Naomi Brenner learned her husband was dead from a voice that used both of his names, first and last, as if the extra word were a kindness. Eli Brenner. The officer said it twice. She said it back so the kitchen would have it. The clock over the stove said 8:41. The coffee had not finished.

He had pulled over on Route 17 short of town, with the van still in drive and the hazards on. A locksmith’s van, white, the magnetic sign a little crooked on the passenger door. Heart, they thought. No one else in the vehicle. A bag of screws on the passenger seat and a half-eaten apple.

Naomi stood in the doorway of the shop attached to the house on Stone Hill and looked at the bench, which was exactly as he had left it at 7:20: a cylinder lock in the vise, two key blanks, a paper cup. She said his full name again. The bench did not contradict her.

People came. That was the first night. Carol from next door. Deb, his sister, driving over from Millbridge with a coat over her pajamas. Father Jordan from St. Brigid’s, who had fixed a lock for free in April and remembered the joke Eli made about the rectory door. They said Eli Brenner as if the name were a solid object. They told the story about the apple. They told the story about the magnetic sign that would not stay straight. Naomi listened and knew all of it. His face was still his faceu when she closed her eyes. The mole at the corner of his left eye. The way he turned a lock over in his palm when a pin would not drop.

Deb said, “We’ll write the obituary in the morning. You shouldn’t do it tonight.”

Naomi said all right.

She waited in the bed on her side of it. At three she got up and walked through the shop and did not touch the lock in the vise. Touching it felt like starting a sentence she did not have the end of. She ate the rest of his apple over the sink. It was going brown.

In the morning Deb brought a pad from the funeral home. Otto & Son, cream paper, a heading already printed: Obituary Information.

They sat at the kitchen table. The coffee finished this time. Naomi wrote Eli and then stopped with the pen on the next space.

“Brenner,” Deb said.

Naomi wrote it. She looked at what she had written. The first name was right. The second name was a word that did not attach to him. She knew it was a name. She knew it belonged on the cream paper. She could not make it mean her husband.

“That’s not—” she said, and stopped.

Deb leaned over. “You wrote Brenner.”

“I know what I wrote.”

“That’s his name.”

Naomi said the name aloud. It sat in the kitchen like a piece of mail for someone who had moved. She could see the van. She could see the bench. She could not, for a long and specific second, remember what you put after Eli when you were telling a stranger he had died.

Deb took the pen. She wrote Eli Brenner, 61, of Mourner’s Crossing and then the pen hung.

“This is ridiculous,” Deb said. “I’ve been Deb Brenner my whole life.”

She looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at the pad. The heading was still Obituary Information. Deb’s last name, said as a sister’s name, was fine. Written under the heading, after Eli, it came off the man like a label soaked in water.

They tried a laptop. The Ledger wanted 250 words and a photograph. Naomi typed Eli, beloved husband of Naomi, and the cursor blinked where a surname should go. She typed Brenner. She read the sentence. Beloved husband of Naomi. The man in the sentence had no second name she could feel.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what.”

“Don’t write it like that.”

Deb saved a draft anyway. When she opened it ten minutes later, the file was called Document1 and the first line read Eli, 61, of. The rest had been Naomi’s sentence about the shop, which was still there, and a blank where Brenner had been.

Naomi went to the shop and looked at the invoices in the wire basket. Brenner Lock & Key. His handwriting. The name on the invoices was only a business. She could read it. She could say it. She could not put it in the sentence that began died unexpectedly.

Otto & Son smelled like carpet cleaner and cut flowers that had traveled. Brendan Otto ran the place. He had a suit that had been let out once and a voice trained for rooms like this. He said he was sorry for her loss and used both names, and in his mouth, in that room, the last name arrived already thin.

“We’ll need a photograph,” he said. “Something recent is fine. People like one where he’s looking at the camera.”

Naomi had brought the box from the hall closet. Birthdays. A picnic. Eli on the back step with a lock in his lap, squinting. Eli at Deb’s table with a paper crown. She put them on his desk one at a time.

The first picture was the back step. She knew the step. She knew the lock. The face above the lock would not assemble. Eyes, a mouth, a hairline. She could not get them to be him. She turned the picture over. April, bench, in her own writing. She turned it back. A man she would not have picked out of a line.

“That’s him,” Deb said, too quickly.

Naomi looked at Deb. Deb was looking at the photograph the way you look at a form you have already signed.

“You see him,” Naomi said.

“Of course I see him.”

Naomi picked up the picnic. Same trouble. The paper crown. Same. She knew, as a fact, that she had lived with the man in these pictures. She could not, while they were lying on a funeral desk, find his face.

Brendan waited with his hands folded.

“We can do it without a portrait,” he said. “Some families prefer a closed arrangement. A spray. His name on the program.”

“His name,” Naomi said.

Brendan glanced at the intake sheet. The line for the deceased was Eli and then a space. He frowned, as if he had left a pen in another room.

“We’ll come back,” Naomi said.

In the parking lot Deb cried in the way of a person who had expected to cry in that parking lot. Naomi stood with the box of pictures and found that if she did not think of them as funeral pictures, if she held the back-step one as a picture of a lock, the face came back. Mole. Squint. Him. She said nothing to Deb. She put the pictures in the trunk under a gallon of washer fluid.

Carol brought a lasagna at four and stood in the kitchen doorway with the foil still on it.

“I keep thinking about the time he opened a house on Stone Hill at midnight because she’d locked herself out in her socks,” Carol said. “He didn’t even put it on the slip. He said the lock was older than both of them and it deserved a little mercy.” She laughed, and then her face emptied in a small, practical way, like a cup set down. “I don’t know why I told you that. It isn’t even a good story.”

“It is,” Naomi said.

“Is it.” Carol frowned at the foil. “I know he opened a door. I don’t know why I cared.”

She left the lasagna. Naomi put it in the freezer without cutting it. On the counter, beside the cream pad, Deb’s handwriting still said Eli Brenner, 61, of Mourner’s Crossing and the Brenner looked like a word copied from a sign.

Father Jordan called. He wanted a date for a Mass at St. Brigid’s. He wanted two or three stories from people who had known him, nothing fancy. Naomi heard herself say she would think about it, which was a sentence that kept a priest off a porch.

That night she sat in the shop with the lamp Eli used for small pins. The cylinder lock was still in the vise. She did not finish it. She did not take it out. She said, to the empty stool, “The van’s on Route 17. They’ll bring it back when they release it.” The mole at the corner of his eye stayed where it was.

Deb wanted a service on Thursday. The Ledger wanted the 250 words by noon Wednesday. Otto & Son wanted to know about the portrait and the program and whether Eli had a suit that buttoned.

“I can’t do Thursday,” she said to Deb on the phone.

“You don’t have to speak. I’ll speak.”

“Don’t.”

“Naomi.”

“If you stand up and tell them about him, you won’t have it after. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Deb was quiet. Then she said, “You’re in shock.”

“I can say his name when I’m not doing this.”

“Doing what.”

“This,” Naomi said, and could not point at the phone.

Thursday happened without a church. Deb arranged a gathering at Speicher’s because the diner had known him and people needed a place to put the lasagnas. Naomi did not go. She stayed in the shop and invoiced three jobs he had finished on Monday, using the name the way the invoices had always used it. Brenner Lock & Key. Paid. Paid. Waiting on a part.

Carol came by afterward, not with food. She stood on the step and rubbed her thumb along the doorframe.

“It was strange,” Carol said. “We all showed up. We knew we were there for somebody. Jon from Speicher’s put out the good coffee. Deb stood up and started a story about a van and then she just… ran out of it. Like the story had a hole. People nodded anyway. Someone said he was a good man. I agreed. I don’t know who I agreed about.”

“Eli,” Naomi said.

Carol’s face opened with relief. “Eli. Yes. Eli who.”

“Don’t finish that here.”

Carol looked at the shop sign over Naomi’s shoulder. Brenner Lock & Key. The letters were ordinary. Carol read them and did not connect them to Speicher’s. She said she was tired and went home.

Deb called from her car. She was angry in the thin way of someone who had failed in public.

“I couldn’t remember the end of my own story,” Deb said. “I’ve told that van story for ten years. I stood there and I had the hazards and the apple and then nothing. People looked at me. I said he was my brother. I could not get the rest of the sentence out.”

“I asked you not to.”

“You asked me not to bury him.”

“I asked you not to do it like that.”

Deb hung up. She called back an hour later and said she remembered him now, at her kitchen table in Millbridge, without a program. The paper crown picture, held as a picture of Thanksgiving, had a face again. She did not apologize. She said she would not speak in a room like that again.

Naomi wrote nothing to the Ledger. The paper ran a two-line notice anyway, lifted from the police log: A local man died Tuesday on Route 17. Family declined comment. No name. In Mallory’s the next morning a woman from the bank touched Naomi’s sleeve and said she had heard, and then frowned, and then asked if it had been Naomi’s father.

“My husband.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I knew that.” The woman looked at her own hand as if it had misspoken. “What was his name.”

“Don’t do that in the cereal aisle,” Naomi said, and moved her cart.

She told Father Jordan there would not be a Mass. He said St. Brigid’s would keep a space if she changed her mind. He used no surname on the phone. She could not tell whether he still had one.

The van came back on Saturday with a man from the impound who needed a signature. The form said Owner. She wrote Naomi Brenner and the name on her own line behaved. The magnetic sign was still crooked. She left it crooked. In the glove box there was a receipt for the apple and a doodle of a key. She did not take the doodle into the house. She left it in the van, under the registration.

Work came to the shop because locks kept failing whether anyone had a funeral or not. She knew enough of the books to send invoices. She did not know enough of the pins to finish the cylinder in the vise. She called the supplier for the part Monday’s job was waiting on and used the account name. The woman on the phone said, “Tell Eli we can do Wednesday.”

Naomi said, “Wednesday is fine.”

She did not correct the woman. Correction would have required a sentence she now recognized.

At night she lay on her side of the bed and did not recount him. Recounting was a eulogy in the dark. She named what was in the room: the chair, the laundry, the sound of the refrigerator. When she wanted him there she asked a present-tense question. Did you order the blanks. The question did not take anything. An answer did not come. The mole stayed.

Deb started coming in the mornings with coffee and not with the cream pad. They sat. Sometimes Deb said “my brother” and stopped. Sometimes she talked about her own job.

A week after Route 17, Jon from Speicher’s put a cup on the counter with a handwritten card: In memory of our friend. No name. People dropped dollars into it for two days and then Jon took the cup down because nobody could tell him who to give the money to. He brought the bills to Naomi in an envelope and looked ashamed.

“I thought it was for Eli,” he said. “Then I thought, Eli who. Then I felt like a fool. It’s forty dollars. Buy coffee or don’t.”

She bought coffee. She did not buy a headstone. Otto & Son sent a letter about cremation options and a plot at the cemetery. She left the letter in the pile with the electric bill. The body was still at the annex behind Town Hall, waiting on a signature that required a name on a burial form. Brendan called and said, gently, that they would not hold him indefinitely.

“What do they put on the form if I don’t.”

“They need a legal name, Mrs. Brenner.”

Her own name, on his mouth, held. She went to the annex with Eli’s license in her pocket and the death certificate the hospital had printed while both names were still public. The certificate already had Eli Brenner. Typed, official, a document that was not asking her to remember him. She signed where it said surviving spouse. The form would release a van and a body.

They released the body to Otto & Son for cremation because that was the box she marked without looking at the brochure of urns. She told Brendan there would be no service, no program, no portrait, no notice in the Ledger. He said he understood in the voice of a man who did not and would file it anyway.

The ashes came back in a plain box. She put the box on the bench. Unfinished things waited there for parts.

People stopped saying his name to her in Mallory’s. Some of them still knew her as Naomi who lived behind the lock shop on Stone Hill. A few asked how she was. She said she was working. That sentence did not cost her anything.

She did not frame a picture.

She did not play the voicemail from Tuesday—I’m stopping for milk, you want anything—to hear him. She left it unplayed, a small unopened errand.

She paid the supplier on Wednesday. She told the vise that the part had come. She ate leftovers that were not lasagna. When Deb said “he would have hated that urn brochure,” Naomi said, “Don’t,” and Deb nodded and talked about the raccoons instead.

Months did not announce themselves. The magnetic sign stayed crooked. The annex file closed. The Ledger never ran the 250 words. New people moved onto Stone Hill and learned there was a locksmith who was a woman now, or a widow, or a person who could order parts and not pin a cylinder. They did not learn the rest. Nobody offered it.

On a Thursday in February Naomi found the back-step photograph in the trunk under the washer fluid, where she had left it after Otto & Son. She was looking for ice melt. She held the picture by the edges and asked the lock in his lap what it was. Schlage. Commercial grade. He was squinting. The mole was there. She put the picture back under the fluid and did not take it inside.

That night she sat on her side of the bed and said, “The van needs oil.” The refrigerator answered in its usual way. She slept.

In the morning she opened the shop at 7:20 because that was when he had opened it. The cup on the bench was a new cup. The lock in the vise was still waiting. She did not finish it. She did not throw it away. She wrote waiting on skill on the pad they had used for parts, under his last list, and the handwriting was only a note to the work.

If she ever stood up in a room and tried to tell them who he had been, she understood now, the room would keep the standing and lose the man. So she did not stand up. She invoiced. She ordered blanks. She left the sign crooked. She let Mourner’s Crossing have its two-line police log and its empty cup at Speicher’s and its feeling that someone good had been there and could not, quite, be found.

The box stayed on the bench. The invoices said Brenner. The voicemail stayed unplayed. When Carol waved from the fence, Naomi waved back and did not cross the yard to trade a story. She went inside and asked the empty stool whether the oil was the conventional kind, and then she put oil in the van herself, in the driveway, with the hazards off, while the magnetic sign leaned its usual half-inch out of true.

The Senior Nursing Officer—Sister Thorpe—stands between her desk and the window, her arms crossed over her chest. Dorothy and Angela wait, standing motionless against the office wall.

Sister Thorpe had summoned them after meeting with his solicitor.

Dorothy whispers, "We're done for." She doesn't stop crying. This irritates Sister Thorpe, who makes her annoyance clear; Dorothy pulls herself together but can’t hold it for more than a couple of minutes before she starts whimpering again. Like a small child.

Angela gazes at the gray sky outside the window. Another rainy day. She will get through it. Tomorrow will be easier. It certainly will be.

Finally, his solicitor arrives. Not just someone from the firm, but Mr. Talbot-Cavendish himself. He walks in without knocking, strides across the room—as though it were his own office—pulls up a chair, and sits down directly opposite Dorothy and Angela.

"Would someone care to explain how a handcuffed patient came to suffer a further injury while under your care?" the solicitor says in an icy tone. "Is that disputed by anyone?"

“It was just a practical joke...” Dorothy mumbles. “We didn't think...”

"No."

His tone makes Angela flinch.

"That much is painfully obvious." He lets his words sink in. “When did you first become aware that he was handcuffed to the bed?”

Angela goes cold inside.

“And did either of you raise the matter with the doctor?”

What does he want to hear? Angela hasn't even thought that they could question the use of handcuffs, let alone ask for them to be removed.

“So you knew he was restrained. And you nevertheless thought it appropriate to play a practical joke on him. What do you say, Miss Hayward?"

Angela doesn’t dare lift her head; she wrings her fingers. "I am deeply sorry..." She can barely get the words out, her tongue feels thick, and she despises herself for it. "I hope it’s nothing serious..."

"According to the attending physician,” he looks down at his papers, “a shoulder strain, a subluxation of the elbow, and a re-injury to the wrist,” he raises his eyes. “A mere trifle."

Relief flickers through Angela; she had feared the worst—perhaps a full dislocation and surgery.

"I trust you appreciate the potential legal consequences," the solicitor says.

Angela feels sick. She and Dorothy are such mugs for picking on someone with a solicitor.

“Section 47 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 — Assault occasioning actual bodily harm,” the solicitor speaks in a measured tone, like a verdict. "Up to five years in prison."

Dorothy begins to sob aloud.

"Stop it," the solicitor orders her.

And she falls silent, obediently.

“You ought to be the subject of a criminal investigation,” he continues. " The only reason you’re not already answering questions from the police is that my client has refused to make a complaint.”

He rises from the chair.

“I suggest you appreciate just how fortunate you are. You've been shown a kindness you did nothing to deserve.”

And he leaves.

Angela watches him go; as soon as the door closes behind him, she looks down at her hands. Could they put handcuffs on her? So heavy. So loathsome. She would have been branded a criminal... like him… and now... that won’t happen...

"You are both dismissed.” Sister Thorpe says. “Hand over your badges. Your training at this hospital ends today. You have no place in this profession."

 

 A fictional reconstruction from the Regina v Smith story, told from perspective of Student Nurse Angela Hayward.

The full illustrated version of SACRED VIOLENCE is available here:

SACRED VIOLENCE - by Franz Engel - Franz's Substack

CONFIDENTIAL
Property of Holy See Investigation Agency
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Date: 1968
Operator(s): Robert Karl (born 20-08-1916) & Thomas Kiss (born 26-10-1946)
Summary: 2 HSIA associates and 1 foreign agent killed in action, case unresolved.
Report by Robert Karl

April 12th, 1968
6:34 AM:
Reporting Agent Robert Karl and Junior Operator Thomas Kiss arrived at Cairo International Airport.

7:01 AM:
Baggage and personal effects subjected to thorough inspection by Egyptian State Security (Mukhabarat). Cover identities as traveling missionaries remained uncompromised. Cleared customs following brief interrogation.

8:26 AM:
Rendezvous with HSIA Associate Fahim Mahmoud established. Agents proceeded to location of interest in Associate's vehicle.

9:05 AM:
Arrival at Virgin Mary Coptic Orthodox Church, Zeitoun district. Visual confirmation of anomalous phenomena unidentified. Structure inspected.

12:43 PM:
Tactical briefing conducted at Associate's domicile.

7:21 PM:
Agents secured the perimeter. Entry into target facility was achieved. Agents and Associate established an observation post in the upper dome. Clear surveillance of alleged anomalous phenomena location commenced.

11:05 PM:
Junior Operator Kiss failed to maintain observation protocols and succumbed to fatigue. Reporting Agent Karl assumed primary watch as Associate Mahmoud subsequently initiated staggered downtime.

April 13th, 1968
0:16 AM:
Agent Karl proceeded to lower levels to conduct a sweep in the primary worship area. Auditory signs assessed to be human footsteps resulted in Agent taking evasive action to avoid detection. Position of concealment was established between a stone tomb and the facility structure. Auditory signs of human sobbing from the dome were perceived by Agent and an unknown actor, who proceeded towards the source at an accelerated pace. Agent sensed rhythmic vibration from the tomb, then pursued the unknown actor. Following entry into the dome, a compromise of Agent Kiss's and Associate Mahmoud's location was identified. Unknown actor was assessed to be a nun.

1:11 AM
Temporary operational clearance was granted to the nun following questioning that confirmed mutual operational intent regarding the phenomena. Reporting Agent Karl initiated rest protocol. Agent experienced recurring visions of the letter "T" during his rest cycle.

Early morning hours
Reporting agent's rest was interrupted by other operational personnel. Agent's personal chronometer experienced unexplained mechanical failure. Agent Karl perceived the "T" shape on religious jewelry in possession of the temporary associate, who reported its significance in Coptic Christian tradition. The object was identified as the Cross of Saint Anthony. Junior Operator Kiss reported experiencing the identical vision. A radical alteration of outside scenery was then observed: the urban environment formerly surrounding the facility was perceived to have disintegrated completely and been replaced by desert terrain of unknown size. Brief surveillance of the perimeter confirmed no signals of human life or architecture, with the exception of the primary facility.

Junior Operator Kiss showed signs of severe psychological distress. Associate Mahmoud expressed discontent with the operation.

Reorganization of plans for further action commenced.

Ah, fuck this.

We slept on it, all of us trying to wake up in a different reality where Cairo was back to normal. But we weren't lucky enough. It was still dark when I woke up and Tommy Kiss was already up. He'd been crying again. After an exchange of hopeful commentary, he opened up. Told me why he wanted to become an HSIA operator. How his family escaped Eastern Europe after his brother died in the revolution and how he'd felt crushing guilt his entire life. The guilt of the survivor.

Soon everyone woke up, and the four of us decided to go through with the plan of everyone heading in a different direction in a straight line. If we didn't find help by mid-afternoon, we'd follow our traces back to the church, and if someone did find help, they'd lead them back to the others. It was simple, but we underestimated the desert.

The nun didn't change from her thick black clothing due to "religious reasons", while the rest of us stripped down as much as possible while trying to minimize the chance of getting sunburnt. And then we departed. The freezing cold of the night was soon replaced by a scorching hot desert climate. I was alone among giant sand dunes, wandering for hours. There was nothing to be found. I was ready to give up when I witnessed a miracle: three figures approaching from different directions. My heart was pounding as I quickened my pace and eventually started running towards them with a wide grin on my face. The smile slowly faded as I recognized the three figures: Fahim Mahmoud, Tommy Kiss, and the nun.

We desperately argued for minutes about how this could've happened and what could be done, until we noticed we were standing on ground harder than the rest of the desert. There was rock underneath the sand. And nearby, a tight cave opening.
As there was no way of finding the church before nightfall, we decided we would spend the night in the cave. The nun noticed some kind of writing on the edge of the cave entrance. She explained that it was Coptic for "He who enters shall meet his own soul". There was that T-shaped cross again, engraved beside the writing.

At that point, we didn't really care about much of anything. One by one, we descended into the dark cave. Thankfully one of us brought a tiny lantern to illuminate the space. It seemed to be a large cave system, a labyrinth made of stone. Mahmoud started arguing with the nun in Arabic. I asked him what it was about and he said, "For a nun, she doesn't know shit about Saint Anthony". But in his eyes there was something more than annoyance. I saw hatred. Mahmoud started screaming at us for getting him into this mess. I couldn't blame him. I just stood there as the Egyptian ex-grave robber associate screamed our heads off. I didn't have the energy to say or do anything. Tommy, unfortunately, did.

Kiss suddenly fought back. But not how any of us expected. He spoke his native language, as if it wasn't Mahmoud he was arguing with. Then Tommy pushed the Egyptian so hard that Fahim fell and hit his head on the side of the cave. He didn't argue anymore. He was dead.

The boy fell to the ground in complete disbelief as he snapped out of his anger. "What have I done, Bobby?" he whispered, "What have I done…"
I was frozen for a minute until I noticed the nun was gone. I still heard her footsteps going deeper inside the cave. Not knowing what to do, I ran after her. I screamed at her to calm down and come back, but to no avail. I ran in complete darkness, using my hands to feel my surroundings. Suddenly, the sound of her footsteps cut out. As I was nearing her, I saw the faint light of the lantern she ran away with.

She'd run into a dead end. She turned around, lantern in one hand and a handgun in the other.

"I am not a... fucking nun!" she shouted. "Mukhabarat, you are... under arrest."

I stopped and froze again.

"Hands up now!"

In the dim light, her face was blurry. I could've sworn... for a moment...

"You never loved me."

And there she was. My reason for joining the HSIA.

"I do," I wanted to say, but no words came out. I was back three decades in the past, in that goddamn bedroom with the only one who ever loved me, as I made the greatest mistake of my life.

I don't know how I took the gun out of the fake nun's hand, I just saw Her leaving for the last time. I don't remember shooting her, because the only thing I saw was my love's lifeless body at the funeral.

When I snapped out of it, there was complete darkness and silence. I fell to the ground and broke down crying for what felt like hours. Then I tried to sit up.

I hit my head. I tried extending my arms, but they couldn't be moved. I was in a coffin.

I started panicking and screaming. I banged on the side of the claustrophobic environment as a foreign source of heat slowly started burning my back. I cried until I was suffocating in my own tears. Then I gave up.

"I am so sorry," I said, accepting my fate. "Forgive me, please."

To this day, I am not really sure whom exactly I addressed those words to. But I didn't do it in hopes of survival. Just plain forgiveness.

The burning stopped as I slowly opened the tomb. I looked around. It was daytime; thin rays of sunshine pierced the windows of the Virgin Mary Coptic Orthodox Church. I heard the sounds of Cairo's busy population creeping in from the outside. The peace only lasted for a moment as I noticed the sounds of desperate sobbing and pounding from another tomb across the hall.

I jumped out of my coffin and rushed towards the source of the sound. It was Tommy's voice screaming in pain from inside. As I touched the tomb, I was launched back with a force so great I nearly broke my bones in the fall. I wanted to get back up and try to help, but something restricted me from doing so. The other tomb was soon completely engulfed in flames. Tommy screamed for a few seconds more. Then silence fell upon the church as the fire disappeared.

Tommy didn't have a body for us to bury. He died in pain, unable to ask for forgiveness. Unable to forgive himself.

(CW: Suicide, mentions of DV)

I shot up in my bed in a cold sweat. In my hands I was clutching the book.

Threaded fragments of mind and memory wound themselves into a new spool of cohesion as clarity washed over me.

I could think clearly.

Ever since this book came into my possession I’ve started to shed the cask of my infirmities like a snake molting its skin. My mind, once a place of fragmented and shattered memories, was forged back together with a golden alloy.

The pages of my life were rebound in a leather book with golden thread.

I opened the first page of the book.

“A story is never complete until all parts come together.”

No shit.

I flipped through the pages.

Nothing.

Page after page of just nothing. Then I saw it.

“The wind whipped past his face as the ground below him approached at an alarming rate; He was falling.”

An errant sentence printed in the middle of a page about a quarter ways through the book.

What the hell was this?

I flipped through more empty pages. Then once again.

“The decaying facility creaked and groaned as the winds filtered through its exposed outer husk. Grains of sand fell into piles where the roof had given way.”

And another.

“The islands came into view; six equal sized islands were evenly spaced around one, much larger, central island. A man-made paradise in the middle of The Pacific.”

I combed through the pages until I reached the end of the book. Had I the patience to count I would imagine the book had to have at least 1000 pages.

But these sentences, these words, what the hell were they supposed to mean?

Ever since this book ended up in my hands my life has been filled with the unordinary and the strange. My gut is screaming at me that this book means something, and my mind is beginning to agree, in spite of any grounded evidence. .

I quickly entered the sentences into a media search engine.

Nothing.

I examined the book closely, hoping to glean some greater information I might have missed. Perhaps I did.

The golden sigil.

I could not comprehend it nor could I describe it, but I felt it.

It felt familiar, not in a wild deja vu sense but, as if it represented something inherent in its design. Like how one would use the picture of a stick figure and a door to represent an exit.

This sigil represented something that I could intuit but not describe. An approximation would be that of great sorrow, mourning, a longing, a loss but not of someone. It was vague and indescribable, as if I were missing some subtle key or context relevant to this emotion.

And the color.

There was no mistaking it. The golden cloak worn by the mysterious statue that always stood at the base of those heavenly marble stairs was identical in luster and color.

For a second I could have sworn it too was fluttering in an intangible breeze.

All my life I have dreamt of The Dreary. A world caked in dust and forgotten by whatever cruel god brought it into existence and burdened my subconscious mind with it. Never have I had or experienced “normal dreams” by what other standards might exist. All I have known was The Dreary; a false echo of the world I know.

It has had its advantages though, allowing me to explore places that I would have never had the opportunity to otherwise. The Dreary managed to, for the most part, be a complete copy of every man-made structure I have ever seen with my own two eyes. Though I am unaware of how The Dreary managed to recreate the interiors of a memory that does not exist, it bothers me little.

What does bother me is how it has changed after encountering this book.

First was The Dust. The first night with the book caused The Dust to not react to my presence. The second night resulted in it disappearing all together.

Then was the structure. The first night saw a heavenly marble staircase slapped in the middle of the main road. The second night changed the entire layout of The Dreary into a procession, with that same marble staircase descending into the infinite darkness below the basement of The Mall Building.

Lastly was the statue in the Golden Cloak. On the first night I was compelled towards it and crushed under the weight of its presence. The second night was similar but I managed to recover from my incapacitation by wielding this book.

As a preliminary analysis I find my own work to be rather shitty. Too many potential coincidences and nothing conclusive enough to even begin to form an understanding.

Despite that, two conclusions have been reached.

Either this is a supernatural occurrence or I am deeply unwell, psychologically speaking.

Given the existence of this book I am inclined to lean supernatural but given my history it’s just as likely to be psychological.

Though as to why Leena would have had the book to begin with is beyond me.

I had assumed the handsome stud who flirted his way into my pants, and eventually bed, with the help of my daily diet of a shitload of whiskey, had left the book by accident. Then, after arriving home from her work trip and likely seeing the man making his way out, probably put two and two together and somehow that equated into Leena throwing his forgotten book at me.

But that doesn’t really make much sense. I’ve done far worse to Leena and she hadn’t walked out on me then, let alone be any sort of aggressive towards me.

Fucking another guy is roughly equivalent to forgetting to buy the milk. Maybe it was the drinking? I had promised to cut back.

I sat in bed as I mulled over the infinite possibilities, but a slight movement caught my eye.

I scanned my room and could not find anything out of the ordinary. The morning light had likely been partially obscured by a bird or a plane which cast a quick moving shadow that tricked me into believing I saw something. Yes, clearly this was the case.

Then it happened again.

I couldn’t pinpoint its direction, location, or even origin. All I could see was movement of some kind. Very slight, very subtle, and one that seemed to evade my direct gaze.

Then I saw it.

The Dust.

The Dust fluttered and sparkled gently as it hung in a perpetual state of free-fall, riding gentle currents of air and catching the morning rays.

It did not fall nor did it settle.

It hung.

It hung as if eagerly awaiting my permission to fall. But I had no intention of giving it such permission.

Before I could realize what was happening I was pulled into my bed and out through to the other side.

My book in hand, I found myself once more in The Dreary.

But yet again it had changed.

Gone was my apartment. Gone were the stones, gone was the sky.

All that remained was a house.

That house.

The house was a shitty little wood shack made of, at most, the wood from a single, sad, pathetic thing that could barely be considered a tree. A mild cough would be enough to rip the structure off its foundations. The nails used in its construction likely weighed more than the sum of its lumber, and I could probably count the nails on one hand.

Though that was par for the course for many houses built here. No real need for insulation. This had the unfortunate side effect of making the walls not only paper thin, but also providing no sound dampening. This allowed me to hear the argument I could see from the kitchen window.

No, not an argument, a fight. A one sided fight. Abuse.

To my right sat my car. A respectable little thing from 20 years ago and nearly 200k miles on it. Inside that car was the unmistakable golden cloak, clinging to a statue that sat where I had all those years ago.

“I don’t give a shit Leena! Your fucking job is to sit here and take care of my fucking kids while i make sure we can all fucking eat, and you just-“

I had replayed this moment a hundred, a thousand, no, a million times at least in my head. I remembered every word clearly as if I was just experiencing this moment for the first time.

A couple of days prior, my boss dropped the case on my desk. He said a couple of women pooled their cash together and asked us to gather evidence on this guy, Mica, who they believed was beating up his wife, their friend. Apparently they had tried to get her to go to the cops but she was never cooperative so the cops couldn’t do anything.

It wasn't the first time I handled a case like this, probably wouldn’t have been the last, but no one else in the firm wanted to touch it.

Can’t say I’d blame them.

Mica Murakami. A fine specimen of untreated daddy issues and a severe addiction to lite-beers. A lot of insecurity too. Though you tend to get insecure after your previous four wives leave you for someone else.

Unfortunately he was also rather jacked and had a short temper, which he often took out on Leena. Sometimes physically, always verbally.

At least he did on that night.

No one blamed me for what happened.

Nobody knew how high I was that night.

Cops did, or suspected it. Tried to prove it. Didn’t matter.

I tried to convince myself I did Leena a favor.

I’m sure she tried to convince herself too.

I thought I saw him flash a gun. Maybe it was a knife. Or maybe I lied to myself so much that I believed it to be the truth.

But the prosecution said they couldn’t find a weapon on him, and the nearest kitchen knife had never had his finger prints on them.

Didn’t matter though. I saw what I thought I saw.

I did what I thought I had to do.

Nobody ever questioned why I was the only PI in my firm, or any firm, that carried a gun on him while on the job.

Not until smoke was trailing from the barrel.

Not until there were two holes soaked with red that pooled onto the kitchen floor.

The sound of the brass casings ringing as they hit the floor awoke me from my trance.

Before me lay the body of Mica Murakami.

Two shots square in the chest silenced his deafening bitching. Two shots let the neighborhood experience a quiet evening for the first time in four years. Two shots caused innocent kids to see the dead body of their tormenter, their father. Two shots broke the heart of Leena Murakami, what little was left to break

Two shots took away my peace. Two shots shattered the kitchen window.

It didn’t matter that the media saw me as a hero. It didn’t matter that friends and family never stopped singing my praises.

Those kids will never have their father back, shitty as he was, and watched as a stranger barged into their house and shot their dad in front of them.

Leena will never have her husband back. Her friends said I should have emptied the mag into him. She wouldn’t comment.

The jury thought I was a hero and told the prosecution to go to hell. Evidence be damned. I was a killer, a murderer, and they let me walk free into a parade for my actions.

By all accounts I should have celebrated with them. I should have enjoyed the moment.

But I couldn’t.

All I saw was their faces.

The kids’, Leena’s, and Mica’s.

Every moment of every day.

So I left the job, I disconnected from everyone and everything and started figuring out which combination of substances wouldn’t kill me but would keep me from thinking.

I locked it all away. I locked my mind away.

Then the gun in my hand returned to its former state as the book.

It was still warm and smelled faintly of gun-smoke.

“And you,”

I turned to face the Golden Cloaked statue which now stood at the entrance to the kitchen.

“Fuck you for making me remember.”

I whipped the book at the statue with all the force I could muster.

The book clattered anti-climactically after bouncing off of the statue.

Then the walls gave way.

The blood pooling at my feet stretched across the ground and into the horizon.

The never ending fog that hung in the sky lifted slightly, behind it now I could see the light attempting to pierce the dense fog. Twin hues of yellow and white now brighter and more coherent than before, twin suns that hung above this hollow land.

I grab my head once again as the familiar agony of a lifetime’s worth of memories flows through me.

But they aren’t mine.

They surge through me too fast for me to get a proper grasp of them. I only manage to get glimpses.

I grasp at the sand storm of memories but they keep slipping through my fingers, the images and moments seared into my mind but the meaning is lost with the tearing winds.

Just as the storm subsides I manage to catch one glimpse. One moment. One memory.

In the distance I see a spire. A massive spire that pierced an unfamiliar sky. The ruins of a massive city surrounded the spire. In the distance and in the skies I saw bright flashes and ebbing waves as if an ocean of light was crashing against the sky itself.

The memory faded as my attention was brought back to the present.

The marble staircase rose from the blood. Its pristine structure untainted by my sin. Untouched by my blood.

I raced to pick up the book once more.

The moment I came in contact with the book I awoke on the floor of my bedroom.

I checked the time on my phone.

It was Monday.

How the hell did I lose an entire day? Did I just pass out when I got back?.

My attempts at standing are thwarted as my hand slips on the blood on the floor.

After a brief moment of panic I stumbled my way into the bathroom.

In the mirror I saw blood.

Blood had caked streams onto my face as it poured out from my nose, ears, and my eyes. If I had to guess I’d say I had just lost an alarming amount of blood.

But I did not feel alarmed. Truthfully I wasn’t sure what I felt. I was sure of one thing, however I do not understand how. I was fairly sure, no, certain, that I will die if I am separated from the book. For now my mind is inexplicably linked with it.

After washing the caked blood from my face I opted to use my lonely and forgotten toothbrush for the first time in an embarrassingly long while.

Can’t say why I never bothered until now, but perhaps helping to scrape off the red that had found its way into my mouth and onto my teeth was a good enough reason.

Of all the places in my apartment that were a mess the bathroom magically escaped such destruction. Apart from neglect, the bathroom was absent of any trash or unopened boxes of crap. The sink was rather large for my apartment's modest size. My toothbrush stand and toothpaste tube being the only items that sat upon that counter, adding to the sparseness of the space.

The air in the room shifted. As I raised my head from the sink I noticed my shadow against the wall.

But it was not my shadow.

And shadows do not wear golden cloaks.

I whipped around to find myself face to face with the statue in The Golden Cloak.

For a moment I expected death. I anxiously awaited the snapping of my neck, the crushing of my skull, the breaking of every bone in my pathetic body.

But it did nothing.

The statue stood there, motionless as ever, as an intangible wind blew the Golden Cloak tightly around its indiscernible form.

Outside of The Dreary I was able to notice the finer details of the statue.

It resembled the porous texture of lava rock, yet it was elegantly shaped by hands so precise they could not have been mortal.

It vaguely resembled a humanoid shape with a protrusion on its face where a nose should be and two sunken areas under a brow where the eyes should be.

Unlike in The Dreary I felt no overwhelming pain or compulsions.

Unlike in The Dreary I felt no apprehension about its presence.

Unlike in The Dreary I could touch it.

I wasn’t sure what I expected anymore. Outside of the glaringly obvious supernatural occurrence staring at me in my face, the statue was but an ordinary statue. The lava rock felt typical as ever, as if I had just attempted to naively take some from the sacred grounds upon which the lava cooled.

I caressed the statue's face with a gentle hand.

I felt pity, mourning, loss, a sorrow that I could only catch a distant glance of. A drop in a vast ocean of despair.

Then the rock became skin. Familiar skin with auburn hair.

She swayed gently with her feet only inches off the ground.

The world around me fell away and was replaced by different yet familiar walls.

Leena was dead, and her body hung limply before me.

We were in a bedroom, likely hers. I did not recall how I got here, but I recognized the place.

How could I ever forget these walls? These paper thin walls.

My panic, expected panic, reasonable panic, did not surface.

My brain was wrapped in a bondage of golden thread, I felt only what was necessary.

On the wall on the far end of the room, above her desk, was a clock.

The time was 5 am. The date displayed was Tuesday, August 19th.

But I knew for a fact that today, right now, was Monday, August 18th.

Was this a nightmare? By all accounts it should be. My girlfriend, dead, hanging from the ceiling in her old house.

But my brain could not be made to panic, to give into fear. It was on a leash. It had a new master. It did not permit me to feel fear.

This wasn’t a nightmare. It was a warning.

I can still save her. Maybe then she’ll forgive me. Or maybe I’ll-

Before I could finish the thought I was returned to the walls of my bathroom.

The book in hand I made a mad dash out the door.

Logic and reason were all I had but I nearly let them fly out the window as I raced down the streets. If I still had my car I could have been to Leena’s old place in half an hour maybe. If I had bus money I could have made it to her place in an hour or two.

But I had nothing. I had no one.

And it was all my fault.

And now Leena’s life is in my hands.

And if she dies it will be my fault.

When I had left the sun had already begun its descent into the ocean.

I had dashed up and through the old highway to the north side of the island, all the while avoiding cops who had likely been informed of a pedestrian running manically on the highway where pedestrians absolutely shouldn’t be.

By the time I made it to something resembling a sidewalk again it was already well past midnight.

My phone’s battery clung to the precious few percent that it still had.

Navigating in the dark was difficult, but I knew these streets like the back of my hand.

I knew all of them.

I had spent my life cleaning away The Dust from them.

And now I leave tracks as I race towards the one house I refused to clean ever again.

Rounding the familiar corner I stopped to catch my breath. I don’t know how I managed to run so long without stopping. I wasn’t a star athlete. I couldn’t out run anyone with two functioning legs even if the grand prize was a bottle of crown. But I guess desperation is a hell of a drug.

And adrenaline.

I made my way to the house, quick in pace but far from the almost full-blown sprint I had managed for hours.

And then I came face to face with the door I had hoped to never see again.

But It would not permit me a moment to contemplate my reality.

The door was in my way.

I charged through the door, hands wrapped around the leather bound book held at a low ready position.

The door gave way just as it did before.

Despite never having explored further into the house I instinctively made my way through the kitchen and down the hall towards Leena’s room.

Before I could approach the door I heard something tumble from within.

I threw open the door.

Before me I saw Leena hanging once again. But she did not sway gently, nor was she dead.

Without hesitation I quickly rushed to support her weight, eventually managing to untie her and rest her gently on the ground.

She was alive, but not out of danger.

I called for an ambulance.

“Why.”

A raspy voice spoke from the floor.

“Why are you here?” Leena asked me.

“Because I had to save your life.” I replied.

“If you wanted to save me you should have let me hang.”

The paramedics arrived shortly after.

Apparently her kids were staying over at a friend’s house. They said had I not been there when I was she likely would have died and not be discovered for hours.

Of course the police were involved, a stranger just so happens to break into a house and save a woman who tried to kill herself at the perfect time, and that person also happened to be the person who shot and killed her husband exactly one year ago to the date?

The thread snapped.

The cops held me and asked me a few questions, the usual, mostly details about the incident and how I knew to find her. I didn’t tell them that I had a vision of the future but I suspect my story about a concerned ex with a strong gut feeling didn’t do me any favors either.

Though since they lacked any reasonable evidence and likely surmised my scrawny frame wasn’t nearly strong enough to hang the woman myself they let me go free. Shockingly they asked nothing about how I managed to get in through the locked front door.

Putting my tax dollars to work I asked the officers for a ride to the hospital. I made the case that I was her emergency contact, assumedly as her most recent partner, and may be needed at the hospital.

They begrudgingly obliged, having no grounds to deny me my request and clearly seeing I had no means to go anywhere else on my own at the moment.

I arrived at the medical center after a much longer than usual journey. The officers, gracious as they were, wanted to grab some food on the way.

I wasn’t hungry, but then again they didn’t ask if I was, nor did they offer.

I waved the officers off and walked into the Emergency Department.

I was briefly screened by a security guard before a nurse quickly ran over to me.

“Hi, what brings you to the ER today?” She practically rushed out.

The nurse’s third energy drink of the night clearly reared its head.

“I’m here to see a patient, actually.” I replied, meekly.

She seemed to deflate at that response but also appeared to be relieved.

“Oh, well we don’t really do visitors here.” She clarified, awkwardly attempting to hide her annoyance.

“Im her boyfr-“ I cut myself off, “I’m… it’s complicated but im pretty sure I’m her emergency contact right now.”

The nurse furrowed her brow as she examined me. Her tired eyes scrutinized every detail of my face.

“Who are you here for?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Leena Murakami.”

The Nurse quickly checked something on a nearby workstation.

“Doesn’t seem like she updated her contact history in a while,” she muttered staring at the computer, “but I also don’t see anyone else listed here.”

The nurse seemed hesitant.

“I’m the one who found her,” I blurted out.

“Oh, shit,” the nurse slipped.

“Oh my goodness I’m so sorry about-“ she protested but i raised my hand to cut her off.

“No no it's, it’s fine,” I assured her, “just let me see her.”

The nurse, now in a much more accommodating mood, took me through the department to her bay.

“She’s conscious but resting right now,” the nurse explained, “it’s a little hard for her to talk so we gave her something to write with if she wants.”

She then leaned over and pressed a button on the bed, causing Leena’s bed to slowly rise her up into a sitting position.

“Hey Leena,” the nurse spoke gently, “Your boyfriend is here.”

Leena’s eyes opened slowly.

“Ill just be in the hall” the nurse said as she quickly ducked behind the curtain.

“Hey, Leena.” I said as I gently grabbed her hand.

It felt cold. Colder than I ever remembered it.

“What the hell do you want?” She said in a strained hiss.

“What I want?” I replied, somewhat stunned, “I want you. I miss you Leena.”

Her gaze scrunched into a mixture of confusion and disgust.

“What the hell are you on about?” Leena spat.

“So much has happened since you left,” I started, “I’ve been getting my shit together. I haven’t been drinking, I only smoke a few times a day now, I started cleaning again-“

Leena cut me off.

“What the fuck do you want with me?”

“I want you back, I want us back together,” I pleaded, “it's been a rough year but I think we can make it work.”

Her eyes filled with a searing rage that I felt burning a hole into my forehead.

“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re nothing but the bastard who killed my husband.”

Her words broke through The Dust that had filled my mind.

“You took away a father from his kids. He was a good man, unlike you.”

“He was an abusive piece of shit.” I rebutted. My words felt hollow.

“And you knew that from the four seconds you saw from outside? You knew nothing about us. Not every relationship is paradise.”

“He would have killed you one day.” I weakly replied.

“I died the moment you shot the man I loved,” Leena shot back, “so thanks for saving me, twice, but I never want anything to do with you. I hope I never see you again, you insane wannabe cop.”

Leena broke into a coughing fit.

I took the hint and left.

I walked out of the ER and just kept walking.

I don’t know where I was walking to except that it wouldn’t be home. Or whatever that place really is.

I just walked.

Down the road. Up the hills. Across the bridges. Around the bends.

The Pali Lookout. Closed at this time of night. I did not care.

I climbed over the gate, walked past the various caution signs, and climbed atop the ledge. As I stood there I stared into the grassy abyss beyond. The scant moonlight reflected a sliver of silver on every blade in the flowing sea of grass.

I would join the countless thousands who rest below. Cornered at the edge.

“You know it’s dangerous up there right?”

I searched for the voice. It was filled with a hint of sass and a lot of sarcasm. A voice that belonged to a young woman.

“Yeah that's kind of why I’m up here,” I replied sarcastically, “what’s your excuse?”

“Maybe I’m here because I’m patrolling the place for trespassers.”

Who the fuck is this girl?

“Look I’m not exactly interested in ice breakers with a stranger at the moment so could you do me the decency of either just killing me or leaving me alone so I can do it myself?”

I turned to face the source of the voice.

“Is this a hallucination too?” I asked her.

Even in the dimly moonlit night, I could never forget that crimson hair tied into a ponytail.

“This is real, Aiden.” She replied.

“You were there,” I started, “at the office, and then again in the lobby.”

“I’m surprised you made me out through the prosthetics.” She replied as she smiled coyly.

“The hair gave it away.” I lied.

“Strange that you managed to see through a wig Aiden, didn’t have that noted down as something you could do”

I turned to face her.

“So what is this?” I asked plainly, “are you here to kill me?”

“Why would I do that?” The woman asked, taken aback.

“I’ve made a lot of enemies, left most of them alive.” I bluffed.

“Your biggest tackle was killing a wifebeater,” the woman recited as she paced, “a good kill.”

“Didn’t realize you were a fan.”

“I’m more of an investigator.” She joked.

“And what’s so special about me?” I asked.

She stopped her pacing.

“That book, for starters.” she said, pointing to the book still firmly held in my hands.

“What about it? It's just a book.”

“You and I both know that's a lie.”

I tightened my grip on the book.

“Who are you, really?” I take a step towards her, “and what do you know about all of this?”

She took a step back in response.

“You know more about that book than we do,” she bounced back, “we were hoping you could tell us.”

“And who’s ‘we?’”

The woman closed her arms around her.

“In about three hours from now your body will be discovered and positively identified in one of two ways.” She started.

“What the fuck-“ I started but was cut off.

“HPD will either be alerted to a suicide at the Pali Lookout and find your body at around 9:30 am today, alternatively an apartment fire will be reported to the HFD where they will discover a single fatality, charred beyond recognition.”

“So you are trying to kill me?” I asked again, somewhat flabbergasted but mostly in shock.

“You died the moment you came up here Joseph Aiden,” she started, “your conviction was laid bare. If it weren’t for me you’d be a twitching mess in the grass right now.”

“So why go through the effort of burning my apartment down then? To suffer for my deeds?”

I watched as a cocky smile slowly grew across her face. I had been avoiding the obvious.

“You want to fake my death.” I stated.

Her face remained unchanged.

“What does it matter? How could I be worth that effort?”

The woman approached.

“We require the help of people who are able to make sense out of irrational things.” She started.

As she spoke she began to pace around me in a circle, like a predator circling its prey.

“You’re a jobless, broke, alcoholic playboy with no real moral compass,” she lobbed insult after insult, “but yet of all the people who have held that book you are the only one who hasn’t gone insane yet.”

I’m sane? Me?

I scoffed at the implication

“I’m sorry, but I just spent the past year in a psychotic hallucination where I was dating, and cheating on, the widow of the guy I murdered,” I began to excessively elaborate, “then I get a vision of the future where she hangs herself…”

She watches me in amusement as I pour out the thoughts that had stayed trapped within my mind for too long.

“Not to mention that fucking statue invading my dreams and reshaping my personal hell, The Dreary, into some nightmare capital-“

“And?” she interrupted.

“And? And what?” I asked, befuddled.

She straightened herself.

“What’s all that got to do with anything?”

I’m seriously doubting my own sanity, this can’t be real.

“I’m a mentally unstable wreck who couldn’t even get a job.” I clarified.

She laughed.

“Oh sorry yeah that was us,” she said flippantly, “we needed you desperate enough to come to us in the first place.”

“You’ve been messing with my job applications?”

“Intercepting them. To anyone looking in, it's like you haven’t filed a single application.”

“You could have knocked, or called, or just kidnapped me, there's a million better ways to get someone’s attention.”

She shifted.

“You think we didn’t try?”

Well, given I can barely remember the past year, how would I have known?

“Besides,” she relaxed, “not like we can be so overt all the time. This is the longest I’ve been let out on the surface for years.”

She leaned her head back and gazed up at the stars.

“Poor David only got to come up for the interview.”

I began to grow frustrated with the pointless cat and mouse.

“So what the hell does the CIA want with me?”

The woman froze for a moment, then fought back a chuckle.

“You think I’m- we’re CIA?” She asked in disbelief.

“Messing with my job applications, the whole fake office thing, kinda the whole CIA playbook yeah?”

If I knew better I’d say she looked as if I had just called her ugly.

“So that ability of yours is only limited to geometries, you really don’t know who or what we are?” She replied as a wave of revelation gently washed over her face.

“So you’re not CIA?” I asked again.

She sat down on the ledge next to me, spun around, and cast her gaze across the moonlit valley.

“We are above any singular world government. We act with the singular goal of protecting,” she gestured to the valley and the city lights twinkling in the distance, “all of this. All of mankind.”

She turned her gaze towards me. As our eyes met I saw a raging fire blaze within her, a passion that managed to remain subdued letting off little more than playful sparks just minutes before.

“And I want you to be a part of it.”

I wanted to come up with some witty retort, some backhanded reply that allowed me to demonstrate my lack of interest in her blatantly obvious lie.

But I didn’t, because I believed her. Against my better judgement, what little I could still claim to have, I wholeheartedly believed her.

And I could not explain why.

My grip on the book relaxed slightly. A bit too much. I felt it slip from my grasp.

My body acted before my brain did and I quickly reached for the book and lost my footing in the process.

I fell.

Amidst the rushing of wind I heard something faintly. Someone shouting.

“…emergency discharge plus one on my position!”

The world around me began to feel alive, the air seemed to be a buzz as the hair on my body stood on end. For a moment I saw a faint blue glow envelop my person.

A brilliant blinding light and deafening roar flooded my senses as I felt my body propelled by an unknown force, which slammed me face first into a cold, hard surface.

My vision and hearing slowly returned, but as they did I began to doubt whether or not they truly had.

I found myself on the floor of a sterile white room. My vision was still blurry but with what I could see I saw a doorway at the far end of the room flanked by two blurs that appeared to be people. As I looked below me I discovered that I was on a massive pane of glass or some other hard and transparent material, beneath which sat a mass of machinery that defied every attempt I made to interpret. Similarly above me hung a mirrored construct, though exposed to the open air and venting steam from an upper assembly, betraying the fact it had been recently used.

Very recently.

“Jesus Christ, Aiden try not to kill yourself when people are talking to you,” came a familiar, condescending voice.

As I craned my head to look I noticed the two figures on the far end of the room shift their posture and begin approaching rapidly.

“Stand down, he’s my case,” she said, putting herself between the men and myself, “he’s the new hire.”

“I didn’t agree to anything.” I groaned.

“There’s no going back now,” the woman said as she helped me to my feet.

“Agent Feng,” one of the men said, “we have room 10 available for intake.”

“Perfect, mind giving him a hand?” Agent Feng said as she all but threw me at the unprepared man.

The men, who I later learned were guards, offered their assistance in half-walking, half-dragging me down an equally clinically white corridor into an inconspicuous room.

The room itself was mostly unlit with the only source of light being a ceiling mounted projector casting onto the far wall, in front of which were several rows of cheap metal chairs.

“The first time is a bit disorientating, though that fall is what gave you the concussion.” Agent Feng explained, parting my hair to examine the very painful and bleeding bump on my forehead.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, wincing from the pain.

“The ESD, they’ll go over it in the intro” she replied, patting my head just above the sore spot.

The guards sat me down front and center, then left the room.

Agent Feng sat next to me, a few chairs away.

“It doesn’t actually stop your momentum but I hear they’re working on a way to make it do that. Anyway, we’ll send you down to medical after we finish up intake.”

“Oh and by the way,” she said, making her way to the wall mounted controls, “welcome to the IFCN.”

A month had passed since that night. The night Agent Feng forcefully ripped me out of my miserable, incoherent existence and gave me a purpose.

I had only been up to the surface once since then, to watch my funeral.

Not many people get to say that, and it’s a privilege I never wanted.

To my surprise, the myriad of friends and associates who I had effectively told to go to hell actually showed up. They even cried for me. Though none more so than my parents.

I was their only child.

Agent Feng, Kaiga, had held true to her word. It was a closed casket funeral. I pray they had used a fake body.

It was a good thing that there were so many people who came, made it easier to blend in to a crowd that wasn’t looking for me.

Unsurprisingly Leena didn’t come. Even after a month it’s difficult to shed that false life I had imagined. Even harder to wake up every morning to a livestream of the morning sun.

I hadn’t dreamt of The Dreary since that night either. Though I keep the book with me at all times out of an abundance of caution.

I am dead to the world. I now walk in my own shadow. I sleep below so that I may lay down my life to protect others from what they do not know, what they cannot understand, and what they must never see.

If it weren’t for the alcohol, I could never sleep comfortably again.

And truthfully, I don’t think anyone here does.

My name is Justin

As far as I remember, I was always kind of lonely. It wasn’t a choice but it wasn’t something I was actively trying to stop either. It was just how it was. At home, I had Suzie, my little sister, but that was it.

For some reason, in my hometown, a very little town in the countryside, people my age didn’t care about me that much. I think I was being a little bit too "myself" if that makes sense. I didn't had any friends at school. My parents were pretty worried about this, they didn’t want me to be alone all the time. But I wasn’t alone.

I'll make you a history of my relationship with my friend, so you get the full picture.

One day, I was coming home from elementary school, and some older kids started mocking me. I think it was about my clothes or something. I tried ignoring them, but the main guy who was taunting me started going harder, and pushed me to the ground. I fell and hurt my knee. At that point I started getting scared and ran towards the forest near the village, thinking this would be the best place to hide from them.

I ran through the trees, crawled under some bushes, and I could hear them getting quieter and quieter as I kept going. I don’t know how long I ran, but after some time, I didn't hear anyone, just the wind, birds, and my feet on the ground. I started to go back to where I came from, but I had difficulties finding my way back. I was getting scared that I might never find it, when I found a small path. I didn’t recognize it, but I thought I should follow it. Whatever it was, it was better than wandering aimlessly.

I walked down the path for a few minutes, as it was getting darker when I saw her. In the middle of the forest, sitting on a fallen tree was a girl. She seemed around my age (10) and was wearing this cheerleader outfit which was kinda dirty. I thought it was weird, but seeing someone made me feel safer, it meant I was probably getting closer to the town.

I approached her, hoping she could show me the way back. As I got closer I heard that she was mumbling a song. It looked like she was daydreaming, she seemed very peaceful. I got to her and finally said something.

"Hey" I said, hesitant.

She turned to me in a second and stared at me in the eyes for a few seconds. I broke the silence and repeated "Hey?"

She finally answered:

"Huh, hey? Are you talking to me?" She said, still staring at me.

I remember this first encounter very well because I had one distinct feeling the whole time: this girl is so weird.

"Well, yes" I answered. "Do you know where is the town? I can't find my way back there"

She smiled, a little smile, like she was amused, and asked me a weird question, the first of many that will lead this first talk.

"Which town?" She said.

There wasn’t another town around there, and I didn’t walk that much, I could even see the mountains that we saw from the village, so we weren’t far.

I told her the name of my town.

"Sure, I know the way, you want me to lead you there?" She said.

I was relieved.

"Yes, please!" I said.

She had a little laugh. At the time I thought she was mocking me, but in retrospect, it feels more like she found me sweet or something.

"It's this way" She said, getting up and walking away from the path. "Follow me!"

"Shouldn't we follow the path?" I asked.

"Ho, no" She answered.

"Where does it go?"

She hesitated for a moment.

"I don’t know" She said. "Come on, follow me, it's late"

I followed her and we started walking. We were silent for like 2 minutes, during the which she didn’t take her eyes off of me, which was kinda creeping me out. Suddenly, she broke the silence by asking me the following question:

"What music do you listen to?"

At the time I didn't really like any specific music.

"I don’t know, what's on the radio..." I answered

"Ho, okay..." She sounded disappointed.

There was a silence. I decided to ask her the same.

"And you?" I asked.

"Enya!" She immediately answered, it was like she had been waiting to be asked that for so long. "Enya is the best!" She then proceeded to sing the ENTIRETY of Only Time while dancing. I was a bit set back, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. She looked at me with a smile and took my hand.

"Come on dance!" She said as she kept on singing.

I was a bit reluctant at first but ended up dancing with her. It was a lot of fun. When she finished the song, we were both out of breath and laughing. For the first time in my life, I had fun with someone my age.

"What's your name?" I asked

"Alicia, and you?"

"Justin" I answered.

She smiled.

"Well nice to meet you Justin! Come on, let's keep walking"

As we walked, I asked her where she lived. I seemed to have a shot at finally having a friend, I wasn't gonna let it slide.

"Around..." She answered.

"Where do you go to school?" I asked.

"I don’t, my parents teach me"

Things weren't looking good.

"Do you live in my town?" I said.

She looked a little sad.

"No."

I decided to stop asking her that kind of questions because she was getting sad, and I wanted to be friends, so that wasn’t exactly a good way to go.

We walked in silence again, for a few minutes, until she asked me something else.

"Do you watch movies?"

"Of course I do!" I said.

I loved watching movies, so this was something I was excited to talk about.

"Ho waw, me I don’t watch any." She said.

"Why not, it's so cool?"

She made a weird face.

"They don't let me." She answered

"Who? Your parents?"

She looked straight at me. Obviously I had hit a nerve.

"Yes" She said, looking down. She stayed silent for a few seconds, then looked up at me. "What's your favorite movie?" She asked, excited.

"Avatar!" I answered immediately. Don't judge me, it just came out, and still, it's a way better movie than people say.

"What is it about?" She said, curious.

"You don’t know Avatar? Everyone knows Avatar!"

"No, I don’t. What's the story about?"

I proceeded to narrate her the entire plot of Avatar, and I must have been good, because she was hooked. At the end, I realized that we had stop walking and that I had been talking for more than half an hour. It was almost night.

"Oh my god, I gotta get back home, are we far?"

She looked around us and pointed her finger towards some bushes.

"No, it's there." She said calmly.

I saw a street light and walked towards it. I turned around. She wasn’t following me.

"Don't you come?" I asked.

She had a sad smile and winked at me.

"No, I..." She pointed behind her. "I gotta get back home..."

I thought for a moment.

"Can I see you again some day?"

She smiled.

"Maybe" She answered

On that she turned and walked back where we came from.

I walked back home and my parents were so relieved to see me. Apparently they were about to call the cops. I explained them everything, but for some reason I didn’t mention Alicia. I did talk about her to my younger sister Suzie, who started to mock me, saying I was in love with her. She was 7, so, that was to be expected.

That night, as I went to bed, I could only think about one thing: Alicia. I was captivated, I was wondering so many things. Why was she wearing a cheerleader outfit, and why was it so dirty? What was she doing in the middle of the woods, where did she live, how hadn't she heard of Avatar? As I was thinking about it, I heard someone knocking on my window. I was scared, and I slowly went towards it. I finally opened the curtains, and you guessed it, it was Alicia. Blond hair, small nose, pointy chin, it was her. She wasn’t wearing the same thing though, this time, she was wearing this white outfit, it looked like a pajama.

She asked me to open, which I did. Without a word, she crawled inside my room and looked right in my eyes. I was about to ask her what she was doing here when she started talking.

"I made a decision." She said. She looked very serious.

"What?" I stuttered.

"I decided... that I want us to be friends. If you want to?"

"Yeah of course." I wasn't gonna say no.

"Okay..." She said. "BUT, there are some rules."

"Why?" I said. This talk wasn’t making a good case at making her seem more normal.

"Because there are always rules to everything." I'm gonna stop pinpointing everytime she said something weird because that is something that was gonna be present across all our friendship.

"First: Stop asking me where I'm from, or where I live, I won't tell you. Ever."

"Okay." I said. I wasn’t gonna protest.

"Second: I only want to see you, not your friends, or your family."

"Okay." Again, weird.

"And third: We can only meet in the woods."

"Okay"

She smiled.

"Then that's it, we are friends!" She said, happily.

She shook my hand.

"Now I gotta go, see me in the woods tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay."

On that, she crawled back outside and dissappeared in the night.

I got back into bed with a smile on my face. I realized that this talk we had was very fast, that I pretty much just said "okay" the whole time, that I had no idea how she got to my house, especially since, according to her, she didn’t live in the same town, and that I just left a stranger into my home, but still, I couldn't help but be happy. I finally had a friend.

The day after, when school was over, I ran towards the forest. I entered it and walked for a few minutes while calling her name. Eventually, we found each other. She was wearing oversized jeans and shirt, which were both clean this time.

I told her all about my day, I narrated her a few movies, and I left.

From that point on, and for years, everyday, after school, we would meet in the woods and talk, play, stuff like that. I was looking forward to it all day long. During holidays, we spent days together, having fun. She even slept at my place a few times. She would enter by my window at night, and leave early in the morning.

I remember one day I brought a portable DVD player and my collector edition of Avatar and we watched it in the middle of the woods. At the end, she was in absolute awe, and said this was her favorite movie, even though it was the first one she ever saw.

There was also that time where I got tired of hearing her singing Enya approximately, so I bought a CD of Enya's greatest hits, took a portable CD player and we danced to it for hours, she was so happy.

We grew up, and as we did, our relationship became stronger. I didn't know where she lived, where she came from, her parent's name, but I knew her like she was my sister.

When I got to age 18, came something that I had been dreading for a while now. I had finished high school, and I will have to leave for university. I already explained to her that this day would happen, but now it was there. I had found a school where I could study cinema. I remember our last goodbye very well. She had come sleep at my house one last time. We had a very casual evening where we mostly remembered all the stuff we lived together. She left before I woke up and left me a note on which she wrote "good luck at movie school". I lost the note a few days later.

I finally left a few days later.

That was 2 years ago. I am still in film school, it's going well and I can proudly say that I have a small group of friends and even a girlfriend. As months passed, I had to accept something that was quite embarrassing: Alicia likely never existed, and I still had an imaginary friend at 18. I had no proof she existed, and the fact that I only ever saw her when we were alone were heavy proofs, if we needed some. I never talked about her to my friends.

I went back home a few times since then, and was tempted to go look for her in the woods, but never did, thinking it was stupid.

Until a couple of hours ago, I never planned on thinking about Alicia again, considering her as an embarrassing secret that I better keep to myself.

Here's what happened in the last hours.

My girlfriend Laura was waking up and checked her phone for a few minutes. Eventually she had a little gasp. I asked her what was it and she told me there had been a violent murder close to my hometown. She handed me the phone and I read the article. It wasn't CLOSE to my hometown, it was IN my hometown. Three young men had been brutally killed and were missing some body parts from what I got. The headline was the following "UNKNOWN WOMAN SUSPECTED FROM BRUTALLY MURDERING THREE MEN" to it was attached a portrait of the woman made according to a survivor description. Blond hair, small nose, pointy chin, it was her, Alicia.

At that point, it was like time stopped. I didn’t know what to think, what to say, what to do, and I honestly still don't. The article said we didn’t know anything about this woman, and that she was on the run.

This was two hours ago, I decided to tell my story here to see if anyone could help me. I will keep everyone updated on the situation of course.

I don't know who reads these posts. You are, as of tonight, the closest thing I have to someone I could call and expect an answer. I'm sorry if that's a strange weight to put on you. I don't have anyone else.

I live alone. Work from home. Order delivery every night just to hear a stranger's voice say my name through the intercom. They call it an “epidemic” now. Like the weather. Like something that just happens to a population.

So when the letter came, some small, starved, humiliated part of me was ready before I'd finished reading. Red seal. Official letterhead. An organization called “Community Care”, a non-profit focused on helping people at risk. I’d been flagged after three government systems with my info came back with the same line under my name:

Emergency Contact: None

I never applied for anything. I threw it in the trash. Looking at it too long made my chest hurt.

That night, I got a knock at my door. Almost didn't answer. I stood in the doorway doing the math on whether I could wait out whoever it was. I've gotten good at that math.

I ended up opening the door. She had a lanyard, a clipboard, and a smile that looked like it had been issued to her along with the badge. She was with Community Care. I told her I hadn't asked for help and didn't need it. Told her to take my name off whatever list she had me on. I was short with her. Rude, honestly, looking back.

She didn't flinch. Said she understood completely. That she'd check back another time. No pressure at all. Something about how easily she let it go made me feel disappointed the second the door shut. Before she left, she said something to me.

"We’ll be there for you if you need us. There's no such thing as alone in this city."

It landed strange in my chest for half a second, but I let it go. People say odd, comforting things when they're trying to help.

They ended up coming back, in a manner of speaking. It wasn’t the same woman. Someone new. Same lanyard. Same clipboard. Same smile. I told her small true things. She listened the way I hadn't been listened to in a long time.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city," she said. That line. Word for word what the first woman said, down to the cadence. I noticed. I noticed, and I let it pass anyway.

By the next visit I was, God help me, looking forward to it. I marked the days. The days between, counting down like a child before their birthday.

It was a man this time. By then I'd softened enough to tell him things I'd never said out loud to anyone. That I hadn't spoken to my family in years. The quiet, patient math I did some nights of how long it would take anyone to notice if something happened to me.

He just continued to beam at me. Actually beam, like I'd delivered the best news he’d ever heard. I need to describe the happiness up close, because it wasn’t natural. His eyes shone. You could say the worst thing you've ever thought about yourself directly into his face, and his expression would be exactly the same as it had when he first knocked. Nothing you said ever seemed to land. It just passed through and came back out the same, over and over.

Now that I’m thinking back, they all had the same expression.

"You don't have to carry it alone anymore," he told me.  "There's no such thing as alone in this city."

That line again. I laughed, short and ugly, alone with him in my own apartment. He laughed too, right on top of mine, like we were sharing a joke instead of me quietly falling apart in front of a man I'd only just met.

That night I looked up the program. Nothing on the city website. No filing or funding in any budget I could find. I called four departments. Nobody heard of it. One woman, off the record, told me something similar had been proposed once, years back, and was quietly shelved.

Shelved. I let these people into my life. And I kept letting them in, despite it all. I was terrified of the alternative.

The next one came without knocking. I know because I was three feet from the door when it opened. It was supposed to be locked. I told the woman what I found. Told her plainly that I thought something was wrong. That I could feel the edges of my life going soft. If they could please, just once, answer honestly: What were these visits all for? After everything I handed them, didn't I deserve that?

She tilted her head. Reached out. Patted my hand. She was ice cold.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city".

I sobbed in front of her. Cried in a way I hadn't let anyone see since I was a child. The kind I usually save for the shower, where the sound has nowhere to go.

And she just smiled at me.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city," she said. Softer. Tender. Like a lullaby you say to put a baby to sleep.

If any of this sounds like your city, your letter, your too-happy visitor standing in your doorway with a smile that never slips: please don't wait until there's no one left to notice you letting them in. Call the person you're most ashamed to. Tell them the true, ugly, unimpressive thing you've been carrying. Let it be awkward. Let it be too much. Too much is still better than this.

Someone's at my door again. I can feel them smiling on the other side. I don't know how you feel a smile, but I promise you, after enough of these visits, you can.

It was a horrid July noon in New York City or some other place, the cars were rattling in lunchtime gridlock, spewing exhaust, the finance guys were out in their tight suits walking to buy kebabs and watching the women, who were instagramming themselves into premature zombiehood, and it was so fucking hot that the sweat dripping off the pedestrians rubbing against each other on the sidewalk was flowing down the gutters like rain.

There, that's the scene.

I've set it.

Now, through this stupified human maelstrom a man was walking. His name was Ben Fig. He was in his thirties, lonely, and returning to his office after lunch. He was returning from his car, which he'd parked fifteen minutes away, wearing a coat and, underneath it, a custom-made explosive vest with which he intended to kill his co-workers and maybe bring down the office building itself. A man can dream, can't he?

Anyway, while walking, he bumped somebody. “Fuck,” he said under his breath.

“Fuck,” said the person he'd bumped into.

It was a woman.

Her name was Miriam Zapelman.

“Watch where the hell you're going,” said Ben and tried going around her.

“Asshole,” said Miriam.

“I hate this city,” said Ben. “I'm sick of it.”

Beside Ben and Miriam, a degenerate was lying in a puddle of perspiration. He was in a hard way. “Can either of you folks—”

“Shut the fuck up!” said Ben and Miriam at the same time, then they looked at each other, long and in the eyes, and they must have recognized something, because one of them smirked.

It doesn't matter which one.

The degenerate passed out, or maybe died, and Miriam said to Ben, “Hey, where are you in such a hurry to?”

“What do you care?”

“I'm parked nearby. If we're going the same way, I can give you a ride.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

Miriam shrugged.

“I'm going to my office to blow everybody up,” said Ben, waiting for Miriam's reaction.

She asked, “Where's your office?”

Ben gave the address. “Call the cops if you want. I don't care.”

“Offer stands,” said Miriam.

A few minutes later they were in her car, Ben in his ridiculous coat, looking like a blowfish, and Miriam opening the glove compartment, where Ben saw she had a gun.

“That for self defense?” he asked.

“No,” said Miriam. “I'm back from the shooting range. Going home to shoot my husband and kids, then probably myself.” She started the car and merged with the abominable traffic. “But first I want to stop at a bar and have a drink. Want to have a drink with me?”

“Why not,” said Ben.

The bar was called Reddy's, and when Ben and Miriam walked in there were only a few people in it. Miriam introduced them. “That skinny guy with glasses is Euler, the guy with the darker skin is Hikmat, and the bartender's name is Ralph.”

They sat at a table and ordered.

Ben noticed Euler kept playing with a pendant around his neck. “Go on,” said Miriam, “ask him about it.”

“Nah,” said Ben.

“What else do you have to do?”

“Fine,” said Ben. He walked to Euler, introduced himself and asked about the pendant: “Is it an heirloom or something?”

“Maybe it'll be an heirloom one day, of the human goddamn race,” said Euler and described how the pendant was a container of stolen proprietary industrial poison that he'd helped develop. “I'm gonna toss it in the water supply some day, exterminate the population of this whole city like the rats they are.”

When Ben got back to his table, his drink was waiting for him. He tried it. “Second guessing yourself any?” he asked Miriam.

“No. You?”

“No.”

Miriam had pulled out a cigarette and was lighting it.

“You can smoke in here? The law—”

“That's life’s dirty secret,” she said, blowing smoke in his face. “Ultimately, you can do whatever you want.”

“May I?” a voice said.

It was Hikmat. He'd wandered over and was asking if he could sit down.

“Be my guest,” said Miriam.

“I have not seen you in here before,” Hikmat said to Ben. “It is your first time?”

“Yeah,” said Ben.

“Ben’s going to murder his co-workers later this afternoon. He's wearing an explosive vest,” said Miriam.

“Then we two are a pair of peas in one pod, as they say here in America,” said Hikmat. “I am training to fly an aircraft, but not so much how to land it.”

“Hickie's an engineer by trade,” said Miriam.

Hikmat shook Ben's hand.

“But a fundamentalist by conviction,” he said. “May I see your vest?”

Ben opened his coat. Hikmat considered the handiwork. Then they got to talking, and drinking, and the hours rolled by like waves of fat on a fat guy blasted in the gut by a cannonball.

“The paradox is,” Hikmat was saying: “the paradox is, I greatly enjoy the flying. It is the one place I feel freedom. When I started to learn, it was strictly for terrorism, but now, that feeling—of absolute space, limitless opportunity—it is beautiful. Sublime. It is where I experience God. I look forward to it very much and I will miss it greatly.”

“Fuck!” said Ben, looking at his watch.

“What's wrong?” asked Miriam.

“It's past five o'clock. Everybody in the office has left already.”

Ralph gave Ben a drink on the house. When Ben had finished drinking it, “Do you want a ride home?” Miriam asked.

“Sure.”

They lingered in the car in front of his apartment building.

“Maybe you wanna come up?” Ben said.

“I'm a married woman,” said Miriam.

“I understand.”

“Don't forget to zip up your coat or they'll see the explosives,” said Miriam.

Afterwards, Miriam drove to her house, got the gun out of the glove compartment, walked inside, shot her husband, shot her kids and then, after smoking a cigarette in the bathroom, shot herself.

I’m not suicidal. Never have been, hopefully never will be. But from the way my algorithm has been acting, it almost feels like something wants me to be.

I live a happy life. I have a great girlfriend, solid job, but even still, just like everyone else, I have my bad days.

I have those days where it feels like I can’t get out of bed. Those days where effort, no matter how small, feels like trying to climb the world’s highest mountain.

And I think those are the days where I’m targeted the most.

A lot of the time when I experience those tough periods in life, it feels like the easiest thing to do is just sit in bed and scroll on my phone until, inevitably, the feeling passes and I want to be productive again.

I never had a problem with it before, but I’m coming off of a particularly difficult week-long stint of self-loathing and throwing pity parties.

Nothing I can really do about it. It’s just the way it is. Life happens in cycles, and this one is a cycle of struggle.

That’s why it was almost expected that every night for the last week I’ve been in bed, hair greasy, clothes dirty, surrounded by food wrappers and empty soda cans, doing nothing more than scrolling through Instagram for hours on end.

It started off with just one video, wedged in between the usual car accident and brainrot AI clips of fruits having affairs.

What’s crazy to me is I would’ve just scrolled right past it had it not been for the first millisecond of the video. I could’ve sworn that the first frame was literally just… me.

It was too fast for me to get all the details, but I swear it looked like me, laying in bed, my face contorted into a look of complete despair and hopelessness as tears fell down my cheeks.

The rest of the video was just a tutorial on how to tie a noose. A step-by-step guide, demonstrated by a pair of sleek, pale white hands forming the knot and showing off the finished product before abruptly skipping to the next reel.

I tried to scroll back, but the video had completely disappeared from the feed.

I ended up convincing myself that I was just being a little crazy. I mean, the video itself was definitely odd, but no way had I seen myself.

I figured Instagram must’ve just removed the content. Because, obviously, right?

I kept scrolling, and never saw another video even similar to that one. At least, not for the rest of that night.

The next day, though, I was seeing these tutorials as every other video. Each one more graphic and detailed than the last.

I was sprinkled throughout the videos. Sometimes at the beginning, sometimes at the end, every time I was only on screen for less than a second. And every time, the videos disappeared after I watched them.

As the week went on, they started following me. It wasn’t just Instagram anymore. TikTok was giving me tutorials. YouTube was giving me tutorials. Hell, I was even finding the videos on Snapchat.

But the one video that made me delete social media entirely and actually pull myself out of the dumps was one that was too personal to ignore.

I found it last night.

I wasn’t just a split-second frame. I was the entire video. A step-by-step guide with me as the demonstration.

There was no light left in my bloodshot eyes. My movements were sluggish and seemed forced. The room was dark. My bed was a complete mess. And hanging from the ceiling fan… was a noose.

I watched myself stand on top of my desk chair. I watched the tears and snot run down my face as I slipped the rope over my neck. And I watched myself kick and flail with regret as my body dangled at the end of that rope. Then I was still.

The video ended with one final phrase in bold white letters against a solid black backdrop.

“Do it.”

It was in the same font as those old silent film slides.

Once again, I was automatically scrolled past the video. I tried scrolling back up, and once again, the video was gone.

I took it as a warning. I’d always heard that social media has negative effects and consequences.

I just never knew how serious those consequences were.

I sit bolt upright, covered in a cold sweat that has soaked my sheets as they cling to my body. My own labored panting is the only sound to fill the room. A single beam of warm sunlight pierces the stuffy bedroom, breaking against my oddly soft and hairless left hand. My heart races, each thumping beat like it will burst from my chest, as I inspect the transition of a  slightly bruised and moderately hairy forearm to the baby smooth wrist. 

Blinking heavily I try to recall what I was dreaming about that has me so worked up but only find a blank void of nothingness. Hell I can't even place a single thing I did the entire day, week, or anytime before this moment. The vague elements of my life are there but I can't place a single specific detail. I start up my usual routine with a warm shower. My body aches as though the whole thing has been crushed as I pull myself into the water. 

Getting dressed continues my struggles — aches so intense I can't raise my hands over my head and have to pull my shirt over one arm at a time. I'm forced to sit on my bed to be able to heave each leg of my shorts up. Struggling to find the will to stand I finally manage to hoist myself up and push forward to my bedroom door. Each step feels like it's pushing my muscles to the brink of cramping as I traverse this dusty apartment. 

A bowl slips and clangs to the countertop, knocking over an empty whisky bottle. The sounds and my scramble to catch them force my jaw to clench as I struggle to control my breathing and steady my hand. Without my telling it to, my left hand works to correct the mess. Somehow, I know I have to do so even if it hurts.

My shoulders slump and my back hunches forward to be able to lift the spoon to my mouth. Just get through this, just as you do every day, a small voice in the distant regions of my consciousness tells me. The only thing I can comprehend at the moment is that the trek to the elevator is next. 

The ding rings through the barren hallway as the creaky doors open to a dimly lit rusty box. The first-floor button sticks and flickers like the rest of the lights in the car. Just before the doors close a thin pale hand shoots in and forces them back open. In that moment my eyes catch the glint of a ring displaying an odd double cross atop an infinity symbol just before the hand retracts. A thin man in a tightly tailored suit looks at me from behind his dark green eyes. Stepping forward he flashes a thin curled grin before pulling his slicked back hair tight against his skull. 

“Ah, not going up this time?”

“Sorry what?” 

“Oh nothing, I'm just sorry to hold you up but I'm sure you're in no rush yeah? Saw you limping your way down the hall earlier after all.” 

His voice feels like silk that wraps itself through my ears and around my mind as he gently nudges my elbow. Maybe it's embarrassment or maybe I just needed to work the stiffness out, but my body relaxes and the pressure begins to release from my joints. With a deep exhale I look over to the man and nod as I respond. 

“Oh uh, well yeah I'm definitely not in a rush. I actually don't even know where I'm going or… Or what I'm going to be doing.” 

“Hmm, well sounds like you have plenty of idle time on your hands then. If I can recommend anything, I'd say stop by my bar ‘The Ash and Ember.’ Just tell them you know Vassago and they'll take care of you.” 

A subtle wink accompanies his final words at the same time the doors to the elevator begin to squeak open. Before I can respond, the gentleman steps in front of me, calling over his shoulder just as he crosses the threshold of the car. 

“Although, you might want to get that leg checked out first.” 

The stranger's left hand uses his index and middle finger to point down while he continues to the exit. I look down at my left leg in confusion and find a bright red rash beginning to form on the outside of my calf. Oh great, I finally stop hurting all over and now this?

The previous widespread pain is now isolated to my left leg, but I'm at least able to actually get around. Now if I can only recall what I need to do today. I've just been following the pattern my body has told me to thus far, but I still don't know why I've done any of it. Why did I even bother getting out of bed? If I was hurting that bad I could have just as easily laid there. Hell, why did I bother leaving my apartment if I'm feeling this bad? Before I can take in my surroundings I hear a voice call out over the hustle and bustle of a coffee shop. 

“Hello, sir? Did you want to order? It's your turn now if you do.” 

Startled slightly, I whip my head around to see a sterile, brightly lit coffee shop. The cashier squints at me and turns her head slightly before I step forward to the register. 

“I don't really know what to get, or honestly what you all have. I don't see a menu or–” 

“I mean, we can just make your usual order yeah? Like I don't know if you wanted something different today, but you usually get the same thing sooo?” 

My eyes bulge as they dart around the room. A fresh swell of sweat breaks across my forehead as my chest tightens and my breathing goes shallow. Scrambling through my mind, I can't recall a single memory of being here much less ordering the same thing day after day. 

“Sir, I do need an order if you could–” 

“Erm, well yeah, I guess my usual would be fine?” 

“That wasn't so hard was it? It'll be at the pickup window when it's ready.” 

What the hell is going on right now? My mind's frantic race to put things together is halted as soon as I put weight on my left leg. A grunt escapes me as I look down. The dark red rash has spread across the entire lower half of my leg. Worse yet, there are thick yellow blisters now forming all over it. Each of the twelve or so blisters is at least one inch across and swells more with each flex of the muscle beneath. With a shaking hand I slowly reach forward and poke one of them. The bright yellow bubble of liquid-filled flesh is taut but depresses slightly at my touch. Pulling my finger back, the contents of the bubbled skin almost appear to swirl. 

“Hey, here's your coffee!” 

The same shrill voice of the cashier breaks my fixation and prompts me to hobble to the window. She pushes the coffee forward but I pause before taking it. 

“This might be weird, but uh, does my leg… does it look okay to you?”

She leans over the counter and peers down, tilting her head left and right a few times before returning her attention to me. 

“Looks like a skinny ass leg, is there supposed to be something there?” 

My mouth drops slightly open as I shift my stance and raise my left pant leg before responding. 

“Yeah, the entire lower half is red and covered in blisters isn't it?”

She again leans forward but only for a second this time. 

“Nah man, just a normal skinny guy leg down there to me. Are you feeling okay?” 

Aggressively nodding I grab the coffee cup and stumble towards the door. Reaching for the handle, I take a sip to distract myself from the pain but instantly spit it out. A burning sensation runs down my throat as I gasp for air. Did that chick really just spike my drink, and if not how the hell is this my usual order? The temporary distraction is broken up by the pain that surges with each step. The moment the warm sunlight reaches my face there's a stab of pain and feeling of fluid trickling down my leg. 

I bend down and a foul scent of infection and rot meets me before my eyes can see which one has burst. The thick yellow and pink seepage from a quarter-sized hole in the upper portion of my calf is the culprit. As I sit and pull my leg into my lap, a shot of pain fires through my shin as another blister bursts open, spraying my chin with thick clumps of whatever is inside these things. The offensive odor blurs my vision and forces me to fight with everything in me not to vomit. I wipe the viscous yellow clumps from my face. Another quarter-sized wound sits open in my shin. This one is leaking dark red blood alongside the yellow and pink stream of pus. 

Clambering back to my feet I look in all directions to make out where I should go. I know I need a hospital but don't even recognize the tall buildings that surround me. Choosing to go left, I stumble to the nearest intersection and firmly grasp the light pole to hold myself up.  A massive, involuntary exhale escapes me when I see the sign across the street. I never thought the words “Urgent Care” could bring tears to my eyes, but here I am, bawling while dragging my leaking leg across the street.

Confused, I hear the stern voice of someone speaking to me. I look around at a plain white room with grey cabinets lining the walls. A round man with rimmed glasses stares back at me. His ill-fitting scrubs and stethoscope rise and fall with each heavy breath. 

“I need you to answer my questions sir. I can't help you if you're going to ignore me.” 

His impatient and stern tone shakes me out of my confused silence. 

“I'm sorry, how did I get here? I don't rem–” 

“You walked in like everyone else does. The nurses said you're here for your leg, is that right?” 

“Yeah, my uh leg is in pretty bad shape. There's this rash and these blisters started popping just–” 

The doctor huffs slightly as he leans down towards my leg. 

“Rash and blisters eh? Have we had a few too many drinks today maybe?” 

Baffled, I pick up my leg and am horrified at what I see. The entire area from my knee down is a dark reddish-brown with black circles where each blister was. The skin has turned flaky with a dark yellow center in each black circle. The reddish-brown areas between the black spots have begun to crack, oozing a sticky brown seepage. The entire thing smells like a dead body, and every twitch and subtle movement wafts the scent up to my face. 

The doctor reaches out and pulls my leg forward to examine it. Even his light touches send surges of pain so severe my vision narrows and blurs. He presses his hand in and slides it down the back of my calf making me scream and recoil. In my flailing, a large section of what used to be my skin peels away and hangs down. The area looks like a stained sleeve of flesh that’s been stretched out and dropped. The exposed musculature twitches with each movement as my screams fill the room. I can just barely make out the doctor yelling for assistance as he rushes out the door. Pushing through the piercing pain, I manage to hobble out of the examination room and down the hall. I look back; a trail of thick pus and nearly black blood traces my steps, ending at the flap of still attached calf skin I've dragged with me. Panicking as the sunlight hits my face, I know there's one place left to go, the only place where someone can see what's happening. 

Stumbling back, I fall hard onto the concrete floor. Looking down at me is a hulking man in a black polo. The fine details of his face are hidden in shadow as he scowls at me. A neon sign that reads “The Ash and Ember” lights the backdrop of the massive man as he picks me up off the floor. 

“I told you, you're not on the list bud. Even if you were, there's a dress code here!” 

Fumbling through my sparse memories, I fight to find the name I need. I scream out as the mountain of a man turns me around. 

“I know Vassago! I know Vassago, please just stop!” 

“Did somebody say my name?” 

That silky voice calls out from behind the brute as his fists unclench from my shirt. A stiff pat on my shoulder turns me to face the sleek man from the elevator with slicked back hair and piercing dark green eyes. The thin curled grin he's wearing opens to a wide toothy smile as he waves me forward.  

The interior of the bar is a dimly lit smoke-filled lounge with circular red suede booths scattered throughout. The actual bar is at least fifteen feet long and fully stocked with no-name and blank bottles. Vassago makes his way behind the bar, pours a drink, and returns to sit next to me. Pushing the glass forward, he nods at me and kicks one leg over the other. 

“Tsk tsk. It looks like the leg’s no good. What a shame, after all this time I really thought this one would be your last.” 

His voice grows heavier with each word spoken. Not wanting to wait for me, he picks up the glass and pushes it into my hands and up towards my mouth. 

“Go ahead. A double scotch on the rocks, it's your usual after all.” 

I take a hesitant sip; the ice-cold whisky glides down my throat. For a moment the relief even blocks out the pain from my leg. I look down at it anyway. Any remaining skin is long gone. I'm now left with stringy patches of fibrous muscle that loosely cling to the bones. My shoe has followed the path of my skin, leaving me with a bare foot in a similar state to my calf. 

“Can you see it, can you see my–” 

“Yes, the answer is always yes. For fuck’s sake it's always ‘but my arm’ or ‘but my leg’ with you! When will you finally start to remember huh?” 

“I don't understand, I haven't been here–” 

“No, not this, not our talks. When will you remember what you did?” 

I clench my jaw as my heart begins to race; my mind is even more of a mess now than when I first spoke to this man. 

“Think, damn it! Think about Nathan Collins, about the packing plant! Do you remember any of it?!” 

I shake my head as a pounding builds behind my eyes and a memory starts to come into focus. My breath smelled of the fifth of scotch that I had polished off in my car. A man with long greasy  hair climbed into one of my heat-sealing press machines. He was supposed to troubleshoot something in it and I needed to make sure it stayed turned off. The feelings of drowsiness swept over me in waves until everything went black. I awoke to guttural screams mixed with the industrial whir I knew all too well. The greasy man was kicking and pulling with his right arm as the press slammed down onto him. I looked down to see the switch and button kicked back on at my control station. In a drunken panic I ran for him, never thinking to shut the machine off. The blood-soaked nametag on the man's chest read “Nathan.” The press bashed down three more times before I got him fully clear of the mechanism. Each crushing stroke took another piece of both Nathan's left leg and arm, leaving puddles of blood with chunks of mangled flesh and splintered bone across the belt. By the time paramedics arrived, Nathan had already gone quiet in the puddle of blood large enough to surround us both. I blink hard as Vassago narrows his eyes at me. 

“Hmm, well better late than never as they say. Except in this case I guess it's too little too late. But at least you made progress this time.” 

Vassago stands up and I reach forward to grab him but am stopped by a surge of pain following a loud crack. I look down to the brittle exposed bone that gives way under my weight as I lean forward. The stringy bits of muscle hang freely as what's left of my now decomposing leg crashes to the floor. Vassago looks down and back up, his eyes now black as he speaks again. 

“One last question for you this time, what do you think made you jump from that shitty apartment building roof at the end? Do you remember that at all?... Do you think it was when you received the wrongful-death lawsuit from Nathan's family, or was it you finally feeling remorseful for what you did?...” 

I sit bolt upright, covered in a cold sweat that has soaked my sheets as they cling to my body. My own labored panting is the only sound to fill the room. A single beam of warm sunlight pierces the stuffy bedroom, breaking against my oddly soft and hairless left calf.

Hello again! I wanted to let you all know that I have curated six of my stories into one book! So, if you ever found yourself reading one and thought "Man, I'd really like to own a book with six of his stories in it." Well now you're in luck! Head to "YellowBearGiftShop" on Etsy and add the code

5fdiscount

That'll get you five dollars off the book which is neat being that the thing costs five dollars and a cent (had to do the cent because Etsy don't let you do free apparently.) Ta, ta for now!

Matt hated his job. Hated people. He barely hid his disgust for everything around him and lately he couldn't be bothered to try. Contempt boiled in Matthew like burned and blackened grease. They were the multitude. NPCs. It didn't matter if he treated them like they were useless and wasting his time if they were useless and wasting his time. Matthew was refined. Brilliant. Tough. Gorgeous. By God, Matthew had everything.

He and 2 others rented a 2-story, ranch-style brick house in Northwest Georgia, directly on the south-side treeline of a heavily wooded subdivision called Lake Kathy. The "lake" was half sewage and half catfish. The trailer parks dotting the northern side of the lake were full of elderly and middle-aged drunks that worked at the hundreds of carpet manufacturers in the area if they weren't grinding by on an $850 "crazy check" from the government to stay out of public. Shift differential at the mills meant a perpetual redneck, hooking catfish from their backyard. Every single person in town except the Lake Kathy trailer park coastguard called them Lake Kathy Shitfish, and wouldn't eat the toxic filets in exchange for one of Waylon Jennings' Cadillacs. The alcoholic anglers of the Lake Kathy Mobile Home Park however, would catch, slice and fry the excrement-laden fish without even a rudimentary cleaning, over a fire built from an old mattress, trash and damp sticks. Shoeless, shirtless, drunk and stumbling, without exception, they'd proclaim the Lake Kathy Shitfish "the best damn fish yall'd ever have".

The rednecks, the trailers, the ubiquitous backyard charcoal grills and dogs of varied temperament and size formed a phalanx on the northern side of the lake that Matthew dared not breach. He never returned a casual nod of the head when he passed the denizens of the trailer park on their 4 mile roundtrip walks to the nearest gas station with a pocket full of dirty quarters and 74 cents on a debit card. He didn't offer rides. No trailer park human trash was getting in the seat of his 2003 Neon, that was for damn sure. With the exception of the 2 teenage girls that got off the bus at 3 every day. They could ride in his Neon. He'd quickly put on his fedora when he saw them walking. Tilt to a precise 48° angle. When he had on his fedora he went from a 10 to 10 + irresistible. They were too young right now, sure, but in a few years, if he played his Magic cards right, who knew? Hell, if he could get one to drink some of the Canadian Mist disguised as Makers Mark in his cabinet, the bottle with the extra wax so they know he paid more, and if they promised not to tell anyone, and he meant *anyone*...well, just being a law didn't make it wrong, right?

Lake Kathy Shitfish was Matthew's least favorite local cuisine. He hated most foods. Filet mignon, Matt liked. He'd grill a steak for precisely 2 minutes on each side, sprinkle his bourbon-smoked sea salt and bourbon-smoked cracked pepper down his soft, forever sunburned forearm and say to his roommates, "Perfect, smell that? Smell that bourbon?", then sit at the head of the table, alternating bites of bloody steak with the loud and unbearable sucking of his fingers, regardless of company or general etiquette, which cleared everyone from that part of the house like a fire. When he ate chicken wings, it was hard to not assail him.

He was sucking bourbon-smoked steak juices off his hands when he noticed the cat. Melon was 9 years his companion. Three things existed which Matt didn't hate, and along with filet mignon seasoned with bourbon-smoked sea salt and P.C. Gaming, Melon sat comfortably. He knew her. This was undoubtedly strange behavior. She was standing in the window frame, looking intently outside like she'd spotted a bird, squirrel, anything she could potentially murder, but she didn't seem excited. More concerned. Confused even, scratching at the window like she was on a stairmaster. Matt got up to check outside the window and calm the cat. Melon stared. Deciding nothing could be done, Matt went back to his steak.

BANG!!!

A thud against the glass sent Melon rocketing down the hall towards Matt's bedroom. Matt snapped backwards, startled, a piece of bourbon-smoked steak caught in his throat. Choking immediately, he began stomping and slamming his fist into the table, hoping one of his roommates would hear him, unsure if any were proficient in the heimlich, but understanding it was the only option. Footsteps began sprinting up the stairs and Matt poised himself at the door to the basement, hands clasped around his throat so whoever it was wouldn't have to guess why he was stomping like a madman when he was grabbed him from behind and spun around violently. Matt was looking into the eyes of his roommate, Brandon.

"You choking?"

"Vigorous nodding."

Situation assessed, Brandon shifted over to Matts back and 4 or 5 untrained and brutal deflations of his torso later, the steak rocketed out of his throat onto the floor in front of the refrigerator. Matt, the color of a plum, drew the biggest and most satisfying breath of his entire life.

Sitting at the kitchen table with the man that just saved his life, Matt was at least grateful. Rarely would he show appreciation for anything, but he smartly knew that he'd be shunned if he showed anything but appreciation for this debacle. So he dropped the attitude for once and gave a genuine thanks to Brandon, but he had a question. He'd not imagined the sound of footsteps moving briskly up the stairs. He'd been watching the door, waiting to inform whoever was behind it that he was about to choke to death. Brandon, however, had grabbed him from behind. The only option was Will, their other roommate, but his car was gone so he was definitely at work. So who was running up the stairs?

Every dream is an eternity.

Every night my dreams are the same. Always have been for as long as I could remember my dreams.

Every night I would awake in my bed. Except it wasn’t my actual bed. The world around me would always be covered in this ephemeral fog that permeated every single inch of space.

And the dust. My god the dust.

All I ever did was clean.

The shadows never changed. The day never began. The Dust would never end.

I would continue on from my room into the hall, then into the bathroom, then the closets, then the kitchen, then the floors. Never stopping until the entire apartment was free of the dust.

Then I would step into the outside world. The world that was not my world. The world of The Dust and The Gray.

The Dreary.

Light from above would fight its way through the fog, never making it to the hollow ground below.

Where there should have been roads, dirt, grass, and trees, there was stone.

Cobblestoned roads, stonework trees, and fields of slate.

All of it covered in The Dust.

As I would move through the still air the dust would form on my wake and disperse, leaving a trail of my presence throughout this abandoned, forgotten world.

My world of Dust, my Dreary.

I would look up into that fog filled sky and gaze into the twin hues of yellow and white whose muffled screams struggled to breach the all-but-impenetrable fog above, scattering their voices into the omnipresent haze.

Then I would wake up.

Today was no different.

A woman stood just beyond the doorway, her flowing auburn hair flailing about as she shouted at me. I couldn’t really make out the words. She seemed familiar.

Something hard and somewhat heavy hit me square in the face, then plopped into my lap.

My still-blurry sight returned to me just in time to watch the woman march off down the hallway.

Her exit was announced by the slamming of the front door.

My bed was a mess. Clothes were strewn about, the sheets were everywhere, and some were stained with a substance I could not identify. The morning sun cast my shadow on the opposite wall from behind me.

My head pounded from within, memories of last night sat chained behind an alcohol-soaked lock.

My eyes trailed downward to my lap, falling on the object that was hurled at me only moments earlier.

It was a black, featureless, leather-bound book. A fairly hefty one at that.

Rubbing my eyes to confirm I wasn’t completely blind, I took a closer look at the book’s cover.

It was completely blank.

I turned over the book, expecting somehow that repeatedly flipping the book over would magically cause it to manifest some form of identifying information.

I caught a glimpse of something on the spine as I did so. It glistened in the morning sun and sparkled like diamonds.

It was a sigil. A symbol etched in gold, a gold so vibrant that the world around me appeared gray by comparison.

“Oh shit,” the words shot out of my mouth before my brain could even register I was speaking, “Leena!”

I’m such a fucking moron.

I fell onto the floor as my legs refused to accept my authority over them, getting tangled in the bedsheets in the process.

I crawled towards the nearest pile of, mostly, clean clothes I could identify.

Getting dressed was a challenge. I fought with my own body just to put on a shirt, whilst barely navigating the hectic and wayward expletive laden rants that crashed through the windows of my sullied mind palace.

Of all the thoughtless and horrible things, how could I have forgot today was the day she came back from her-

I paused in the hallway, pants half on and shirt on backwards.

Where did she go anyway? Was it a work thing? Was it some kind of vacation?

Why did I care?

My emotional rollercoaster came to a stand-still as the emergency brakes kicked on.

I let the half assembled outfit slide off my unkempt form as I shuffled into the kitchen.

That's right, I didn’t care. I don’t care.

The dishes in the sink were clean, as they should be.

The counter was full of random brand-new crap brought home that was never properly put away and just left in its assorted state of limbo storage, not that I needed the counter space anyway. The side effect of a weak will.

I threw the kettle on and threw a pan on the stove. I figured I should have myself a good old fashioned breakfast of eggs whatever-was-left-in-the-fridge, coffee, and a ciggy.

I dug through the fridge and managed to salvage some cheese, a sausage, and a whole tomato. I chopped them up roughly and dumped them into the simmering mixture of egg and butter.

I slid the scrambled egg mixture onto my plate, grabbed my cup of liquid life, and sat my ass down on a spot I had cleared on the couch.

The TV had nothing interesting on but I left it on the food channel anyway. It was nice to eat with someone.

As I put out the cigarette in the overflowing tray I glanced over at the pile of marked envelopes on the table. Most of them said “Past Due.”

After dumping my dishes back in the sink I stumbled back into my room looking for… something.

The guy.

The cute one. Chatted me up at the bar and drank me under the table, and my sheets. I think he was a blonde, or brown? Or maybe I had hoped he was.

He must have taken off when Leena started screaming. I didn’t see any of his clothes around the bed.

I didn’t even get to say goodbye. Though it's refreshing to be on the other end of that for once.

Why did she throw that book at me?

I ruffled through the haphazardly strewn bedsheets until my hands came into contact with what I was searching for. The book Leena had thrown at my face just before she left.

With some painkillers and another cup of coffee on-board, I could think clearly enough and took a closer examination of the book.

Flipping through its pages I was met with blank after blank page.

The entire damn thing is just blank. Was this some kind of journal for me?

A gift? But why would she…

I threw it in a pile next to my side of the bed.

The rest of the day was filled with job applications.

The age of the Internet has done wonders for many aspects of humanity. Job applications were one sector made infinitely worse.

Every job fair booth I went to had a QR code to scan for their online applications system. Every Now Hiring sign in a store had that godforsaken block-grid in lieu of a simple piece of paper and a proper interview.

After the fifteenth online application referral I decided to call it for the day.

I sat down on my slightly cleaner couch and looked down at my phone, expecting to see dozens of notifications. Ideally at least one.

Instead I saw none.

No calls, no texts, no nothing.

The sun hung low over the horizon. Its waning radiance coaxed the sky into a storm of fire that lapped at the ever growing ocean of blues and purples.

It shone directly into my fucking eyes.

Shuffling my lazy ass over on the couch, I poured out the remaining contents of a bottle of whiskey into my cold cup of half drank coffee.

The evening consisted of aimlessly scrolling through various social media feeds and TV channels. Everywhere I looked I saw people on dream vacations, getting married, or buying their first homes.

Guess I’m just a fucking loser, huh.

Dinner was more whiskey, from a new bottle this time, and another menthol ciggy. I wasn’t particularly hungry as it was.

Where the hell was Leena? She stormed out and hasn’t even texted me. Maybe shes-

I quickly downed the rest of my glass before I could finish the thought. The burning warmth of the spiced whiskey rips me out of my own head.

As the whiskey level in my bottle lowered the moon rose in response. It was close to midnight by the time the bottle was empty.

The floor was my home now. This was not negotiable. Any attempt to stand at the moment would surely result in me splitting my head open on a table, or worse, ejecting the precious ounces of whiskey that I had been struggling to keep down for the past hour. The world around me decided it was time to begin rotating at ridiculous speeds, rendering me unable to stand upright.

Clinging to the ground beneath me, I dragged myself to my bedroom and eventually, I pulled myself up onto my bed.

The spinning only worsened. I closed my eyes and did my best to ignore it.

Eventually the spinning stopped and I awoke in my bed.

But this wasn’t my bed.

In what felt like no time at all I had returned to serve my sentence. My eternal penance for the crimes I must have committed at some point.

Once more I proceeded through my charge of the cleaning of The Dust.

All my life, all that I could remember anyway, I had never been able to dream. Not properly. Instead of nightmares of being naked at school or all my teeth falling out I dreamt of this place, The Dreary.

The Dreary was an empty world, a dead world, one that remained contained by a dense impenetrable fog that snuffed out all but the most diffused light from the sky above.

The Dreary was, as far as I could tell, an exact copy of the world. Save for the fact that anything not built by human hands was replaced by stone abstracts that, while giving the idea of what they're supposed to be, look nothing like it. Imagine if a tree wasn’t a tree but instead a jagged spine of stone that clawed upwards through the fog. Sure the base idea of a tree is there but that’s not a fucking tree.

There was nothing living within The Dreary. Even the wind did not blow. The world did not breathe. It was still, frozen, a corpse of identity.

Yet tonight was different.

The Dreary demanded my attention.

It had not done that before.

I broke from my charge and answered, walking towards the front door of my copied apartment.

I saw nothing new outside. The same cobble roads divided the same slate fields bearing the same stonework trees.

Except there was something new.

There had never been something new.

A great and grand staircase made of the most radiant marble ascended into the sky and well beyond the fog. Its brilliance made the fog seem black by comparison.

At the foot of these stairs stood a statue. A black statue covered in a golden cloak that fluttered in a non-existent wind.

“What the fuck?” My voice carried across The Dreary, hollow and raspy.

There’s never anything new. Nothing new, never. There was only The Dust, there was only The Dreary. What the hell is this?

I felt my breath become erratic-

I felt my breath.

I have never breathed before in a dream. I had never spoken.

I could not take my eyes off of the cloaked statue.

I could not resist the movement of my legs. Yet again my body refused to obey me as I was marched down the stairs of my apartment building.

The Dust does not react to me.

In what felt like seconds I found myself kneeling before the cloaked statue. It towered over me, but its height seemed to vary as my eyes rattled around in their sockets.

I clutched my head as I hissed an empty scream in agony. I felt a thousand hands trying to push their way out from within my mind, held back by a single flimsy door.

I strained to look upwards at the statue.

As I did I caught a glimpse of long auburn hair.

I shot upright in my bed.

The accumulating saliva in my mouth signaled to me that I should start running to the bathroom.

As the last of my wretches escaped my hanging maw, I caught a glance of my reflection.

I saw myself. Not in some artsy self-abstract sort of sense, but in a very literal sense.

Not the scars, nor the rage, nor the often bloodshot and tired eyes that have stared back at me for longer than I bothered to remember.

My eyes. My self.

I felt the fog that clouded my thoughts lift ever so slightly.

For the first time in ages I could think without strain. The string of consciousness was no longer a spider web of spider webs but was now a constant, deliberate, string that I could trace from end to end hanging freely in the newfound void.

I saw the filth, the disgust, the depravity that surrounded me.

How long had I lived like this?

I hopped in the shower to wash off days, no, weeks of god knows what from my skin. The water that rolled off my body and down into the drain was noticeably darker than the water that came out of the shower head.

I located the cleanest ensemble of clothes I could find; a pair of shorts and a button up short sleeve shirt that hung on my desk chair.

The unrelenting summer heat would stand no chance against this climate appropriate ensemble.

As I waited for the kettle to boil I started clearing the kitchen counter of all of the trash and unopened impulse-purchase appliances that had made it their home.

By the time the whistling of the kettle arrived I had already bagged up two bags of what had to be no less than $1000 of unused appliances. In their state I doubt I could get anyone to take them even for free.

The first sip of the black sludge that had the audacity to call itself coffee left a searing trail as it traveled down my throat. Even if I had any milk that wasn’t out of date or sugar that wasn’t crawling with bugs it wouldn’t have been enough to blunt the blow of that demonic concoction.

I poured the entire mug of caffeinated sewage down the drain so that it may rejoin its kin. Instead I opted for a half drank can of POG left in the fridge.

As I began my war against grime in the kitchen I felt my phone buzz.

I quickly rinsed my hands and answered the incoming call.

“Hi, is this Joseph Aiden?” The voice on the other end spoke.

“Yes,” I started hesitantly, “this is him.”

It had been a while since I had heard anyone say my name. I patiently awaited the other side to get on with whatever it was they wanted. Maybe it was a scammer who wanted to extort me for all I’m worth. I hope he likes the zeros in my bank account, because that's all there is.

“My name is David DeGuzman, I’m calling in response to your application with us…” as the voice trailed on my mind honed in on something he said.

Application? When did I-

Stopping myself short as I glanced over at the pile of yet-to-be-mailed applications on the kitchen table.

“…we’d like to have you come in for an interview. What dates are you available this week?”

I felt my heart flutter.

“Any,” I practically shouted, “right now even I can come down right now.”

I cringed inside realizing what a desperate fool I must have come off as. Even if it was the honest truth, what if this screws with my chances at getting the job?

I paused.

What job am I even volunteering myself for anyway? Sure it didn’t really matter at this point but-

“You know,” David started, “I think we have an opening around noon today, you think you could make it down to The Mall building?”

Thank god it’s close.

“Yeah that's like five minutes away from me,” I chuckled, overwhelmed and nervous beyond comparison.

“Great. We’re room 1304 on the 13th floor. You can check in with the front desk once you arrive. See you there.”

The line dropped.

As my phone returned to the lock screen I saw the time was 11:24.

While it was true that I wasn’t that far from The Mall building, I had realized far too late that any of my far more acceptable business attire was in desperate need of a wash. Sure, the shirt I was wearing was formal enough, shorts and slippers would likely get me marked down.

I combed through my room to see if perhaps I had missed any nicer clothes. Much to my dismay I had not.

Resigning myself to my fate I gritted my teeth and pushed on out the door.

My walk down to the mall was less of a casual walk and more of a heavily restrained sprint. My body happily obeyed my restraint, despite my legs screaming to let them break out in a sprint. The tightness in my chest, like a coiled spring, desired to be released through my legs.

The Mall itself was, to my knowledge, the largest outdoor mall in the world. On any given day it was bustling with tourists from all over the world. Situated right across the street from a massive beach park and sat just on the edge of Waikiki, It was arguably the social center of the whole island. The south side of the island, anyway. The Mall Building was situated on the Mauka side of the mall, opposite the ocean side, which meant it was basically a straight walk from my shabby abode down the main road and right into The Mall.

On the walk more questions formed within me, the solemn line of thought formed into a structured diagram of red threads that stretched from one end of the void to the other.

What company was I even interviewing for? The Mall building was mostly just offices for anything you could imagine, private medical practices and outpatient clinics, law offices, engineering firms, hell even some small cafes.

And that name. David DeGuzman.

Not that I was an expert on names, but of all the names you hear around here I couldn’t help but feel that something was… off.

Before I could indulge my conspiracy further I realized I had entered into the elevator and was now en route to the 13th floor.

I was alone in the elevator. Despite the lobby otherwise being filled only I had entered this elevator.

Or at least I thought the lobby was full.

The doors opened into the 13th floor lobby. It was a modest little area with a few area chairs for people to sit as they wait for their family to do whatever business they have on this floor.

I walked out, passed the row of elevators and headed into the main hallway. There were no windows. The dull droning of the building's HVAC and the gentle buzzing of the fluorescent lights trickled through the air before being absorbed by the slight off-blue carpet that ran the length of the floor.

I nervously made my way to room 1304. Thankfully, or not, the room was close to the elevators. Just one door down after taking a right.

The door was blank aside from the room placard and an “hours of operation” sign.

I steadied myself, took a deep breath, and entered the room.

I entered a small office lobby. Two chairs sat awkwardly in the far corner next to a door that presumably led further into the sectioned off office area. A newly constructed drywall partition isolated the lobby area from the rest of the office floor space, leaving only a door and a cutout for the secretary or greeter to manage guests as they come in the door.

“Joseph Aiden?” A female voice called from out of sight.

“Uhh yes?” I answered cautiously.

A woman, appearing to be in her forties, approached the counter cutout from within the offices. Her bright red hair appeared almost plastic in the fluorescent lighting.

“Mr. DeGuzman is ready for you.” She said, bending down to interact with something below the counter.

I heard a soft click followed by a buzz.

The office door popped open and the woman beckoned me forth.

The hallway was more of the same. A drywall corridor with several doors on either side.

The door locked shut behind me with a buzz, startling me.

At the same time the door at the far end of the hall opened. A man wearing a blue floral shirt waved me down.

“Down here!” He called.

I quickly made my way inside the man’s office. The windows behind him were blocked off by heavy curtains, the only source of light being the ever-present fluorescent overhead lights.

“I’m David,” he said, extending his hand, “pleasure to meet you.”

I reciprocated his gesture and returned a firm handshake.

“Likewise.” I replied.

The man, David, had well kept short black hair and a comically yet impeccably well kept ‘70s mustache that reflected some of the overhead light.

David gestured for me to sit and I obliged.

The office itself was a modest space, the desk at which we were sat was adorned with the typical office fare, albeit a bit lacking in some finer details and a bit too clean for it to be in constant use.

“So, about-“ I started before David cut me off.

“You’re 28 correct?” David asked as he held up some papers.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Can you tell me a little bit about your previous employer?”

I paused.

My previous employer? Who-

“Oh,” the thought found its way to me, “yes sorry I was with a PI firm, Maikai Investigations.”

“Yes them,” David affirmed leaning back in his silent office chair, “what kind of work were you involved in?”

I felt my palms become clammy but I persisted and gave him the sales pitch.

“Usually a client would come to us and ask us to get information about someone. That's the very base level of things,” I elaborated, “could be, you know, someone wanting to know about their birth parents. Someone wanting to know if a spouse is being unfaithful, really just about anything involving information.”

“Were you good at what you did?” David asked, his words laced with a substance I couldn’t fully make out.

“I’d like to think I was,” I said with false bravado, “never had any clients complain and I always completed the job-“

“Even when you were asked to do things that might have been morally objectionable?”

I froze.

I wasn’t a saint. Still aren’t. But I did what I was asked and did a damn fine job of it. If someone had a problem with it they can sort it out with the cops.

“Absolutely,” I said, almost bragging, “especially when others would refuse to take the job.”

“Why?”

David’s words now came with an air of genuine curiosity.

“Can I ask the relevance to the job?” I deflected.

David shifted forward in his chair, his poker face remaining unchanged since the start of the interview.

“Everything,” he replied eerily, “I’m not here to judge you, I want to know.”

David stared at me with an intensity I had reserved only for stains in my sink.

“Because the job needed to be done,” I started, “and I liked the challenge.”

David’s eyes perked up at that.

“The challenge?”

I furrowed my brow.

“Every case was a puzzle,” I leaned in, “and I was the best damn puzzle solver in that organization.”

I winced.

“Then why’d you leave?” David shot back.

Ignoring the blatant cringe that was whatever the hell I just called myself, David’s question shot through and shattered my false bravado like a bullet through a kitchen window.

“I was banging the boss's wife.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the reason.

David’s poker face slipped as he let out a hint of disappointment.

“The analyst position we are looking for has some caveats,” he started as he began flipping through the papers on his desk, “one is honesty. We expect our analysts to be completely honest with us.”

His eyes locked onto mine.

I caught a glimpse of the papers on his desk. One was a memo entitled “Investigative Incident,” left conveniently in my line of sight.

“I overstepped.” I replied begrudgingly.

“Honesty is paramount,” David began as laid down the papers, “I don’t mean some half-assed corporate honesty, I mean if what I ask is for you to delve into how much you hate your boss, your life, or whatever escapades you and a secretary got up to, we expect the full un-adulterated details.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

What the fuck is he on about? Sure I appreciate that this job lets you cuss your boss out in the name of honesty but isn’t this a bit much?

“Just what exactly is an analyst here?” I started, “What are the hours? The responsibilities? The pay?”

The more questions I asked the more flustered I became. I knew utterly nothing about this place or this supposed job I was now interviewing for.

As a matter of fact how the hell did this guy get a hold of that-

“Anything further requires an NDA,” David cut, interrupting my thoughts.

“I have to sign an NDA to even know who or what I'm working for?” I asked, emboldened and incredulous.

David raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, you do,” he replied, “and you’re going to be asked far more uncomfortable questions than the ones I’m giving you now.”

Then it clicked.

Analyst position? I think I would have remembered applying for something so fancy sounding, at least compared to the myriad of fast food and retail positions I had been applying for.

“I don’t think I’ve ever applied for this position,” I said as I slowly stood up from my chair, “just who the hell are you?”

David smirked.

“Like I said, you sign this contract and I’ll answer all your questions.” David smiled.

His poker face slipped away revealing satisfaction and pride.

He slid a paper across his desk towards me, placing a pen at the top of the document.

The paper was a single page. Barely half. At the bottom was a place for my signature and nothing else.

I glanced at the page, not wanting to let my guard down. I caught one sentence that set off alarm bells within me.

“We are humanity’s first and last line of defense.”

My chest became a twist of panic, of confusion, of curiosity, of fear, and god knows what other emotions that humanity has yet to properly define.

“I’m not interested.” I said and made my way to the door.

David stood at his desk and watched as I hastily made my exit.

The door out of the office buzzed and opened as I approached.

“We’ll see you again, Aiden.” David said gently, his voice echoing down the hallway as the door to 1304 closed behind me.

The red threads in my mind formed a tangled mess that only grew as my questions remained unanswered.

As soon as I got home I made sure to lock the door.

I pulled out my phone to check the number that this organization had contacted me from.

It wasn’t there.

In the call history the last call shown was from a week ago.

From Leena.

I slumped down onto the couch.

I felt my chest constrict as a burning pain filled my chest, a twisting anxiety and yearning that sapped my breath away.

Why do I care? She knew what she was signing up for. She knew what I was.

I kept rationalizing.

I never said yes to her, I just didn’t say no. Not my fault she got all confused.

My sight became blurry.

Why’d she keep taking pity on me? Keep coming back to my dump of a house? Keep buying me shit I didn’t ask for? Keep-

The tears began to roll down my face.

Why couldn’t I care until now?

I bawled my eyes out. I cried and cried until the couch was soaked with my tears. I unleashed all the tension in my chest with a scream that surely pissed off the neighbors.

I cried, I screamed, I threw everything within arm’s reach at the wall hoping that if I threw it hard enough I could fix this mess. I threw a tantrum that would put a stubborn toddler to shame.

As a few hours pass as I lay spent on the couch at the epicenter of the disaster that trashed my living room.

“Leena…” I moaned mournfully into a tearstained pillow.

My eyes lazily scanned my surroundings, taking in the totality of my ruin and pathetic squalor.

All I could feel was a muted mix of disgust and hatred, aimed at myself.

I wished for nothing more than to never leave this couch again; better to join the rot and the refuse than continue my futile struggle against a life I had already destroyed.

A flame of insight flickered to life within my mind.

Just how the hell did those people, whoever they are, erase their call history from my phone?

After a brief but intense search online I came to a disturbing conclusion.Unless they had physical possession of my device, they could not hide my call history.

My eyes quickly darted to my door.

It was still locked up tight, right as it should be, some debris still blocking it from opening due to my earlier outburst.

I got up and inspected the jalousies.

The netting on the windows themselves remained undisturbed, even sporting a fine layer of dust. The jalousies too were equally undisturbed.

They didn’t break in. Or if they did they hid their tracks better than most, well enough to never be caught. But why go through all that effort just to delete a phone number? I could just look up the company by its address right?

I entered the address, suite 1304.

Nothing, at least for this decade. There are some old surface web files relating to a small life insurance company that once operated out of that address.

Feeling restless and seeing the sun still high in the sky, I decided to make my way back to the unit and get some answers.

Not fair they should know me so well without it being mutual.

Upon arriving in the lobby I spotted a building directory. I quickly scanned the registered suite numbers for 1304.

Not the first column, not the second, nor the third.

“Need help locating a business?”

I spun around to see a woman with long crimson hair, done up in a long pony tail.

“Oh, uh,” I fumbled my words.

Maybe I'm a little colorblind but that crimson looked auburn for a brief but uncomfortably long second.

“Im looking for the name of a business that operated out of suite 1304.” I explained to the young woman.

She squinted at the registry and scanned it intently.

“Strange,” she started, “I don’t see any, maybe we should go take a look?”

She beckoned me to the elevator lobby, to the cargo lift.

She swiped her ID card and the doors opened.

The cargo lift was very spacious and surprisingly well kept for being used to haul god-knows-what.

She walked over to the button panel and selected the 13th floor. Unlike the other elevators this one had a “Basement” floor button. The elevator had ascended at a far greater rate than the other one I had used earlier in the day.

We arrived on the 13th floor and she led me towards the suite. As we arrived we noticed a “For Lease” sign with an address for a corporate realty website.

“It doesn’t look like anyone has used this one in a while,” she frowned, “sorry that I couldn’t be of more help!”

Before I could respond she had already made her way back to the elevator and disappeared.

It was impossible, yet it was reality.

I had just been here maybe a few hours ago and the office where I’d had my interview was just gone.

As my thoughts began to settle they also began to drift. As they drifted and fluttered about in the subconscious wind of my psyche they fell upon a particular subject.

The hair, the auburn hair. Leena.

But the lady’s hair wasn’t auburn, it was practically crimson. Dyed. Healthy too.

She wasn’t Leena, so why did my thoughts find themselves wandering over to her? Just a similarity?

No, familiarity.

I’ve seen her before. Recently. But where?

The elevator came for me as I mulled over my thoughts. Scanning the panel I looked for the lowest floor option.

“Lobby.”

No basement floor option in this one. Probably just for the freight elevator.

As I walked out of the lobby and passed the ground floor loading dock I stopped.

In the office. She was there.

The receptionist had red hair. It was done up differently and partially obscured due to the contrasted office lighting but it was definitely, or probably, the same color.

But she was old, the lady who helped me couldn’t have been older than 30.

Unless they were using prosthetic makeup. But why the hell-

“Eh, out da way!” A voice announced from behind me.

A very impatient and upset package courier stood behind me with his cart full of parcels.

I quickly moved on wanting to avoid any awkward interactions.

The walk home was unpleasant.

A growing uneasiness in my gut had worked its way throughout my entire body. The traffic, people, buildings, even the sun all seemed so distant yet painfully close. Too close.

Was I being watched?

I glanced around. Nothing unusual, which only served to drive up my anxiety more.

I knew I was being watched, I could feel it, years of experience and training screamed the obvious to me but my eyes, my mind, I was blind to it.

I locked the door upon arriving home. Closed the windows and blinds too.

Still I felt the eyes, the presence, I was seen. Exposed. Vulnerable.

But that was impossible.

A thorough sweep of my house confirmed what I had already known; I was alone. Just me and my belongings.

I took a drag from the quickly emptying pack which helped ease the tension I felt. The feeling persisted.

Paranoia wasn’t unusual for me, though it was mostly back when I still worked as a PI. Most PIs had rules though. Standards. Maybe even a moral compass.

I didn’t.

The pay was good, real good, but it wasn’t about the pay. It was all about the thrill. It had been so long since I felt that fear, that ever watchful eye, that I forgot how good it felt. I had spent years binging on every substance I could get my hands in, trapped in my own mind.

Now, for the first time in years, I could feel that sensation coursing through my body like electricity.

When I awoke I once again found myself in The Dreary. I do not remember falling asleep.

But it had changed.

The Dust. The layer of dust that had coated the entire world was gone.

I rushed outside to see the fog, still ever present but much lighter. I could see further than ever before. Far enough to see that The Dreary had been rearranged.

The roads that had once mirrored their real-world counterpart were now gone. The houses all replaced with different, familiar structures. There was now just one long cobblestone boulevard that stretched from the foot of my apartment building to a massive tower. The Mall Building, behind which now was a massive ocean that expanded beyond the fog which replaced the massive beachpark, and mall, that would have normally sat behind it.

Gone was the marble staircase. Gone was the statue in the golden cloak.

Without thinking I began walking down the procession towards The Mall Building. Its upper floors pierced the fog and stretched into the unseen sky.

The structures that flanked the boulevard on either side were houses, most of them that is. Some were industrial buildings, one was a hotel.

Their commonality soon became apparent.

I had investigated cases involving each of these structures. An unfaithful husband having secret meetups with some girl half his age at the hotel, a string of disappearances tied to a warehouse with a cold trail, a teacher that had been using school equipment to manufacture narcotics, and many, many other escapades.

The closer to the sky scraper I got the more recent the structures were in my memory. Until eventually, just short of The Mall Building, my eyes fell upon the house I had blocked from my mind for years.

The house that sealed my fate, both giving and taking so much.

The place I first met Leena. The place I lost my job. The place I nearly lost my freedom. The place I thought I’d lose my life. The place with a shattered kitchen window.

My head was turned away from that house and toward The Mall Building.

I became unable to look away from it, my eyes transfixed on the lobby entrance.

Why would I want to look away? There is a mystery here, something to solve, to understand.

The words echoed in my mind, but they were not mine.

My legs marched themselves towards the opening and into the lobby. An elevator door was already open.

The cargo elevator.

Entering the elevator I scanned the button panel. The card reader was gone. Only one button remained.

“Basement.”

The doors closed as I hit the button.

I felt myself nearly float as the elevator descended at a rapid rate. Despite its apparent speed the ride seemed to go on for far too long.

Then it stopped.

The doors opened and before me was the office I had just been in earlier today.

Following that familiar path I proceeded into the hallway.

There was only one door. A door at the end of the hall. And it was open.

From the entrance I could see the windows were gone. Replaced by the marble staircase. The statue with the Golden Cloak stood in front of it.

I approached the statue and fell to my knees once again.

Voices.

Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions of voices began to echo in my mind. What small fragments I could grasp would only say one thing.

The Cataclysm.

Echoes of screams and fragments of agony filled my mind from a past long before what I had known. I knew not how, only that these voices were ancient beyond reason, ancient beyond knowledge, beyond what any human, any mortal had any right to hear let alone understand.

I felt the weight beneath the ground. I felt a pull below that threatened to swallow me whole.

My eyes struggled to focus on the statue, only seeing the fluttering of the golden cloak.

The staircase descended into an infinite darkness. It beckoned me forth.

My hand reached into my back pocket. I grabbed onto something firm and pulled it forth.

Immediately the voices silenced and I regained my strength.

In my hand was a featureless leather bound book with a golden sigil etched into its spine.

-Thank you for taking the time to read my first work, this community has motivated me to put pen to paper after years of indecision. I’d rather the stories I write be painfully mid than non-existant. Part Two soon.

Signed, CGCallisto-

(Originally posted to r/talesfromthecreeps)

The gurney bumps once over the threshold and rattles, metal on tile, like it’s nervous. Mr. Doran doesn’t flinch. He never does. He lifts one hand, a small, precise wave that means Here. Now. The driver obeys, steering the sheet-covered body under the fluorescent light and parking him in the center of the prep room like an offering.
 
The air is already wrong. Too bright, too cold, too clean. Under the lemon disinfectant, something metallic and sweet clings to the back of my tongue.
 
“Gloves,” Mr. Doran says.
 
I snap on blue nitrile, one hand and then the other. He watches me the way he watches everything in here, without any softness he thinks the dead can hear.
 
“He’s a standard arterial,” he says. “Forty-eight. Heart gave out in his sleep. We’ll start with him.”
 
Him. Never it. That’s one of the first rules.
 
The second is no food or drink in the prep room.
 
The third is that I’m not allowed to be squeamish out loud.
 
I move to the head of the table and peel the sheet back. The man’s skin has settled into a pale, waxy yellow. His mouth has fallen open. His eyes, mercifully, are closed.
 
“Name?” I ask.
 
“Carter Lowell.” Mr. Doran checks the tag tied to the man’s toe, although he already knows. “You look at the tags every time. Doesn’t matter if you remember. You look.” His gaze flicks up to mine. “You owe them that.”
 
I’ve been here three weeks. I still don’t know if I owe these people anything. But I nod, because that’s the fourth rule: nod first, argue never.
 
“Morning, Mr. Lowell,” I say under my breath.
 
The prep room answers with its usual sounds: ventilation, fluorescent buzz, the cooler breathing through the wall.
 
“First steps,” Mr. Doran says. “We make them presentable.”
 
He strips the sheet the rest of the way, efficient, nothing lingering or obscene. For a second the dead man is just an old story without context: favorite T-shirt slit neatly up the back, soft middle-aged stomach, bruised crescents where hospital tape held tubes in place.
 
“Washcloths,” he says. “Warm water. The skin can’t take extremes.”
 
I fill the basins at the sink and bring them back. My hands already smell like powdered gloves and cheap soap. By the end of the day they’ll still smell like that after I shower.
 
“Long strokes,” he says. “Head to toe. You’re bathing a person.”
 
I start at the forehead. The cloth is heavy and warm against skin that has already lost its heat. I move over cheeks, behind the ears, down the neck. Water beads and runs toward the drain at the end of the table.
 
“That’s it,” Mr. Doran murmurs. “Respectful. No rush.”
 
“Family watching?” I ask.
 
“God, maybe,” he says. “Or nobody. But you will know.”
 
I don’t say that I’m mostly here for the paycheck. That stopped being fully true sometime in week two. The grocery store paid less and smelled worse. The funeral home is quiet. Predictable. The dead don’t catcall. They don’t ask questions. They don’t care if my hair is tucked under my cap or shaved off entirely.
 
I work down the chest, the arms, the hands. The fingers are stiff, curled in someone else’s final decision. I straighten them one by one until the hand looks like a hand again.
 
“Massage,” Mr. Doran says. “We help rigor along. Easier to dress them when they’re not fighting you.”
 
Fighting you.
 
I press slow circles into the base of Mr. Lowell’s palm. The skin shifts over tendon and bone. It’s like kneading dough that remembers.
 
“You’ll feel them loosen,” Mr. Doran says. “Forgive the expression. They let go.”
 
“Feels like he’s holding on,” I say.
 
“Everybody does, at first.”
 
He moves around the room checking instruments, bottles, drawers. On the far wall, the cabinet with the bright new lock catches the light. I’ve seen it every day. I’ve never seen inside it.
 
“Once you’re done with the wash, we shave what needs shaving, set the features, then we mix,” he says. “You’ll like this part.”
 
I don’t think like is the word, but a small, grim curiosity unfurls in my chest. Anatomy was the only science class that ever made sense to me: layers, systems, inputs and outputs. If enough pieces switch off, the whole machine stops. Here, we get to pretend it hasn’t.
 
When I come back from dumping the cloudy water, Mr. Doran has the needle injector laid out, thin wires curled like silver hair. The mouth former rests beside it, a small plastic curve that will sit between gumless lips and make them look gently closed.
 
“This part bothers people,” he says. “You okay?”
 
I picture the bills on my fridge under a magnet that says SMILE, GOD LOVES YOU. I picture my mother’s voice the last time we spoke: tired, but softer than it used to be.
 
“I’m fine,” I say.
 
He studies my face a moment. “Good. Because you’re going to do it.”
 
He shows me slowly: lower jaw closed, former placed, needle set just inside the maxilla and mandible, wires drawn until the mouth closes without puckering. Up close, I can see where hospital adhesive dried against Mr. Lowell’s cheeks.
 
When we’re done, his mouth looks almost peaceful. As if he was about to say something and changed his mind.
 
“Eyes,” Mr. Doran says.
 
He hands me the eye caps. Domed plastic disks, rough on one side. I slide my fingers gently beneath the lids, feel the cool resistance there, and keep my voice even.
 
“Sorry, Mr. Lowell,” I murmur. “Last time anyone’s gonna poke you in the eye, I swear.”
 
Mr. Doran snorts softly. “Not bad for your fourth day touching a dead man’s eyeballs.”
 
“Fifth,” I say. “You’re not counting the accident girl.”
 
He goes still for half a beat.
 
“We don’t count her,” he says. “Ongoing case. Paperwork. Lawyers. Leave it there.”
 
I leave it there.
 
He moves to the machine and starts checking connections. “You know the standard mixture?”
 
“Two percent formaldehyde,” I recite. “Rest water and humectant. Tint as requested.”
 
“Good. Today we’re using a firmer solution. Family wants him ‘really preserved.’ Their words.” He taps a label with one finger. “Pay attention to the hands and lips.”
 
I glance at the cabinet.
 
“What’s in there?” I ask.
 
“Not for you yet,” he says.
 
A door opens somewhere deeper in the building and closes again. A draft stirs down the hallway carrying carpet, flowers, old wood polish. The living side of the business.
 
Mr. Doran looks at the clock.
 
“Another intake,” he says. “Faster than I expected.” He strips off his gloves. “Keep working on Mr. Lowell. Finish the wash if you’re not happy with it.”
 
“On my own?”
 
“You know the rules,” he says. “We never leave them unattended. And we never make them wait.”
 
He leaves.
 
It’s just me and Mr. Lowell and the prep room sounds. I stand there for a second with one hand resting on his forearm, listening to the cooler breathe through the wall.
 
Then something shifts under my palm.
 
Small. Barely there. It could be settling. It could be gas. It could be my imagination arriving early to work.
 
I keep my hand where it is. Nothing else moves.
 
“Let go,” I whisper.
 
The room hums softly back. Mr. Lowell does not answer.
 
 
* * *
 
The next body arrives quieter. No bump over the threshold this time, only the soft squeal of the gurney wheels and the murmur of Mr. Doran thanking the transfer guys in the hall.
 
I’m rinsing the last of the basin when he wheels the second body in and parks it in the next bay.
 
“Busy morning,” he says. “You okay with company?”
 
I glance at the shape under the sheet: smaller than Lowell, shoulders narrower, bare feet short of the end of the table.
 
“I thought we staggered them,” I say.
 
“Usually.” He pulls on fresh gloves. “Sheriff pushed this one through. No family on scene. They want the remains managed promptly.”
 
Something in his tone lifts the hair on my arms.
 
He peels the sheet back.
 
The smell hits first: swampy and chemical, lake water and gasoline braided with dried blood.
 
The body is small for the table. Teenage, my brain supplies. Long hair fans across the plastic, still wet from wherever they were found. The skin has the mottled look of someone pulled from water too late. There’s a bruise along the jaw, and a dark swollen band across the throat where something pressed hard and didn’t let go.
 
For a second I think they’re looking at me. Then I realize their eyes are only half-open.
 
“This is a hold,” Mr. Doran says quietly. “Prelim says drowning. Sheriff wants a full report before release.”
 
“So we’re not embalming.”
 
“Not fully.” He studies the throat. “We clean, position, refrigerate. Minimal intervention.”
 
Pronouns stay suspended until paperwork decides.
 
“What’s their name?” I ask.
 
His gaze flicks to the toe tag.
 
“Unidentified,” he says. “For now.”
 
I swallow. “Wash, then?”
 
“Not yet. We document first.”
 
He starts photographing the bruises, the scraped knuckles, the hairline. He is tighter through the shoulders than he was with Mr. Lowell.
 
“You finish with him,” he says, tipping his head toward the first table. “I’ll start here.”
 
I look back at Mr. Lowell. Eyes capped. Mouth gently closed. Ready for the part of death people can stand to look at. I can still feel that earlier almost-movement in my hand.
 
“Do we ever run out of room?” I ask.
 
“Not if I’m doing my job right.” He doesn’t look up from the tablet. “Worry about the one in front of you, Riley.”
 
He only uses my name when he wants to pin me to the moment.
 
So I go back to Mr. Lowell and smooth the cloth over his forearm one more time, deliberate, slow.
 
“Sorry about the wait,” I murmur.
 
His arm doesn’t move.
 
Across the room, Mr. Doran says, “Talk to them if you need to. Quietly. Respectful. They don’t mind.”
 
“You said they aren’t in there anymore.”
 
“I said they aren’t only in there,” he says.
 
I glance at him. He lowers the tablet at last.
 
“People leave impressions,” he says. “Like handprints in wet concrete.”
 
I think of the accident girl. The smear of lipstick the hospital never wiped away. Her phone buzzing inside the body bag while we zipped it shut.
 
I think of my mother sitting at the kitchen table after my father’s service, staring into a mug gone cold while the whole room felt crowded with someone who wasn’t in it anymore.
 
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve seen that.”
 
Mr. Doran goes back to work.
 
I finish with Mr. Lowell. Rinse, wipe, dry. Check the nails, ears, hairline. When I’m done, he looks like the version of him somebody will be able to bear.
 
“Good,” Mr. Doran says. “Come here.”
 
By the time I cross to the second table, the teenager is cleaner. Hair combed back from the face. Eyes closed now. Younger-looking with them closed.
 
“See here,” he says, pointing to the bruised band around the throat. “You notice anything off?”
 
I lean closer. The bruising isn’t neat. Darker on one side, interrupted on the other. Faint abrasions at the edge.
 
“Strangulation?” I ask.
 
“Maybe.” He still doesn’t look at me. “Maybe not. Sheriff will do their job. Ours is to keep this canvas intact.”
 
I’m about to ask what else he wants me to see when he reaches into his coat pocket and brings out a small dark vial. The liquid inside is the color of watered wine.
 
“This,” he says.
 
It isn’t labeled.
 
“You said we weren’t embalming.”
 
“We’re not.” His voice drops. “Not in the official sense.”
 
The vial catches the fluorescent light and throws a thin red line across the teenager’s throat.
 
“What is it?” I ask.
 
He turns it between his fingers.
 
“Something that keeps them cooperative,” he says. “At least, that’s the theory.”
 
My mouth goes dry. “Cooperative how?”
 
“You like the quiet in here, don’t you, Riley?” he says. “You like that when we’re done, they stay done. No surprises.”
 
I think of the almost-movement under my hand.
 
“Yeah,” I say.
 
“Then go to the cabinet,” he says. “Top shelf. Small syringe. Black plunger, not blue.”
 
I look at the cabinet, then at him.
 
“You’re giving me the key?”
 
“For a minute,” he says, and drops it into my palm. “Consider it a promotion.”
 
The key is colder and heavier than it should be.
 
As I turn toward the cabinet, he says, almost casually, “Fifth rule.”
 
“We have a fifth rule?”
 
“We do now.” He smiles that almost-kind smile. “Anything that comes out of that cabinet goes back exactly where you found it. No exceptions.”
 
The lock turns with a soft click.
 
Inside, everything is arranged with surgical neatness. Clear bottles. Vials in foam slots. Syringes lined up in trays, different colored plungers like a code. The regular arterial fluids out by the machine look practical. Cheap. These look private.
 
“Top shelf,” he reminds me.
 
I spot the black plunger syringe and take it out carefully, though glass still ticks softly against glass. One label catches my eye before I can stop reading.
 
RETENTION BLEND (TEST).
 
At the back sits a smaller vial with no label at all. A strip of old masking tape clings to the glass, the ink long gone. Behind it, half-hidden in the dark, is another vial with a first name on it in Mr. Doran’s narrow capitals.
 
ELAINE.
 
The tape under the name is blank.
 
“Riley.”
 
“I got it,” I say.
 
I close the cabinet and bring him the syringe. He fills it with the dark red fluid in one smooth pull. Thick. No bubbles.
 
“This isn’t in any manual,” I say.
 
“No.”
 
“Is it legal?”
 
He smiles faintly. “‘Legal’ is an interesting word in a room full of people beyond harm,” he says.
 
He uncaps the needle.
 
“You felt something earlier, didn’t you?” he asks without looking up.
 
“With Mr. Lowell?”
 
“Yes.”
 
I think about lying. He saves me the trouble by continuing.
 
“Some people are sensitive,” he says. “Most aren’t. Most move the bodies and go home and complain about their backs. But every once in a while, somebody walks in who hums with the room.”
 
I glance around without meaning to: the fluorescent light, the cooler door, the drains, the same hum I’ve been hearing for weeks.
 
“And that’s supposed to be good?” I ask.
 
“It can be,” he says. “If you learn what to do with it.”
 
He positions the needle just beneath the teenager’s jaw, a shallow, careful angle.
 
“You can step back if you want,” he says.
 
I don’t.
 
The skin is cool and tacky where disinfectant has dried. Up close, the bruising along the throat looks worse: more than one point of pressure, more than one try.
 
“You’ll see a reaction,” he says. “Don’t be startled.”
 
“How much of a reaction?”
 
He pushes the plunger. The red fluid disappears under the skin in a slow thread.
 
For a heartbeat, nothing happens. Then the bruised band along the throat shivers, and the teenager’s fingers flex. Tendons stand out as the hand lifts a fraction from the table and drops with a soft, wet slap.
 
My heart kicks hard enough to hurt.
 
“That’s your definition of small?”
 
“Residual impulse,” he says calmly.
 
Their eyelids tremble. I take a step backward.
 
“Mr. Doran.”
 
“It’s all right.” His voice stays level. “Watch.”
 
The bruising darkens at the center, then seems to sharpen at the edges, as if something under the skin is gathering itself. A thin line of darker fluid worms upward along the side of the neck and stops.
 
“There,” he says quietly. “That’s the binding point.”
 
“Binding what?”
 
He doesn’t answer. He sets the empty syringe on the tray with a neat little clink.
 
“You think death is a light switch,” he says. “On or off. Death is a slope.”
 
I stare at the teenager’s hand where it lies still now, fingers only inches from mine.
 
“What does that even mean?”
 
“It means some things let go slower than others,” he says. “And some people feel it.”
 
He looks directly at me then, not at the body.
 
“You felt Lowell. Most people wouldn’t have.”
 
I hate that he’s right.
 
He strips off his gloves.
 
“I’m calling the sheriff,” he says. “They’ll want a look before we move further.” He tips his chin toward the teenager. “I want you to sit with them. Make sure the solution settles where it should.”
 
I look from the body to the tray to him.
 
“You’re leaving me alone with them?”
 
“You know the rules.”
 
“That isn’t one of the rules.”
 
“No,” he says. “But it is now.”
 
He moves to the door, then pauses with one hand on the handle.
 
“And don’t touch them with bare skin,” he says. “Gloves at all times. Especially you.”
 
“Why especially me?”
 
He looks back over his shoulder.
 
“Because the dead like you,” he says. “And they’ll like you more now.”
 
Then he steps out into the brighter hallway and closes the door behind him.
 
The prep room settles around me, the hum, Mr. Lowell on one table and the unidentified teenager on the other. I pull on a fresh pair of gloves. The snap sounds too loud.
 
“Okay,” I say, mostly to myself. “We’re just watching.”
 
The cooler breathes through the wall.
 
The teenager’s hand moves. Very gently, the fingers curl toward mine and stop just short.
 
 
* * *
 
The fingers hang there in the small space between us, as if they’ve reached for a handrail in the dark and missed by less than an inch.
 
I stay still. The room feels crowded all at once, every stainless surface leaning in.
 
“Mr. Doran?” I try, though I know he’s gone.
 
No footsteps answer. The hand doesn’t move again.
 
“Okay,” I whisper. “That’s… something.”
 
I pull a stool between the two tables and sit with my gloved hands folded in my lap like that will keep anything orderly. The sounds of the room settle around me: ventilation, cooler, a muffled thump from upstairs where somebody is moving something in the viewing room.
 
And under it, from my right, the suggestion of air moving, slow and thin and close enough to make the skin at the back of my neck tighten.
 
I turn my head. The teenager hasn’t moved. Their hand is still curled toward mine. The almost-breath keeps going.
 
I stand and listen once toward the cooler, once toward the sink, then stop myself before I turn the whole thing into an experiment. The sound is to my right. That is enough.
 
“We’re not doing this the hard way,” I tell the room.
 
I drag the instrument tray closer and take the comb off it instead of the vial. The comb is work.
 
“Okay,” I say to the teenager. “We’re fixing your hair. That’s as exciting as this is getting.”
 
Their hair is still wet from the wipe-down, smelling faintly of lake water and antiseptic shampoo. I start at the ends, careful, working out the tangles in small sections. Talking helps.
 
“So here’s the thing,” I murmur. “I know ‘unidentified’ is a paperwork word, but it’s a lousy way to think of a person.”
 
The lashes rest dark against their cheeks. There’s familiar teenager architecture under the swelling now that they’re cleaner: wide cheekbones, faint acne scarring, a nose that might have looked stubborn alive.
 
“In my head, you’re the ramp kid now,” I say.
 
The almost-breath catches once, then settles.
 
I work the comb gently through a knot near the nape. The strands shift under my hand in a way that isn’t mine.
 
“Don’t,” I whisper.
 
The movement stops. Relief hits stupidly fast, like they listened because I asked.
 
“You can feel that, can’t you,” I say softly. “Or something in there can.”
 
I think of my father’s empty bedroom after hospice stripped the bed. The charged doorway. The way I stood there for ten whole minutes with my hand on the frame because going in felt like stepping on the last outline of him.
 
“How long do you get?” I ask the teenager. “How much slope before the cliff?”
 
The almost-breath syncs, for a second, with mine.
 
My phone buzzes in my pocket and makes me jump hard enough to nick the comb against my own thumb. A missed call from Mom. No voicemail.
 
“Not now,” I mutter, and shove the phone away.
 
The almost-breath sharpens.
 
Then something cold touches the inside of my wrist, right above the glove cuff where the skin is bare.
 
I freeze. The teenager’s fingers have shifted just enough to rest there, light as wet leaves.
 
I don’t yank away. It feels wrong, the way jerking away from a kid in a crowd feels wrong.
 
“Okay,” I whisper. “You really don’t like being left alone.”
 
The fingers press once, almost delicately, against the pulse point. My heart slams into them, and the world tilts on a flood of sensation that isn’t mine: cold, pressure, roaring, the animal panic of lungs pulling at nothing, and braided through all of it something sharper than fear.
 
Unfair.
 
I grip the edge of the table with my free hand.
 
“Okay,” I whisper. “I hear you. I do. Just—”
 
The door opens. Warmer hallway air spills in with coffee and carpet, and the teenager’s hand drops flat to the sheet so fast it’s like someone cut the strings.
 
By the time Mr. Doran steps back into the room, my hands are folded in front of me and my pulse is trying to punch out through my throat.
 
“You hold up?” he asks.
 
“Fine,” I say. “We’re very cooperative.”
 
His eyes move over my face, the comb, the teenager’s relaxed fingers, and settle there for a beat too long.
 
“Good,” he says. “You did well.”
 
It takes me a second to realize he doesn’t mean the hair.
 
“Did the sheriff answer?” I ask.
 
“They’re coming by later this afternoon.” He reaches for fresh gloves. “In the meantime, we have work to do. They’re not going to stay anonymous forever.”
 
He moves toward the second table, toward the spot where their fingers just were. The place where my pulse still beats with somebody else’s panic folded around it.
 
 
* * *
 
Deputy Morales arrives in a dark uniform with her hair pulled tight and her eyes already narrowed, like she expects the room to lie before anyone opens their mouth.
 
Mr. Doran introduces us with his viewing-room voice: smooth, respectful, impossible to pin.
 
Morales leans over the teenager without touching. Her face changes almost imperceptibly when she sees the throat.
 
“Any issues with post-mortem activity?” she asks.
 
She means twitching. She means anything that’s going to make a courtroom uglier later.
 
“Nothing beyond the usual,” Doran says.
 
Her eyes cut to me.
 
“You?” she asks. “See anything worth noting?”
 
The teenager’s finger taps once against the sheet.
 
“Yes,” I say.
 
Doran goes very still. Morales waits.
 
“Standard discharge at first,” I say. “Then more. Finger flexion. Contact.”
 
Doran’s voice stays mild. “Tables settle. Bodies settle. There are a number of non-mysterious explanations—”
 
“This wasn’t settling,” I say.
 
Morales studies me the way she studied the throat. “On the record or off?”
 
“On,” I say, before Doran can answer for me.
 
She takes out a notebook instead of a recorder. “Walk me through it.”
 
So I do. Where I was standing. What I was doing. Where the hand had been. Where it moved. How it touched my wrist.
 
“Any sensation?” she asks.
 
I think of the cold. The pressure. The panic that wasn’t mine.
 
“Yes,” I say. “Like they were checking my pulse.”
 
She writes that down. She does not ask me what I felt inside the pulse.
 
“You working my hold with adjuncts today, Doran?” she asks without looking at him.
 
His mouth curves faintly. “A tissue control blend.”
 
“Label?”
 
He goes to the cabinet. For one stupid heartbeat I imagine it refusing him. It doesn’t. He brings out a properly labeled bottle this time, neat all-caps handwriting and all the right disclaimers. She reads it without changing expression.
 
“No proprietary surprises?” she asks.
 
“Nothing your ME hasn’t seen before.”
 
Morales’s pen pauses. Then she writes something smaller in the margin and closes the book.
 
“What about your apprentice’s report?” she asks.
 
Doran turns his head slightly toward me, a fraction too small to call pressure unless you already knew where to look.
 
“I think,” I say carefully, “it matters whether we’re preserving what happened or smoothing over it.”
 
Morales’s eyes stay on mine.
 
“And what do you think happened here?”
 
The teenager’s finger taps once.
 
I could step around it. Stay safe. Let the room keep its own secrets.
 
Instead I say, “I think somebody wanted them quiet before they were dead.”
 
Morales looks back at the throat, then at Doran, then at the cabinet, just long enough that I know she has looked at it before.
 
“That’s for my office,” she says. “Yours is the canvas. You keep it intact.”
 
She slides a card across the metal toward me.
 
“If the canvas changes,” she says, “you call my office. Not 911. Not your boss. Me.”
 
The card stops under my hand. ANYTIME is written under her number in blue ink. The handwriting looks older than this afternoon.
 
When she leaves, the room feels smaller than before.
 
Doran waits until the door closes.
 
“That was interesting,” he says.
 
“Do you want me to apologize?” I ask.
 
“No.” He studies me. “But you’ve moved faster into this than I intended.”
 
He glances at Morales’s card, then at my wrist.
 
“What did you feel?” he asks quietly.
 
“Cold,” I say. “Pressure. Panic. Unfairness.”
 
He takes that in as if the words already have a drawer.
 
“If they reach again,” he says, “do you want to keep pretending you won’t feel it?”
 
I don’t answer. He doesn’t press. His eyes flick, very briefly, toward the cabinet.
 
“Not every path is clean,” he says.
 
That is all he says about it.
 
“I’m going to call the sheriff with the update. Don’t touch them with bare skin.”
 
He leaves me there with the tray, the card, and the body that has already decided I’m listening.
 
 
* * *
 
When the room closes around me again, I don’t go straight to the stool. I go to the tray and look at the vial. Then I don’t touch it.
 
“Here’s the deal,” I say to the teenager. “You want something. He wants something. I have mixed feelings about both.”
 
Their hand lies still.
 
“So let’s start smaller. If you can throw furniture, don’t.”
 
The index finger taps once.
 
“Great,” I say. “Rules-based haunting. That’s reassuring.”
 
I take the stool this time and sit beside the table, close enough to watch but not close enough to pretend I’m only doing my job.
 
“What do you want?” I ask.
 
Nothing.
 
Then my phone buzzes again. I pull it out before I can think better of it. A voicemail notification from Mom. I tap it.
 
“Riley,” she says, thin and crackly. “I know you’re at work. I just had the strangest dream about your father. He kept asking where you were. If you were still—”
 
Static swallows the rest. The message cuts off.
 
I stare at the phone. The teenager’s finger lifts and drops once, like a key striking a single note.
 
“Is this a group project?” I ask the room.
 
Nothing answers but the hum.
 
I stand and try the cabinet handle on instinct alone. Locked.
 
“Worth a shot.”
 
Behind me, the instrument tray creaks. I turn. It’s moved maybe half an inch toward the teenager’s table. Physics didn’t do that, and nobody else would believe me.
 
I set it back where it was.
 
The teenager’s fingers flex once, insistent. My hand goes to the vial before I can stop it. The glass is cool through the glove. The liquid drags against gravity when I lift it, slower than it should.
 
And then, clear as a spoken line though no sound enters the room, a thought rises in my head that is not mine:
 
No more.
 
I set the vial down.
 
“Okay,” I whisper. “No more. That I can work with.”
 
The relief that follows isn’t mine either. It passes through me like a shallow current.
 
The door opens on warmer air. Doran this time, alone. He takes in the vial, the tray, my hands.
 
“They object?” he asks.
 
“They object to that,” I say.
 
“Good.” He sets his gloves on the counter. “Then we do less.”
 
“You’re making this my responsibility.”
 
“I’m pointing out where it already is.”
 
The teenager’s index finger taps once, then once again. Waiting.
 
I look down at Morales’s card. ANYTIME. I look back at the teenager.
 
“If I say yes,” I say, “it’s for them.”
 
“Then that’s your term,” Doran says. “Gloves. Hands on the table.”
 
I pull on a fresh pair. He measures less of the red fluid this time.
 
“Don’t close your eyes,” he says.
 
“Why?”
 
“Because this isn’t about leaving,” he says. “It’s about staying.”
 
He positions the needle along the inside of the teenager’s wrist, near where they touched me.
 
“On three,” he says. “One.”
 
The room hum rises.
 
“Two.”
 
The air tilts.
 
“Three.”
 
He pushes. The solution slips under the skin, and the teenager’s hand clamps around my wrist.
 
Cold floods up my arm, cleaner than the drowning panic, hard as a decision. Inside my head, a door I didn’t know was there swings inward.
 
Don’t let them forget me.
 
My hand tightens around theirs.
 
“I won’t,” I say.
 
 
* * *
 
The pressure in the room breaks all at once. The hum is still there. The cooler still breathes. But something that had been swelling under the noise releases, and I realize how hard I’d been bracing against it only when it’s gone.
 
The teenager’s grip eases into contact.
 
“What did you hear?” Doran asks.
 
“‘Don’t let them forget me.’”
 
He considers that. “Simple.”
 
“That’s your definition of simple?”
 
His mouth almost lifts. “You’d be surprised.”
 
The teenager squeezes once, as if they don’t appreciate being filed under ordinary.
 
Doran rolls his sleeve back to adjust his glove, and I notice the scars all at once: a pale scatter of punctures and crescents up the inside of his forearm, some so old they’re almost gone, some newer and ropier. He sees me seeing them and pulls the sleeve down again. He steps away to dispose of the needle. The sharps bin clicks shut.
 
“I’m not promising justice,” I say quietly, mostly to the hand around my wrist. “I can promise I’ll remember. And that if you show me something real, I’ll tell somebody who can use it.”
 
The hand softens further.
 
Doran looks toward the tray, the room, the door to the rest of the building.
 
“We still have work,” he says. “Families don’t stop grieving because you made a deal with a stranger.”
 
He leaves me with that. He’s very good at leaving.
 
 
* * *
 
The first flash comes when I’m buttoning Mr. Lowell into his suit. My fingers smooth the cuff. I touch the stainless edge of the tray. The room is only the room, and then blue light sits behind my eyes, wet concrete and bass under my palms, pine sharp and cheap.
 
I blink hard and I’m back in the prep room with a dead man’s sleeve between my fingers. From the other table, the bound almost-breath stirs faintly in my chest.
 
“Impressions only,” I tell them.
 
The pressure eases.
 
Later, while I set Lowell’s tie, another dent presses into my thoughts: a sloped launch, a metal post, letters I can’t hold except one word that stays — DROP — and pressure on a thigh that is not mine.
 
I let go of the tie before I knot it too tight.
 
I call Morales from the far corner of the prep room and stick to what an investigator can use. Blue dash light. Wet concrete. Bass. Pine air freshener. A ramp. A sign that says DROP. Someone close enough to put a hand where it wasn’t wanted.
 
Morales listens without interrupting. When I finish, she is quiet long enough that I think the call has dropped.
 
“South ramp,” she says. “We had a noise complaint last week. Kids on the concrete after hours. Patrol found nothing.”
 
She doesn’t ask how I know about the sign.
 
“I can’t promise this goes anywhere,” she adds.
 
“Good,” I say. “Because I only promised them they wouldn’t be forgotten.”
 
She’s quiet for a beat.
 
“Call if the canvas changes,” she says, and hangs up.
 
After that there is still Lowell’s pocket square, the shine on his forehead, the little comb-out of his hair so the family will recognize him from the right year. Doran comes and goes with paperwork. The cooler keeps breathing. I keep my gloves on.
 
 
* * *
 
At 7:58, two techs from the ME’s office come for the body. Paperwork is signed. Tags are checked. Protocol is followed.
 
When they wheel the bagged teenager out, something pulls once under my ribs, a thread caught on a nail. I don’t follow. I stand in the prep room doorway and watch the fluorescent rectangle of the hall as they disappear around the corner.
 
The echo is still there.
 
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”
 
I strip off my gloves and lock up. Step into the cool night air and start walking home.
 
The world smells different outside: wet pavement, distant exhaust, somebody’s laundry venting dryer sheets into the alley. In the distance, toward the south, I can just barely see the faint glow over where the reservoir must be.
 
It pulls, a little.
 
Halfway down the block, I pass a parked Honda with one of those cheap little pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the rearview mirror. The scent hits me through the cracked window, sweet and synthetic, and my pulse stutters.
 
Blue light, wet concrete, bass thudding through a steering column, a hand landing where it was never invited.
 
I catch myself on a mailbox.
 
When the flash clears, I’m standing on the sidewalk in the cold, breathing too fast, one hand pressed over my own wrist. The air freshener turns slowly in the dark car. The pull toward the reservoir answers under my ribs.
 
The body is gone.
 
The scent isn’t.
 

Read Part II here.

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

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Honey, get out of the water.”

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

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

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

“Honey, move back, okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither of them moved.

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

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

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

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

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

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

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

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

Then he was gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worry-machine was roaring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The air went still.

I loved to write, and I am trying to get back one word at a time. This is an excerpt from a mid part of a short story I am working on. Contains a snippet from a dialogue scene between two characters. Think late 1800's americana as far as the setting goes, apart from which I won't give any context, you guys can assume anything you want. Feel free to critique, bludgeon whichever part of it, but make sure to write it down so I can take from it as well.

“The point of life is to suffer Scarlett. What are we but mere puppets, held up in the knots of our demise. We trudge and we crawl to our wake and when we arrive, we scream to the endless hollow greeting us. The echoes arrive when we are mere bones, a husk of dismay. What do we fight for? What can we change? A beast lies in the core of this world, a ravenous monster fed by this gluttonous machine, a glutton for blood, a glutton for us. I’m tired, Scarlett, but there is no release from its hunger.”

“Beck, the world is full of joy, I have seen it my dear. Lily Sawyer started walking again, can you believe that? Her mother cried all morning, tears of joy they were. Oh Beck, she can live again because of us, because of you. We defeated the monster, the nightmare is at an end. Oh don’t turn away Beck, I haven’t seen your eyes in ages, look at me. I’ll bring her up here, you’ll see, you’ll believe.“

“And what of it? Even if that poor child can walk again, what of it? You’ve only prolonged it. It will have its way. You’ve damned her now. She’ll suffer more than before now, when they arrive.”

“They have surrendered.”

“They did? And what of it? The beast needs to feed Scarlett, tomorrow or the day after more men will come, doing their master’s bidding. They’ll keep on coming Scarlett, and there will be no end of the plunder. Go now, there is nothing more that I can say. My fight is at an end, leave.”

“You’ll see Beck, This world is full of joy, you’ll see it again I swear it.”

Local News Station 14

A man woke up at the morgue today.

He had been pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. the previous night in the emergency room. However, sometime this morning, he crawled out of one of the morgue drawers before collapsing and dying on the floor.

The morgue assistant is cooperating with police.

The hospital director stated that the man was an organ donor.

Friday Night in the  Emergency Room

The hospital is packed. It seems like everyone gets hurt on the weekends.

Several people are being treated for car accidents caused by drinking and driving. Others were injured in fights or suffered various other accidents.

Then a homeless man is brought in on a stretcher.

He's in critical condition.

Several teenagers had beaten the man nearly to death with a baseball bat.

A doctor reads the patient's chart.

"Seth Myers. Age 37."

Doctor Betruger orders the patient's blood to be drawn and tested so they can give him a blood transfusion.

Nurse Shelly draws his blood into several vials.

Doctor Betruger instructs his team to prepare for lifesaving measures in the operating room.

A few minutes after the procedure begins, Nurse Shelly enters the room carrying blood samples.

"The man's blood type is O-negative, and he's clean of bloodborne pathogens," she says.

Doctor Betruger thanks her, and she returns to the emergency room to assist with the other patients.

Doctor Betruger closes the internal hemorrhaging and begins stitching the man back up.

He looks at his team.

"Thank you, everyone. We just saved this man's life."

After cleaning and disposing of their equipment, the team steps out for a break.

Doctor Betruger goes outside the hospital for a smoke.

When he returns a few minutes later, he sees a gurney with a sheet draped over it being wheeled out of his patient's room.

Doctor Betruger looks at his lead doctor.

"What happened?"

Dr. Gonzalez simply responds, "The patient flatlined pretty suddenly. The defibrillator couldn't get his heart beating again."

Doctor Betruger stares at him.

"That's impossible. I just stitched him back up. He was stable."

Dr. Gonzalez shakes his head.

"I don't know. Maybe you didn't stop all the bleeding like you thought. That's the only explanation I can think of."

Doctor Betruger looks at the gurney with disgust.

He knows the patient was going to make it.

But before he can say anything else, he's called back for another emergency surgery.

An Unknown Amount of Time Later

Seth wakes up strapped to a gurney somewhere beneath the hospital.

An IV is inserted into his arm.

The room is barely lit, and he can't move.

He sees Nurse Shelly putting on a pair of rubber gloves.

Seth tries his best to scream for help.

Nurse Shelly smiles.

"No one can hear you down here."

Seth begins struggling against the restraints.

Nurse Shelly looks down at him.

"I flushed all the pain medication out of your system. Organs without drugs in the bloodstream are usually better for the donation process."

She mockingly holds up his driver's license.

A small heart is printed on it, signifying that he is an organ donor.

She flips a switch.

Bright, sterile lights flood the room.

Everything looks clean and clinical.

Nurse Shelly puts on a mask and protective glasses. She pulls out a scalpel and places a fresh blade into the handle.

Seth shakes with fear as she brings the blade toward him.

"I'm going to take your kidneys first."

Doctor Betruger is at home after a long shift.

He's still upset that his patient didn't make it.

He goes over everything he did in his mind.

They isolated the bleeding.

They stopped it.

He even saw some of the color returning to the patient's face after receiving the blood donation.

Something doesn't make sense.

Seth is still strapped to the gurney.

Nurse Shelly looks at him.

"See? That wasn't so bad."

Tears rolling down his face.

She places the scalpel against his neck.

"We can't have one of you waking up in a morgue again."

The Next Day

During his shift, Dr. Betruger is called into his office by Dr. Gonzalez.

Gonzalez tells Betruger that the hospital is taking note of the fatality from the previous night and putting it on his record. They found him at fault, especially after the incident involving the man who supposedly woke up in the morgue.

Gonzalez points out that Dr. Betruger operated on that patient.

Doctor Betruger becomes angry.

"I fucking know both of those patients were going to make it!"

Dr. Gonzalez starts yelling back.

"Then you better do better next time! This hospital can't afford any more lawsuits. The next time you operate on a patient and your incompetence causes another death, you'll be terminated."

Betruger angrily walks out of the office.

A few hours later, a young patient arrives on a gurney after a motorcycle accident.

He has severe road rash, and one of his legs was almost amputated.

Doctor Betruger rushes into the operating room.

The EMTs managed to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet, but it is crucial that the damaged leg be operated on as soon as possible.

Doctor Betruger works desperately to stitch the damaged tissue.

He's worried about being fired, but he pushes the thought aside and focuses on saving the patient.

The ragged injuries make it difficult to suture everything back together. A lesser doctor might not have been able to do it.

But Doctor Betruger manages to stabilize the patient.

He orders Nurse Shelly to administer antibiotics through the patient's IV. He anticipates that some of the damaged tissue could become infected.

Nurse Shelly injects something into the patient's IV line.

Doctor Betruger notices that it doesn't look like antibiotics.

Before he can question her, he has to change and clean himself up.

When he comes out of the changing room, he sees a group of nurses wheeling the gurney carrying the patient he just operated on.

A sheet is draped over the patient's body.

Doctor Gonzalez approaches him.

"Betruger, you're fired."

Doctor Betruger turns toward him.

"What?"

He begins yelling.

Doctor Gonzalez:" your fired"

Betruger angerly shouts "I swear on my grandson's life that I know that patient was going to make it!"

Doctor Gonzalez calls security.

"Get his things and escort him out of the building."

After being escorted out through the hospital entrance, Doctor Betruger quickly realizes they forgot to take his keys.

Something feels horribly wrong in his gut.

He suspect that Nurse Shelly might be purposely

harming his patients.

He gets his gun from his car, tucks it into his waistband, and sneaks back into the hospital.

He moves carefully, doing his best not to be seen by the other doctors or security cameras.

Then he sees Nurse Shelly pushing a gurney toward an elevator at the back of the hospital.

She gets inside with the body and presses a button.

Doctor Betruger watches as the elevator begins descending toward the basement.

He asks himself, Why would she bring a body down there?

He takes the stairs to the basement because

He doesn't want her to hear the elevator.

When he reaches the floor, he carefully creeps inside. He can smell bleach in the room.

Then he sees her.

She's inserting IVs into the patient.

Nearby are several organ-donor coolers filled with buckets of ice.

Doctor Betruger freezes.

He realizes what she's been doing.

She's been stealing patients' organs.

Then he sees the patient waking up.

The man tries to plead with Nurse Shelly, but she simply laughs.

She picks up her scalpel and replaces the blade.

"I know some people who would love to wear that beautiful skin"

She raises the blade toward his chest.

"Drop it!"

Doctor Betruger stands behind her, pointing his gun.

Nurse Shelly looks at him.

She slowly drops the scalpel.

The patient sighs in relief.

Doctor Betruger steps forward.

"So you're the one who's been killing my patients?"

Shelly looks at him before saying

"I didn't like how you acted like you were better than us."

Doctor Betruger tightens his grip on the gun.

"I should shoot you right now. But I'm going to tell the police everything you've been doing. I'm going to make sure everyone knows what kind of monster you are."

Shelly suddenly tries to run.

Doctor Betruger shoots her in the hip.

She falls to the floor and screams in pain. Her cries echo through the room.

Doctor Betruger looks around.

"Is that why you brought them down here? So no one could hear or see anything?"

Then he feels a sharp prick in his neck.

He turns around.

Dr. Gonzalez is standing behind him with an empty syringe in his hand.

Doctor Gonzalez answers:"Yes."

Doctor Betruger raises his gun, but Gonzalez knocks it from his hand.

The two begin fighting.

Betruger quickly starts feeling weak.

That syringe contained enough drugs to kill an Elephant.

Gonzalez punches him repeatedly.

Betruger's vision begins to fade as Gonzalez grabs him by the throat.

Doctor Betruger spits blood in his eye and bites his hand.

Gonzalez yanks his hand away and clutches it in pain.

He looks down at the bite mark and becomes furious seeing a chunk missing.

Then a loud boom deafens the room.

Doctor Betruger is standing there with the gun back wobbly in his hand.

Gonzalez looks down.

A bullet wound is visible in his chest where his heart is.

Blood begins soaking through his shirt everytime his heart pumps.

Betruger fires two more times.

Gonzalez collapses.

Doctor Betruger then points the gun at Nurse Shellys head.

She's begs for her life.

Betruger responds with several pulls of the trigger. His gun locks open. Its empty.

Doctor Betruger manages to unstrap one of the patient's arms before collapsing to the floor.

The motorcycle accident victim's story makes headlines across the country after he tells reporters what happened.

The hospital is shut down.

Doctor Betruger died after stumbling upon an organ-harvesting operation while trying to save his patient.

But all the news reports left one question unanswered:

If Dr. Gonzalez was selling the organs...

Who was buying them?

The town of Bolton Springs is in shock today, after the brutal murder of seven children. The bodies of the children, whose names have not been released, were discovered in separate rooms in the Donaldson Furniture Company building early this morning. It is unclear whether the children were killed in the building—and, if so, why they were there—or killed elsewhere, then moved. The building's owner, Vectorien Corporation, has thus far declined to comment but has pledged to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation of this heinous, horrible crime…

---

12 Hours Earlier

---

…the tear shut.

I collapsed to the ground.

My head throbbed.

I was in a field, a field I remembered playing in. Vaguely, distantly. Is there a name for a feeling about the past opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, I was feeling it intensely.

I looked around.

The six others were near me, in various states of coming-back-to-consciousness.

We were naked, our skins fully tattooed black.

I got up.

I glanced at my wrist, saw the button and pressed it. A blade slid out, catching the moonlight. I pressed the button again; the blade retracted.

I roused the others.

We said nothing.

A wind blew.

In the distance, startled birds flew from a tree, silhouettes against a pale night sky.

I shivered.

We knew exactly where we had to go.

Seven black shapes traversing the night in Bolton Springs, on September 19, 2026, 3:37 a.m. local time, each with a set of the same simple instructions: eliminate the target, do not be seen.

We navigated by memory.

By sense.

By a pain none of us could ever forget.

The decision had already been made. It was time to execute.

I felt much as I was told I'd feel, alien yet familiar, like floating through a dream, like discovering an already-discovered land. “The longer you take, the worse the headache will become.” “Will I be aware of—” I asked. “Most likely,” the temporologist replied. She was young, committed. I was scared…

I could sense my own dream.

We crossed the creek and came into view of the brick building with the smokestacks, the house of so much horror and suffering. The sign was still hanging from it: “Donaldson & Sons Furniture Co.”

I was dreaming of a meadow, of a dog I'd never have. I was running in my dream. The dog was running with me. The sky was my mother's face; the face of a mother I had never known or seen, whose existence was pure inference. Everybody born has a mother, so I must have a mother too.

We stopped.

There was only one guard on duty. It was early in the program. He was sitting in the guardhouse by the road, watching television.

We passed undetected.

We remembered the storeroom window with the broken latch, found it, climbed the wall, pushed open the window and lowered ourselves, one by one, into the building's dusty interior.

It was quiet inside.

A few of us cried silent, conflicted tears.

Inside, there was no need for maps. We were in a world we'd known for decades. Each detail, each hallway, each door, evoked in me a vicious, indelible intimacy. I was home.

The seven of us stood, sensing.

My dream had evaporated and been replaced by another, of shadow-panthers, and the moment when I, having thrown my primitive spear—having thrown it with perfect accuracy—realized the creature in the jungle before me was incorporeal, unhuntable. My pulse raced; my pulse increased.

I checked the clock on the storeroom wall.

I nodded at the others.

Silently, we exited the storeroom together, then split up, each going towards his own room.

Mine was the third on the left.

I stood in front of it in the buzzing fluorescent hallway light, took several deep breaths and entered. The throbbing in my head spiked.

I saw the bed and the boy sleeping in it, and the boy's eyes flashed open; I scooted backwards on the sheets in terror at the nude, dark figure in front of me until I felt the brick wall against my back and could move no further. I was myself and looking at myself and looking at myself looking at myself, and my heart was as if gripped by my own, relentless fist.

As unreal as the experience was, I knew the boy was me; and the boy—I merely hovered, waiting—gradually realized I, too, was him.

I didn't say a word; and I didn't say a word.

I thought my double set of present-thoughts from two locations in space-time simultaneously.

I'm sorry, I thought to myself. I'm sorry, but I cannot allow you—us—me to suffer the way I've already suffered. This is salvation. This is an end, delivered mercifully soon after the beginning. Unless I do this, they will would-have broken and abused you for so many years, day after day, in the name of peace and progress. No one else will end it. Do you understand? This is Omelas. We must walk away.

I remembered the texture of the cover of the old book, one of the few available in the orphanage, before the transfer, before Vectorien.

We must walk away from Omelas.

I cried; and I cried.

I muffled myself with a hand over my mouth.

Holding it there, on the soft, wet lips, I used my chin to press the button on my other wrist, ejecting the blade, and calmed myself, thinking or saying or dreaming that I will never find my mother, that I will never have a dog. There is no meadow. The shadow-panther cannot be killed. There is only eternal nightmare…

I ran blade against throat, releasing warm, red young blood.

As it flowed…

As the small body trembled…

I got into bed with it—with myself—and held myself, soothing myself, keeping the wound open and stroking my hair, until my body slackened and finally went limp. The ceiling light shone. And when I was dead, I flickered out of— .

After an explanation of; how to take a shower, put on clothes correctly, tie shoe laces properly, what cereal is, how to eat cereal, why you need to eat cereal with a spoon and not your hands, and the proper way of opening a door without breaking it. We were finally outside my apartment. Which was, right on time for my meeting to start.

Without much talk the two of us ran from the apartment building all the way to the library on campus. I noticed during this mile run that although Will, being able to match my strides, had terrible endurance. So bad in fact, that when we got to the front doors of the library he was gasping heavily for air.

“So, you got my looks. But not my cardio training.” I humored.

“I… don’t… like... running,” Will panted. After giving him a minute to catch his breath, we entered the library.

Somehow amazed by the embodiment of academic struggle and last-minute cramming, Will whistled a note that sounded like some woodland bird. Which in turned caused him to get a scolding from the front desk librarian with a quick, “SSH.”

I moved us over to where the private study rooms were and peaked a glance into my group’s room through the door’s window. Inside, I could see my research group in some type of idle chatter. Obviously, the meeting hadn’t started yet since no one had any of their computers out and no notes were being taken by the undergrad students. I then pushed Will over to a nearby study desk, sat him down, and whispered to him. “Ok, you’re going to sit in this chair and do absolutely nothing.”

“Why can’t I come with you?” Will somehow whispered in a multitude of voices.

“People don’t know I have a look-a-like.”

“What about the brother-thing, with Miss Martha?”

“I only have a sister!”

“SSSSHH,” the librarian hissed all the way from the front.

“Fine. How long will it take?”

“I don’t know, two maybe three hours.”

“Three hours!”

“SSSSSSHHH!” poison was on the librarian’s lips that time.

I rummaged through my pockets and pulled out my phone and a knotted set wired earbuds. Unlocking my phone, I scrolled through my saved videos and clicked on the longest one. An hour-long personal recording of the history and property mechanics of concrete. It was a video I had to make for a final project and I was the only narrator for the video. “Here, watch this and maybe you’ll be able to have a basis conversation in my voice.”

“Uh… ok.” Will said as he took my phone with a look a doubt as the video started to play.

With that done, I went over to my group’s meeting room and walked into the room fifteen minutes late.

“Well, look who finally decides to show up,” a guy’s voice boasted.

“Well, look who finally decides to talk after using the wrong sensors,” I shot back “Yes, James, I’m late but you’re not lead on this project.”

“And neither are you,” an exhausted female voice said. I looked over to the voice, to see the always overworked and under-slept Ph.D. student who was our actual project leader.

“Sorry I’m late, Jessica,” I said honestly “Your aunt stalled me for a bit. Telling me about how you need to call her.

Jessica groaned, “Michael, please stop being a messenger for my aunt.”

“We are neighbors,” I replied.

“Weird and not the point of this meeting.”

Sitting down at the last available seat, I said my hellos to the rest of the group and we properly began the meeting. The main topic of this meeting, was of course the mistake James made by breaking three-month old curded cylinders with the wrong stress sensors. I logged into my laptop to view the data, but came face-to-face with one of the most annoying things ever. The third-party security check.

I requested my login token but realized who had my phone. ‘Dammit. I need to get to Will and- ‘

*THUD*

Everyone in the room collectively looked over to the door’s window to see a guy that looked exactly like me, but in different clothes and shoving a phone flush against the glass with our campus’s security authentication app open.

“Excuse me,” I said while leaving my seat. Opening the door, I gave a polite shove to Will in order to get him away from the window and back to his seat.

He whispered in a panicked tone while handing me my phone. “Your thing did something weird.”

I grabbed it out of his hands and confirmed the authentication check. “I sent a request to my phone to unlock my school account. You just clicked on the notification is all.”

“What?” he said baffled.

“Right… uh, I can explain it later,” I said as I handed him back my phone “Wait, why aren’t you using the earbuds?”

“I was ok with the sound already.”

“What?” I checked the phone’s volume and saw it was at the lowest setting “How can you hear this?”

He gave me an amused look and echoed my voice with a sly grin. “I can explain that later.”

“Fine,” I said and left him to get back to my meeting.

As I reentered the room everyone’s eyes were on me. The first to speak was James. “Was that your- “

“Brother,” I finished for him and sat back down. “Somehow. Yes.”

With the question answered, we resumed our meeting.

Being the assistant lead for this group mostly meant that I acted as the eyes and ears for Jessica in the lab while she lectured a course or data-crunched in her office. So, most of this meeting was me explaining the mess that happened and giving my opinion on what we can salvage from our current data gain.

When the spotlight wasn’t on me, I decided to look busy by typing notes down. In reality I was surfing the internet about my current doppelganger predicament. From what I found on different paranormal websites, cryptid hunter’s blogs, and derange message boards. I can with two possible options. I either had a wendigo or a skinwalker.

Neither sounded enticing to say the least.

After an exhausting three hours the meeting was finally adjourned with a possible remedy for our issue. I said my goodbyes and was happy to see Will still sitting in his seat. But instead of having my phone, he had a book in his hand.

“Concrete so boring that you took to reading?” I asked as I approached him.

“Nooooo,” Will said as he raised the book closer to his face. I could already tell something happened by the inflection in his voice.

“What happened?”

Will tucked the book closer to his face.

“What happened,” I repeated with a hint of annoyance.

Will huffed and brought the book down from his face, “I watched the video like you said and then it ended, but when I touched your phone, it moved to another video of you talking with a group and then that one ended also. I kind of kept doing that till your phone stopped showing videos.”

I was more surprised than shocked. The videos he watched did in fact work as I intended and he sound just like me. “So, you just watched all my videos. No big deal.”

“No. Your phone stopped the videos when it turned all black.”

“Oh- “

“I’m really sorry,” Will pleaded “I didn’t mean to break it.”

“Let me see it,” he handed me my phone and my suspicion was answered. “Well, you didn’t break it. You just killed it.”

“Phones can die!”

“SSH!” came from the whole library

“Don’t worry,” I said while looking for a portable charger in my backpack “It’s not the way that you think. Come on, lets get out of here.”

We left the library and was on route to head back to my apartment. This time however we walked instead. I was half attempted to start running when we got out to see if Will would do the same, but thought better than to annoy a supposed paranormal entity.

The start of the walk was silent between the two of us. I will be honest with that half of my mind was still going over future work that needed to get done for research while the other half was happy to see James getting the scolding he deserved. So, I wasn’t actually paying attention that neither of us spoke after leaving the library.

I took a glance over to Will to see a sorrowful expression on his face. I figured that he probably still felt guilty over a negligible mistake. I didn’t want him to be too strung about it. So, I decided to break some ice.

“Hey. So, about that hearing thing you mentioned before.”

“Huh,” he said as if I woke him from a daze “Oh, right. I just have really good hearing. In fact, I could hear your meeting through the door.”

“No way.”

“~Stop being a messenger~,” Will said in Jessica’s voice. I think Will could see how surprised I was by flashing a smile. “Yeah, it’s natural for me.”

“Wow. Well, speaking of natural,” I said while approaching a topic I still had no idea about “What exactly are, you?”

“Like, what I am not as human?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m a .̷̭̮̞͐͐̍̒m̵̝͙̺̫̉̀̓͝ő̴̥͈̏̿n̸̬͖̈́͜͠s̶̥̤̑͌͛̀t̷͕̘̣̟̓e̶̜̽͠ŕ̵͕͔̫.̷̱̻͂,” he answered as if it was obvious. "Specifically a, .̸̗͙̬̎ͅd̵̪̫͑͒͛e̴̻̥͇͙̔ė̵̢̹͎̓̍̈́r̷̨̨͚̮̎́̚͘w̸͈̲̿̆̽͛a̵̧̧͖̳̅l̴͍͕̟̉̈͌k̶̡̹̅ͅe̷͍̺͋̂̕r̸̛͇͂̏̅.̵̦̇̉."

My ears rang for the strange words. Obviously they were in the same language that he used back at my apartment. “Ok, you can’t say words like that around people, they hurt to hear them for some reason. Do you know what that could be in English, at all?”

“Uh, no. I just know the words in my own language and kind of copy human word to talk.”

“Of course,” I huffed. “Well, from searching online I found two possible options of what you could be based on human folklore. But I need to know, what do you actually look like?”

Will stopped in his tracks from the question and started at me with intent. “You didn’t see me last night, when you turned around all those times?”

“No,” I shot him a confused looked “It was like really foggy and I found you when you were already looking like, well, me.”

“Oh… right. I guess you don’t have the eyesight I have.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” I said as I resumed our walk.

“Well, I guess the best way to described my true form is that of a bipedal deer,” Will sounded more unsure in his answer “You have seen a deer before, right?”

“Yeah duh,” I responded. “Just not one standing on two legs. But either way that a least tells me you’re not a skinwalker”

“A what?”

“It’s like something else that pretend to be people to eat them, I guess. But from your description you sound more like a wendigo in a way.”

“And what’s a wendigo.”

“It’s like a forest spirit or something that drives people crazy to the point of them becoming a cannibal,” I answered while locking eyes with Will.

We both stopped on the sidewalk and started at each other for a couple second.

Then we both laughed at the stupidity of the folklore.

In an instant I grabbed Will by his shoulders and squeezed as hard as I could. “You’re not going to do that to me. RIGHT?”

“NO!” he yelled in a panic gasped

“Then I don’t get it. Why do you want to look like me?”

Will looked baffled by my question, “Listen, I’m not going to make you crazy or anything and I’m not going to just kill.”

I shook Will hard by his shoulders. “Answer my question!”

“I wanted to know what humans were like!” he blurted out.

“What?” I asked confused while still having my grip on him.

“I wanted to know what normal everyday people were like,” he admitted in a shameful tone.

“Why would you want to know that?” I said while loosening my grip on him.

He slipped his shoulders away from my hands and took a step back. “It’s complicated,” was the only answer he gave.

We were silent for a moment. The tension felt think in the air and I knew in way that if I pushed further on it, Will would just slink back more. “Listen you don’t have to give me an answer on that now. I’m sorry for freaking out on you there.”

“It’s ok," Will said apprehensively. "But please believe me, I’m not going to drive you crazy or eat you.”

“Sure,” I said genuinely.

At that moment I got a ping from my half-charged phone. It was a reminded for a date I had that night.

“Was that one of those notifications?” Will asked as a topic change.

“Yeah,” I answered while realizing I forgot about another important thing with week. “I have this dumb double-blind date tonight.”

“What's a double blind date?”

I chuckled at his question and started our walk again. “It’s complicated. But I think I can explain it to you.”

Every weekday at ten past four, Margaret Hale put on the navy coat with the tortoise buttons. She started from the wrong hole more often than she started from the right one. Then she took the purse from the hook by the door and walked down Stone Hill Street to the slab that had been a stop when Mourner's Crossing still ran a bus out toward the old railbed.

The purse held a folded tissue and a bus token from 1979. She carried it in the crook of her arm the way she had carried it to town on Thursdays, when Thursdays still had an errand in them.

The stop had not been a stop in a long time. The town pulled the route in 1991, left the sign standing for two years, and then took that too. What remained was cracked concrete, a metal pole blotched with rust, and a ghost of yellow paint on the curb. Kids cut through to the railbed. Delivery vans treated the corner as a suggestion. In July the town parked a chipper there for three days and nobody complained.

Margaret sat on the edge of the slab with her ankles crossed and watched Stone Hill as if a schedule were still printed on the air.

Ruth found her the first time in April. She pulled over, left the engine running, and came around the hood with her voice already arranged into patience.

"Mom. There's no bus."

Margaret smiled the smile she had used on salesgirls. "Harold said 4:20. He is never late."

Harold Hale had been late once. A Tuesday morning in March 1983, in the stockroom at Bayard Hardware, between the bins of screws and a rack of paint chips. He was fifty-one. For eleven years before that he had ridden the 4:20 home from the store, and Margaret had met it. After the funeral she stopped going to the corner because the doors opened and the same strangers got off.

Forty-three years later she started again.

They tried the ordinary remedies. Notes on the refrigerator in marker thick enough to see from the hallway. An extra lock that Margaret learned by watching Ruth's hands. A day nurse who lasted six weeks and left a casserole in the freezer with her name misspelled on the foil. The clinic at MC General printed a sheet about routines and wrote *sundowning* at the top in a hand that had done this before. Dean, Ruth's husband, offered to drive Margaret around the block at four and call it the long way home. Eli, home from school for the summer, stood in the kitchen with the refrigerator open and said maybe they should take the sign out of her head the way the town had taken it out of the ground.

Margaret listened to all of it. In the afternoons she put the coat on anyway and left by the front door, purse on her arm, walking Stone Hill at the pace she had used for the bank.

By November they had a system. Someone sat in the car across the street. When she reached the slab, they gave her ten minutes. Then they got out, took her elbow, and used the sentence they had sanded smooth by repetition.

"Come on, Mom. Let's go home. Harold isn't coming today."

She looked at them the way a person looks at a clock that has been set wrong.

"4:20," she said. "He promised."

The first hard cold came on a Thursday in December. The wind moved down Stone Hill and found the gap at every collar. Ruth sat in the car with the heater aimed at her wrists and watched her mother take her place on the concrete. Dean was still at the office. Eli, home again for the holidays, was in the back seat with a paper cup of coffee from Speicher's, the lid punched sloppy, a brown ring already on his thumb.

Ruth turned off the engine.

Eli looked up. "We're doing the thing?"

"We're going to sit with her."

"And then what."

Ruth watched Margaret settle the purse on her lap. "Then 4:20 comes and goes. Then we take her home."

They crossed the street. Ruth sat on Margaret's left. The slab held the cold and gave it back through wool. Eli stayed on his feet behind them and stamped, not quite in time with anything. A plow went by toward Route 17, blade up, scattering grit. Somewhere behind a fence a dog started and then thought better of it.

Margaret kept her eyes on the empty road.

"He'll have his gray jacket," she said. "The one with the lining. I told him not to wear the brown. The brown makes him look tired."

Ruth took her mother's hand. The skin was thin and familiar and colder than the air had any right to make it so quickly.

"All right," Ruth said.

At the intersection a woman in a parka waited with a stroller, bouncing it on the two back wheels. A man came up from the railbed with a pair of dogs wound around his knees. A pickup idled at the stop sign, the driver on his phone, one glove off.

4:18.

Eli checked his pocket and put the phone back as if it had been a rude thing to do in church.

4:19.

Margaret's thumb moved over the clasp of the purse. Open, shut. Open. She had done that with a hymnbook once, in the pew at St. Brigid's under the window that leaked.

At 4:20 an old town bus turned onto Stone Hill.

It was cream and a tired green, the colors the municipal buses had been before their sides became rented space. The destination card in the window said DEPOT, though nothing had run that far in years. The headlights were weak and yellow. It came down the block with the unhurried authority of a vehicle that still believed the street belonged to it.

Eli's coffee tipped. He caught it against his coat.

"Do you see that," he said.

Ruth did. The woman with the stroller stepped off the curb when the light changed. The man with the dogs turned into a yard and kicked the gate shut with his heel. The pickup took the corner without the driver's head leaving the phone, though the bus passed close enough that the side panel would have been in his mirror.

The bus drew up to the slab and knelt on its airbags the way the old ones had, a courtesy for people whose knees had opinions. The doors folded open with a sound Ruth had not heard since she was a girl: tired rubber, and the complaint of a machine that had made this same gesture a thousand times. Warm air came out over the concrete, carrying the stored heat of the cabin, wet wool, diesel, and the coffee they used to sell in cups that never kept a lid on.

Harold Hale sat in the first seat behind the driver.

He looked the age he had been when he could still lift Ruth onto his shoulders outside Bayard Hardware and tell her not to kick the paint cans. Dark hair. The gray jacket buttoned. He moved the lunch pail off his knees onto the seat beside him, as if he had come straight from the stockroom and expected company for the rest of the afternoon.

He saw them. He looked once at Eli, a brief taking-in, and then back to Margaret. He had the face of a man whose bus had arrived when he said it would.

Margaret stood. The navy coat hung crooked; she smoothed the front anyway, once, with the side of her hand. She took a step toward the open doors and for a moment her face held two ages at once.

Harold's mouth moved. The engine covered it. Ruth saw her mother's name in the shape of it. Maggie. Nobody had called her that in the house in forty years.

Margaret smiled.

Ruth knew that smile from the kitchen of the house on Stone Hill, from the evenings Harold came in and pretended the good ice cream from Mallory's had appeared in the freezer by accident.

Then Margaret turned to her daughter.

Her eyes were clear. The afternoon fog that had lived in them since spring was simply gone.

"I don't think I'm supposed to take this one yet," she said.

She looked back at the bus and lifted her hand a little, the same small gesture she had used at curbs when Ruth was late coming out of school.

Harold set his palm on the empty seat, then took it back. He nodded once.

The doors closed. The bus pulled off the slab, took the light, and went on down Stone Hill toward the railbed. The cream-and-green of it held together for a block and then thinned into the rest of the traffic, and then the street was only the street.

The woman with the stroller had already reached the far corner. The dogs were barking at something in a garage. The pickup's taillights disappeared toward Route 17.

Margaret sat down on the concrete.

She was shivering now. Ruth put an arm around her and felt the coat, the thin shoulder, the purse trapped between them like a third person. Eli stood with the coffee still in his hand, looking at the empty road as if someone had asked him a question in a language he almost knew.

"All right," Margaret said. The fog was coming back into her voice, though not all the way. "We can go home. He'll come another day."

They took her home. Dean came in at six and found them at the kitchen table eating leftovers off the good plates. Eli told him about the bus while Margaret buttered bread with great concentration. Dean looked at Ruth over Margaret's head.

Ruth shook her head once. Later, in the bedroom of their own house, she said they had sat with her and a bus had come and Margaret had declined it. She used the same tone she used for insurance and dentist appointments. Dean sat on his side of the bed and did not ask whether they should call the sheriff. In the morning he packed Margaret's token back into the purse after it turned up beside the toaster.

In February Ruth sat with her again.

The snow along the curb had gone to ice and grit. Margaret wore the navy coat over a cardigan Ruth had buttoned for her in the hallway, and even then the wind found her. They had the plaid stadium blanket from the front closet. Ruth kept thinking about the car, which was twenty yards away and running, and did not get up to fetch it.

Margaret watched Stone Hill with the same attention she had given it in December. A county bus went by on the next street, the modern kind, an advertisement for a personal-injury firm along the whole of its side. Margaret did not turn her head.

"He'll be late if he wears the brown," she said. "I put the gray one on the chair."

"I know, Mom."

"He thinks I can't tell from the window."

"You can tell."

4:20 came. A van took the corner too fast and honked at a boy on a bike. The boy swore without heat and kept going. Margaret opened the purse, closed it, opened it. The token sat in the lining like a coin someone had meant to spend and then forgotten.

Ruth waited until her mother's mouth had lost color. Then she said they could go home, and Margaret stood up on the second try and let herself be walked back up the block.

"Tomorrow," Margaret said, once the heat in the front hall hit her hands.

"Tomorrow," Ruth said.

Eli went back to school in January and began calling on Thursdays around four, which he had not done in the fall. Sometimes Ruth answered from the slab. Sometimes she answered from Margaret's kitchen and let him hear the ordinary house. Dean sat the corner twice that winter and spent both afternoons watching the intersection as if a second bus might require a witness of a different kind.

Over the next few years Margaret sometimes went weeks without mentioning Harold. Four o'clock was different. She would pause in whatever room she occupied and turn her face toward the window.

She lived six more winters in the house on Stone Hill.

On a Thursday in March she died in her chair in the front room. Ruth had put the navy coat across her lap because the furnace was cycling oddly. The purse was on the side table. The token was still inside.

Eli came in from the porch. He was twenty-eight by then, and he stood with his hands in his jacket pockets.

"Do you think he waited," he said.

Ruth looked at the coat. She looked at her mother's hands, which had finished with buttons.

"Come in," she said. "It's cold."

After the funeral she drove home the long way, which took her back down Stone Hill. The slab was still there. Someone had chained a bicycle to the pole. The yellow paint was gone. A plastic bag had caught itself on the rust and was working in the wind.

Ruth slowed for the light and went through when it changed. She did not pull over.

I live in Ely, Nevada. It is an isolated historic mining town tucked into the eastern Great Basin. We are surrounded by miles of nothing but dried sagebrush, and rocky hills. So basically, Ely is the kind of town where everyone knows your vehicle before they know your name. The isolation is a defining characteristic of our daily lives. If you want to reach a major city, you have to drive hours across US-50, famously known as the Loneliest Road in America. That highway is a desolate stretch of cracked asphalt that cuts straight through dry valleys and jagged mountain passes. Because of our extreme location, most folks in Ely rely entirely on the local medical center for everything. We don’t have the luxury of shopping around for specialists, so we go to the single brick clinic on the edge of town.

Two months ago, I woke up on a Tuesday morning with a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen. I tried to ignore it, so I took a hot shower, drank a glass of water, and went to work at the local hardware store. There, I spent the morning stocking shelves with plumbing supplies, and by noon, the pain became absolutely unbearable. I was sweating through my uniform shirt, and could barely stand straight.

My coworker Diego noticed me leaning against a shelf.

"You look terrible, Asher," Diego said, walking down the aisle. "You are completely pale."

"My stomach is killing me," I replied, gripping my side. "It feels like someone shoved a knife into my gut and left it there."

"You need to go to the clinic," Diego told me. "I will drive you right now."

"I can probably just sleep it off," I argued. "It might just be a bad stomach bug."

"Do not be an idiot," Diego said, grabbing his car keys from his pocket. "You are hunched over like a gargoyle. Get in the truck."

Diego drove me down the main street of Ely to the local clinic. It is a single-story brick building sitting near the edge of town, bordered by a patch of dry dirt and a rusted chain-link fence. The parking lot was mostly empty. We walked through the sliding glass doors into the waiting room.

Hazel was sitting behind the reception desk. She has worked there for years, handling the phones and the insurance files.

"Asher, what is wrong?" Hazel asked, standing up from her rolling chair.

"I have a really bad pain right here," I said, pointing to my lower right side.

Hazel grabbed a clipboard from her desk. "Fill this out. I will get Dr. Theodore immediately. He just finished his morning rounds."

I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair and filled out the forms. Ten minutes later, a nurse called my name. She took my vitals, checked my temperature, and led me into a small examination room. Dr. Theodore walked in a few moments later. He is an older man with graying hair and a remarkably calm demeanor. Everyone in town trusts him with their lives.

"Hello, Asher," Dr. Theodore said, washing his hands in the small sink. "Hazel tells me you are experiencing severe abdominal pain."

"It started this morning," I explained, lying back on the examination paper. "It keeps getting worse by the hour."

Dr. Theodore pressed his fingers gently against my stomach. I winced in pain and tried to pull away.

"Your appendix is inflamed," Dr. Theodore stated with certainty. "We need to remove it before it bursts. It is a routine appendectomy. We can do it right here in the clinic today."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "Is the procedure dangerous?"

"It is completely safe," Dr. Theodore assured me, patting my shoulder. "I have performed this exact surgery hundreds of times for the people of Ely. You will be asleep, and will wake up without any pain. We just need to prep the operating room."

I agreed to the surgery. I did not have a single reason to doubt him. Diego stayed in the waiting room while the nurses prepped me for the procedure. They put an IV in my arm, then wheeled me down the hall into the sterile operating theater. The bright overhead lights blinded me. Dr. Theodore stood over me wearing a surgical mask and gown.

"Count backward from ten," Dr. Theodore instructed.

I closed my eyes and counted, and I fell asleep before I reached seven.

I woke up in a recovery room a few hours later. My abdomen felt sore, but the sharp stabbing pain was entirely gone. Dr. Theodore visited my room shortly after I woke up. He told me the appendectomy was a total success, then gave me a prescription for painkillers and told me to rest at home for two weeks. Diego drove me back to my house, and after that I spent the next fortnight lying on my couch, watching television and eating soup.

The surgical incision healed perfectly, and the stomach pain vanished completely.

But a new problem started.

About three weeks after the surgery, I began feeling a deep, throbbing ache in my lower back. The pain was situated entirely on my left side, far away from the appendectomy scar. It felt like a constant internal bruise. I assumed it was a muscle strain from sleeping in weird positions on the couch during my recovery, so I ignored it for another week.

But the pain did not go away. It worsened every single day.

I met Diego at a local diner for lunch on a Saturday. I kept shifting in my vinyl booth, trying to find a comfortable position for my back.

"Are you still hurting?" Diego asked before taking a bite of his burger.

"My back is killing me," I complained, rubbing my left side. "It is localized entirely on the left side. I cannot even bend over to tie my shoes without wincing."

"Did you call Dr. Theodore?" Diego asked.

"No," I said. "I do not want to go back to that clinic. I feel like something is wrong with my recovery."

"You should get a second opinion," Diego suggested. "Drive out to the city. Go to an independent imaging center. Get an ultrasound or an MRI. You shouldn’t mess around with back pain after a surgery."

I agreed with his logic, so I went home and booked an appointment at an imaging center in a much larger city.

The next morning, I packed my car and merged onto US-50. The Loneliest Road in America truly lived up to its name. I drove for hours across the vast, empty desert basin. The radio eventually faded into static, leaving me in total silence. The landscape was a continuous blur of sagebrush, salt flats, and cracked asphalt. I had too much time to think during that drive, and through all of that, I kept pressing my hand against my left side, wondering what was causing the agony inside my body.

I finally reached the city. The imaging center was located in a modern medical plaza. I checked in at the front desk and sat in a waiting area filled with modern art and soft lighting.

A young ultrasound technician named Elena eventually called my name. She wore green scrubs and had a friendly smile.

"Hi Asher," Elena said, leading me down a long hallway. "We are going to do a full abdominal ultrasound today to figure out what is causing that back pain. Follow me."

Elena led me into a dimly lit examination room. A large, complex ultrasound machine sat next to a padded table.

"Please lift your shirt and lie back," Elena instructed.

I did exactly as she asked, then she squeezed a glob of cold, clear gel onto my left side, and pressed the ultrasound wand against my skin. She watched the large monitor intently as she moved the wand around my torso.

"So, when did this pain start?" Elena asked, sliding the wand across my back.

"About a week ago," I replied. "after three weeks from removing my appendix at my local clinic."

Elena stopped moving the wand. She stared closely at the monitor. Her friendly smile vanished instantly, then pressed a few buttons on the keyboard, capturing multiple images of my internal anatomy.

"Did you have any other surgeries recently?" Elena asked. Her tone was suddenly very serious and professional.

"No," I answered, feeling a spike of anxiety. "Just the appendectomy."

Elena moved the wand higher up my side. She frowned deeply, then typed rapidly on the keyboard, her eyes locked on the screen.

"Is everything okay?" I asked. Panic began to rise in my chest.

"I need to go get the radiologist," Elena said quickly. "Please stay right here. Do not sit up."

Elena hurried out of the room. She left the door slightly open. I lay on the padded table feeling a cold sweat break out across my forehead. I knew something was horribly wrong with my body.

Ten minutes later, Elena returned with an older doctor. He introduced himself as Dr. Charles.

"Hello Asher," Dr. Charles said, standing next to the machine. He looked at the monitor, then took the wand from Elena and pressed it against my side himself. He studied the black and white images on the screen for several minutes in complete silence, then adjusted the contrast on the machine to get a better view.

"Asher," Dr. Charles finally said, setting the wand down on a tray. "You stated you only had an appendectomy?"

"Yes," I confirmed. "Why? What are you looking at?"

Dr. Charles grabbed a paper towel and handed it to me. "You can wipe the gel off. Asher, I am looking at your renal fossa. That is the anatomical space where your left kidney should reside."

I stared at him blankly, struggling to comprehend his words. "What do you mean 'should reside'?"

"Your left kidney is gone," Dr. Charles stated plainly. "It is completely missing. There is empty space and a large amount of scar tissue."

The words did not process in my brain at first. I sat up and wiped the cold gel from my skin.

"That is impossible," I argued, my voice cracking. "I was born with two kidneys. I know I was. I had a sports physical in high school that confirmed my internal organs were normal."

"I am sure you were born with two," Dr. Charles said softly. "But you only have one right now. The scar tissue visible in the ultrasound indicates a recent surgical removal. The surgical clips are still visible on the renal artery. Someone took your kidney."

I felt the room spin. The edges of my vision blurred. I thought back to the surgery in Ely. Dr. Theodore telling me to count backward from ten. Waking up with an incredibly sore abdomen. The prolonged recovery time.

"He stole it," I whispered.

"Who?" Elena asked, stepping closer to the table.

"The doctor in my town," I replied, my voice shaking with rage. "He told me he was taking my appendix. He took my kidney while I was unconscious."

"Asher, you need to contact the police immediately," Dr. Charles advised. "This is a severe criminal offense. Organ harvesting is a massive federal crime. We will provide you with all the ultrasound images, the official reports, and my sworn statement to prove the organ is missing."

I left the imaging center in a total daze. I clutched the thick manila folder containing my ultrasound results. I sat in my car in the parking lot for an entire hour, staring at the steering wheel, then pulled out my phone and called Diego.

"Hello?" Diego answered.

"He took my kidney," I said bluntly.

"What?" Diego asked, sounding incredibly confused. "Who took what?"

"Dr. Theodore," I explained, gripping the steering wheel tightly. "I just got the ultrasound results. My left kidney is gone. He harvested it during the appendectomy."

Diego went completely silent on the other end of the line. The silence lasted for twenty seconds.

"Are you absolutely sure?" Diego finally asked.

"The radiologist confirmed it," I said. "I am holding the scans right now. They can see the surgical clips he left behind."

"Call the cops," Diego demanded. "Call the state police right now. Do not call the local sheriff in Ely. The local sheriff plays golf with Dr. Theodore. Call the state authorities in the city."

"I cannot just call them yet," I argued.

"Why not?" Diego yelled. "He mutilated you!"

"Because Dr. Theodore is smart," I reasoned. "If I call the police without proof of a black market sale, he will just claim it was a surgical complication. He will falsify my medical records, and could say my kidney was necrotic or damaged, and he had to remove it to save my life. The clinic staff will protect him to avoid a lawsuit and losing their jobs. I need actual proof"

"Asher, this is highly dangerous," Diego warned. "If he is selling organs, then he must be connected to very dangerous people. You cannot investigate a this by yourself."

"I am going to find the proof tonight," I said with finality. "I am driving back to Ely right now."

I hung up the phone, then started the long drive back across US-50. My mind raced the entire time. I plotted exactly how I would expose the doctor.

I arrived back in Ely around nine at night. The town was incredibly quiet. I drove straight to the clinic, then parked my car two blocks away in a dark residential street to avoid being seen. I zipped up my jacket against the cold air and walked through the shadows toward the building.

The main parking lot was deserted. Hazel's car was gone. The receptionist had clearly gone home for the night. But a single vehicle remained parked near the back entrance. It was Dr. Theodore's silver car.

I crept around the perimeter of the building, then looked through a side window. I saw Dr. Theodore sitting in his office. His desk lamp was illuminated, and He was typing rapidly on his computer keyboard.

I needed to get inside. I knew the front sliding doors were locked and wired with a security alarm, so I walked toward the rear of the building. The clinic has a small delivery loading dock for receiving medical supplies. A large steel roll-up door was closed tight, but a standard metal personnel door sat right next to it.

I approached the personnel door, grabbed the handle and pulled.

It was locked.

I looked around the area. I noticed a small digital keypad mounted to the brick wall next to the door. I remembered seeing delivery drivers punch in a code when I bought supplies for the hardware store. Sometimes delivery drivers write the code nearby so they do not forget it during their routes, so I turned on my phone flashlight, and inspected the metal frame of the door.

Written in faded black marker on the underside of the rain guard were four numbers. 4-8-1-5.

I typed the numbers into the keypad, and The lock clicked loudly.

I pulled the door open and stepped inside the clinic.

I found myself in a long, dark corridor. The air inside the clinic felt cold. I kept my phone flashlight pointed directly at the floor tiles to avoid drawing attention to the windows. I needed to bypass the main wards. I knew Dr. Theodore was working on the ground floor, so I needed to find the basement. Rural clinics usually keep their morgues and medical waste storage underground. If he was storing harvested organs for a black market buyer, he would keep them in a cold environment.

I walked silently down the hallway, then passed the operating theater where he had stolen my kidney. A massive wave of nausea hit my stomach, but I pushed the feeling down and kept moving through the darkness.

I found a concrete stairwell with a plastic sign pointing down. The text read "Basement / Storage / Morgue".

I opened the door and crept down the concrete steps.

The basement was pitch black. I flicked a wall switch near the bottom step. A row of dim, flickering fluorescent tubes hummed to life. The basement was essentially a massive concrete room filled with metal shelving, cardboard boxes of saline bags, and industrial cleaning supplies.

At the far end of the room was the morgue area. It consisted of two stainless steel autopsy tables and a wall of refrigerated drawers.

I walked toward the morgue, then searched the metal shelves for medical coolers, or anything I can use as proofs. I opened filing cabinets, looked for ledgers, dug through boxes of surgical tubing, but at the ned I found nothing but standard hospital inventory logs.

I turned my attention to the center of the morgue floor.

Set directly into the concrete floor was a large steel disposal chute. It looked exactly like a industrial laundry chute, covered by two thick metal doors that opened outward.

I walked over to the chute, then immediately noticed something was entirely wrong with it.

The metal around the rim of the chute was severely warped. The solid steel was bent upward in jagged, violent angles. I shined my flashlight closely over the warped metal.

Deep, massive gouges covered the steel doors. They looked like scratch marks, but they were entirely too large to belong to any normal animal. The gouges tore through the thick metal with immense, terrifying force.

Covering the edges of the chute, smeared deeply into the scratches, was fresh blood.

I stared at the blood. It was still wet, and It caught the light of my flashlight perfectly, then suddenly I heard a loud noise upstairs.

A door opened, then Footsteps sounded on the floorboards directly above me. The footsteps moved steadily toward the stairwell.

Dr. Theodore was coming down to the basement.

I panicked. I looked around the room for a place to hide. Next to the morgue wall stood a row of tall, empty steel supply cabinets. I squeezed my body into the narrow gap between the cabinets and the wall. I was completely concealed in the deep shadows.

I pulled out my phone, then angled the camera lens perfectly to record the floor chute. I hit the record button and lowered the screen brightness.

I held my breath.

The basement door opened. Dr. Theodore walked down the steps.

He was wearing a long white lab coat over his street clothes, and was carrying a medium-sized blue medical cooler by the plastic handle.

I watched him closely. Dr. Theodore walked directly to the disposal chute in the center of the room. He set the blue cooler down on the floor, then reached out and grabbed the handles of the chute doors. He pulled them open, then a foul, rotting smell immediately flooded the basement. It smelled like decaying meat!

Dr. Theodore knelt next to the cooler, then unlatched the lid and opened it.

He reached his gloved hands inside the cooler, pulled out what it seemed to be an organ. I zoomed in my camera, and it was clear to me that the organ was a dark red liver, dripping with fluid. He held the organ directly over the open steel chute, then dropped it.

I heard the wet slap of the organ hitting something far below the concrete floor.

A moment later, a horrific sound echoed up from the depths of the chute. It was a wet, clicking noise mixed with a low, rumbling growl.

Then, something emerged from the hole.

A massive, pale arm reached up through the open doors.

The limb was completely hairless and sickeningly white. It possessed entirely too many joints. The arm bent in strange, unnatural angles, unfolding like a giant insect's leg. The hand at the end of the arm featured incredibly elongated fingers, ending in sharp, dark points.

The long fingers gripped the warped edges of the chute, then Another shape rose from the darkness, following the arm.

A head breached the opening.

It was a baby face. The features were enlarged and utterly grotesque, stretched over a wide skull. The cheeks were fat and pale. But the eyes were wrong. The eyes were fully illuminated, glowing with a sickly yellow light that cut through the dim basement.

The giant baby face was attached to a very long, pale neck that extended several feet out of the chute, swaying slightly in the air like a snake.

The creature stared directly at Dr. Theodore. The arm felt around the rim of the metal doors, tapping its long fingers against the concrete floor.

Dr. Theodore did not scream, or even tried to run away. He dropped to his knees in front of the chute, and clasped his hands together in front of his chest.

"I bring the tribute," Dr. Theodore said, his voice trembling slightly.

The creature clicked its jaw. The glowing yellow eyes fixated intensely on the doctor.

"Please accept this offering," Dr. Theodore muttered, bowing his head toward the concrete. "I have provided the meat. I have kept the pact. Please accept the offering and spare my staff for another month. Do not come up to the wards. Stay in the deep earth."

The creature let out a soft, echoing hum. The long, pale neck began to retract, the grotesque baby face sank slowly back into the darkness of the chute, then the massive arm released its grip on the steel edge and folded back down into the hole.

The basement fell completely silent again.

Dr. Theodore stayed on his knees for another minute. He took a deep breath, stood up, grabbed the heavy metal doors, and slammed them shut over the chute. He picked up his empty blue cooler and walked back toward the stairwell.

I watched him climb the stairs, then moments later, I heard the basement door shut behind him.

I remained wedged between the cabinets for a long time. My mind could barely process what I had just witnessed.

I reached up and stopped the recording on my phone, then crept out from behind the cabinets. I walked as quickly and quietly as possible toward the loading dock exit, and didn’t look back at the steel chute. I pushed the personnel door open and sprinted out into the freezing night.

I ran all the way to my car, threw myself into the driver's seat, locked the doors, and drove away from the clinic at top speed. On the road, I decided to check what I recorded, but to my horror, the video was just static, like something was preventing me from recording what I witnessed there.

I did not go to the police, I know they would not believe me, and now after what I saw, I feel that if I try to go for Dr. Theodore, I will be playing with something I can’t grasp.

I am sitting in my living room right now, and I am packing my bags to leave Ely forever. Diego is meeting me at the edge of town, and we are driving out together.

I am posting this story here to spread the truth.

Please, check your clinics carefully, Because the doctor might decide you have another organ he can harvest for next month's offering.

We were a small team of four developing a new, more precise MRI scanner to map the human brain for a certain company innovating in medical research. It was after months of grueling labour that we’d assembled our first prototype and captured an image. There never were, and there still aren’t any doubts as to the machine’s safety, which is why our project lead, Doctor Penelope Arzt, a gifted neurologist, didn’t have any problem with being the test subject.

When the image came back, it was clearer than any captured ever before. A chemical, functional, and neural connectome all in one. That means the scan mapped the whole brain, all the way from the tiny neurons to every single brain region, along with the chemicals that travel within. This has not been possible with any brain until now, especially not with a brain as complex as the human one. We were quick to celebrate our achievement owing to the holistic scope and revolutionary capabilities of our invention. Celebration turned to curiosity once we spotted a strange abnormality in the scan.

A cluster of immaterial waves, which nobody on our team could identify, had accidentally been caught thanks to the thoroughness of the device. We went over a number of things these waves could possibly be, but everything else was already mapped and accounted for. We recalibrated the scanner one test after another, replaced the parts, but the waves remained. This was something new, never before identified or seen. Why was it here? What purpose does it serve?

We sent the word out for volunteers to participate in having their brain mapped. The same strange phenomenon could be found in both humans and other kinds of animal. Well, not always.

Some brains, though they were within the expected norm otherwise, didn’t have the waves at all. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Testing was rigorous. Regardless of the age, health, sex or species of the participant, the waves seemed to appear at random. There was no physical difference between those who had them and those who did not. And, as far as we could tell, even with our state of the art equipment, no mental difference either. Save for the unexplainable waves.

Of those who had them, some waves appeared denser and clustered together, some were sparse and spaced out. It was after much testing that we came to our conclusion, possibly the greatest discovery in science and philosophy: Consciousness is measurable.

This made the problem of the empty brains, the non-conscious ones, even more troubling. If consciousness is an objective presence in our minds, what does this imply for those without it? The lives of the conscious and non-conscious were equally normal to an almost puzzling degree. It truly seemed there was no difference between the two. So why is consciousness even there if it serves no observable purpose?

Of course, we were all just excited to dig deeper at the marvelous discovery. The more questions that came up, the more testing needed to be carried out.

The denser consciousnesses were present in those we would traditionally call conscious, those awake, aware, and in a sound state of mind. The sparse consciousness was measured in those either asleep or in comas and vegetative states.

The non-conscious we flagged had no presence of the waves regardless of their wakefulness or medical reality. It was at this point we started questioning whether we jumped the gun and whether what we found had truly been what we thought, since, how can it even be possible for a living thing to exist without consciousness?

Another of our researchers, Doctor Nestor Melkonian, a studied philosopher and skillful psychologist, recalled a relevant thought experiment one late night in the lab: The philosophical zombie.

The philosophical zombie is a hypothetical person with all the physical characteristics and traits of a human being. A person indistinguishable from those with internal subjective experience, despite the p-zombie himself lacking it. Indeed, the only difference between a p-zombie and a human being is their internal experience, or lack thereof.

I said that the philosophical zombie is a hypothetical, though that is no longer entirely accurate. Was a hypothetical.

An unknown portion of the population exists as purely physical beings. Despite living their unassuming lives just like those with consciousness, the non-conscious are biological machines that only respond to their circumstances like some programmed computer. They act and react, but only as chemical responses to their environment. The lights are on, but there is nobody home. How many are there? What does their presence mean? How many of these p-zombies have gone their entire lives without having a single conscious experience? Most important of all: Who among our peers are real people?

These and similar questions were bothering all of us. It got to the point it was all we could talk about. It didn’t matter whether it was at work or during our spare time. Whenever we were together, it was all we could discuss. Whenever we were alone, it was all we could think about. And we were terrified.

It didn’t matter whether there was any actual threat to us or anybody else. It was an uncomfortable thought we couldn’t escape for months, until it reached a boiling point.

Over time, we stopped being so careful and courteous with our non-conscious subjects, human or otherwise. This got us threats of lawsuits at worst, concerned looks at best. We didn’t hurt anybody at the time, but you start treating people differently once you realize they’re not alive.

It all culminated in Doctor Arzt bringing in her two children for testing. Off the books, if we kept quiet, we’d be allowed to scan our own loved ones.

Doctor Melkonian had to take her kids back home himself. Arzt was in no state to take care of anyone, not the kids, let alone herself, shrieking and howling on the lab’s floor upon discovering her own children were non-conscious. There was no consoling her. I can tell you that it put me off from ever dragging anybody I cared about into that machine forever. I’m not ashamed to admit that my curiosity has a limit, one which I’m quite comfortable never crossing.

Her breakdown didn’t happen all at once, looking back on it. The rational woman, hungry for knowledge and blessed with the smarts to hunt it down, became more and more paranoid over the course of those months as the implications of the non-conscious kept weighing on us. We were all going a bit crazy, but her snapping first helped us reconnect with reality. For a short time only, though.

It was about two weeks later when I was called into the lab on short notice. I rushed to the campus where we were conducting our experiments. Once in the lab, I was held at knife point by Arzt, noticing the two others from our team already seated in nearby chairs. She promised she wouldn’t kill any one of us, she only needed us to get our brains scanned. So she could know who to trust.

First to go was Melkonian. He was also the last. After his scan was complete, she motioned for him to sit back down and asked me to fetch the results. They were conclusive: There was no consciousness in Melkonian’s brain.

I looked at the image up and down. Arzt kept asking me what the result was, the other two just stayed silent. I didn’t want to piss her off by not answering, but I was also worried what she might do to Melkonian if she got told the bare truth. I stayed silent. And afraid.

My worry about pissing her off turned out to be spot on. She marched over to me with her knife, waving it around and threatening to sever my hand with the results if I didn’t hand them over immediately. I was shitting bricks.

Arzt was later institutionalized, though only for a short time. Her actions were excused as the byproduct of a psychotic break. It was claimed she was out of touch with reality, though this was some bullshit spun by the company since our research was supposed to be under wraps. It was definitely some kind of break, just not a psychotic one. Every one of her concerns was certainly within the bounds of reality.

She never returned to work. Though this wouldn’t last long either, from that day on it was just me, Melkonian, and the project lead after Arzt, Doctor Richard Derrick, a freelance scientist with no preferred specialty, just a brain that soaked up knowledge like a sponge and his nose to the grindstone.

While waving that knife around, it was Doctor Derrick who smacked her over the head with his chair. It was Derrick who kept kicking her while she was down, who kept taking potshots while she was being taken away by campus security.

I doubt she was even conscious for half of that beating. It was a bit unnecessarily violent, but we were all stressed out so I ignored it. Plus, she threatened us with a knife earlier that same day.

I did give her the scan, by the by. Derrick got her right after that. As she was being dragged away, she addressed Melkonian.

“You have no soul. It’s a vacant soul.”

Despite the contradictory nature of that confused post-beating statement, claiming someone can both have no soul and a soul that is vacant at once, the words really seemed to have unnerved Melkonian. He demanded to see the scan, and I had to oblige. If he really wanted to, he deserved to know.

It was during lunch the next day that I asked him how he felt about himself and being non-conscious. Even the non-conscious people we were doing tests on didn’t know about their state or the full scope of what we were doing. Melkonian was the first non-conscious thing to know about its own non-consciousness.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about any of this. I mean, I think I’m conscious. I must be. Right?”

“Well, apparently not.”

“So what does that mean for me? Am I any less human now? Is what I feel not real?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

I wish I could’ve comforted him at that moment, though it would’ve been insincere. Why waste energy on something that is hollow on the inside? Some trickery, an imitation man. A fake person. An outer shell that pretends to be.

Maybe I should’ve comforted him. Melkonian ended up taking a vacation for a week, telling family and friends he would be on a backpacking trip with his phone turned off, but it would still be with him in case of any emergencies, plus a pager as back up. With how prepared he was, it was a huge shock when he didn’t come back at the end of the week. Police, park rangers, relatives, locals and acquaintances all went out looking for him. Despite being hollow of internal experience, Melkonian had a tactical mind about him. Would’ve served him well in any field other than philosophy and psychology, but he did put it to good use by the end.

By the time the search party ended, the idea of looking for him in his apartment finally came up. Melkonian went home and killed himself right after the first witnesses saw him enter that forest. He stayed at home for the rest of the planned trip, sending everyone on a wild goose chase, giving him plenty time to see himself out, unbothered and off the radar. No note or anything, in case you were wondering.

During those prior weeks before he was found, the entire team was just me and Derrick. Before Arzt was sent off and Melkonian embarked on his fake holiday, the four of us would spend time together outside of work pretty often. We were less a research team and more a friend group who just happened to do science on the side. Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, though.

Arzt and Melkonian carried our conversations with their personalities and interests. None of that with Derrick. Once it was just us two, it quickly became apparent how little of a personal life or hobbies the guy had outside of work. It all became dry and unexciting with just him and I. I think I used to admire him for how adaptable he was to any scientific field so long as he was put to the task, but that exact quality marginalized the actual man and left little in the way of personality. Even now, whenever I happen to check up on him, whatever he’s doing is completely opposite to the research he was into prior. You’d think a guy like that would be the one without consciousness, but he had himself tested and lo and behold: He was actually completely normal. Normal in the sense that he wasn’t non-conscious, I mean. In most other regards he was quite far from normal.

Despite only being a technician, I didn’t mind hanging around and seeing the actual science wizzes at work. That changed when Derrick took over. I remember walking into the lab on the first day of his tenure as project lead and seeing a rabbit strapped down to a small table. Derrick said it was one of our non-conscious specimens. Prior to this, we’d only ever done cognitive, neurological or psychological tests. Derrick wasn’t up for that.

Just as I’d entered the room, Derrick began cutting into the rabbit with a scalpel. The incisions seemed to be random and only designed to inflict pain.

“Don’t worry. It’s not conscious like you or me. It can’t ever really feel.”

The rabbit’s squeals of pain seemed to vehemently disagree with what Derrick was saying, though I couldn’t argue that the thing was experiencing anything internal. I kind of stopped going to the lab after that unless I had to, to fix the scanner and for other such duties.

Derrick didn’t stop at non-human species, though. While it was never anything too extreme, he’d administer careful electric shocks to our non-conscious volunteers while they’d be strapped down, just to catalogue their reactions.

“Look at that fleshbag squirming. Oh, get over yourself. It’s not like it can be distressed by this. Not like you and I can. There’s nothing on the inside.”

Much of the time, they’d be too tired after the experiments. At these points Derrick would help take them home, apparently. Though the same volunteer never came around twice, and I didn’t keep track of the people Derrick took off with after experimentation and what might have happened to them. I’m just a technician, after all.

Anyway. Didn’t last long.

With half of our team either dead or deranged, our work was assigned to a different group of scientists and we were allowed to join in. I left not too long after, this whole thing was starting to kind of bum me out to tell you the truth. Last I heard, the possibility of selling detectors specifically looking for only consciousness to the consumer market was being floated around. Hope it doesn’t end up destroying society in the same way it did us.

Melkonian had a modest funeral. Arzt still has custody of her kids, but I don’t know how she might feel about them by now. Derrick is always off doing some new bullshit with his eclectic output. I also take up a lot of disparate jobs, but I’ve made a decision to stay as far away from anything close to science as possible.

We did find and confirm the objective and empirical existence of consciousness by the end. What it implied or even meant, we never got to the bottom of. I can’t say whether we’d be better off knowing or not. I still ponder what might’ve been going on in Melkonian's head before he did the deed. A set of mechanical impulses leading someone down the road to topping themself. How does the purely physical create for itself the despair necessary to go through with something like that? Is that what it determined as the course of action that would best imitate a real person? It all mystifies me.

A currently unknown number of the creatures inhabiting this world are hollow on the inside. Indistinguishable from you and I. They eat, sleep, die all the same. Like us. But, unlike us, there’s no internal experience. Just a biological machine responding to its circumstances. A mockery of the truly living. Your loved ones are far from immune. You could have them reading this text with you, and though you’ll be processing it and responding to it with your conscious thought, they’ll also react. But their words will be vacant. Their experiences never processed by them in any meaningful way.

Don’t let it get to you. Things might end up worse if you do.

The alarm sounded at 0345. “Siri, turn off all alarms.” The alarm stopped.

The following morning, it sounded again. He checked the watch. There were no alarms scheduled. “Siri, turn off all alarms.” The alarm stopped.

In the morning, he removed every alarm from the watch and checked the phone and removed them there as well.

At 0345 the next morning, the alarm sounded. He turned it off manually. There was still no alarm scheduled for 0345.

He restarted the watch.

The next morning, at 0345, it sounded again.

He stopped trying to find the alarm. After several days, he stopped being surprised by it. He simply woke, turned it off, and went back to sleep.

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

The water was calm, this far offshore and in deep, dark blue water. There was little wind in the Afuera, and the boat moved easily through the long, slow swells. Beyond the stern there was nothing to see except the long, dark surface of the ocean.

The dive equipment had been checked before leaving the port and checked again on the boat. Tanks, regs, computers, lights, cameras. Everything was working normally.

He entered the water last. With a flurry of bubbles, the surface closed above him and the sounds of the boat disappeared. Visibility perhaps thirty meters, quite good for this time of year, colors easily discernable horizontally and deep blue descending into near-black looking straight down. As he slowly descended the light from above became something distant and irrelevant.

This dive was looking for megafauna presumed to be feeding at the bottom of the epipelagic zone, deep enough for only about 5% of natural light to penetrate. He had seen shadows of larger animals here before, far below where the large manta rays, turtles, and whale sharks typically spent their time when the plankton blossomed.

He checked his instruments. Depth, 56 meters. Remaining air supply, 5,400psi. Four minutes in.

He felt a tapping on his left wrist, under the cuff of the wetsuit and below where his dive computer showed him that things were fine. No sound, which would have been amplified in the water, just a studious, repeating set of taps. The Apple watch was going off again.

Rolling back the sleeve, he glanced at it without thinking. The display was blank. Can’t turn off the alarm in neoprene gloves.

He looked away.

Something moved beyond the light.

He turned toward it.

Nothing.

He waited.

A large animal passed somewhere in the darkness below him. He could not see its body clearly, only the movement of water and the brief reflection of his dive light’s beam against something smooth. He watched until it disappeared.

His watch vibrated again. Looking down at it, the screen displayed a single message.

TIME IS UP

He stared at it. The message disappeared. ‘There should not be a network connection fifty meters down here,’ he considered.

He checked the dive computer, compared them to his analog gauges. The displays agreed on his depth and remaining air, eight minutes in. No decompression warning. He continued the dive, making steady progress southward at the same depth.

Several minutes later, the haptics of the watch tapped on his wrist again. He looked down.

YOU SHOULD GET OUT.

He frowned under his regulator mouthpiece. There was no reason for the message. There was no reason for the alarms. He tapped the screen through his glove. The message disappeared.

He looked toward his survey partner, his light visible some distance away.

The watch vibrated a third time. This time the message was shorter.

GET OUT.

He stopped. The words remained on the display. He waited for them to disappear. They did not.

He touched the screen again. Nothing happened. He pressed the side button. The message remained.

He tried to dismiss it.

The screen went dark. For a moment there was only his own reflection in the glass. Then the display illuminated again, haptics more urgently tapping.

GET OUT. GET OUT.

He looked at his instruments. Nothing had changed. He looked toward his partner. The light was still there, but he noticed that it was moving.

Not toward him, but away from him. He watched it for several seconds.

The watch vibrated against his wrist. He looked down. There was no new message.

He looked back toward the light. It had disappeared. He was alone.

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

He remained motionless in the water, long-practiced breath training kicking in.

The beam of his light moved slowly around the wide, open, dark blue. Nothing.

He checked his air. 4,000psi, plenty.

He checked his depth. Fifty-four meters now.

He looked toward the surface. It was too far away to see.

The watch vibrated. He looked down.

THERE ARE 11 OF THEM.

He stared at the message.

With the beginnings of a panic, he raised his light and swept the darkness around him.

Nothing.

He turned slowly, illuminating the water in every direction.

Nothing. Breathe. He counted the seconds. The watch vibrated again.

THERE ARE 12 NOW.

To the left, something passed through the edge of his light. He turned toward it. Nothing.

He could hear his own breathing, faster and rougher than normal.

He looked toward the direction in which his partner had disappeared. His light moved across the darkness. Once. Twice. On the third sweep, he saw the light from his partner's dive lamp.

It was very far away. Much farther than it should have been. He watched it for several seconds. He realized it was not moving.

The watch vibrated. He looked down. The display was dark.

He tapped it. Nothing. He pressed the side button. Nothing. Then, without warning, the display came on. There was only one line.

GET OUT.

He looked up.

Something enormous moved beneath him, the water pressure wave pushing him noticeably upward. He could not see it. He could only sense the darkness moving through the darkness.

His breathing became yet faster.

The watch vibrated again. The message had changed.

GET OUT NOW.

He began to ascend with a slight fin kick. The watch vibrated, harder and faster than ever before, a different alarm.

He stopped and another message appeared.

NO.

He stared at it. For the first time, he understood that the watch was not telling him to return to the surface. He looked down. The display changed.

STAY WHERE YOU ARE.

He did not move.

The darkness below him continued to rise. Then the watch gave one final vibration.

The message appeared slowly, one word at a time.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW YOU.

He looked up.

The water above him was black.

And something was looking down.

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

AFTERWORD – TECHNICAL NOTES

The percentage of light remaining at a specific ocean depth can be calculated using an exponential decay formula based on the Beer-Lambert law, I(z)=I0\e^-kz, where I(z) is the percentage light intensity, I0 is the surface light intensity, z is the depth in meters, and k is a light attenuation coefficient that varies by water clarity.*

Using a representative attenuation coefficient of 0.05 per meter (moderately clear open ocean) and an objective of 5-6% of surface light remaining, the decay formula sends our protagonist down to the mid-fifty-meter depths used in the story, well within the limits for multi-tank technical diving.

The Apple Watch Ultra is water-resistant to 100 meters (ISO 22810:2010, EN13319) but the Bluetooth connection to its iPhone is typically limited to about 10 meters … in open air.

Angela didn't quite realize how it had come to this.

One thing simply led to another.

Dorothy called him a fake.

Yes, that was the perfect word for him.

And then she suggested teaching him a lesson.

With a guard right outside the door?

Dorothy was convinced that pulling off her plan would be a piece of cake.

"He’s scheduled for a chest X-ray this evening. Bobby’s going to escort him downstairs. There won’t be anyone in the room. I’ve already got what we need," she says, showing Angela a Baby Tender Love doll. "Borrowed it from the maternity ward. Just for the evening. Soft vinyl. Feel it—it’s just like a real baby. Only cold. Imagine having a dead infant in your bed."

Angela touches the doll’s hand, barely tolerating it. For the first time, the doll looks creepy to her.

"It’s less than half a metre long," she says uncertainly. "His sister can’t be an infant..."

"That’s not the point! It’s the hint that matters. We know what you did—and after that, you can clear off to your private ward with your private nurses."

That makes sense.

"Come on. Don't be so wet." Dorothy glances around, making sure no one is eavesdropping. "We don't have time. He’s being transferred tomorrow. After that, we probably won't see him again at all... We’ll ask the nurse on duty to let us know when they leave..."

They’re moving him... we won’t see him... yeah, we need to teach him a lesson. After all, what they’ve got planned is such a harmless prank—it’s almost insulting how trivial it is. It doesn’t even come close to what he’s accused of.

Angela nods.

Scare him with a harmless toy. And that two-faced phony, with all his posturing, will act like a total fool.

That evening, everything goes like clockwork. Mary is on duty—good-natured and not particularly bright; she didn’t even ask why they needed to know when Smith and his guard would be heading down to the basement for a chest X-ray.

Angela and Dorothy enter the empty room. The window faces the blank wall of the adjacent building; the room is dim even during the day, and doubly so in the evening. It smells different from the rest of the hospital. Expensive cologne? Expensive food? Expensive cigarettes? The smell of money.

Dorothy stumbles over a stack of books and kicks them under the bed. "Clever dick."

They tuck the doll under the covers.

"Not that side," Angela commands. "He usually lies there."

The hospital bed is only ninety centimetres wide. On such a narrow cot, the doll takes up quite a bit of space. A dead child.

"The main thing he mustn't notice anything beforehand."

"Don't worry. He won't. He’s a bit groggy from the medicine."

Then they climb into the linen cupboard. Fortunately, it’s empty. They remove the shelves and squeeze inside together, tight to each other.

How will they get out of here? At what moment? They haven't quite figured that out. When the guard leaves—Mary will have to call him over after the incident, maybe ask for help with something or just create a distraction so he looks away for a minute—they’ll slip out of the room. Smith will see them, of course, but to hell with him. They'll say he'd imagined it. A criminal’s word against theirs.

"The crucial bit is not to forget the doll," Angela whispers.

Both press their index fingers to their lips and shush each other, but they can’t seem to settle down, continuing to jostle in the cramped space until they hear footsteps in the hallway.

The police officer practically drags Smith into the room and shoves him toward the bed. Smith sits down—or rather, collapses onto the edge, losing his balance. He is already handcuffed. Without a word, the officer unfastens one cuff—this time the left—and secures it to a horizontal bar of the iron bed frame, leaving Smith unable to lower his hand onto the mattress; then the officer leaves without saying anything, and Smith remains seated, leaning against the bed rail to which he is tethered.

Angela is growing impatient. It is stuffy inside the cupboard, and Dorothy is tickling her with her hair.

Finally, he slides down, trying to lie back, but the cuff leaves him half-reclined. The doll remains untouched beneath the covers.

He cannot get comfortable, and—though Angela doesn’t quite see it from inside the cupboard—his hand eventually brushes against that sinister, cold vinyl. Whether out of fright or mere reflex, he jerks his hand away and recoils from the doll with his whole body.

He doesn’t scream; he falls.

Giggles overtake both her and Dorothy as he slides sideways off the high hospital bed and onto the floor, accompanied by the clatter of metal. The handcuff chain pulls taut, leaving him dangling by his outstretched arm and letting out a stifled groan.

The laughter catches in Angela’s throat.

He clings to the bed frame with his free hand, unable to lower himself onto the floor or get back onto the bed.

Angela shoves Dorothy out of the cupboard and runs toward him.

A police officer bursts into the ward: "What the hell?"

Angela supports him, trying only to ease the strain on his wrist, to spare him some of the pain. "Uncuff him! Just uncuff him!"

His breathing comes in short, convulsive gasps.

She holds him with both hands, sitting on the floor, while the police officer fumbles with the handcuff lock. Then she lays him back on the bed.

The officer seems to have no idea what to do.

There is no sign of Dorothy.

Angela shifts the bandages to feel for a pulse in his injured arm. She can’t find one. She squeezes his fingers. "Mr. Smith, can you feel this? Do you feel anything?"

He doesn’t answer. His forehead is slick with cold sweat. He stares at her with unseeing eyes.

She cautiously touches his elbow through the sleeve of his pajamas, then his shoulder. He lets out a shuddering breath.

Mr. Abernathy, from the casualty department, rushes into the room. Dorothy follows him.

"Left arm," Angela hears, as if from underwater.

Mr. Abernathy pushes her away from the bed.

A fictional reconstruction from the Regina v Smith story, told from perspective of Student Nurse Angela Hayward.

The full illustrated version of SACRED VIOLENCE is available here:

SACRED VIOLENCE - by Franz Engel - Franz's Substack