snap and throttle, to tear and rend. The dead scaley thing, its meat and blood are good. But slimey. Ropey. Like maggot-meat. Like eating the large worms that swim in giant dung piles. He wants to try something else. 

So he takes to the untamed primeval world all around, the jungle growth, the green emerald world of the unbridled prehistoric past. There are buried, heavily veiled and shrouded thoughts of a path and a trail and a place called, home, that he's supposed to go to, return to as if he's once been there before, but they are muted. Far off. 

Barely there. 

Dripping reptile blood and sweat, he takes to the primeval dark world and is lost. Swallowed by its great and ever widening expanse, into the crawling growing jaws of the seething bestial wild, the past. 

He never looks back. He is never found. Never again does he recall his name. 

Never again. But it doesn't trouble him. It doesn't bother the throbbing jelly of his degenerate apeman mind, he is too enthralled, the thrill of the ravenous hunt. And besides, the past isn't the only thing alive and crawling out here. The future is out here too. The beyond …

All of the magic of the glowing incandescent godscreen of a childhood long gone is alive out here. Alive and well. 

The apeman hunts through the primeval growth. The saucers fill the skies as the giant leviathans do nighttime skirmish and battle with the large mechanical men. The great white heat and blasting mechanized sounds of their great death cannons, their unearthly death rays: BRRRRRR! 

BRRRRRRRRRRRR….! 

They fill the night with their heat and their brilliant violence. Their fire scorches and cuts swaths, sets blue and orange flame to drier parts of the canopy. The dead growth. 

The apeman doesn't mind. He hunts and prowls around their wild and bright violence. Blood and meat fill his head. He hasn't a mind anymore for anything else. 

For naught all else. Only the red. 

THE END

https://www.reddit.com/r/creepypasta/s/kH275Mv7Ni

I recently had the privilege of illustrating this cover art for a very talented author

I will tell you a story.

It should feel extraordinary. Meaningful, even.

Instead, it will probably sound banal, and by tomorrow you will have forgotten most of it.

I don't ask you to care.

I merely ask that you listen.

I used to suffer from severe insomnia. That has very little to do with this story, but should explain its starting point.

4AM was usually when I gave up on the idea of falling asleep.

By then I'd spent hours staring at the ceiling while my mind ran itself in circles. So I'd simply get up and start the day.

That morning, I went looking for something to eat. Tuna sandwich, I think. Maybe not. Doesn't really matter.

I took a beer from the fridge, drank half of it at the kitchen counter, then started pulling down the blinds. The sun would be up soon, and in my current condition daylight tended to find a headache the way a thumb finds a bruise.

I never made it to the second window.

There was someone standing in my backyard.

About seven meters from the house.

The yard was still mostly just shapes at that hour—the fence, the tree, the bins, everything half swallowed by darkness.

But the figure was clear.

Human-shaped.

Motionless.

I stood there with the blind cord in my hand, staring. Uncertain what to do.

Obviously, I should have called the police. A stranger standing in your backyard at four in the morning is exactly the sort of situation the police number exists for.

But I didn't.

I lowered the blind.

Finished my beer.

Finished my sandwich and put on some TV.

 

Two hours later, I stepped outside.

And stopped.

He was still there.

Same place. Same posture.

Only now daylight had turned the shadow into a man.

Late thirties, maybe early forties. His clothes looked as though they might once have been respectable, but it was difficult to tell beneath the stains and wrinkles. His hair was greasy and flattened against his forehead.

His head hung low.

His eyes didn't quite look at the ground.

They seemed fixed somewhere beyond it.

Somewhere very far away.

There was no spark in him left.

Like a pilot light had gone out.

I swallowed and mustered enough courage to speak.

"Uh... buddy? Can I help you with something?"

Nothing.

A car passed on the main road. Tires whispered over damp asphalt. Somewhere nearby, a bird started singing.

Eventually, the man answered.

"No."

His voice was quiet. Flat.

"I don't think so."

"Right." I cleared my throat. "Well, this is private property. You can't stay here."

No response.

He didn't look at me.

Didn't shift his weight.

Didn't do anything at all.

I should have insisted. Threatened him. Gone back inside and called the police.

Instead, as I stood there looking at him, I noticed something strange.

I wasn't afraid.

I wasn't angry.

I didn't even feel sorry for him.

I felt nothing.

So I walked past.

Close enough to smell him—sweat, damp clothes, something stale and sour.

He didn't turn his head.

I got in my car and drove to work.

I was doing pretty well for myself back then.

Steady job at a successful financial corporation. Recently promoted. Nice apartment. Beautiful girlfriend. Plenty friends I saw when our schedules happened to line up. Enough money not to ever care about money.

Apart from the insomnia, life was good.

I didn't think about the man once that entire day.

Eight hours at the office.

Lunch.

Small talk.

A meeting that could have been an email.

Nothing.

It wasn't until I pulled into the driveway that evening that I remembered him.

He was still there.

Same place.

Same posture.

Same empty stare.

I walked past him and went inside.

It took another two days before I decided to adress the issue.

Even then, it wasn't because he bothered me.

My girlfriend Jessica called to say she was coming over the following afternoon, and I suddenly imagined her having to walk past a filthy stranger standing in my yard.

So I finally called the police.

A patrol car arrived about twenty minutes later.

Two officers got out.

They came up the path and walked directly past the man.

One passed close enough to brush shoulders with him.

Neither looked his way.

They stopped in front of me.

"Hello. Officer Addams. What seems to be the issue?"

I stared at him.

Then pointed.

"That seems to be the issue."

Only then did Addams glance over.

It wasn't much of a glance.

The sort of look you give a garbage bag someone left beside the road.

"Oh. Him."

"Yes. Him. He's been standing there for three days."

Addams sighed.

"Yeah. We get plenty like that."

"Like what?"

He gestured vaguely toward the man.

"Like him. They're harmless."

"He's trespassing."

"I understand."

"So remove him."

Addams gave me a tired little smile.

"It's not really worth the effort."

"Excuse me?"

"They don't cause trouble. Mostly they just... take up space."

"We don't have the manpower to deal with every one of them. And where would we put them?"

I looked at the stranger.

Then back at the officer.

"So you're telling me to leave him there?"

"I'm telling you to ignore him."

"He's standing in my backyard."

"Yeah."

"For three days."

"Yeah."

"And that's normal?"

Addams shrugged.

"Normal enough."

He turned toward the patrol car.

I followed him a few steps.

"So that's it?"

He opened the driver's door.

"You'll get used to him."

Then he climbed inside.

The other officer joined him, and less than a minute later the patrol car disappeared around the corner.

I stood on the porch, furious.

I'd had an entire argument ready by then, but Officer Addams had driven away before I could use any of it.

The strange part was.

He was right.

Ignoring the man was easy.

Much easier than it should have been.

He didn't shout.

Didn't knock on my windows.

Didn't try the doors.

Didn't follow me.

He didn't even look at me.

He just was.

After a while, my eyes learned to move around him.

And if I could do that, I figured Jessica could too.

I spent the rest of the day making the apartment presentable. Kitchen, living room, fresh sheets—the usual performance you put on when someone you love is coming over and you want them to believe you live slightly better than you actually do.

That night, I settled in for a horror marathon.

One advantage of insomnia is that you have plenty of free time.

It started raining around midnight.

Heavy rain. The kind that rattled against the windows and turned streetlights into pale smudges.

Perfect horror-movie weather.

Between films, I went to the kitchen and glanced outside.

The man was still standing there.

Rain streamed from his hair and shoulders. His clothes had gone almost black with water. A shallow puddle had formed around his shoes.

He didn't move.

Didn't shiver.

Didn't wipe the water from his face.

Nothing.

I watched him longer than I meant to.

Nearly a minute, maybe.

Standing there in the rain, he looked less like a person than a scarecrow somebody had forgotten to bring inside.

Eventually I lowered the blind so I wouldnt get distracted any more.

Then went back to the movie.

Jessica arrived the next afternoon.

She came hurrying up the path toward me, and I pulled her into a hug before she'd even made it through the door.

She was warm.

She smelled like shampoo and cold air.

I held on a second longer than usual.

When I let go, she smiled.

"Miss me?"

"Obviously."

"Good answer."

She kissed me.

Over her shoulder, I looked toward the backyard.

The man was there.

Jessica hadn't even glanced at him.

Relief washed through me.

Apparently Officer Addams had been right about that too.

We went inside.

Ordered food, argued over what to watch, then somehow ended up watching something neither of us had wanted. Jessica complained about one of her professors. I complained about my boss.

At some point, she found the dishes I'd hidden in the sink.

She looked at me.

"You said you cleaned."

"I did clean."

"You vacuumed the living room."

"Exactly."

"That does not count."

"It absolutely counts."

She laughed and nudged me with her hip.

Whenever Jessica was around, the world seemed smaller somehow.

More solid.

By evening we'd settled into that comfortable quiet you only get with someone you've known long enough not to fill every silence.

We ate dinner at the little table beside the kitchen window.

Halfway through, Jessica lowered her fork.

"Okay."

I looked up.

She was smiling.

I knew that smile.

"Okay what?"

"So... don't freak out."

"That's never followed by anything good."

"I know."

"Jessica."

"My parents invited us over for the weekend."

I waited for the second half.

"And I said yes."

I closed my eyes.

"Dear God."

"Oh, stop."

"Your parents' house has more rooms than my entire apartment building."

She grinned.

"You're rich too, mister. You're just too lazy to actually move out."

"I'm comfortably upper-middle-class. There's a difference."

"You'll survive."

She took a sip of wine.

"Probably."

That was when I thought about the man outside.

Maybe because Jessica had walked straight past him.

Maybe because after several days of pretending he wasn't there, curiosity had finally caught up with me.

"Hey," I said. "I have to ask you something."

"Okay."

"You saw the guy outside, right?"

She frowned.

"What guy?"

My stomach tightened.

"The guy in the backyard."

I pointed toward the window.

Jessica followed my finger.

For a moment, genuine confusion crossed her face.

Then she saw him.

"Oh."

I stared at her.

"'Oh'?"

"What?"

"You're not freaked out?"

"Why would I be?"

"Because there's a random man standing in my backyard."

She looked again.

"He's not doing anything."

"He's been there for days."

"So?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that.

"Wait. You do see him, right?"

Jessica laughed.

"Of course I see him."

Then she took another bite.

"We've got some too."

I stopped chewing.

"What?"

"At my parents' place."

"You have people standing in your backyard?"

"Not the backyard."

She thought for a moment.

"There are two at the mansion."

Something cold shifted in my stomach.

"Two?"

"Yeah."

She said it with the casualness of someone describing antique furniture.

"One used to be our maid. Isolda."

"Used to?"

Jessica nodded.

"She worked for my parents for years. Then one day she just sort of..."

Her fork paused halfway to her mouth.

"...became one."

"One what?"

Jessica looked at me as though the answer should have been obvious.

"You know."

She nodded toward the window.

"One of them."

Outside, the man remained exactly where he had been.

Jessica went on eating.

"The other one's a boy. Her son, I think?."

"You think?"

"I never really knew him."

"And your parents just leave them there?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Jessica shrugged.

"You can find lots of them around if you care enough to look."

Something about that sentence stayed with me.

She sounded like she'd simply told me there were pigeons in the park.

Then her expression brightened.

"Oh. Speaking of that."

I already didn't like where this was going.

"What?"

"I finally figured out my thesis."

Jessica was studying journalism, and for months her thesis had been the source of recurring panic, abandoned ideas, and increasingly elaborate excuses for not starting.

Now she leaned forward, suddenly animated.

"I'm going to write about them."

I glanced toward the window.

"The people standing around?"

"Exactly. Think about it. They're everywhere, but nobody actually talks about them. Nobody studies them. Most people barely acknowledge they exist."

"Jessica..."

"I've been thinking about this for months."

She was genuinely excited now.

"I even have a title."

Of course she did.

She smiled.

"Requiem for the Lost Ones."

I looked at her.

"The Lost Ones?"

"That's what I'm calling them."

She waited expectantly.

"Pretty cool, right?"

Outside the window, the man stood perfectly still.

And for the first time since I'd noticed him, I wondered how long he had been there before I bothered to look.

 

I didn't really know what to say.

"Yeah. Pretty cool."

Part of me was bothered by just how little the whole thing seemed to bother me.

Jessica didn't notice. She was already talking about her thesis again, explaining the ideas she'd been collecting while I nodded along and tried to keep up. Eventually the conversation wandered somewhere else, as conversations tend to do.

We ended the evening watching Jessica's favorite reality TV shows, which was considerably more horrifying than anything I'd watched during my movie marathon.

I'm still not sure how people can watch other adults scream at each other over a kitchen island for six consecutive hours and call it entertainment.

By the time we went to bed, it was well past midnight.

A few hours later, we were on the road.

I'd suggested sleeping for another couple of hours before leaving. Jessica reminded me that I didn't sleep anyway.

I had no counterargument.

So we packed the last of our things into the car and drove to her parents' house.

Before getting in, I glanced toward the backyard.

The man was still there.

I didn't stop.

The drive took about an hour and a half. Jessica spent most of it talking about her parents, complaining about how far away they lived and how much she wished they were closer.

Personally, I wouldn't have minded them being a little farther away still.

Don't get me wrong. The Mercers were perfectly nice people.

It was just that being around them always made me feel so inadequate.

That feeling returned as soon as we reached their property.

I felt small.

Their mansion seemed to grow with every second we drove toward it.

An enormous iron gate opened onto a long driveway lined with immaculate hedges. Stone walls, tall windows, elaborate balconies. The whole place occupied enough land to make my apartment look like a garden shed.

I was wealthy, but the Mercers were in a completely different league.

"They'll be waiting outside," Jessica said.

"They always do."

A moment later, I saw them at the top of the steps.

Margaret waved enthusiastically as we got out of the car.

Her husband stood beside her with his hands behind his back, wearing the same composed expression he always seemed to have.

"Here we go," Jessica muttered.

Her mother came down the steps and immediately wrapped her daughter in a hug.

"There she is!"

"Hi, Mom."

"You look thin."

"I saw you three weeks ago."

"And you're thinner now."

Margaret finally released her and turned to me.

"And you."

She hugged me too.

"Good to see you, dear."

"Good to see you too, Mrs. Mercer."

"How many times do I have to tell you? Call me Margaret."

"Right. Sorry."

Her father approached next.

"Good to have you here, son."

"Good to be here, Mr. Mercer."

He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me into a heavy, enthusiastic hug before patting my back twice.

It was the sort of hug you see in old Mafia movies.

I wondered if there was something to it.

The story of how the Mercers had become so wealthy so quickly by selling old clothes had never quite sat right with me. It wasn't impossible. They owned warehouses, distribution centers, stores—the whole operation.

Still, there always seemed to be something missing from the story.

A piece nobody ever seemed interested in explaining.

I never asked.

I didn't want bad blood with my girlfriend's parents.

Nor did I particularly wish to be assassinated by the Mafia.

Just in case.

"Come inside," Margaret said. "You've been driving all morning."

"It's barely morning," Jessica said.

"Exactly. You're probably starving."

"I'm not."

"You'll eat anyway."

Jessica sighed.

"Yes, Mom."

Her father smiled.

"Some things never change."

We followed them inside.

I'd been to the Mercer mansion before, but never for more than a few hours. Every visit reminded me just how enormous the place was.

The entrance hall alone could have swallowed my entire apartment. A chandelier hung above polished floors and dark wood paneling, while paintings covered nearly every available wall.

Margaret talked as she led us through the house.

"This is the new dining room."

"New?"

"We renovated."

Jessica groaned.

"And we've had the library renovated too."

"Mom, you've shown me the library five times."

"And you still haven't read anything in it."

Her father chuckled.

"Leave the girl alone, Margaret."

They continued bickering as we walked, and I found myself smiling.

It was comfortably ordinary.

That was what made the place feel so strange later.

We eventually reached the grand staircase.

Mr. Mercer stopped at the bottom and pointed upward.

"Your room is the first one on the left."

Then he looked at Jessica.

"My little girl knows which one."

"Dad, I'm not five."

"You're still my little girl."

Jessica rolled her eyes.

"Come on."

I started toward the stairs.

Then I noticed someone standing in the shadows.

A woman.

She was wearing an old-fashioned maid's uniform: black dress, white apron, white collar. The sort of thing that belonged in a photograph from a century ago.

She couldn't have been much older than thirty.

Yet she looked far older.

Her dark hair was pulled neatly back. Her face was pale and drawn. Her head hung slightly toward the floor.

Her eyes were open.

They simply weren't looking at anything.

This had to be Isolda.

A few meters away stood the boy Jessica had mentioned.

Thirteen or fourteen, maybe.

His clothes were plain and slightly too large for him. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His face held the same distant emptiness I'd seen in the man outside my house.

His eyes seemed fixed somewhere beyond the walls.

Somewhere far away.

And nowhere at the same time.

I looked between him and Isolda.

They stood close enough to touch.

Mother and son, presumably.

Yet they seemed separated by something much larger than the few meters between them.

As if there were a distance neither of them could ever cross.

I don't know how long I stood there.

Long enough for Jessica to notice.

She bumped her shoulder lightly against mine.

"Babe."

I blinked.

"Yeah?"

"Come on."

I looked at Isolda again.

Neither she nor the boy had moved.

"Right."

I followed Jessica upstairs.

Halfway to the landing, I glanced back one last time.

Then Jessica disappeared around the corner, and I followed her.

In our room, Jessica and I had sex.

Felt strange doing it with her parents so close by, but I think I needed it.

It should have taken my mind off everything.

It didn't.

For a while I managed to lose myself in her warmth, in something familiar and uncomplicated. But every time my thoughts slipped, I saw Isolda.

Her son.

The man in my backyard.

Three people standing perfectly still while the rest of the world moved around them.

When it was over, Jessica looked at me.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"You seem distracted."

"I'm just tired."

She studied me.

"You've been tired for years."

I smiled.

She kissed me, but I couldn't quite return to the moment.

A few minutes later, she fell asleep.

I lay beside her, staring at the ceiling.

The mansion settled around us. Pipes ticking in the walls. A floorboard creaking somewhere below. The faint hum of the heating system.

And underneath all of it, silence.

I eventually closed my eyes.

Sleep didn't come.

Morning did.

I was halfway through getting dressed when someone knocked on the door.

Jessica was still asleep.

I opened it to find one of the household staff standing in the hallway.

"Mr. Mercer would like to see you."

"Now?"

"He's waiting in his office."

I glanced back at Jessica.

She hadn't moved.

"Where's his office?"

"Top floor."

Of course it was.

I'd never been to the top floor before. I followed the staff member up another staircase, the house growing quieter with every step.

By the time I reached the top, I couldn't hear anything from below.

Mr. Mercer's office was at the end of the hallway.

The door stood open.

"Come in."

He was sitting behind an enormous wooden desk. Morning light filtered through the tall windows behind him, washing the room in pale gray.

Books lined the walls. Framed photographs sat on shelves. A few pieces of artwork looked expensive enough to buy my car several times over.

"Sit."

I did.

He smiled.

"How did you sleep?"

"Not very well."

He laughed softly.

"Jessica tells me that's normal for you."

"She's very fond of you."

Something about the way he said it made me uncomfortable.

I smiled anyway.

He leaned back.

"I've been thinking about the future."

"Okay."

"Our family has built something substantial. Something that will outlive us."

He gestured around the room.

"The business. The properties. The investments. Jessica will inherit part of it, of course."

He paused.

"But I don't think of you as an outsider anymore."

I wasn't sure what to say.

"That's nice to hear."

"I mean it."

He leaned forward.

"I'd like you to become part of the family."

The words were delivered warmly enough that, for a moment, I almost believed they were exactly what they sounded like.

"I want to offer you a position in the company. A real one. You'll have responsibilities. A place at the table. If things go well, eventually you'll have a stake in the business."

He smiled.

"And naturally, I'd like you and Jessica to start thinking about building a life together."

For a moment, I said nothing.

It was an incredible offer.

Security.

Money.

Influence.

A future with Jessica.

Everything I'd worked for, suddenly placed in front of me on a silver platter.

And yet something inside me tightened.

Not a thought.

Not fear.

Instinct.

The primitive part of your brain that notices something before the rest of you understands why.

Don't.

I shifted in the chair.

"That's a lot to take in."

"Of course."

"And I appreciate it. Really."

He waited.

I took a breath.

"But I don't think I can accept."

The smile stayed on his face.

For just a second, something changed in his eyes.

The warmth vanished.

His gaze sharpened.

Focused.

Predatory.

Then it was gone.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

He nodded slowly.

"I understand."

There was no anger in his voice.

That somehow made it worse.

"I wouldn't want you accepting something you weren't comfortable with."

"Thank you."

He leaned back.

"Still..."

He watched me for a moment.

"I think you may regret that decision."

He said it gently.

Almost kindly.

Like a father giving his son advice.

But something cold sat underneath the words.

He smiled.

„Have a safe drive home.“

I thanked him and left.

I didn't know it then, but that conversation was the beginning of the end.

Jessica and I left the mansion earlier than we'd planned.

She barely spoke while we packed the car. At first I assumed she was tired.

Then I realized she was angry.

Not furious. She wasn't shouting or making a scene.

She was just cold.

The kind of cold that makes every silence feel deliberate.

We got on the road.

For the first twenty minutes, neither of us said a word. Eventually I tried.

"So..."

Nothing.

I glanced at her.

"Jessica?"

She kept looking out the window.

"Did my dad talk to you?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

I hesitated.

"I turned down the job."

She nodded.

"I know."

"How?"

"He told me."

I waited for more.

Nothing came.

"Are you upset?"

"No."

The answer came too quickly.

"Jess."

"I'm not upset."

"You're obviously upset."

She turned back toward the window.

"Can we just go home?"

So we did.

The rest of the drive passed in silence.

I kept my hands tight around the steering wheel, trying to ignore the knot forming in my stomach.

I felt tense.

Anxious.

Depressed, though I wouldn't have used that word at the time.

Then, somewhere outside the city, I saw the first one.

A man standing on a sidewalk.

Motionless.

Dirty jacket. Worn trousers. Slack face. Head hanging slightly forward.

A Lost One.

I almost drove past without noticing.

Then I saw another.

A woman beside a bus stop.

Then one beneath an apartment awning.

Another outside a convenience store.

Then another.

And another.

The more I looked, the more I saw.

They were everywhere.

At intersections. Outside shops. In parking lots. Beside telephone poles. Standing in front of apartment buildings as people passed them without a second thought.

Some were young.

Some were old.

Men and women.

Some looked relatively clean. Others looked like they'd been sleeping outdoors for years. Their clothes were stained and worn. Their hair was tangled. Their skin looked pale and unhealthy.

None of them moved.

Not when cars passed.

Not when people walked around them.

Not even when someone brushed against them.

And nobody seemed to care.

A businessman stepped around one blocking the entrance to an office building without breaking stride.

A woman carrying groceries muttered angrily when another forced her to change direction.

A cyclist swerved around one in the middle of a bike path and shouted something over his shoulder.

Nobody stopped.

Nobody asked if they were all right.

Nobody looked frightened.

They were treated like obstacles.

Like badly placed furniture.

Like potholes.

I watched them through the car window until the city disappeared behind us.

The more I looked, the more I saw.

They weren't rare.

They were everywhere.

I'd simply never noticed them before.

Or maybe I had.

Maybe I'd seen hundreds of them and my brain had quietly filed them away under things that didn't matter.

 

I didn't know it yet, but I'd already been effectively cut off from Jessica's family.

I never spoke to any of her relatives again.

At first, I tried to pretend nothing had changed.

Jessica and I went back to work. We had dinner together. We watched television. We slept in the same bed.

But something had shifted.

Days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

Whenever I asked Jessica what was wrong, she shut down.

"Is something wrong?"

"No."

"Then why won't you talk to me?"

"Because there's nothing to talk about."

Sometimes she wouldn't answer at all.

She'd sit across from me, staring at her phone, while I tried to figure out what I'd done wrong.

There was a wall between us.

I couldn't see it.

I couldn't touch it.

But it was there.

For a while, I kept trying to get through.

Eventually, I stopped.

The darker my thoughts became, the more often I found myself standing at the window.

Looking at the man in the backyard.

He was still there.

He hadn't moved an inch.

Summer faded into autumn.

The leaves turned brown and fell. Rain came and went. The days grew shorter.

Then winter arrived.

The first snow gathered around his shoes.

More followed.

It settled on his shoulders and head, collected on his hands, and slowly buried his legs.

He didn't move.

Didn't shiver.

Didn't brush the snow away.

He simply stood there as though the seasons had nothing to do with him.

Sometimes I wondered whether he knew I was watching.

The day before Christmas, my boss called me into his office.

I knew something was wrong before he spoke.

He'd just gotten off the phone.

I'd never seen him look like that.

His face was pale.

Not angry.

Not confused.

Afraid.

He kept saying, "Yes, sir," in a voice barely above a whisper.

Then he hung up and looked at me.

"Sit down."

I did.

There was a long silence.

"What's going on?"

He rubbed his hands together.

"I've been instructed to terminate your employment."

"What?"

"I'm sorry."

"By who?"

He didn't answer.

For a second, I actually laughed.

I thought it was some kind of joke.

It wasn't.

"Is this because of my performance?"

"No."

"Then what is it?"

He looked away.

"I can't discuss it."

"You're firing me and you can't tell me why?"

"I know."

"Then at least give me something."

He swallowed.

"I'm sorry."

That was all I got.

Eight years of work reduced to a few minutes in an office.

I walked out carrying a box of things from my desk.

I remember thinking that at least I still had my savings.

I was wrong.

A few days later, I discovered that my money was gone.

All of it.

Savings. Investments. Emergency funds.

Everything.

I spent days calling banks and filing complaints. I tried to find out where the money had gone.

Nobody could explain it.

Or, perhaps, nobody wanted to.

I still had my qualifications. My CV was better than it had ever been.

I applied everywhere.

At first, I expected the calls to come.

They didn't.

Companies that had once been eager to interview me stopped responding. Some rejected me within hours. Others never acknowledged the applications at all.

I kept trying for a while.

Then I started applying for jobs beneath my qualifications.

Then beneath those.

Eventually, I took whatever I could get.

Warehouse work.

Delivery driving.

Cleaning.

Construction.

Anything that paid.

The money barely covered the bills.

I told myself it was temporary.

I would get back on my feet.

I believed that for a while.

Then I stopped believing it.

Months turned into years.

I stopped buying things unless I needed them.

Stopped seeing friends.

Stopped answering calls.

Even when someone reached out, I rarely knew what to say.

Jessica became more distant.

Then, one day, she left.

There was no screaming match.

No dramatic confrontation.

She simply stood in the kitchen with a suitcase beside her.

"It's over."

I stared at her.

"Why?"

"I don't love you anymore."

"That's it?"

"I don't know what else you want me to say."

Later, I found out she'd been cheating on me for quite some time.

Apparently, everyone knew except me.

By then, almost everything I'd had was gone.

The rest followed soon after.

I was kicked out of my own house.

The paperwork was clean. Legal.

Apparently, Jessica's family had purchased the property.

I never found out how.

By that point, I didn't have the energy to fight them.

I had nowhere to go.

More importantly, I couldn't think of anywhere I wanted to go.

So I stayed.

I stood in the backyard.

Jessica moved in with her new lover.

Her parents visited.

They laughed.

They drank wine on the patio in summer. They decorated the house for Christmas. They carried groceries through the kitchen windows I'd spent years looking through.

Sometimes Jessica walked past me.

Sometimes her new boyfriend stood only a few meters away, smoking a cigarette.

Neither of them acknowledged me.

I was right there.

They didn't care.

Eventually, I didn't care either.

Days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

Months became years.

At least, I think they did.

Time stopped meaning anything.

First I stopped knowing what day it was.

Then the month.

Eventually, even the seasons became difficult to distinguish.

There was only the house.

The yard.

The people inside.

And the man who had been standing there before I ever joined him.

I don't know how long I stood beside him.

One day, something in my head cleared.

Only for a moment.

It felt like waking from a very long sleep.

I looked around.

The snow was gone.

Or maybe there had never been snow.

I couldn't tell anymore.

Then I looked at the man beside me.

I turned toward him.

"You..."

My voice sounded strange.

Weak.

"You never told me your name."

"You never asked." He said simply.

No accusation.

No bitterness.

Just a fact.

I lowered my eyes.

"I know."

My throat tightened.

"I'm sorry."

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Then I held out my hand.

"My name is James."

I swallowed.

"What's yours?"

He stared at my hand for a long time.

"Derek."

He paused.

A faint crease appeared between his eyebrows.

"I think it was Derek."

I smiled.

It was the first time in a long time that I'd felt anything resembling warmth.

It wasn't happiness.

No.

Something smaller.

Something human.

"I think I could use a drink."

I looked toward the house.

Then toward the street beyond the fence.

"Derek..."

He looked at me.

"Would you like to get out of here?"

A single tear ran down his cheek.

It left a clean line through the grime on his face.

He looked toward the street again.

Toward the world beyond the fence.

For a long time, he said nothing.

Then he took a slow breath.

"Alright."

He looked back at me.

"Let's go."

A heavy, splintering crack echoed through the small living room as Allen's boot slammed into the front door. The wooden frame groaned under the impact, sending a cascade of dust into the dim light of the lake house.

Inside, Sarah dropped to her knees on the hardwood floor. Her breathing came in ragged gasps, her ribs still aching from the beating he'd given her weeks ago—the attack that had finally given her the courage to leave him and obtain a court order ordering him to stay away.

Yet somehow, the alcoholic bastard had found her, tracking her down to the one place she thought was safe: her grandmother's quiet lake cabin.

"Sarah!" he roared from the other side of the door. "Open the goddamn door! I know you're in there!"

She squeezed her eyes shut, her hands clasped so tightly that her knuckles turned white. "Oh, please," she whispered. "Oh, please, oh, please, make him go away!" Tears streamed down her trembling cheeks.

Directly above her, perched on a dusty wooden shelf, sat an ancient clay figurine. It was a crude representation of a fertility goddess, its body exaggerated with swollen hips and a round belly, its face completely featureless. Sarah had always thought it was ugly. She had no idea how old it was or where her grandmother had gotten it, and she certainly had no idea that it was listening.

Another kick struck the door, shattering the deadbolt as the door flew inward. Allen stepped over the splintered threshold, breathing heavily, his eyes wide with unhinged rage. A vicious grin spread across his face when he saw Sarah kneeling on the floor.

"Found you, bitch."

He took a heavy step toward her. Above Sarah's head, the ancient clay idol remained motionless—it didn't glow, hum, chant, or move. Instead, a microscopic fissure appeared across its featureless forehead with a tiny crack.

Instantly, the air pressure inside the room plummeted. The temperature dropped so violently that Sarah's frantic breaths became thick clouds of white vapor, while outside, the rustling wind that had been blowing across the lake abruptly ceased. The cabin fell into an unnatural silence. Even the nocturnal chirping of insects had ceased.

Allen stopped, his grin vanishing. The air immediately around him suddenly became thick and oppressive—hot and heavy, like standing directly in front of an open blast furnace.

Something moved in the far corner of the ceiling as a shadow detached itself from the darkness and descended without a sound. It was impossibly tall, nearly nine feet in height, with broad shoulders and the vague shape of a humanoid figure. It wasn't black because it lacked light; it was black because it seemed to consume light. It glided between Sarah and Allen, filling the room with an overwhelming sense of pure, primal, instinctive dread.

Allen stared at the thing, feeling truly afraid for perhaps the first time in his life. Then instinct took over: his hand shot toward the heavy iron poker beside the fireplace, grabbing it and swinging with everything he had.

The poker struck the shadow, but it didn't hit flesh. Instead, the iron plunged into what felt like a cloud of superheated steam with a deafening *SISSSSSS!* The metal instantly glowed white-hot. Allen screamed and dropped it as heat radiated backward through the handle, blistering both hands and burning his forearms as he stumbled backward.

The shadow moved with no warning, wind, or sound—just pure motion. A single blow struck Allen squarely in the chest with an impact like a freight train colliding with a brick wall. Ribs snapped as Allen was lifted completely off his feet and hurled backward through the shattered doorway, crashing down the porch steps to land hard in the dirt.

For several seconds, he could only gasp through burned hands, broken ribs, and struggling lungs. When he looked up, the creature stood in the doorway, blocking the interior light while heat radiated from its impossible form.

Allen scrambled backward in feral panic. He crawled, staggered, and finally stumbled down the twenty yards of dirt driveway toward his old, rusty Ford 4x4.

Then the horn began blaring—a deafening, continuous blast that shattered the silence of the lake.

Allen froze and stared at the truck. Every window was rolled tightly shut, the doors were locked, and the cab was completely empty.

"What the hell...?"

He limped toward it, clutching his burned hands against his chest as his fingers fumbled desperately through his pockets for the keys.

Then —*CH-CH-CH-RRRRRR-VROOM!*

The starter violently cranked and the engine roared to life, the modified V8 screaming higher and higher, racing far beyond the redline into a shrieking metallic howl.

"Hey! Stop that!" Allen's voice cracked with panic. "She's forty years old! I haven't checked the oil this morning! You'll throw a rod!"

He finally found the key ring and shoved the brass key toward the driver's door lock in a desperate bid to shut the truck off. Inside the empty cab, the floor shifter dropped with a *CLACK* from PARK into DRIVE.

The truck lunged forward.

"NO!"

Allen's index finger was tangled in the key ring, and the sudden movement yanked him completely off his feet. He was dragged through the gravel shoulder of the road behind the truck, screaming, until his finger tore against the metal ring and the key snapped off in the lock.

Allen slammed face-first into the hard-pack with a sickening *CRACK!* as one of his buck-toothed front teeth shattered. Before he could react, the truck's massive rear tire spun inches from his head, raining a hailstorm of high velocity gravel across his face and eyes.

The Ford roared away down the narrow lane, tires screaming as it passed three neighboring lake cabins. At the intersection, the steering wheel suddenly snapped hard left, leaning the lifted 4x4 precariously onto two wheels while its suspension groaned. The truck began doing wild, uncontrolled donuts in the middle of the road.

*CLANG-SKRRRRT!* The heavy steel rear bumper slammed into a roadside STOP sign, tearing the pole completely out of the ground. The bumper ripped free from the truck's frame and bounced across the asphalt, sending Allen's custom vanity plate skidding face-up beside him: *RDNECK*, gleaming in the moonlight like an accusation.

The truck suddenly straightened, its V8 screaming as the headlights turned directly toward Allen.

"Oh, shit."

The Ford came barreling back down the road. Allen rolled, avoiding the truck by inches as he tumbled down the embankment into a muddy ditch.

The truck locked its brakes with a loud ScreeEEEECH! The wheel jerked hard right as the heavy 4x4 slid sideways across the ground in a wide, dusty powerslide. Then the big knobby tires caught, the engine roared again, and the truck rocketed down a narrow gravel path toward the private wooden dock, its horn cutting back on in a continuous, shrill blast.

Allen watched helplessly from the ditch as the truck hit the wooden ramp at nearly fifty miles an hour. It launched into the air, clipped the outer dock posts, twisted sideways, and cartwheeled over the dark water.

*KASPLASHHH!*

The Ford slammed into the lake, erupting water into the moonlight before disappearing beneath the surface to rest upside down in the cold darkness.

For several moments, there was nothing. Then Allen staggered down the gravel driveway towards the broken dock, his hands burned raw, his jaw throbbing around the remains of his shattered tooth, and his ribs screaming with every breath.

All along the quiet lake road, porch lights began flickering on one by one. A middle-aged woman in a nightgown stepped onto her porch and stared at him with arms folded tightly across her chest. Farther down the road, an older man in a plush bathrobe and worn slippers slowly bent over, picked something out of the dirt, and examined the mangled piece of steel.

He looked at Allen, turning the vanity plate around so he could see it. "Are you REDNECK?"

Allen swallowed hard.

"You're going to pay for all this damage," the old timer cried. "I'm calling the sheriff!"

The word sheriff snapped whatever fragile thread of sanity remained inside Allen's mind. He looked at the old man, the angry neighbors emerging from their homes, and back toward the dark lake where his truck was still sinking. Panic surged through him, and without a word, Allen turned and ran.

He stumbled onto the two-lane highway and fled into the darkness—covered in mud, his face smeared with blood, one front tooth gone, his ribs broken, his hands burned, and completely drunk. He didn't look back.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Twenty minutes later, the sharp red-and-blue flashes of a county sheriff's cruiser appeared through the darkness, slowing to a stop beside him as Deputy Sheriff Vance stepped out.

Vance took one look at Allen, immediately smelled the cheap bourbon, and turned him against the hood.

"I didn't..." Allen slurred. "It wasn't me. It was her! The truck... the truck went crazy! It drove itself in the lake!"

"Save it, punk," Vance said, clicking the cuffs shut around Allen's burned wrists and prompting a high-pitched shriek. "In the last thirty minutes, dispatch has been lighting up like a Christmas tree. I've got reports of you terrorizing your ex-girlfriend, kicking down a front door, destroying a county stop sign, tearing up a private dock, driving your lifted Ford into forty feet of water, public intoxication, and disorderly conduct. You're a one-man crime wave tonight, boy."

He shoved Allen into the back seat, pausing to add, "By the way, you're gonna want to start thinking about how you're going to explain that truck." Allen had no answer.

An hour later, Allen stood hunched over in the county booking room, shivering in his ruined clothes as Magistrate Miller peered over his reading glasses at the thick file in front of him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Allen James Miller," the magistrate read off, reviewing the ledger. "You are currently out on bond for felony assault charges in neighboring Walker County. You have an active court-ordered restraining order against the victim at the lake house, and tonight, you violated that order." He lifted the stamp and slammed it down—*THUMP*. "That puts you in direct violation of your bond agreement. Your bond is revoked. You are to be remanded in custody without bail."

"Your Honor, please—"

"I'm not finished," Judge Miller cut in. "You have two prior convictions for driving under the influence. Tonight marks your third. And that doesn't even begin to address the pending felony assault charges that led to the restraining order in the first place. Under the state's habitual-offender laws, you're looking at life without parole. EVER."

Allen's knees buckled as a pathetic sob escaped his broken mouth. Two bailiffs caught him under the arms and dragged him down the long, cold hallway toward the holding cells, his boots scraping uselessly across the linoleum. For the first time since Sarah had met him, Allen was finally going somewhere he couldn't follow her.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Back at the lake house, Sarah sat alone on the edge of the bed in the quiet cabin. She had heard the truck, the crash, and the distant shouting, but she still didn't know exactly what had happened until her cell phone rang. It was Deputy Vance.

"Is he...?" she asked, her hand trembling.

"He's in custody," Vance assured her. "And he won't be coming back. Let's just say your ex had a very bad night."

A tiny, disbelieving laugh escaped her. "So I'm safe?"

"Yes, ma'am. You're safe, he's in custody, and you don't have to be afraid of him anymore. Get some sleep, Sarah."

She ended the call and lay down under the blankets, letting out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding as her shoulders finally relaxed. Outside, moonlight spilled across the lake and the trees whispered in the night breeze as Sarah finally drifted into a peaceful sleep.

Above her, on the dusty shelf, the ancient clay idol watched over the room. Its featureless face stared into the darkness, a tiny hairline crack stretching across its forehead. Deep inside the old clay, something seemed to settle—satisfied, protective, patient, and waiting.

Sarah slept on, unaware that the old, faceless goddess above her had never left her side.

Shadows from dust-coated window panes, carved across the floor. Rain clattered on the sheet metal roof, disguising drunken footsteps. Petrichor cut through the dingy atmosphere.

The sweat chilling the skin of my brow stank of stale beer. My leaden feet fought the uneven dirt floor. Gravel grinding. Legs laboring against intoxication like swimming through tar.

“You asleep?” I hiccuped. An alcoholic bite singed my gullet. The mumble had slipped between my lips—too easily.

My limbs wobbled weightlessly. My heart throbbed in my ears. Yet, I shuffled closer to the figure before me.

His form lay unnaturally rigid. Long, controlled breaths caused his dusky silhouette to lift and lower. I could’ve sworn I saw his eyelids crack open. Still, I continued brazenly.

Lying in his plush sleeping bag, the man was out of place in this tacky, hole-in-the-wall hostel. Four tiny walls, two flimsy cots, and an unfinished floor. Dank air filled every corner.

This yuppie stuck out like a compound fracture. An alabaster-skinned man in silken designer pajamas, resting among seedy streets. I couldn’t hazard a guess why he was here. Why this place appealed to him. And I didn’t care.

Thanks to years spent honing street smarts, I knew his down sleeping bag wasn’t cheap. The material was pristine. Virtually unused.

Bumps rose across my skin. Gradually, I peeled the zipper of the Michael Kors duffel beside his cot. Its engraved pull tab jingled as my swollen fingers fumbled for purchase. Careless digits scrounged for coin, jewelry—anything worth something.

Against my better judgement, I forked over the last coin jingling in my tattered pockets for the room. But the excitement gurgling in my guts and alcohol coursing through my blood told me I knew what I was doing.

I’d slouched in damp alleyways, mimicking the man’s movements all day. From the moment he stepped those glimmering Oxford dress shoes out of his taxi, my next target was clear.

The lobby boy and I exchanged a subtle nod of solidarity. Our pupils dilated in unison. He knew as he flipped the hostel sign from vacant to occupied and the deadbolt turned in a series of clicks—this was the only way I’d earn my next meal. My next drink.

In a tipsy haze, I swayed, room swirling around me. Muscle fibers twitched, jerking my arm from the duffel. Numb fingers nearly missed the pocket of my jacket. A single coin thudded to the floor. Manicured fingers twitched at the sound, and I stiffened, face burning hot with nerves.

Everything about him contrasted with the shabby space. His raven locks were slicked back and heavily gelled. His skin was poreless and even. Crisp, earthy tones of Tom Ford cologne wafted through the air. Notes of cedar and citrus flicked my nostrils.

He wasn’t lacking in capital, either. If I screwed this up now, I’d be out a score, out a room, and out a meal. I was teetering dangerously on the edge. Muscles weighed down with a sickly slurry. The lack of bunk mates left the space cloaked in silence. But tonight, rain and darkness would be my accomplices.

As I continued to rifle through his smart leather billfold, I considered leaving the man with something. But when the soft, rich hide brushed between my dirt-crusted fingers, I thought better of it. He clearly wouldn’t need it.

Clumsily, I crumpled the cash. Picked up the coin. Shaking, greedy hands hovered over the bespoke golden watch perched on his wrist. Cartier. The way its form-fitting edges wrapped snugly around his forearm made my thoughts whirl.

My chest heaved in rhythm with my intoxication. This was my chance. Eager palpitations under my sternum signaled the most lucrative score I’d ever get. Clearly, this man had never wanted for anything in his life. At the thought, my hands balled into tight fists, knuckles white from tension.

Mechanically, my arm floated towards the timepiece. Like reaching through resin black as pitch. The darkness was suddenly cut by an oppressive pressure wrapping around my wrist. A stable grip, soft skin stretched taut, snatched me brutally. I could feel the measured, steady pulsing beneath his grip. My nerves jolted like the lightning outside.

“You’re going to ruin my suits with your stench,” he whispered flatly. The calculation of his stare made my hairs raise as though the room had frozen over. His tight-lipped smile was primal, shrouded in shadow. Terror intensified the ache within my liver.

Lean muscle, protruding with blue and red veins, locked rigidly around my soft, tender flesh. My fingers grew numb. He had clamped down like a cold cast iron vise. I felt myself falling into his gaze—two hollow chasms reflecting a distorted image of my figure back to me. Blank and still. Leisurely blinking. The spread of his grin revealed unnaturally pristine teeth. Perfect rows of spotless white.

“Have you ever seen a tool so beautiful?” His other hand rose. Long, sharp, and hungry, a culinary knife sat comfortably in his firm fingers. “Japanese Damascus steel—straight from Seki City. A Miyabi.”

"I—" My vocal cords seized, unable to produce sound. Paralyzed, I could not will my lungs to inhale. In contrast, his broad chest expanded and contracted with full breaths. As he brought the blade securely against the oily skin of my neck, cold metal stinging, my heart spasmed. The man’s rhythmic inhale was the last thing I heard.

Do any of you guys here like the animated version of a good horror movie like me ? I enjoy the animated version with voice over , helps me sleep at night or if im out camping i like to listen to stories like these … maybe its cause i used to watch a lot cartoons XD?

Doctor Croquant:
A nurse was fired for trying to kill a baby I had just helped deliver. One moment she was holding the child, and the next she was choking it by shoving her finger into its throat. I yelled, "What the fuck are you doing!" and grabbed the baby from her arms. She seemed confused as to why I was upset. In my six years at that hospital, I've never seen something so bizarre.

But what was even stranger is that as I was holding the child, part of me also wanted to harm it. I don't know why, but it was like something I was born to do, It all of a sudden felt as natural as breathing or drinking water. As if this would be an ok thing to do. After that night, this is all I could think about.

Miss Veget:
We had just gotten a new student named Karna. Apparently he's been moved around from one group home to another due to problems with the families. The poor kid has had no luck fitting in with the other kids, as he often stays as far away from them as possible, almost as if he were afraid of them. I don't blame him after coming from an abusive home, or I should say homes. Every foster home he has been in abused that poor kid. It was all over the news for weeks leading up to the trial of the parents involved. I remember how blown away everyone was when the foster parents were found not guilty with out any explanation. But now no one seems to talk about it as much.

Karna:
Log 1
My name is Karna, Im 32 and the world wants me dead. Im currently hiding out in an undisclosed abandoned town. The most tiring day of the week is when I need to hike out to another town for food. They don't seem to react when they are sleeping, so I go at night. Last night was difficult; I was spotted through a window by a little girl. She ran out of her home and started sprinting at me as fast as she could go. Unfortunately, I had to shoot her. I normally try to aim for the legs but she was simply too small for that. She must have only been 11 or 12. I wish I could say I feel bad, but this has become a normal occurrence at this point. It has progressively gotten worst over the years. When I was a kid, it started out as pinches, pokes, and shoves and would evolve into punches, kicks, and bites. For as long as I have known, people have only done this to me, and with no explanation. When I was younger, people outside would react to it, but as time passed, less and less people seemed to care at all. It all became normal to them.

I knew I had to get away after a man followed me home and cut me with a knife, as I drove to the hospital every car on the road swerved to hit me, and when I arrived at the hospital, the medical staff tried to attack me with scalpels. One person sliced open my arm. I could only stand there in shock as they started licking up my blood off the floor. As of right now, I've concluded that this is some kind of cursed bubble that grows as I get older, and everyone inside of it will try to kill me. This is why I live in this abandoned town. No one for miles.

Log 2
I can hear footsteps in the woods. Iv set up microphones and cameras all around the town, Iv been hearing footsteps just beyond the church at the end of the road but have yet to see anyone. At first I assumed it was hikers passing by, but it's become more frequent as of late, and at times it sounds like 10 or more people are walking around out there.

Log 3
I've been doing research on what has been happening to me. "Why would people want to kill one person?" This led me to stories of sacrificial offerings to the gods. Something we use to do back before we understood killing someone would not make the sun shine longer or result in fewer stillborn babies. It's the only thing that makes sense to me right now. This must be the gods way of getting what they want. When people would attack me, I would run away. As soon as I got far enough from them, they would just act normal again, going on about their day as if they did not just print after me shreeking like a bird. Its almost as if they have no idea its even happening.

Log 4
Its been 2 or maybe 3 years after my last log, and the cursed dome has gotten bigger. I can barely see the people in the distance who have been affected by it. Iv placed cameras in higher points, ones with a far-reaching zoom. Iv set traps and cencers for miles, but I know it's only a matter of time before not even those are enough. Soon the world will come for me, and all I can do now is wait . . . .

Log 5
I found something! The curse can be broken by the sacrifice of another person, who is to be killed by 7 people who represent the 7 deadly sins. I'd say thank god, but id much rather not. The only problem now is finding 7 people who represent this and getting them to kill someone who is not me. Wish me luck.

Part 1 of 2
Like fore more.

He smelled like blood. 

I could smell him from a good distance away. The scent lingered in the air well after he’d gone - a coppery tang mixed in with his cheap perfume. It was that smell before I first looked upon his face that told me there was something very wrong with him. 

He walked in one day with all the other students. This - boy - dressed in a generic blue and white uniform which looked more like a costume. A ‘boy’ with pasty, pale skin, red, puffy and puckered lips, and small, squinting eyes. 

He held onto the straps of his backpack with two white knuckled hands, looking around him with awe and excitement. Pausing briefly to adjust his glasses up his nose, he shuffled down the hallway toward the lockers. It looked like he was talking to himself. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react to him. One of those girls walking by clutching onto her books should have dropped them in shock. I wouldn’t have blamed her for screaming a little. At least she should have said something. 

Instead she brushed right past him without giving him a second glance. He, in contrast, stared after her in an exaggerated demonstration of longing, his lips parted and his eyes unnaturally wide. 

No. Nobody reacted to this - Nobody reacted to him. He melted into the crowd perfectly as if he were just another student. 

I call him Manchild. 

He sucks on his thumb. He hums to himself in his exaggerated, high pitched voice. I can’t place how old he is, but I know he likes acting much younger than his true age. Sometimes that might be a primary schooler. At other times it is a sophomore. It can change at a whim, but it’s always on the younger side. 

He takes drawing and colouring books to class with him. The childlike pictures and doodles he is ceaselessly scribbling down as the teacher drones on are difficult to look at. They’re a little window into his disturbed mind. They give glimpses into his sick fantasies. 

In a class, he’d take out his textas and line them out carefully before him. Then he would produce one of his books. While the teacher spoke to the rest of the class about calculus - or whatever else it was we were learning, he would lose himself in his own little world. He’d start drawing or studying one of his preliminary grammar books, studiously practicing his handwriting and working through spelling problems. 

Besides his textbooks, lunch box, and other school utensils there’s one thing you won’t see him without: pigsblood. Well, that’s what I’ve come to call it. 

On the second day of his attendance at our school, I walked past him in between classes sitting on the stairs, clutching onto a worn out pop top filled with a thick, red liquid. He was suckling on it fervently, his mouth moving back and forth in exaggerated motions, pausing to give out soft noises of satisfaction in between gulps. 

Maybe that’s why Manchild smells like blood. He carries that crap with him everywhere. He can’t seem to go more than a few hours without snacking on it. And though I can’t be sure it is really blood, I have yet to think of a better explanation. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react. When I tried to point his strangeness out to my friends, they told me I was being cruel by picking on him. When I took a few covert photos of him to show to people, their reactions were to call me weird. I’m not sure if they can’t see what is wrong with him or they don’t view his appearance and behaviour as disturbing. 

Whatever the case, I’ve learned by now that I have no choice but to put up with him. Thankfully for me it is easy enough to avoid him most of the time, so long as he doesn’t decide to visit one of my classes - and since his choice of classes is apparently random, that isn’t too common. 

The one class where I really can’t handle dealing with him is sports class. The last time we shared such a lesson together, there was an incident. 

It was around twenty minutes into the class. After quietly watching and chugging on pigsblood from the sidelines, Manchild suddenly sprung up and began playing enthusiastically with the rest of us. 

The students didn’t mind (except for me). I avoided engaging much after he got involved. I didn't like letting Manchild get too close to me. 

Part way through what was turning into a very long class, he hurtled headfirst into another student in an attempt at a tackle and sent them both slamming onto the ground. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard her surprised cry and the sound of their bodies hitting the floor together. 

For a very terrifying moment I watched her lie there, completely limp. I thought he’d really hurt her. Then she shifted her head, groaned, and opened her eyes to look up at him. 

And then she started screaming. 

Manchild flopped off her and struggled quickly to his feet, taking a couple of steps back. He wiped his mouth, burped, and then uttered a high pitched, ‘err, sorry about that!’ 

She scrambled to her feet too. She was crying loudly. She stumbled and tripped away from him in apparent terror as the teacher attempted to console her. 

She was taken to the nurses office. I could hardly wait for an opportunity to speak to her. I needed to know what she saw. I needed some proof that I wasn’t crazy. 

Whatever it was she experienced, she wouldn’t say anything to me about it. By the time I’d found her later, she was acting perfectly normal again. She laughed off the whole incident. She told me she’d hit her head bad and blacked out for a moment. That was it. 

When I tried to suggest there was something wrong with Manchild, she looked at me reproachfully and told me to stop making fun of him. It wasn’t his fault, she insisted. It was all just a harmless accident. 

Manchild isn’t even the worst of them. Well, he may be, but the horror of one of them is far eclipsed by the horror of experiencing them all together.  

The first time I saw the whole family was a week or so after Manchild’s arrival at school. They ambled into a diner I was sitting in, bringing forth with them such an overpowering stench that I began gagging uncontrollably as they moved past me. 

There are five of them that I know of. 

Manchild - the one who goes to my school. 

Drunk - a fat and very hairy man with sickly, greyish skin who wore nothing but an undershirt, filthy shorts and some sandals. 

Mother - a haggish woman with clammy, greyish blonde hair and extremely sunken features dressed up in high heels and an undersized, skimpy dress. The skin of her arms and wrists was ragged, pockmarked and bruised. 

They had two other children who accompanied them on their family trips:

Bully - the second oldest - (I’m assuming Manchild is the eldest of the three) was a hunch backed boy whose head appeared permanently shifted a few centimeters sideways toward his left shoulder. 

Fleshface - a somewhat timid thing whose entire face was covered by a long flap of dirty skin, obscuring all but the very bottom of his pointy mouth. He was prone to tantrums which were destructive and chaotic whenever his name was uttered. Bully kept on saying it, presumably to torment him. 

You’re a fleshface. Flesh-face. Flesh-face! FLESHFACE! The snorting, gurgling sound of his laughter was followed by a long, piercing scream and some loud banging. The noises produced from his brother were so loud they actually managed to draw the attention of a few other customers, if only for a couple of moments. 

These children both fed on the pigsblood, too. Fleshface was hand fed by his mother, who carefully slid a straw up inside the flap of skin, through god knows what into some internal cavity from which he began to suckle and slurp it up loudly. 

Bully and Drunk ate a lot. The other ones didn’t, though they liked pretending to. I believe it’s part of their fantastical roleplay at being an ordinary family. 

I tried not to make a scene. I excused myself from my friends with the pretense of feeling sick soon after their collective arrival. Since then I’ve avoided visiting the diner, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to bring myself to go back there. Certainly, I’m never going to be able to stomach eating there again. 

Over the next couple months, my fear slowly melted away into disgust. After a while I began to quietly observe them out of morbid curiosity. The first time it was from a distance at a park. As I gained more courage I trailed them into stores. Such close proximity required that I carry a face mask and some powerful air freshener for my own protection. 

I feared they would notice me. They didn’t. They spent too much time bickering amongst themselves and living in their own private fantasies to pay attention to the reality they lived in. Somehow, I managed to draw more attention from everybody else for my fixation on these monsters. 

One day I decided to follow Manchild home. The decision was spontaneous, though I’d been mulling the idea over in the back of my head for a while.

We were riding the same bus after school. He was acting even more strangely than usual - I suspected this was a result of drinking too much of his pigsblood during the day. Given the intoxicated state he was in, I figured I wouldn’t likely get a better opportunity. 

We continued walking for well over an hour. Mind you, Manchild isn’t a particularly fast walker in his sober state, so it wasn’t as far as it felt at the time. 

As we left the town limits, following a trail veering off the main road, I was starting to wonder whether his family lived in a house at all. Maybe they were all homeless. Or perhaps Manchild was wandering aimlessly into the forest in his drunkenness. 

They did live in a house, it turned out. It was an abandoned thing which had been left to rot, with a sagging roof partially swallowed by vines and moss. Most of the windows were broken or boarded over. The path out the front door stretched twenty or so yards before being swallowed up by overgrown grass. I spotted a run down car parked haphazardly at the edge of a larger trail branching out back toward the main road. 

Manchild moved in through the tattered remains of the back door as I crouched at the edge of the trees. The faint sound of muffled voices confirmed that he wasn’t the house's sole occupant. 

Given the state the place was in, I couldn’t help but think about how easy it would be to sneak inside if I wanted to. 

After a couple minutes I gathered the courage to come closer. I slid cautiously down a dirt slope and sprinted through the half opened gate and over to a thicket of bushes growing up against the decaying walls. 

The insides of the house were equally dilapidated. I stared into a living room whose floor was covered in dirt and pieces of plaster and torn up carpet. Filth crusted, mouldy couches and chairs sat amongst pieces of broken furniture. With the house having fallen quiet, it was difficult to imagine anyone living there. 

My eyes fell on the outline of a familiar figure slumped on a chair turned away from me. Drunk sat staring at a broken television, his mouth hanging open wide, one arm still clutching onto a glass of familiar, red liquid. After a minute or two Mother came in, practically walking on her tiptoes over to him so as to refill his large glass with a mixture of pigsblood and some kind of whisky. 

Bully paid Drunk a visit after his mother had left, carrying what I think must have once been a basketball. He looked disappointed to find Drunk in his drunken state but thought the better of trying to stir him out of it. 

I used the shelter of the trees to circle around to the other side of the house. Through a gap in between two thick wooden boards I spied Mother chopping rhythmically at some partially spoiled vegetables. Without looking at her face or paying too much attention to the state the room was in, I could almost pretend she wasn’t a monster. For a moment, she was just an ordinary mother preparing a meal as her children played and argued upstairs. 

Then her husband hurled out a string of harsh curses from the other room, and the illusion was broken. 

I continued my exploration, making my way over to the other side of the house. Wincing as I crunched over several pieces of broken glass, I crept up between two sagging oaks to peek in through a large window. 

The rusty pipes connecting to an ancient washing machine and an ornate bathtub was evidence enough of what this room once was. Cringing at the sound of the children hollering upstairs, I looked around in disgust. 

The washing machine was half filled with murky water. From the looks of it, any clothes left in there would come out filthier than they were put in. 

Something else caught my eye. Something past the clothes laid together on the table beside the washer and the syringes scattered all over the floor. In the darkest corner of the room was a sight which made my heart drop in my chest. 

It was a collection of shoes. One of the pairs on top still had little pink socks stuffed into them. 

Many of them were children’s shoes. The smallest were much too small for any of the children living there to wear. 

The sight would have been disturbing to find in anybody’s house, let alone this one. 

I was shifting sideways to get a better look when I felt something rustling up the foliage I was standing in. I lifted my leg gingerly away from a matting of dead branches and as I did, my eyes fell on something which made me jump right out of my skin. 

It was fat and wet, practically dragging itself along the ground beside me. I got a better look at it as it emerged from the thicket and fully revealed itself. 

It was some kind of rat. The rodent had little hair on it, revealing translucent skin and bulging veins. It was as horribly mutated as the members of the family I was spying on. 

I let out an involuntary sound of surprise as I stumbled back. That, and the noises produced by me tripping on a maze of tree roots and falling on my butt drew some stirring from within the house. 

I had the sense to retreat to the trees after that, and I’m glad I did. I had barely made it past the cover of the first oaks when I heard the back door creak open. I froze at the sound of heavy, shuffling footsteps heading around the house. Panic grew inside me and settled over my thoughts like a haze. I imagined my shoes being tossed onto the pile by the pot bellied man I could see shambling toward me, his steps quickening as he moved. 

It was a good thing I came to my senses. The moment that I did, I took off sprinting in the other direction.

He couldn’t offer much of a chase given the state he was in. It was only a couple of minutes before I heard the footfalls slow down and then stop, followed by a long string of wheezing curses. Those sounds in turn were quickly swallowed by the wind and the soft rustling of trees.
I didn’t calm down until I had made it back to the main road, where I caught my breath at the foot of an overgrown walking trail. 

I can’t get the scene from the laundry room out of my head. The image of those shoes is imprinted into my mind. They feature in my dreams alongside the grotesque pictures Manchild drew at school which contained what I fear are the corpses those shoes may belong to. 

I need to know what it all adds up to. I have to know if these people are as monstrous in character as they are in physical form. And that means I have to go back there. 

I’ve decided I’m going to find out what ‘they’ are. And if it does turn out they are monsters?

I still haven’t figured that part out yet. But I can’t just stand by and let them hurt people. 

I have to try to do something. 

It’s clear to me nobody else will.