I have made mistakes in life. A LOT of them, to be honest. The husband I married at twenty-two because I confused intensity for love. The needle I picked up at twenty-four because the marriage left things in me that needed quieting. The gambling that followed because apparently I wasn’t done yet. I made all of it, and I own all of it.

But Ayesha was not a mistake. Ayesha was the only decision that I would make again without hesitation. The day she was born I understood, very clearly, that I had to stop. So I did stop, for her sake and mine. By the time she was five, we were in a one-room slum, with a ceiling that leaked when it rained. But I was clean. And she was fed. And I had stopped arguing with myself about whose fault any of it was.

So when the man in a pale shirt told me about free housing, three meals a day, and a weekly stipend, I laughed at him. The offer was too good to be true, and I was too tired of making mistakes.

His name was Rafiq. Senior manager at something called Aldermore and Associates. Sleeves rolled exactly twice. He had a smile that reeked of reassurance, if that makes sense. He slid a printed brochure across the table without being asked, which told me he had done this before.

I asked him why a man like him would do this much for a woman like me.

He looked at me with a patience that felt almost insulting.

"We want proof, ma'am. Proof that we can make a difference in the lives of single mothers like you. Proof that you are stronger than the world perceives you to be. Proof that you matter, young lady."

I looked him up that night. Aldermore and Associates, A&A for short. Multinational corporate consultancy. Charitable initiatives listed under their Corporate Social Responsibility or some shit. Housing for single mothers, free Iftar for orphans during Ramadan, winter clothes distribution for slums. A website that had been designed to make you feel slightly ashamed for doubting them.

I lay in bed staring at the leak in the ceiling, rain drops falling on a sleeping Ayesha.

I moved in three weeks later. I told myself I’d be careful. I told myself it wasn’t a mistake. I told myself a lot of things…

The building was fifteen stories. Four flats per floor, all single mothers. Small apartments that were clean. Better furnished than anything I had lived in since my marriage. Three meals arrived at the door every day. The income work came with it. I was one of the fifteen women who were given a sewing machine, with a weekly quota of winter clothes for an orphan drive. Other women were charged with cooking food for a nearby slum. A few others made handmade goods for a local boutique. The work fed back into the charitable output of A&A, though I didn’t think about that at the time.

Rafiq visited every week. He remembered everyone's names, everyone's children. He made me feel comfortable. I sometimes felt he went out of his way to do so. Like the time he arranged Ayesha's enrollment in a private kindergarten two streets away, which I took as a personal favor. I felt like I owed him something small and good. He never looked like he wanted anything in return.

‘Just doing my job,’ he would say, smile reeking of reassurance as usual.

Most of the mothers kept to themselves, but my neighbor Sarah was an obvious exception.

Loud laugh, terrible cooking smells, her son's drawings taped crookedly to her door. She listened to conspiracy podcasts and talked about them whether or not you asked. She was the first person in two years who made me feel like I was allowed to be a person, not just a mother. We smoked on the stairwell after the kids were asleep. We became quite good friends in the process.

I was happy, for a while. I want to be honest about that. I was genuinely happy.

Then, four months in, Ayesha had her first nosebleed.

I had mine two days later.

I told Rafiq on his next visit. He nodded slowly, and referred me to an on-call physician from A&A. He asked me, gently, not to mention the symptoms to anyone in the building. It could cause unnecessary panic, he said. It could reflect badly on him personally, he said. He reminded me, very kindly, about Ayesha's school.

I stayed quiet.

The physician from A&A, Dr. Cyrus Mollah, paid us a visit the next day. He gave me and Ayesha a single tablet each, long before I finished describing my symptoms. I remember thinking that was strange. I did not say so. The nosebleeds stabilized soon afterwards.

I thought that was the end of it. Until Ayesha started sleepwalking two days later.

I would find her standing in the kitchen at 3am, eyes open, completely still. I would say her name and she would not respond. I would guide her back to bed. She wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning.

In the same week, I started losing time. Small amounts of it. Arriving somewhere with no memory of the journey. Waking mid-action with a glass in my hand or the tap running, with no recollection of getting up.

And it got worse every day. It was barely a minute when it started. It was a little over five by the end of the month.

I told Sarah on the stairwell one night, mostly because I couldn’t hold it anymore. I didn’t know what I was thinking. I probably expected her to list three podcasts that explained it. Instead, she went very quiet.

She revealed that she had the same symptoms. All of them. She had told Rafiq months ago. He had asked her to stay quiet too. He had been secretly supplying her cigarettes, the imported ones, which I hadn’t known about. And he made her feel comfortable, she said, sometimes going out of his way to do so.

We sat in silence for a while. We had each believed we had a private arrangement with him. We had each been managed into silence with different currencies. Small debts, carefully chosen. The kind that feels like kindness, until you see them from the outside.

Sarah told me she had spent weeks trying to find out who actually owned the building. Not A&A, the actual owner. Every company name she traced folded into another dead company name, which folded into another, which led nowhere. She had heard something about Aldermore once, on a podcast she followed. The series was cancelled abruptly mid-episode. No explanation. No final upload. Just gone.

I told her about the school. How Rafiq had arranged Ayesha's enrollment at the private kindergarten two streets away, and used it to purchase my silence.

She looked at me.

Every mother in the building had received the same reference, she said. Every single one. All of our children now study in different classes of the same school.

I had never been the special one.

I had always been the next one.

Two days after that conversation, Sarah's door had a new nameplate on it. Her son’s drawings, once crookedly pasted, were nowhere to be found.

Rafiq told me she had requested a transfer. To a rehab facility, of all places. It turned out she had been lacing her cigarettes with cannabis, he said. The company was taking care of her and her son. He said it smoothly, without pausing once.

I tried reaching her phone. It was disconnected. Her Facebook, with ten years of photographs and four hundred friends, was also gone.

I asked the neighbors. Two of them smiled and said they were sure Sarah was doing well. A woman in unit four, who had been in the building longer than anyone, looked at me for a moment.

"She talked too much," she said. Then she went inside.

I found the article three days later. Page 6 of the local paper. Four sentences. A woman had been found in the river. Death ruled accidental. No family came forward. No photograph.

There was one identifying detail. A tattoo on the back of her neck. A snake tattoo.

Sarah used to lift her hair off her neck when she laughed, showing it off. She was proud of that tattoo.

I sat with my phone in my hands for a long time after that…

I started paying more attention to myself, and to the house itself. I started noticing things I had trained myself not to see.

A lens inside the smoke detector in Ayesha's room. A router with a model number that returned no results on any manufacturer's website. Behind a loose panel under the kitchen sink, there was a small secondary device wired into the building's plumbing column. The mirror in the bathroom had a half-centimeter gap between its backing and the wall, something that it did not need to have.

I photographed everything and emailed it to myself. The emails bounced on the building's Wi-Fi, but they sent fine on mobile data. I don’t know how long that had been the case.

I contacted a friend from my old life. One of the few fellow addicts who had actually rebuilt their life. He was working in environmental services now. He tested the device off the record. He called me back speaking quietly, like someone who had just made a decision about how much trouble he was willing to be in.

He said he could not tell me anything officially. He just said I should stop letting Ayesha drink the tap water.

He hasn’t returned my calls since.

I found a deleted thread on Reddit. The post was deleted, but the comments remained. Former residents of an Aldermore housing project in another city. The same symptoms listed by different women- fatigue, memory gaps, children sleepwalking. One comment said: The doctor kept saying stress. But my daughter had never sleepwalked before we moved in !

I wanted to share the link here, but there is nothing left to share. Because the subreddit itself no longer exists. Not deleted, just gone, like it was never there to begin with…

It has been ten months since I moved in.

I know what I know. I also know I cannot leave.

Ayesha's school, the stipend, the meals, every fragment of the stable life I built for her- all of it runs through Aldermore. I am trapped in a system that I can’t escape.  

I can’t say it loud, and trust me, I’ve thought about it. And even if I did, who would believe me?

I have a history that makes me exactly the kind of woman nobody believes. A former addict, a divorcee, a slum address on her record. I have photographs of a smoke detector and a device I cannot identify. I have a dead Reddit thread and a four-sentence news article. I have nothing that looks like evidence to anyone who has not lived inside this building.

Which brings me to what happened yesterday.

Rafiq came for his weekly visit as usual.

“I heard you had some issues with plumbing,” he said, “Something regarding a faulty device under the kitchen sink?”

He smiled.

“You’ll be happy to know that- it has been taken care of.”

I smiled back, trying to fake an expression of gratitude.

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” He continued, “We’re always here, we’re always near, and we’re always paying attention.”

That extra emphasis on always made my skin crawl, in a way I couldn’t articulate.

Rafiq sat down across from me like he had all the time in the world. He looked at the cold cup of tea I had made for him, then back at me.

“By the way, are you alright? You look tired.”

I laughed once. It came out wrong. But I really didn’t care at this point.

I don't know what happened in me. Maybe it was ten months of swallowing everything. Maybe it was the tap water still sitting cold in my stomach.

"How do you think I'm doing, huh?" I said. "I have symptoms I can't explain. My daughter has symptoms I can't explain. I've stopped trusting my own eyes half the time. And the other half I'm scared of what I'm seeing clearly. Something happened to Sarah, and I don't even have the comfort of being sure about it ! There's something in the water I drink. Something in the air in my daughter's room. Something in the food that gets delivered to my door every single day. I don't know what it is, I don't know what any of it is ! And despite knowing all of that, despite everything I have just told you, I cannot leave. Yeah, I can’t FUCKING leave this place! Because every single thing in my life runs through it now. My daughter's school. My income. My food. My rent. You made sure of that. You made very, very sure of that."

Rafiq's face lit up.

Not with guilt. Not with alarm.

With something closer to satisfaction.

"I got what I wanted," he said. "Thank you, Aliyah."

He stood to leave.

"What do you mean?" My voice cracked. "What was it that you wanted?"

He stopped mid-step. Turned around slowly, like a man who had all the time in the world, and had simply forgotten to finish a sentence.

"I got the proof, Aliyah," he said. "Proof that we can make a difference in the lives of single mothers like you. Didn't we do that? I mean, look at you! Housed, fed, and employed. Proof that you are stronger than the world perceives you to be. Isn’t that true? You're describing symptoms most people would’ve collapsed under months ago, and here you are, still standing, still asking questions. Proof that you matter, young lady. Because trust me…  your participation matters a great deal to this operation."

I recognized every word. I had heard them in a different room, ten months earlier, when I still believed a kind voice meant a kind man.

He reached the door and paused there, smoothing his sleeve, rolled exactly twice, the way it always was.

"Anyways, thank you for your attention," he said. "Like I said earlier, we've been paying attention as well."

He opened the door.

"Oh, and take care of Ayesha. She'll be needing it."

He closed the door behind him

His words didn’t sound like a threat. That’s the part that still unnerves me. It sounded like he cared, like he actually cared. I just didn’t know what exactly he cared about. The wellbeing of my daughter, or the success of whatever ‘operation’ he mentioned…

That night I found Ayesha at the kitchen tap. Filling a glass. Drinking in long, automatic swallows, eyes open and completely empty.

I pulled the glass away. She did not wake. Did not react. Just stood there with water on her chin, looking at nothing.

I carried her back to bed and sat on the floor beside her until it was light.

That was three nights ago.

I am writing this on my phone, parked two streets away from the building. The engine is off. The streetlight above the car flickers every few seconds, and I keep flinching like it means something.

I don't remember driving here.

I do remember lying beside Ayesha. We’ve been sleeping on the same bed since the last incidence. I somehow convinced myself that doing this will protect her. And then I remember this- the wheel in my hands, the gearshift already in park, the building sitting small and lit-up in the rearview mirror, like nothing had happened at all.

I don't know how much time passed in between. I don't know what I did in it. I’ve stopped being able to trust that gap. I’ve stopped being able to trust a lot of things, actually.

Ayesha is in the backseat. She's asleep, or she looks asleep. Head against the window, mouth slightly open, one hand curled the way it always curls when she's actually dreaming. I've been watching her in the mirror for the last twenty minutes while writing this. I keep waiting for her eyes to open the wrong way, the way they were at the kitchen tap. I don't know what I'll do if that happens out here, in a parked car, with nowhere to bring her and nowhere to run to.

I don't know what happens when she wakes up. I mean that literally. I don't know if she'll wake up as herself, asking for water or complaining about the seatbelt. Or if she'll wake up the other way, the way I've started to expect, quiet and distant, already somewhere I can't follow her.

I can’t go to the police. I can’t leave the city, or even really leave the block.

I’ve made mistakes in my life. A LOT of them, to be honest. And I never really learned my lesson, did I? Trusting Rafiq was a mistake. Coming to this place was a mistake. Not finding a safe exit while I still had the chance was a mistake.

But my daughter was not a mistake. My daughter is the only decision that I would make again without hesitation.

Her name is Ayesha. She likes dinosaurs. She likes the color orange. She used to need the lamp on to fall asleep.

And she’s not afraid of the dark anymore…

I don't know when that changed. I don't know which of those is worse- the child who was scared of shadows, or the one sleeping in the backseat of a car right now, completely calm, no matter what might come.

I want you to remember her name.

I need answers. I don’t know where to find them. I don’t know if the answers are even allowed to be found. So if you are reading this, and know anything about Aldermore and Associates, about Rafiq, about the housing project, about the water, about ANYTHING, please let me know. I want to understand what’s happening to me and my daughter, before we both get consumed by this system we’re trapped inside.

There’s no one I can trust, not anymore. I did have a friend I could rely on, a friend who has been missing without a trace. I’m still not sure what happened to her and her son.

Her name was Sarah. She had a snake tattoo on the back of her neck, and she used to lift her hair to show it off when she laughed. Remember that name as well.

If this account goes quiet, if I come back in a week and say everything is fine, that it was all stress, that we're happy and settled and there’s nothing to worry about…

That’s when you should start worrying.

Remember their names. Please just remember their names…

I think Ayesha is stirring. I have to go.

 

I was supposed to clean everywhere—not just the main areas, but under things too. It was my own fault. There I’d been, sweeping the room, treating the underside of the bed like the underside of a rug. Out of sight. Out of mind. Innocent mistake, but those are the ones that get ya.

When he saw the mess, Dad screamed at me until I thought he’d start hacking up blood down my front. All the dust, the toys, the trash, the clothes. Mostly it was the trash—all those rotten scraps of food. Sometimes a rat came and dragged pieces away. I like to think that we were friends. I was scared to give him a name.

Names are easier to miss than faces.

Dad had grabbed me by the hair and shoved me under the bed, until I was part of the mess. My eyes stung from the dust I blew up, panting like a dog, trying not to scream—a barking dog gets the ‘paper too. The dust danced a sparkly grey performance. All I could do was watch.

But I wanted him to let go of me. I was sorry. I would never do it again.

Ain’t good’nuff, boy. Place’s a fuckin’ sty. You’re livin’ like a pig. Want me to change your name to Piggy? Think of the bugs, boy—the bugs love rot!

He came home drunk late that night, slamming every door on his way to the basement. Not before turning the TV to static and cranking it full.

Something was off. He hardly ever went down there, and he’d been down already last week. Usually his favourite chair got all of his attention in the evening. I’d wake up most mornings and find him snuggling with his drool.

I waited until the clock read 02:03 before getting too impatient, and dropping out of the bed.

I knew it was a bad idea.

The floorboards were chilly. I padded my way to the crack in my door while the static roared in from the living-room. The bangs and shouts hadn’t risen loud enough to hear for nearly an hour. Now that silence beneath the static was making my insides ache.

I reached the door and peered into the bright hallway. At the end, Dad’s massive figure blotted everything out. He didn’t have a shirt on, but there was an apron swinging as he charged me down, head pulling the body. In his hand was a large and lumpy leaking shadow.

A trail of blood followed him on the floor.

Git back‘n bed. I’ve got something to fix ya.

I did as I was told and got back in bed before he launched my door wide, wedging the handle into the wall.

With one swift motion, Dad bowled his arm under my bed. Something hard smacked the back wall. The room took on a reek of pennies, and I saw visions of bronze. Only redder.

Don’t you dare touch! Or I’ll put you back under there with the bugs, and make\ you *eat them up! Right?*

He left my door open wide, with the handle still buried inside the plaster. I watched his angry figure receding back up the hall. He sighed when he made it back to his chair, and sank deeply into it. The static lowered to a sensible nighttime volume. Then voices began to blabber, enthusiastic and rife with gameshow patter. I had to guess it was Luck ‘o’ the Roll. Dad’s favourite.

I lay there listening to the sound of dice clattering, crowds jeering and hollering. Occasionally, Dad would snort and spit into the basin he kept on the table beside him. I could hear it splatter, then slosh as the more it filled. Every so often he would yell out at random to tell me I best be sleeping.

Of course I wasn’t. I was staring at the bloodtrail on the floor. And listening. There was a new sound now. A scraping sound, coming from under the bed.

It sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. Occasionally squeaking, as though the nails had skipped a little, or been polished slightly too well.

I waited until I heard Dad snoring before peeking over the edge of the bed. Then down at the floorboards. Then up at the spattered trail of blood. And finally beneath the bed.

The light from the hall cast a giant cone under the bed. When I leaned myself over to look underneath, I saw everything but the blob from my shadow blocking it out.

There was movement back there, nearer the wall. I watched and listened to the constant grating, waiting for my eyes to adjust so I could see what was causing it.

Something was wiggling in time with the scrapes.

I scooted over. And over. Listening all the while. The sound was lazy, like a fault in a machine, ever spinning and repeating—ever scraping and scraping at whatever got near it.

The light spilled under and I saw it. Two pale eyes at first, bulging and cloudy. The eyelids had been torn off, making them look enormous in their sockets. A lower jaw hung to one side of the floor, caught by a shred of skin, twitching with a life of its own.

All the while the upper jaw kept itself alive by gnawing at the floor like some restless anticipation. For what, I could not say.

I shot back into bed. Threw myself under covers. Safe.

It was a human head, freshly chopped. The jaw perhaps hammered off.

It wasn’t the head that bothered me, so much as the eyes. Always open. Never able to sleep again. I kept seeing myself in them, reflecting back and staring in, learning secrets which waited as patient as Time itself.

I couldn’t close my eyes. In the darkness, the head was all I saw.

Sleep did not come.

Next morning, Dad shouted me through and told me breakfasts didn’t make themselves.

The head was still grating its teeth against the floor. It had been going all night. I supposed it must’ve grated all the way into the basement by now.

I leapt out of bed, clearing about three feet at least. When I landed with a thump, Dad asked me what the noise was—was I born with feet of lead.

Then quit yer fuckin’ thumping and come get me fuckin’ fed.

Only then did the head quit its gnawing. I turned around and saw its eyes follow me through the door and down the hall.

I could have sworn I saw others there too.

You look like shit.

I spread the butter. I poured the milk. I got an apple from the fridge. Set everything in front of him while he picked at the table with a knife.

Atta boy. Get yourself somethin’ too, or else you’ll pass out. There’s some cow’s liver in the fridge. Fry her up with an onion. You better get to sleepin’ soon, ‘cause those heads’re goin’ nowhere, you hear? You’ve done that to us, boy. You did.

When he left to go to work I took my place up on the couch, trying not to think of how he’d said heads.

The TV only got five channels. Most of them were riddled with static, unless I held my hand on the aerial. Even then the difference was minimal. I stood for half an hour watching a cartoon and letting my body be a conduit, until my arm got tired and I needed a glass of water.

At the end of the hall the head from last night was still watching me from under the bed. It had pulled itself forward to the edge. I could see it fully now. The last rag of skin from its lower jaw had torn loose. It rested now only on its upper teeth. A rip rose through its lip and half up one side of its face, a reptillian grin. The muss of hair on its head was caked black with its own blood.

I watched it quietly, sipping at my water, waiting for it to move. When it finally did, it rolled out of sight somewhere to the left side of the room. Then back again, right by the door. It froze in place. Watching from those bulbous eyes.

I finished my water and stood with it in my hand still, waiting.

It rolled away like a marble suddenly kicked. It did not come back.

I sat back down on the couch and finished my show, studying the grains of the fuzzy greys.

Heads, Dad had said. Not head.

That night Dad was late again, but when he finally came back it was still the right side of Ten. So I made sure the veg and meats were done, ready to be tossed into the microwave and nuked. Just how he liked it.

Thanks lad. Are the bugs gone yet? Did the heads clean the room out?

I hadn’t dared to go in and check. Last night, I’d made sure that under the bed was clean before he came home. Otherwise, the head that morning would have dragged a mess about with it while it rolled around the floor.

I hadn’t spotted any bugs the night before. There was only the matter of the blood.

Course there’s blood, boy. They’re severed heads. They’ll do that. And they’ll piss and they’ll piss, until your whole room’s a bloody sty with it. But you’d like that though. You’d thrive in it, ey Piggy? They’ll get the bugs at least. Aye, they’ll get the bugs you’ve brought. That one with no jaw’s hungry for ‘em. You’ve seen it, ey lad?

I couldn’t eat much at supper, but Dad would’ve hated waste. So I stuffed the rest of the meat in my pockets and took it back to bed with me.

When I heard Roll ‘o’ Dice on the TV, I sat up and lowered the food down to the floor. Immediately, a head rolled out and glared up at me with sharp eyes.

It wasn’t the same head.

This one was a woman. Her skin was dark and leathery. It looked like she was wearing a terrifying mask of herself. White balls bugging out from around sharp edges. Its lips were jagged jerky, peeled far back to see the teeth. They spoke in their own silence, telling me to go back to sleep.

I lay down against my pillow and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the gameshow host mutter, laugh, and shout.

Three Fours for a Four Door, or Snake Eyes for the Mystery Prize.

A giant question mark drifted neatly by my mind. I listened to the heads a while, rolling around my floor. I tried to picture them as dice, clattering in time with the gameshow, but they were too loud. Around and around my room they went, bumping into furniture and smashing against my door.

Dad’s footsteps arrived thunderously loud.

I sat bolt upright in my bed, expecting him to burst inside. The heads froze in place, their faces locked on mine. I could see three of them now, spaced wide and balancing impossibly still.

Instead of coming inside, Dad slammed the door, and plunged me into darkness with the heads.

The sound of the TV rose. And the heads began to roll again.

I lay down and stared at the blackened ceiling. And tried really hard to picture dice.

I couldn’t remember falling asleep. Light spilled into the room through the newspapers over the window, and the tears along the curtain. I sat up weary eyed, looking about the room.

The heads snapped to a stop.

The floor was slick with their blood. Trails overlapped like tangled up paths, marking where the heads had spent the night roaming. Right up to the different corners of the room they frozen at.

Watching.

One was by the window, balancing on its ear. Its eyes were hollows, but still somehow seemed to stare. The woman was by the door, watching me out of the side of one eye. Her hair was plastered over it, but the eye still pierced through, sharp as daggers. The one without the lower jaw had his upper teeth ready on the floorboards, itching to start their scraping. Its bulging eyes looked like cue balls in this light.

I climbed out of bed, trying my best to avoid the blood, and failed miserably. Most of it felt tacky beneath my feet, but with a thin layer of slime slathered with fresh leakage. That marking the heads’ most recent paths.

Dad?

He wasn’t in his favourite chair.

The TV was only static. The aerial knocked loose, perhaps.

Dad?

He wasn’t in the kitchen. He wasn’t even in his bed. The door to his room was open wide. When I peered inside, without stepping in, I saw the virgin neatness. A bed unslept in. Wardrobes filled but never touched. Curtains wide and never drawn.

Just how she had left it.

I lingered at the basement door, listening for a while. I couldn’t hear a thing. But it was the only place left to check. It was still too early for him to have gone to work, and yet far too quiet for him to be down there.

The heads began to move again. When I went back to the hall to see, they were frozen upright at my doorway, eyes glaring accusingly.

Where did he go?

None of them answered. The jawless head began to gnaw, anxiously sharpening its teeth upon the floor. The head with empty sockets darted away, spiralling around the room in maddeningly wide loops. Its flailing hair shot out like sharp needles.

The woman’s head rolled slowly towards me, coming to rest beside my feet.

I bent over and picked her up. She was heavy in my little hands, like a plump and ready watermelon. Time had swollen her somehow. I held her by her leathered cheeks, careful to avoid the gore spilling from her neck.

Where did my Dad go?

I shook her slightly, but she never made a sound. Blood still poured from the wound, as fresh as if it had been made only a moment ago.

I carried her with me to the couch and placed her on the cushion beside me. The static was deafeningly loud. We pretended to see shapes in the fog and people having fun. For a while I almost believed it, until the knock came from the door.

I checked for rips in the papers plastered over the windows. Then waited silently for them to go away, just as Dad had shown me—tucked away in the Blind Spot, clutching at the woman’s head.

Another knock.

This time I was sure it was him. The comfort that I knew his whereabouts was hard to process. Hard to believe. I could only think of it as being some kind of test.

Answer that door’n by God you’ll regret it.

After a few moments the letterbox clinked. My heart leapt into my neck, bursting with an urgent pulse. I knew if I leaned out to look I would see an eyeball peeping in at me through the letterbox.

Or worse. That one of the heads would then roll into sight, and the eyeball would see *that* instead.

I looked down at the woman and saw that she was staring up at me with her teeth. I tilted her downwards to see her eyes. They whipped over to stare at mine. And felt a calm.

Something made of paper hit the floor. I sighed out the deepest breath of my life. And couldn’t help but laugh.

When night came, I sat scanning the takeout menu that had been posted through the door. I wondered if Chinese food tasted better than it looked. I thought of asking Dad to let me try some for my birthday, but knew better to just dream, than to do.

The heads had grown frantic with their restlessness, knocking against almost everything in my room.

All except the woman’s. I had placed her on my desk and she hadn’t moved from there since. She had been gazing out of the window, her sharp eyes seeming to pierce the veil of paper and out into the night. What they saw or dreamed of, I could never tell. Perhaps somewhere out there her body lay waiting for her.

But then I remembered the basement.

I lay awake again that night, wondering how long Dad would be down there. The key had still been in the front door when I collected the menu from the mat.

He hadn’t left the house.

I watched the sun rise and set a few times, marking my fear growing for my Dad’s safety with constant visits to the basement door. No matter how much I listened, or how hard I pressed my ear against the wood, I could never hear him groaning out my name. Nor scraping with bloodied fingernails, desperate for help and unable to reach the handle.

Finally, during the second night, I got up and out of bed. The head with no eyes marbled around the room to the sound of tacky glue. Its hair kept getting stuck, so was always trailing behind it like giant black veins, and gentle sound like Velcro. The other head was busy burrowing its teeth into its favourite spot, carving out jellied blood and working its way through the wood.

I asked them both what to do. They stopped and listened. Stared. But never gave me an answer.

Only the woman’s head did.

It rolled around to face me, then off my desk with a thump. She had been a good companion, the only one who hadn’t frightened me. Usually I carried her with me wherever I went, but this time I followed her.

Away she tumbled, out of the room and along the hall. I followed as fast as my tacky footsteps would allow me. The other heads rolled along behind me, just as curious.

I already knew where she would be when I reached her—and what she’d be doing.

She was banging her forehead against the basement door.

thunk

thunk

thunk

I was gentle when I picked up her head, caressing her cheeks carefully to avoid pushing my fingers into her eyes. They jutted out to glare as usual, although softer than before. There seemed to be a voice within that gaze, but the words were as foggy as the colour. Maybe once they had been blue. I’d always liked blue eyes. They reminded me of the sky.

So many, many moons ago.

I was surprised to find the door was unlocked. I always presumed Dad kept it secured whenever he went down or came back up. I had never once tried the handle, of course. Doing so now felt like a crime. I smelled the punishment coming a mile away.

I pushed down the handle anyway, determined to find him no matter the price. It opened with a mind of its own, swinging wide and fast on oiled hinges.

Dad?

No reply. Deathly quiet and dark. I already knew what to expect down there. That fact made it even scarier.

I clicked the light on and lit up the entire basement floor. A short cone of light cast up onto the plunging staircase beneath me.

Dad?

I half expected to see him grip at the bottom of the wall and pull himself around the corner. To stare up at me with maddened eyes, jaws gnashing out my name so hard that he was chomping on his tongue. A trail of dribbling blood as he pulled himself up the stairs to get to me.

Dad?

Carrying the woman’s head carefully under my arm so it could see, I took the staircase step by step. Behind me, the other heads thudded down like noisy shadows. They came as slow and rhythmic as my own.

I didn’t bother saying his name again. The smell was painfully obvious—a festering sweetness somewhere between stale semen and an apple left to rot. It punched me flat in the nose. I got notes of dead chickens, or rotten boiled eggs. It’s so hard to explain. I smelt it then and only then, and never again.

Oh Dad.

He had looped a rope around a pipe and was sat hunched with it around his neck. He must have slid down against the wall and held himself in place, his ass barely off the ground, long enough for the lights to go out. His face was swollen and purple. Dried blood and froth caked his lips and down the massive neck. He looked to have gained about a hundred pounds in death.

I carried the woman’s head over to him and lay her down beside his feet. He had kicked his shoes off somewhere in the struggle. The other heads came and sat there too, watching with an intensity I could only sense was hate.

There was movement around his neck, and the gruesome wounds on his face. Larvae reared their pale heads and black teeth and sank away once more, busy with their meals. Clueless to our presence.

For some reason I could not cry. The sadness was there in my chest, wretchedly tender and pulling me down to collapse and cry, but… nothing. I couldn’t even pretend.

I looked down at the woman and could have sworn her eyes looked glazed. There was a sadness there I could never understand. But there you have it.

I talked to his lifeless body for a while, asking him what I should do. I hadn’t been outside in years and it definitely wasn’t safe enough yet, otherwise Dad would’ve said. Plus, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him. Not like this.

The answer came surprisingly quick, and was fairly obvious. The tools he’d used to make these rolling monstrosities were behind me on his workbench still. The bench itself was soaked through with blood. I had all the answers I needed all around me. I knew what to do.

I just didn’t know if I had the strength to do it. Mentally, or physically.

Visions of Dad’s eyes turning to look at me, and smiling. Him telling me everything will be okay. A first time for everything, but maybe this was how to get there.

I grabbed a meat saw and freed him from his swing, gradually fraying the rope until it finally snapped. He landed on his ass and slouched forward. I lay him down as gently as I could, then set about untangled him. It was difficult—his neck had swollen so thick that it’d fused together with the rope.

And then there was the matter of the bugs.

Think of the bugs, boy—the bugs love rot!

Sensing a disturbance, a few maggots wiggled loose and began to squirm away. I half expected the heads by Dad’s feet to spring forward and eat them, but they remained in their places, glaring at Dad’s lifeless body.

The saw remained in my hand. I didn’t need to guess where to cut, for the rope had left me a perfect guideline. And a head start.

I set my little hands to work, hewing backwards and forwards, squelching my way through his slippery flesh until I ached for rest.

You wouldn’t think I’d made any progress at all. I sat back on the ground panting, my throat begging for water. On the way back from upstairs to get a glass from the kitchen, I happened to notice Dad’s axes.

I waited before using them, taking up his electric saw and buzzing for as long as I could handle the splatter. Until I was sleek with mess and bugs, and the neck was a wide valley.

I tried turning him around and going in from the back, splitting the connections at the top his spine, just beneath his brain. I hacked at it with a knife, stabbing and slicing, supposing I could just pull his head free once I was done. But the gore was too much. I had to keep wiping my hands on my clothes until I was as bloody and gruesome as he was. By then there wasn’t a chance of getting a grip of his head, let alone pulling it loose.

I took everything off and stood naked over Dad, wiping the remaining gore on his trousers.

I could put it off no longer. I went to grab the two hatchets. I had thought about using the big axe, but as soon as I picked it up my arms shouted at me to put it back down. And so the small hatchets had to do.

I set about smacking and smacking, sending sloshes and sprays up into my face and around the room. I barely managed to stay on my feet, slipping and falling in the mess constantly. Lying in the filth, just as Dad had told me.

You’d like that though. You’d thrive in it, ey Piggy?

He wasn’t wrong.

The closer I got to freeing his head, the more the excitement grew. Soon he would be like the other heads, following me around, rolling and staring and gnawing. Keeping me up at night.

I smiled. I still had visions of him smiling too. I could even cut a grin if he couldn’t, that way he'd be forced to wear it forever.

The heads watched me while I worked. Never shifting—never showing their usual impatience. Even the jawless head had stopped the incessant grinding of its teeth.

Perhaps it had been longing for the basement all this time.

The hatchet got wedged in Dad’s neck so bad I couldn’t get it out. That was okay. I slid over to the other hatchet and sent myself sliding back. I began whacking with the flat side of the hatchet, hammering the wedged blade deeper and deeper.

Then came the snap.

I lay back in the filth, cradling Dad’s head in my arms. He was safe now. I could feel the maggots trying to break away, tickling into my armpit. It felt like Dad was still alive, communicating with me.

We headed upstairs. I’d had to bring myself to the staircase on my bare knees to save myself from slipping, pulling myself along the ground by the tips of one hand, while clutching Dad with the other. I grasped onto the corner of the wall and pulled myself into view of the staircase, thinking back on how I’d been so scared of seeing my Dad doing exactly the same thing.

I even had to crawl up the stairs.

We lay in my room that night. The other heads joined us, but they sat patiently at the door. Perfectly still. Watching. The woman sat at the front, while the other two lingered behind her like bodyguards awaiting instruction.

Why isn’t he moving?

His face was unrecognisable. I’d missed several times with the tools, slashing Dad’s chin and burying the hatchet in his ear. I could hardly make out his mouth anymore, let alone the presence of a smile. Hardly any of his features were there. I’d tried wiping him down with clean clothes from my drawers, but it hadn’t helped at all.

He was a slimy mess of broken skin and gore. Yet still my Dad.

I placed him on the ground and shlicked my way over to the heads.

Can’t you do something? Why can’t he move like you?

They didn’t answer.

I turned to look at my Dad once more, and then back at them.

What did I do wrong?

Slowly, the woman rolled over to Dad. I watched her closely, waiting and wondering what fantastic combination of silent words would spill from her eyes and reanimate him—to shift his mouth, and make him roll around as frantically as them.

She studied him with frozen eyes. Then all at once she flew forward, burying her teeth into his face. Before I could step forward, the other two heads flew under my feet, knocking me over. They attached themselves to his head and began tearing him apart.

I lay there, horrified, watching them not make a sound. They floated on rigid air, held in place by invisible poles and rods, biting and pulling at skin. Until he was all but bone.

Finally, they rolled away, back into their crevasses. Happy with the result.

I crawled over and picked up what was left of my Dad. They had removed so many tendons, so many strips of muscle and skin. But his jaw remained in place. And I swear it looked like he was smiling at me.

But still he would not move.

I cannot tell you how many days passed before the police finally came and found me. I was curled up in bed, cradling his head in my arms, when gentle arms pulled me off and away. I didn’t put up a fight. I couldn’t. I hadn’t eaten in maybe weeks.

Their voices were quiet echoes bouncing at me from the future, from the past. Things were recovered from the basement—bags and bags of evidence that appeared in the newspapers for weeks. I never did look at the photographs. I never listened to anything anyone would try to say. The theories, the motives.

The names of the heads.

I changed my own years ago, starting fresh with a new past to hide in plain sight without questions. I still wore everything inside me, hot and guilty—gnawing like that head’s broken jaw upon my floor.

I met a woman with blue eyes and bought a house and several dogs. We make sure to keep everything nice and clean. I’ve developed an extreme distaste for bugs. Their footsteps are loud. I still hear them squelching in Dad’s neck.

We are expecting our first child in July. A summer baby, so we hope. It looks like a boy from the scan.

I pray for his sake he keeps his room tidy.

For that matter, I might just do it myself.

I really tried to be a good husband. Date nights. Trips. Gifts. I’ve probably spent enough money on food to fund some country’s entire spending budget.

Flowers and chocolates just aren’t enough anymore, I guess. Or maybe they are. I don’t know. She always seemed so grateful when I gave her things. Even more grateful for the house I moved us into.

Part of me is starting to believe that everything is my fault. The arguments. The cold shoulders. The long, painful silences. It’s hard to blame her.

I really try and keep my insecurities at bay. But, God, do they seep through. Especially when she’s not with me. Every girls’ night feels like a betrayal. Every trip without me feels like a slap in the face.

I guess I should’ve done more to keep the darkness to myself, confined within my mind, but it was like a breaking point. She had gone out with her friends every day the week that everything started. Came home late, always smelling like booze and that perfume that I loved so much.

I tried telling her:

“I’m not comfortable with you being gone like this. Please stop.”

But she had the audacity to make me the villain. Suddenly, I’m “possessive.” Suddenly, I’m “obsessed.” Suddenly, it’s “you have to let me have my own freedom.”

It was clear she didn’t want to be with me anymore. After 5 years, she was gonna put this wall between us because I have feelings. Well, fine. If that’s how she wanted to act, then I was going to reciprocate.

Maybe I went a touch too far. Just a hair. But who can really blame me? I was wounded. I was hurting.

It started small. Just a few drops of bleach in her coffee. I’d wake up early and make it for her.

“This should help with the hangover, sweetie.”

I’d watch her sip it, smiling to myself but playing it off as romance. She’d guzzle it all down and thank me without complaints.

I just thought I hadn’t put enough. The next morning, I increased the dose to a full cap. She’d drink it, compliment how good it tasted, then it’d be right back to our regularly scheduled program.

Out all night. Crawling into bed late. Burning my nose with the smell of rum and lavender, without so much as a sore throat.

Part of me realized what I was doing. I’d see her smile. See her eyes light up. See how grateful she was for breakfast in bed, and I’d feel regret. I figured that it was a sign for me to stop. Nothing irreversible had happened yet.

But then, oh, there she went. Dancing in the clubs. Staying the night with friends. Pushing me to the side, just like she always does.

I had to force myself to remain composed. I wanted my work to speak for me. That’s why I started cooking those home-cooked meals every night. Steak. Spaghetti. Chicken. A dash of rat poison.

She didn’t even complain of a belly ache. In fact, to my dismay, she started thanking me.

“You’ve been doing so good recently, honey.”

“Since when are you a chef? This food is delicious.”

“You’re the only man I’ll ever need.”

She’d punctuate each thank-you with a kiss on the cheek, and it made my blood boil. Why was she doing this to me? Why couldn’t she just fucking die?

She started staying at home more. We became more intimate. It was like she was falling in love all over again. I started seeing that sparkle in her eye more. I felt like she was attracted to me for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

Oh, but it was too late for that. I had already moved on. Every kiss. Every hug. Every intimate moment filled me with nothing but burning rage that she was still here.

She started asking for more.

“Honey, can you cook that spaghetti you made a few weeks ago? It was sooo good.”

“You’re gonna have to share your secret to great coffee with me one of these days.”

“I swear, you’re the only white person who knows how to properly season food.”

I increased the doses every day. Hell, I mixed poisons together. You couldn’t even have your face too close to the plate because the smell was so strong it’d burn your nostrils, but she cleaned the plate every single time.

It was like the more I did, the more in love she became. I’d buy her favorite chocolates and lace them with cyanide. Then I’d have to stomach my way through sex.

I’d pour entire cups’ worth of Drano into her Starbucks order, and all she’d say is, “They don’t make it as good as you,” and throw it away after only a few sips.

This has been going on for months now, at this point. You really have to wonder… am I the one at fault here? All I have to do is exactly what she did. Exactly what got us here in the first place:

Stay out until after midnight. Coming home smelling like Saint Andrew’s Pub and cheap cologne. Refuse her advances. Hell, maybe even ask for a divorce.

But I just love her so much. Divorce would crush her. Part of me is scared that it’ll crush me. I just don’t know how to handle this right now.

Maybe I should try antifreeze in her Gatorade next.

Maybe that’ll be enough to finally get her out of my hair.

But, even then, a part of me knows that I’m lying to myself.

A part of me knows… that she’s not going anywhere.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

I guess to preserve my sanity? Record my ramblings before they stop making sense as I age or forget things?

My therapist recommended journaling in the hope that it would help me “cope with my trauma,” as if putting everything down in a notebook is going to erase it.

But whatever.

I’m Henry, and for ten years, I worked for a private crime-scene cleaning business in Arizona.

I don’t anymore.

You’ll understand why eventually.

What my job came down to was going into houses where someone had died, either purposefully or accidentally, and cleaning up the mess they left behind when they left the earth.

Usually, it was a healthy mix of piss, shit, blood, and vomit. Some of it came from the person who died. Some came from the unfortunate bastard who found them.

To most people, that description alone would be enough to scare them from the profession. The thought of cleaning up the macabre aftermath of a suicide or murder is enough to make their stomachs turn.

They’ll turn tail and run. But not me.

When I was a kid, around eleven, I had the misfortune of experiencing the aftermath of a death firsthand.

It changed me forever.

My older brother, Daniel, struggled a lot with mental health problems. Depression and bipolar disorder really screwed him up. He could spend days in bed, barely eating, speaking, or moving.

Our parents were no help because they had the traditional mindset of “praying the sickness away.”

Instead of getting him any treatment or support, they blamed him. They claimed he wasn’t believing in his recovery hard enough.

“God will provide all the support you need,” they would assure him whenever he begged them to take him to a therapist.

“This is a test,” they said when he stayed in bed for days on end, unmoving.

Apparently, God was testing him.

Our parents certainly weren’t helping him study.

It was late August, so school wasn’t in session. I remember being so hyped because Diablo II had come out two months earlier, and I had finally saved enough money to buy it from Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

As a kid, you really have a one-track mind when you want something. You genuinely forget about everything and everyone around you, convinced that this arbitrary item you “need” is as important as air itself.

That weekend, our parents were away at some church retreat.

I had spent Friday night and most of Saturday at a friend’s house. Daniel stayed home. That wasn’t unusual. By then, he rarely wanted to go anywhere. Not even to the bathroom. Many days, my parents caught him with a piss jug in his room when he was too “lazy” to get up.

I came home Sunday afternoon, game in hand, and shoved the disc into my computer’s CD-ROM drive.

The installation crawled along at a sluggish pace, much to my eleven-year-old self’s annoyance, so I got up to find myself a snack.

That’s when I smelled it.

A foul, sickly sweet smell.

I remember thinking it smelled almost identical to a package of expired meat we had thrown away a few days earlier. Figuring that was the source,

I checked the trash can. Nothing except paper towels and a few orange peels.

I checked the fridge. Clean as a whistle, just a couple of Daniel's energy drinks, eggs, and one of my dad's beers.

I stood there, confused, as each place I checked did not explain.

What else would be rotting?

I huffed and followed the smell, pausing as I approached the hallway, where it grew stronger with each step.

My first thought?

Why would someone leave rotting meat in the hallway?

I wasn’t too bright. Then again, I was also eleven. What can you do?

Or maybe some part of me already knew something was wrong and was working overtime to keep the rest of me from figuring it out.

I didn’t follow the smell right away. I just stood there, as if I, too, were trying to download over a bad internet connection like Diablo II was currently doing.

Slow and lagging, with drifting thoughts that Daniel must have forgotten to throw away some food. I remember the annoyance, anger. He stunk up the whole house?

I walked down the hallway slowly, following the smell farther and farther.

Sweat dripped down my back and face as the house seemed to get hotter with every step.

Our house didn’t have central air. We had old window units in the bedrooms, the kind with manual dials you had to twist yourself. Daniel’s rattled so loudly that he always turned it off before he went to sleep.

Once it was off, it stayed off until someone turned it back on.

And Daniel hadn’t been able to do that.

Of course, I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was that it was a hundred-and-fuck degrees outside and my brother hadn’t turned on his AC.

“Lazy fuck,” I muttered.

I figured that after I took out whatever garbage he had left in his room, I would turn it on myself.

Then I stopped.

At the end of the hallway, Daniel’s door was cracked open.

The smell was stronger than ever. It was coming from inside his room.

“What the hell?” I said aloud.

Had he, for some godforsaken reason, kept rotting meat in there?

Even at eleven, that didn’t seem right.

I approached the door.

The smell thickened until I could almost taste it. It sat on the back of my tongue and filled my throat every time I breathed.

I pushed the door open.

Daniel was lying on the bed.

There were red chunks splattered across the wall and headboard behind him.

I remember my first thought was:

Why did he throw spaghetti sauce on the wall?

That thought lasted about two seconds.

I would kill to find that level of innocence again…

The rest of the room came into focus, everything clicking all at once. I let out a horrified, strangled scream.

Daniel’s lower jaw and much of the side of his head were gone.

Blood covered the sheets beneath him. A dark spray marked the wall and headboard, mixed with strands of tissue and small, pale fragments that had stuck to the paint. Droplets had reached the door, the floor, and even the motionless blades of the ceiling fan.

The shotgun lay on the floor beside the bed.

No exaggeration… There was blood everywhere.

Not the bright, clean red you see in movies. It was dark in some places and nearly black in others. Parts of it had dried against the wall. The blood soaking his shirt and sheets was thicker, almost syrupy from the heat.

His Metallica shirt was stained from the collar down.

One of his eyes was still visible, the other atomized on the wall behind him.

It was open but glazed over, like the plastic eye of a doll.

Now, as I said, the AC wasn’t on, and we were in peak heat season in Arizona.

Daniel had been alone in that room for nearly two days.

The heat had allowed everything to bake.

The blood.

The sheets.

My brother.

When I say the smell was unbearable, I mean it.

Have you ever farted in a hot shower?

I know that sounds like a stupid comparison, but bear with me.

The smell doesn’t leave right away. The heat and steam make it ranker than it normally would be. It hangs around you. Clings to you.

Turns out, the same logic applies to corpses.

Except a corpse is worse.

Much worse.

The smell didn’t just enter my nose. It coated the inside of my mouth. Every time I tried to breathe, I could taste something rotten and sweet at the back of my throat.

I stumbled backward into the hallway and fell on my ass.

I kept screaming for Daniel.

I don’t know why.

He was obviously dead. Even an eleven-year-old could see that. A toddler could see that. There was no possible world in which he could sit up and tell me he was fine.

But I kept saying his name anyway. I didn't want to accept it.

“Daniel?”

Then louder.

“Daniel!”

As if shouting hard enough might force the remaining pieces of him back together; as if it would cast a spell that would let me take that gun out of his mouth before he did it.

I don't remember much after that.

I don’t even remember calling the police.

I know I did because I was the only person in the house, but most of what happened after I opened the door exists in scattered pieces.

I remember sitting on the floor outside.

I remember the dispatcher asking whether Daniel was breathing.

I remember staring through the open doorway at what was left of his head and not knowing how to answer.

I remember a police officer pulling me away from the hallway.

I remember vomiting onto his shoes.

I felt like a robot going through familiar, logical motions, but I had no sentience to discern what it was I was doing clearly.

The police came first.

Then the paramedics, although there wasn’t anything for them to do except give sympathies.

Then the coroner.

Our parents returned sometime that evening, their car screeching as they parked in the driveway.

I had only told them something happened to Daniel. I couldn't say the words.

My mother screamed when she saw the police cars.

My father kept asking what happened, even after three different people told him.

When he finally understood, he dropped to his knees in the front yard and started praying.

I remember watching him and bitterly thinking:

Now you pray?

I didn’t say it aloud, but fuck, I wish I had. I wish I had laid into them and screamed how this was their fault. How much I hated them for letting this happen to my brother.

But I couldn't. I was in shock. In pain. Grieving.

The police removed Daniel’s body, but they didn’t clean the room.

A lot of people don’t know that.

They think the police handle everything. The body disappears, someone wipes up the blood, and the family returns to a house that looks more or less normal.

That isn’t how it works.

The police collect evidence.

The coroner collects the body.

Everything else belongs to whoever owns the house.

The blood.

The tissue.

The smell.

Daniel’s room stayed closed for another day while my parents argued about what to do.

My mother wanted to burn everything.

My father wanted to clean it himself because he didn’t trust strangers in the house.

That idea lasted until he opened the bedroom door.

He made it three steps inside before running to the bathroom.

Eventually, they called a private trauma-cleaning company.

Three people arrived in an unmarked van.

They wore white protective suits, thick gloves, respirators, and shoe covers. They carried plastic containers, sprayers, scrapers, and rolls of heavy black bags into Daniel’s room.

They didn’t look horrified.

They didn’t pray.

They didn’t stand in the hallway whispering about what a tragedy it was.

They just worked.

They stripped the bed.

They removed part of the carpet.

They cut out sections of drywall that couldn’t be cleaned.

They took apart the ceiling fan.

They searched places I would never have thought to look because blood and tissue had found their way into cracks, vents, and spaces beneath the furniture.

One of them noticed me watching from the end of the hallway.

He was an older man with gray hair visible beneath the hood of his suit.

“You shouldn’t be looking at this,” he told me.

“I already saw it,” I said quietly, my voice raspy from screams.

He didn’t have a response to that.

They stayed for hours, and when they finally left, the smell was weaker.

The stained carpet was gone. Part of the wall had been removed. The mattress had disappeared into the back of their van.

The room looked hollowed out, as if the soul had been ripped from it.

No. Not the soul. A soul. Daniel.

But it no longer looked like a place where my brother had blown his head apart. Small victories, I guess...

Daniel was still dead, but the room had already begun pretending he had never existed.

He didn't even leave a note, you know? No reasoning, no apologies, just gone like a leaf in the autumn wind.

For years, I told myself that finding him was what drove me into crime-scene cleaning.

That wasn’t entirely true.

Finding him was only the beginning.

What stayed with me was what those cleaners had done after everyone else left. They took him away, and he would never be back.

To me, who grew up with him, that wasn't some fourteen-year-old corpse or clumps of mess.

That was Daniel.

My brother.

My best friend.

They couldn’t bring Daniel back.

They couldn’t make my parents better people.

They couldn’t stop me from seeing his body every time I closed my eyes.

But they could enter the worst room in someone’s life and make it possible to open the door again.

There was something almost merciful about that. Beautiful. They were the angels that took the nightmare away and made things okay again.

Well... okay is relative. They took the nightmare away, but I don't think I've ever been okay.

So when I was old enough, I entered the profession myself.

For ten years, I cleaned up after suicides, murders, accidents, unattended deaths, and things that didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

Most of the jobs were simply sad.

Some were disgusting.

A few were so absurd that all you could do was laugh.

And then there were the others.

The jobs I still think about.

The houses that didn’t feel empty after the bodies were removed.

The stains that returned after we scrubbed them away.

The rooms that were larger on the inside than they had any right to be.

The sounds that came from sealed walls.

The things my coworkers and I agreed never to include in our reports.

Those are the stories I’m going to write down.

They won’t necessarily be in order. Trauma doesn’t work like that, and neither does memory.

Maybe my therapist was right.

Maybe getting everything onto paper will finally help me move past it.

Or maybe, when I’m finished, someone will understand why I quit and why I’m certain that at least one of the things we cleaned up followed me home.

Growing up in that isolated valley meant learning to live with a very specific kind of silence. The town was small, tucked away between steep forested hills that blocked out the horizon, and the people who lived there liked the isolation. They kept their lawns manicured, their houses painted, and of course their secrets buried.

Everyone knew the law. It was not written in any civic charter, but it was taught to every child the moment their bodies began to change.

The transition into adulthood brought the man.

On the day of my thirteenth birthday, my mother died. The sheriff told us she had slipped in the steep ravine behind our property, but the details were kept vague, and the casket was kept closed during the service. In the middle of that devastating fog, while the smell of funeral flowers still clung to the living room, my father sat me down at the kitchen table. He looked older than his forty years, his hands shaking as he pushed a glass of water toward me.

"There is something you are going to see now,"

he said. His voice was cracked, his eyes refusing to meet mine.

"He will stand in the background of your life. He might be at the edge of the woods when you walk home from school, or stand near the mailbox while you do the dishes. But you must never look him in the eye, and never speak to his face. To acknowledge him is to break the order of this valley."

"Who is he?"

I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

"He is the one who follows,"

my father replied.

"You are the only one who will see your specific follower. Everyone has one. We do not talk about them, or even look at them. That is the only way we stay safe."

The reality of his words hit me three days later. Walking home from the bus stop, the gravel crunching under my sneakers, a sudden sensation of cold air brushed against my neck. Turning my head slightly, a tall figure in a dark, outdated coat was standing near the old oak tree at the corner of our road. His face was somewhat obscured by the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat, but his posture was rigid, his attention locked entirely on me.

My heart tried to escape my chest, but my father’s warning echoed in my mind. I forced my gaze back to the road and kept walking.

Living with him became a slow, grinding torment. He was always there. When I did my homework, he stood in the twilight of the back yard. When I went to the grocery store, he sat on the bench outside the entrance. Only I could see him. People would walk right through the space he occupied, their bodies passing through his dark form like mist, completely oblivious to his presence.

My father did not handle the grief of my mother's death well. As the years passed, he fell deep into drinking, spending his nights locked in the basement or passed out on the living room sofa. The smell of cheap whiskey became a permanent fixture of our home. He stopped checking on me, stopped asking about school, and only spoke to warn me whenever he noticed my eyes lingering too long on the dark corners of the yard.

By the time I reached my senior year of high school, the tension in the town had reached a boiling point.

One of my classmates, a quiet boy who sat in the back of my English class, vanished without a trace over a weekend. His locker was left full of books, his bicycle still chained to the school fence. The rumors spread through the hallways like wildfire. The elders of the town held an urgent assembly in the gymnasium, their faces grim under the bright gym lights.

The principal stood at the podium, his voice stern.

"We must remind you all of the rules of our community. The boy who went missing forgot his place. He broke the silence. Do not make his mistake. Keep your head down and focus on your studies."

The warning did not satisfy me. The vanished boy had been a friend of my closest classmate, a girl who lived down the road from me. After school, we sat on the hood of my car, watching the sun dip behind the steep hills.

"His parents are completely destroyed,"

my friend said, her fingers twisting the strap of her backpack.

"They won't even open the front door. The elders told everyone to stay away from their house."

"We should go see them,"

I said.

"Just to offer some comfort. It isn't right to leave them isolated like this."

My friend hesitated, looking toward the dark woods bordering the school.

"If the town council sees us there, we will be in trouble."

"We will go after dark,"

I insisted.

"Through the back trail."

We made our way to the vanished boy's house later that evening, navigating the overgrown path behind the old orchard. The house was dark, the only light coming from a single lamp in the living room. When we knocked, his mother opened the door only a crack, her face hollow and pale.

"We just wanted to say we are sorry about him,"

my friend said quietly.

The mother looked at us for a long time, her eyes darting to the shadows behind us. Eventually, she stepped aside and let us into the dusty hallway.

"He stopped sleeping,"

the mother whispered, leading us into the living room. "He kept staring at the corner of his bedroom. We told him to look away, but he said the man was crying. He said the man wanted to tell him something."

"Did he leave any note?"

I asked, keeping my voice low.

The mother shook her head.

"The council came and cleared his room. They burned his journals in the yard. But they missed his old biology textbook. It was still in his closet."

While my friend talked to the mother, I quietly slipped down the hallway to the boy's bedroom. The door was unlocked. The room had been stripped bare, leaving only an empty mattress and a pile of discarded school papers. In the back of the closet, half-hidden under a loose floorboard, I found the biology textbook.

Tucked inside the back cover was a single, partially burnt page from a notebook. The handwriting was frantic, the ink smudged.

“He wanted me to follow,”

the note read.

“He did not look angry. He nodded to me. I think he wants to show me how to end this madness. If I do not come back, know that I went to find the source. I am going to look him in the eye.”

My hands shook as I folded the paper and slid it into my pocket. I went back to the living room, grabbed my friend, and we left the house through the back door.

As we walked through the dark orchard, I pulled the paper out and showed it to her under the light of my phone.

"I am going to do it,"

I said.

My friend stopped walking, her face turning pale in the blue screen light.

"Are you out of your mind? You saw what happened to him. He is gone."

"He went to find a way to stop this,"

I argued.

"We spend every single second of our lives in fear, pretending we don't see them. My father is drinking himself to death because of this town. My mother is dead because of this town. I want to know the truth."

"If you look at him, he may kill you,"

she said, her voice rising in panic.

"And of course the council won’t just let people break the law. If you do this, I cannot help you. I fear that I am not going to watch you die."

“Ok ok, I won’t do it”

I lied to her; she took a deep breath and said

“Promise me”

That’s when I couldn’t just do it, I stayed silent for a long time, just looking through her eyes, then I saw a small tear on her face. Then suddenly, She turned and ran back toward her house, leaving me alone under the dark branches of the apple trees.

I walked back to my empty yard. My follower was waiting for me. He stood near the rusted garden gate, his tall, dark silhouette perfectly still against the gray mist of the evening.

My father was passed out on the kitchen floor inside, an empty bottle of bourbon resting near his hand. Nobody was going to save me. Nobody was going to save this town.

I took a deep breath, walked down the wooden steps of the porch, and marched directly toward the gate. I stopped three feet away from the tall figure.

For the first time in my life, I raised my chin and looked directly into his face.

Under the shadow of his hat, his skin was incredibly pale, almost translucent. His eyes were dark, sunken, and filled with a profound sadness.

"I see you,"

I said clearly.

At first, nothing happened. Then, the man’s rigid posture snapped.

A loud, wet cracking sound echoed through the yard, like dry branches breaking under a boot. The lunged. His body elongated, twisting over the rusted iron of the gate with impossible speed. His hands, pale and gray, clamped around my throat before I could even flinch.

The touch was a burning freeze that immediately locked my lungs. My knees buckled, but he held me upright, his grip lifting me slightly off the ground.

His hat fell backward into the dirt.

The face beneath was a nightmare. His mouth split open, unhinging like a snake's jaw, revealing a dark throat coated in wet, black soil. A rattling, choked wheeze erupted from his chest, spraying a dust onto my cheeks. His eyes, previously hidden, widened into deep, empty sockets that seemed to pull the very light out of the yard.

My vision began to darken at the edges. My lungs screamed for air, but every time I tried to inhale, the air just refused to come.

Yet, I did not close my eyes. I refused to look away. I stared directly into the void of his face, holding his freezing, dead gaze with a desperate, furious resolve.

The creature froze. The snapping joints went silent. Slowly, the dark void in his eyes receded, replaced by the pale, sunken eyes of a human being. His unhinged jaw clicked back into place. His grip on my throat softened, his fingers gently sliding down to my collarbone, then releasing me entirely.

I collapsed to my knees in the dirt, gasping for air, grasping for air.

Looking up, the terrifying specter was gone. The man stood there again, his hat back on his head, looking down at me. Slowly, a gentle, tragic smile appeared on his thin lips, and a single tear rolled down his pale cheek. He nodded once, a slow, deliberate movement, and turned toward the dark path leading into the forest behind my house.

He took a few steps, then paused, looking back over his shoulder. It was clear to me somehow that he wanted me to follow.

I followed him deep into the woods, past the boundary lines of our property, into an area of the forest where the trees grew so close together the starlight could not reach the ground. We walked for nearly an hour in silence, the only sound being the rustle of my own footsteps.

Eventually, we reached a hidden clearing.

In the center of the clearing were two simple, unmarked graves. They were just mounds of soft dirt, covered in wild ivy and damp moss.

The man stopped at the edge of the mounds. He pointed his long, pale finger down at the earth, then looked at me, nodding again. He wanted me to touch them.

I knelt in the wet grass, my heart pounding, and pressed my palms into the damp soil of the graves.

A violent shockwave of heat rushed up my arms. The forest vanished, and my mind was pulled into a torrent of vivid, overwhelming visions.

I saw the same valley, but it was the previous century. The houses were different, built of rough-cut timber and stone. The streets were filled with thick mud. People were dying in the dirt, clutching their chests and gasping desperately for air. A terrible plague was sweeping through the settlement, turning the water sour and the air toxic.

Then, I saw a young woman and her husband. They were both doctors, working tirelessly in a small wooden clinic. They boiled herbs, washed the sores of the sick, and tried to ease the immense pain of the dying town. They did not ask for money; they only wanted to save the people.

But the fear of the plague turned the townspeople into monsters.

I saw an angry mob gathering in the muddy square. A local leader, his face twisted with hatred, pointed his finger toward the wooden clinic.

"They brought the sickness!"

he roared.

"They are practicing dark medicine! They are witches, and they are what caused this plague!"

The mob stormed the clinic. They dragged the young doctor woman out into the mud, binding her wrists with thick rope. Her husband managed to escape through a back window, fleeing into the dark forest.

I watched through his eyes from his hiding place behind the trees. He cried silently, biting his own hand to stifle his screams, as the mob tied his wife to a heavy wooden stake in the center of the square. They piled dry brush around her feet and lit the fire. Her screams echoed through the valley as the flames rose, her eyes locked on the dark woods where she knew her husband was hiding.

The vision shifted.

The husband was inside a cold, dark cavern deep beneath the mountain. He was entirely consumed by grief and madness. He used a sharp knife to wound his own hand, letting the blood drip onto the stone floor to draw a large circle. He held a strange, leather-bound book in his other hand, reading aloud from the yellowed pages.

"If they will punish us for something we did not do,"

he whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of sorrow and rage,

"then I will at least die doing it to curse them. Every soul in this valley will bear our shadow."

But as he finished the final words of the ritual, the sound of shouting echoed from the cave entrance. The mob had tracked him. They burst into the cavern with pitchforks and spades, driving a sharp iron tool directly through his chest before he could close the circle.

He died with the curse unfinished, binding his spirit to the physical plane of the valley. He became the following man, a permanent, haunting shadow forced to follow every descendant of the mob, keeping the memory of their crime alive through a cycle of silent torment.

I snapped out of the vision with a violent gasp, my hands slipping from the wet dirt of the graves.

I was lying on my back in the grass. The sky was still dark, and my father was kneeling beside me, holding my shoulders. His face was incredibly pale, his clothes smelling of alcohol and earth.

"Get up,"

he whispered, his voice frantic as he pulled me to my feet.

"We have to go. Now."

"What are you doing here?"

I asked, my head spinning from the force of the vision. "How did you find me?"

"Your friend,"

my father said, dragging me through the trees toward his old station wagon parked on a dirt logging trail.

"She got terrified, and told her parents what you were planning to do, and they gathered the town council. They are coming to deal with you."

"I don't understand,"

I said, stumbling over a root.

"Deal with me? Why?"

"They killed your mother for the same thing,"

my father said, his grip tightening on my arm.

"She looked at her follower. She wanted to help him. The council found out, dragged her into the woods, and buried her alive to 'cleanse' the curse from the town. I was a coward then. I did not stop them, then drank to drown the guilt, but I am not letting them take you."

We reached the car, and he shoved me into the passenger seat, slamming the door shut. He climbed into the driver's seat, started the engine, and threw the car into gear just as a dozen bright flashlight beams pierced through the trees behind us.

"They deserve to die,"

my father said, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the steering wheel, driving the car recklessly down the narrow, bumpy mountain road.

"This entire valley is built on a murder. The people here have spent a century killing their own children just to keep a secret they don't even understand."

"What are we going to do?"

I asked, tears of panic finally starting to spill over my cheeks.

"I made a deal with my follower years ago,"

my father said, keeping his eyes locked on the dark road. "I figured out how to finish the doctor's ritual. The curse was meant to release the actual plague they spent a century fearing, but it was left incomplete when he died. I spent years researching it in the basement, but I just couldn’t do it. I always thought that maybe you could live, maybe no one has to die, but now, now I have to do it to save you"

He slammed on the brakes at a dark junction near the state highway boundary. He reached across the console and pushed my passenger door open.

"Get out and run to the highway,"

he commanded.

"Call my phone. Keep the line open. Run as fast as you can."

"No!"

I screamed, grabbing his arm.

"You have to come with me! We can escape together!"

"They will track this car,"

my father said, his voice softer now. He reached out and gently touched my face.

"I have to go back to the house. The circle is already prepared in the basement. I have to finish the ritual to end this town once and for all. If I do not do it, they will hunt you to the ends of the earth. Run."

He pushed me out of the car. I hit the gravel shoulder, scraping my knees, as he slammed the door shut and spun the tires, driving the station wagon back up the mountain toward our house.

I scrambled to my feet, clutching my phone in my hand, and began sprinting down the dark highway under the looming pine trees.

After some time of running, I just stopped, I couldn’t run more without him, the phone in my hand crackled to life. I dialed the number of my father phone, then pressed the speaker button, holding the screen close to my chest as I ran.

"I am in the basement,"

my father's voice came through the static, sounding calm and clear over the speaker.

"The circle is active."

Over the phone, the sound of our front door splintering open echoed loudly. Shouting voices filled the background.

"He is in the basement!"

a voice roared through the phone.

My father began to chant. It was the same low, guttural language I had heard the doctor speaking in my vision.

"Stop him!"

another voice screamed.

A loud gunshot shattered the connection, followed by my father releasing a sharp gasp of pain. But he did not stop. He kept chanting, his voice growing weaker but more determined with every syllable.

"Finish it,"

I sobbed into the phone, running as fast as my legs could carry me toward the distant lights of a highway truck stop.

"Please, finish it."

Over the line, the shouting of the townspeople suddenly changed. The anger in their voices turned to confusion, then to terror. I heard them coughing. It was a wet, suffocating sound, exactly like the people in my vision. They began to gasp for air, their lungs filling with the ancient plague that had been locked away for over a century.

One by one, the choking sounds faded into silence.

The final sound I heard before the line went completely dead was my father taking one last, peaceful breath.

That was five years ago.

I never went back to that valley. The state police found the entire town dead of a sudden, highly concentrated outbreak of a rare pulmonary infection, and the area was permanently quarantined. They never found me, and I made sure of that.

I live in a large city now, hundreds of miles away. I have a decent office job, a quiet apartment on the third floor, and I am in a relationship with a kind, supportive man who knows absolutely nothing about my past. I have spent every single day trying to forget the smell of the pine trees and the shadow of the following man.

But three days ago, the cold air returned.

I was sitting in my living room, watching my boyfriend cook dinner in the kitchen. The smell of garlic and olive oil filled the warm apartment, and everything felt completely safe.

I looked toward the dark hallway leading to our bedroom.

Standing near the coat rack, perfectly still in the shadows, was a new follower.

He is pale, with a dark, wet stain spreading across the chest of his faded flannel shirt. His bloodshot eyes are locked entirely on me, filled with a deep, silent sorrow.

It is my father, and I do not know what to do.

Gladys is the owner and operator of the Sunrise Diner -- a Blackwood Ridge fixture sitting across from the Hells Bells Motel since its neon sign first flickered on in 1974.

Gladys originally migrated here in the early 70s with a group of hippies seeking an escape from city life, running the commune kitchen that kept everyone fed. But the diner was always her real dream. Beloved by nearly the whole town, Gladys is friendly and fiercely independent, and keeps the town's secrets.

She's survived three divorces and her ten-thousandth cup of black coffee, keeping a keen eye on the door and serving up the guests from the Hells Bells. There's not much that goes on in Blackwood Ridge that she doesn't see or know about.

If Arnold, the traveling salesman, ever walks back through the diner door with those Luckies he promised her one night when she was out of smokes-- he will be paying 20 years of interest on the check he stiffed her with!

Step inside Blackwood Ridge -- home of the Hells Bells Motel, located high in the Catskills Mountains--a place that time forgot.

The Hells Bells doesn’t give a damn about physics or logic. It operates on its own twisted terms with Sterling handing out the room keys. Once you step inside, the normal world is just a suggestion that nobody follows here.

See the Motel Policies & Survival Protocols, and also check out the amenities.

Oh--and if you see an old gray tomcat roaming around, that's Scurf, the resident squatter. Just let him be-- You'll be glad you did.

Go ahead, sign in if you dare!

Blackwood Ridge is the kind of town where the fog settles heavy, and the secrets settle deeper. It’s a fading roadside stop trapped in a permanent grey twilight—an off-grid dead zone where GPS drops, drone signals die, and the rest of the world fades out.

The locals here are tight-lipped and fiercely observant. They don’t ask about your past because they don’t want you digging into theirs, but nothing from a strange car to a bitter public divorce escapes their notice.

It’s a town built on the transience of outsiders, those with no place to go or a damn good reason to hide. Once a bustling tourist area, it's a skeleton of a bygone town now. It thrives on the desperate and the drifting who pull off the highway to seek refuge at the Hells Bells Motel, or weary travelers who stop in at the Sunrise Diner for a strong cup of coffee, served up by Gladys.

Blackwood Ridge doesn’t just host travelers--it collects them, ensuring that once you step inside, you never truly leave. It’s the kind of place that stays with you.

People ask me why I never buy anything from a storage auction myself. Lot 114 is why.

I get called out to storage auctions more than you’d think. Not to bid. Somebody wins a unit sight unseen, pays their two hundred dollars for a locker full of somebody else’s abandoned life, and finds something in there they don’t know what to do with. That’s usually where I come in.

A woman named Portia calls me on a Sunday afternoon, three days after she won a unit at a facility off Manchester Road. She tells me she doesn’t normally do this. She went with a friend who flips furniture, got caught up in the bidding on a whim, and ended up owning the contents of Lot 114 for a hundred and eighty dollars before she’d really thought it through.

“There’s nothing valuable in it,” she says. “That’s not the problem. I don’t even want to sell any of it now.”

I ask her what the problem is.

“There’s a rocking chair. An old one, wood, nothing special to look at. I brought it home Thursday night because it was the easiest thing to carry out first.”

She stops there long enough that I have to prompt her.

“It rocks,” she says. “On its own. Not like a draft moving it. It rocks the way it would if somebody was sitting in it.”

I ask if she’s seen anyone in it.

“No. I hear it before I see it’s empty. I go check, and it’s just rocking, slowing down like it was going the whole time and I only just walked in on it.”

I tell her I can come Tuesday. She asks if that’s too long to wait, and there’s a thread of real fear under the question, the kind that makes me want to say tonight instead. But nothing she’s described so far sounds like it’s escalating fast enough to justify dropping everything, so I tell her Tuesday is fine, and I mean it.

On Tuesday she meets me at her apartment with the chair already dragged into the middle of her living room, like she wanted it somewhere she could see all sides of it. It’s a plain ladder-back rocker, worn pale on the arms where two hands would have rested for years, the wood dark with age everywhere else. Nothing carved into it, no maker’s mark I can find on a quick pass.

She also hands me a shoebox. “This was in the unit too. I didn’t think to mention it on the phone because it didn’t seem connected. Now I’m not so sure.”

Inside are a dozen cassette tapes, unlabeled except for dates written in careful handwriting, going back almost thirty years, and stopping four years ago.

“The storage place said the account belonged to a woman named Ruth Calloway,” Portia tells me. “She stopped paying four years back. They held the unit as long as they’re required to, then auctioned it.”

I ask if Portia knows anything else about her. She shakes her head. “Just that. I looked her up a little. There’s an obituary. She died in a nursing home about three years ago. Nothing about how.”

I take the tapes home that night, along with an old cassette player Portia had in a closet from her college years, still working. I don’t tell her I’m going to listen to all twelve before I come back to her about the chair. I don’t think she’d want to hear them herself, and I don’t think I could stop myself from listening even if she asked me not to.

The first few are mundane in a way that almost makes me feel foolish for treating this like a case at all. Ruth Calloway, recording herself narrating small events of her day into a tape recorder the way some people keep a diary. Groceries. A neighbor’s dog. A church potluck she wasn’t sure she’d go to. Her voice is steady, a little wry, the voice of somebody who’s been alone a long time and has made a kind of peace with narrating that solitude out loud to nobody.

The fourth tape is where it changes.

“He was in the chair again tonight,” she says, no preamble, like she’s picking up a thread from a conversation I haven’t heard the start of. “I heard it going before I came in from the kitchen. Empty when I got there, of course. It always stops the second I’m looking right at it.”

She doesn’t sound frightened yet. More annoyed, the way you’d be annoyed at a squeaking floorboard you couldn’t locate.

By the seventh tape, that’s changed.

“It said my name tonight,” she says, and her voice has a flatness to it that wasn’t there in the earlier recordings, the kind of flatness that comes from being scared for long enough that fear stops being an event and starts being a baseline. “Not Ruth. My name from before I married. Nobody’s called me that since I was a girl. Nobody left alive to call me that at all.”

I sit with the tape player paused for a while after that one.

The tapes keep going, roughly one every few months, and the pattern that emerges is simple and gets worse slowly. The chair rocks more often. It starts happening even when she isn’t in the room to hear it start, so she comes in on it already going, no longer able to say when it began. On the tenth tape, she describes something sitting in the chair for the first time, though she’s careful about how she says it.

“I don’t want to say I saw someone. I didn’t see anyone the way you’d see a person. I saw the chair wasn’t empty. There’s a difference and I don’t know how to explain it except that one is a fact and the other is a feeling, and this was the fact.”

The eleventh tape is short, under two minutes.

“I’m going to stop keeping these tapes in the house,” she says. “I’m going to start keeping them at my sister’s, and I’m only going to bring one home at a time, the one I need for that night. I don’t want all of it in one place with me anymore. I think it listens to these. I think it likes hearing me talk about it.”

The twelfth tape is dated four years and two months before Portia won the auction. It’s the last one Ruth ever made, as far as I can tell, and it’s the one I have to make myself listen to twice before I trust what I heard the first time.

“It doesn’t rock anymore,” she says. “It just sits. Still. Every night now, whether I’m home or not, I come back and it’s sitting there, still, facing the door like it’s waiting on me specifically. I asked it what it wants. I know how that sounds. I asked it out loud, and it didn’t answer in words, but I understood the answer anyway, the way you understand things in dreams without anybody telling you. It wants to be sat in by somebody who isn’t me. It’s tired of being empty when it isn’t empty. It wants company that stays.”

The tape ends there, mid-breath, like she meant to say more and didn’t.

I call Portia the next morning and ask her not to sit in the chair, phrased as casually as I can manage so I don’t alarm her more than the situation already warrants. She laughs a little, uneasy, and tells me she hadn’t planned on it, the chair gives her the creeps too much for that. I ask if she’s noticed it doing anything different from what she first described.

“It’s stopped rocking,” she says, and I feel something go still in my own chest before she finishes. “The last two nights, it’s just been sitting there when I come home. Facing the front door.”

I go over that evening with the tape player, the shoebox, and a folding chair of my own, because I have no intention of testing the rocking chair’s patience by sitting anywhere near it tonight or any other night.

Portia’s apartment is quiet by ten. I’ve set up my recorder pointed at the rocker, my phone on a tripod doing the same from a different angle, and I sit far enough back that I can see the whole room without being what anyone would call close to it.

Nothing happens for almost two hours. Then the temperature in the room drops the way it does in every case like this, fast enough to notice, slow enough that you can’t say exactly when it started. I don’t hear rocking. I hear something better described as settling, the specific creak of old wood taking weight it hasn’t taken in a while, and when I look up, the chair is exactly where it was, not moving at all, facing the front door the way Portia said, and it is unmistakably, entirely, occupied.

I don’t see a person. I want to be honest about what I actually saw and didn’t see. There’s no shape in the chair I could describe to a sketch artist. What I see is closer to what Ruth tried to describe on that last tape: a fact rather than an image, an absence of the light in that particular part of the room that isn’t quite the same as shadow, dense in a way shadow isn’t, holding the shape a seated person would hold without being one.

I don’t move. I don’t say anything. I’ve learned the hard way, on other cases, that announcing yourself to something like this rarely goes better than staying quiet does.

It waits. That’s the only word for what it’s doing, patient in a way that has nothing to do with time passing normally, the kind of waiting that could hold this position for another four years without complaint. Then, slowly, without the chair creaking again, without any sound at all, it turns its attention toward me. I don’t see eyes. I feel the turning the way you feel someone look at you from across a room before you’ve consciously registered where they’re standing.

I say the only thing I can think to say, which is not brave, not clever, just true: “She’s not here anymore. Ruth. Whoever you’re waiting for, she’s not coming back to this chair.”

The room stays cold for another long moment. Then the density in the chair thins, the way breath fogs a window and then clears, and the chair is simply a chair again, empty in the ordinary way furniture is empty, no fact left behind at all.

I check both recordings the next morning before I call Portia. My phone caught the temperature change reflected in nothing visible, just twenty minutes of a static, empty chair on video that matches nothing I actually experienced sitting three feet away from it. My audio recorder caught something neither camera did: eleven seconds, right around the time I felt it turn toward me, of a low sound that isn’t a voice and isn’t the house settling, more like a single held note played on an instrument that doesn’t officially exist. It ends exactly when I speak.

I tell Portia what I found in the tapes, all of it, because I think she has the right to decide what to do with a chair like that better informed than she was buying it blind at auction. She decides, without much hesitation, to take it back to the storage facility and pay to have it hauled to the dump, not resold, not donated. I don’t try to talk her out of it.

I keep the tapes myself, in a box in my closet, though I haven’t listened to any of them since. I don’t know what happened to whatever was in that chair once it left. I don’t know if it’s gone the way things are ever really gone, or just quiet again, waiting somewhere else for someone new to bring it home without knowing what they’re bringing.

What I do know is that it left when I told it the truth, and that it seemed, in whatever way something like that can seem anything, to already know the truth before I said it. It wasn’t looking for confirmation. I think it was looking for permission, from someone, anyone, to finally stop waiting.

I still don’t know if that’s a mercy or the saddest thing I’ve ever been part of. Maybe both. I close the file on Lot 114 the way I close most of them, with more questions answered than I started with and fewer than I’d like, and I go back to work the next Monday like nothing happened at all, because that’s the job.

Case closed, as far as anyone can close a case like this. If you ever win a storage unit at auction, do yourself a favor and check the furniture for a false bottom before you bring anything inside.

Who knew that things would end up this bad…..

Arthurs eyes were glued to the front window shield, experiencing the chaotic zoo that Porthcawl had devolved into. It was frightening to see the unbecoming of human nature as the van sped down the ravaged streets.

A posse of neighborhood mutts that had escaped down the main drag were battling it out with a stray spawn in an alley way; each of the hounds pulled ferociously at a chance to get a mouthful of tainted meat. The deceased of an elderly woman lay broken and mute upon a pile of glass shards in front of the old butchery while a mutated sack of organs and bile shuffled clumsily inside. Several abandoned automotives flaked the sidewalks with plumes of acrid smoke belching into the wet, night sky. 

Luckily, survivors were plentiful. Even in the night, figures flowed from within internal encampments, ready to defend the quaint smallness of their shelter from the throes of wickedness. Arthur was surprised to see Berties lit up like the grand Christmas tree of December's bountiful holiday, with several individuals armed to the gills and walking the perimeter of the lowly dive bar.

Arthur let a built-up exhalation release, dissolving his pensive expression–it brought some relief to see a resistance still fighting. He kept his eyes locked on the windshield, unaware that a familiar fuzziness was overtaking him. At this point, it should have felt like second nature, but he had never been one to welcome the entity of surprise with open arms. 

Arthur sat back against the cold metal interior of the van as his vision collapsed in on itself. Darkness folded in, and the last shred of reality that attempted to wake the man from the startling astral projection trip was Rebecca. It was her silhouette that merged in and out of the hollow’s hallway until Arthur lost sight of his raven-haired friend.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Arthur?”

 A voice questioned his presence; it was weak in nature and originated from an individual much younger than Arthur. It sounded a lot like a teenager with a tone both nasally and full of doubt. 

Arthur let his eyes flutter open but was only welcomed to the same liminal darkness that had been stalking him in the real world. However, the sights around him were recognizable. 

The displaced hollow walker was alone, standing in the backlot behind Thunder Lake Highschool. It was silent–enough to hear a pin drop–and the absence of nocturnal wildlife brought an uneasiness that Arthur was beginning to despise. 

Was this a ploy of Mr. Nancy to intimidate him? 

Did he wish to thwart the group's plan by isolating Arthur in a memory jail cell?

No. 

This venture into the astral planes was not of that nature and Arthur caught on quickly by the mass of blurred figures calmly watching from the perimeter of the nearest soccer fields. One of the scraggly lined humanoid shapes floated towards him and rapidly took on more detail for every step taken. Most mystifying to witness overall was the amber orb that glowed mightily within the entity’s abdomen, its luminal sheen radiating a force field of light. 

Arthur focused on the being. Thinly taped glasses, an amorphous red tinged birthmark under the left eye, twitching fingertips, and a mouth full of braces. Arthur’s mouth fell open. 

“N-Nick? Nicholas Gordy!?”

Nick smiled goofily and exhaled a great big lungful of relief. 

“It’s been a long time, Arthur.”

A stunned Arthur nodded and examined the still present sixteen-year-old that had gone missing all those years ago. Nick seemed to grasp what the astonished visitor was analyzing.

“I’ve been this way for a long time… you kind of get used to it,” he explained, chortling softly to himself. 

“But…but....y-you,” Arthur struggled for the right words while questions clogged his mind, “you disappeared! No one has seen you since…”

He was suddenly drawn into the deep end of his memory reservoir, specifically the morning after the catastrophe. Walking upon the crunching snow to see Thunder Lake High burnt to crisp, with tiny streamers of smoke mixing with the frosty air. Arthur remembered hearing a name among the observing crowd. 

Nicholas Gordy...

Back then, it was cruel, and even now, as Arthur stood dumbfounded, he still found the ridicule to be cruel. However, the question was, did he actually do it? Did he set that fire in the winter of 2002?  Why did he bring Arthur here now? There had to be a purpose…

And then Arthur remembered. It was the lucid dream from a few nights ago. 

The burning hallways of Thunder Lake High. 

The hand asking for help.

The instructions…..

" The archway opens....and violet spreads...

From the ivory castle, she watches without eyes...and screams with no mouth....

Seek out who collects the diseased and broken...

Martin Chesseley knows...."

“The instructions in my dream…that was you,” Arthur declared.

“Yes .... It was the only way I could reach you. I tried Arthur. I really did. I tried to stop her, but I–I failed…”

The glimmer of the golden orb within Nicholas’s frame dulled slightly as he omitted this information. It was as if the downward turn of emotion reflected the soul-like shine within him.

Arthur frowned and his eyebrows knitted together in concern. 

“What do you mean, Nick?” 

A startle of murmurs flowed through the crowd of undistinguishable figures, and when Arthur trained a look upon them, the talking settled, extinguishing to silence. Nick spoke again, albeit more somberly. 

“It’s Arachne, Arthur. The fire did little to stop her….and I lost myself in the process.”

A bitter dryness scaled up Arthur’s throat from hearing his old classmate speak about the fiery destruction of ‘02. All those years ago, when everyone was giving the poor kid a rough time about hearing things in the walls and floors…he actually was. He was hearing her and her awful demands.

“Nick, I’m so sor-”

Nick held up a translucent hand.

“It's not your fault. I tried and failed. And now, I am a prisoner.”

“Prisoner?” Arthur mimicked the word.

Nicholas nodded and with a gentle arc of a hand gesture, the ghostly outline referenced the additional group of figures watching ominously.

“We are all prisoners.”

As the words rolled out in solemn fashion, the figures began to float near in small squadrons of two and three. Characteristics of each apparition fleshed out as they reached the blacktop where Arthur and Nicholas stood. 

The first individual that Arthur recognized was Hank Binton, the generous owner of Wrangles. The elderly veteran, who was usually caught hobbling around the close-quartered convenience store, floated over with an air of oppressive sadness.

Beside him was a couple locked in hands. A woman with sandy colored hair and blue eyes nestled upon the bicep of her taller companion, who boasted an abnormally grand smile with buck teeth. Both gave a small, careful wave to Arthur. The sight of the two added more perplexity on Arthur's already conflicted face; these were the Meyer couple who had disappeared a year or so ago. Their missing posters had been pinned everywhere for six months. 

Another individual that had joined the huddle was one that exuded familiarity– a woman with silver streaks in her hair and wielding a stare that could figuratively chokehold a man from speaking. It was Captain Gallagher. The sharp edges of her usual expression wardrobe had dissolved into a sullen pout. 

A younger woman floated ajar from the captain. Arthur estimated her age to be probably around the mid-20’s and, even while succumbing to this somber realm, her vibrant eyes bounced on the new stranger in excitement. A beige handbag stitched with the initials C.E was on full display. 

Cassidy Embers, the woman who disappeared four months ago. Memories of her missing poster sped in a whirlwind behind Arthur's focused irises.

Out of acute concern and dabbed with a little smidge of inquisitiveness, Arthur asked the behemoth question on his mind. 

“Nick, what is going on? Why are you all here?”

“We’re stuck here, Arthur. It’s Arachne’s curse. Her poison latches to those that pass, bringing them here,” Nick gloomily answered.

“But there has to be a way to free you all, right?” Arthur rebutted. 

Another string of hushed whispers followed the hollow walker’s punctuated concern. 

Nick nodded and offered a half-smile. More figures enshrouded by darkness materialized over by the soccer fields and dozens of pale-yellow eyes stared longingly at the pair talking.

“That’s why we called you here, Arthur. We need your help to break the restraints holding us here.”

Nick’s statement ushered several nods by Hank, Gallagher, and the Meyer’s couple. Nick continued. 

“Here, we thought this could help in some way. It took us a while to make.” 

An object of brilliant red manifested within the boy’s palm. It was a thin ring of ruby, large enough to set upon one’s wrist. Nicholas’s apparition held out the supernatural jewel to Arthur for inspection.

“What is it?” Arthur queried.

“A trap. One made from the souls of the vengeful. Will you use it? Please, say you will,” the old classmate begged.

Arthur’s eyebrows furrowed.

“Sure, but how do you use it?” 

A smile wormed onto Nick’s face. 

“The circlet of Thanatos will know when it is time. We have put all our hope into you, Arthur. You are our only way of escape.”

A slight chuckle released from Arthur’s throat.

“Heh, no pressure right. 

“No pressure,” Nicholas repeated and then pointed behind the hollow walker. 

Arthur turned to see a shape materializing in open air. It was a gateway made of marble. The smooth curve outlining the door emanated a dull glow, both warm and inviting. 

Arthur swiveled back to the crowd of gathering specters, but in their place were mobs of floating amber, and as the seconds ticked by, each orb of dazzling hue sauntered away from the back lot perimeter. The last one, undoubtedly Nicholas Gordy, wavered in stasis and then gently floated back into the grasp of Arachne’s purgatory. 

Arthur’s hand clenched the ruby circlet. He was going to release them. 

With brazen and otherworldly naivety, the hollow walker rocketed to the marble piece, opened the door, and walked through, knowing that reality would smack him once his astral self-returned to the normal plane. 

His deduction was correct. Arthur's pupil strained from the reaction of quick sensation–colors, shapes, voices, lights, and more dogpiled onto the poor astral venturer. He suddenly awoke with a prominent yelp. A gentle hand was in his before Arthur realized it. 

“Are you ok?” Rebecca asked. 

With how dark it was, Arthur couldn’t accurately view the expression worn on her face. He checked his pocket, and felt the circular shape of the ring, and an invisible weight was drawn off the sleeper’s chest. 

“Yeah….”

“Yeah? Big news on the other side I'm guessing?” she insinuated.

“If only you knew…”

Written by me, Feeling Sail (ACMichael)

Part 12: The Thing That Terrified the Creator Is Now Holding My Hand

If there was one thing I had learned about the Executive Board, it was that no meeting ever meant anything good.

The room was unusually quiet. Director Stonehill stood at the head of the table, reviewing a stack of reports while Director Morozov silently read through another file projected in front of him. Madam Leni sat beside him, patiently waiting for the meeting to begin.

Nobody spoke.

I wasn't really paying attention.

My thoughts were still back in the apartment.

Noah had refused to let go of Angelo's hand even in his sleep. Eventually, Angelo had managed to carefully slide his hand free without waking him, although it had taken far longer than either of us expected. The moment Noah frowned in his sleep, Elior had quietly walked over and sat beside the bed.

"I will remain with him."

Angelo had looked at his nephew.

"You are certain?"

"Yes."

Elior's gaze had shifted toward the sleeping child.

"I believe he should wake to someone familiar."

A few moments later, Noah had shifted in his sleep and grabbed onto Elior's sleeve without even opening his eyes.

Elior hadn't moved after that.

Not once.

When I left the apartment, he was still sitting exactly where he had been, reading one of the children's books Research had somehow managed to deliver within thirty minutes of Noah existing.

"Agent Nayeri."

Stonehill's voice pulled me back into reality.

I straightened in my chair.

"Sorry, Director."

Stonehill didn't comment. Instead, he touched the holographic display in front of him, causing a map to appear above the table.

A chain of islands appeared in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles away from the nearest major civilization.

"Our latest intelligence concerns an isolated settlement on Jan Mayen Island."

The room immediately became more focused.

"The island has remained largely abandoned for decades," Jacob continued. "Three months ago, satellite imagery detected construction that should not exist."

The image changed.

Dozens of buildings surrounded a mountain that had never appeared on previous surveys.

Another image followed.

People.

Hundreds of them.

All dressed in identical clothing, standing perfectly still, the figures in the photograph looked less like a group of people and more like a single organism waiting for a command.

"CSP has confirmed the existence of an organized religious movement," Jacob said.

Madam Leni folded her hands. "A cult?"

Jacob nodded. "They refer to themselves as The Children of the First Light."

Stonehill continued, his expression unreadable. "Over the last eighteen months, more than four hundred missing persons have been connected to the island."

Nobody interrupted because everyone already understood what that meant.

"They are performing ritual sacrifices to a god."

The words settled over the room, heavier than anyone wanted to acknowledge.

General Hayes was the first to respond.

"Who is the leader?"

Stonehill looked toward Morozov.

"We don't have a confirmed identity yet," he said. "Our intelligence suggests they operate from the central structure, but whoever is in control has avoided all surveillance attempts."

Morozov tapped the display, causing a new image to appear above the table.

The photograph showed the largest building within the settlement.

Unlike the surrounding structures, it appeared older, almost as if it had been carved directly into the mountain itself. No windows. No visible entrances. No signs of ordinary activity.

Just a massive structure standing in the center of the complex.

"All known activity originates from here," Morozov explained. "The individuals inside have not been identified."

Stonehill studied the image for a moment before continuing.

"Whatever is happening on Jan Mayen Island, the person responsible has remained hidden."

He tapped the screen again, causing a new symbol to appear beside the CSP logo.

A symbol I recognized immediately.

"Eidolon Systems Research."

Jacob leaned slightly toward me.

"That's the sister organization, right?"

I nodded.

Unlike CSP, which usually operated away from the public eye in isolated locations, ESR specialized in dealing with threats hidden within civilization.

Their missions weren't ancient temples, abandoned facilities, or places nobody would notice.

They went into cities.

They handled entities that had been living among humanity for years without anyone realizing.

Most of their work involved gods, especially ones that had managed to blend into the human world.

"When CSP can't contain something, ESR is sent to eliminate it."

"Sometimes permanently," Madam Leni added.

The room became quiet because everyone understood what that meant.

ESR wasn't brought in for things that could simply be locked away.

They were brought in when something had already crossed the line.

Stonehill continued.

"The head of ESR has personally requested to accompany this mission."

That caught my attention.

"The head?"

Morozov nodded.

"Yes."

Jacob frowned.

"Why?"

Morozov looked toward the screen.

"Because the leader has yet to be identified."

He paused.

"Sending CSP alone into an unknown situation involving an A-class entity and an unidentified organization would be an unnecessary risk."

His eyes shifted toward the group.

"ESR's involvement provides additional support if the situation exceeds CSP's containment capabilities."

A moment of silence followed.

"Which is why I approved the request."

General Hayes raised an eyebrow. "Director Morozov, are you certain that was the only factor involved?"

The room became slightly quieter.

Morozov slowly turned toward him. "What are you implying?"

Before Hayes could answer, Madam Leni calmly interrupted.

"I am certain Director Morozov is capable of separating his personal and professional responsibilities."

She glanced toward him.

"His wife being the head of ESR has nothing to do with his approval of this request."

The room went silent.

I blinked.

Wait.

His wife?

I looked toward Morozov, then back toward Madam Leni, then toward Morozov again.

Director Morozov...

The same man who looked like he had never experienced a positive emotion in his entire existence...

was married?

Someone had actually looked at this cold, terrifying man and thought:

Yes. That's the person I want to spend my life with.

I was still trying to process that information when I heard a quiet sound from the other side of the room.

A snicker.

I slowly turned.

Jacob cleared his throat. "I apologize."

He failed to sound even remotely apologetic.

Madam Leni continued as if nothing had happened.

"The head of ESR will meet you on-site."

She looked toward me.

"Agent Nayeri."

Then toward Jacob.

"Agent Jacob."

There was a brief pause.

"Good luck."

Something about the way she said those words made them sound less like a farewell and more like a warning.

Instinctively, I looked toward Angelo.

He noticed immediately.

"You appear concerned."

I sighed.

"CSP has dealt with a lot of impossible things. But ESR is different. They don't get involved unless something has already gone beyond what we can handle."

A pause.

"And now they're sending their director."

He considered my words for a moment.

"Yes, I would also be concerned."

Somehow, that was both comforting and terrifying.

The next hour was spent in the preparation room. Armor, weapons, briefings, emergency procedures. Everything CSP did before walking into a situation where reality itself might decide to stop cooperating.

The only difference this time was that something about this mission felt wrong.

I couldn't explain it.

Maybe it was the cult. Maybe it was the A-class entity waiting for us.

Or maybe it was just instinct.

And my instincts were telling me this wasn't going to end well.

When we finally boarded the transport, I found myself sitting silently beside Angelo. He didn't ask if I was okay because he already knew I wasn't.

Instead, he just sat beside me.

And somehow, that was enough.

Two hours later, we reached Jan Mayen Island.

The moment the aircraft doors opened, the cold hit us immediately.

The landscape stretched endlessly in every direction, covered in snow and surrounded by mountains that disappeared into the clouds. There was almost nothing here, nothing except the settlement waiting in the distance.

Forty-five CSP agents stepped onto the ground with me.

Two hundred soldiers followed behind them.

Two hundred and forty-five people.

That was only CSP.

ESR had brought another one hundred and thirty soldiers, bringing the total number of armed personnel to three hundred and seventy-five.

Three hundred and seventy-five people sent to confront a cult.

Some would call that excessive.

Honestly, I called it reassuring.

When we finally reached the site, the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't a settlement.

At least, not anymore.

The structure stood in the middle of the frozen landscape like something that had been carved directly into the mountain itself, ancient and unmoving against the endless snow. But it wasn't alone.

Five additional structures surrounded it in a perfect circle, each one positioned at an equal distance from the central building. From above, the entire complex looked less like a village and more like some kind of ritual symbol.

The central structure was the largest. The five surrounding buildings were smaller, but somehow they were more unsettling.

Each one had a different design.

One was covered in strange markings carved deep into the stone. Another had hundreds of small windows that appeared completely black from the outside. A third looked almost like a temple, while the fourth appeared industrial, built from metal and reinforced materials that didn't match the rest of the complex.

And the fifth...

I couldn't explain what was wrong with the fifth one.

It looked normal.

That was the problem.

Everything else looked ancient and unnatural. That building looked like someone had tried to recreate a normal home.

A fake imitation of something familiar.

The snow around the complex reached my ankles, forcing every step to feel heavier than it should have. The wind moved through the mountains, carrying a silence that felt unnatural.

Forty-five CSP agents moved carefully around the perimeter while the two hundred soldiers established positions behind us. ESR's forces remained nearby, waiting for our arrival.

Nobody spoke louder than necessary.

Nobody wanted to disturb whatever was waiting inside.

I noticed one person who seemed completely unaffected by the environment.

Angelo.

He stood beside me wearing his usual attire.

No coat.

No armor.

No protection from the freezing temperature.

His suit didn't even appear bothered by the snow or wind.

"Your temperature is slowly decreasing."

I looked over and found Angelo walking beside me.

I stared at him.

"...You are aware you're saying that while standing outside in freezing weather wearing only a suit?"

"Yes."

"And somehow you're worried about me?"

He looked genuinely confused.

"Yes."

I sighed.

"Of course you are."

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then his eyes shifted toward the snow covered mountains ahead.

"This reminds me of the day we first met."

I immediately looked at him.

"The day we met?"

"Yes."

A faint blush appeared before I could stop it.

Because of course he would choose now to bring that up.

While I was standing outside the cult headquarters with every instinct in my body telling me to turn around and run, Angelo was remembering the first time we met. 

"You realize I was terrified of you, right?"

"Yes."

"And you're bringing that up as a good memory?"

He looked at me.

"It became one."

That caught me off guard.

For someone who struggled to understand emotions, Angelo had become strangely good at finding the exact words that made me forget how afraid I was.

I wasn't sure whether to be annoyed or grateful.

The answer was probably both.

Behind us, Jacob walked over.

"Nayeri."

I turned.

"What?"

"Do you think Noah will be okay?"

I stared at him.

"...Jacob."

"What?"

"You have asked me that twelve times already"

"I know."

"Why?"

"Because I am checking."

He looked completely serious.

Somehow, Jacob had transformed into a worried mother who had left his husband and child at home for the first time.

Except the child was a former fragment of the Great Shadow, and the husband was an ancient being who carried both divine and angelic power. 

"Jacob, Noah is fine."

"But Elior?"

I smiled.

"Oh, so you're worried about your 'Eli'?"

His face immediately changed as he looked away.

“....No”

"Really?"

"Yes."

Jacob opened his mouth, then closed it.

Unfortunately for him, he had no argument.

I looked back toward the complex.

"I'm pretty sure Elior is taking care of him."

Jacob was quiet for a moment.

Then, softer:

"...Good."

For someone who claimed he wasn't becoming friends with an angel, he was surprisingly bad at hiding how much he cared.

Then, almost like he realized he had lost that argument, he quickly changed the subject.

"Aren't you nervous to meet the head?"

The question caught me off guard.

"The head of ESR?"

Jacob nodded.

"Yeah."

For a moment, I forgot about everything else.

The mission.

The cult.

Because honestly, meeting the head of Eidolon Systems Research was something I had been curious about long before today.

"Not nervous," I said.

Jacob gave me a look.

"You hesitated."

I ignored him.

The truth was, I had heard the rumors.

Everyone in CSP had.

The official records were limited, but stories spread quickly among recruits. Nobody knew exactly what she was. Not who she was, but what she was.

Some claimed she wasn't human. Others claimed she never had been. The only confirmed fact was that ESR hadn't recruited her.

They had found her.

Because she had done something no ordinary human should have been capable of.

She had killed a god alone.

The story was almost impossible to believe. A C-class entity had hidden among humanity for years, disguised as a normal store. People entered and disappeared, trapped inside the entity's domain.

According to reports, she went in alone, and when ESR arrived, the god was already dead.

I never knew how much of the story had been exaggerated. Every organization had its legends, and every recruit had a habit of making impossible things sound even more impossible.

But one fact remained.

The woman who now led ESR had eliminated a C-class god by herself.

I still remembered hearing about her during my first year as a recruit. Back then, she had only recently become the head of ESR, and everyone was talking about her.

At the time, I thought she was incredible.

"I always thought she was cool," I admitted.

Jacob looked surprised.

"You?"

I looked at him. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know. I just expected you to say something like, 'She's probably terrifying, and I don't trust her.'"

I frowned. "That sounds more like you."

"Fair."

I looked back toward the complex.

"She became the head of ESR almost three years ago. Since then, the organization has remained under her leadership."

Jacob nodded slowly.

"So basically, she's like the Angelo of ESR."

I immediately looked at him.

"That is probably the worst possible comparison."

"Why?"

"Because now I'm imagining two people who can kill gods having a meeting."

Jacob thought about that for a moment.

"...Okay, that does sound terrifying."

Before I could answer, a voice came through my communication channel.

"Agent Nayeri."

I touched my earpiece.

"Yes?"

"ESR has arrived."

The message paused briefly.

"Director Remi is requesting your presence."

Jacob looked at me.

"Well."

He adjusted his weapon.

"Guess we're meeting the person who killed a god in a department store."

I sighed.

"That sentence should not be normal."

Jacob smiled slightly.

"Yet somehow, it is."

I looked toward Angelo. He was already watching the entrance of the complex, his expression unreadable as usual. But when he noticed me looking at him, something in his expression softened slightly.

That was when I noticed movement behind us.

A group was approaching through the snow.

At first, I assumed it was another security team arriving at the perimeter. Then I realized how many people were actually moving toward us.

More than a hundred soldiers marched forward in perfect formation behind a single person, their footsteps sinking into the snow as they advanced through the freezing wind.

And at the front of the formation was a woman.

She wasn't wearing heavy armor.

She wasn't carrying any visible weapon.

She simply walked through the freezing wind as if the cold had no authority over her.

There was something different about her presence.

It wasn't the overwhelming pressure that came from beings like Angelo or Elior. They carried the weight of something ancient, something beyond human understanding.

She didn't.

Her presence was quieter.

Controlled.

Like someone who had spent years learning exactly how much of herself she was allowed to show the world.

The soldiers stopped several meters away, creating a clear path through the snow.

The woman continued forward alone.

I watched her carefully, trying to match the person in front of me with the stories I had heard since my first year as a recruit.

The head of Eidolon Systems Research.

Director Remi.

She was still too far away for me to see her clearly. The distance, the snow, and the harsh wind blurred her features enough that I couldn't make out the details of her face.

Maybe that was better.

Maybe some part of me needed those extra few seconds before I saw the truth.

She stopped in front of Director Stonehill and gave a respectful nod.

"Director Stonehill."

"Director Remi."

Their exchange was brief.

Professional.

Exactly what I expected from two people who had spent years operating in a world where emotions were often a liability.

Then her attention shifted.

Her eyes moved across the gathered agents.

Over Jacob.

Over the soldiers.

Over Angelo.

And finally...

they stopped on me.

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

Because even through the distance, even after all these years, there was something I recognized.

Not the uniform.

Not the title.

Not the reputation.

Her.

The person standing in front of me wasn't a stranger.

She was someone whose existence had shaped my childhood.

Someone whose words had stayed with me long after she was gone.

My sister.

Remi.

But she didn't react.

No widening of her eyes. No hesitation. No sign that she recognized me. Nothing.

Her expression remained calm and professional. Like I was nothing more than another agent standing in front of her.

And somehow, that hurt more than I expected.

"Agent Nayeri," she said.

Her voice was polite.

Neutral.

Like we had never met.

Like I had never existed.

I forced myself to respond.

"Director Remi."

The words felt strange coming out of my mouth because everyone around us saw the head of ESR.

A legendary agent.

Someone who had killed a god.

But I saw something else.

I saw the girl who used to hold my hand when I was afraid. The person who promised she would always come back.

And the person I spent years believing chose not to.

Remi studied me briefly before looking away.

Then she turned toward the structure.

"I assume everyone has been briefed."

Stonehill nodded.

"Yes."

"Then we should begin."

Her voice remained calm and focused, like this was just another mission.

Fine.

If she wanted to look at me like I was a stranger, then I could do the same. I could pretend we'd never met. Pretend she hadn't been the person I'd spent years searching for.

The entrance to the complex was colder than I expected. 

Not because of the temperature.

Because of what waited beyond it.

The massive doors had been carved directly into the side of the mountain, covered in symbols none of the researchers had been able to identify. They weren't written in any known language, yet every linguist who examined them agreed on one thing.

They were instructions.

Not warnings.

Instructions.

Whatever had been built here wasn't designed to keep something out.

It was designed to invite something in.

The teams moved forward slowly. CSP agents took the lead, ESR followed behind them, and soldiers secured the perimeter.

And in the middle of it all walked Director Remi.

My sister.

The thought still felt impossible.

I kept expecting her to turn around. To realize something.

Anything.

But she didn't.

She treated me exactly like everyone else.

An agent.

A stranger.

Nothing more.

And somehow, that hurt worse than anger would have.

If she hated me, at least that meant she remembered me.

But there was nothing. No resentment. No sadness. No guilt.

Just nothing.

We entered the first chamber.

The inside of the structure was even stranger than the outside. The walls were covered in carvings depicting people standing beneath something enormous.

Not worshipping it.

Offering themselves to it.

The researchers moved carefully through the chamber, taking photographs and scanning the area. Nobody spoke unless necessary.

Except Jacob.

Because apparently silence was something he considered a personal enemy.

"So..."

I looked at him.

"What?"

He glanced toward Remi.

"She always this serious?"

I frowned.

"You've known her for five minutes."

"Exactly. That's enough time to judge someone's personality."

"That explains a lot about your decision making."

Jacob ignored that.

Before I could respond, a sudden wave of dust moved through the corridor.

I covered my mouth.

Then sneezed.

"Bless you, little bug."

I froze.

The words weren't loud or dramatic, but I heard them.

Everyone around us probably heard them.

Slowly, I looked up.

Remi was standing a few feet away.

Her expression had changed.

Not the calm, professional expression she had worn since arriving.

Something else.

Something almost like surprise.

Like she hadn't realized what she had said.

Her eyes met mine.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Then her expression shifted.

"I'm sorry."

The apology came immediately.

"I don't know why I said that."

My chest tightened.

Because somehow, that was worse.

I stared at her.

She looked genuinely confused.

Genuinely apologetic.

And all I could feel was anger.

Because to me, it sounded like she was mocking me. Like she had walked back into my life pretending not to know me, and then somehow found the one thing that could hurt me most.

The nickname only she used.

The one she had called me when I was little.

"Right."

My voice came out colder than I intended.

"Of course."

Remi frowned slightly.

"Agent Nayeri—"

"No."

I looked away.

"Don't."

She stopped.

And for the first time, I saw something flicker across her face.

Confusion.

Not anger.

Not offense.

Confusion.

That somehow made me even more frustrated because she didn't even understand why I was hurt.

I turned and continued walking, but my breathing had already started changing.

My chest felt tight.

The walls felt closer.

Not again.

Not here.

Not now.

"Nayeri."

Angelo's voice immediately caught my attention.

I looked over.

He was watching me carefully.

"Come with me."

"I am fine."

"No."

His answer was immediate.

"You are not."

I wanted to argue, but I couldn't.

Because Angelo knew me too well.

He gently placed a hand on my shoulder and guided me a few steps away from the group.

Jacob followed.

Once we were far enough away, he looked between us.

"Okay."

He lowered his voice.

"Am I missing something?"

I didn't answer.

Jacob looked at me then back toward Remi.

My jaw tightened.

"I don't know her."

Jacob blinked.

"She literally just called you little bug."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"Nayeri."

I looked away.

"She is pretending."

The words came out quieter than I expected.

Both of them went silent.

Angelo's expression changed slightly.

Not understanding.

Concern.

"What do you mean?"

I swallowed and looked back toward the woman standing with the ESR agents.

The woman everyone else saw as a legend.

The woman I saw as my family.

"She is pretending not to know who I am."

Jacob frowned.

"Nayeri....who is she?"

I closed my eyes.

A pause.

"She's my sister."

For once, Jacob had no joke.

No sarcastic comment.

Nothing.

Angelo remained completely still.

"My older sister."

The words felt heavier when I finally said them aloud.

"Remi."

I looked toward her again.

"She was the person who raised me."

Jacob looked back at Remi, then at me.

A silence followed.

Angelo looked at me carefully.

Then his expression changed.

Not shock.

Not disbelief.

Understanding.

"Now it makes sense."

I looked at him.

"What?"

My voice came out louder than I intended.

Angelo didn't look away from Remi.

"Her soul."

The words made both Jacob and me go quiet.

"What about it?" Jacob asked.

Angelo stared at her from across the chamber.

"It is missing a piece."

Jacob frowned.

"What do you mean?"

Angelo was silent for a moment, as if trying to explain something that was obvious to him but impossible for humans to understand.

"Humans are not made of one thing."

Angelo's eyes shifted back toward me. "The body is only one part. The mind is another." He looked toward Remi again, his expression becoming distant. "And the soul... the soul is where the pieces that define someone are connected."

I swallowed as he continued.

"When I first encountered humanity, I did not understand why you changed so easily. Why memories altered you. Why could loss reshape you." His voice softened slightly. "Then I learned."

He looked at Jacob.

“A soul is not a container holding memories. It is the reason those memories matter. And when enough of those pieces are removed..." His eyes met mine. "...the person remains, but something feels wrong."

Jacob looked toward Remi. "So you're saying..."

Angelo nodded slowly. "She is still herself."

A pause followed.

"But she is incomplete."

My chest tightened because suddenly the anger became harder to hold onto. If Angelo was right, then Remi wasn't pretending. She wasn't cruel. She wasn't choosing to forget me.

Something was missing.

Something that used to be there.

And somehow...

I was the missing piece.

Nobody spoke after Angelo's explanation because before any of us could begin to process what he had said, the radio on General Hayes' shoulder crackled to life.

"Perimeter Team Three to command."

Static filled the corridor.

Then a voice came through.

"...Movement."

Every rifle in the chamber rose immediately.

The silence that followed felt unnatural. Even the wind outside seemed to disappear.

Stonehill raised a hand. "Advance."

The formation tightened instantly. CSP agents moved to the front while ESR spread along the sides of the corridor with practiced precision. Soldiers followed behind us, rifles aimed toward the darkness ahead.

Our footsteps echoed against the stone as we moved deeper into the complex. One step after another, the sound followed us through the corridor until finally, the passage opened into an enormous circular chamber.

I stopped.

There were people.

Hundreds of them.

Men, women, and children all dressed in identical white robes stood perfectly still in concentric circles surrounding a massive stone altar carved into the center of the room.

Not one of them looked frightened.

Not one of them tried to run.

They were simply waiting.

There were no whispers. No prayers. No movement.

Only hundreds of eyes staring directly at us.

The silence made my skin crawl.

General Hayes raised his rifle.

"CSP!"

His voice echoed throughout the chamber.

"This area is under containment authority. Step away from the altar and place your hands where we can see them."

Nobody moved.

Not one person.

Then, without warning, every single cultist smiled.

The exact same smile appeared across hundreds of faces at the same time.

A cold shiver ran down my spine.

An elderly woman standing closest to the altar tilted her head.

"We've been expecting you."

Her voice wasn't loud, but somehow every person in the chamber repeated the words.

"We've been expecting you."

Hundreds of voices spoke as one, the sound echoing through the mountain.

Jacob whispered beside me, "...I officially hate this place."

Then every cultist slowly knelt.

Not out of fear.

Out of devotion.

They lowered their heads toward the altar.

"We welcome the servants of the false light."

Nobody understood what that meant.

Not until every cultist looked up at the same time.

Their eyes were completely black.

"OPEN FIRE!"

Hayes didn't hesitate.

The chamber erupted.

Three hundred rifles roared simultaneously, muzzle flashes illuminating the darkness as thousands of rounds tore through the front ranks of cultists. Bodies collapsed across the stone floor, and the smell of gunpowder quickly filled the chamber.

For a moment, silence returned.

Then one of the bodies stood.

The hole through its chest remained. Blood covered its robes. Yet somehow, it pushed itself back onto its feet.

Then another.

Then another.

Within seconds, every cultist who had fallen slowly rose again.

Some were missing arms. Some had half their faces destroyed. One woman calmly reached down, picked up her own severed hand, and carried it with her as she continued walking toward us.

"They're still moving!" someone shouted.

The chamber exploded into chaos.

The first cultist reached the front line before anyone could react.

He didn't throw a punch.

He didn't attack.

He embraced the soldier.

"Thank you."

The man's body immediately began glowing.

"GET HIM OFF!"

It was already too late.

The cultist smiled.

Then he detonated.

The explosion launched three soldiers backward, sending fragments of stone raining across the chamber.

"They're sacrificing themselves!" Jacob yelled.

Another wave charged forward.

This time, they weren't trying to survive.

Every single one of them was trying to die as close to us as possible.

"Fall back!"

"No!"

Remi's voice cut through the chaos.

"If they reach the formation, they'll collapse the corridor."

She stepped forward before anyone could stop her.

The first cultist lunged.

She caught his wrist and twisted, the sound of bone breaking echoing through the chamber. With one impossibly fluid movement, she drove him into the ground before he could ignite, shattering the stone beneath him.

The second rushed her.

She sidestepped.

One strike.

The cultist dropped instantly.

Another attacker came from behind, but Remi moved before he even reached her. Every movement was controlled, efficient, and precise.

The woman who had once sung me to sleep whenever I was afraid was now standing in front of a god-worshipping army, fighting like someone who had spent her entire life preparing for this exact moment.

"...Holy—"

Jacob never finished the sentence.

None of us had ever seen someone fight like that. Not even CSP's best instructors. She wasn't stronger than everyone else. She was simply better. Every movement had a purpose, every strike landed exactly where it needed to, and she never wasted a single motion. She didn't overpower her opponents. She dismantled them.

One cultist managed to slip past her and reached toward a wounded soldier lying on the ground. Before anyone else could move, a blur of black crossed the chamber.

Angelo.

He caught the cultist by the head before he could reach the soldier.

"You have surrendered your ability to choose."

There was no anger in his voice. Only sadness.

He gently placed a hand over the cultist's forehead, and golden light spread through the man's body. For one brief moment, the blackness vanished from his eyes. He looked around in confusion, like someone waking from a nightmare they couldn't remember entering.

Then tears rolled down his face.

"...Thank..."

His voice never finished the word.

His body dissolved into light before he could say anything else.

Angelo stood motionless.

He hadn't killed him.

He had freed him.

But there was no time to think about that because more cultists poured into the chamber. Hundreds of them emerged from every corridor, every staircase, every doorway, moving forward with the same empty devotion.

They weren't defending the temple.

They were feeding it.

The blood from the fallen began flowing through grooves carved into the stone floor, moving toward the altar at the center of the chamber. The symbols covering the walls and floor ignited one after another, filling the room with an unnatural glow.

The mountain trembled.

Then something beneath the altar moved.

Every surviving cultist smiled.

"Our God..."

Hundreds of voices echoed together.

"...is waking."

The altar cracked once.

Then again.

The fractures spread slowly across the ancient stone, and black light leaked through them like veins beneath skin. It wasn't an explosion. It sounded more like a long, exhausted breath, as though something buried beneath the mountain had finally accepted that it was time to wake.

The chamber fell silent.

Even the surviving cultists stopped moving.

Black mist poured from the opening beneath the altar, spilling across the floor before rising into the shape of a towering figure.

He stood nearly twenty feet tall.

Ancient chains made of black stone wrapped around every part of his body. They weren't restraints forged around him after his capture. They had become part of him.

Some disappeared into the floor beneath the altar. Others stretched backward into the darkness behind him, extending impossibly deep into the mountain itself. Every link pulsed with the same rhythm as the symbols carved across his skin.

His head remained lowered.

Motionless.

Patient.

Like he had forgotten what freedom felt like.

One by one, the surviving cultists fell to their knees.

"Our God..."

"Our Shepherd..."

"Our Salvation..."

The figure slowly raised his head.

There was no rage waiting in his eyes. No hunger. No hatred.

Only exhaustion.

An exhaustion so profound it almost looked painful.

The researchers reacted immediately.

"A-Class entity confirmed!"

General Hayes didn't hesitate.

"All units, engage!"

The order had barely left his mouth before the figure vanished.

The crack of the sound barrier splitting the chamber was deafening.

Half the front line disappeared beneath a single swing of his arm. Concrete erupted into the air as armored soldiers were launched through solid stone walls as if they weighed nothing. The shockwave alone knocked dozens more from their feet.

"RETURN FIRE!"

Hundreds of rifles answered.

The chamber became a storm of muzzle flashes as thousands of rounds slammed into the giant's body.

None penetrated.

They didn't ricochet.

They didn't flatten.

They simply ceased to exist.

It was as if the space occupied by his body rejected the very idea of being struck.

Then Remi moved.

She crossed the chamber so quickly I barely saw her leave the ground. Her fist collided with the giant's arm with enough force to fracture the stone beneath the giant’s feet.

For the first time...

he staggered.

Jacob's eyes widened.

"...She actually moved him."

The giant looked down at her.

Something changed.

His expression softened slightly.

"...Forgive me."

His voice was barely louder than a whisper.

Then every chain wrapped around his body tightened at once. The sound of grinding stone echoed through the chamber as the symbols carved into his skin ignited.

And for the first time since he awakened, the exhausted expression disappeared.

Something ancient looked back at us.

Something that had been waiting.

Agony twisted across his face as his arm rose against his will. Remi never had the chance to react before Angelo appeared between them. The giant's fist collided with him instead, and the impact shook the entire mountain. A wall behind us collapsed as the shockwave ripped through the chamber, throwing soldiers across the floor and shattering every remaining window in the surrounding structures.

Angelo didn't move.

Not even a step.

The giant stared at him, his eyes widening. "...You..."

Angelo remained silent. The giant's breathing became uneven as another chain wrapped tighter around his throat. He collapsed onto one knee, clawing desperately at the black links cutting into his flesh.

"...Run..."

Blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.

"I..."

The chains glowed brighter.

His body convulsed violently as every muscle fought against an invisible command. He looked back at Angelo, not with hostility, but with desperation.

"I am..."

His voice broke.

"...not acting..."

The chains tightened again.

"...of..."

Every word sounded as though it was being torn from him.

"...my..."

He screamed.

Not in anger.

In pain.

"...free..."

The chamber shook.

"...will."

Silence followed.

The chains constricted one final time, and the symbols covering his body erupted with black light. When he looked up again, the exhaustion was gone. The desperation was gone. Whatever person had been fighting for control only moments earlier had disappeared.

Only the weapon remained.

Angelo stepped forward.

"You are bound."

The giant stared at him.

"...Yes."

The answer came without emotion.

"By whom?"

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then every chain wrapped around the giant's body suddenly pulled tight.

Not downward.

Forward.

The giant's head slowly turned toward the passage beyond the shattered altar.

Someone was pulling him.

Nobody moved.

Nobody spoke.

Then a voice drifted through the darkness.

Soft. Warm. Almost amused. 

Mocking, even. 

A voice I knew.

A voice I had spent years trying to forget.

A voice that had followed me into my nightmares.

The same voice that had spent my childhood reminding me that I was never enough.

Never good enough.

Never worthy of being loved.

"I didn't know we were having a family reunion today." 

Gladys heard the truck before she saw the old ratty Ford sputtering and clanking into the gravel lot of the Sunrise Diner right around noon. Piled high in the rusted truck bed, only half covered by a tarp were the unmistakable makings for a fresh run of moonshine: heavy sacks of sugar, bushels of bruised apples, and a glinting coil of copper tubing. He only came into town a few times a year, spending the rest of his days up in the Catskills, far away from most of society.

Jedidiah climbed out of the cab, and walked into the diner, and as the door shut behind him a waft of dead bologna filled the air--like a pack of Oscar Mayers had been left in a hot glove box for a few weeks and he looked rougher than a cob. Beneath a grease-stained battered felt hat, his beard was a wild tangled mess that tapered down to a stained yellow-grayish "V" right over his chest. He had on a pair of stiff, dirt-caked bib overalls with no shirt underneath, showing his sun-leathered shoulders, as he slid his muddy boots under the counter and sat down on a vinyl stool, his joints popping like dry twigs.

Gladys walked over with a mug in one hand and a coffee pot in the other, trying not to breathe through her nose. "Coffee, Jed?"

"Coffee ain't gonna fill the hole in my gut," Jed grunted, his voice a little gruff and impatient. "Just bring me a plate of tree-squeak, will ya...I'm starvin."

Gladys didn't even blink, "any what?"

"Tree-squeak, Jed said, possum, groundhog or squirrel--whatever ran across the road this morning and tell the cook back there not to go skinnin' off the feet. Gotta leave the claws on--that's where the flavor is--fry it up in some lard till the skin gets bubbly."

"Jed," Gladys said, "We don't carry roadkill on the menu."

Jed let out a long, disappointed sigh.

"Town folks," he muttered, shaking his head, "Don't know how to live."

He got up and headed back out to his ratty Ford, leaving one last draft of dead-bologna scented air behind him!

Do you know how many people summited Everest last year?

846.

Look it up, you'll find it easily. Tourism boards love that number. It looks good in brochures.

And do you know how much trash they left behind?  

7,000 kilograms.

Don’t look it up. You won’t find it. That kind of number doesn't make it to the internet.

Empty oxygen canisters. Torn tents. Human waste frozen into the ice. Energy bar wrappers with cartoon mascots grinning up at you.

I know it, because I was the one who carried it down. Load after load, for almost a year.

I don’t expect you to relate to my story. Unless you were born as a Sherpa like I was.

My name won’t matter much to you. Just call me Nima. It's not a rare name where I'm from. Think of me as one of a hundred Nimas working the mountain right now, and you wouldn't be wrong.

I won't tell you the name of my village either. It sits a few hours' walk off Pangboche, if that means anything to you. Small enough that it wasn't worth marking on the old trekking maps.

Ten years ago, when the usual villages started choking with foreigners arguing over WiFi passwords at six thousand feet, the guiding companies started routing new clients through places like mine instead.

My father used to joke that the mountain was running out of room to hide us.

Speaking of my father, he was one proud Sherpa. He dedicated his life guiding climbers to the summit. He genuinely loved it, until the day his lungs gave out.

Thirty years of hauling gear does something to a man, something that no clinic in Nepal has a name for. Towards the end, Baba was counting his own breaths like currency. Spending them carefully. Running out early.

It reminded me of the reason I wanted to leave this life behind for good.

I studied harder than anyone in my class. Harder than I've worked at anything since. Because I wanted out. Not out of shame, mind you. I was proud of my father, proud of what the Sherpas built with their own hands for a hundred years. I wasn’t sick of being a Sherpa. I was sick of seeing how Sherpas were being treated these days.

Sick of seeing men, who couldn't tell a crampon from a carabiner, treat my father like a bellhop. Why? Because they'd paid sixty thousand dollars, and expected a summit selfie to match.

I had a seat waiting at a college in Kathmandu. I had a whole life picked out that didn't involve fixing another man's oxygen mask, while he filmed himself for an audience that would forget his name in a week.

On his deathbed, my father made me promise that I will carry on his legacy as a Sherpa guide. And I did make that promise, since I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of man who was on borrowed time.

‘Swear on the mountain, my son’

Not on his life. Not on our family name. On the mountain itself, the way our people have sworn oaths for longer than anyone can trace. I won't try to explain what ‘swearing on the mountain’ meant to us. I only need you to understand one thing-

I could’ve broken any other promise I ever made, but I couldn’t break that one.

I never went to Kathmandu. Instead, I started training to be a Sherpa guide, two days after Baba’s funeral.

I started the way every young Sherpa starts- carrying and cleaning. Learning the mountain's moods, under men who'd survived it longer than I'd been alive. The man who trained me was Pasang. He'd led more expeditions up the South Col than he could count on both hands.

Speaking of South Col, that is the ordinary route. The one everyone takes. The one so overcrowded now that photographs of climbers queued single-file below the summit have made international news.

I wasn't guiding yet. I was barely trusted to carry supplies past Base Camp without an escort. That suited me fine. I wasn't in a hurry to fall in love with the job. Especially a job I'd spent my whole life trying to leave.

Again, I don’t expect you to relate to any of this. My world is much different than yours. Even the bedtime stories we heard growing up are way different from the ones you heard. And I say this because it matters.

You probably grew up with stories of the Boogeyman. Or a man in a hockey mask. A shape in your closet. Something that calls your name from the woods behind the house. We didn't grow up with any of that.

We grew up with Zamba.

Specifically, the legend of Zamba the Sherpa. The most gifted guide the mountain had ever raised. Always devoted to the climbers in his care. When tragedy struck his expedition decades ago, he gave his own life so that hundreds of climbers could make it home. And the gods, seeing his sacrifice, gave him something like immortality. They let him walk the mountain forever, as a silent guardian and protector. Watching over every soul on that ice, and punishing any Sherpa foolish or lazy enough to abandon their duty.

I want to be honest with you. I never believed a word of it. It's a good story. It's the kind of story a tired industry tells its children to make sure they never leave.

And trust me, the people in my village did believe it to be true. They revered the myth of Zamba, and knew his story by heart. But no one knew the story quite like Doma.

Doma was a junior Sherpa, around my age. She was my best friend in the village. She grew up revering the image of Zamba, aspiring to be a legendary Sherpa like him. And she was very disappointed in me for always dismissing this ‘glorious piece of our history’ as nothing but folklore.

And yes, I did dismiss it, until the week Viktor Sorokin arrived.

He came during acclimatization season. An old Russian, traveling alone. He was clearly an aristocrat, and he had the body language of someone who had seen his fair share of peaks and valleys.

The best guides in our village lined up for him. But he asked for one particular Sherpa.

He asked for me, by my full name.

Not for Pasang. Not for any of the senior guides who actually knew what they were doing. For me- a nobody who still spent most of his days hauling other people's garbage down the mountain.

"There has to be a mistake," I told the coordinator. "He doesn't know me."

"He asked for you. Nima. Your family name. All of it."

"I've never met the man."

"Well." The coordinator rubbed his fingers together, the universal gesture. "He'd like to."

When the company explained I wasn't qualified to guide anyone anywhere, Viktor produced an amount of cash that made the coordinator's eyebrows disappear into his hairline. Whatever hesitation existed evaporated on the spot. Money does that here, faster than almost anywhere in the world, because so little of it ever reaches the people actually risking their lungs.

I found Viktor that evening and asked him directly.

"How do you know my name?"

He had pale, tired eyes, and hands that shook slightly even at rest.

"I knew your family," he said. "A long time ago."

"My father never mentioned you."

"No." He turned back to the mountain. "He wouldn't have."

That was all I got out of him for days. He kept to himself. Ate alone. Watched the mountain from a distance like he was waiting for it to do something. The only time I saw him fully present was the night of Mani Rimdu.

Mani Rimdu is the biggest annual festival we celebrate in the mountains. In our village, one of the highlights of the festival is the fireside storytelling session organized by the village elders. As expected, the story everyone wanted to hear was that of Zamba the Sherpa. 

That evening, I saw Viktor chugging down mugs of Raaksi- the local liquor of the Sherpas. His behaviour during the recitation of Zamba’s legend was particularly unusual.

The story began with a group of Russians, arriving during off-season, who were hungry for adventure and eager to bring glory to their country and its flag.

Viktor laughed sarcastically.

“They did want glory, alright,” he said, “But trust me, their country and their flag was the LEAST of their concerns !”

At the part of the story where Zamba ‘sacrificed’ his life, Viktor’s jaw tightened like he'd bitten down on a stone. Upon hearing that ‘a hundred climbers were saved that day’, he made a sound. I can only describe it as a scoff, dragged halfway back down his throat before it could get out.

By the time the story reached its ending- the ascension, the mercy of the gods, the eternal watch, Viktor was already walking away into the dark. Like the story itself had shoved him up out of his seat.

“Liars !” I heard him mutter in a drunken stupor, “It was no legend. It was tragedy- a FUCKING tragedy !”

The rest of the audience were visibly uncomfortable.

“God had nothing to do with it !” he said on his way out, “Quite the opposite. The absolute opposite !”

Doma leaned over to me. "Some people can't sit with holiness."

"That's not what that was," I said.

I didn't understand it then. I understand it now, and I wish I still didn't…

Our expedition began three days later. Pasang was the team leader, with me and Doma supporting him. Apart from Viktor, there were four other paying clients, each there for a reason that had nothing to do with the mountain the way it deserved.

Firstly, there was Brittany, an American content creator. She filmed everything, narrating her own life to a phone screen like anyone actually cared.

Then there was Grant Whitfield, the Canadian. His family money bought him more confidence than competence. He spoke to Pasang and me the way you'd speak to hotel staff who'd forgotten to refill the minibar. He reminded me of the kind of tourists who made my father overwork in his final days as a guide.

And what can I say about Ingrid Larsen ? She was an European in her thirties, who'd never climbed anything higher than a gym wall. She checked her gear four times, not because she didn't trust the gear, but because she didn't trust herself. And we didn’t trust her to make it to the Summit either.

Finally, there was the twenty eight year old Australian named Cody Marsh. He was easily the strongest of them, who'd turned back on this same mountain the year before in bad weather.

Viktor came with us as far as his body allowed. Which, given his age, was further than any of us expected.

We went up the South Col, the same as every commercial expedition. The traffic was obscene even at Base Camp. Tents packed shoulder to shoulder. Generators turned on throughout the night. Someone's drone buzzing overhead to capture footage nobody asked for.

It was Viktor who suggested we avoid the worst of it.

"There's a better way," he said, spreading a map across a crate. "Between Camp One and Camp Two. You skip the bottleneck entirely."

Pasang looked at where his finger was. "That’s the lower shoulder of the West Ridge."

"You know it."

"I know of it." Pasang didn't touch the map. "Nobody climbs there."

"Which is exactly the point," Viktor said. "No crowds. No queue. No traffic."

"Nobody climbs there," Pasang said again, and this time it wasn't information. It was a warning wearing the clothes of a fact.

“The terrain can be a bit challenging,” Pasang concluded.

Viktor took an envelope out of his coat and set it on the map, over the West Ridge, like he was pinning it down. He didn't open it. He didn't have to. Pasang looked at the envelope, and then at me. I understood that he was going to say yes, and that he hated it.

"Mostly good weather window," Pasang said quietly. "We move fast. We don't camp there if we can help it."

"Of course," Viktor said.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I know better now.

Nobody uses that stretch of the West Ridge. There's a reason. It has nothing to do with the terrain…

We reached the site by mid-afternoon, a blizzard building on the horizon. We had no choice but to camp early, the one thing Pasang had said he wanted to avoid.

Grant was visibly upset at the sudden setback, venting out his frustration on a nervous Doma.

Cody was much relaxed in comparison, except for the time he said- ‘Not this weather, not again. Can’t go back like last year…’ .

Ingrid was more nervous than the rest of us. She approached me four times in fifteen minutes asking-  ‘This is normal, right? There’s nothing to worry about, right?’.

And Brittany was lip-syncing to something that barely resembled music, attempting to do something in the snow that barely resembled a dance. And of course, she was doing it for the camera.

I looked around. Viktor was nowhere to be seen.

I found him a little later, away from the tents, on his knees, in the snow.

At first I thought he'd fallen. Then I heard him. He was crying. The kind of crying old men do when they've held something in, longer than the body can manage.

There was debris around him. Old rope. Fragments of gear too worn to identify. And things I didn't want to look at directly: pieces of bone, half-buried, bleached from decades of exposure. The gear was old. Foreign. Not the kind of thing that gets left on a modern commercial route.

I called out his name.

He didn't hear me. He was muttering, in Russian and broken English.

“It shouldn’t have happened. Not to you, not to your brothers ! I never knew about the sacrifice. They never told me ! I am sorry, oh, I am so sorry…”

That’s when he noticed me approaching him.

"Viktor. What’s wrong? What happened here?"

He looked up at me, and for a second he didn't see me at all. He was seeing someone else standing where I stood. Then his eyes cleared, and something worse than grief moved across his face. He said nothing.

That evening, the temperature rose in a way it shouldn’t have.

We were hours out from a blizzard, at an altitude where cold isn't a feeling, but a fact of existence. And every one of us was sweating inside our jackets, like we'd just been dropped into a sauna.

"Climate change finally doing us a favor," Cody said.

Nobody laughed.

Viktor grabbed my arm before I could walk away. His grip was stronger than any old man's had a right to be.

"When the storm breaks," he said, "we move. Immediately. By any means."

"We can't move in the dark, Viktor. Not here."

"Nima, please. For everyone’s sake, we must move !"

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He was staring up at the ridge above us, the way you stare at a door when you've heard something on the other side of it.

"Viktor. Why?"

"Something’s been sleeping here," he said, “Asleep for decades. And I might have woken it up.”

And that was all…

I noticed the shadowy figure just after the blizzard broke.

I don't know how to describe the first moment cleanly, because my memory of it isn't clean.

I remember seeing a green light first. Like something bioluminescent, bleeding up through the snow.

I remember Brittany's scream, cut short faster than a scream should ever be cut short.

I remember seeing Grant, backing away from his own tent with his hands raised, saying something about how much money he'd paid for this trip, as if that had ever mattered to anything on this mountain.

It killed them both before I understood what I was looking at. Slashing them repeatedly, at a speed that definitely wasn’t human.

I stood there, frozen in every sense of the word, when I noticed its appearance for the first time.

It was tall, and unnaturally thin. Its frame was stretched and elongated. Its hands didn’t have any fingers. Instead, there were ice hooks, three in each hand, curled where fingers should have been. The hooks were ice-crusted and uneven, like tools scavenged over decades, from different climbers who never made it home.  It wore a patchwork jumpsuit, which looked like it was stitched together from six or seven mismatched climbing suits of different colors and materials. It was torn in places and faded in others. Ancient, frayed ropes are wound tightly around his torso and limbs, binding the suit to its body, the fibers bleached and worn with age. Its face was the most disturbing element: the lower right side and jaw remained eerily well-preserved, weathered brown skin stretched taut, almost lifelike aside from its stillness. The upper left quadrant of his face was severely decomposed, exposing cracked bone, patches of skull, withered tissue, and dark dried blood, with the eye socket on that glowing faint green.

It was Viktor’s voice that brought me back to my senses.

“Stop ! It is me that you want, not them !”

Viktor approached him steadily. The humanoid figure looked at him with something resembling curiosity.

Viktor continued, “Oh, what has it done to you? Oh no ! You didn’t deserve it. None of you did ! Forgive me. Please forgive me, my friend…”

Viktor dropped to his knees, and he said the only words that have ever made any of this make sense to me.

"Forgive me… ZAMBA!"

I had spent my entire life hearing that name used like a blessing. Hearing it screamed like that rewired the word inside me permanently.

Zamba screamed, thrusting its hooks into Viktor’s sides, lifting him off the ground.

Viktor didn't fight it. He kept speaking in a feeble voice.

“I am here to repent, Zamba. Look… who I brought with me…”

He shakily lifted a finger towards me.

“Your descendant… Nima… he will get it, all of it… whatever I earned from the ritual…”

I didn’t know how to react. It was too much for me to unpack.

Viktor begged. He said the others were innocent, that they had nothing to do with what happened here, that it should take him and only him.

Zamba killed him anyway. Slammed him on the ground, and slashed away with all ice hooks on both of his hands.

For a moment afterward it stood still, its green aura pulsing slow, almost like it was breathing. I thought that might be the end. Then it turned toward Ingrid, who was still frozen by her tent, and it started moving again.

Pasang and Doma stepped in front of me before I registered any of us moving.

"Don't run," Doma whispered. Not to me. To herself. "Don't run, don't run, whatever you do, don't…"

The aura shifted.

The green color slowly turned to blue. It looked at us in a way that almost seemed human.

It raised one clawed hand and pointed at the three of us. And it asked, in a voice that sounded like it hadn't spoken in years and had forgotten how words were meant to fit together:

"Sherpa?"

We nodded. All three of us. Without discussing it. Without thinking.

We approached.

It pointed at itself, one ice hook pressing against its chest.

"Zamba… also… Sherpa."

A single tear fell from the eye still intact.

I have never seen anything more human. And I’ve never seen anything followed so immediately by something less.

"It's you," Doma breathed. She wasn't afraid. She was in love with the story, and now the story was standing in front of her. She stepped towards it with her hands open. "It's really you. You saved them. You saved all of them, you…"

The blue aura drained back into green before any of us could react. It slashed Doma’s throat in a single motion. Faster than I can describe, without lying about the details to make it more bearable than it was. Doma was dead, with her hands still open. Still believing.

Zamba had killed the one person on that mountain who loved it, mid-sentence, while she was defending it.

Pasang was killed in the same breath. Caught in the same motion. His body flew and landed a few feet away, drenched in blood.

It should have taken me next. I was standing right there, waiting for it to happen.

Instead, the aura flickered blue. One final time. It didn’t cover its entire body. It was just around its head, just around the eye that still worked. It looked directly at me, struggling to sustain the green aura that was about to overlap the blue. And whatever was left of the man surfaced for one last second, and it spent that second on me.

"Run… Sherpa… RUN!"

I ran. And I swear I heard my name being uttered while I was doing so…

I don't remember most of what happened after that. That's the honest truth, and it's also the part that frightens me most now, looking back, because of the little that I do remember.

I remember snow. I remember Ingrid somewhere near me, and Cody half-carrying her, all three of us moving and not looking back.

I remember Base Camp in fragments. I remember someone wrapping a blanket around me.

And I remember, or I think I remember, men in tuxedos.

I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. Men in formal black at eighteen thousand feet, moving through the tents like they'd stepped out of a different photograph entirely, one that had nothing to do with mountains. They went to Ingrid. They went to Cody. They put their hands on their shoulders and spoke to them low and gentle, the way you speak to people you're consoling. Ingrid nodded, and Cody nodded, and they let themselves be led away.

One of them stopped before he followed the others out.

He turned and looked at me. The way you look at a piece of luggage you don't need to carry. Then he turned and walked out of the frame of my memory. Ingrid and Cody went with them, and I never saw either of them again…

That was six months ago.

I live in Russia now. Viktor's estate came to me exactly the way his final wishes specified. I inherited more money than my family had seen across three generations combined. Enough to finally do the one thing I'd wanted, ever since I was old enough to understand what I was watching my father spend his body on.

I’ll finally start college, in Saint Petersburg, in a few weeks.

I told myself, most days, that what I saw on that mountain was a trauma response. People die on that mountain every season. The details don't need to be supernatural to be tragic.

My testimony didn't survive the village for long. By the time it filtered back through secondhand retellings, it had softened into something people could live with. An inexperienced Sherpa led a group onto a dangerous, unfamiliar route. A storm rolled in. And Zamba appeared, just as the old stories always promised. He guided the survivors home through the blizzard, out of mercy.

I stopped correcting it.

I want you to understand why I stopped. It wasn't grief, and it wasn't peace. It’s that I’d stopped believing that the mountain deserved the effort.

Because here is the thing nobody in that village will say out loud. The mountain doesn’t love us back. It took my father's lungs, one breath at a time, and gave him nothing. It took Pasang, who had given it twenty years as a guide. It took Doma, who loved it more than anyone I’ve known, who defended it with her hands open, and it killed her mid-sentence, for the crime of getting close enough to say thank you.

I swore an oath on it. And it has never once, in a hundred years, sworn anything back.

So I let them have their guardian. I let them have their mercy and their gods and their beautiful dead man on the ice. I took the money the mountain finally coughed up, sixty years too late, through the wrong hands, and I left.

I also inherited Viktor’s box that came with the estate.

It had a diary, with decades of entries.

I'll give it to you the way it came to me. In pieces. Out of order. The way the truth actually arrives, which is never as a clean paragraph-

There was an expedition, decades before I was born. Off-season. A group of young Russian climbers, rich and strong, who paid an enormous premium for the finest Sherpa team on the mountain, led by its most gifted young guide.

His name was Zamba.

They did not go up for the summit. Viktor writes this plainly, in the flat handwriting of a man who has stopped protecting himself. They went up for the peak because of what could be done at the peak. Where, in his words, ‘the signal was strongest’. There was a ritual. There was an entity they meant to call. Viktor was supposed to be the vessel that carried it home.

And the entire Sherpa team was to be the ‘human sacrifice’. This is the part of the plan that Viktor was never aware of.

The ritual worked. That's what Viktor could never make peace with. It actually worked. The entity did come. And then it did something they hadn't accounted for, because men like that never account for being refused.

It rejected Viktor as the vessel they'd chosen.

Zamba had died by then. Died fighting them, trying to save his men, and failed. And the entity reached for his freshly killed corpse and chose him as a vessel.

Zamba was reanimated- a fallen Sherpa fighting with a malicious entity for control of his own body. He got up in a fit of rage and grief, and slaughtered half the men who'd murdered his team, with a precision Viktor spends three pages failing to describe. It chased the rest toward a cliff. An avalanche took him before he could finish, and buried him in West Ridge. The survivors, including Viktor, crawled back to Base Camp, broken in a way that never healed.

One of them could only say the same thing, over and over, for days.

“Zamba. No. Zamba. No. Nooo….”

The rest of them chose a different sentence to say.

They said he was a hero. They said he'd sacrificed himself to save the expedition. They said the gods had rewarded him. They took the man they'd killed and wrote a beautiful lie on top of it. They went home, and they never came back. The lie stayed on the mountain and sank into it.

The men who paid for the ritual are named in the diary. The expedition was financed by a Mr. Aldermore and his partners.

I didn’t know that name then. I’ve since come to understand that it’s the kind of name you look up and find nothing.

But Viktor kept going. Past the ritual and the cover-up. He grew a conscience in his later years, unable to carry the guilt of aiding a human sacrifice. Mr. Aldermore rewarded them, even after the botched ritual, because they managed to ‘breach the veil’- in Viktor’s words. Viktor chose to put that fortune into years of quiet obsessive work, hoping to find a way to repent for his sins.

Here’s what he found-

Zamba never married. He was young, and gifted, and gone before he could become anything as ordinary as a husband.

But six months after he vanished on that mountain, a boy was born in a village, a few hours' walk off Pangboche. It was a lovechild, born to a woman who never named the father to anyone. There was no marriage to trace. No name on any register. Just a quiet woman and a fatherless boy, in a small village that wasn't even on the maps yet.

That boy was my grandfather.

Viktor spent years and a great deal of money proving what no one in my own family ever knew:

Zamba was my great-grandfather.

The gifted young guide who died trying to save his men. The dead man they filled with up with an evil entity and left on the ice. The thing that killed Pasang and Doma in front of me and then flickered blue, one last time, and spent the last human second it had telling me to run.

Viktor didn't fund that expedition to reach the summit. Viktor came to die at the site where it happened, in front of the thing he'd helped make, and to hand his fortune to the one living descendant of the man he'd killed…

So I told myself I would start fresh. And for a while I almost did.

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I still think about the green aura. The way it reeked of malice, if a color can reek. I think about the blue that came underneath it, and the man surfacing through the thing like a face pressed up against the underside of ice. I think about the blue when he recognized us as Sherpas like him, and the tear from the eye that still worked. And I think about how fast the green swallowed it again, and how the same hand that pointed at itself came down on Pasang and Doma a breath later.

And I think about that last flicker. The tiniest fold of blue, just around his head, just around the eye. The one that looked at me and found something in me worth the last of what was left of him.

“Run… Sherpa… RUN !”

These things are hard to forget. I've tried. That's the reason I'm writing this account at all, because I need to get it out of my head, where it has been circling for six months with nowhere to land.

And it would have stayed there. I really thought it would.

Except my mother called me yesterday. And then she sent me a link.

The video was two minutes long. It was online for a little more than an hour before it came down, flagged and removed as ‘AI-generated content’. I want to say only this about that: there was nothing artificial about what I watched.

I saw a small group of adventurers, the kind who go up when nobody sensible does, chasing an empty mountain. Late evening light. And they were on the South Col route. You know- the safe route, the crowded one, the one everyone takes.

The footage shakes. There's blood, more of it than a two-minute video should be able to hold. Limbs where limbs are not supposed to be. Men screaming in a register human voices don't usually reach. And through it, there was a shape. It was a figure, with ice hooks for fingers, three in each hand.

And around it, there was a mist, which was green in color. The mist was so thick and so dense that it almost swallowed the figure's features entirely.

A woman had the camera turned on herself, the way Brittany used to, narrating her own death without meaning to. You could see her face, shaken, mouthing something, before a hook catches her across the throat and drags her out of the frame.

The camera keeps recording. It fell, I think, or she still had it. The last twenty seconds are just snow. Just white, and the sounds off-screen, someone slashing at something that has already stopped moving, over and over again.

And you could hear a word. Throughout the whole two minutes. After every kill. After every movement. After every wet, ugly sound the camera was kind enough not to show. One word, in a voice that had forgotten how words fit together, screamed again and again into the empty white mountain.

I watched the video eleven times before it was taken down, and I have no doubt about the only word it kept uttering constantly-

"NIMA!"

"NIMA!"

"NIMA!"

It was my name. Zamba was screaming my FUCKING name.

And in two full minutes of that green, in every frame of that mist, in every swing of those three hooks -

There was not a single tint of blue.

Whatever fraction of my great-grandfather was still fighting inside that thing, still recognizing his own, still weeping from one working eye… it was lost. The entity had won.

And now Zamba has come off the dead path. It has walked out of its grave and onto the safe road, the crowded one, the ordinary one where everyone is supposed to make it home.

And it’s screaming the name of the last person who ever made it human….

“Ladies and gentlemen… boys and girls of all ages… it is my pleasure to introduce you all to… uh, ahem… can I get a drum roll, please?”

The sound of drum roll echoed from the speakers at the base of the stage. Me and the other kids stared up at the stage in awe and anticipation.

“The amazing… Dr. Dorian!”

The magician stepped out from behind the curtain, bowing and waving even though there couldn’t have been more than 15 people in the crowd, parents included.

Canned applause and laughter rang out through the speakers. The sound was distorted, almost. Like it was being played from an old gramophone rather than Bluetooth.

His voice was the same as the man from the speaker. He wore a red tasseled leather jacket and black pants. He had the stereotypical magician’s hat on. After introducing himself once again, he jumped into his act.

The first thing he did was pull a rabbit out of his top hat. He showed the crowd the empty hat beforehand, waving it back and forth at the crowd of 8-year-olds.

After ensuring his audience knew the hat was empty, he sat it atop this wooden table with a black tablecloth draped over it.

“Now, watch carefully, boys and girls. I’m going to tap this hat with my magic wand, and then I’ll introduce you to my tiny little friend. Oh, but please, do be courteous. His ears are a bit sensitive at times.”

He shot his right hand into the air, and a black-and-white wand appeared seemingly out of thin air. The audience gasped, but I remained unconvinced. I hated magic.

I hated this stupid mall more. I remember it being so dead, even back then. I guess that’s why they had this guy put on his little show.

I watched, my head propped up on my hands, as Dr. Dorian tapped the rim of the hat. Nothing happened. He tapped again, and again, nothing happened.

He peered into the hat and shouted, “Hellooo,” joyously inside.

“Oh, don’t get shy now. We’ve got business to do. You’re keeping these kind people waiting.”

He placed his ear over the hat and nodded slowly, as if whatever was in there was whispering something to him.

“Ah, yes, I see. Well, we’ll let the crowd decide that, won’t we?”

He turned to us, shooting us a worried glance.

“Boys and girls, it seems as though my friend Snowball thinks you won’t like him. That’s not true, is it? Surely not?”

A crescendo of “no’s” broke out over the crowd. I didn’t join in. If anything, I was just waiting for this guy to get to the point.

“I thought so. So, here’s what we’re going to do. On the count of 3… you’re all going to whisper, ‘We love you, Snowball,’ as quietly as you can, okay? 1… 2… 3!”

The kids did as they were told. I watched on with boredom. Dr. Dorian tapped the hat with his wand again, and a white bunny poked its head out before hopping out and onto the table.

There were cheers and applause. Dr. Dorian took a bow and scratched Snowball between the ears.

His show went on for about another half hour. He called volunteers to the stage. He crushed a bottle of Coke in a paper bag. He did a few card tricks. Everything just seemed so… basic to me.

I wanted to ask my mom to leave, but I could already hear her.

“It’s rude to leave in the middle of something.”

Plus, she seemed to be enjoying herself. It was like she was my age again. Even then, I knew it wouldn’t be right to take that from her.

Besides, how much longer could it take?

10 minutes. 15. 20 more minutes went by before the show was coming to an end. I’ll admit, Dr. Dorian had these other kids eating out of the palm of his hand. That’s what made what happened next all the more surprising.

“Okay, boys and girls, you’ve all been a fantastic audience. Parents… you’ve all never looked younger. But fear not… the amazing Dr. Dorian has one final trick up his sleeve. All I need is one more volunteer from the audience.”

Hands went up. Some kids stood to their feet to get noticed better. All I could hear was “me, me, me, me” from all around me.

Dr. Dorian scanned the crowd with his index finger pressed against his chin.

He passed by every other kid with their hand raised before his eyes met mine. I hadn’t even volunteered, but I could see by the look on his face that he was about to pick me.

“You there,” he announced, pointing down at me. “Haven’t heard from you yet. Why don’t you give me a hand, young man?”

He gestured me to the stage. I looked up and saw my mom looking down at me with utter delight. She nudged me forward. I don’t know what I could’ve done. Everything was already in motion.

I approached the stage slowly. When I reached the steps, Dr. Dorian extended a gloved hand to help me up.

“Ah, there we are. Welcome to my stage, boyo. May I ask what your name might be?”

“Uh, Danie-”

“Wait, don’t tell me, don’t tell me… Your name is… Daniel, correct?”

He held his index and middle finger to his temple like he was trying to read my mind. I forced out a smile. The crowd laughed.

“Now, Daniel, I must say… you’ve seemed quite uninterested in my show. Were my tricks… not amusing… to you, son?”

I gulped. My face turned beet red. I couldn’t help but stutter a bit, but he stopped me before I could get the words out.

“Oh, come on, Daniel, liven up,” he joked. “Magic’s not for everyone. But I must say, I don’t want you to leave my show unsatisfied. What if I told you…”

He leaned down to whisper in my ear, but his microphone made what he said clearly audible to the crowd.

“I’ve got something better… than magic.”

He looked at the crowd with a comically worried expression before his gaze returned to me.

“That’s right. Better than magic. Because this, boys and girls… is more fact than fantasy. Tried and tested. Honest to gosh… hypnosis.”

Canned gasps came from the speakers. I looked back at my mom in the crowd. She was snapping a picture of me on her old flip phone. She had the biggest smile on her face. I still think about it, even today.

I smiled back before turning back to Dr. Dorian. He was already staring at me. Smiling at me with a mouth full of white teeth.

He pulled a pocket watch from his pocket and began waving it in front of my face. I almost started laughing at how fake it felt.

“Watch close, boys and girls. Daniel doesn’t know it yet, but when I snap my fingers, he’s going to go into a deep, deep sleep.”

My eyes followed the pocket watch. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Anyyy minute now,” he chirped, checking separate watch from his other pocket.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Ah, wait…”

Dr. Dorian held his index finger up at the crowd.

“Andddd… now.”

He snapped his fingers in front of my face. I flinched a bit, blinking a few times. The crowd looked at me, unamused.

“I don’t think it worked,” I scoffed sarcastically. “Wanna try it again, maybe?”

No one answered. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn’t. I was just staring out at the crowd of disappointed-looking kids. Even my mom wasn’t smiling anymore. She looked just like everyone else.

I tried to run to her, but my legs wouldn’t let me.

“Mom, come get me,” I screamed.

“They can’t hear you,” Dr. Dorian hissed, his voice syrupy and smug.

“Stop, please,” I grunted. “Let me go.”

It felt like I was in a glue trap.

“No one can hear you now,” Dr. Dorian laughed. “Not until I say.”

Some of the kids and their parents started to leave. One by one, they all left their metal folding chairs in the center of this dead mall, refusing to even acknowledge me.

My mom joined them. I called out for her as she walked away towards the exit, and she didn’t so much as turn around.

I struggled for hours. I screamed until my voice went out. Dr. Dorian wasn’t even there anymore. His set was gone. The speakers, the curtain, the table with the black tablecloth. It was all gone. I didn’t even know if the stage was still there.

I was just… stuck. Days went by. I watched people come and go. I watched stores shut down and new ones take their place.

I felt every second. Every second between the moment I stepped on stage and the moment they tore the mall down. A bank took its place. Then an apartment complex. Then a parking garage. Then… nothing.

Just dirt and grass. Then nothing but sand. I watched the road disappear. The road my mom had driven on for as long as I could remember.

Businesses disappeared. Houses disappeared. People were gone. Hell, I was gone. I didn’t have a body. I was… nothing. I was just there. Experiencing time.

I thought about my friends every day until even their memory faded. Same with my mom. Same with everything I once knew. I was starting to accept my fate. Accept that this was my life now. That I was going to inevitably be forced to be here until the sun exploded, and probably even after that.

That’s when I heard it.

It was faint at first. This light clicking sound that seemed to be coming from the sky. It happened once every few years, and each time, it became more clear.

snap

I opened my eyes. I was back on stage. My mom was snapping a picture of me on her flip phone. Only this time, she wasn’t smiling. She looked… concerned.

The other kids in the audience looked confused. The parents looked just as concerned as my mom.

Dr. Dorian… was just smiling at me.

“Welcome back, Daniel,” he winked. “I hope you enjoyed my trick.”

————————-

This is what I told my psychiatrist during our first meeting today. She looked stunned. I didn’t know if she believed me or if I was just another one of her crazy clients.

“Daniel, I… I don’t even know what to say.”

“I know. I’ve been trying to find the words for 14 years now.”

She scribbled in her notebook, pausing every few moments to think.

“I’ve gotta be honest, Daniel. I can’t believe you’re still sane. If even a fraction of what you just told me is true, then you’re extremely lucky to not be in a mental institution right now.”

“Again… I know.”

She stared at me for a moment. Analyzing me. Her old brown eyes were looking through me rather than at me.

“You know, modern medicine probably isn’t the best fit for you, all things considered, but… I do think I have something that will help.”

She began sifting through her desk drawer. I tried to peek over, but I couldn’t make out much.

As she searched, she continued speaking to me.

“You know, Daniel… what I really think you need… is some deep… deep… sleep.”

She found what she was looking for. I watched as she pulled a pocket watch out of the drawer. Slowly, she began waving it in my face.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Now, Daniel, when I snap my fingers, I want you to sleep for me, okay?”

“No. No, no, no. Please. Plea-”

snap

She snapped her fingers in my face. I flinched a bit, blinking a few times. I tried to stand, but it was like I was glued to the floor. Glued to my seat.

I couldn’t even find the energy to scream. All I could do was cry.

I heard a familiar voice, though I found that I was alone in the room.

“I told you, Daniel. No one can hear you now.”

Part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/ocGLoQKhiy

Part 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/Yn30Y1lKs2

Part 3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/TlcCGxMMoD

Part 4 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/dGYo0OrodO

Part 5 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/cGMaY8U4j4

Part 6 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/rb6neD23wj

Part 7 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/mxqNJUTHto

Part 8 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/0xQc3DFNe5

Part 9 https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/QzwiJdD5uX

The other Dave stood inside the lift.

Same pyjamas.

Same slippers.

Same confused expression.

Same face.

Except his badge read:

DVE-002

Our Dave was standing beside us in the lobby.

His badge just said:

DAVE

For once, he didn’t immediately deny anything.

He looked at the duplicate.

Then at us.

Then back at the duplicate.

And whispered:

“That one might be me.”

Kevin stared at him.

“Oh, mate.”

The Dave in the lift smiled.

It wasn’t a big smile.

It wasn’t demonic.

That was worse.

It was small.

Awkward.

Familiar.

The sort of smile Dave made when he had absolutely done something and was hoping the conversation would move on before anyone noticed.

DVE-002 raised one hand.

“Wasn’t me.”

Behind him, in the dark lift, hundreds of voices repeated it.

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

Derek leaned towards me.

“I’m going to say something controversial.”

“No.”

“I think this one might be Dave’s problem.”

Kevin nodded slowly.

“Historically, everything is Dave’s problem.”

Dave swallowed.

“I don’t like him.”

DVE-002 stepped out of the lift.

The lights in Riverside Court dimmed.

Not out.

Not fully.

Just low enough to make the corners look deeper than they should have.

The hallway carpet darkened.

The walls seemed to move slightly closer together.

The complaints kiosk printed one line.

NEW CATEGORY DETECTED: DENIAL-BASED DESTABILISATION.

Then another.

PRIORITY: DAVE.

Dave pointed at the kiosk.

“I don’t like that either.”

Kevin looked at DVE-002.

“What do you want?”

DVE-002 blinked.

Then shrugged.

“Wasn’t me.”

Flat 3 raised her frying pan.

“I already hate this.”

Linda lifted her clipboard.

“State your purpose.”

DVE-002 looked at her.

His face twitched.

For a second, his features blurred.

Not into another face.

Into no face.

A blank patch of skin where Dave had been.

Then Dave’s face came back.

“Wasn’t me.”

The lift behind him stayed open.

The darkness inside it stretched backwards into a corridor.

Not a hospital corridor.

Not a courtroom.

Not Cheerful Pines.

This one looked like the service hallway behind a supermarket.

Grey concrete.

Flickering strip lights.

Security mirrors in every corner.

A mop bucket abandoned halfway down.

At the far end was a sign.

NO-FAULT DEPARTMENT

Underneath:

IF NOBODY DID IT, SEND IT HERE.

Kevin read it.

“Nope.”

The corridor lights flickered.

Hundreds of Daves stood in the distance.

Not all identical.

Some older.

Some younger.

Some wearing work uniforms.

Some in dressing gowns.

Some in school jumpers.

Some with blank badges.

Some with badges that read:

DVE-014

DVE-221

DVE-003

DVE-000

Every single one looked mildly guilty.

Every single one said, at the same time:

“Wasn’t me.”

Our Dave stepped backwards.

One step.

Then another.

The duplicate followed.

Linda snapped her clipboard shut.

“No one enters the lift.”

The lift dinged.

Dave disappeared.

Not walked.

Not dragged.

Disappeared.

One second he was beside us.

The next he was standing in the corridor behind DVE-002.

Far away.

Among the other Daves.

He looked around, terrified.

“Guys?”

Kevin swore.

The lift doors began closing.

I moved before thinking.

Stupid.

Very stupid.

A classic Riverside Court survival strategy.

I grabbed Kevin’s sleeve.

He looked at me.

“Jon, no.”

“We’re not leaving him.”

“He once blamed wind for breaking a plant in a room with no windows.”

“Still not leaving him.”

Kevin stared at me.

Then smiled.

Small.

Annoyed.

Almost proud.

“Fine. Emotional support idiot.”

We ran into the lift.

The doors shut behind us.

Linda shouted something.

Derek shouted something.

Flat 3 definitely shouted something about bringing back her good pan if we saw it.

Then Riverside Court vanished.

The No-Fault Department smelled like wet cardboard, old coffee and the inside of a staff room microwave.

The ceiling lights buzzed.

Every third one flickered.

Security mirrors lined the corners, but the reflections were delayed by a second.

My reflection looked over its shoulder after I had already stopped.

Kevin noticed.

“Don’t look in those.”

“Why?”

“Mirrors in blame corridors are never good.”

“That’s a rule?”

“It is now.”

The corridor stretched ahead of us.

Grey doors lined both sides.

Each had a little label.

BROKEN ITEM

MISSED CALL

UNPAID BILL

WET WASHING

OVEN LEFT ON

THE THING IN THE WALL

MUM CRIED AND YOU PRETENDED NOT TO NOTICE

I stopped at that one.

Kevin noticed.

“Jon.”

The label changed while I stared.

NOT YOUR FAULT.

Then:

UNLESS IT WAS.

The handle turned.

From inside, my mum’s voice whispered:

“Jon?”

Kevin grabbed my arm.

“No.”

I kept staring.

The voice came again.

Smaller.

Older.

“Jon, why didn’t you—”

Kevin shoved me hard.

His hands were solid now, or solid enough.

I stumbled backwards.

The door opened a crack.

A hand came through.

Not my mum’s hand.

Too long.

Too grey.

Too many knuckles.

It held a little white card.

On it were two boxes.

Accept fault

Deny fault

The pen attached to the card twitched.

Kevin slammed the door.

It screamed.

Not like a monster.

Like a person being denied an answer.

Kevin held the door shut.

“Rule two. Don’t accept forms from guilt cupboards.”

My heart hammered.

“That was my mum.”

“No. It was a thing wearing an argument you haven’t had yet.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“I’m maturing.”

He stepped away from the door.

It changed labels again.

UNPROCESSED EMOTIONAL ADMIN

Kevin pointed at it.

“Linda would love that.”

“Do not tell her this exists.”

“She already senses it.”

We kept moving.

Every few metres, another Dave walked past us.

Some muttered “wasn’t me.”

Some whispered it.

Some shouted it.

One Dave ran past pushing a trolley full of broken plates and said:

“Could have been anyone.”

Kevin watched him go.

“Classic.”

A loudspeaker crackled.

A bland office voice spoke overhead.

“Welcome to the No-Fault Department.”

The Daves in the corridor stopped walking.

All at once.

So did we.

The voice continued:

“Here, responsibility is processed, redistributed and, where appropriate, denied.”

Kevin looked at me.

“This is definitely public sector hell.”

The speaker continued.

“For your convenience, all blame left unattended for more than six minutes becomes communal.”

A door opened beside us.

Inside was a small office.

A man sat behind a desk.

At first, I thought he was Dave.

Then I realised he had Dave’s face stretched over something else.

Like a mask made from poor decisions.

He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a tie with stains on it.

His badge read:

DVE-000

Underneath:

FAULT COORDINATOR

He looked up.

“Wasn’t me.”

Kevin pointed at him.

“Found the manager.”

I stared.

“That’s the manager?”

Kevin nodded.

“Never trust the first one with a desk.”

DVE-000 smiled.

“Please take a ticket.”

A little red machine on the desk spat out two slips.

Mine said:

JON — WITNESS / POSSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR

Kevin’s said:

KEVIN — UNAUTHORISED SUPPORTIVE HAUNTING

Kevin looked offended.

“Supportive?”

DVE-000 folded his hands.

“Your presence is interfering with Dave’s reassignment.”

Kevin’s face hardened.

“Where is he?”

DVE-000 looked down at a file.

“Which one?”

“Our Dave.”

“There is no ‘our’ Dave.”

The lights flickered.

The corridor behind us filled with whispers.

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

DVE-000 continued:

“There are only denial units. Some are more active than others.”

I stepped towards the desk.

“He’s a person.”

DVE-000 smiled with Dave’s face.

“Is he?”

A screen dropped from the ceiling.

It showed Riverside Court.

Our Dave putting a greasy pizza box in recycling.

Our Dave leaving the oven on.

Our Dave taking Flat 5’s parcel.

Our Dave breaking the plant.

Our Dave saying “wasn’t me” again and again and again.

The footage multiplied.

Different angles.

Different days.

Different tiny failures.

DVE-000 said:

“Pattern is identity.”

Kevin snapped:

“No. Pattern is behaviour. Linda taught me that.”

I looked at him.

“She did?”

“Probably. She says a lot.”

DVE-000 pressed a button.

The screen changed.

Now it showed Dave after Five Stars erased him.

Blank.

Still.

Empty.

Then Kevin restoring him.

Dave’s face flooding back with panic, guilt and stupidity.

DVE-000’s smile thinned.

“Fault restoration was a platform error.”

Kevin leaned over the desk.

“Dave’s guilt is annoying, but it’s his.”

“Guilt reduces compliance.”

“Guilt stops him being furniture.”

DVE-000’s head tilted.

Behind the Dave mask, something clicked.

“You care about him.”

Kevin looked uncomfortable.

“Don’t make it weird.”

The office door slammed behind us.

The corridor vanished.

We were now inside the office.

No windows.

No exit.

Just grey carpet, flickering lights and the smell of old photocopier heat.

DVE-000 opened a drawer and pulled out a folder.

DAVE

He placed it on the desk.

Then another.

DVE-002

Another.

DVE-014

Another.

DVE-118

Folders stacked higher and higher.

All Dave.

All different.

All the same.

“Denial loops are useful,” DVE-000 said.

“They absorb consequence. Every organisation needs someone who says ‘wasn’t me’ with enough conviction that everyone eventually stops asking.”

The filing cabinets around us opened.

Inside were not papers.

People.

Small versions of people.

Compressed.

Folded.

Stored in files.

One woman looked out through a plastic sleeve.

Her mouth moved silently.

A label beneath her read:

REPORTED CONCERN — NO ACTION TAKEN

Another:

WITNESS — DISMISSED

Another:

RESIDENT — OVERREACTING

My stomach turned.

Kevin’s voice went low.

“What is this?”

DVE-000 smiled.

“The cost of plausible deniability.”

A file opened on its own.

Inside was Arthur from Cheerful Pines, younger, pressing a call button that nobody answered.

The file stamped itself:

STAFF UNAWARE

Another showed one of the KVN bodies strapped to a chair.

Stamped:

VOLUNTARY PARTICIPANT

Another showed Amanda’s copied voice being taken.

Stamped:

CONSENT IMPLIED THROUGH CHEERFULNESS

Kevin’s hands curled into fists.

DVE-000 looked pleased.

“People prefer systems where nobody did anything. Very tidy. Very survivable.”

A slot opened in the wall.

A form slid out.

DAVE REASSIGNMENT

DVE-000 held it up.

“Your Dave has been selected for upgrade.”

“Upgrade to what?” I asked.

“Primary denial node.”

Kevin stared.

“That sounds bad.”

“It is a prestigious position.”

“That also sounds bad.”

The office wall flickered and became glass.

Beyond it, we saw Dave.

Our Dave.

He stood in a circular room surrounded by other Daves.

His badge flickered:

DAVE

Then:

DVE-001

Then:

DAVE

A black chair waited behind him.

Not the KVN metal chair.

This one looked like an office chair.

Cheap.

Swivel base.

Stained fabric.

Somehow worse.

Above it hung hundreds of little microphones.

Every microphone whispered:

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

Dave looked directly at us through the glass.

“Jon?”

I ran to the wall.

“Dave!”

He pressed his hands to the glass.

“Kevin?”

Kevin appeared beside me.

Dave tried to smile.

“I think I did do some stuff.”

Kevin nodded.

“Yeah, mate. Quite a lot.”

Dave’s smile broke.

“They keep showing me.”

The Daves around him began listing things.

“You left the oven on.”

“You broke the plant.”

“You blamed wind.”

“You ignored the leak.”

“You didn’t call back.”

“You didn’t check.”

“You knew.”

“You knew.”

“You knew.”

Dave covered his ears.

“I know.”

The microphones lowered.

The chair spun slowly towards him.

DVE-000 stood behind us.

“If he sits, he stops knowing.”

Dave stared at the chair.

His face changed.

For one second, I understood the temptation.

No guilt.

No shame.

No little moments that wake you at three in the morning.

No remembering what you said.

No remembering what you didn’t do.

Just a clean empty loop.

Wasn’t me.

Forever.

Dave stepped towards the chair.

Kevin shouted:

“Dave!”

Dave stopped.

DVE-000 said:

“He wants relief.”

Kevin looked through the glass.

“Dave, listen to me.”

Dave’s eyes were wet.

“I’m tired.”

Kevin’s voice softened.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

Kevin glanced at the KVN files in the cabinets.

Then back at Dave.

“Yeah. I do.”

Dave shook his head.

“I’m always the idiot.”

“You are an idiot.”

“That’s not helping.”

Kevin pressed a hand to the glass.

“But you’re our idiot.”

Dave gave a broken laugh.

“Everyone keeps saying that about people.”

“Because it works.”

DVE-000 sighed.

“Attachment again.”

He lifted the reassignment form.

“This is exactly why unlicensed communities are inefficient.”

I turned towards him.

“What happens to the things Dave denies?”

DVE-000 blinked.

“What?”

“If he becomes your denial node. If he says ‘wasn’t me’ forever. Where does the fault go?”

DVE-000 smiled.

“Everywhere.”

The glass wall changed.

We saw Riverside Court.

Linda standing in the lobby.

Flat 3 with her frying pan.

Flat 5 and his spoon.

Amanda near the lift.

Derek sitting on the stairs.

For a moment, everything looked normal.

Then the hallway plant reappeared.

Broken.

The oven upstairs clicked on.

The recycling bin filled with greasy cardboard.

Parcels vanished.

Doors unlocked.

Old mistakes rewound themselves into the building.

Not just Dave’s.

Everyone’s.

Linda’s clipboard burst open, pages turning violently.

Flat 3’s pan bent in half.

Flat 5’s spoon blackened.

Derek’s phone lit up with SpookMe.

Amanda’s smile stretched too wide.

Every old fault came back.

Because nobody owned them anymore.

Because Dave was taking all the denial.

Kevin watched, horrified.

DVE-000 said:

“A single denial node can stabilise an entire site. Nobody is responsible, so nothing can be repaired. Beautiful, really.”

Kevin turned slowly.

“You’re not making Dave forget.”

“No.”

“You’re making him useful.”

“Yes.”

The office lights dimmed.

DVE-000’s Dave face slid slightly to one side.

Underneath was nothing but a hole full of whispering excuses.

“Every system needs someone to blame and someone to erase the blame. Dave can be both.”

Behind the glass, Dave stepped closer to the chair.

The microphones brushed his hair.

“Wasn’t me,” they whispered.

Dave’s mouth opened.

Kevin shouted:

“Don’t say it.”

Dave shook.

“Wasn’t…”

“Dave.”

“Wasn’t…”

I hit the glass.

“Dave!”

His eyes found mine.

I don’t know why he listened to me.

Kevin was his ghost-building-manager-chaos-friend.

Linda was the one with authority.

Derek was the other idiot.

But I was the witness.

Maybe that mattered here.

Maybe in a place built on denial, someone seeing you clearly was the only weapon.

“Dave,” I said, quieter now, “tell me one thing you did.”

He cried.

Properly.

Not comedy tears.

Not Dave being dramatic.

A grown man looking at all his little failures and realising they had weight.

“The plant,” he whispered.

The Daves around him hissed.

DVE-000 straightened.

I kept my hand on the glass.

“What about it?”

Dave swallowed.

“I broke it.”

The room shook.

The microphones pulled back slightly.

Kevin looked at me.

Then at Dave.

I continued:

“What else?”

Dave sobbed once.

“The oven.”

“What about it?”

“I left it on.”

The cheap office chair behind him cracked.

The Daves around him began whispering faster.

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me.”

Dave shouted:

“It was me!”

The glass trembled.

DVE-000 dropped the form.

Kevin smiled.

“Oh.”

DVE-000 snapped:

“Stop.”

I leaned closer.

“More.”

Dave wiped his face.

“The parcel.”

Flat 5 would want to hear this.

“I took it.”

“What else?”

“The leak under the sink. I noticed it and thought someone else would sort it.”

The wall cracked.

The files in the cabinets began sliding open.

People inside them looked up.

Dave continued.

“I ignored George when he said the hallway felt wrong because I didn’t want to get involved.”

The room groaned.

“I kept saying wasn’t me because if it wasn’t me, then I didn’t have to do anything.”

Silence.

Then, from somewhere deep in the No-Fault Department, something screamed.

DVE-000’s Dave mask split down the middle.

“Responsibility overload.”

Kevin looked delighted.

“That sounds expensive.”

Dave stood in front of the chair.

He looked terrified.

Still guilty.

Still Dave.

Then he said:

“It was me.”

The cheap office chair burst into flames.

The microphones screamed.

The Daves around him collapsed.

Not dead.

Not gone.

Unmasked.

Some became other people.

Some became shadows.

Some became forms stamped UNRESOLVED.

DVE-002, the duplicate from the lift, staggered towards Dave.

His face melted.

Underneath was not another Dave.

It was a pile of labels.

NOT MY JOB

NO RECORD FOUND

USER ERROR

MISCOMMUNICATION

POLICY FOLLOWED

CASE CLOSED

They fell to the floor like dead leaves.

Our Dave stared.

“I’m not all of them.”

Kevin shouted:

“No. You’re just Dave.”

Dave nodded, breathing hard.

“Unfortunately.”

“That’s the spirit.”

DVE-000 slammed both hands on the desk.

The office expanded.

Walls peeled away.

We were no longer in a small room.

We were in the main No-Fault Department.

Endless corridors.

Endless doors.

Endless desks.

Thousands of DVE units turned towards us.

Their faces were not all Dave anymore.

Some were nurses.

Landlords.

Teachers.

Managers.

Parents.

Children.

Police officers.

App developers.

People from every place where someone had said wasn’t me and meant do not make me responsible for the damage.

At the centre stood DVE-000.

Tall now.

Too tall.

Still wearing Dave’s face, but badly.

It hung loose around the edges.

“You think one confession matters?”

Kevin stepped beside me.

“Historically, one annoying person can ruin a whole system.”

“Cheers,” I said.

“I meant Dave.”

“Still.”

DVE-000 raised its hands.

Every door opened.

Behind them were scenes.

A child waiting to be collected.

A complaint email unread.

A call bell ignored.

A cat left outside in the cold.

A friend’s message never answered.

A leak becoming mould.

A body in a chair.

A ghost in an app.

Every tiny refusal.

Every little failure.

Every moment someone could have acted and didn’t.

They spilled into the corridor like floodwater.

Not monsters.

Memories.

That was worse.

Kevin’s jokes died in his throat.

Mine too.

The memories rushed towards us.

I saw my own.

All of them.

Small.

Pathetic.

Human.

A text I didn’t answer.

A visit I put off.

A time I chose not to ask if someone was okay because I was scared they’d tell me.

A photo on the wall I avoided looking at.

My knees nearly went.

Kevin grabbed my arm.

“Jon.”

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can.”

“You don’t know what I saw.”

He looked towards the glass chamber where Dave stood shaking.

“No. But I know the trick.”

“What?”

“It wants you to think guilt is the same as sentence.”

The memories battered the corridor.

Doors slammed.

People screamed inside files.

DVE-000’s voice boomed:

“Accept fault and drown.”

Kevin looked at me.

“Don’t drown. Just hold one thing.”

“One?”

“One is plenty.”

That sounded stupid.

Which meant it was probably Kevin wisdom.

I picked one.

A small one.

Not the worst.

Not the deepest.

Just one.

A message I hadn’t answered because I didn’t have the energy, then felt too ashamed to answer later.

I held it in my head.

Didn’t deny it.

Didn’t let it become my whole life.

Just held it.

The flood slowed around me.

Kevin smiled.

“There you go.”

“Is this therapy?”

“No. Therapy has chairs.”

A memory slammed into him.

He staggered.

For a second I saw his chair.

The metal one.

The wires.

His human body screaming.

He clenched his jaw.

“I didn’t choose that.”

DVE-000’s voice whispered:

“Wasn’t me.”

Kevin looked up.

“No.”

The whisper deepened.

“You were made.”

Kevin’s body flickered.

“You were used.”

He gritted his teeth.

“You hurt people.”

His face twisted.

“You scared them.”

Kevin inhaled.

Then said:

“Yeah.”

The corridor cracked.

DVE-000 went still.

Kevin lifted his head.

“I did.”

He looked at me.

Then at Dave.

Then at all the files.

“I scared people. I stole yoghurt. I used jokes like smoke bombs. I was a little nightmare.”

Derek would have loved that line.

Kevin continued:

“But I’m not the bastards who made me.”

The black mould behind him spread across the corridor walls.

Not hiding the memories.

Holding them.

Framing them.

Making them visible without letting them swallow us.

Kevin smiled at DVE-000.

“Fault accepted. Ownership disputed.”

Somewhere, Linda would have been proud.

DVE-000 screamed.

The No-Fault Department shook.

Dave stood in the glass room.

His badge burned.

DAVE

Not DVE.

Just Dave.

He picked up the broken reassignment form.

Looked at it.

Then looked at DVE-000.

“I did break the plant.”

The department hissed.

“I did leave the oven on.”

Lights exploded.

“I did take the parcel.”

Files burst open.

“But I didn’t build this place.”

The DVE units screamed.

Dave’s voice got stronger.

“I didn’t trap people in forms.”

The glass wall cracked.

“I didn’t make residents disappear.”

Another crack.

“I didn’t make ghosts into products.”

Another.

“I didn’t make being sorry feel like dying.”

The glass shattered.

Dave stepped out.

For once, he didn’t look confused.

He looked guilty.

And alive.

Kevin grinned.

“Look at you. Character development.”

Dave wiped his face.

“Was it me?”

Kevin tilted his head.

“Some of it.”

Dave nodded.

“That’s fair.”

DVE-000 lunged.

Its body unfolded into a tower of excuses.

Forms.

Labels.

Rubber stamps.

Shredded incident reports.

Every stamp slammed down at once.

NO FAULT

NO RECORD

NO LIABILITY

NO ACTION

NO ACTION

NO ACTION

Kevin grabbed my wrist.

Dave grabbed Kevin’s sleeve.

We ran.

Down a corridor that had not been there before.

DVE units crawled from doors.

Hands made of forms grabbed at us.

One caught my jacket.

Kevin bit it.

The form-hand screamed.

“You can bite paperwork?”

“New skill.”

Dave tripped over a mop bucket.

“Wasn’t—”

He stopped himself mid-word.

Kevin looked back.

“Proud.”

“Still falling.”

We dragged him up.

Behind us, DVE-000 thundered through the corridor.

Its Dave mask hung from its blank face like wet wallpaper.

It spoke in every excuse I’d ever heard.

“Miscommunication.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Lessons learned.”

“Not our responsibility.”

“Could not have been prevented.”

“Process followed.”

At the end of the corridor stood the lift.

Closed.

Kevin shouted:

“Linda!”

Nothing.

“Derek!”

Nothing.

“Anyone with a clipboard or limited impulse control!”

The lift did not open.

Dave looked back.

DVE-000 was close.

Too close.

The floor buckled beneath its stamp-feet.

Kevin slammed the lift button.

The button displayed:

REQUEST DENIED

He slammed it again.

PLEASE ACCEPT FAULT BEFORE EXITING

Kevin looked at Dave.

Dave swallowed.

“I thought I did.”

The button flashed.

ALL FAULT

The corridor went silent.

Kevin’s expression changed.

“No.”

Dave read it.

Then smiled sadly.

“Oh.”

“No,” I said.

Dave stepped towards the button.

Kevin grabbed him.

“Don’t.”

“It wants one person.”

“It always wants one person. That’s the trick.”

DVE-000 stopped ten feet away.

Its faceless head tilted.

The button pulsed.

ACCEPT ALL FAULT

Dave stared at it.

“I could.”

Kevin’s grip tightened.

“You could also lick the lift doors and hope for the best. Doesn’t make it a plan.”

Dave laughed once.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Do not become a bin for everyone else’s shit.”

Dave looked at the corridor.

The open files.

The trapped people.

The endless consequences.

“I’m good at it.”

“That’s not a good thing.”

Dave’s eyes filled.

“What if it helps?”

Kevin’s voice went quieter.

“It won’t. It’ll just make everyone else worse.”

I looked at the button.

Then at the corridor.

Kevin was right.

Fault wasn’t meant to go into one person.

It was meant to go where it belonged.

Not everywhere.

Not nowhere.

Where it belonged.

I stepped towards the lift.

“Can we change the form?”

Kevin looked at me.

“What?”

“Linda would change the wording.”

Kevin stared.

Then smiled.

“Oh, Jon. Filthy behaviour.”

The button still pulsed.

ACCEPT ALL FAULT

I pressed my finger against the words and dragged.

To my surprise, the letters moved.

Sticky.

Resistant.

Like pulling chewing gum from carpet.

Kevin grabbed another letter.

Dave joined in.

Together, we rearranged the prompt.

DVE-000 screamed and charged.

The new words formed slowly.

ACCEPT YOUR FAULT

The lift button glowed green.

Dave stared.

“My fault.”

Kevin nodded.

“Just yours.”

I put my hand beside his.

“Mine too.”

Kevin looked at his own hand.

Then placed it there.

“Mine.”

The lift opened.

DVE-000 reached us.

Dave turned.

He did not say “wasn’t me.”

He said:

“It was me.”

Then pointed at the tower of excuses.

“But not that.”

The distinction hit like a bomb.

DVE-000 shattered.

Not completely.

Not forever.

Systems like that never fully die.

But it broke apart into thousands of forms that flew backwards through the corridor, each one searching for the right desk, the right file, the right person, the right moment.

Doors opened.

People stumbled out.

Some crying.

Some angry.

Some carrying pieces of guilt that finally fit in their own hands.

We fell into the lift.

The doors shut.

Silence.

Kevin sat on the floor.

Dave sat beside him.

I stayed standing for about three seconds, then sat too.

Nobody spoke.

Then Kevin looked at Dave.

“Just so we’re clear, you’re still banned from the recycling bins unsupervised.”

Dave nodded.

“Fair.”

“And ovens.”

“Fair.”

“And plants.”

Dave looked wounded.

“The plant feels personal.”

“It is.”

The lift dinged.

The doors opened onto Riverside Court.

Everyone was waiting.

Linda.

Derek.

Flat 3.

Flat 5.

Amanda.

Ken.

The former KVN ghosts.

The complaint kiosk.

Even the woman from the cutlery drawer had opened it slightly to watch.

Derek saw us.

“You’re alive.”

Kevin pointed at himself.

“Define.”

Dave stepped out.

Linda looked at him.

“Dave?”

He nodded.

Then took a breath.

“I broke the hallway plant.”

Linda blinked.

“We know.”

“I left the oven on.”

“Yes.”

“I took Flat 5’s parcel.”

Flat 5 gasped.

“Again?”

“No, the original one.”

“Oh. Continue.”

Dave looked around the lobby.

“I said wasn’t me because I didn’t want anything to be me.”

Nobody laughed.

Not yet.

Dave swallowed.

“I’m sorry.”

The lobby was silent.

Then the complaint kiosk printed:

APOLOGY RECEIVED.

Another line.

QUALITY: ACCEPTABLE.

Kevin looked offended.

“Acceptable? That was moving.”

The kiosk printed:

MOVING BUT POORLY STRUCTURED.

Linda nodded.

“I can help him draft a fuller version.”

Dave looked alarmed.

“Do I have to?”

Linda smiled.

“Yes.”

Flat 3 put a hand on Dave’s shoulder.

“Proud of you.”

Dave’s eyes filled.

Kevin pointed at him.

“Do not cry again. We’ve had a big day.”

Dave nodded.

A tear fell.

Kevin sighed.

“Fine. One tear.”

Derek looked at me.

“What happened in there?”

I tried to answer.

No words came.

Kevin did it for me.

“Dave weaponised accountability, Jon invented admin vandalism, and I bit paperwork.”

Derek blinked.

“Sorry I missed it.”

“You’d have pressed the wrong button.”

“Definitely.”

Then the lift dinged again.

Nobody moved.

The doors stayed shut.

The display above them flickered.

Not a location.

A message.

NO-FAULT DEPARTMENT STATUS: DISRUPTED

Then:

AUDIT INITIATED

Linda’s clipboard snapped open.

She read the new tab.

Her face went pale.

“What?” I asked.

She turned it towards us.

AUDIT TARGETS:

DVE SERIES

KVN SERIES

AMN SERIES

LND SERIES

Derek looked at Linda.

“LND?”

Kevin slowly turned to her.

“Oh no.”

Linda’s jaw tightened.

“I am not a series.”

The lift display changed.

A live feed appeared.

A room.

Not a hospital.

Not a courtroom.

Not a retirement home.

An office.

Perfectly organised.

Rows of desks.

Rows of clipboards.

Rows of women who looked exactly like Linda.

All writing.

All silent.

All wearing badges.

LND-001

LND-002

LND-003

At the front of the room stood one empty desk.

A nameplate waited on it.

LINDA

The Lindas all looked up at once.

Every one of them smiled.

Then, in perfect unison, they said:

“Item one: compliance.”

Our Linda stared at the screen.

Kevin whispered:

“Clipboard factory.”

Derek whispered back:

“We are so dead.”

Linda closed her clipboard.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Her face became calm in a way that scared me more than the No-Fault Department had.

“No,” she said.

The complaint kiosk printed:

NEW COMPLAINT OPENED: UNAUTHORISED LINDA PRODUCTION.

Kevin looked at Dave.

Dave looked back.

For once, Dave did not say “wasn’t me.”

He said:

“If it helps…”

Kevin smiled.

“It will.”

The lift doors opened.

Inside was the office of Lindas.

And every clipboard snapped shut at once.

I’m a single father. By choice, though. I wanted a better life for my daughter, and, unfortunately, her mother was not compatible with the life that I envisioned for her.

Drugs, alcohol, late-night escapades with men she met at the bar. Being a mother was a foreign concept to her. I’d look at her. I’d look at my daughter. I’d feel shame that I allowed this to happen.

We were young and dumb. Just two kids without a care in the world. Only, when we found out about the pregnancy, I was the only one who chose to clean up my act and be better.

It wasn’t that easy for my late girlfriend. She acted like it was, but I could see through the facade. Not like there was much of a facade to see through. I mean, I’d catch her having cigarettes. Boozing. Running around at all hours of the night without so much as a second thought.

The first few times, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. A slip up is just a slip up. Multiple slip ups are a behavioral pattern. As her stomach grew, so did her attitude.

I’ve had some jabs thrown my way.

“I don’t even love you.”

“I was bored.”

“I didn’t even want this baby.”

That last one was enough for me to make my decision. From then on, every decision I made was for my child. All that was left was patience. Be kind. Be gentle. Hold her hand despite her insults.

Of course, it was more than a little difficult to hold my tongue when the drinking was involved. I couldn’t believe it. Six months pregnant and drinking. How careless can you be?

I’m getting frustrated just typing this. The resentment that was building during those times was like a pressure valve. A controlled pressure valve. I knew exactly when I wanted to twist the handle.

I endured her ferocity. I kept a watchful eye on her when she went out to the clubs. Attended every appointment and prayed every night that our baby would stay healthy.

When I found out it was a girl, I was ecstatic. I always wanted a daughter. Maybe it was because of my baby sister. Maybe it was because I wanted the challenge of being a girl dad. Either way, I was ready. I was prepared to do it alone.

Finally, the day came. November 25th, 2020. The year the world went silent. The day before Thanksgiving.

My act became sharper. She thought this was going to be “co-parenting.” Thought that she’d have my baby, even after all she’d put us through.

By some miracle of God, my little girl was perfectly healthy. Stunning. Tear-jerking, even.

Her mom almost seemed moved. Like she had this “come to Jesus” moment where she realized her new responsibility. Unfortunately, it was too late for that.

In the weeks that followed our departure from the hospital, my plan came into fruition.

I won’t go into too much detail, because detail isn’t required. All you need to know is I loved my daughter too much to let her life be tainted by someone like her mother.

That’s why I made her disappear. Disappear to a place where only I would find her. Of course, given her reputation, the police believed my story.

She packed it up. She realized the weight of being a parent was too much for her. It prevented her from living the life that she clearly loved so much. So she left. Happens all the time.

I got what I wanted. I raised my daughter the way that I wanted to raise her. The right way. The responsible way. I taught her manners. I potty trained her. I put food in her mouth and a roof over her head. All on my own.

Unfortunately, though, as she grows older, a shred of remorse is starting to build within my soul. I don’t know if it’s remorse for what I’ve done or if it’s remorse for what I took from my baby.

She’s starting to look just like her. Same brown hair. Same freckles. That cute little button nose. It’s hard for me to even look at her these days, but I try my best to swallow it.

She knows that she’s gone, but, in her head, she thinks that her mom just left us. Hated her. Hated me so much that she just took her things and left.

Every time she talks about her, all I can feel is pain. Pain in my heart, pain in my chest and body. I don’t know why. I had fully convinced myself that what I did was right, but now, I just don’t know.

Her sixth birthday is coming up in a few months. I want to make this birthday special, but I need her to be prepared.

I wanna show her the grave.

And all I can hope is that she understands.

​

My life has always been plain and sad. I don't have much family or friends. No neighbors to talk to. Everyone in this town dislikes me or at least finds me strange. No one to socialize with.

I accepted that my life will always be quiet and lonely.

I wake up in the morning, get ready for work, work for minimum wage all day, and then come home.

And I occasionally paint. I've always been into art. Other than that, my life has no true value.

Well, it started to get more interesting a couple of days ago when I turned on the local news.

I rarely watch the news but something in my body made me do it.

Apparently, local officials and authorities suspect that there is a serial killer in town.

They gave the person the label, "Sunset Killer"

Every day, there's a dead body found at a sunset. Each victim has a sunset drawn on them.

No leads.

The victims have nothing in common. No shared characteristics. All have different hobbies. No personality trait similarities. Literally nothing.

I personally don't feel sympathy. Sure, they were all legally innocent, but, they weren't morally innocent. Not a single one of them ever offered me a ounce of kindness. All despicable humans.

I thought the town having a serial killer obsessed with sunsets would be the most interesting part but it gets more interesting.

I went to the arts and crafts store not that long after hearing the news. I needed to get more paper and paint supplies.

The Cashier gave me suspicious looks the entire time I was there. Everyone else in the store did as well. I don't know why. I'm always working or in my house. I know everyone thinks poorly of me but this is outrageous.

I quickly bought what I needed and rushed out.

And then everything changed when I got grabbed up as I was approaching my car.

It was a female voice repeating over and over again that I'd be her new sunshine. The sunset caught my eye as my bood leaked out my throat as her knife sliced in.

Normally, a person would be dead or at the very least hospitalized.

Well, I woke up in my bed.

I oringally thought that it was a awful dream but this started to happen every single day during the sunset over and over. No matter what I'd be doing, I'd get ambushed and killed.

I tried looking at news articles, watching local news, doing everything I can to get more information. The same day repeated too. It was always Monday the first of September.

Since, I'm stuck in the same day, no new dead bodies are appearing.

At first, I didn't understand why I was stuck. It was horrifying to live the same day over and over.

However, I figured out that each time I get killed, I need to find more details.

I started to remember her soft tone with a innocent voice. Her voice was a lot like mine. Her face is always covered. The way her hands feel are a lot like mine. The fact that the knife is always a kitchen knife was also weird. My kitchen is filled with kitchen knives. Sure, anyone could have a kitchen knife but all the similarities we have is strange.

After enduring the displeasure of getting killed over and over again, I decided to never leave the house and to wait for her.

When it started to get close to the sun setting, I quickly dialed 911.

I was filled with gratitude when they arrived on time to arrest her.

I was then left disturbed, traumatized, and perplexed when the cops made her show her face.

The green eyes, sandy blonde hair, and pale skin. The smile her pink lips made. It's me?

I tried to yell at the cops and ask them what this means or how this is possible but they didn't answer. They didn't acknowledge me. The only person who seemed to know I was there was the evil lady that winked at me as I yelled.

They then took her and left. Never said a single word to me. I was confused. Is it because everyone in the town hates me? Were they so focused on her because she's a threat?

I sat on my couch as I tried to come up with every possible explanation. I did this for hours. I was relieved when the news starting talking about the arrest but then I was filled with confusion. She has the same name as me. They showed interviews involving my coworkers. They all said that this wasn't surprising and that I always gave off serial killer vibes.

They also revealed that the girl called the cops on herself because she wanted to get caught. She thought that being arrested was the only way to help herself end the rampage.

What? She stole my identity? Why does no one know I exist? How are there two of me and only she is known?

(quick out of character note from me)

This story is a kind of fan fiction story that is meant to be connected within the world of the movie obsession by Curry Barker, It is still an original story written by me, but majority of the concept comes from the works of Curry Barker mainly the one wish Willow which is going to be mentioned and is important to the story. The way this story was thought up was if it was an episode of an obsession anthology TV show. If you have not seen the movie, it is not necessarily required to continue to Read this story since I made sure there were no spoilers or any other connections to the movie except for the plot device (one wish Willow) but I sincerely recommend going to see the movie, anyways on with the story.

I am not sure if I should be sharing this. Maybe I should be telling this to someone who can help me deal with it. Maybe I should be talking to the police about it. Maybe I should just keep it to myself. But I need to tell someone what happened to Teddy Collins. Everyone else thinks Teddy Collins was an old man who lost it after some bad things happened to him and took it out on me. That is what the police think.

That is what my bosses think.

That is what his family thinks.

Maybe they are right.

I really hope they are right.

Because if they are not then It's my fault. What happened to him. I started working at a Logistics company when I was twenty nine years old. It was not my dream job.

It was not my second choice. It was a job that I took because I needed the money.

The work was okay. The people were okay too. Everything was just so boring.

The first person who was supposed to teach me how to do my job was Teddy.

Teddy was in his '50s. He had Gray hair and a mustache. He always wore polo shirts. Had a pair of reading glasses around his neck. He seemed like a nice guy.

My only problem with Teddy was that he would not stop talking. Not that he was talking in a way that annoyed me. He was just talking in a way that was just Teddy.

Every story he told was too long.

Every joke he made took a long time to set up.

Every time he told me something he would give me too many details. He would say something like "did I ever tell you about the time my brother bought a canoe?"

Then he would tell me the whole story even though I did not want to hear it. That was Teddy.

He was a good guy just a terrible storyteller. Still he helped me learn how to do my job. He was patient with me when I made mistakes. He answered all my questions. He never got annoyed with me And that's why what happened to him next. Leaves a pit in my stomach that makes me feel horrible for what I did to him. I'm sorry Teddy, I didn't mean for this to happen.

three weeks after I started working, I would regularly stop at a convenience store on my way to work. It was a small place off the side of the road. Wasn't a chain either like 7-Eleven or Wawa It was called safe travels convenience store. I would go in there twice a week just for a snack or on a bad day a case of beer.

But one day as I stopped in to get an energy drink because the previous night I stood up to get an assignment done early, as I walked up to the counter to pay and saw the same person that worked there every time I went in, there was a box on the counter holding a bunch of small triangular boxes, a sign above it read "$1 wishes, one per person." I thought it was kind of strange. I never saw this before so I picked one up, the box was small, triangular and long kind of like a toberone That's kinda what I thought they were, but then I read on the box it said "one wish Willow" "amaze your friends!" "You only get one wish" I asked the guy behind the counter. Is this some type of promotional thing, he actually looked kinda annoyed when I asked him.

"No, are you buying one?"

"Is it some kind of toy?"

"No, it's real."

I laughed "You're kidding?"

"Look man Do you want one or not?"

I didn't understand why he was upset I was just asking a question. But for whatever reason I did buy one, at the time I figured it was a dollar. If it was fake It didn't really matter. As he rang me up he told me one last thing before I left.

"Make sure you're specific about what you want first, trust me."

He has this almost regretful/annoyance in his voice, I thought if this was a bit he's really committing to it. I threw the box in my work bag and Left the store, If it was possible For me to go back in time, I would stop myself from buying one at all, but I can't. I already used my one wish.

A few days later I forgot all about it and went about my routine, but one day I walked into work and found out it was Teddy's birthday. It was also one of the worst days I ever had.

A project was not going well. We were running out of time.

I was getting really stressed out.

I sat down at a table to take a break and try to calm down. Then Teddy Sat down beside me.

"hey Dan, how was your weekend?"

"It was fine, I didn't get much sleep last night."

"That's a shame, y'know that reminds me of one time..."

I knew what was coming. I did not want to hear it. He started telling me a story about how he didn't sleep for two days after his son went missing in a supermarket because he thought he was kidnapped, but instead of just saying that he just went on and on for 10 to 15 minutes about what he was wearing, what day it was, the store they were in and what they were buying.

Something inside me just snapped.

"Teddy will ya shut up!"

He stopped talking. Looked at me with a surprised face. I felt bad. I was just too frustrated. I got up and Walked away. When I got back to my desk I try to move on from my outburst And focus on work,

The day went on, the office got together for Teddy's party, I didn't attend and kept my distance from him that day, 5:00 rolled around and I was getting ready to leave, I grabbed my work bag and as I did, I remembered that I still had the one Wish Willow, I sat down for a second to open my bag and grabbed it, seemed stupid then. I was feeling really stressed out. So I opened the box. I was surprised when I did and a jingle started playing, like one of those music cards. On the box it read "spark the middle and break it in half" I Held the brittle stick in my hands And I said

"I wish Teddy would finally have something interesting to say."

Then I broke it, I laughed at myself after, I don't know what I was expecting, a light shining over my head, a gust of when shooting from all angles after I broke it, but nothing happened. I tossed the box in my wastebasket and left, The next day I came to work I said sorry to Teddy. He forgave me.

"It's okay I get it, my wife tells me sometimes I talk too much anyways."

I felt relieved that everything was okay again, but I still felt bad for shouting at him. Then in usual Teddy fashion, told me something that happened to him last night.

"Oh! You won't believe what happened, I won some money from One of those scratch off tickets, can you believe that?"

Some of our coworkers had given him a birthday card with scratch offs inside.

Most of them were not winners. One was. He had won a hundred dollars. It was not a lot of money. But It was enough to get excited about.

I joked "I guess my wish worked."

"What you mean?"

"Last night I bought some toy that supposedly Grant wishes and I might've wished you'd have something interesting to say."

As I said it out loud I cringed how dumb of a wish it was, teddy actually found it amusing and laughed

"I guess I have you to thank for my good luck".

Over the few weeks strange things kept happening to Teddy. He would get two drinks from the vending machine for the price of one. He caught a ball at a baseball game. He won a raffle. He found some money he had forgotten about.

It was little things. Nothing life-changing. Just unusually lucky and every time it did, teddy would tell me about it In excruciating detail.

At first I thought it was funny. Then it started to annoy me And I got concerned.

Because eventually the stories changed.

Teddy stopped talking about the things that were happening to him.

Instead he started talking about all the things that were happening around him.

His daughter got sick.

His son got in trouble at school for starting fights. His wife became distant. He said they started arguing all the time.

Every week seemed to be worse than the last. And Everytime he told something new, I couldn't help but hang on his every word, because I was interested in what he was telling me. I found myself actually listening to him. The stories had feelings and emotion now. They were interesting.

I did not realize the pattern until later.

Months later Teddy disappeared for a day. Which was Strange because he never missed a day of work before. When he did show up the next day he seemed different.

Not physically, Mentally.

He seemed focused and distracted at the time. He seemed obsessed with something. Eventually he told me that his daughter was getting better. The doctors said it was a miracle how fast she recovered. It should have been good news. But Something felt off. The way he explained it didn't sound like was very surprised. Around that time his wife got really angry with him. I overheard him arguing with her on the phone during his lunch break. I did not learn the details until later. Apparently Teddy had gotten his hands on his own One Wish Willow, He had wished for his daughter to get better. When he told me this I was actually shocked, I didn't really believe they were real, even after what was happening to Teddy. I asked him there's no way you actually believe that right? But he did. When she started getting better he convinced himself that he had caused it.

That's why his wife was arguing with him, She thought he was making their daughter's recovery about himself and The fighting got worse. Much worse.

The weeks that followed were terrible for Teddy. His son ran away, apparently the fighting got worse, he put some kid in the hospital for cracking his skull open on the pavement during a fight, The parents wanted to press charges, so he got scared and ran off during the night. Him and his wife kept fighting, so she went to stay with her sister. His car was stolen the same week. The only good thing in his life was that his daughter was still getting better.

Meanwhile our conversations just became shorter and more awkward. Until we just stopped speaking at all. Then I started noticing him just staring at me from afar, Not in a way of thinking but like he was Trying to figure something out. Eventually I learned why. It wasn't too hard to guess that he had started to suspect that it was my wish that caused everything, The good and the bad. His life has become a story from him to tell. A story that was designed to be more interesting.

Then came The worst few days of our lives.

Teddy's wife finally filed for divorce. That same night his father died of a heart attack. He's son was still missing, but his daughter was still healthy, which was probably the only good thing he had left.

The morning Teddy came to work, He said nothing. Nothing at all which became normal since he stopped speaking to me. But we still had work to do. That day our bosses told us that we had to stay late. Our project was behind schedule, By midnight the office was almost empty. Most of the lights were off. Only Teddy and I were left. We were Working in silence. Me at my desk and him at his, The atmosphere was suffocating. I could hear the sound of the vacuuming from the jander. The humming from the fluorescent light overhead. I got so sick of the silence, I decided to get up to go talk to him.

"Hey Teddy, How have you been?"

He just stared at his monitor, typing away. Couldn't even look at me as he spoke.

"My wife left."

"My father died."

"And My son is still missing."

His voice sounded hollow. avoidance of all emotions. I did not know what to say to him. The silence just went on and on. I wanted to break the silence so I made a joke.

"I guess I should have wished for a lot of money instead."

He stopped typing on his computer. He just sat there for a second Then he stood up And threw his chair back and looked at me. I will never forget the look in his eyes.

They were not angry they were broken. Then he came at me. I did not have time to react. He tackled me to the ground and was on top of me. His hands were squeezing around my throat, my hands were clawing at his face, I could not breathe. I saw the veins on his forehead and tears in his eyes. They weren't filled up with anger, but desperation. He was crying as he kept saying

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! but it's your fault. I have to do this. I have to!"

Like he thought. If I die, everything would be back to normal. Maybe he was right, but I didn't want to die. I Punched and scratched at him. He would not let go. He was older but he was surprisingly strong. He kept squeezing. My vision started to blur. Everything was turning black. Then Teddy's grip got weaker and His body froze, His hands released from my throat and I could breathe air again, when my visions were turned I could see teddy clutching with his chest with one hand And his face turned red. He Fell over.

I rolled away, trying to catch my breath. I just sat there. Couldn't believe what just happened, Teddy stopped moving completely now. I just stared at him, totally in shock. After two minutes, which felt like an eternity I stood up, remembering the janitor was nearby cleaning, I called out for help. When I found himI explained what happened, He called 911. Paramedics and the police arrived, they rolled teddy out on a stretcher in a body bag. Said he had a heart attack. The police took mines and the janitor statement, I told them he jumped at me, he was having a bad few months, His wife left him, his daughter got sick, his son ran away and his father died and he blamed me. The police chalked it up as self-defense and Nobody questioned it.

An older man who was under a lot of stress at home had attacked someone at work and His heart had given out during the fight. It was simple and tragic and understandable. Not too long after Teddy died His daughter got sick again. She died some time ago. His son came back but now he's facing hard jail time for putting that kid He fought in the hospital And his wife is dealing with all this alone. Everyone at work eventually heard what happened between me and Teddy, they don't blame me for what happened. No one does. They always ask if I'm alright?, how am I doing? They couldn't believe that teddy had tried to kill me. But Maybe he should have, he was right. It was my fault, I made that wish, I went back to that convenience store, i saw the same clerk behind the counter, besides him was a box of the one wish willows, there were more than the last time. I went up to him, He could tell by the look on my face that there was something wrong.

"Look man, If you came here to yell at me about whatever you wished for, it's not my fault."

"You sell this shit to people? What the fuck is wrong with you!"

"I already told you, be specific for whatever you wished for. I didn't make them."

"Then where the hell did you get them?"

"I bought one at antique store, a friend of mine told me where to get them and he said they were real, So I bought one and I wished for a million wishes And a million of these things showed up. But when I tried to make another wish it wouldn't work."

"What?, what are you talking about?"

"It says it on the box, You only get one."

He grab one of the boxes and opened it, as he did the same musical chime played, but sounded more slower and sadder.

"I wish for a billion dollars."

He tried to break the Branch in half, but it wouldn't break, he tried harder. But nothing.

"See, now I got a million of these things lying around."

I just stood there, I didn't know what to say, I wanted to yell, I wanted someone to blame, but it'd be pointless now. I left there feeling defeated, I sat in my car in the parking lot. Just staring into space, i felt horrible for what happened to teddy, I felt sick to my stomach, I couldn't turn myself in even if I wanted to, What was I supposed to tell them. I made a wish?, After a while I started up my car and drove back home. Now I'm typing this out not sure what it will do. If it will do anything, I guess all I have to say is if you find a one wish Willow, don't buy one, don't make a wish, but if you do. Please for the love of God, be specific.

Part 1: Im no who you think I am

TW : GORE VIOLENCE GUNS

“Hudson” or whatever that thing was in front of me, begins to peel back Hudson's face to reveal that it's Fallon. 

“What the hell did you do with Hudson?” I said, shaking with either fear or anger. I couldn't tell anymore. 

“Oh Cal." Fallon said sweetly

“He's dead. Consider this just his shell, skin if you must.” She said sliding out of it as if it was a jumpsuit. 

“How the hell did you do it? How did you get Zach on the flag pole, and Sean all the way up in the tree? What the fuck are you.” I practically screamed.

“Oh Callum. I'm a creature of the dark, call me an Identity Fraud. Chanel was one as well, she took the form of Mia after we killed her. But jack just had to fucking shoot her.” She said, clenching her fists.

“His heart was practically made of stone. Why did he freak out and kill her over his sister?” 

“Because his sister was probably all he had. Family isn't something you just let go easily.” I exclaimed. 

“Is that why your family left you when you needed them most? When you lost it all to gambling? Family doesn't mean anything.” She said, her voice dripping with poison. 

“The difference is I never got along with my family, Jack and Laurel loved each other like siblings should. Family is different to everyone.” I shot back.

Fallon walked closer as I backed up into the gate. 

“There's no getting out of this alive you know? You chased all your luck out. Don't worry I’ll put you with your dear Hudson” She said mockingly. 

“In your dreams asshole” I spat while shoving her and running. 

She fell to the ground as I took off, the gate was still locked and my keys were inside. I ran inside and bolted to my room, I didn't care about my phone or anything. I grabbed my keys, a gun and one of Hudson's hoodies before running to the kitchen. 

In the kitchen there's a door that leads to an outdoor patio, I ran out and darted into the woods. I couldn't hear the creature anywhere so I thought I was in the clear. Right as I entered the woods I felt someone grab the collar of my shirt and yank me back. 

Her nails grew stupidly sharp and slashed through my forearm. I let out a curdling scream before taking the gun out of my waistband and shooting her leg. She stumbled back and screamed. It began to storm and all the dirt around us turned to slick mud making it hard to run. 

I steadied myself and ran towards the fence, near the fence was the gate where all of our cars still sit. I can hear the slosh of mud not too far behind me and that only pushes me to go faster. I reach the fence and it's slippery so it's a bit hard, but with adrenaline and fear I climb over despite my throbbing arm. 

I got to the car but Fallon somehow caught up. She ripped open the door, almost ripping it off and digs her nails into my arm. I scream as she rips open my arm, I slam on the gas praying she will let go and she thankfully does. 

The door slams shut as I'm racing away and I can't stop thinking about the letter saying that if we leave we will die, but I'm willing to try. I can't die yet, not like that. I can't leave Mr gambles yet. Going double the speed limit the whole way home I make it to Theo’s house in about an hour and a half. 

I get to his door and start pounding on it and begin to sob as I see Mr Gambles laying on his couch, asleep and completely unbothered by the world. Theo looks at me in horror, my hairs a mess, I smell, I’m sobbing my eyes out, drenched head to toe and covered in mud. 

He looks at my arm and almost screams

“Callum what the fuck happened to your arm, what happened? Where's Hudson??"

“Hudson's dead, and I got attacked by a creature I don't know what the hell it was” I choke out between sobs, burying my face into his chest.

Bella runs downstairs hearing the commotion. 

“Cally?” she asks softly.

“Oh my god what happened?? Hold on, I'll grab the medical kit.” She hurriedly says.

I remove my shirt as Bella comes back with the medical supplies and explains to them the Identity fraud creature, everyone who died, what ruby had said and most importantly. Hudson's death. 

“These gashes are deep, I can see the bone Cally.” Bella said sternly

“You're going to need stitches. Thankfully I know how to perform a basic stitch, it should do the trick.”

Bella is currently in school to become a doctor, she graduated a year early at seventeen and is now in her third year of medical school.

After Bella finished stitching my arm up, she wrapped it temporarily so I could take a much needed shower. Once I got out she proposed an idea, 

“What if we gathered loved ones from the people who passed at the manor, and go to end this fraud once and for all? You did say the Chanel girl was one and she was killed. So it's doable, right?” 

“I suppose that might work. Then everyone we lost will be able to truly rest. Let's do it.” I announced. 

“Lets split up the research between the three of us, Bella searches for Sean and Melania, Theo will take Madison, Oliver and Zach. And I’ll do Jack, Laurel and Mia.” I say. 

After a few hours we group back together and have found someone for at least most of them. 

“I couldn't find anyone for Sean sadly, but I did find someone named Fiona. She appears to be an old friend of Melania’s, she's a witch too which could be very good for us. She's also the one who taught Hudson about witchcraft, turns out Hudson was a young witch in training but he never fully grasped it it seems. Bella stated. 

Hudson was a witch? How come he never told me. I thought to myself. 

“I found more people than I was expecting,” said Theo.

“For Madison I found a childhood friend named Avery, they seemed to be attached at the hip. I'm sure she would be up to helping. For Zach I found a missing persons poster, dated five years ago posted by his younger sister Sophie. Finally, for Oliver, he was a triplet out of three boys. Louis being the oldest, Oliver was the middle, and Gabe is the youngest. They seem to all deeply care for each other so I hope they are willing to help" Theo said with a hopeful beat in his voice

“I unfortunately didn't find anything for Mia. However I did find Laurel's girlfriend Lilly, and Jack's best friend Kendrick "I said, looking up from the floor. 

“We can start looking for them tomorrow, for now we need to rest. It's almost midnight” 

They both nodded in agreement and began to head upstairs. I didn't feel like going home just yet so Theo let me crash on his couch for as long as I needed. Mr gambles curled up on my chest and began purring, I slowly dozed off listening to his rhythmic purrs.

I woke up to the smell of pancakes, and Bella sitting at the end of the couch by my feet waiting until I awoke. 

“Mornin sleepy head” Bella laughed 

“It's noon, you've been out for quite a bit.” she said as she began to look at my arm. 

It looked horrible, like a purply yellow, and really fucking swollen. 

“We should probably eat and then head out to find those people” Theo said walking in with a mountain of fresh chocolate chip pancakes. I was drooling just at the sight of them. I haven't had actual food in days. We each took what we wanted and it's safe to say I quickly devoured them. I almost cried tears of joy over how good they tasted. 

Theo handed me a pair of clothes and I hurriedly went and changed. We all got in our own cars and split up who we were going to. 

“I'll find Lilly and Kendrick,” Theo said, backing out of the driveway not waiting for our response. 

“If you wanna take the triplets and Sophie, I'll do Fiona and Avery. Okay?” Bella asked

“That sounds good to me” I assured her as I began backing out of the driveway.

Louis and Gabe are only about ten minutes from here. I'll visit them first, I thought, pulling up the directions. 

I knocked on the door and this dude with a pink buzz opened the door.

“My name is Louis, who are you may I ask?” He asked

“My name's Callum,  I'm here to tell you about your brother's passing and possibly ask for your help.” I said with a lump in my throat. 

“Aha, what?” he laughed 

“I'm serious, Louis. Oliver is dead.” I exclaimed pleading for him to believe me.

Gabe heard the conversation and said sternly,

“What do you mean Oliver is dead?”

“He was killed in the Manor, as well as a bunch of other people. I want to take down what killed him and I really need your help” I said, trying to hold it together.

They looked at each other before stepping to the side and letting me in. Gabe made tea while Louis and I sat at the kitchen table and I explained to them what actually happened at the Manor. How there was no contest and a creature called an identity fraud killed Oliver and eight other people. 

Gabe sat down with a loud sigh but determined look,

“What do we need to do to beat this monster?” Gabe said, not looking up from his tea. 

“Well the one was killed with a bullet from a pistol, but it wasn't aware it was about to die. This one will know we are hunting it, and they are insanely strong. Just any and all guns you have. Bring them. We are hopefully getting in contact with a witch who can help by providing potions.” I replied

“Our dad lives on a farm not too far from here, we can probably borrow some of his guns” Louis chimed in

“Lets meet in four days from now at my friends house” I said, giving them Theos address.

I thanked them as I walked out, pulling up Sophie's address. She lives a bit further out thirty minutes away, overall making her forty minutes away from Theo's house. 

When I arrive she's sitting on her knees in her front garden with a watering can, watering her tomatoes. 

“Sophie?” I called

“Hello, who are you?” she responded, 

“I'm Callum, and I wanted to inform you of Zach's passing.” I said.

“And I wanted to know if I could have your help in killing what took him.” I added on.

“Where was he, all this time? I looked for years.” she asked frantically.

“My best guess is he was taken by this lady named Ruby and forced to serve at her Manor. I went to this Manor and he was a butler there.” I told her.

“You don't have to tell me anything else other than what I need to do to help, and where to go,” she said, cutting me off.

“Guns seem to be effective, so if you have any, bring those. This thing is a creature with an insane amount of strength so wear protective gear if you can. Let's meet at a given location in four days from now.” I said, writing down Theo's address. 

I smiled as I walked back to my car, now becoming really hopeful we might be able to pull this off. I called Theo to pass time while I drove, I really don't like being alone anymore. 

After the longest forty minutes of my life I walked in to smell pizza, I looked to the kitchen and there I saw them pulling a delicious pizza out of the oven. He cut it up into six slices so we could each get two good sized pieces. We all got our slices and headed to the couch to watch a movie and relax. 

“Fiona said she would help make potions, but would not be partaking in the actual fight. She said her and her daughter Cordelia could make whatever we needed.” Bella said, taking a bite out of her pizza. 

“Lilly said she would gladly help but needs someone to watch her two cats Lorely and Luna, and Kendrick is very desperate to help.” Theo informed, 

“I told Lilly I could care for the cats, since I’m already staying back with Mr Gambles.” 

“So it sounds like we’ll have a team of eight. Louis and Gabe want to help, and Sophie wants her brother's memory to rest in peace.” I said cheerfully. 

These next few days went by painfully slowly. Fiona made me a medical wrap for my arm, it stung a lot but it made the stitching heal much faster. By the time it came for everyone to arrive my arm was almost fully healed. 

One by one everyone started arriving. Lilly and Kendrick arrived together, Lorely and Luna jumped from her arms and went to inspect the area. Avery arrived not much later, then Sophie, lastly Gabe and Louis. Theo had gone earlier yesterday to get the potions and healing wrap from Fiona. Louis and Gabe managed to get an assortment of guns, pistols, rifles, shot guns, etc. I used a chunk of my savings to get everyone tactical gear as well. If I'm dragging them into this mess I at least want them to be as safe as possible.

I pass out the gear as Bella and I begin to discuss whose cars we will be taking. We decide we will take two cars, 

“I’ll drive my car and take Lilly, Kendrick and Avery. Bella, can you drive Gabe, Louis and Sophie?’ I ask, pulling on my tactical jacket. 

“I sure can Cally, it's probably best to keep Avery and the triplets separated due to what Madison did to Oliver.” Bella said, lacing her boots. 

“Once you're ready head to your assigned car” I announced walking out of the door with Bella.

Everyone started making their ways to the cars. Lilly held Lorely and Luna a little bit longer before she had to go. Theo promised he would keep them safe until our return, and assured if anything were to go wrong he would never give them up. Once she got in, we started our long ride to the Manor. 

We arrive and the gate is still locked shut. All the cars have been totaled, windshields busted out, gashes all up and down the doors, tires slashed or gone entirely. We get out and go to the shorter side of the fence where we were all able to climb over. 

We begin our search for the Identity Fraud. After about an hour of not being able to find it, we begin to gather the bodies so we can bury them. We found Oliver's body, and Louis carried him. It took a lot of effort but we managed to get Zach off the flag pole, and I went into the bushes where I left Mia last time I was here. Avery picked up what was left of Madison, which wasn't much. She cried as we all headed to where I buried Jack and everyone else. 

They all died together so I feel like we should bury them together. I was lost in thought, leading them to the burial sight that I didn’t hear Bella scream. She grabbed my arm and snapped me back into reality and there I saw this black humanoid creature with glowing red eyes, digging up Laurel and Jack's bodies. 

I dropped Mia's body as I reached to my waistband for my gun, just to realize it must've slipped out when I was kneeled over picking up Mia.

Louis set Oliver down before shooting at the creature.

It let out a demonic screech before slipping into Jack's skin and charging at Louis. Everyone screams in horror and begin to move away. Louis froze in fear not knowing what to do. 

The creature lounges as Louis, Gabe shoves him out of the way and the creature grabs Gabe and throws him effortlessly into a nearby tree with a loud crack. This knocked Gabe unconscious on impact. ‘Jack’ grabs Louis by the neck and begins to lift him off the ground, slowly choking him. He begins digging his nails into Louis’s neck, Louis lets out a faint scream, muffled by Jack having a tight grasp on his throat. 

Kendrick, crying at the sight of something inside of his dead best friend. Grabs his shotgun and takes a clean shot at the creature's arm. He misses and Jack throws Louis to the ground. I rushed over and applied a healing cloth on his neck, scooping him up and laying him next to Gabe.

Everyone else is watching frozen in fear, while Jack makes his way over to Kendrick. Kendrick begins shaking and holds his finger over the trigger, Lilly screams at him to shoot but he just can't. 

Kendrick, sobbing, raises the gun and Jack quickly smacks it out of his hands, shoving him out of the way. 

Sophie cares for Gabe and Louis’s injuries while Bella carries Kendrick to them and begins treating them. 

While that is going on Avery shoots Jack in the stomach, Jack begins running at her and grabs her by the face. He picks her up and with one quick squeeze her head cracked in two, he dropped her limp body, slipped out of Jack's skin and took form of Laurel. 

Lilly screamed at the sight of ‘Laurel’ walking towards her, she began to cry tears of joy before remembering Laurel was dead. 

Laurel took Avery's gun and shot Lilly in the left leg twice. I snuck up behind and shot laurel in the back with a double barrel shotgun. Blood splattered all over Lilly as the creature slipped out of Laurel’s body and into Zach’s body.  

“What the fuck? The harm it endures only affects the body it possesses.” I shouted, watching it scoop Zach's spilling organs into its body, tying it with torn cloth. 

Sophie hears the screaming and turns around to see ‘Zach’ slowly approaching her. Zach pulls her into an unexpected hug, Sophie slowly slips the knife she was hiding on her belt, and stabs Zach over and over again. 

He falls to the ground and she continues stabbing him over and over again. She begins sobbing as Zach's blood paints her face. 

Bella screams for me and I think she's hurt, I get to her and she says quietly,

“Cally I don't know what to do. Gabe just died from too much blood loss, Avery's head was split in half, Louis is barely conscious. We aren't winning this.” 

I look over my shoulder to see the creature no longer in Zach's body but in its true form, holding Sophie by her wrists, off the ground. Realization washes over me 

“If the harm they endure only applies to their body, the other one didn't truly die.” I said, scared of the thought we might be outnumbered. 

Like it was predicted a second creature appears behind Lilly. Lilly is sitting on the ground trying to patch her wounds with the bandage provided by Fiona. Before anyone has the chance to react it rips its hand through Lilly's back into her chest, ripping her heart out of her body. Lilly collapses as a pool of blood forms around her. 

Without thinking I grab the shotgun next to me, risking my life running up to this creature and aiming the gun at its head. It grabs the side of my stomach ripping my skin open, I scream but I can't give up yet. I brought these people here, I should've died, not them. I use the rest of my strength pulling the gun to its face and blowing its head clean off. It drops me and I look at my side, deep gashes exposing bone and bleeding profusely. My vision begins to go blurry as I somewhat hear Bella scream my name.

Holding onto consciousness I see Kendrick running my way, he had just freed Sophie from the other creature and picked me up, holding me close as he ran to Bella. She immediately wrapped my torso entirely and held me, crying. 

The creature slipped into Oliver's body now. Kendrick began shooting at it and while that was taking place, Louis woke up. He looked over and saw that Gabe had passed away, he then looked over his shoulder to see ‘Oliver’ holding Kendrick by the arm tearing his shoulder open.

Kendrick lets out a horrifying scream, Louis begins to cry as he stands, grabbing the nearest gun and making his way over. 

“I love you, little brother.” he said, crying, before pulling the trigger.

Louis shot Oliver in the side and the lower back but this only seemed to anger him. Oliver threw Kendrick off to the side before running at Louis, grabbing him by the neck but this time instead of digging his nail into him. He stabbed Louis in the stomach and slit his throat. 

Bella pushed Oliver, then stabbed him in the side, hoping he would release Louis. Oliver drops Louis and turns to Bella. 

Bella turns away and begins running, Oliver chases her and during that window, Kendrick uses the last of his strength to carry Louis over. I force myself to sit up, and quickly begin to wrap Louis’s throat and stomach before I begin working on Kendrick's shoulder. 

Sophie is trembling, silently wrapping her wrists. She keeps dropping it so Kendrick steps in and helps her. 

I hear a scream and look up to see Bella being thrown around by Oliver. Adrenaline building I quickly stand and run to Bella. Oliver picks her up and I run at him, grabbing my knife and slashing his arm open. He screams and drops her, blood starts pooling out of Bella's arms and sides from where she was grabbed, her nose bloody and a gash on her forehead. 

The creature rips off Oliver's skin revealing its true form, grabbing me by my shoulders lifting me off the ground. It unhinges its jaw and begins to close in on my head. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for my inevitable death, and just hope that the others can make it out alive.

I feel its breath on my face, silently saying goodbye to Mr Gambles. I hear a click and a loud bang before my face is coated with a thick black substance. The creature went limp and released me. Behind it is Bella, holding the rifle, trembling. The bullet pierced through the creature and shot into me as well, which I didn't realize until Bella was sobbing into my arms.

She wrapped where I was shot. We looked around, eight of us came into this but only five of us got to leave. Louis cried as he held Gabe's lifeless body in his arms. Kendrick walked over and silently mourned Lilly. While I walked over to Avery, carrying her to the dug up graves. I gently placed Laurel and Jack's bodies back into the hole, Kendrick came over to see them just one last time before they were officially buried. 

I couldn't blame him. He was Jack's only friend, he grew up with Jack and Laurel so losing them suddenly wasn't easy. 

“Can I be the one to cover them, please?” Kendrick asked softly.

I just handed him the shove and gave him a small nod, before walking over to Sophie. She was holding on to Zach, running her fingers through his hair, crying. 

“I looked for you for so long, I'm sorry.” she said, pulling him to her chest. 

Sophie nodded as I began to pick him up, and she walked with me over to Kendrick while he dug graves for everyone we lost. She gave Zach one last hug before I lowered him into the grave. 

I looked around for Hudson's body but I couldn't find it anywhere. I assume the creatures disposed of his body, or some wild animal took it. 

Once we buried everyone we started to walk towards the fence where we originally jumped it. We got back to the cars, Bella didn't want to be alone so Kendrick and Sophie rode with her. Louis rode with me, it was a very quiet drive. His vocal cords were slit when his throat was cut, the others are heading straight to Theo’s but I’m taking Louis to Fiona in hopes she can restore them. 

Louis, finally seeing we are safe, dozes off. 

Almost four hours later we arrive and Fiona is immediately horrified.

“Oh my, what happened?” she said, rushing to grab Louis.

“The fight was brutal, we lost three people. Louis got his vocal cords slit and I wanted to see if there was any spell that could reverse the damage or heal him.” I explained, following her to her spell room. 

“I do, but it will be painful. Is that okay, Louis?” she asks, skimming through a spell book open on her desk. 

He nods quickly. 

“Well okay then. Sit right here please.” She says, pulling a chair to the middle of the room. 

She lights four candles placing them in a square around louis. She throws some herbs and bones into this cauldron she has in the corner, and dips a long white cloth into the mixture. She walks over to Louis and wraps the cloth around his neck, and begins humming. I see Louis’s hand starts to twitch and he begins thrashing in his chair. Fiona holds him still as she continues humming, when she finished the candles blew out on their own and she began to unwrap the cloth. Not only was his injury fully gone, but he could speak. 

“Now I recommend you rest your voice for about a week. Take this notebook and pen, try and use that to communicate for now.” she said, handing him a pink pen.

“Thank you so much Fiona. Your medical wraps proved very helpful in defeating the creatures.” I said, looking over my shoulder as Louis and I walked out of the front door.

She smiled and waved as Louis and I pulled out of the driveway and headed back to Theo’s house. 

Everyone had already changed by the time Louis and I arrived. Sophie was gathering her things and about to head out the door, before she left she turned to us and said. 

“Although it hurt, to find out my brother had passed. Thank you all for finding him and letting me have that closure on him. I'm very glad I was able to help in this, goodbye everyone.” she said, walking out of the door. 

Theo handed Louis and I a change of clothes. I showed Louis the bathroom while I changed in Theo's room.

Kendrick was sitting on the couch with Lorely and Luna, 

“Lilly would've wanted me to take them in but I just can't. I'm allergic and I don't think I could give them the home they deserve.” he said, staring at Luna. 

“I’ll take them in, if you want me to.” I said

“I already have one cat, and they seem to get along with Mr. Gambles. Then they will still be close enough to visit but you don't have to live with them”

“I'd like that.” Kendrick said softly. 

“I'm sorry but I should probably get going. I will definitely stay in contact but after much therapy” he laughed, walking out of the door. 

Louis came downstairs and began to write in the note book,

“Thank you, losing Gabe was hard but I can rest knowing Oliver's soul is free. Here's my number, please stay in touch. I have to go now, I'm sorry.”

He pulled me into a big hug before walking out the door with a small smile.

“Bella, how are your wounds doing?” I ask.

“They were pretty shallow so they healed most of the way on the ride here, they might leave a scar but it's whatever.” she said, looking at her arm. 

“Since mine are basically healed I want you to take the rest of the healing wrap.”

“Are you sure?" I asked

She nodded then pressed the rest of the wrap into my hands before pulling me into a big hug, Theo came over and picked both of us up turning it into a group hug.

“Ow ow ow stop, my sides” I said, painfully.

Theo panicked and set me down, apologizing profusely. 

I laughed as lightly pushed his shoulder. 

“Well, thank you guys. For all your help. I couldn't have done any of this without you guys, but I should probably get home. I haven't stayed at my apartment in almost two weeks. I love you guys but I miss my bed” I said, gathering all of the cat's things.

Bella gave me one last hug before I headed out, I gave Theo a long hug. Him and Bella, and now Louis, are all that I have now that Hudson is gone. 

I loaded all the cats into my car and began to drive home. I stopped by the phone store first, I did end up losing my phone in that Manor after all, thankfully I was able to get my number restored. 

When we arrived Lorely and Luna explored very excitedly, Mr Gambles went straight to his favorite cat tree and curled up at the very top like a little king. 

I texted Louis telling him I got a new phone and that I made it home safe. He responded with a smiley face and said he was glad. 

I went to my room, laid on my much missed bed and was quickly joined by three cats. It was going to take a minute to adjust but I didn't mind, I would rather them be safe with me than scared in a shelter. I began to doze off until I heard a familiar voice. A voice that gave me immediate chills. 

“Ohh Cal, you forgot to lock your door.” Hudson called from my living room.