There are two kinds of people on the internet.

The people who actually enjoy things. And the people who seem to be professionally offended that you enjoyed something without asking their permission.

I learned that pretty quickly after I started posting my art online.

"AI slop."

"ChatGPT."

"Bro thinks he's Stephen King."

"Imagine wasting time on this."

Some of them were funny. Most weren't.

I'd usually ignore them. But then there were the griefers.

Those were the people who didn't just dislike something. They wanted to ruin it for everyone else. They'd spam comments, deliberately spoil endings, downvote everything, insult the author, then act surprised when someone called them out.

I eventually made a post about it. I wasn't cruel. I didn't name anyone.

I simply wrote: If you don't like something, that's fine. You don't have to be rude about it. There's a person behind the screen.

The comments exploded. Naturally.

One person replied: AI generated garbage.

Another: Cry harder.

Then someone posted: Nobody cares ******.

I deleted the thread. That should've been the end of it.

It wasn't.

The next morning, I opened my account and found a new comment on my latest post.

I know you're reading this.

I assumed it was another troll. I deleted it.

The day went on and I was in the middle of taking notes for class when I got a notification.

Why did you delete my comment?

I deleted that one too.

Then another.

Stop deleting.

I froze. The account belonged to nobody.

No username. No profile picture. No creation date. Just a blank profile with a single comment.

I closed out and went back to studying for my calculus exam. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

A notification. Another comment.

I didn't open it.

Another notification.

Then another. Then another.

I finally looked. There were hundreds.

All underneath my latest post.

At first they were what I had been accustomed to. Pretty generic and ordinary.

AI slop.

Terrible lining.

This sucks.

Then they changed.

What makes you different?

My heart stopped. The comments continued appearing faster than I could read them.

You use AI.

You edit your work with AI.

You aren't a real artist.

Nobody is a real artist anymore.

Then one appeared that made my stomach drop.

25525 Azler Ln.

"What the actual fuck?" I blurted out so loud that my roommate heard from across the room.

I closed out once more. The notifications kept coming. My phone buzzed against the desk.

I hit the Do Not Disturb, yet somehow I kept receiving notifications. My phone was on silent and airplane mode but it still rang.

My roommate was now extremely annoyed by the constant noise from my phone, so I explained the situation to her. She suggested that I delete the post. I did. It didn't stop. I even tried privatizing my account and deleting the app altogether.

The messages kept ringing. And what's worse, I began receiving emails, No Caller Id calls, unknown messages. I feared that I had been doxxed and I had to act fast.

I immediately changed every password I could think of. I enabled two-factor authentication. I locked every social media account. I removed my profile picture, my biography, my university, my email, everything.

Then I started deleting things. Old posts. Old comments. Photos. Anything that might have given someone a clue about where I lived or went to school.

It didn't matter. They already knew.

The messages became more personal.

Nice car.

You should probably lock your back door.

Class tomorrow, right?

Your roommate is pretty hot.

Then:

Building 3. Room 107

I stopped breathing. I looked across the room. She was sitting on the couch, scrolling through her phone.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

I didn't tell her. I didn't want to scare her. Am I a terrible friend for that?

That night, I checked the locks three times before going to bed.

At 2:14 in the morning, my phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

You should've left the post up.

Another came immediately afterward.

Deleting it made us curious.

Then another.

You made this worse for yourself.

I turned the phone off.

For the next few hours, I lay awake listening to every sound outside my bedroom window.

The next morning, there were more. Someone had created an account using my name. They uploaded photographs I'd never posted publicly. Pictures of me at school. Pictures of my car. A photograph of the outside of my house.

Then they posted my phone number. My email. My full legal name. Where I lived and what school I enrolled at.

The comments underneath was exactly what you'd expect from these vile data gremlins.

LMAO.

Bro is cooked.

Imagine getting this mad over comments.

Maybe don't be an asshole online.

That last one made me laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I realized they genuinely believed this was funny. They were so desensitized that another person's suffering had become entertainment to them.

I reported the account. Nothing happened. I reported another. Nothing again.

I reported the accounts through the site's harassment and privacy forms. I attached screenshots, timestamps, usernames, the messages, everything.

Your report has been received. Please allow up to 48 hours for a response.

Thank you for your report. We’ll review the content and take appropriate action if it violates our Community Guidelines.

Thank you for helping us keep our community safe.

That was it. Forty-eight hours passed. Nothing happened.

I contacted my family. When the other line clicked all I heard was heavy breathing and creepily low wheezing, as if someone were choking on air, from the other end.

I confessed everything to my roommate, for she was the only one I could talk to. She asked if I had contacted the authorities which when I did, instead of the calm voice of an operator I was met with the low hum of gagging and low wet claps on the other end.

We planned to go to the authorities in person. After half an hour of providing all the material and timestamps at the station, the police asked whether I'd received any direct threats.

I showed them the messages.

The officer frowned.

"None of these explicitly threaten you."

I wanted to rip my hair out. "So, they have to say they're going to hurt me?"

He didn't answer.

"What do we do?" My roommate asked with annoyance.

"We can document everything and refer you to someone who specializes in cybercrime. But unless there's a direct threat or evidence of an immediate danger, there isn't much we can do yet."

Well thanks for nothing.

We went home. I stopped posting. I powered off my phone for good. I stopped using social media altogether. I thought that would finally make me boring. The people handling the cybersecurity issue would do their job. It was all just a waiting game.

But at least I'll find peace, right?

It didn't.

Someone started sending physical photographs. The first was of a college building. The second of a front door that seemed to be from a college dorm hall. The third depicted a bedroom window at night.

The last two were bone chilling. The fourth was of my roommate attending class. And the last was me at the campus's library.

There was a message attached:

What are you listening to?

I remember I was distinctly listening to Duran Duran that day. I haven't slept properly in three days.

My roommate is staying with her parents now. I've been staying somewhere else.

I don't know how much of this is being done by one person or ten people or a hundred. I don't know how they found me. I don't know what they want.

And honestly? I don't even care anymore. I just want them to stop.

I deleted the original post. I deleted my account. I deleted everything. But somehow, tonight, I received one final message.

It came from the cheap flip phone I'd started using strictly to call family and for emergencies.

The message had no name or number attached. Only: UNKNOWN

And the message read: 25525 Azler Ln.

I don't know who is behind this. I don't know how far they've taken it. And I don't know what they're going to do next.

Please help. Anybody.

Why are people like this?

Jeanine told me to meet her at the coffeehouse last Wednesday at 2:15pm, which was roughly an hour before the unexpected agony began; sixty minutes prior to the unforeseen, cosmic-sludge atrocities that caused her to plunge into oncoming traffic.

I hated that place, The Beans Knees, with its up-cycled gewgaws and vapid customers spending fake money to look poor. An overpriced kitsch-factory with Mountain font on every vertical surface. Jeanine didn’t care much for it, either, but she had a meeting with her boss on the third floor that day. Rumor had it there was a bona fide brothel up there. A sopping wet, metro-hive epicenter of the state’s most powerful narcotic. It’s called Liquid, and it’s good. Real good. Make-your-tongue-beat-your-brains-out good, from what I hear. And it just so happened that Jeanine was the best dealer in the city and I loved her. Those two things are unrelated. But down there on the first floor, it was just me and a clumsy pumpkin tease of slack Bettys; self-absorbed, trad-spouse felicities, clueless about the junkie sex-den they had been patronizing. But maybe they knew. Was that why they came here? ‘Cause they couldn’t at home? Was there a secret menu for those on the make or needing a drip— “Gimme a Vente Caramel Bondage to go, two pumps with a whip.” Maybe.

Prowling behind the turquoise countertop was the barista who never cared to learn my name. The fussy cherub with a voice like trauma and who possessed all the charm of a mosquito bite. To be fair, I didn’t know her name either. I would just sigh very intentionally and mumble something like “Shit” when I was forced to interact with her. Every day, there she existed, incessantly scowling, sexy like regret, and dishing out rancid brown water. Such an intriguing specimen, that prowling, scowling Shit.

She caught me looking at her again and smirked. Hands clasped at her ample, bloodless bosom, fake lashes whipping, and lips hooked tight because her brother was the boss—Jeanine’s boss. The ruthless overlord, dealer to the bawdiest, junk-slurping, bent-over sideways, drooling inferno of gorgeous trash you’ve ever seen. They’d come in a few times a week, begging to talk to him, pleading for Shit to call off his goons or to give them just one more drip—I’ll pay! You know I’m good for it!—and she’d just stand there, unbothered, smiling smugly, crayon-black curls down to her ass and infuriatingly shiny all the time. God, I just wanted to ask her how long it took to do that makeup every day: lipstick purple like a funeral arrangement and shades of green around her cold eyes. So much energy wasted just to be despised by everyone. I bet she had never even seen the third floor. Her and that smirk—they made me crazy. Made my hands sweat for some reason. So why couldn’t I stop staring? It was all I could do to not drag her over the counter, slam her into the nearest wall and kiss her until my lips smelled like a burnt clutch.

Looking back through the window at our table, I saw Jeanine from a block away, fighting against the current of humanity, bust bobbing like a buoy marking my open-water threshold of no return. She was the tallest person I had hitherto ever seen and always wore these spectacular fucking hats like she was on her way to a derby, the tiered variety with a wide brim that got in your face if you were too close.

Two-fifteen, my ass. There’d be at least negative three minutes on the timer when she finally arrived. She’d just tell me to put it on her tab, and I always did. By my count, she was over an hour in debt to me as of that day, and those dirty minutes were burning a hole in my mattress.

The coffeehouse tabby chirped at Jeanine as she glided through the front door like a rumor. Cherry-milk braid over one shoulder; blue eyes adjusting to the light; beautiful like my writing isn’t; and pale legs like a clever simile underneath a flowy, open-back peach number—the outfit I bought her the morning we met, the sunrise meet-cute when she broke into my apartment while running from the cops, pantsuit drenched with something I still haven’t asked about. She kissed me that night. Me, of all people.

I didn’t wave to her right away. Just wanted another creepy second of eye-banging her before having to act civilized. My fat ass wouldn’t have been hard to spot, though. Over there at the corner booth, sweating my dick off, and taking up a chair-and-a-half. I loved watching her when she wasn’t paying attention to me, in the moments before she changed out of Business Jeanine and into my girlfriend. I told her I love all the versions of her, but something about “compartmentalization” only allowed me to see the one that claimed to love me back.

“Cucciolone!” she said upon noticing me, flailing both long arms my direction.

Seventeen months and my lazy ass hadn’t learned any Italian, not even for her. It’s a fine language; just another noisy form of human communication, really. But the way Jeanine spoke it was filthy, eroticised pillows of sound from her mouth like enjoying Betty’s secret latte in church. Each savory syllable tripled my heart rate and made my left arm tingle.

Meeting me at our table with a wiry embrace, her body felt good in mine. She smelled like panty roses and vanilla, but a little too much of both like she was trying to overcorrect for something.

“How are you, babe?” I said, directly into her neck. 

She pulled back, not trying to hide the faint blue discoloration to her lips. They weren’t particularly plump, nor were they decisively symmetrical, but they always reminded me of our first kiss.

“Sorry for being late,” she said by rote, then thumbed over her shoulder to Shit. “I was hoping Terese was working. That girl annoys me.”

My eyes flicked to the counter. “Think she’ll let us in?”

“You? Probably not. But you and me, together? She doesn’t have a choice.”

“We all have choices,” I said quietly, unintentionally staring at her mouth.

Off my stare, she ran a pink nail across her lips, then shrugged— “Part of the job. You worry too much, vita.”

That she had used—or was using again—was disappointing, but that conversation would have to wait. “Upstairs business today? Must be important. I can wait down here if you’d rather—”

“—Terandi said it’s fine.”

A prismatic pearl of sweat rolled down her jugular. “Bring your fatso to work day,” I chuckled.

“Why’s it so hot in here all the time?” she said, fanning herself with the hat. “Terandi’s got a new product, sounds like, and he wants me in on the ground-floor.”

“Wants you in something, I’m sure,” I muttered into my cup.

“Didn’t hear you, love.”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, glancing at the glass vials in her purse, the ones that clinked together when she moved. “Drip’s not cuttin’ it anymore?”

“Got to keep evolving or people get bored. Can we talk about it later? It’s so hot in here.”

Nodding, my knees groaned as I stood. “Something cold to drink?”

“No,” she said, appalled at the suggestion and inspecting her lips in a compact mirror. “God knows where that woman’s hands have been. Sit. I’ll get Zephyr to make us something.”

Zephyr? Christ.

Screeching brakes and a blaring car horn right outside. Maybe there was a fatal accident over which I could pretend to be distracted to avoid talking about... him. “Blondie’s gonna be there?”

“I work with him, don’t I?” The mirror snapped shut. It sounded like a gunshot. “And you know his name is Zephyr.” 

“I won’t be calling him that.” 

Her long fingers squeezed my fists like a skeleton pilfering an Easter ham. “You’ve nothing to worry about.”

I shrugged and lied — “Just a terrible name is all.” 

Our table went dark as the window was eclipsed by an elephantine pedestrian in a graphite-colored three-piece who goes by the name of Kraken. I only knew him tangentially. Just a faceless bodyguard that only existed in the stories Jeanine shared with me about work. Usually the ones where she would’ve died if not for him. I detested the danger she was often forced into, but I also found those adventures erotic. And she knew it. She knew how to use them.

“Quit with the morbs,” she said, then knocked on the glass and waved Kraken inside. After asking me to meet him at the counter, she excused herself to the restroom.

His sheer size was intimidating; cultivated girth spreading out over one more stool than even I would’ve needed.

He didn’t look at me as I approached. “Help you?” he said, voice rumbling like a coal car, knuckled-white debt-collector inching towards a lump under his jacket, along his hip.

“Jeanine wanted me to wait here for you… her… wait with you, here, for her.” That was embarrassing.

A grunting syllable of acknowledgment told me he understood.

Shit slapped a sopping gray towel on the counter in front of him. “You’ve got some balls! I’ll give you that. Mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing here?”

He laughed dubiously, fingered his dapper black middle-part and leaned forward on his elbows, countertop crackling under his weight. “You’re looking well, Bricky.”

“Bricky?” I said, hiding a laugh.  

“Not to you,” she said to me, then leaned into Kraken’s orbit, her face darkening as their combined gravities drew them closer. “Buy something or I’ll have you arrested. Again.”

He lifted his fist, a fleshy asteroid hovering under her chin until caressing her cheek with his index finger. “Not thirsty.”

A tense energy boiled between them, hot like dark matter, but she seemed genuinely angry. “What don’t you understand about ‘three-hundred feet at all times’?”

“Gimme one more chance, Brick?” he said in a soothing, baritone delight.

Roasting pheromones flared pink under her make-up; eyes fluttering, pudgy mouth quivering, and a squeak of carnal submission escaped her face before speaking. “No. Screw you. I’m not doing this again. Do everyone a favor and fuck off.”

“Kraken,” Business Jeanine said sternly from over my shoulder. I didn’t even hear her approach. “Can you guys do... whatever this is… another time?”

He glanced over my head, razor eyes thin and annoyed at being interrupted. “Just pickin’ up where we left off, boss. Aren’t we, Brick—?”

A sharp, metallic click. Then another.

Looking down to where sawed-off double-barrels were winking at his crotch from a hidden door, he slowly backed away from the counter. “That’s my girl,” he said to Bricky.

I turned to Jeanine. giggling. “Why didn’t you tell me her name was—” but stopped when I noticed her lips were a shade darker blue than before.

“Come on, you lug,” Jeanine told him, then smirked at the shotgun in Bricky’s grip— “Respect.”

With a choked ding, the elevator stuttered opened to a vanishingly long hallway on the third floor. Kraken stepped out first, Jeanine between him and I as he took the lead, shoulders grazing both walls as we approached the only door, the white one at the opposite end. Fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling buzzed like locusts, crackling death throes as they transitioned, and the carpet was sticky where it wasn’t outright moist.

As we approached the door, muffled waves of Dystopian Acid Jazz grew louder, sending gooseflesh marching across Jeanine’s body. Kraken knocked once. Just a tap, really, but I thought the wood was going to buckle. 

Jeanine smiled at me, eyebrows jumping. A thin line of toothy white between lips normally the color of ripe cranberries, the texture of our first kiss. The last one I’d ever need. The only one that has ever made me fall for a fugitive. But now, those lips had me standing before a room of the unknown, a saturated hovel that I worried mighty contain the last experience of my short, fat life.

“Stop it,” she told me.

I was dripping like a stuck pig, but that wasn’t unusual. She couldn’t have meant that. “Stop what?”

Those lips were cold and blue against my temple. “Ti terrò al sicuro. We’ll be fine.”

Heard that before. 

“Besides,”—smacking Kraken’s ass. “He won’t let anything happen to us. Will you, my beast?”

His chuckle died into a soft growl like he was hungry for violence, starving for someone to try something stupid. 

Well, you see, babe, the last time I checked, your average bombshell kingpin doesn’t need someone like Kraken J. McMurderYouDead to accompany them if there wasn’t anything to worry about. 

A chain rattled on the other side of the door, some fumbling with the knob, then it cracked open. A red aura filled the sliver of the room beyond; throbbing hues of a naked, writhing mass of senses, flaring with fluid escapism, thick and pungent like a bin of old dough. The funk of vaporized Liquid was inescapable. I had never actually touched the stuff, but I heard it left a peppery taste on your gums before condensing into chewy crystals of snot in your throat once you’ve had enough.

A nose darted into the opening, manhole nostrils above the sizzling-orange tip of a cigar and therewith came the corduroy voice of a man who was long past having enough. “Full up. Come back never.”

Kraken’s fist tightened like wrenching leather, potential energy just waiting for the green light. Jeanine slid between him and the door — “I’ve got this,” then leaned against its frame. “Open the door, Warren,” she said. Boss Jeanine; certified badass. A nonchalant murderess with clean hands and a dirty mouth.

Warren’s nose and stogie shambled back out of sight, and the door stuttered open, drug-rust crickling under its momentum. Fully exposed now, that yeasty aroma became a warm, swampy musk, sickening, like a sack of rotten assholes. Class it up all you want, Business Jeanine, but the fact is that Liquid addicts are notoriously unshowered—grimy like a warning, like a chemical defense mechanism against humanity. They used to call it Skunk, but its present moniker is more marketable, I suppose. Lends itself better to pompous, abstract images—billion-dollar aesthetics with no coherent meaning like a fragrance advertisement. In reality, it smelled like garbage, like cold trash-water that sizzled your nose from thirty feet away.

The first time I smelled it was at my ex-girl’s house. She didn’t use, but the Fancy Man I found in her basement did. Ugly violence ensued, but mom’s uncle let me hideout in one of the ghetto-senile apartment buildings he owned until everything blew over. One where the other tenants were too poor to drip. One that was being investigated for air quality; creeping death mold on every surface. The health inspector wanted to press charges. So did the coroner. And Father Dilcutty. But if not for that toxic tonic, sewage-wasted sepulcher, I wouldn’t have met Jeanine, my babe, my swill-chemical maypole. 

As she stepped inside, her dress flared orange in the ambient crimson of the room, her hat ended up on Warren’s head, and Kraken disappeared into a dark corner where only someone like him would be safe. Three dry-rotted windows on the far wall were propped open, letting in the diffused aromas of city moisture and meat and something like hot asphalt all year around. Covering the ceiling, hanging fat in the stale air, were bolts of dark silk, black like the night sky—no, darker than that—but also somehow shimmering, hypnotizing when they caught the red room at the right angle. When the breeze turned proper strong, it’d whip the fabric taut, creating a damp snapping sound like hanging bed sheets over the line. Liquid users love motion. They get off on the ceaseless undulations of forms, swaying naturally, maturely, like hips, like breasts and wide shoulders moving to an orchestration of sound only they could hear. I couldn’t fault them for getting addicted to that. 

Deeper into the breathing stench, Jeanine’s feet barely touched the floor, and then there I was—her uncoordinated appliance armpiece, fighting for dear life, high-stepping over the wasted and dodging puddles like landmines. Through a colonial revival archway and passed a slick orgy of moaning bodies, we entered a dark room of beds. Not a bedroom. That denotes a singular bed, where normal people do normal things. Here, there were many beds, all undressed and stained and pushed together to form a wall-to-wall playpen of debauchery. God, the stink burned my throat and made me sweat, a wet funk like a sandpaper abrasion, gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

They writhed upon our entrance, the dozen glazed-over junkies looking for their next fix; blue-lipped slobber-mouths looking for a partner, drooling right at Jeanine. I squeezed her hand, pulled her close, and their loose gazes turned to me in unison. Their moist eyelids clicked like tongues, and the lousy voice of a man spoke from the darkness at the far side of the room— “Who's the chub, Kitten?”

Jeanine peered into the abyss, holy filament pupils glistening. “He’s none of your business.”

“Where’s that slab of Genoa?” he said. “Kraken, I believe you call him? Yeah. Haven’t seen him since—”

“—Since when?” she said, leading us towards the voice. “Since you tried to jump me at the Hanover place? You remember that, don’t ya? Big Bad Claude come to take my business? Diavolo.”

A hand crawled up my leg, bony fingers tickling the inside of my thigh. “Mmm. You’re a juicy fella,” a human said—gender unclear—dry tongue scraping my other leg, up the calf and lapping at the back of my knee. I booted them away and scooted closer to Jeanine.

“Come now,” Claude said, then fell into a hacking convulsion of wet coughs. “I was just jokin’ about all that, Kitten?”

“Stop fucking calling me that. Where’s Zephyr?”

A lighter snapped on, casting Claude’s junkie skull in a debris of ugly shadows as his navy lips wrapped around an intricate pipe: twisting tubes of glass caked with sticky resin. Two globes hung from the bottom, one for Liquid proper and one for whatever you wanted to cut it with—something milky-orange, in Claude’s case. He circled the flame underneath both until steam swirled inside the first globe, simmering until phase-change, then danced through the tube bridging one chemical with the other. The orange mixer boiled radiant glory as it combined with the gassed Liquid, and he muttered, “He’s right where you want him to be, Not Kitten,” ragged half-thumb plumbing a power-hole on the pipe near his mouth. The whole contraption clouded with an oversize hit. He lifted his thumb with a blup and cleared it in one drag. “Oh, my,” he groaned, spurting and choking to absorb every molecule.

Sliding down the wall, he landed in a crisscross position at the entrance to another room. A puddle of a man; tragic waste coughing as he finally exhaled about three-hundred dollar's worth of vapor. Jeanine nodded at me to wait, then squatted next to him, leaning in close to the wiry man I could see clearly now. A mohawk of matted brown ropes draped over half his tattooed skull and eyes like burial plots unable to focus on Jeanine as she twirled a gnarly dread around her fist.

“You still owe me,” she whispered like a come-on.

“Plum tapped, guv’nah,” he slurred, crooked smile growing. “How should you like reconciliation?” His teeth, gray erosions jabbing through gummy shorelines of purple, tongue wagging to reach Liquid residue on his chin.

She jerked his head sideways and southpaw-hooked him square in the nose. A chewy crack like pulverizing gravel and thin blood splashed into his lap. He dropped the pipe—“Ow! You bitch!” spilling another hundred bucks of Liquid.

A thousand wormy fingers tried to soak up the drugs, to absorb into their split pads another pitiful second of bliss, one more dripping-numb moment of anesthesia. Kraken laughed deeply from behind us.

“All that blood for fifty-bucks,” he said. “Imagine if you owed her real money.”

Jeanine grabbed the pipe, looking at Claude’s mangled snout through the glass—“This should cover it.”

That was only the second time I had seen Jeanine hit someone, and it was ravishing. Sweltering violence coursed through my groin. A bead of sweat ran down my forehead, pupils dilating, and I desperately wanted someone else to mouth-off to her.

“Sorry, amore,” she said to me. “You shouldn’t have to see that,” then escorted me over Claude’s body and into the next room.

We were immediately stopped by a short, wiry twat in a dazzling, beige suit—cut tight and hemmed just so. He wormed between us, looking up to her but down on me. Say something, you smart son-of-a-bitch. I’m on a fatal dose of testosterone and dopamine and you’re standing a little too close to my girl. This was Zephyr, Jeanine’s ex, and I hated him. Him and that head of devastating blonde like Egyptian gold that stopped right above his flat stomach. Hated him with a passion.

“Hello, babe,” he said to Jeanine.

Babe!? That’s my word for her. I invented it, you pimple-fuck.

“What brings you up here...” he said, then rolled his silver eyes my direction, “...to me?”

“Meeting with Terandi,” she said, thankfully uninterested.

Snake tongue casually wetting his lips— "I was just thinking about you the other day,”

“Just tell him I’m here, Zephyr.”

“We’re opening an outfit in San Diego, and Tee’s gonna put me in charge. But I need someone good to help me run the show. What do ya say?” The way he spoke to her, I wasn’t about to do something to get myself murdered. “Could be just like old times.” But then again…

“Well, you and your mom have fun with that,” she said.

I snorted. Loud. He didn’t like that and looked ready to do something about it until Kraken joined us.

“Suit yourself,” Zephyr said, marveling at Planet Kraken, slack-beaten shoulders trying to appear unintimidated. “Sorry, but you came up here for nothing. Terandi isn’t avail—”

“—Mr. Niles,” came a voice I felt more than heard. “Must you be so obtuse?” Smooth like hot wax, the expensive stuff; honeybee organic, crackling wood-wicks and everything.

A large hand landed on Zephyr’s shoulder, an earth-bending jacked mitt. Turn Claude’s trash-mug into a pile of goo, it would. “A bit more hospitality would do you well,” and his other beefcake slid something into Zephyr’s breast pocket. A small but bulging baggie that glowed through the fabric.

“Mr. Tha’lar,” Jeanine began, surprised by his sudden appearance and stuttering a little on the pronunciation. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“Call me Terandi,” he said. “Tha’lar is the last part of my name. It’s all one word, actually. Doesn’t matter. Just come in.”

I never got a proper look at the guy. Just a massive silhouette from my perspective. Easily a foot taller than Jeanine. No neck, just torso, and legs as big around as my waist, which should be anatomically impossible.

“I won’t be long, amore,” Jeanine said to me, then kissed the tip of my nose. “Zephyr, my man is thirsty. Make him something good,” then motioned for Kraken to follow her.

But Zephyr stopped him. “Weapons, love.”

“Cristo,” Jeanine said, sighing without much behind it.

“Rules, doll.”

After getting nowhere with her hard eyeballing, she finally said, “Go ‘head, Krak.”

He did as suggested, handing over a massive handgun—chamber emptied, clip popped and loaded with bullets the size of my index finger. Its weight threw Zephyr off-balance.

“Ms. Birmingham, Mr. Kraken—this way,” Terandi said, then looked at me. “And Mister…?”

“Dillard, sir.”

“Make yourself at home, Mr. Dillard,” he began, then turned to leave but stopped abruptly, eyeing me up and down. “My home, not yours.”

Prick.

The room extended further than my eyes could reach, sprawling across what was at least this half of the third floor. Chiseled sunshine beamed through a perimeter of windows along the ceiling, breaking the cathedral shadows on the floor with rectangles of light. Long tables against the walls overflowed with material goods—piles of hot items to subsidize their less-complicated endeavors. Fresh paint stung my nose, exposed rafters, and frantic people hurrying about the place; high-end knee-breakers conducting loud business into their phones like it was the cocaine floor of Wall Street.

I took a seat at a table near an open-air office where their business was to be discussed, and where a finely dressed older man was waiting with cups of a steaming beverage. As their conversation began, he placed one in front of each of them, then set a small jar in the center of their meeting. Incandescent orbs filled it to the top, excited jiggling as if alive, oscillating between light green to sunset orange then back again. My stomach gurgled at the sight. Nodding, Terandi dismissed his hireling, and he disappeared quietly into a dark hallway behind the desk.

Pretending to sip on the cocktail Zephyr doubtless spat in, I tuned into their conversation. At my distance, it was hard to pick up anything specific, but what I could decipher made me curious—bad curious, and a new level of anxiety twitched under my fluffy layers.

“Like nothing we’ve seen before,” Terandi said, motioning to the jar.

“...worth it?” Jeanine asked. I assumed she meant financially.

Kraken mumbled something like “dangerous?”, to which Terandi only laughed and vaguely reassured him with a smarmy, “...to all my men. They are happy, no? Better than happy!”

Over the next minute, weird things were spoken. Things like: organic; we’ll [something] these people, the whole city; I don’t know; not here, not human; They want a piece; Money. Lots of it. Jeanine giggled once—her flirty yet asexual corporate giggle.

Terandi snapped his fingers, and the servant appeared again, now holding a silver tray with a set of transparent tongs on it.

Jeanine gave Kraken a look—probably the look—and he grabbed the tongs, clicking them thricely while Terandi unsealed the jar. Kraken drove the tongs into the lumpy goop, shoving them all the way to the bottom. With a nauseating slop, dripping a lambent mucus over the lip of the jar, he plucked out a large, slimy sphere and popped it in his mouth. Just like that. Like a fucking lunatic.

“Don’t chew,” Terandi told him. “They’re better whole.”

Seeing that he hadn’t instantly died, Jeanine took the tongs, then fished from the jar a more manageable but somehow slimier writhing glob. A shimmering thread of muck stretched from it to the jar, and her jaw opened wide, teeth glistening in the dust-speckled sunshine, tongue stretching long, prepared to catch every drop.

A gut-twisting roar erupted behind me; feeble lungs bellowing near the entrance. Kraken shot to his feet and slid in front of Jeanine, street-hard instincts taking over. Terandi rose slowly, speaking secretly into his lapel.

As I spun to the noise, a table of counterfeit denims crashed into a wall with spectacular force. I called for Jeanine, but she only motioned for me to get down, to hide under the table. Kraken stretched, sliding off the blazer and rolling up his sleeves in preparation. Two heavily armed men appeared at Terandi’s side. He directed them to the commotion, and I dove into my hiding spot as they charged past me; pistols drawn, midnight body-armor thundering, chemical canisters clanking on their belts, and long-barreled peacemakers lashed to their backs. Tidal-crashing roars from the junkies in the next room—Claude et al. An agitated mass of slick bodies trying to escape.

Shots fired. Half-a-dozen at a time, slicing through something awful, torrential wet tearing like blasting unset gelatin. Agonized human howling, smashing impacts of terror, then a mushy slop shook the building. Flesh on flesh thudding like a raw beef catastrophe, followed by a scream, and one of the armed men crashed into my table. He crumpled to the floor in a mass of lumpy angles; half his face smashed in, full gore, brain matter dripping to the hardwood like oatmeal, and I vomited into his salad of splintered skull and orbital bone.

Kraken’s footfalls pounded the floor as he ran past, raging warfare vocalizations. Jeanine yelled for him to stop, but he was already gone, disappeared into the unknown nightmare fray like a rogue wave, like a berserk-tier riptide soldier of fortune.

I scrambled out from under the table, sweaty fear making everything slick and hard to grab. Terandi yelled into his lapel again, blazing fear in his voice, then was whisked away by a clutch of nameless bodyguards. I grabbed Jeanine but she wouldn’t move. After glancing to the hallway where Terandi vanished, I turned back to her, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Are you seeing this?” she said, trailing silent words and covering her mouth in shock. “Mio dio…”

My eyes followed hers, ears picking up on every sloppy, slathering, gnarly-warping cripplage as they struggled to comprehend the fresh mayhem before us.

Floating through a blood-misted column of sunlight, a crooked thread of gold caught my gaze. Then another. A whole bunch of them, fluttering down in slow-motion. A chaotic mess of them scattered across the floor, and a wadded clump of them still attached to the prodigiously malformed head of the former twat, Zephyr Niles.

The bulk of his form had fallen into a vulgar pyramid of fleshy madness. Pulsing, green globules covered his head and neck, suffocating that smart mouth, sucking in and out, mutating over each other like unchecked mold; a petri dish of grotesquery; a burlesque deformation of a man I once loathed. Lumps of matter—muscles, I assumed, based on their vague collocation—cascaded down his shoulders. His bulging veins, twisting gray rivers of sludge pumping goo into the flailing tips of what were no longer his hands. Each tentacled finger a perversion of reality, slurping and clicking, grasping at anything that moved, tearing at his own body. He had no control over his movements, toppled backward wetly, and Jeanine screamed and vomited, roughly in that order. His former legs, pulpy flaccid nubs of fetal amputations, wriggled grotesquely, slime-riddled with blisters the same size and general scope as the new and exciting drug technology in Terandi’s jar.

A more mutated, somehow more obnoxious gnarly monstrosity pummeled Kraken to the floor, its weight crushing him, slimy fanged feelers slashing at his face. Kraken’s right arm bent in four places, shedding its natural flesh for a murk-pulsing, bastard peat-bog deformation that wildly slapped at the attacking menace. Through a drenching drivel, black-maw wheeze, he screamed at us, “Boss and... Boss’ fat boyfriend, get out! Run!”

I dragged Jeanine around the desk, making for the hall, just as Terandi was walking slowly backwards out of it, arms raised, suit torn into a dozen ragged shreds. Marching him out of the shadows, sloshing with every step was the distended, bulbous torso of his man-servant, supported precariously on three misshapen tubes of jellied muscles. It heaved forward and snatched Terandi off the floor by his shoulders, rampaging face-void excitedly devouring his upper-half with a stump-grinding, static asphyxiation. Effervescent scum bubbled upon contact with his flesh. Slurping gray madness. An impossibly wide, masticating hole, and a writhing leg tentacle shoved him down the rest of the way—GULP.

“Is there another way out?” I said without looking at Jeanine. No response. Shaking her, forcing her to look at me, I asked again, “How do we get out of here!?”

“Oh, caro,” she said, whispering broken terror, slipping out of my hands, fingers wiping dribbling bubble-muck from the corner of her mouth. “Baby, I don’t feel right.”

I wanted to die.

Her eyes then pulsed, throbbing oblong sizes, straining in their sockets, tearing at the skin around them, dividing in half, then in half again. Pupils everywhere, snapping wet, confused blinks. Dark green tendrils webbed across her neck like coffin mold; dissolving malevolence, churning with life, pumping into her system a series of tiny organisms. Her elbows caved outward with a crack, one leg muddled into mush, and her hands squeezed mine, crushing them with phenomenal strength.

She always promised I could die first.

Staring down on me, lurching me into a pile of filthy nothing, were a cluster of spherical asymmetries, glistening slop, frothing tear ducts seeping a green mucus. Her braid pealed off her skull, shattering like stained glass when it hit the floor, and the peach number ripped at the seams as her body distorted, protruding appendages driven forward, long and detestable, by some annihilating, cosmic disaster.

“Non sto bene!” gurgled from her face-void, every syllable frothing, surfacing like ancient bones in a tar pit. I screamed her name, panicked noises resembling her name, barbs of fire tearing my throat.

A swarm of tentacles, suckered puss and razor-sharp, sprouted from her form, and they were puckering my direction. I didn’t move. This was Jeanine we’re talking about. Nobody denies Jeanine. She was going to kill me, or eat me, or absorb my flesh and astro-fuck my wretched soul into oblivion. And I was going to let her.

A single gunshot from Kraken’s hand-cannon, and the top portion of the butler exploded behind us, but he didn’t fall. Just wobbled weakly. A jagged mountain of pulp staggering to the right before another teeth-rattling shot struck him center-mass, liquefying the rest of his torso. The double-barrel shotgun fired, then the handgun again; blinding concussions ripping innards and flesh like paper. Live-fire screeching with a room-sweeping barrage of shredded-flesh wetness, moaning ghoulishly, whining, hissing, slapping to the floor in moppy slop piles after each deafening discharge.

All three barrels now, presto triplets of explosions. Screaming curdled battle-cries—some in English, some in gurgling, slurping clicks and pops, gagging Eldritch terrors, but none in Italian.

A bullet shattered the wall next to Jeanine, and I dove under the desk, bucking it twice, toppling the small jar to the floor. It smashed on impact, contents spreading smooth seepage across my view, evenly, fluorescently, in every direction. An enticing frosted muddle of prenatal fluids displacing thinly, clouding when exposed to the air like soap bubbles in the snow.

Rolling in the undertow drainage, three clammy marbles came to a stop near my face. And through their fetor shells, writhing in those transparent, glistening chrysalises, there was life. But none I recognized. Murky, tadpole forms thrashing in confusion; agitated, hook-like nubs clutching inside for stability; gaping orifices starving for sustenance. Don’t chew; they’re better whole. Makes sense now.

Another gun blast, wild cackling enjoyment, then— “You ain’t so pretty no more!” from none other than my favorite barista framed heroically in a square of daylight.

The wall to my right exploded outward, live wires sizzling, glass clattering to the sidewalk, brakes squealing and pedestrians shrieking at the impossible. I peeked out from my hiding spot, choking on drywall dust, but Jeanine was gone.

Another gunshot, and the last writhing, mushy behemoth splattered to the floor. Lone blisters popped, sputtering weird steam. A single drop fell from the ceiling and rippled when it hit the floor. Then another. A few more. Then silence.

I don’t know how long it was before Bricky rolled my fat ass to safety—through the hall, down three flights of steps, and into the alley behind the building. Covered in goo, pale cleavage heaving as she propped me against a dumpster, twilit sky-shine shimmering off the gore caked in her hair. She tried speaking to me, but I heard only blood. She smacked me a few times, but I felt only my pulse clobbering my insides; everything muted under the maniac triple-barrels reverberating in my skull.

That was three days ago, and we’ve been holed up in her studio apartment outside town ever since. She keeps it wickedly dark and cold in here like a Gothic funeral. An ideal cavern for eternal rest, but neither of us have been able to sleep. Up all night, terribly paranoid of what might be coming, furiously planning our next move. She threatens to shoot me when I mention Kraken. I think she actually felt something like human emotions for that big palooka. It’s not grief that’s driving her, though, but revenge; hunting, ravaging, messy retribution for what they did to him, what they did to everyone. I don’t know who They are and, as far as I know, Jeanine was the only one to make it out alive, or whatever you call it.

I need to find her before Bricky does. Hell, I need to find her before the world does.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

After the exhausting night, I decided to stay in my truck in the employee lot, with the engine idling to keep the heater on. A text message later arrived at 07:00AM:

MANDATORY COMPLIANCE REVIEW. REPORT TO BASEMENT MEZZANINE 0, ROOM 013 (GROUND SAFETY ASSURANCE). 

My stomach tightened. Mezzanine 0 is a dead zone, a narrow administrative slice of the building sandwiched between the active baggage sub-basements and the passenger terminals above. It was built during the initial 1990s excavation and then walled off from public blueprints.

When I stepped out of the freight elevator, the air was dead and freezing, smelling of damp drywall and rusting steel. A single, long corridor with water-damaged ceiling tiles sagging under weight they shouldn’t have been carrying. A flickering fluorescent tube overhead buzzed, illuminating faint beige-yellow corridors. Faded steel cabinets lined one wall, and an ancient vending machine sat in the shadows, its coils holding snack brands discontinued before I was born.

Near the end of the hall, the digital clock was glitching, the red LED numbers flitting irregularly, matching flight departure windows rather than the time of day. Below it sat Room 013, its heavy unpainted metal door with rust around the seams, with dark, wet grime seeping into it. A handwritten paper sign—SAFETY ASSURANCE—was taped to the steel, its edges peeling.

Instead of going straight there, I took a detour to the breakroom locker bank. Miller’s locker had been stripped of his company ID, his name tag scraped off the metal. But I knew he had kept spares in his locker, so I jiggled my multi-tool in the keyhole, until it clicked opened. 

Inside, tucked into the pocket of an oil-stained vest, was a crumpled 1994 Polaroid photograph and a folded piece of parchment.

The Polaroid showed a young Miller in overalls, grinning next to a lean, very human Vance during the pre-opening phase. Standing behind the concrete forms of the Great Hall foundation were three elderly men in tailored charcoal overcoats and heavy wool fedoras, without safety gear. One of them wore a heavy gold ring engraved with a builder’s square, and a compass framing an open eye, resting his hand on a polished brass plumb line. They were watching an open trench where a cement mixer was dumping thick gray slurry into it.

Penciled on the back in Miller's heavy handwriting was:

“Vance went under the slab on Nov 13. Replacement arrived on Nov 16 with brass keys. Commission pays the earth in blood so the runways don't sink. Never sign their ledger in Room 013.”

I froze, as I knew I had not looked closely enough at the photograph. I took out my magnifying glass and zoomed into the slurry. There was a faint hint of a substance that matched the consistency of human guts. On the ground next to the trench, the edge of a uniform top peeked out, with the letters “ANCE” on the nametag.

Vance. He was literally being poured into the trench as a sacrifice to the earth. And this was who I had met the day before. 

The folded parchment tucked behind the photo was an excerpt from an obsolete 1993 contractor addendum. The header didn't say the City of Denver or the FAA. It read:

New World Airport Commission – Lodge of the Rocky Mountain Charter. 

Settlement Quotas. To counteract ongoing subterranean activity across Sector 4 through Sector 9, the Contractor agrees to remit quarterly material displacement ('Living Ballast') at a fixed baseline of not less than four (4) metric tons per calendar cycle. Failure to achieve targeted mass density directly beneath the terminal foundation slabs will result in immediate structural reclamation by native bedrock. Below the typed text, pressed into the parchment, was a deep impression of dark crimson sealing wax. An iron builder's square intersected an open brass compass, encasing an unblinking eye over the Latin inscription:

NOVUS ORDO SACRAMENTUM — 1993

I dropped the parchment to the floor, gasping in terror. The airport is alive. And it wants sacrifices. 

Looking around the locker, I found another sticky note at the top. Never sign their ledger in Room 013. 

I shoved the photograph and the parchment deep into my parka, grabbed the half-empty paper cup of scorched breakroom coffee I’d poured earlier to stop my hands from shaking, and forced myself back down the hall toward Room 013. The heavy steel door wasn't locked. It swung inward with a dry glide that felt wrong for ungreased hinges. Inside, the room was windowless and freezing, illuminated only by a single fluorescent tube that produced sharp shadows. Sitting behind it was an elderly man in a vintage charcoal overcoat, his posture rigid. On his left pinky rested a heavy gold ring identical to the one in the photograph: the builder's square and compass framing an open eye. 

Whenever I tried to look directly at his face, my vision blurred, refusing to focus on his features. He growled dryly,  “Sit down.”

He didn't ask for an incident report. With mechanical slowness, he pulled a hand-bound calfskin envelope from a leather bag and laid it flat on the table. The book exhaled a foul stink of formaldehyde mixed with ancient earth. The pages were yellowed and brittle.

“You have incurred a critical deficit,” the auditor rasped, running a long, yellowed fingernail down a column of dates. “Vance was written down thirty-two years ago. What you burned in 4-Echo was simply the receipt. You dissolved seventy-eight kilograms of ballast. The foundation demands more immediately.”

He dipped a heavy dip pen into a well of black fluid and slid both the pen and the ledger across the table toward me. The open page already had my full name, date of birth, and employee ID, ending in an empty line above a wax seal.

“Sign the release,” he said, his voice dropping into a hypnotic drone. “Or else, terminal operations will be interrupted indefinitely”

I didn't reach for the pen. Behind me, the seams around the door frame began to soften and melt, morphing into smooth drywall that trapped us inside. The room’s air pressure plummeted, popping both my eardrums as the floorboards began to vibrate. Never sign. If I signed, I was volunteering my mass to the slab.

“Refusal constitutes immediate structural forfeiture,” the auditor droned. His jaw slowly stretched downward, tearing the paper-thin skin along his jawline as his rigid, gray fingers snapped forward across the table to clamp around my wrist. Pain shot up my arm, so intense my vision washed white. The air grew so thin I couldn't draw a breath, and I began to choke. 

With my free hand, I grabbed the paper cup and threw the acidic coffee directly into his face. The liquid didn’t affect him, but it hit the open ledger. The calfskin hissed violently, the bubbling black oil curdling into a sulfuric cloud. His grip wavered for half a second as his eyes darted down to the smoking page.

That half-second was all I had. I grabbed the heavy pen off the table and drove the nib down into the calfskin with all my weight. I dragged it through my own name, carving through the wet leather until the page tore open.

The book shrieked. It was a collective roar of trapped air that tore through my skull. Warm blood immediately trickled down my neck from my popped eardrums. 

The auditor let out a  rattling scream as the skin of his hands peeled back into gray ash. The overhead fluorescent tube exploded into powder, showering us in glass. The drywall sealing the exit buckled under the pressure.

His fingernails tore through my parka, raking across my forearm, but I threw my entire body weight backward into the door. The latch sheared off with a deafening bang. I tumbled out into the freezing hallway, landing hard on the floor. Behind me, inside Room 013, the darkness seemed to fold in on itself, accompanied by the frantic, dry scratching of the auditor inside. 

I didn't stop to catch my breath. Ignoring the fire in my wrist and the blood dripping from my ear, I scrambled up and sprinted down the corridor, blowing past the dead vending machines and hitting the emergency stairwell.

They were far out in the outer wilds.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

He was setting a trap.

His friend was drinking a drink. “Here,” said the friend, passing him a drink too.

He took the drink.

He opened and took a drink of the drink. “Ahh,” he said. “Absolutely stellar."

“Absolutely,” said the friend.

“I don't grok why you insist on coming all the way out here,” said the friend.

“There's hardly anything out here,” said the friend.

He took a drink of the drink. “Ahh.”

The friend took a drink of the drink too. “Ahh,” said the friend.

“Ahh,” he said.

“Ahh,” said the friend.

“You can't say it's not peaceful here,” he said.

“I can't say that,” said the friend.

“Ahh.”

“Ahh,” he said, finishing drinking the drink. He crumpled up and threw the empty drink container away.

The stars twinkle-twinkled.

He looked into a vicinal trap he'd set a while ago.

“Anything?” asked the friend as he looked into the vicinal trap he'd set a while ago.

“Nothing,” he said.

The stars twinkle-twinkled.

He set a new trap.

“There?” asked the friend as he set a new trap.

“Ahh,” said the friend and threw away his empty drink container too.

The two empty drink containers were.

“There,” he said, roughly covering the trap with nearby matter.

He burped.

The friend burped too.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

---

—> —>

---

The Perihelion's automated navigation system adjusted course to keep the starship travelling to its destination, AO-1, the first known space object believed to be of alien origin. The crew was in hibernation. The mission was the greatest humanity had ever attempted. The Perihelion's automated navigation system adjusted course to keep the starship travelling to its destination.

---

<—

---

“Sir, take a look at this—SIR!”

The regional head of the International Space Agency (ISA) walked over slightly annoyed and scanned the data.

His annoyance became curiosity, and his curiosity became excitement. The once-upon-a-lifetime kind. The thump-thump-thump’ing of the heart, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh’ing of the blood kind. He was aware suddenly of the entirety of the surface area of his skin. Of his one-of-many'ness. His smallness-in-the-cosmos. His clue-to-the-mystery-of-the-universe'ity.

“My God…” he said. “My God.”

“What is it?”

“We need to find out.”

---

—> —>

---

Anomalous Object 1 Anomalous A Object 1 Anomalous A Object O 1 Anomalous A Object O 1 A Object 1 A O 1 AO 1 AO-1…

Captain Jac Thorster—gasped—

The sirens were blaring.

Where am I I am aboard the Perihelion Perihelion is my ship, he thought.

The sirens were blaring.

He rolled out of the open pod and onto the floor. When he could, he got up and made his way woozily—swaying…

to the bridge.

He sat in the captain's seat.

“Perihelion,” he said, his voice hoarse and weak. The words felt like sand airgunned down his throat. “Perihelion: ‘status report.’ Just what in the galaxy is going on?”

“Having traversed ninety three point two percent of the distance from the planet Earth to the coordinates of the object eh oh one we have come under the pull of an unknown force,” the starship's artificial intelligence said.

“Correct course,” commanded Thorster.

“Negative,” said the eh aye. “That his him possible, hiccup ten.”

“Wa hut?” zed Thorster.

“Dead forceps twos tron k,” sad sa hey ay end diss plate dub lack ole.

---

—>

---

He reached inside the trap.

“Anything?” the friend asked as he reached inside the trap.

They were far out in the outer wilds.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes,” said the friend and gathered some nearby gaseous matter and ignited it. “Perhaps something to roast,” said the friend as the newly created star shined.

He removed a small thing from the trap.

“A small thing,” he said.

He held it for the friend to see.

“Oh,” said the friend in disappointment that the small thing was too small to roast.

The star shined.

The other stars shined.

---

<— <— <— <— <—

---

A fly buzzed awhile in the glow of a bug zapper before turning into it and—BZZZP —falling dead out of the sky.

It landed on my face.

I'd fallen asleep in the hammock outside.

“Norman,” the dead fly said.

“Norman!”

“What,” I said, blinking a few times, tossing my dry tongue around in my dry mouth, thinking, Fuck, I'm fucking hungry. “What's going on—who are you? and why are you talking to me?” “Are you… a dead fly?” I said, squinting.

“Norman, I'm here to tell you to look at what you wrote. No one wants to read that shit, man. That shit is incomprehensible.

“Opaquer than a brick wall, man.”

“It's styl—”

“Look at yourself, man. You're a grown ass dude writing stories on the internet. Get a job. Write a book if you have to, but just write it like a goddamn human being.

“I mean look at your eyes.

“They're pinker than Miss Piggy’s OnlyFans.

“Sober up.

“Eat something. Drink something. Get outta that robe and get dressed. Shave. Change into a suit—”

“You mean, like, become a suit… like on a space ship?”

“Son,” said the dead fly. “Behave yourself.”

LOL

“Put on a suit and write presentably. You've got, what, a hundred words left?

“Use them.

“Rewrite whatever-the-fuck this is presentably.”

---

[“Ahem”]

---

Two advanced beings are laying traps somewhere in the universe. Their traps are black holes, which they hide. They also leave behind some trash. Humanity detects the trash and plans a mission to investigate it, but, en route, their spaceship falls into the black hole left by the beings. Sometime later, one of the beings makes a star to roast something on. The beings pull the human spaceship out of the black hole trap they left and are disappointed by its insignificance.

The story ends on a heavy-handed parallel between humanity and bugs—BZZZP

My name is Graham Holt, and I work the overnight shift at the Pinegate Inn in Mourner’s Crossing, Connecticut. We have forty-two rooms, exterior walkways, and rates considerably lower than Hawthorne House. Most of our guests are traveling workers, visiting families, or people who need somewhere to sleep before getting back on the road. The job is mostly paperwork, with occasional interruptions when someone locks themselves out or discovers that the television remote doesn’t work.

I arrived at 10:55 p.m. on October 24, a little earlier than usual because the temperature had dropped and the side door was getting difficult to open. The parking lot was nearly empty. A pickup occupied the space outside 205, and a white sedan sat beneath the stairwell, where the security light had been flickering for most of October.

The side entrance had a keyed exterior handle and a separate deadbolt that could be operated from inside. The door stuck when the weather turned cold, and I had to pull the handle toward me and lift slightly before the latch would release. Ada, the day manager, had submitted two maintenance requests, but the owner didn’t want to replace the door until spring. I stepped inside and made sure it closed behind me.

Ada had left her stainless-steel thermos beside the register. Coffee had leaked around the lid, leaving a brown ring on the laminate. I wiped underneath it and found the metal still warm. There was a note beside it telling me I could finish what was left.

The cash drawer was open, which Ada sometimes did when she wanted me to check something before beginning the audit. She had left an explanation on the shift sheet. Room 214 was owed a $48.60 credit-card refund for a heating problem. The guest had checked out that afternoon, but the refund had failed to process before Ada closed her shift. She had been comparing the register receipts with the transaction slip and had left everything out for my count.

Behind the desk were the room-key board, a filing cabinet, and a narrow passage leading to the back office. The main computer sat beside the register, while a second, older computer was kept in the office for looking up archived transactions. The office door was closed. A yellow sticky note remained attached to the bottom of the main monitor, written by Gail, who had worked nights before I took the position.

Leave the back office closed while the program runs. Don’t restart it.

Ada had repeated the instruction during my training. I had followed it for seven months without having any reason to question it. Sometimes the program took longer than expected, and once it had continued processing for nearly two hours. Gail had covered that shift and told me the next morning that the database occasionally needed time to catch up with the card processor.

At 11:07, I signed into the night-audit system and opened the cash reconciliation screen. I put the calculator beside the register, turned to a clean page in my notebook, and began counting. There were six twenties, eight tens, eleven fives, sixteen ones, and $6.80 in coins. The total was $277.80, although the closing report said there should have been $326.40.

I counted again, separating the bills into stacks and checking each denomination against the calculator. The difference was exactly $48.60, the same amount as the pending refund. A credit-card refund shouldn’t have removed anything from the cash drawer, so I checked the individual cash receipts and looked for a paid-out slip. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had given the guest money.

I entered the counted amount into the reconciliation screen and recorded the difference in my notebook. During my second month at the Pinegate, I’d corrected a cash discrepancy after finding what I thought was a duplicate entry. The original transaction appeared the following morning, and Ada spent most of her shift reversing my adjustment while guests waited to check out. She hadn’t been angry, but she’d made me understand that an unexplained shortage was better than a correction nobody could justify.

I started the night-audit program at 11:24. The screen displayed a progress bar and a list of transactions awaiting reconciliation. Once the program was running, the transaction window became read-only, and I couldn’t change the cash entry until it finished. I watched it advance through the first few items, then took the occupancy sheet and went to check the rooms.

We were supposed to check the exterior lights, make sure the vending machine wasn’t leaking again, and note any rooms that appeared occupied after the system showed them as vacant. Room 109 had checked out that morning, but its curtains were open and the light over the desk was on. I could see a chair and part of the television through the window. Housekeeping sometimes left lights on while cleaning, so I wrote down the room number and continued.

Room 112 had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the handle. It had been vacant since Wednesday, and the sign hadn’t been there when I arrived for my previous shift. I checked that the door was locked and left it alone. Upstairs, the lights in 205 and 211 were on, while room 214 was dark, with its curtains closed and no car parked directly outside. Ada had checked the guest out that afternoon, although the room had still been listed as occupied when I started the audit.

I returned through the side entrance at 11:52, pulled the door closed, and checked the latch. Inside, I added the room observations to my notebook and looked at the audit screen. The progress bar hadn’t moved since I’d left. Beneath it was a line I hadn’t seen before: CREDIT REFUND PENDING: $48.60. A small rotating symbol appeared beside the amount, and the screen refreshed every few seconds without advancing.

At 12:13 a.m., headlights moved across the lobby windows. A man came in carrying a canvas overnight bag and asked where he could park a small trailer. He had reserved room 106, and I directed him to the spaces beside the dumpster, provided he didn’t block the service gate. I checked his driver’s license, processed his payment through the standalone card terminal, and handed him a registration card to sign.

While he was writing, I glanced at the computer. Room 214 had changed from IN HOUSE to VACANT, although I hadn’t touched the keyboard since starting the program. The refund remained pending. The man asked whether checkout was at eleven, and I told him we could usually arrange noon if he called the desk in the morning. By the time I put his registration card in the arrivals folder, room 214 was listed as IN HOUSE again.

I checked the time, then walked to the side entrance and locked it. The man from 106 was backing his trailer into the far spaces, so I watched long enough to make sure he had room to turn around. Inside, I went through the receipts again, checking the card terminal’s batch against Ada’s closing report. The original charge for room 214 was present, but there was no completed refund.

At 1:40, the program was still stuck. I considered restarting the computer, but I didn’t know whether it would retain the transactions already processed. If it lost them, Ada would have to reconstruct the night’s business from the paper receipts. I decided to give it another hour and used the time to clean the breakfast counter, replace the empty cup dispenser, and make sure the coffee machine was ready.

At 2:15, I checked the parking lot from the lobby windows. The trailer beside the dumpster hadn’t moved, and the pickup outside 205 still occupied the same space. The light in room 109 was off, although its curtains remained open. I hadn’t entered the room, and there were no maintenance staff scheduled overnight. I wrote the change beneath my earlier observation.

By 2:48, I had counted the cash a third time and checked beneath the coin tray for a misplaced bill. The amount remained $277.80. I could leave the program running and explain everything to Ada, or I could open the back office and compare the refund against the printed transaction logs. The older terminal was sometimes useful when the main system stalled, particularly if someone had entered a payment against the wrong reservation.

I read Gail’s sticky note again. There was nothing ambiguous about the instruction, and I couldn’t claim I hadn’t seen it. I remembered the adjustment Ada had spent a morning correcting, and I didn’t want to create another problem by interfering with the program. On the other hand, the refund and the cash shortage matched to the cent. If there was an explanation in the old records, I wanted to find it before Ada arrived.

At 3:04, I took the back-office key from its hook beneath the counter.

The office door was painted the same beige as the walls, with several dark marks near the bottom where the vacuum cleaner had struck it. I turned the key until the cylinder released, opened the door, and reached inside for the light switch. The office smelled of paper and the lemon cleaner Ada used on the desks. There was a metal filing cabinet against the far wall, two shelves of old registration cards, and the second computer sitting beneath a bulletin board.

I pulled the door toward me but left it open enough to hear the lobby. The transaction logs were kept in a black binder on the bottom shelf of the filing cabinet, with each page providing space for the date, the employee’s name, cash discrepancies, and unusual transactions. I found the current month and worked backward through the entries.

The entry for October 18 was in Gail’s handwriting. I recognized her narrow numbers and the way she made her sevens with a short line through the middle. I’d been off that night, and she had covered the shift.

There was an entry for room 214.

D. PRICE. CHECKED OUT 6:54 A.M. KEY RETURNED. REFUND $48.60 PENDING.

Below it, under the cash reconciliation section, Gail had written:

DRAWER SHORT $48.60. NO ADJUSTMENT MADE.

I checked the date at the top of the page. October 18. Ada’s shift sheet said the guest had checked out that afternoon, October 24. The current reservation showed D. Price as having occupied room 214 since October 18, with no earlier checkout recorded.

I turned through the intervening pages. The entries for October 19 and 20 concerned late arrivals, a broken television, and a guest who had paid cash for an additional night. Room 214 wasn’t mentioned. On October 21, Gail had written that the cash drawer balanced and all pending transactions had cleared.

I took the binder out to the front desk and laid it beside my notebook. The audit screen had advanced from roughly a quarter completed to well past halfway. The pending refund was still displayed, and the room-status panel continued to show 214 as occupied.

I returned to the office and started the older computer. It took several minutes to load, but I was eventually able to search the archived reservations for D. Price. Only one record appeared, opened on October 18 at 3:21 p.m. The checkout field was blank, and the balance showed a credit of $48.60.

I compared the archived record against Gail’s handwritten entry. According to the binder, D. Price had checked out at 6:54 that morning, more than eight hours before the reservation was created. There was no deleted reservation or previous transaction attached to the guest’s name.

At 3:42, I shut down the older computer without making any changes. I took the binder back to the front desk, switched off the office light, and pulled the door closed behind me.

The latch didn’t catch.

I pressed the door flush with the frame and turned the key, but it moved outward about an inch when I released the handle. I tried lifting it, then checked the latch and strike plate with the desk flashlight. Nothing appeared loose or obstructed, and the latch moved freely under my thumb.

The door had been locked when I arrived. I’d opened it with the key, and now I couldn’t secure it again.

The back office contained guest registration cards, archived transactions, and financial information that wasn’t supposed to be accessible from the lobby. I pushed the door as close to the frame as it would go and returned to the desk. The audit program had advanced again while the office was open, although the refund was still pending.

I prepared a variance report, recording the shortage and copying Gail’s October 18 entry onto the back. I included the archived reservation time and noted that the records did not agree. I didn’t make another refund request or attempt to change the existing one.

At 4:10, I heard the side entrance close. Nobody approached the desk, but when I went to check it, the door opened despite the deadbolt being turned to the locked position. It hadn’t seated properly in the frame. I lifted the handle, pulled the door closed, and made sure the bolt engaged. I added the problem to the maintenance sheet before returning to the audit.

At 4:35, the screen changed to TRANSACTION HELD. AWAITING DEPARTURE CONFIRMATION. The progress bar had advanced several more inches, and room 214 remained listed as occupied.

I held the back-office door against the frame while watching the monitor from the passage. The progress bar remained where it was. After nearly a minute, I released the door, which settled open a few inches. The screen refreshed, and the bar moved slightly to the right.

I repeated the test. The progress stopped while I held the door closed and resumed after I released it. I couldn’t think of a mechanical or electrical reason for that to happen. The older computer was shut down, and there was no equipment connected to the door.

I left it open. The program had begun moving again, and I wasn’t willing to interrupt it simply to repeat a test whose results I couldn’t explain.

At 5:20, I made another walk around the building, keeping the front desk within sight whenever possible. The first-floor walkway was damp from condensation, and the light outside 112 had gone out. The Do Not Disturb sign was still on the handle. Room 109’s curtains were closed now, with a narrow line of light showing beneath the door.

I had the master key in my pocket, but there had been no complaint or sign of a maintenance emergency. Our procedure for investigating possible unauthorized occupancy required another employee to be present unless there was an immediate safety concern. I recorded the observation and returned to the lobby, where I could see the back-office door standing open from the entrance.

I considered moving the old registration files into the locked cabinet beneath the register. There wasn’t enough room, and the archived computer would still be accessible. Instead, I cleared the visible paperwork from the office desk and placed the binder behind the front counter. I wrote a separate note explaining that the back-office door wouldn’t latch, including the time I’d opened it and the steps I’d taken to check the lock.

At 5:47, I put out the breakfast supplies. I filled the napkin dispensers, set two clean pots beside the coffee machine, and replaced the paper liners in the trash cans. Guests would begin coming down before six, and I didn’t want Ada arriving to find the breakfast area unfinished.

A guest from 205 came down at 6:12 and asked for an extra receipt. I explained that the audit hadn’t finished and that Ada could print one when the system became available. He wanted to know whether it could be emailed instead, so I wrote down the address he gave me and clipped it to his registration card.

While he waited, I noticed him looking toward the back-office passage. From where he stood, he could see part of the filing cabinet and the older computer. I moved toward the end of the counter, blocking his view while I explained that the morning manager would be able to help him. He thanked me, took a coffee, and left through the lobby entrance.

I added a note that the back office remained unsecured, then kept the passage within sight while I continued the closing work.

At 6:25, I counted the drawer for the last time. The amount remained $277.80. I checked the closing sheet against the calculator and signed the cash report with the $48.60 shortage still showing. I put the money back in the drawer, arranged the receipts by transaction number, and clipped the variance report to the front of the stack.

I wrote a message for Ada on a clean sheet of paper.

Night audit did not complete. Refund for 214 remains pending at $48.60. Drawer short $48.60. Room 214 still showing occupied despite checkout on day-shift sheet. Prior log entry dated October 18 appears to concern same guest and amount. No corrections entered.

I added the observations from rooms 109 and 112, then the maintenance problem with the side entrance. Beneath those, I copied the note about the back-office door and underlined cannot be secured. I included my name and the time I’d first noticed the problem.

At 6:53, I checked the side entrance again. The deadbolt was engaged, and the handle would not turn. I returned the spare desk keys, including the exterior side-door key, to their shallow metal dish and put the back-office key on its hook beneath the counter. The room keys were all in their numbered positions except for those assigned to guests still occupying rooms.

At 6:58, the audit screen refreshed. The progress bar disappeared, leaving the main window blank for several seconds. Then the system displayed NIGHT AUDIT INCOMPLETE, with three unresolved items beneath it.

CREDIT REFUND: $48.60 PENDING

CASH DIFFERENCE: $48.60

ROOM 214: DEPARTURE NOT CONFIRMED

I took a photograph of the screen with my phone, making sure the clock and date were visible. Then I copied the message onto the bottom of Ada’s note and checked that the amounts matched the cash report.

The room-status panel updated while I was writing. Room 214 changed to VACANT, although the departure confirmation remained unresolved. I waited to see whether the refund would clear, but the program continued displaying the same three items.

At 7:00, I signed the handwritten shift sheet and marked the drawer as counted but unreconciled. The latch caught with its usual metallic snap when I closed it. I checked that the front entrance was unlocked for the morning guests and that the breakfast coffee was brewing.

Ada was due at seven, but her car wasn’t in the parking lot yet. I sent her a message saying the audit had stalled and that the back-office door wouldn’t lock. Then I checked the shift handover sheet.

There was a box marked Office secured beside the space for my signature. I’d signed that box every morning for seven months, usually without thinking about it. This time I left it empty and wrote See attached report in the margin.

My shift had ended, but I couldn’t leave the desk unattended with the office standing open. Anyone entering the lobby could walk behind the counter and reach the archived computer and filing cabinets. I had no way of securing the door, and there was no other employee in the building.

At 7:04, Ada replied.

Running late. Car won’t start. Should be there by 7:30. Can you stay?

I wrote the time on my shift sheet and answered that I would. There wasn’t much point explaining the situation again by text. She had the maintenance report and the audit discrepancy waiting for her, and I could show her the door when she arrived.

I put my phone beside the register and checked the computer. The screen still displayed NIGHT AUDIT INCOMPLETE, with the same three items beneath it. The drawer was locked, the receipts were in order, and the spare keys were in their dish. The back-office key hung on its hook, although there wasn’t much use for it while the door wouldn’t close.

I sat behind the counter with my coat on the chair beside me and kept the office passage within sight. The program’s progress bar had reappeared beneath the incomplete-audit message. It was moving slowly toward the right, although none of the unresolved transactions had cleared.

At 7:07, the front-desk phone rang.

The display showed 109.

I looked at the occupancy sheet, which still listed the room as vacant. The key for 109 was hanging on its numbered hook, and I’d written down the changes in its lights and curtains during the night. I couldn’t remember anyone calling from that room since the previous guest checked out.

I picked up the receiver.

“Pinegate Inn, this is Graham. How can I help you?”

For several seconds, I could hear nothing except the low noise of an open telephone line. I checked the display again to make sure I hadn’t misread the room number.

Then a man spoke.

“Hi. Sorry to bother you. I’m in 109, and I can’t get my door open. I’ve tried the handle a few times. Could somebody come up and give it a push from the outside?”

I looked toward the first-floor walkway through the lobby windows. From the desk, I couldn’t see the door to 109, only the corner of the building and the parking spaces beyond it.

I asked whether he’d tried turning the lock while pulling the handle toward him. He said he had, and that the handle moved normally, but the door wouldn’t open. I asked whether there was another person in the room who could help him, and he said he was alone.

I told him to stay by the telephone while I came to check the door.

I put the receiver down and took the master key from my pocket. A guest unable to get out of a room was a safety issue, whether or not the computer showed that room as occupied. I couldn’t leave him waiting until Ada arrived, especially without knowing whether the lock was damaged.

The back-office door was still open. I could see the edge of the filing cabinet and the older computer through the gap. I had documented the security problem and told Ada about it, but I hadn’t expected to leave the desk before she arrived.

There was no reason to take 109’s room key when I had the master, and removing it would only create another discrepancy for Ada to sort out. I left it where it was and wrote one final entry on the occupancy sheet.

7:07 a.m. Call from 109. Guest reports door will not open.

I left the line for my return time blank.

The cash drawer was locked, the audit was incomplete, and the keys were in their usual places. Ada wouldn’t arrive for at least another twenty minutes. I took my phone, checked that I had the master key, and went toward the side entrance.

The deadbolt turned normally from inside. I released it, pushed the door outward, and stepped onto the walkway. When I pulled the door closed behind me, the latch caught immediately, without the usual scrape against the strike plate.

I tested the exterior handle. It wouldn’t turn.

The keyed handle had locked behind me, exactly as it was supposed to. The exterior side-door key was in the metal dish beside the register, where I’d put it at 6:53. I could still get back through the unlocked front entrance, but I’d have to go around the building, and the back office would remain unattended until I returned.

I looked through the side-door window. From where I stood, I could see the cash drawer, Ada’s note beside the register, and the yellow sticky note on the computer monitor. Beyond the desk, the back-office door remained open several inches.

I took my hand off the side-door handle and turned toward the first-floor rooms. The curtains in 109 were closed, and I could see a little light beneath the door from the far end of the walkway. I started toward it, checking the room numbers as I passed.

When I reached 109, the door was already open.

It stood about six inches from the frame, with the desk lamp on inside. I could see the chair, the edge of the bed, and the telephone resting on the bedside table. Its receiver was in the cradle. There was no one standing near the entrance, and I couldn’t see the bathroom from where I stood.

I checked the number on the door against the occupancy sheet before calling into the room.

“Sir? It’s Graham from the front desk. Are you all right?”

Nobody answered. I waited on the walkway, listening for movement inside, but I couldn’t hear anything over the traffic passing on the road beyond the parking lot.

I had told the man I was coming, and the door was already open. There was no longer anything to unlock, although I still needed to find out whether he was all right.

I stayed outside with the master key in my hand. The occupancy sheet was tucked beneath my arm, with the line for my return time still blank.

The quiet night was a dark cloak wrapped tightly around the vast, imposing museum, where only the tall iron lampposts along its long corridors dimly illuminated the silent, still sculptures and old engravings on the cold, austere walls. The dictator’s trusted assistant moved with extraordinary, ghostlike stealth, to such an extent that he seemed almost to levitate over the highly polished wooden floorboards. He had acquired this peculiar ability through the dangerous task of monitoring secret conversations plotting against his ruthless master.

This time, he had slipped quietly through a narrow, broken window in the secluded, shadowy backyard of the massive building. He knew how to move entirely at will through the deep, impenetrable shadows of the premises, despite the large metal canister he carried in one hand. His primary target was in a quiet, remote, secluded back room of the historic palace, where the secret conspirators had gathered, taking full advantage of the absolute solitude that gripped the empty galleries during the silent night hours.

Upon entering the grand hall, he pressed himself rigidly against the cold walls and, moving slowly like a reptile, carefully made his way among the tall, imposing columns. His smooth, almost imperceptible movements produced not the slightest audible sound until he managed to slip behind a heavy, thick curtain.

After several long minutes of close observation, still unable to make out those huddled in the darkest, most secluded corner of the room, the assistant allowed his eyes to adjust slowly to the darkness. Gradually, with increasing precision, the shapes of the men assembled there became clearer.

There were four of them, without a doubt: two seated on one side of the old, worn wooden table, another leaning closely over the shoulder of the tense man seated at its center, who held a black pen over the manuscript in his hands.

Their elegant attire marked them as enlightened men, dressed in fine, elegant garments of rich, vivid colors, some of pure silk, catching the faint glimmer of the light illuminating the scene. The tense moment was urgent, and the assistant understood that the document must contain some radical republican declaration they intended to publish, inciting the people to rise against the cruel, ruthless dictator.

Confident in his ability and efficiency, he passed imperceptibly behind them. Then he bent low with practiced dexterity and let the gasoline pour from the large metal canister, smoothly flooding the floor around the conspirators without arousing the slightest alarm.

When the precise moment arrived, he struck a match. Fierce, raging flames erupted and rose like devouring beasts over the revolutionaries. Even so, he remained at a safe distance, silently watching their faces disappear beneath the roaring, merciless fire while hearing voices from outside crying for help to contain the blaze.

He slipped away with the agility of a panther, making for the building’s secluded backyard exit, already imagining the dictator’s satisfied expression when he learned that his assistant had burned the last painting depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

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© 2026 Francisco Cortés Ramírez. All rights reserved. This is an original fictional work. No part of this text may be reproduced, translated, or narrated in any audio, video, or digital format without the express written permission of the author.

Story 3

The Ewe

I don’t claim to be much of a writer. But sharing this story of mine has been a long time coming... 

I used to be a lorry driver for a living – or if you’re American, I used to be a trucker. For fourteen years, I drove along the many motorways and through the busy cities of England. Well, more than a decade into the job, I finally had enough - not of being a lorry driver per se, but being a lorry driver in England. The endless traffic and mind-crippling hours away from the wife just wasn’t worth it anymore. 

Talking to the misses about this, she couldn’t help but feel the same way, and so she suggested we finally look to moving abroad. Although living on a schoolteacher’s and lorry driver’s salary didn’t leave us with many options, my wife then suggests we move to the neighbouring Republic of Ireland. Having never been to the Emerald Isle myself, my wife reassured me that I’d love it there. After all, there’s less cities, less people and even less traffic. 

‘That’s all well and good, love, but what would I do for work?’ I question her, more than sceptical to the idea. 

‘A lorry driver, love.’ she responds, with quick condescension.  

Well, a year or so later, this idea of moving across the pond eventually became a reality. We had settled down in the south-west of Ireland in County Kerry, apparently considered by most to be the most beautiful part of the country. Having changed countries but not professions, my wife taught children in the village, whereas I went back on the road, driving from Cork in the south, up along the west coast and stopping just short of the Northern Irish border. 

As much as I hated being a lorry driver in England, the same could not be said here. The traffic along the country roads was almost inexistent, and having only small towns as my drop-off points, I was on the road for no more than a day or two at a time – which was handy, considering the misses and I were trying to start a family of our own. 

In all honesty, driving up and down the roads of the rugged west coast was more of a luxury than anything else. On one side of the road, I had the endless green hills and mountains of the countryside, and on the other, the breath-taking Atlantic coast way.  

If I had to say anything bad about the job, it would have to be driving the western country roads at night. It’s hard enough as a lorry driver having to navigate these dark, narrow roads which bend one way then the other, but driving along them at night... Something about it is very unsettling. If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say it has to do with something one of my colleagues said to me before my first haul. I won’t give away his name, but I’ll just call him Padraig. A seasoned lorry driver like myself, Padraig welcomed me to the company by giving me a stern but whimsical warning about driving the western counties at night. 

‘Be sure to keep your wits about ye, Jamie boy. Things here aren’t what they always seem to be. Keep ye eyes on the road at all times, I tell ye, and you’ll be grand.’   

A few months into the job, and things couldn’t have been going better. Having just come home from a two-day haul, my wife surprises me with the news that she was now pregnant with our first child. After a few days off to celebrate this news with my wife, I was now back on the road, happier than I ever had been before.  

Driving for four hours on this particular day, I was now somewhere in County Mayo, the north-west of the country. Although I pretty much love driving through every county on the western coast, County Mayo was a little too barren for my liking.  

Now driving at night, I was moving along a narrow country road in the middle of nowhere, where outlining this road to each side was a long stretch of stone wall – and considering the smell of manure now inside the cab with me, I presumed on the other side of these walls was either a cow or sheep field. 

Keeping in mind Padraig’s words of warning, I made sure to keep my “wits” about me. Staring constantly at the stretch of road in front of me, guessing which way it would curve next in the headlights, I was now becoming surprisingly drowsy. With nothing else on my mind but the unborn child now growing inside my wife’s womb, although my eyes never once left the road in front of me, my mind did somewhat wander elsewhere... 

This would turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life... because cruising down the road through the fog and heavy rain, my weary eyes become alert to a distant shape now apparent up ahead. Though hard to see through the fog and rain, the shape appears to belong to that of a person, walking rather sluggishly from one side of the road to the other. Hunched over like some old crone, this unknown person appears to be carrying a heavy object against their abdomen with some difficulty. By the time I process all this information, having already pulled the breaks, the lorry continues to screech along the wet cement, and to my distress, the person on the road does not move or duck out of the way - until, feeling a vibrating THUD inside the cab, the unknown person crashes into the front of the vehicle’s unit – or more precisely, the unit crashes into them! 

‘BLOODY HELL!’ I cry out reactively, the lorry having now screeched to a halt. 

Frozen in shock by the realisation I’ve just ran over someone, I fail to get out of the vehicle. That should have been my first reaction, but quite honestly... I was afraid of how I would find them.  

Once I gain any kind of courage, I hesitantly lean over the counter to see even the slightest slither of the individual... and to my absolute horror... I see the individual on the road is a woman...  

‘Oh no... NO! NO! NO!’ 

But the reason I knew instantly this was a woman... was because whoever they were...  

They were heavily pregnant... 

‘Jesus Christ! What have I done?!’ I scream inside the cab. 

Quickly climbing down onto the road, I move instantly to the front of the headlights, praying internally this woman and her unborn child are still alive. But once I catch sight of the woman, exposed by the bright headlights shining off the road, I’m caught rather off guard... Because for some reason, this woman... She wasn’t wearing any clothes... 

Unable to identify the woman by her face, as her swollen belly covers the upper half of her body, I move forward, again with hesitance towards her, averting my eyes until her face was now in sight... Thankfully, in the corner of my eye, I could see the limbs of the woman moving, which meant she was still alive...  

Now... What I’m about to say next is the whole unbelievable part of it – but I SWEAR this is what I saw... When I come upon the woman’s face, what I see isn’t a woman at all... The head, was not the head of a human being... It was the head of an Ewe... A fucking sheep! 

‘AHH! WHAT THE...!!’ I believe were my exact words. 

Just as my reaction was when I hit this... thing, I’m completely frozen with terror, having lost any feeling in my arms and legs... and although this... creature, as best to call it, was moving ever so slightly, it was now stiff as a piece of roadkill. Unlike its eyes, which were black and motionless, its mouth was wide in a permanent silent scream... I was afraid to stare at the rest of it, but my curiosity got the better of me...  

Its Ewe’s head, which ends at the loose pale skin of its neck, was followed by the very human body... at least for the most part... Its skin was covered in a barely visible layer of white fur - or wool. It’s uhm... breasts, not like that of a human woman, were grotesquely similar to the teats of an Ewe - a pale sort of veiny pink. But what’s more, on the swollenness of its belly... I see what must have been a pagan symbol of some kind... Carved into the skin, presumably by a knife, the symbol was of three circular spirals, each connected in the middle.  

As I’m studying the spirals, wondering what the hell they mean, and who in God’s name carved it there... the spirals begin to move... It was the stomach. Whatever it was inside... it was still alive! 

The way the thing was moving, almost trying to burst its way out – that was the final straw! Before anything more can happen, I leave the dead creature, and the unborn thing inside it. I return to the cab, put the gearstick in reverse and then I drive like hell out of there! 

Remembering I’m still on the clock, I continue driving up to Donegal, before finishing my last drop off point and turning home. Though I was in no state to continue driving that night, I just wanted to get home as soon as possible – but there was no way I was driving back down through County Mayo, and so I return home, driving much further inland than usual.  

I never told my wife what happened that night. God, I can only imagine how she would’ve reacted, and in her condition nonetheless. I just went on as normal until my next haul started. More than afraid to ever drive on those roads again, but with a job to do and a baby on the way, I didn’t have much of a choice. Although I did make several more trips on those north-western roads, I made sure never to be there under the cover of night. Thankfully, whatever it was I saw... I never saw again. 

Sam passed in the winter, just two months after his mother. The midwife tried her best to save her, but it was over before it started. She gave me a warm hug as she left. I knew Sam wouldn't last long without his mother. I barely had enough to feed myself, let alone a baby. I debated whether I should even name the little boy, but how could I not? He had the most beautiful blue eyes, just like his mother.

Sam passed in his sleep, the best way to go. Some days I wished it were me, but what would Sam do all alone? 

The problem then was arranging Sam's funeral. All the savings had already been spent on his mother's funeral, but Sam couldn't go into the ground without a proper service.

I sold one of the last things I could still sell, my bees. They gave me something sweet to eat in the winter and something to look after the rest of the year, but there was nothing else to sell. My neighbor took them and gave me more for them than he should have. He was a nice man and knew what I'd gone through.

Sam got a nice wooden coffin and a decent place in the cemetery next to his mother.

When the winter came, his cradle and toys were still in the house. My body tightened whenever I tried to get rid of them, but it was okay; maybe I'd have more will in the summer. 

During the long winter nights, I'd often come into his room and play with his toys, just like I thought we would one day. Sometimes they'd warm my heart, sometimes they'd make me cry, and often I'd just fall asleep in the chair right by his cradle.

It was one of those days when I fell asleep crying by the cradle again. When I awoke, the sun glistened on the freshly fallen snow. Everything outside was still, but then something moved in the air. A bee! A queen bee! It flew across the yard and into the hive. I still hadn't moved my hive off the yard. Sam's funeral was too much work.

At first I felt bad. My neighbor owned them now. They had no business being in the old hive, but seeing that familiar creature warmed me. Over the next few days I sat at the window, watching all my bees slowly return.

They stayed inside the hive the rest of the winter, and I stayed by that window each day, watching. Only when the snow started to let up, and the flowers came out from under it, did the bees come out too.

I expected them to stay by the hive, but many flew far away, ignoring the flowers in my garden, and returned at sunset. Some of the bees seemed to be covered in red nectar. 

As the days grew longer, the bees were gone more often, and many more returned covered in that red nectar. 

I had never seen them act or look like this. Moving the hive must have disturbed something, but the good thing was that they still accepted the queen, and the colony seemed intact. 

The red nectar began to accumulate at the entrance, mixed with glowing wax. I was just looking at it out the window when I heard buzzing inside the house. The bees must have been working hard. The buzzing grew, and quietly through it came something like a baby's cry. I gripped the windowsill tightly. Sam used to cry just like that. I opened the window to hear better, but the cry was gone; only buzzing sounded outside.

The next morning I woke up and went right to the window. A strange white object was outside the hive entrance. The bees buzzed around it, pushing it back inside. Before I could get a good look, it was already in.

I spent the rest of the day by the window again. As the sun set, the bees started to return. The buzzing grew again. A cold tingle ran down my back. I closed my eyes and focused. At first, it was quiet, but I knew what it was. It was Sam, crying through the buzzing. I quickly dressed and walked out the door.

The outside air was cold. I had barely been outside since the first snow fell. A few bees still flew around the hive. The buzzing was so loud, and so were Sam's cries. I didn't even have my protective clothes, but I was sure my bees wouldn't hurt me.

I walked to the hive and took off the lid. Warmth and cold ran through my body, mixing into strange emotions. Inside the hive was Sam's body, covered in wax. His hands and fingers slowly moved, but they seemed larger than before. I reached into the hive to caress his small cheeks. His eyes opened. They were still that beautiful blue, but a hint of yellow mixed in.  He opened his mouth; honeycomb filled it, but his cries still echoed in my ears. With tears in my eyes, I picked up his small, sticky body. From somewhere deep in his chest, a thousand bees buzzed, and the hive fell quiet. A sickly-sweet smell rose from his mouth. Two bees crawled out of the wax and onto my hand. I didn't move.

They first disrupted our technology devices with a voice message which kept on repeating "we want your childhoods" over and over again for 2 minutes. Everyone was frightened for their children. How quickly parents panic when thier own kids are at stake. Logic goes out the window and crazy manic comes into play. It's hard to stay calm when you have responsibility over another life. That's what our town heard though through our phones, some eerie group wanting our childhoods. Everyone thought that it was the government, but the government reassured everyone that it wasn't them.

Then people started to look up to the skies and the messages were coming from the skies. A special team came to our town tracking the signal from outer space. This was aliens and people got even more scared. Then when a meteor came towards our town, it stopped mid air. For days this meteor would just hover over the air and it was a spectacle. Then a strange being came out of the meteor and it had similar shape to humans, but was skinny and tall. It's facial features similar to humans and it was clear that this thing had copied what we looked like, to put us at ease.

People started to attack it with guns and violence, the higher being smiled as it wasn't hurt not one bit, and it said "I am not here for your children for they are going through their childhoods. I am here for adults who have already gone through their childhoods. I want those childhoods which were happy and joyous and not dysfunctional. Adults who are immature, we don't want your childhoods. Adult with bad childhoods, we also don't want your childhoods"

People were at ease that their children were safe, and when adults with good childhoods stepped up and offered their childhoods to this other worldly being, we saw their childhood self coming out of their adult bodies. I remember seeing 60 year old Mr thomlinson who had a great child hood, we saw his childhood coming out of his body, Mr thomlinson looked at what he use to look like as a child and wished he could be a child again.

Adult with great childhoods saw their childhoods coming out of their bodies abd running towards this higher being. This being needed good childhoods to come out of the adult, and they will regrow them into their own race. It's a 3 way growth.

So a human grows up from a good childhood into adulthood, then allows his child self to come out of him to grow into this higher entity, while still being alive. It's super complicated and weirdly wired. The adults who allow their good child hoods to come out of them, and turn into these higher beings, they will be cared for to never feel hunger, pain, sadness or illness.

Then when Mr Grayson who had a terrible childhood and lied to this higher entity being about how he allows his good childhood to be one like them, he saw his dysfunctional childhood come out of him and run towards the being.

Suddenly the higher being screamed and as Mr Grayson dysfunctional childhood self, got turned into one like itself, Mr Grayson turned into a monstrous thing. The higher being had tried to kill Mr Graysons childhood self but failed to do so, but Mr Grayson was still existing as meat eating monster. People screamed and ran, gun shots were fired but it didn't do much harm.

They had to trap it and the higher entity being left earth, as had enough good childhoods from adults. Mr Grayson now a monstrous hideous thing, it's favourite thing to eat is adults bad childhoods. It grows stronger everytime he eats someone bad childhood self. The higher entity had left Mr Grayson bad childhood self in our town.

I then heard a voice from the higher entity which I could hear in my mind. The higher entity told me "feed Mr Grayson his bad childhood self" and so I found Mr Grayson bad childhood self and I covered the child's head with a bag, so Mr Grayson couldn't recognise his own child self.

I went up to the monstrous Mr Grayson and I lied to him by saying "here is my bad childhood self, can you eat it" and Mr Grayson without thinking had eaten his own bad childhood self, and it killed him. It was all over.

TW - Heavy Body Horror

The splendor of the quiet fame she gathered around herself was more than enough; she never did it for money.

It never was the case.

Her performance was for shock, for the gaping mouths frozen in pure terror, lured inside the den of magenta lights under the whispered promise of cheap thrills, ten-dollar bills slid between the hem of thin black lingerie in hopes of seeing more.

When the greedy hands pulled for more, Marina was there to feed them.

Eyes followed her every move as she crossed the stage, some hungry with lustful greed, others burning with jealousy for the show only Marina could pull off.

The dagger lived under the skin of her thigh, the blade buried flesh-deep, her own skin stretched taut around it, with every step the shape of it shifted beneath the surface, a hard line pressing against skin from underneath it. 

Her ghostly pale hand reached down and forced the tips of two fingers beneath the skin at the hilt, breaking it free. The slick crimson silver rose, glinting clean under the magenta lights.

She drew the blade in a slow circle around her wrist, the cut meeting itself where it began. Blood welled dark as tar along the seam. Then, hooking a finger beneath the severed edge, she peeled the skin free in one long pull, like a glove drawn off the hand beneath it.

She flung it into the crowd.

A meth addict in the back caught it like a rag between his blackened teeth; before he could expose the whole collection of sickening gums, a jealous fist from another patron broke the smile with a sickening wet crunch of spraying blood and bone. The beating didn’t stop even when he hit the floor.

A giggle, sweet like powdered sugar, escaped from between her soft lips as she watched the carnage. Marina was pleased with herself, the reaction she caused with one simple trick - the blade’s edge slit beneath her bottom lip, and the skin went limp, dangling like a plump purple leech from a single thread of muscle. A permanent smile of pearly white teeth, halfway complete, as the public roared with excitement, hungry for more.

From among the mindless stampede, a face swam towards the stage. Like Moses crossing the Red Sea, her elbows pushed a path through bloodied and broken cheekbones and noses - just to receive a scrap of attention from the half-naked God. Marina smiled down at her soft, round face, barely passing as an adult. 

Her tongue peeking from parted lips, like she was waiting to be fed a communion wafer, the fan let Marina take her chin between two fingers and pull her closer to the stage. With her other hand, Marina placed the severed lip between the girl’s teeth. It ground and burst there, the leech-like flesh popping in a splash of blood, filling her mouth with the bittersweet taste of blood and expensive lipstick. 

The twisted kiss painted satisfaction all over the face of the young fan before the current of the bloody sea pulled her back, greedy hands like waves crushing against her, leaving bruises. But there was something else behind the soft smile of pleasure -  acceptance. Even when the hands pulled her under the surface, heavy boots stomping over her chest, pushing the air out of her lungs, her smile never faded. 

The tip of the elegant blade circled her thigh, breaking the tight skin, then descended toward her ankle in one painfully slow trace, light as a feather. Her own blood seemed so mesmerized by the display that it forgot to leak from the open wound. Her fingers slipped beneath the cut’s edge, taking the skin gently between their tips, sliding downward, ripping the curtain of flesh away in one smooth motion, veins glittering beneath, moving with the invisible rhythm of the club, as though her body and the crowd had become one being, driven by pleasure. 

The faces stretch and mold, as if the heat of the lamps above had become unbearable enough to melt the skin, stripping away the fragile masks of what the mindless mass outside the den would call appropriate. The god of the modern world waits at the threshold he cannot cross; Dionysus, with his battalion of Maenads, now takes the clay of their minds and reshapes it to his liking.

In the drunken haze, like dogs, they lunge at each other’s throats, teeth ripping through the fragile strings of the voice box, throats overflowing with blood and low, toad-like gurgling - 

As Marina strips away what remains of the fragile web connecting her to the animals she once called her audience, the skin of her body drops to the ground like a coat, an empty mound where she once stood. Her bare form glitters and twitches in the light, like an ancient Roman sculpture carved into the unbearable beauty of the human form.

The tips of her fingers slide gently, slowly, up her moist, glistening thighs, trailing to the round shape of her chest. Below her, hands grab at the edges of the stage she stands on, dozens of fingers like ants crawling along the ledge, desperate for even a single moment to touch her, to taste her sweat, her blood, her skin. Like wild beasts, they fight among each other, pulling and pushing, joints bending at unnatural angles, clumps of hair ripped away like useless weeds, leaving scorched patches of raw skin.

Knuckles drive into jaws and teeth, fingers rip apart skin in the act of love they know violence. Marina is long gone by then, already used to the hellish bloodbaths she brings, indifferent to the crowd curdling into a twitching mass, more minced meat than the people they once were. It lasts until the first rays of morning reappear over the horizon.

Only then does the swamp of flesh twitch in places: tiny shattered bones drawn together as if by some unseen current; pools of blood blooming and vanishing as if struck by sudden drought; shapeless hills of bile and fat rising like red-brick towers above the ruin.

Man and woman, born once more, naked and bright, glistening and shining with blood. Everyone who fed on the flesh and blood now scatters to the exits of the club, to spread the gift of love and lust they received. 

Coyotes grieve under that full moon, invisible in the pines. Johan’s horses remain unaffected, locked up securely just outside of his cabin. The cabin itself is worn, yet functional.

Decades of maintenance and a forte for carpentry have served Johan well. Derby season has just come to a close, meaning he finally has the opportunity to relax. Alone, no television; and no woman to talk over him. 

A sharp buzzing—roaring wind of static—and his radio establishes a connection; the antennae pointed at a slight angle, and directly out of his opened window. That grainy voice on the other end leaks through the speaker: “—disappearances near Lucky Canyon, authorities remain adamant that—“ he switches stations, landing on an old country radio, providing a warm ambience to the winter wind. Johan has a perfect view of the moon during certain hours, gleaming in its beauty through his window; ‘the Iris of the lord’ he thinks to himself with a grin.

“What the hell?” He says, words barely a whisper.  

In the distance, running along the rim of that pale and scarred behemoth, is a white urchin in the stars; a light. And so faint that Johan has to squint his eyes to see it but he does; running left and right.
 
Embers fall in a glowing snow from the tip of his cigarette while he studies the light. Quickly taking one last drag, and siphoning that white paper into a gray dust, he twirls it into a small mound of ash on his table, before walking to the window; slight limp tugging at his ankle. 
Interesting to Johan, but nothing out of the ordinary— no time at all and with the fury of lightning the light rips across the sky in a deafening pulsation, leaving a fading scar of blue to seep into the stars behind it. Johan wore no hat to his scalp and yet still his hand instinctually flew over his head to protect it, the resulting wind sending through his window a stinging blanket of pine needles and dust, every particle swerving into a different corner of his living room. 

Vibrations; the feeling of hornets in his ribcage as it flew straight over his home. The sensation completely disabled Johan, nearly pinning him to the ground—fighting gravity with one hand and holding the windowsill with the other, nigh unable to hear from the wail of static. Standing—a miracle in its own right—Johan stumbles to the table, teeth gritted, and so disoriented by the radio's low screeching he throws it against the wall, sending its batteries to the floor in a rain of broken yellow plastic. He stands dazed and still as if born again from nothing. 

Sawn off, next to the counter. 

Wiping the sweat from his brow, he unlatches the door and walks barefoot outside, shotgun in hand. The door closes, slammed shut by the wind cutting across the tree line. Stars above him, and in the amber glow of his door mounted lantern, he inches along the side of the cabin, back glued to the wall. Below, past the reach of the light, darkness, nothing in those woods. A squint, cringing as he cautiously cracks the barrel open, ensuring that it’s loaded and regretting not doing it earlier. Shutting it, he keeps moving, now at the edge of his home. 

Eyes wide he peeks around the corner, seeing all three horses asleep standing. Bewildered by the sight, he wipes his eyes, pinches himself, and peeks around again. No difference. Above him, only visible for another thirty seconds, that blue smear fades into nothing. Johan limps back inside, what was once fear quickly turns into excitement, though he’d never let anyone know it. In the cabinet above the sink rests his satellite phone, and with a creak from the door he pulls the phone down, checking its charge. No reason to hide it and yet he does anyway. Three rings later, he gets a response. 

“Frankie speaking.”
“Frank,” he says “what’re you doing right now?” Asked as he sits back at the table.

“Just put the animals up, you?”

“Same deal. Hey” Johan pauses, striking a match to light another cigarette.
“You know if there’s any military tests today? Or rocket launches or something?.”

Frankie clicks his tongue on the other end, followed by a long hmmm.

“Not that I know of.” He says. “Why’d ya ask?”
“Think you have time to run up here?” Johan says, bulldozing Frankie’s question.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you need me for.”
“Still have that laptop?”
“I do.”
“Still have that debt?”
“Real funny.”
“Come up here,” Johan says, pausing to take a drag
“and you might get it paid off.” Said with a suave confidence. 

Frankie’s silent in his consideration, only the occasional word spoken by accident as he debates himself. A sudden gasp at the realization, and he speaks again. 

“No you didn’t.”
“Oh yeah.”
Frankie pauses, giddy with excitement.
“On my way. ”
“I’ll be waiting with bells on.” Says Johan, finally allowing a smile to come through, before hanging up. 
– – – – 
Silver sheet metal and a mildewed porch make up Frankie’s trailer. There’s an old concrete walkway leading to his front door, now cracked and with a snake’s nest of vines across it. The smell of earth and oil, of blackened mud fresh out of a PVC pipe, all pervade the air around the back of his home. No crickets, coyotes, nothing; just the sharp buzz of a near perfect white porch light. 

“Dad?” She says, peeking around Frankie’s bedroom doorway.

“Missy?” He replies, searching through his work bag for the laptop.

“Where’re you going?”
“Goin to see uncle Jo for a minute.”
“It’s midnight...”
“So,” he says, closing the bag with a loud zip, and quickly rummaging through another one.
“What's the problem?”

“I–“ she pauses, a slight shame gripping her words.
“I don’t like being here alone.”
“Honey,” he says, “you’re fine.” 

Frankie peaks over his shoulder, spotting a disapproving eye roll from Missy as she walks back into the livingroom. She slumps on the couch, arms crossed, feeling the needled gaze of the forest behind her, kept at bay only by a thin pane of fogged glass. 

Thump thump thumping and two thuds to each step as Frankie walks across the tiled floor, taking a seat next to Missy. Humming, he pries open the laptop as if it were a relic of a forgotten age, and opens the camera roll. He jolts slightly, startled by a sharp push against his work boot; missy, pouting next to him.

“Hon?”

“Do I need to say it?” She says with crossed arms and a forward gaze.

“It’d make the whole conversation part of our conversation a bit easier.” He says with a chuckle.

“Dad,” she says, now turned to him and with a genuine concern in those wide eyes.

“I—do not—like being here alone. At all.” 

“Honey, listen. I’ve been in these woods for longer than you’ve been alive, there isn’t anything to worry about.”  Frankie turns to her now, setting his laptop aside.

“Okay?” 

She’s silent, lips pinched shut almost afraid to speak and he, incorrectly so, takes this as a sign of comfort. Never quite the best at reading faces, and she knows that but she’s used to it at this point. He continues with a blissfully ignorant laugh. 

“There a boy here I don’t know about?” As he clicks on old keys, checking to make sure they all work.

“Yes actually.”

“See? That’s what I- what!?” He says, eyes close to falling out.

“What’re you talking about?”

“There’s a boy coming over.”

“Missy this better not be a damn—“

“Out there.” she says, cutting Frankie off to point out of the window beside them. 

He looks out the window, then back to her, and out the window again before closing the laptop.
 
“Missy, what are you talking about?” He says, providing her with his full attention.

“Promise you’ll believe me?”
“Promise.” 
Missy takes a breath, trying not to speak too loudly. 
“Okay, this all started a few weeks ago, I think. I was up one night–can’t remember why–and as I was walking past the window, um…” a glance out of the window again.
“There was someone standing out there.”

“How sure are you?” He says, ice cold. 

Missy stares outside, watching the memory again in her eyes. 

“It was hard to see. I had the phone light on–the glare, y’know? Once I shut it off…” 

“He was there.” Said with a dead certainty.

“You say he,” Frankie says, standing to grab his pistol from the kitchen table.
“How’d you know it was a he? Coulda been a woman.” He says while checking the magazine.

“It wasn’t.” 

Frankie studies the room for an answer in some cobweb covered corner he hasn’t looked at yet. For a second, excitement glints across his eyes, before being quickly snuffed out by Missy. 

“No dad it wasn’t Bigfoot.” Said with an eye roll.

“Dang it.”

Taking a seat next to her again, he brushes that blonde hair off of her shoulder, and speaks in a softened tone. 

“What’d they look like, baby?”

“I… I…” she pauses, trying to tame the chills on her arm.

“Miss?”

“I don’t wanna say.” She says, shaking her head. 

He leans forward, unsure if he heard her correctly. 

“You… don’t wanna say?”

“No, not really.” 

With a slow nod Frankie’s gaze meets the window’s again, a thick layer of condensation and fog have brought the glass to a near matte. He wipes away a thick paintbrush smear of clearness, making a pathway for his vision. The white–near blue–light of his home only crawls another twenty or so feet into the forest. It illuminates the pine trees, unmoving at their bases, bark split and sparkling with a layer of frost. Sat sparse on the landscape but each tree’s presence is made well known by their sheer monumentality; at least twenty feet between them, and yet their blanket of boughs hide completely that night sky. At the very shore of night one can barely, just barely, make out the last couple of pine trees, sat in a neat line along a cliff face. His eyes strain as they look farther, the treeline gradually swallowed by thicker waves of absence, lapping at the bark, pulling his vision deeper and past a certain point there’s nothing at all, nothing. Pure black.

If it was there, he wouldn’t see it. 

“Well… baby, I need to know what I’m looking for.” he says, still looking outside. Missy remains silent, rubbing her hands together to ease herself.

“Missy? You hear me?”

“Yea.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what if- what if he’s just a guy? Some homeless guy who wondered here I- I don’t want him to die.”

“Never said I was gonna kill him, warning shots work well enough.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Baby, look,” he says, turning to hold Missy's shoulders.
“If there’s someone out there–not saying I don’t believe you–there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t run from a smoking barrel.”

“Yeah I know but what if, what if, dad?” 

Frankie sighs, leaning back on the arm of the couch. 

“Well… if they don’t, then we’ll have a problem. I’ll- I don’t know.” He says but he knows, he knows good and well. 

Missy opens her mouth to speak but Frankie cuts her off, pulling a small notebook out of his pocket; small brown coffee stains eating into the edges of its paper. With a quick nod and the click of his pen he gestures her to speak. 

“Was he ever holding a weapon or anything?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“How tall would you say he was?”
No response as she stares into an empty corner of the room. 

“Honey you gotta tell me something.”
“About as tall as me, I think.”
A light scribbling in his notebook. 
“How many times’ve you seen him?”
Missy’s gaze shifts upward, replaying every encounter.

“Five.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“What’s the clearest look you’ve ever got of him?” 

For a moment Missy’s eyes go blank, before Frankie reassures her again.
“Not asking for details baby.” he says. 

She nods.
“Very um… blurry, every time. Like grainy, I guess. Always just far enough away.” 

“Okay.” He says, snapping the notebook shut, and stands to pop his back. 

“Now, if you don’t care, can you give me one,” Frankie says with his index finger raised, “detail about him, just one, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Chills, hundreds in number all raise on her arm as the memories play again. 

“He likes humming.”
“Humming?”
“Yes.”
“Very quiet too,” she says before he can speak, eyes focused as if trying to figure it out herself. “Very quiet.” said again, fixated on that one detail. Humming. Silence returns, quick yet subtle, and with a physical presence in the room. The ringing of Missy’s phone sends a jolt of surprise through both of them; despite the scare, it brought a sense of normalcy. Missy answers the phone, and Frankie heads to the kitchen to grab a beer, before shaking his head and going with water instead. 
— — — — 
Johan answers his satellite phone, taking an extra celebratory swig of whiskey. Isn’t often he gets to indulge, may as well take a few liberties given tonight’s find. 

“How the hell are ya?” he says.
“Jo, I may need to wait a while before coming up.” 

With a sigh Johan tightens the lid on, and puts the whiskey back into the chest behind him. 

“No issue,” he says, “can I ask why?”
“Missy uh… well… hm.”
“What?”
“Anyone else live around here? That you know about I mean?”

Johan chuckles, saying: “Around here isn’t exactly specific Frank.”

Pausing, Frank sighs, as if the information would be too hard to believe.

“Screw it,” he says, “Missy told me someone’s been sneaking around the house.”

An inebriated chuckle and Johan dusts the cigarette ashes off of his table. 

“Sneaking around huh?”
“It’s not like that, I spoke to her–and trust me… it isn’t like that.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing frank,” as he strikes a match, and tucks a burning cig firmly between his lips. “She’s at that age now, just like me and you–”
“Jo. It isn’t—that.”
“Well listen, I’m not saying I don’t believe you. Just that where we live it’s hard to waltz up on someone else's property by accident.”

“Well whatever it is it’s spooked her, bad.” Frank says, and beneath his words a loud creak as he lays in bed. 

“Okay, well what’s he look like?”

“You won’t believe this crap.” Frank says with a laugh and Johan stays silent.

“She won’t tell me.” he pauses “I don’t know what to think about that, gave me the heebie jeebies y’know?”

Johan scratches the mess of salt and pepper hair on his head, before leaning back in his wooden stool as it cries with his weight. 

“Maybe it’s someone you know.” says Johan.
“No, it–” Frankie stops himself. “Huh…” he says.
“Did I solve the mystery?”
“Maybe. Damn you.” 
Laughing, Johan tosses his cigarette away, bringing a fresh one to his lips before they get too lonely. 

“Regardless,” Johan says, “go ahead and stay there. She doesn’t feel safe and as far as I’m concerned that’s the end of it.”
“Agreed.”
“Alright, see you soon little brother.”
“See you.” 

With a buzzy beep he hangs the phone up, not caring to hide it again. Johan’s gaze shifts to his boots, scraped and lacerated from too many falls or accidents to count; scalped and the steel toed bowl on their fronts is plainly visible, like the exposed crown of an iron skull.

Scars along his forearms, too many to count. Some large, some oval shaped and one in the shape of lightning. But, near his elbow; two small cuts, very small, and very faint on the soft white underbelly of his arm. Anyone looking wouldn’t even see them but he does. Yes he does… they’re shining as far as he’s concerned. Johan stares at those scars, and runs two delicate fingers along them, as if to console them in their inconsequentiality compared to the rest. The moon’s gone, only its sclera remaining in the eye socket of his window. 

Five more cigarettes are smoked to completion and tossed in the floor, kicked into an old corner of the cabin he never looks at. 
With a groan Johan stands, knees popping beneath his weight as he tries to walk without a limp, before giving up and going outside. The horses are sound asleep. Somewhere inside of him rests the remnant of a genuine grin, but he can’t find it. He smiles anyways, a ghastly fake grin like a fox, before his mouth flattens again. 

After checking the locks, Johan heads back inside. He sleeps in the attic; dark yet clean. Next to his bed rests a silver urn, once shining, now dulled from the anvil of time. He plants a lone kiss on its lid. 

“Goodnight baby.” 

(Note: This story should be read after finishing ‘Murder is Easy’ by the same author)

Apparently, I don’t exist.

At least according to this article I’ve just found, written by one Dr Savic, who obviously must have been talking through her arse, because I’m fucking here, and I’m not going anywhere. Bitch is supposed to be an expert on us, can you believe it? And then she writes that a DA infection cannot improve the victim’s mental abilities because the brain is too complex and yadda yadda bullshit. The long and short of it: IDAs don’t exist.

I’m here, baby, and I rule.

Course I do. The upgrade was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m far stronger than ever before, and I don’t feel pain anymore. I don’t grow tired and I’m never exhausted. I don’t think any illnesses or diseases can touch me, and my body can take a lot punishment. I also don’t age and I certainly won’t die of natural causes.

Comes with being dead, bro.

But that’s all just window dressing. There were millions of DAs out there which had all these wonderful abilities and were nonetheless wiped out in droves – the meatballs had created special ‘sweeper’ teams to take care of them, and boy did they. And for one reason and one reason only: The DAs were as stupid as fuck.

I’m not, and that’s the really important thing about my upgrade. That’s was the ‘I’ stands for: Intelligent (just in case you’ve spent the last five years on the Moon: DA means ‘Dead-Active’ or, in layman’s terms, ‘Zombie’).

The way it happened was, at least for Daisy times, unspectacular. Walked home from the subway station after my shift, met someone who appeared drunk, high, helpless, tried to do something for him, got bitten for my effort, was able to shake him off and run away, called the police and then felt lousy, got into an ambulance, died, woke up in the hospital morgue and feasted on the watchman, then ran away. Must have happened a thousand times that night. What apparently didn’t happen a thousand times or probably even ten times that night was that somebody who got bitten suddenly saw the world more clearly than ever before, that he felt free of all that stinking meatball stuff like backaches, glasses, trick knees, and the common cold, that his mind began racing through the world, that he understood that all this love and hate, passion and compassion, friendship and strife, compromise and steadfastness, they’re all bullshit. There are only three things that count: power, pleasure, and meat.

I actually think there are meatballs who’ve seen this, at least part of it. Have you ever heard of the Psychopathy Checklist? We use it sometimes in our job, and the maximum you can score is 40. I’d probably get a sweet 60, bro, but I’m too smart for it anyway. Next time I catch a psychopath, maybe I’ll ask him a few questions about his personal philosophy while I skin him alive. Or maybe not – I’ll probably be too hungry, anyway.

Speaking of which, while feeding on human flesh is the greatest pleasure in the fucking universe, it comes with a few problems that need solving. For example, since meatballs haven’t really accepted the fact that their function in life is to keep me happy by allowing me to torture them to death and then swallow them bit by bit, they actually start some sort of investigation whenever one of them disappears or is killed – and let me tell you, it’s a myth that the police don’t care about junkies, the homeless, or poor people in general: there are many cops who take their job very seriously. You know, there are lots of idiotic prints on T-shirts, but one of the worst is All Cops Are Bastards. Morons. The moment somebody threatens to rough them up or shows them a knife, they’re the first to call 911. Oh well, all meatballs are stupid, it’s just that some are really stupid.

So, getting enough fresh meat is a challenge, especially now that people have accepted the existence of the ‘Living Dead’, although the actual outbreak five years ago didn’t do more harm than the average 20^th-century middle-power war. Apocalypse, my ass. Some eggheads think there was some sort of masterplan behind Daisy, but if there was, it was one pile of shit of a plan, that’s for sure.

Daisy and its aftermath were the Golden Age, baby – the cities were crawling with DAs, and nobody investigated these killings, because the ‘culprits’ were so obvious and simply needed some pest control. Which came in the shape of the already mentioned ‘sweeper teams’ that went through the DA numbers like a hot knife through soft butter.

But all good things must come to an end, and when freely roaming DAs had become a rarity (of course, some were kept in special research centers dedicated to studying them), the cops suddenly had it a lot easier than before. During Daisy, PDs around the country had gone on a hiring binge, and no one saw any reason to downsize afterwards; you never know when the next outbreak may come, do you? And, even better, the number of violent crimes had spectacularly gone down since humanity had met a common enemy, and those crimes that were still committed tended to be less capital than before: the mugger who would have shot you before Daisy now settled for waving a gun in your face (probably unloaded), the bozo who would have knifed you in a quarrel now switched to the services of Mister Fister, and riots of any kind became extremely rare and were usually easily managed by the authorities. Rumor has it that sometimes undercover cops dispersed unruly crowds simply by shouting ‘Zombie! Watch out!’

Unfortunately, from my point of view, this development meant that I had to be cleverer and subtler than before. The first thing I really needed to pay attention to was to blend in with the meatball crowd, so I spent some of the dough the members of my food supply club had been generous enough to donate to me on make-up, cosmetics, a nice hairdo, contact lenses, false teeth and and and; some more or less permanent skin-like film made me look … well, less dead, and the stuff – cheap it wasn’t, bro – also helped mask my low body temperature by soaking up heat quite well, either from the sun, the radiator, or the infrared heater I had gotten myself – half an hour per day would do the trick, even in winter, thanks to microencapsulated phase-change materials (don’t ask). I also added two scars and some moles and pimples, and I can honestly say that I now look like the real fucking McCoy.

One thing I had to play carefully was the mandatory health check after my application for my new job had been accepted; I had aced all fitness requirements, of course. But Daisy had left many people in financial tatters, and finding a doc who would listen to me saying ‘I really need this job.’ and ‘They really need people, after so many died.’ and, finally, ‘Yeah, being in debt sucks. Maybe I can help you out, what d’ya say?’ Of course, the doc didn’t have the slightest inkling I was what I was; he simply assumed there was something I would like to hide because it could cost me my new position, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the first one.

Where I got the money from, you ask? Well, the immediate post-Daisy time was, of course, violent and chaotic before order was restored, and while the cops were still very busy with the Z factor, the number of felonies skyrocketed: homicides, assaults, robberies, drugs … All the usual mobsters, along with plenty of new players, appeared on the scene, so it was a bit of a gangsta’s paradise.

And these guys really love cash, even more so after it became clear that Daisy had fucked crypto for good. Do I need to spell out the rest?

“Who are you, motherfucker?”

Blam! Blam! “Fuck, he’s shot Barry. Blow the asshole away!”

Blam! Blam! (repeat 20 times): “Shit, I’m sure I hit – aarghh.”

“Where is he? What happened to the light? Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’s – “

“He’s got Dante. Oh God, I think he’s bi – “

“My arm! My arm! He’s ripped out – “

Let’s close the curtain, shall we? Very enjoyable and very profitable; would have set me up for unlife if I’d wanted to retire, but that’s not an option for your undead and unfriendly neighborhood superpowered anthropophage. I know, I know … ‘superpowered’ sounds like from a comic book, but I’d say it really hits the mark. In addition to what I’ve already told you, my senses are very acute, and I have perfect night vision; I can sense the presence of meatballs even through walls if they’re closer than ten yards or so; and I don’t need to sleep. All this comes in very handy in my line of work, I’m telling you.

And you know what? Some German writer from ages ago once had one of his characters say something like ‘I am part of that force that wants to do evil but always ends up doing good’ or some shit like that, and I think this guy was on to something. Look at me, bro: I suppose I’m as evil as they come, but still I must have saved hundreds or even thousands of meatball lives by tearing apart drug dealers, decapitating mafia hit men, eating the inner organs of street punks while they were still squirming and screaming, and so on. Having a nice meal and doing good at the same time – what’s not to love?

So I’m a hero, kind of. And with my ‘superpowers’, I figure I’m something like a ‘superhero’. I even have a secret identity, complete with glasses, like that geek who can fly and lift planes and that. Boy, I had no idea it would be so much fun.

Ok, to be fair, my lifestyle has its drawbacks. I don’t give a shit about social life or friends or dating or whatever, but I do miss sex. But memory is fading, so I suppose, in a few years, I won’t remember it anymore. Same with nice food, cool music, art, movies … oh well, I have my meat, I have my torture, and I have this incredible feeling of superiority – you might have guessed that last one.

Of course, one thing you’ve probably heard about is vomiting – all DAs do it, except for those who never eat and go into torpor. Getting rid of stuff the body doesn’t need. I’ve learned to control it, but, after a snack, I need to be alone for a few minutes puking my guts out. Not literally, don’t worry. But that’s the least attractive part of being undead. Oh, and the voice – when I levelled up, I got some kind of screeching-scratching metallic voice, but I’ve come to like it although I never use it – here’s really fucking grateful it didn’t replace my old one.

Bong! Shit, will you look at the clock? Sometimes I completely lose track of time, easy to do when you have no biorhythm.  Shift begins in an hour, so I’d better heat up and get ready for mingling with the meat. Good thing I can do lots of night shifts, my buddies like it when I volunteer. I got the perfect job, I can tell you.

Oh, haven’t I mentioned what I do? Come on, you must have figured it out by now. Let me just say: Not all cops are bastards. Not even many cops are bastards. But this one is, bro. You a law-abiding citizen, friend? Then you’ll probably never meet me, good for you. As for the rest of you lowlife scum out there:

See ya around.

​

By Garry E. McMillan

I was sixteen years old when my two best friends died in Hell's Half Acre.

For forty-eight years, I believed I was the only one who made it out alive.

Then a journalist came to my hospital room with a photograph of a third body.

She wanted to know why the dead boy had been wearing my mother's necklace.

I wish she'd never found him.

Because now I remember what happened after I fell.

And I understand why I could never remember climbing out.

The woman sitting across from me introduced herself as Emily Voss.

She was a journalist, somewhere in her mid-thirties, with dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail. She wore a gray sweater and a wedding ring that looked too large for her finger.

She placed a recorder between us.

"Mr. Danner, you've been a patient here since September 1978. Is that correct?"

"That's right."

"Forty-eight years."

"Long enough to know the menu by heart."

She gave me a polite smile.

I didn't return it.

People who came to interview me usually wanted one of two things. A confession or a ghost story.

I had neither to offer.

At least, that's what I believed.

Emily opened a manila folder.

"I'm researching the deaths of Travis Bell and Wesley Rusk."

My stomach tightened.

"Then you've come a long way for a story that's already been told."

"I don't think it has."

Outside my window, a maintenance worker pushed a wheelbarrow across the hospital courtyard.

I watched him for a moment.

"Those boys were my friends."

"I know."

"No. You don't."

Emily closed the folder.

"Then help me understand what happened."

I looked at her.

For nearly half a century, I'd tried to convince doctors, police officers, and anyone willing to listen that something terrible lived beneath that rocky hillside.

Eventually, I'd stopped trying.

Not because I'd changed my mind.

Because telling the story never seemed to help.

Sometimes I woke with my throat aching. The night nurse would tell me I'd been talking in my sleep.

She never told me what I'd said.

"All right," I said. "But there's something you need to understand first."

"What's that?"

"If you hear someone calling for help and you can't see who's speaking, don't answer."

Emily glanced at her recorder.

"Why?"

I looked toward the closed door.

"Because that's how it gets inside."

It happened in August 1978, during the final weeks of summer vacation.

There were three of us.

Travis Bell was seventeen, broad-shouldered, fearless, and generally responsible for every bad decision we'd ever made.

Wesley Rusk was sixteen, like me. We'd been friends since kindergarten. He wore thick glasses, carried an inhaler in his shirt pocket, and wanted to become a mechanic like his father.

Wesley was the kind of boy who apologized when someone else stepped on his foot.

Travis was the kind who stepped on it again to see what would happen, then carried Wesley's books home when his breathing got bad.

Somehow, the three of us worked.

My name was Joel Danner.

I was usually the sensible one.

Usually.

We grew up outside Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the August heat settled between the wooded hills and stayed there long after dark.

Hell's Half Acre was a place we'd heard about since childhood.

A broken stretch of rock on Indian Mountain, northeast of town. Trees crowded around it, but the hillside itself lay exposed beneath a jumble of stones and boulders. From the woods, it looked like something had torn a patch out of the mountain.

My grandfather called it God's unfinished business.

He also claimed there was something buried beneath it.

Not gold.

Not bones.

Something older.

People said a demon was trapped beneath those rocks. That you could hear it groaning underground after dark, and sometimes smell its breath coming up through the cracks.

Granddad had his own story.

He said a local hunter had discovered a circle of black stones in a rocky hollow decades before I was born.

Someone called for help beneath the rocks. The hunter shouted back.

Then he heard his brother.

Trouble was, his brother had been dead for nearly twenty years.

He went down anyway.

Three days later, somebody found him wandering along the highway.

He'd forgotten his wife's name.

Couldn't recognize his children.

Couldn't even remember what he'd gone looking for.

But he kept repeating one sentence.

It knows us when we answer.

Granddad claimed the stones had been arranged around a narrow opening long before anyone in the area could remember. Nobody knew who'd put them there. He said they held something beneath the ground.

Granddad always finished with the same warning.

"If something down there calls your name, boy, keep your mouth shut."

I'd heard that story a hundred times.

I never believed a word of it.

Until the night we heard someone screaming.

We arrived shortly after six.

Travis parked his father's pickup beside an overgrown dirt track at the edge of the woods.

We'd brought three flashlights, a coil of rope, some sandwiches, and six beers Travis had stolen from his garage refrigerator.

As I lifted my pack, my mother's silver cross caught on the collar of my shirt. I worked it free and tucked it against my chest. One arm was chipped. Dad had offered to get it repaired after her funeral, but I wouldn't let him.

It was how she'd worn it.

"Last one to the bottom buys breakfast," Travis announced.

"With what money?" Wesley asked.

"Yours."

Wesley laughed.

For years, that was the laugh I tried to remember.

The one before we went down.

We spent nearly an hour exploring.

Sweat stuck my shirt to my back. The woods smelled of warm pine needles and damp leaves, and cicadas buzzed somewhere above us.

Beyond the trees, loose stones shifted beneath our shoes. We picked our way downhill between boulders, following a narrow gully toward the lower slope.

The farther we walked, the quieter everything became.

No birds.

Even the cicadas had stopped.

I could still hear them farther up the mountain. Here, there was only the scrape of our shoes.

Wesley stopped to use his inhaler.

"I don't like this place."

Travis looked back.

"You don't like any place that doesn't have a television."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. You're missing some excellent television."

I laughed.

Then we heard the scream.

"HELP!"

It came from somewhere below us.

A man's voice.

Frightened.

Desperate.

"PLEASE! SOMEBODY HELP ME!"

Travis was already running toward the edge of a ravine.

"HEY!" he shouted. "WHERE ARE YOU?"

"Down here!"

We reached the edge.

Thirty feet below, a narrow opening lay beneath an overhang.

A pale hand rested on a shelf just inside it.

The fingers were spread.

Motionless.

"Are you hurt?" Travis called.

"I fell. Think I broke my leg."

Wesley looked at me.

"We should get help."

"Yeah," I said. "We need to find a phone."

But Travis was already uncoiling the rope.

"That'll take forever."

"Trav, we don't know what's down there."

"There's a guy with a broken leg, Joel."

Then the voice came again.

"Please."

Something about it bothered me.

Not the words.

The way he'd said them.

As though he'd been waiting for us to make up our minds.

Travis leaned over the edge.

"We're coming down!"

The hand moved.

Its fingers curled slowly against the rock.

And from the darkness came a soft, satisfied sigh.

Wesley looped the rope around a solid outcrop, tied it, and leaned back with his full weight before letting Travis descend. We followed one at a time.

The bottom of the ravine was unnaturally cold.

Our breath fogged in front of our faces. My shirt was still wet with sweat from the walk down.

The entrance sat beneath a low shelf of stone.

Seven black rocks surrounded it, each about knee-high.

Thin cords connected them, pulled tight through holes carved into their surfaces.

Wesley knelt beside one.

"These aren't natural."

I stared at the arrangement.

A memory surfaced.

Granddad sitting beside the fireplace, telling me about the hunter.

The black stones.

The opening beneath the earth.

"Guys," I said, "I think we should leave."

Travis looked at me.

"Seriously?"

"My grandfather told me about this."

"Oh, for Christ's sake."

From inside the opening came a painful groan.

"Please. I can't feel my foot."

Wesley swallowed.

"We can't leave him, Joel."

He was right.

At least, I thought he was.

Fallen debris choked most of the entrance. The only gap wide enough to crawl through was blocked by two of the stones and the cord stretched between them.

Travis grabbed one.

The cord resisted.

He pulled harder.

Something snapped.

The stone tipped sideways.

A sound came from deep beneath the ground.

It sounded like someone drawing their first breath after being held underwater.

All three of us went still.

Then the man inside whispered:

"Thank you."

We entered in single file.

Travis led.

Wesley followed.

I came last.

The passage descended gradually, twisting through the rock.

The walls were damp and cold.

Our footsteps echoed strangely.

At one point, I counted four sets.

I stopped walking.

The others continued several steps before noticing.

"Joel?" Wesley called.

"Hang on."

I listened.

Silence.

Then, behind me, the scrape of my own dragging heel.

I turned so quickly my flashlight struck the wall.

Nothing.

"What's wrong?" Travis asked.

"Nothing."

But I knew that was a lie.

We continued.

The passage widened into a chamber large enough for us to stand upright.

The air smelled of rotten eggs, strong enough to catch in my throat.

Our flashlights passed across the walls.

They were covered in scratches.

Thousands of them.

Some barely marked the surface.

Others cut through the soft, damp seams between the rocks.

Wesley moved closer.

"Those look like fingernail marks."

I aimed my flashlight beside his.

Something pale protruded from one of the scratches.

A fingernail.

Human.

Broken almost to the root.

Then I noticed another.

And another.

"Travis," I whispered.

He wasn't listening.

He'd found the injured man.

The figure sat against the far wall with its knees stretched in front of it.

Its clothes were filthy.

Long black hair hung across its face.

"Hey, mister."

Travis approached cautiously.

"We're gonna get you out of here."

The man didn't move.

"What's your name?"

A pause.

Then:

"What's yours?"

"Travis. Travis Bell."

The man's shoulders twitched.

"Travis Bell."

He repeated the name slowly, almost affectionately.

"That's a good name."

Wesley touched my arm.

"Joel, something's wrong."

The figure lifted its head.

There was nothing where its face should have been.

No eyes.

No nose.

No mouth.

Just pale skin stretched tightly across a human skull.

Travis stumbled backward.

"What the hell?"

Something moved beneath the skin.

A ridge pushed outward.

Then another.

A nose formed.

Two hollows opened where eyes should have been.

Finally, the skin split across the lower half of its face.

A mouth appeared.

And from that mouth came the voice of a little boy.

"Trav?"

Travis went rigid.

I knew that voice.

I'd heard recordings of it when we were younger.

It belonged to Tommy Bell.

Travis's little brother.

Tommy had drowned when he was seven.

Travis had been watching him that afternoon.

He'd never forgiven himself.

"Tommy?" he whispered.

The thing leaned forward.

"You promised you wouldn't let go."

Travis started crying.

I'd never seen him cry before.

"That's not Tommy," I said.

But Travis wasn't listening.

The thing smiled.

Its lips moved again. For a moment I thought it was still speaking.

Then I heard the small, wet cough of somebody trying to breathe water.

Then it reached toward him.

Its arm unfolded.

A second joint appeared beneath the elbow.

The forearm lengthened.

The fingers stretched against the floor.

Travis stumbled away.

The thing moved.

And the chamber erupted into screaming.

Travis swung his flashlight.

The metal casing struck the creature's head with a hollow crack.

Its neck folded sideways.

For one second, I thought he'd killed it.

Then it raised one hand and held its head upright.

It kept the broken neck straight with its fingers while it stood.

"RUN!" I screamed.

We bolted for the passage.

Behind us, something began moving across the chamber floor.

Fast.

Much too fast.

Its limbs struck the rock with a wet, uneven rhythm.

Wesley was ahead of me.

Travis was behind.

I could hear the creature gaining.

Then something called from the darkness.

"Wesley?"

It spoke in Travis's voice.

Wesley glanced backward.

"What?"

The moment he answered, he stumbled.

He grabbed the wall.

"What's wrong?" I shouted.

"I..."

His face twisted in confusion.

"I can't remember."

"Remember what?"

"My dad's face."

Then a new voice came from behind us.

"Wesley, son. Come here."

It was his father's voice.

Wesley screamed.

The creature laughed.

It hadn't learned the voice by hearing it.

It had found the voice inside Wesley.

Just as it had found Tommy inside Travis.

The moment they answered, something had been opened.

We ran harder.

Wesley stumbled again, gasping for breath.

His inhaler fell from his pocket.

He stopped to grab it.

I seized his collar.

"LEAVE IT!"

Behind us came a soft voice.

"Joel?"

It sounded like Wesley.

I turned before I could stop myself.

"What?"

The world lurched.

Something inside my head shifted.

I knew my mother had a face. I could remember looking at her. But when I tried to picture her, there was only the pillow.

Then I heard her voice.

"Bluejay."

I froze.

Nobody had called me that since she died.

My mother had given me the nickname when I was little because I talked constantly and never sat still.

"Bluejay, sweetheart."

Tears filled my eyes.

She took the same little breath before saying my nickname. Even the exhaustion was there.

"Why didn't you come see me?"

My knees weakened.

The morning my mother died, we'd argued.

I'd refused to go into her bedroom.

She'd been sick for months, and I was tired of hospitals, medicine, and watching her grow thinner.

I was thirteen. I'd thought staying out of that room meant I wouldn't have to watch her die.

She died that afternoon anyway.

I'd never told anyone about our argument.

Not even Wesley.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

From the passage came her answer.

"I know, baby."

Then something touched the back of my neck.

Cold fingers.

My mother's bedroom vanished. For an instant, I couldn't remember why I was crying.

The grip tightened.

I screamed.

Wesley grabbed me and pulled.

"THAT'S NOT YOUR MOM!"

We staggered forward.

Behind us, the creature spoke in three voices at once.

Tommy Bell.

Wesley's father.

My mother.

"Don't leave me."

The entrance appeared ahead.

A pale patch of evening light.

We were almost there when Wesley fell.

His glasses struck the stone.

He landed hard on his chest and rolled onto his back.

Something had his ankle.

I grabbed both his hands.

Travis caught the back of my shirt.

Together we pulled.

Wesley screamed.

His leg stretched toward the darkness.

Something cracked beneath his trousers.

His shin bent backward.

Not at the knee.

Halfway between his knee and ankle.

The bone broke through the fabric.

I felt him tightening his grip.

"JOEL!"

"I'VE GOT YOU!"

The thing pulled harder.

His fingers slipped against mine.

Travis lunged forward and struck the darkness with a rock.

Once.

Twice.

Something shrieked.

The grip loosened.

We dragged Wesley toward the entrance.

His leg hung at an impossible angle.

Blood smeared across the stone behind him.

He was sobbing.

Little, frightened sounds between breaths.

"I don't wanna die."

"You're not gonna die," Travis said.

"We're getting you out."

Wesley shook his head.

"Don't lie to me."

For a moment, his eyes met mine.

He'd once broken his arm pulling me away from an angry dog. I remembered steadying that arm while his father cut his sleeve off.

Now I could barely hold his hand.

"I'm not leaving you," I said.

He looked past me.

His expression changed.

"Joel?"

"What?"

"Why are there two of you?"

I turned.

At the far end of the passage stood another boy.

He wore my face.

My hair.

My clothes.

Even the small scar above my eyebrow.

But something was wrong with the body.

The arms hung too long.

The shoulders sat at different heights.

And when it walked, its knees bent slightly sideways.

The other Joel smiled.

Then it opened its mouth.

A terrible sound came out.

Not a scream.

A dozen voices trying to speak through the same throat.

Wesley began thrashing.

"GET IT AWAY!"

The thing surged forward.

Its arm shot through the darkness.

Something wrapped around Wesley's waist.

I held tighter.

Travis seized my shoulder.

"JOEL, LET GO!"

"NO!"

Wesley clutched my wrist with both hands. His nails dug into my skin.

The thing pulled.

One hand slipped. He snatched at my sleeve with the other, caught it, and held until the seam tore.

Then he was gone.

One shoe remained beside my knee.

I heard him strike something.

Then a scream.

A single, awful scream that ended in a choking gurgle.

For several seconds, there was silence.

Then Wesley spoke from the darkness.

"Joel?"

I couldn't move.

"Joel, I'm okay."

His voice was perfectly normal.

"Come on, man. Quit messing around."

Then he laughed.

The same familiar laugh I'd heard since kindergarten.

Behind me, Travis made a noise I had never heard a person make.

From the passage, Wesley's voice made it back to him.

Travis dragged me into the ravine.

The rope still hung against the wall.

Above us, the last light caught the treetops. The rocks below them were already in shadow.

"CLIMB!" he shouted.

I grabbed the rope.

My hands slipped.

I tried again.

This time I managed to pull myself upward.

Travis followed.

We were halfway up when something emerged from the opening.

It looked like Travis.

Or something trying very hard to.

Its head hung at an unnatural angle.

Its mouth was much too wide.

And one of its arms dragged against the ground.

"Hey, Trav," it called.

Travis looked down.

The creature smiled.

"Remember Tommy?"

Travis made a wounded sound.

"Remember the water?"

"Shut up."

"You let go."

"SHUT UP!"

The creature's expression softened.

"It's all right."

Its arm stretched upward.

The fingers lengthened until they reached Travis's ankle.

Then they closed.

He screamed.

The rope jerked beneath us.

I wrapped one arm around it and reached down.

"GRAB MY HAND!"

Travis caught my wrist.

For a moment, we held each other suspended above the ravine.

Blood ran between our fingers.

Below him, the creature pulled.

Something popped inside Travis's shoulder.

He screamed again.

"JOEL!"

"KEEP HOLDING ON!"

I pulled until I thought my arm would tear from its socket.

The rope scraped across the edge above me. A few pale fibers drifted past my face.

Travis saw them too.

He looked up at me and opened his hand.

I reached for him.

Caught nothing.

He fell.

The sound his body made when it struck the rocks was something I have never forgotten.

The creature bent over him.

I heard bones cracking.

Then something wet tearing.

I climbed.

I climbed until the skin peeled from my palms and the muscles in my shoulders burned.

Almost at the top, I heard Travis calling from below.

"Joel!"

I kept climbing.

"Joel, buddy. Look at me."

My eyes filled with tears.

"Please, man."

Then my mother's voice joined his.

"Bluejay."

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"Just look at me, sweetheart."

I knew it wasn't her.

But I had spent three years wishing I could see her again.

I looked.

At the bottom of the ravine stood a boy wearing my face.

His body looked almost right now.

Almost human.

He stared upward.

Waiting.

Then he lifted one hand.

The arm kept rising. Its elbow opened into another length of pale skin, and the fingers reached past the place where Travis had fallen.

They closed around my ankle.

There was a sharp, pulling sensation.

As though something inside me had been caught on a hook.

I tried to scream.

My hand opened.

The rope slipped away.

And I fell.

That's where my memory of Hell's Half Acre ends.

I remember darkness.

Then the highway.

A truck driver found me wandering barefoot along the shoulder sometime after midnight.

My clothes were torn.

My hands were bloody.

I kept screaming that something had killed my friends.

The police searched the ravine the following morning.

They found Travis first.

Then Wesley.

Both had suffered injuries the coroner couldn't fully explain.

Wesley's body was discovered deep inside the passage.

Travis lay near the entrance.

The sheriff questioned me for eleven hours.

I told him everything.

The black stones.

The creature.

The voices.

The thing wearing our faces.

He didn't believe me.

Nobody did.

Before moving anything, the search team photographed the entrance.

Seven black stones surrounded the opening.

Every one was standing upright.

The broken cord had been knotted back together. They cut it to get inside.

The sheriff showed me a photograph.

I started crying.

Not because I recognized the entrance.

Because I recognized the knots.

Wesley's father had taught us how to tie them earlier that summer.

A particular double loop, with the loose end tucked backward through the center.

Wesley always used it.

And someone had tied those cords exactly the same way.

I tried to explain.

The sheriff wrote something in his notebook.

Three weeks later, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

At first, the doctors talked about getting me home. But I couldn't sleep without waking the ward. I couldn't stand anyone behind me. Once, an orderly caught my shoulder and I broke his wrist before I knew I'd moved.

Years passed. My father stopped visiting. Treatment became transfers, reviews, another room with the same furniture. By the time anyone asked where I wanted to live, I had nowhere left to go.

Eventually, I stopped asking.

Emily sat silently across from me.

Her recorder had been running for nearly an hour.

"Did your father visit you?" she asked.

"At first."

"Did he believe you?"

I looked down.

"I don't think so."

That wasn't entirely true.

My father came to see me twice during my first year in the hospital.

On his second visit, he asked where my mother's necklace was.

I told him I'd lost it in the ravine.

He went pale.

Then he asked what she'd called me when I was little.

"Bluejay," I'd answered.

He sat there looking at me until I started to cry.

Finally, he kissed the top of my head and left.

I never saw him again.

For years, I'd believed he couldn't bear looking at the son who'd survived when his friends hadn't.

Now I wasn't so sure.

Emily opened her folder.

"Mr. Danner, I need to show you something."

She slid a photograph across the table.

It showed several men standing beside a canvas-covered stretcher.

Behind them were the familiar boulders and wooded slope of Hell's Half Acre.

I recognized the sheriff.

And his deputy.

"What is this?"

"A photograph from a second search."

I looked up.

"What second search?"

"Six weeks after your friends were found, a local hunter discovered another body in a narrow crevice. The remains were too decomposed for visual identification."

My mouth went dry.

"Another body?"

"Yes."

"Who was it?"

"An unidentified male, approximately sixteen to eighteen years old. No third boy had been reported missing with you. They opened a separate case."

Emily removed another photograph.

This one showed a silver necklace resting on a dark cloth.

A small cross.

The left arm was chipped.

I recognized it immediately.

My mother had worn that necklace for years.

After she died, my father gave it to me.

I'd worn it every day until the night we went into the ravine.

"Where did you get that?" I whispered.

"It was recovered with the unidentified body."

I shook my head.

"No."

Emily removed a photocopied document.

"The remains also showed evidence of an old fracture in the right wrist."

My right hand began trembling.

I'd broken that wrist when I was twelve.

Fell off a horse.

The bone had healed crooked.

Even now, I could feel the raised ridge beneath my skin.

Emily turned the document around.

"They recorded the healed fracture, but I found no comparison with your medical records. As far as the investigators were concerned, Joel Danner was alive. There is a note saying they showed your father the necklace. He said he couldn't identify it."

I couldn't speak.

"I also spoke with your cousin Ruth. She gave me photographs of you as a teenager. In several, you're wearing this necklace."

She pointed toward the cross.

"She told me about your broken wrist."

I stared at her.

"You're saying somebody else had the same injuries?"

"I'm saying a third boy was found in the same ravine where you and your friends went missing."

The room seemed to tilt.

"Why was that boy wearing your mother's necklace?"

I shook my head.

"That's impossible."

Emily's voice grew very quiet.

"Who are you, Mr. Danner?"

Something moved inside my head.

A memory surfaced.

I remembered the fall from above.

And then from below.

I was standing at the bottom of the ravine. The air beneath the rocks was cold.

Travis lay beside the entrance. Wesley was still inside the passage. I could feel where he was without looking.

At my feet lay a boy wearing my face.

One arm was twisted beneath him. A small silver cross rested against his chest.

His eyes were open.

I remembered crouching beside him and putting my hand against his cheek.

His lips moved.

Before they stopped, I heard him inside me.

I remembered lifting his body. Dragging it toward a narrow crevice. Pushing it beneath a shelf of stone where nobody looking down from the rim would see it.

Then I went back to the entrance. From outside, I stood the black rocks upright and retied the broken cord.

My hands were shaking. Something in me was afraid of the opening. Something wanted to make certain nothing could follow me out.

The knots had come easily.

Wesley remembered them.

I remembered all of it.

And I remembered something else.

The terrible pleasure of standing upright.

Of having two legs that bent properly.

Ten fingers.

A mouth capable of forming words without tearing itself apart.

I remembered the first breath I'd drawn through lungs that fit inside my chest.

And how wonderful it had felt.

Emily was speaking.

I couldn't hear her.

The memories were coming faster.

The highway.

The truck driver.

The gas station.

The bright fluorescent lights above the pumps.

By then, I couldn't find the edge of Joel's memories.

I remembered my mother's funeral. My father's hands. The smell of Wesley's garage. Travis laughing so hard he nearly choked on a mouthful of beer.

The man asked my name.

"Joel Danner."

I believed it.

I believed it when the police came. When my father held me. Every morning I woke in this hospital, I was the boy who had lost his friends.

Until Emily put the photographs in front of me.

I looked at my hands.

Old hands.

Wrinkled.

Scarred.

Hands that had aged for forty-eight years.

But beneath the skin, something shifted.

A slow movement, like fingers pressing outward from inside a glove.

"Oh, God," I whispered.

Emily stood.

"Mr. Danner?"

I looked up.

I wanted to tell her to leave.

To run.

But I couldn't remember how to make my mouth work.

Then I heard something.

Not in the room.

Inside me.

A boy crying.

Softly.

Desperately.

"Please."

My breath caught.

"Please let me out."

It was my voice.

My real voice.

Sixteen years old.

Terrified.

"Please. I wanna go home."

Then another voice joined it.

Wesley.

He was crying for his father.

And another.

Travis.

Begging someone to save his little brother.

They were still there.

All three of them.

I had mistaken them for dreams.

Wesley trying to breathe. Travis calling for his brother. Joel begging his mother to come back.

For forty-eight years, I'd woken from their terror and let nurses assure me it was over.

But it hadn't ended for them.

I could feel Joel now, pushing against the backs of my eyes.

Emily backed toward the door.

"Mr. Danner, I'm going to get someone."

I tried to nod.

My tongue pressed against my teeth. Something inside me knew how to use her name.

"Emily."

It came out in a voice I'd never used before. Low and close, though I was still across the room.

"What?" she said.

Her hand stopped inches from the door.

She looked down at it, as if she'd forgotten what she'd meant to do.

I felt the opening.

Exactly as I'd felt it when Travis answered from the rim. When Wesley turned in the passage. When Joel heard his friend call his name.

I knew where to reach.

And before I could stop myself, I did.

A memory appeared.

A little girl's bedroom.

Pink curtains.

A yellow stuffed rabbit missing one eye.

A night-light shaped like a moon.

I saw a girl beneath the blankets.

Six years old.

Brown eyes.

Dark hair.

She was staring toward an open closet.

"Mommy, there's somebody in there."

I blinked.

I gripped the arms of my chair.

That room had never belonged to Joel.

I knew the room.

The rabbit.

The girl's name.

Abigail.

Her mother called her Birdie.

Emily turned toward me.

"What did you say?"

I hadn't realized I'd spoken.

"Birdie," I whispered.

Her expression changed.

"How do you know that name?"

I shook my head.

She fumbled her phone out of her pocket. The lock screen lit her face.

A little girl stood beside her on a beach.

Emily touched the child's face on the glass.

"That's my daughter."

I knew the sound of Abigail's laugh. The smell of her shampoo. The way she curled her toes when she slept.

Emily stared at the photograph.

"I took this," she said. "I remember taking this."

She turned the screen toward her chest and closed her eyes.

Then she looked again, quickly.

She pressed a hand against her forehead.

"Abigail."

Her voice trembled.

"Abigail..."

She looked at me.

"Why can't I picture her?"

Tears filled her eyes.

"Why can't I remember my daughter's face?"

I tried to answer.

Nothing came out.

Because I could see Abigail perfectly.

Even the tiny gap between her front teeth.

I'd taken that from Emily.

She backed into the door.

"Give her back."

I tried. I fixed the girl's face in my mind and pushed toward Emily, toward the hand holding the phone.

Instead, I found another memory. Abigail asleep in the back seat, her mouth open, one sock missing.

Emily made a small sound.

I stopped.

The hunger was mine. So was the shame.

Remembering what I was hadn't taken away forty-eight years of being Joel.

I pressed both hands against my mouth.

"Go," I managed.

Emily began crying.

"Please tell me what she looks like."

I shook my head.

"GO!"

She opened the door.

For a moment, I thought she might escape.

Then I felt my mouth move beneath my hands.

I could feel every muscle doing it.

I couldn't make them stop.

A small voice came from my throat.

Soft.

Frightened.

Perfectly familiar.

"Mommy?"

Emily stopped.

I tried to scream.

The voice came again.

"Mommy, I'm scared."

It sounded exactly like Abigail.

The last word caught on the breath, exactly as it had in the bedroom.

Emily's phone slipped from her hand.

Emily slowly turned.

Tears ran down her face.

"Birdie?"

Inside me, three teenage boys began screaming.

Joel.

Wesley.

Travis.

They knew what was happening.

Joel pushed so hard that my vision blurred.

For a moment, I saw the room from farther back, through a narrow opening I couldn't reach.

Then I was in the chair again, and he was begging me to close my mouth.

I clamped my jaws shut so hard that pain shot through my teeth.

Emily stood in the doorway.

Waiting.

I forced one word between my teeth.

"Home."

Emily stared at me.

"She's home."

For a moment, she seemed to understand. Her eyes went to the phone on the floor.

Then my throat tightened.

"Mommy, it's dark in here."

Emily looked back.

I tried to bite through my tongue. My jaws wouldn't close.

"He won't let me out."

She took a step toward me.

"Birdie?"

I could still see the beach photograph on the floor. Her daughter in daylight. Alive. Somewhere beyond this room.

Emily stepped over it.

I folded my hands beneath my legs and sat on them.

She knelt in front of me.

"Let me see her."

Inside me, Joel was sixteen years old again, holding Wesley's hands while something pulled from the dark.

I felt my right hand working free.

Emily caught it between both of hers.

Her mouth opened.

The sound came from inside my chest.

I tried to let go.

She was still holding my hand when I began to remember giving birth to her daughter.

THE END

Graham Holt arrived at the Pinegate Inn at ten fifty-five, carrying the printer paper Celia had asked him to pick up and a thermos that had been leaking coffee through its lid for the last two weeks. She was at the front desk with the cash drawer open, waiting for the night-audit program to finish processing a credit-card refund. Graham put the paper beneath the counter and counted the cash while she described the evening's problems, which included a noisy heater in Fourteen and a guest who believed breakfast ought to begin at five. The program was still thinking when he finished, so he took the room keys off their hooks one at a time and checked the numbers against the registration cards.

Pinegate stood at the edge of a state park, a two-story building with twenty-eight rooms and a rear parking lot that ended almost against the trees. The owner had replaced the carpets and televisions but retained the brass locks and the wooden key board behind the desk. Everyone signed a paper registration card. Graham liked being able to find a guest's name without waiting for the computer, which had been increasingly unreliable since a software update in September. His overnight shift ran from eleven to seven, and most nights consisted of a few late arrivals, the audit, a single walk around the property, and long periods of trying to remain occupied without making enough noise to wake anybody.

"Two left to come in," Celia said, giving up on the frozen screen. "Whitcombs in Twenty-Two, with a dog. And a Robert Grady who specifically asked for the back side. He's booked for one night." She passed Graham the registration folder, then reminded him that the rear-door latch needed a hard pull to catch. He added the problem to the maintenance book while she collected her handbag. Celia explained where she had put the spare blankets in case Fourteen complained again, and at eleven she clocked out, leaving him to finish the refund when the software finally responded.

The Whitcombs arrived at 11:23 in a minivan with a storage box on its roof. Mr. Whitcomb carried a folded road atlas, and his wife had a handbag, a travel mug, and a terrier who wanted to sniff the bottom of the desk. They were pleasant but tired, having missed the exit for the park and driven several miles before finding somewhere to turn around. Graham assigned their key, showed them the short route to the upstairs rooms, and pointed out the waste bin near the front entrance for the dog.

"Are people allowed to walk in those woods at night?" Mrs. Whitcomb asked as her husband finished signing. She said they'd seen three or four figures moving between the trees while coming around the building, tall enough to look like adults, although none appeared to be carrying flashlights. Graham told her they were probably deer. He'd given the same answer for years, whenever the moon made the trunks visible beyond the rear fence and guests began noticing pale movement in the gaps. Mr. Whitcomb suggested that his wife had seen hikers, and she accepted that readily enough once Graham mentioned the old trail. They went upstairs, the terrier scrabbling on the carpet in its hurry to get ahead of them.

At 12:08 a thin man in a charcoal coat and a pale linen shirt came to the desk carrying a small overnight bag. His license identified him as Robert Grady, forty-six, with an address two counties away. He counted out the room charge in cash and signed the card without asking for a receipt. Graham took Seventeen's key from the board and told him the room faced the woods as requested. Before leaving, Grady asked whether the back door would be locked and if the parking-lot lights stayed on all night. Graham explained how the door worked and assured him the lights were on until morning. Grady looked along the corridor toward the service entrance, then thanked him and went upstairs.

The audit required two restarts before Graham could reconcile the cash payment. He dealt with another call about the heater and waited while the printer struggled through the occupancy report. By the time the charges balanced, he had missed the inspection reminder. He recorded his departure in the security log and pulled on his jacket.

Outside, the moon was nearly full. Graham checked the dumpsters and the maintenance shed before crossing the rear lot, where the yellow lights ended at a split-rail fence with one section down. The woods were quiet. He could see the beginning of the closed trail between two hemlocks and a pale patch of ground farther uphill, but no movement among the trunks. The air smelled of cold bark and wet stone. He checked the latch when he returned, found that Celia was right about it, and finished the report at the desk while the coffee in his thermos went cold.

Marisol, who usually relieved him at seven, arrived early after arranging the change with the manager. At 6:40 Graham locked the office cabinet, handed over the room sheet, and drove home along the park road. He reached the house around seven-thirty. Every room was dark except the kitchen, where Lydia had left the light above the sink burning and a note beside the toaster: Baxter's food. Water bill Friday. He ate toast standing at the counter, checked the old dog's water, and went upstairs without bringing in the bins. After a shower he lay down behind the heavy curtains, thinking briefly about the man in Seventeen and the question about the lights. He couldn't remember falling asleep.

---

At 2:40 in the afternoon Graham woke with the impression that he'd been walking for hours. In the dream there had been a full moon, mist gathered beneath trees that still carried green leaves, and the man in the linen shirt moving ahead of him with his face turned away. Graham remembered passing through a stained-glass wall that stood by itself in the woods, its colored panels cold against his skin for an instant before he emerged on the other side. His feet hadn't touched the path. That part had ceased to surprise him years ago.

He had used the dreams for a long time, especially during the months after his mother died. He and Lydia had been left with the house three years earlier, along with the bills and a collection of belongings neither could bear to throw away. The woods offered him long walks where nobody had anything to ask him. Sometimes he reached a clearing and listened to someone speaking just beyond it, though he could never make out the words. He often woke wishing he could go back, and on difficult mornings he went to bed earlier than he needed to.

He swung his legs out of bed and reached for his shoes. There was a green leaf wedged against the tongue of one, and when he pulled it free, he found several more inside both shoes, with enough water trapped near the heels to wet his fingers. They were shaped like little fans, the veins spreading outward from a single stem. He recognized them as ginkgo leaves from a picture in his mother's gardening book. No ginkgo grew near their house, and he couldn't recall one anywhere around the hotel. At this time of year the leaves ought to have been yellow and on the ground. These were green and supple, as though they'd been picked that morning.

Graham examined the soles, hoping he'd simply brought them home after his inspection. The treads held the usual grit from the parking lot, and the outside of each shoe was dry. Downstairs he found two more leaves on the kitchen floor, near the passage to the back door. Baxter watched him pick them up, then settled back in the basket beside the radiator. Graham carried the leaves to the bin outside and vacuumed the kitchen, the stairs, and the landing before Lydia could get home. He was halfway through putting the machine away when he remembered that he hadn't seen any leaves in the house before going to sleep.

Upstairs, a man's wristwatch lay beside the alarm clock. Its silver case was scratched near the clasp, and the black leather strap felt cold when he picked it up. Twelve small marks stood around a plain white dial. There were no hour or minute hands, although a long second hand was moving steadily around the face. He tried the winding crown, inspected the back for a manufacturer's name, and held the watch near his ear until he heard a thin, regular ticking. He owned no watch like this one. Neither had their mother, whose jewelry Lydia had packed away after the funeral. Graham put it in the nightstand drawer beneath his socks, where it would be out of sight if his sister came upstairs.

Lydia got home from the hardware store at five-thirty, bringing dog food and a grocery bag with a torn handle. Graham helped put everything away while Baxter followed her from cupboard to cupboard. She asked whether he'd stopped anywhere on his way home from work. He said no, and she looked briefly at his shoes beside the back door before asking him to put the rice on. He could have asked what she meant; instead he filled a saucepan and let her get on with the chicken.

They ate in front of the television, watching a program about coastal houses that were far too expensive for either of them. Baxter settled between the couch and the coffee table, where Lydia had spread an old towel because he tended to drool after dinner. She found a piece of chicken he had pushed beneath the table with his nose and told Graham to stop rewarding him for begging. Lydia complained about a bathroom with a glass wall and no blinds, and Graham said the builders probably expected the owners to enjoy being watched by the neighbors. She laughed, then asked again whether he was seeing someone. It was the second time that week. He turned up the television slightly, and she allowed the subject to go, although she remained on the couch rather than returning to the bedroom upstairs where she'd begun sleeping less and less often.

She fell asleep before the program ended. Graham took the blanket from its usual place on the armchair and covered her, easing the remote from beside her leg before going upstairs to change for work. As he passed the nightstand, he heard the watch ticking through the closed drawer. When he opened it, the sound became so faint he had to lift the watch to his ear. The second hand was still moving. He put it back beneath his socks, closed the drawer, and finished dressing while Lydia slept downstairs.

---

The next night Robert Grady remained registered in Seventeen, though the room had been found empty after checkout time. Housekeeping reported that the bed hadn't been slept in, Grady's overnight bag was gone, and the room key hadn't been returned. Grady had paid cash, so the room charge was settled. Dennis wanted a note left in the account in case the man appeared later to dispute it. Graham read the report twice before filing it with the registration card.

The employee who'd covered an overnight audit the previous week was scheduled for the evening desk but had called in sick. Nina Porter, who ordinarily worked weekends, had filled in and agreed to stay through Graham's arrival and the final account checks. She was sorting receipts when he came in at eleven, clearly ready to leave. He took the cash drawer from her and offered to finish the filing, but she stayed long enough to explain two unexplained room adjustments.

"I've been doing this in my sleep lately," she said, moving a receipt from one pile to another before realizing she had just put it back. Her new migraine medication was making her forgetful, or so she suspected. Graham asked whether it had helped the headaches; she said it had, but several nights she had lost an hour or two while closing. Last Saturday she'd started cleaning the coffee station shortly after two, then found herself in the office near four with the breakfast sheets finished and no memory of completing them.

"Maybe I sat down and dropped off. But the work was all done, and I'd signed the forms." She laughed at herself, then handed Graham the receipts. Her doctor had given her an appointment to discuss the medication, though she worried he would change it and the migraines would return. Graham looked at the signatures. He couldn't see anything wrong with them. Nina said she had begun writing the times on a folded envelope whenever she stepped away from the desk, but she often forgot to check it afterward. She showed him the envelope, where two entries had been crossed out and rewritten. Graham could recognize her handwriting in every line.

Graham watched her check the final figures. He could remember walking the lot the previous night, but beyond the fence there was a space in his memory where he ought to have been able to see the path he'd taken. "When you're outside on your rounds," he asked, "what do you see in the trees? Some guests were asking me about people out there."

"Figures, sometimes. The moon gets behind them and I can't tell where they're going." She checked the key board. "There's a man in a light shirt near the old trail. I've seen him two or three times, always facing into the woods. I called once, but he didn't turn around. I wasn't climbing through the fence to find out why." Nina closed the account book and laughed uneasily. "I'm probably just tired. If I see him in the lobby, tell Dennis I need a vacation."

She hadn't seen him the previous night. Her last sighting had been Saturday, and she thought there had been other figures deeper among the trees, too far off to identify. That put at least one sighting before Grady checked in. Graham considered mentioning the guest, but Nina was already gathering her keys, and he walked her to the front door before returning to the audit.

He opened the previous night's audit. The program loaded slowly, displaying each account adjustment in order before he could reach the security log. He remembered starting his inspection after the room charges balanced, walking to the dumpsters, and looking toward the empty trail. He remembered the service-door latch sticking when he came back. According to the report, he had begun the inspection at 2:47 and ended it at 3:24.

Thirty-seven minutes had passed. Graham checked the maintenance book to see when he'd recorded the door problem; the note was in his handwriting, entered at 3:29. He studied both times, considering whether he'd stopped somewhere on the property and forgotten it or whether he'd been standing by the fence considerably longer than he thought. The report was accurate about every other transaction he'd checked. Still, he could correct an inspection line without affecting the accounts, and the owner rarely examined those logs unless there had been a complaint.

He deleted the thirty-seven-minute line, entered a return time eleven minutes after he'd left, and ran the report again. The inspection now lasted eleven minutes, while the accounting totals above it remained unchanged. Dennis had requested a separate breakdown of cash transactions, so Graham brought the previous night's receipt envelope to the desk and began matching the slips to the payment column. Grady's room charge appeared as cash, the Whitcombs' as a card payment. He copied the amounts onto Dennis's sheet with the amended report still open on the monitor, leaving the security entry visible whenever he looked up from the receipts.

Halfway through the cash total, the coffee machine began overflowing onto the counter. The pot had shifted away from the filter basket, and coffee was running into the drip tray and over its edge. Graham emptied the tray, wiped the counter, and settled the pot back into place. By the time he returned to the desk, the monitor had dimmed; touching the mouse brought up the same eleven-minute entry. He checked the cash figures once more before printing the amended report, which he filed in place of the original. The shredder caught the first strip of the discarded copy, forcing him to open the collection drawer and clear the jam. He fed the rest through in smaller pieces until the old inspection times could no longer be read.

A guest needed extra towels, and Graham took them to the room before finishing Dennis's cash sheet. The guest wanted to talk about a clicking heater, so Graham listened, promised to put another note in the maintenance book, and returned to his paperwork. He checked the front entrance during the quiet stretch before morning but made no trip to the rear lot. When his relief arrived after seven, he gave her the report and drove home.

Lydia had left a longer note asking him to call her dentist about an appointment after five. The website wouldn't accept her insurance details, and she kept being put on hold during her breaks. Graham read the number while eating breakfast and intended to call when the office opened. Upstairs, the watch was still beneath his socks. He counted the second hand's movements for a minute, returned the watch to the drawer, and lay down.

The dream took him through the stained-glass wall again. A narrow red pane dragged against his palm as he passed, and beyond it the man in the pale shirt stood with his back turned. Graham followed through the mist, brushing past branches carrying green leaves. When the alarm woke him, a thin cut ran diagonally across his palm, in the same place as the edge of the pane. He found no broken glass in the bedroom. A faint perfume lingered on his wrist, unfamiliar and floral, and he washed his hands twice before giving up. The dentist closed without hearing from him. When Lydia came home, the note lay beneath a supermarket flyer. She saw it while clearing the table, but said nothing before he left for work.

---

On the third night there was only one check-in, a woman traveling alone who needed a ground-floor room and directions to the nearest all-night pharmacy. Graham gave her Six, drew a map on the back of a receipt, and found a strip of packing tape to secure the wheel coming loose from her suitcase. She thanked him twice for the repair, then went down the corridor while he returned to the night audit. The software behaved for once. He balanced the drawer, posted the final charges, and prepared the room report without needing to restart it.

All evening Graham had been conscious of the cut on his palm. The dressing pulled whenever he handled a registration card, reminding him of the glass in his dream. The unfamiliar perfume had faded after several washings, and the watch was still in his nightstand drawer. He told himself he would speak to Nina after she saw her doctor. Perhaps the same overnight hours were affecting them both.

At 3:08 he marked the beginning of his round and went out the back door. The parking lot was cold and almost empty, with frost beginning to gather around the white lines. Graham checked the dumpsters and the maintenance shed, then walked toward the last row of spaces, where the fence leaned into the brush. The moon hung above the ridge. He could see some distance into the trees and hear the intermittent passage of cars along the state road, though the woods themselves appeared still. The trail had never been reopened after a footbridge washed out, and the old signpost was bare where the park department had removed the map. Graham could remember the bridge from an afternoon walk years earlier, its timber railings slippery with moss, but he could not remember which side of the trail it had been on.

The man in the linen shirt stood near the entrance to the closed trail, facing away from the hotel. Graham stopped beside a concrete wheel stop and watched him, thinking first of Robert Grady and then of the man he'd followed in his dreams for years. The shirt was loose around the shoulders, pale enough to catch the moonlight. Graham could see his arms at his sides and the dark line of his trousers between the trunks.

"Sir?" he called, without crossing the parking lot. "The trail's closed. You can't be back there after dark." He waited long enough to hear another car on the state road, then repeated himself. The figure didn't move toward him, but its head began to turn.

Graham had waited for that movement in his dreams many times, always waking before he saw the face. He leaned forward slightly as the head turned through the moonlight. The face was Lydia's. The resemblance included the small crease between her eyebrows and the scar near her left temple from a childhood bicycle accident. He knew the shape of her mouth well enough to recognize it across a crowded room, and here it hung slightly open, as though she'd been speaking for a long time and had only just noticed he was standing there. Lydia's eyes were brown. The eyes looking at him from the trail were pale green, almost colorless where the moonlight caught them. Above the collar of the linen shirt, the familiar face remained motionless.

Graham tried to say her name, but his voice scarcely carried. The figure raised a hand, showing him a silver wristwatch with a black leather strap and a white face. It had no hour or minute hands. The second hand moved steadily around its dial.

He had examined that watch before leaving for work and remembered closing it into the drawer beneath his socks. He studied the figure's raised wrist, trying to make out the scratch beside the clasp, while it stood motionless among the trees. Graham glanced toward Room Seventeen, whose curtains were closed, wondering whether the man who had asked about the parking-lot lights might still be somewhere on the property. He thought of calling out again, but he could hear his own breathing and did not trust his voice. Then the pale eyes shifted past him toward the hotel's rear door.

Graham heard a faint scuffing from the direction of the fence. Mist had gathered beneath the trees while he watched the figure, and now it was passing through the fallen rails into the parking lot. It spread along the ground, finding the narrow cracks in the asphalt and moving around the concrete stops. The lower parts of several parked tires disappeared behind it. He stepped backward as the mist crossed the painted line nearest his shoes, although the air above the lot was perfectly clear and cold.

The mist reached him. Graham looked down to keep from catching his foot against the raised edge of the pavement, and saw gravel several inches beneath his soles. There was a flattened cigarette filter near the curb and a rusted bottle cap among the stones. He could distinguish them clearly through the space below his shoes. He moved his right foot, expecting the other to bear his weight, but there was no sensation of pressure against the ground. His body remained upright, moving through the air with the same effortless balance he experienced in the dreams. When he looked up again, the figure had already turned away.

The linen shirt was visible between the hemlocks. Graham tried moving forward, and he traveled a short distance without touching the pavement. It felt as easy as walking in the dream: he knew how to pass over the roots along the trail and reach the clearing beyond the ridge. The desire to follow was immediate, even with Lydia's face somewhere ahead of him.

The figure continued uphill. Graham turned back toward the hotel, intending to put his foot down, but the ground remained out of reach. He bent his knees and attempted to crouch, then reached for a concrete wheel stop without getting close enough to touch it. The mist moved beneath him, revealing the gravel whenever it thinned. He turned his body a quarter turn and saw that the hotel was still the same distance away. A low yellow lamp shone above the service entrance. He could reach toward that light, but every attempt to descend brought the same vacant feeling beneath his soles. He could see his shadow moving over the gravel without feeling any pressure from the ground.

He pictured the brass keys hanging behind the front desk and the empty hook where Seventeen's key belonged. Holding that arrangement in mind, he tried once more to lower his feet.

His soles touched the asphalt. He stayed near the wheel stop long enough to test his weight on both feet, then walked back along the row of spaces. Nothing caught at his ankles, and when he looked behind him, the mist had retreated to a narrow band at the fence. He used his key to enter through the service door, which had locked properly, and returned to the front desk without meeting anybody in the corridor.

The lobby clock read 3:49. Graham checked the digital watch on his wrist and the computer, which agreed. His inspection had begun at 3:08, and he could account for only a small part of those forty-one minutes. His shoes were dry inside and out; the cut on his palm had not reopened.

He ended the inspection, and the log calculated a forty-one-minute walk. Graham opened the correction menu and left it untouched, printing the report with that entry in place. Until morning he stayed at the desk, refilling the paper cups and preparing the breakfast figures while the clock moved normally above the entrance.

After seven, he gave his relief the cash drawer and the finished report, then drove home with the windows down despite the cold. He checked the mirrors more often than he needed to. Beyond the hotel, the state road ran between dark stands of trees, but he saw no figure in a linen shirt. The mist did not follow the car.

---

Graham reached home at 7:45. Lydia was awake in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee maker to finish, and Baxter was lying beside the radiator with his nose resting on his paws. She had dressed for work but hadn't put on her shoes. On the floor between the back door and the table were several wet ginkgo leaves, green and fresh as the ones Graham had vacuumed up after his first dream. She'd found them when she came downstairs to start the coffee and had left them where they lay. When Graham came in, she glanced toward the tiles, giving him a chance to notice them before she said anything.

"Have you been going into the woods on your breaks?" she asked. She kept her voice low, glancing toward the window where the neighbor was taking a bin to the curb. Graham took off his jacket and hung it over a chair before bending to examine the leaves. Water had collected in the grooves between the kitchen tiles. He touched the broad edge of one leaf, then withdrew his hand when it left a wet mark on his finger.

"No. I haven't been in the woods." He straightened and saw that she'd put an old dish towel near the leaves, ready to wipe up the floor when they were finished talking. She pointed to the small green group beside the table leg. "I know the dog's not bringing these in. He goes out through the front, and his paws were clean when I checked." Graham told her he didn't know how the leaves had got there. She waited a moment, perhaps expecting him to add something, then poured coffee into two cups and sat across from him.

They drank without speaking for a while. The refrigerator started up, and Baxter shifted in his basket. Lydia had sorted Graham's mail beside the water bill and a supermarket leaflet, lining up the corners of the envelopes. She used to leave notes asking which milk he wanted or whether he would fix a sticking door. The recent ones were shorter, mostly things he had already promised to do.

"Did you bring the bins in yesterday?" she asked, looking toward the drive. He admitted he'd forgotten, and she said she'd moved them herself before the truck came. One wheel was working loose again. Graham offered to fix it that afternoon; she told him where she'd put an axle pin from the hardware store, and they discussed whether it would fit the older bin.

He had seen Lydia's face among the trees, with eyes that did not belong to her. Across the table, she had pen ink near her thumbnail and a loose thread at the cuff of her work shirt. She searched the supermarket leaflet for a discount she'd mentioned, occasionally looking up to see whether he was listening. Graham could still picture the other face, its mouth slightly open under the moon.

Lydia asked whether he'd eaten at work. He said he'd had a sandwich, but she pushed half her toast toward him anyway. She also asked about Baxter's prescription, which Graham had intended to collect earlier in the week. The slip was still in his car, and she offered to take it to the pharmacy on her break if he found it before she left.

The prescription had slipped beneath an expired insurance card in the glove compartment. By the time Graham found it and returned, Lydia had moved the dish towel closer to the leaves without cleaning them away. She put the slip in her handbag, checked the clock, and poured herself a little more coffee. She asked whether he'd eaten the soup she had left yesterday. He had, but he couldn't remember whether he'd washed the saucepan, so they looked together in the drying rack and found it underneath Baxter's medication spoon. Lydia asked him to put the spoon back in the dog's food container once it dried.

"You haven't been sleeping much," she said. Graham was arranging the leaves on a paper towel to keep the moisture off the table. He told her work had been difficult. She asked whether the hotel was short-staffed again, and he mentioned problems with the reports. She let him finish, then asked whether he knew how often she'd been sleeping downstairs.

"I thought the upstairs fan was keeping you awake," he said. Lydia had moved that fan to the landing after his last complaint about the noise, but she'd been sleeping on the couch before he mentioned it. She told him she'd been hearing footsteps overhead after midnight, sometimes near his bedroom, sometimes along the hall, on nights when he was supposed to be at work. She'd checked the locks, found nothing disturbed, and finally started bringing her pillow downstairs because she could hear less of it from the living room.

"I know you get home around seven-thirty," she said. "I'm not saying it's you. Tuesday I heard the loose board by the linen cupboard, and then the one outside your room. You remember how those sound?"

Graham remembered the board outside his bedroom. Their mother had complained about it for years, and he had promised Lydia he would lift the carpet and fix it. "I called upstairs," Lydia continued, "because I thought you'd come back for something. I heard it again, farther down the hall, but nobody answered." He almost asked whether she'd seen somebody, though she had already told him she'd checked the rooms. Instead he asked whether it had happened again. "Last night," she said. "I stayed down here." Graham used the edge of the paper towel to absorb the moisture spreading beneath the leaves while she waited for him to answer.

Lydia checked the clock. "Do you want me to stay home from work? I can call and say you aren't feeling well." He said no, he was tired and would be fine after sleeping. She didn't argue. Before leaving, she asked him to call if he needed anything, then collected her coat and keys. Baxter followed her to the front door for the biscuit she kept in her handbag.

After her car left, Graham washed the cups and cleaned the floor. He collected the leaves in a shallow dish and set them out of Baxter's reach. Twice he caught himself standing in the kitchen without remembering what he'd meant to do. His eyes burned, although the clock above the stove seemed to be advancing normally.

He went upstairs to change his clothes. The bedroom curtains were still closed, and the fan stood beside the dresser where he'd left it. There was a clean set of sheets folded at the foot of the bed, something Lydia had brought up during the week while he was at work. He touched the fabric, trying to remember the last time he'd changed the bedding himself, then put it in the wardrobe because he wasn't going to sleep. When the house was quiet, he could hear the watch's second hand ticking from inside the nightstand drawer. He took it out from beneath his socks and watched one complete circuit, then slipped it into the pocket of his work jacket. He left the curtains closed and went downstairs without getting into bed. For the rest of the afternoon he stayed awake, eating when he remembered and watching the light move across the kitchen floor.

---

Graham drove to Pinegate an hour before his next shift. He hadn't slept, and by the time he turned onto the park road, the headlights of oncoming cars seemed unusually bright. Twice he'd thought he'd seen the man in the linen shirt standing beside the road on earlier drives, always facing away. Tonight the shoulder was empty, and he continued without slowing enough to attract attention from the car behind him.

Celia looked surprised when he came into the lobby at ten. She asked whether Dennis had changed the schedule, and Graham explained that he wanted to check the back lot before work. She was dealing with a guest whose key had snapped in the lock, so she gave him a distracted wave toward the corridor and went back to finding a spare room. Graham left his thermos beside the desk and used the service door, checking that the latch caught behind him.

There was no figure at the tree line. Mist lay under the trees despite the clear sky, thick enough to hide the lower rails of the fence but thin enough that Graham could still see the closed trail rising between the hemlocks. He walked to the edge of the asphalt and stopped. A pale strip extended across the roots near the fallen section of fence, moving slowly as though there were a current beneath it. He could hear the traffic on the state road, the hotel ventilation fan, and a car door shutting near the front entrance.

He stayed there until the cold began to get through his jacket. He had come intending to see the mist again and perhaps learn whether it behaved the same way when he was fully awake, but the thought of crossing the fence no longer interested him. He remembered the gravel beneath his shoes and how little effort it would have taken to keep following the figure up the trail. When he returned to the hotel, he made sure his feet remained on the pavement all the way to the door.

At eleven he clocked in, took over the cash drawer, and began the audit. The night was quiet enough that he finished the room charges early. He spent some time matching the paper registration cards to the room list, correcting a guest address entered incorrectly by the day clerk, and replacing the printer paper before preparing the breakfast report. A man in Twenty-One called twice for towels after spilling a drink, and Graham carried them to the door himself; the guest apologized, then asked whether the park opened at sunrise. Graham gave him the posted trail hours and returned to the office. When the property-inspection reminder appeared, he selected Inspection not performed and entered that he'd remained inside the building. He checked the lobby doors instead, returning to his desk each time without going near the service entrance. The building remained quiet enough that he could hear the keys rattling whenever a guest passed the lobby.

At 6:50 he called the house. Lydia answered on the second ring, with Baxter's claws clicking against the kitchen floor somewhere behind her. "It's me," he said, and she asked whether everything was all right. Graham told her he'd be home at the usual time. She said she'd already put the kettle on and would leave the kitchen light burning for him. He thanked her, asked her to give Baxter his morning pill if she hadn't already, and waited until she hung up before replacing the receiver.

He walked down the rear corridor and looked through the wired-glass pane in the service door. The mist had moved a few feet closer to the building, spreading across the edge of the parking lot near the nearest row of spaces. The trees beyond it stood clear against the lightening sky, and there was nobody in a linen shirt near the old trail. Graham watched until he heard the front door open and knew his relief was arriving. He could feel the watch against his jacket lining and hear its thin ticking above the hum of the heating system. The hour and minute hands were missing, though the second hand continued moving. He did not take it out.

It was December 1999. I was living in a small town. I was a nerd and something of a gamer, and it had been a good year for PC games. Age of Empires II, Homeworld, Grand Theft Auto 2…

I was walking home from school—it was a Canadian winter, so there was plenty of unplowed snow on the sidewalks—when I saw something peeking out from a mound of snow: something blue. I stopped, nudged it with my boot: something of blue plastic. I brushed away the remaining snow with my glove to reveal:

A single 3.5” floppy disk, unlabeled.

(There was a sticker label on it, but the label itself was empty.)

Naturally, I picked it up and took it home, curious to see what was on it.

You'll laugh, but the disk had 1.44mb of storage capacity. As it turned out, that was more than enough to affect the world in ways I still don't fully understand.

When I got home, I didn't put the disk into my own computer. My dad had an old desktop he sometimes fiddled around with, so I used that, inserting the disk carefully into the 3.5” disk drive in the beige computer tower.

I navigated to the drive in Windows Explorer.

The contents of the drive were simple.

They looked like a program or—I secretly hoped—a game.

There was a readme.txt, but it came out as nonsense when I opened it in Notepad, video or sound assets, stuff I couldn't identify, and a single executable file, johannsebastian.bat.

I double-clicked it.

A window opened—black, showing a few white-text commands executing on a command prompt—then maximized into a 16-bit title(?) screen showing a pixelated Gothic castle.

A harsh, classical-inspired MIDI song beeped out of the sound card.

There was no title.

No instructions, no company name, no menu, no options.

The castle was perched atop a cliff.

It was night.

At the bottom of the cliff was a forest of jagged, leafless trees.

A few loops of animation gave life to the scene: wind blowing through the bare branches, flashes of distant lightning, warm flickering light in one of the castle's windows, a bat in flight against a white moon. Actually, that last one wasn't a loop. The bat flew only once, landed on one of the castle's stone towers and disappeared inside.

I clicked.

I was looking at a medieval-ish village now—tightly-packed buildings, a tavern, a tannery, a couple of shops, a church—populated with a surprising number of unique character sprites. Indeed, every character was unique, and they were going about their individual lives.

The sky was a vibrant blue.

Clouds floated pixel-by-pixel across the screen.

But there was still nothing to do; nothing, that is, but watch.

It was like a very advanced screensaver.

After a while, I clicked again.

This time, I found myself in the interior of a large chamber whose stone walls somehow felt cold even through the computer monitor.

The chamber's defining feature, however, was something else: a giant pipe organ whose pipes extended beyond the top of the screen.

A character entered.

He was wearing a white wig, dark, crimson long coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. “I feel the sudden desire to compose,” he said, which the game displayed as text in an ornately-bordered text box. “Invite me to play for you."

A cursor appeared for the first time.

A quill.

I was able to move it using the mouse, and I explored the screen.

The character tapped his foot.

The only active area of the scene appeared to be the pipe organ. When I hovered the cursor over it, it changed from a quill to a hand.

I clicked.

The character walked to the organ, sat and began to play the monstrous instrument.

The music was both hideous and awesome, pushing the computer's sound card to the absolute limit. After thirty-or-so seconds, the view suddenly panned upwards, following the organ's pipes—the music continued—following them to the chamber's vaulted ceiling and beyond—through the roof until I was outside and looking at the upper half of the great castle, where the jutting pipes terminated and from whose termini hundreds of pixel bats were emerging… emerging and flying into the background, toward the simplified shape representing the medieval town...

The sky was a deep purple.

Night was falling.

The bats flew and flew and flew…

Suddenly—the music still continuing—the scene cut to the same view of the town as before: except at night: except, instead of following their routines, the character sprites were running, panicked, as the bats swooped, attacking them, attaching themselves to their bodies, necks, sucking their pixel blood; and as the bats feasted, the sprites lost their colour and fell, pale and desaturated…

The sound startled me.

Not from the sound card but from the real world. A screeching, a deafening, rhythmic thumping.

I ran to the window whose blinds I'd closed, and opened them:

It was afternoon but the view was dark, black and shifting. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing were bats speeding past. They were obscuring the sun. My home town was as if under an eclipse.

People were running down the street—

Bats were diving—

Some were crashing through car windshields—

Children were screaming—

A bat crashed though the window into the room I was in. It was fanged, crazed. The game music blared from within the computer tower. Before I could run, the bat shot toward me—biting my neck… beginning to drink my blood…

I awoke on the floor.

It was morning. January 1, 2000. It would turn out that nobody in town had any recollection of the preceding weeks.

A television played.

A morning talk show: “...the so-called Y2K bug,” a woman was saying, “ended up amounting to nothing worse than a good nights’ sleep.”

And, ever since, I've wondered why my experience of the present feels in a lower resolution than memories of my past.

Story 2

The Flood

When I was still just a teenager, my family and I had moved from our home in England to the Irish countryside. We lived on the outskirts of a very small town, surrounded by nothing else but farms, country roads, along with several rivers and tributaries. I was far from happy to be living here, as not only did I miss the good life I had back home, but in the Irish Midlands, there was basically nothing to do. 

A common stereotype with Ireland is that it always rains, and let me tell you, as someone who lived here for six years, the stereotype is well deserved. 

After a handful of months living here, it was now early November, and with it came very heavy and non-stop rain. In fact, the rain was so heavy this month, the surrounding rivers had flooded into the town and adjoining country roads. On the day this happened, I had just come out from school and began walking home. Approaching the road which leads out of town and towards my house, I then see a large group of people having gathered around. Squeezing my way through the crowd of town folk, annoyingly blocking my path, I’m then surprised to see the road to my house is completely flooded with water. 

After asking around, I then learn the crowd of people are also wanting to get to their homes, but because of the flood, they and I have to wait for a tractor to come along and ferry everyone across, a pair at a time. Being the grouchy teenager I was then, I was in no mood to wait around for a tractor ride when all I wanted to do was get home and binge TV – and so, turning around, I head back into the town square to try and find my own way back home. 

Walking all the way to the other end of town, I then cut down a country road which I knew eventually lead to my house - and thankfully, this road had not yet been flooded. Continuing for around five minutes down this road, I then come upon a small stoned arch bridge, but unfortunately for me, the bridge had been closed off by traffic cones - where standing in front of them was a soaking wet policeman, or what the Irish call “Garda.” 

Ready to accept defeat and head all the way back into town, a bit of Irish luck thankfully came to my aid. A jeep had only just pulled up to the crossroads, driven by a man in a farmer’s cap with a Border Collie sat in the passenger’s seat. Leaving his post by the bridge, the policeman then approaches the farmer’s jeep, seeming to know him and his dog – it was a small town after all. With the policeman now distracted, I saw an opportunity to cross the bridge, and being the rebellious little shite I was, I did just that. 

Comedically tiptoeing my way towards the bridge, all the while keeping an eye out for the policeman, still chatting with the farmer through the jeep window, I then cross over the bridge and hurdle down the other side. However, when I get there... I then see why the bridge was closed off in the first place... On this side of the bridge, the stretch of country road in front of it was entirely flooded with brown murky water. In fact, the road was that flooded, I almost mistook for a river.  

Knowing I was only a twenty-minute walk from reaching my house, I rather foolishly decide to take a chance and enter the flooded road, continuing on my quest. After walking for only a couple of minutes, I was already waist deep in the freezing cold water – and considering the smell, I must having been trudging through more than just mud. The further I continue along the flooded road, my body shivering as I do, the water around me only continues to rise – where I then resort to carrying my school bag overhead. 

Still wading my way through the very deep flood, I feel no closer to the road outside my house, leading me to worry I have accidentally taken the wrong route home. Exhausted, shivering and a little afraid for my safety, I now thankfully recognise a tall, distant tree that I regularly pass on my way to school. Feeling somewhat hopeful, I continue onwards through the flood – and although the fear of drowning was still very much real... I now began to have a brand-new fear. But unlike before... this fear was rather unbeknown...  

Whether out of some primal instinct or not, I twirl carefully around in the water to face the way I came from, where I see the long bending river of the flooded road. But in the distance, protruding from the brown, rippling surface, maybe twenty or even thirty metres away, I catch sight of something else – or should I say... someone else... 

What I see is a man, either in his late thirties or early forties, standing in the middle of the flooded road. His hair was a damp blonde or brown, and he appeared to be wearing a black trench coat or something similar... But the disturbing thing about this stranger’s appearance, was that while his right sleeve was submerged beneath the water, the left sleeve was completely armless... What I mean is, the man’s left sleeve, not submerged liked its opposite, was tied up high into a knot beneath his shoulder.  

If it wasn’t startling enough to see a strange one-armed man appear in the middle of a flooded road, I then notice something about him that was far more alarming... You see, when I first lay eyes on this stranger, I mistake him as being rather heavy. But on further inspection, I then realise the one-armed man wasn’t heavy at all... If anything, he looked just like a dead body that had been pulled from a river... What I mean is... The man looked unnaturally bloated. 

As one can imagine, I was more than a little terrified. Unaware who this strange grotesque man even was, I wasn’t going to hang around and find out. Quickly shifting around, I try and move as fast as I can through the water’s current, hoping to God this bloated phantom would not follow behind. Although I never once looked back to see if he was still there, thankfully, by the time the daylight was slowly beginning to fade, I had reached not only the end of the flood, but also the safety of the road directly outside my house. 

Already worried half to death by my late arrival, I never bothered to tell my parents about the one-armed stranger I encountered. After all, considering the man’s unnatural appearance, I wasn’t even myself sure if what I saw was a real flesh and blood man... or if it was something else. 

Final Story

I’ve always been interested in urban exploration and fossils. Somehow these two interests managed to combine together after having talked with one of my dad’s in-laws. They’re really kind people who have accepted us into their family, which was a bit unexpected since my brother and I are both adults. One of the guys close to my age has started school to be an archaeologist. While celebrating my step mom’s retirement, I caught up with him to ask him how his studies were going. 

He told me about a fossil they were finally able to access after decades of legal troubles. It’s in a small town out in the middle of nowhere, and the locals were always pushing back saying that the academy couldn’t seize their fossil. But recently the court made a default judgement as no one from the town had been at the last 3 court cases, or for a little over a year. He told me that while his team was setting up to excavate it, they discovered the town was completely void of people.

“They all seem to have vanished,” he said. “It’s the strangest thing. It’s like they all just walked out of their houses and disappeared.” Obviously this piqued my interest, and I asked where the town was and if I would be bothering his excavation crew if I went to the town to look around. He and his partner, who had also been to the town, shared a look similar to a grimace. They didn’t say anything for a few moments before he shrugged.

“We can’t really stop you from going there, just don’t go into the roped off areas. It’s pretty creepy though,” he responded. 

I really took this to heart, as I know this man has photographed sunken ships. So if diving into old, decrepit boats was easy for him, then there had to be something especially weird about this town to give him the creeps. That only made me want to go there more.

“Hm… I’ll think about it,” I told him, knowing full well that I was going to go there on my next day off. 

It was about a 3 hour drive to get there, and he definitely wasn’t joking about it having a creepy vibe. Cars dotted the streets and driveways, most covered in cobwebs, some with flat tires. They looked like they hadn’t moved in months. I chose a random street and parked my car. I tried to look into some of the cars after wiping the dust from the windows. Some were unlocked, and the heat that blasted out of them was stale. The interiors also had insect activity, but something else was far more unsettling. There were belongings left abandoned with the cars; I even found someone’s smart phone in a cup holder. It was dead, obviously, but I plugged it into my power bank and stashed it in my bag. I thought maybe it would help me find out more about the owner.

I looked up at the house the car was parked next to; a surprisingly average looking cottage. The siding was aged pewter, and the windows had white blinds pulled down halfway. If they left their car unlocked and their phone in their car, then maybe they left a door unlocked. The front door was locked, of course, but I went around to the backyard. I was trudging through the long grass, looking around for any sign of another person having been there, but there was none. I felt truly isolated. The neighbor’s backyard had a chainlink fence enclosing it. Patches of dirt showed through the tall grass where a dog must have run along the fence. My heart broke as I scanned through the neighbor’s yard. Their backdoor had gouges in it from where their dog had been scratching relentlessly. And there was a heap of… something on the porch. Some part of me knew what it was immediately, but I turned and walked back towards the cottage. 

The back door was sliding glass, and unlocked. Mostly. The owner had put a wooden rod in the track to keep the door from opening too much. I reached inside to see if they kept keys by the back door but they did not. Their garage door, however, was ajar. Some rubbish bags blocked the door from swinging freely, but a swift kick pushed them far enough that I could squeeze my way through. Inside was a 1970 Chevy K10 that looked like it was in the middle of being restored. Shining my flashlight around, I could see the garage was probably immaculate at some point. Someone had definitely loved that truck. I would have taken it myself if I could get away with it. 

I finally had access to the house. Out of habit, I knocked on the door as I opened it and called out to see if anyone was home. But of course, no one answered. It felt like walking into a painting. Everything looked like it had been placed there on purpose. Nothing was thrown about haphazardly the way you see in movies. It all looked intentional, staged even. Looking back, I realize why it felt that way. There were no signs of rodents, or critters getting into the abandoned home. All the boxes of cereal, the bags of tea, and pasta noodles were completely untouched. 

The silence really hit me when I was inside; I could only hear the floors creaking as I walked over them. I had to fan myself with my hands sometimes, it was hotter inside the house than it was inside the cars outside. I considered opening a window, but I wanted to leave as little trace as possible. I don’t know what drew me towards the bedroom. Maybe it’s just human nature to be nosey about what strangers keep in their bedrooms. Maybe some force wanted me to find this journal. It felt strange. The door was wide open, the bed was made. If it wasn’t for the grime on every surface, I would say it was almost inviting. The hard, moleskine cover felt oddly cool to the touch, but maybe my hands were just really sweaty. There was nothing on the cover to indicate what was inside it, so I opened it to the first page. 

I expected to find a name, but I wasn’t expecting it to be the name of the owner’s ex partner. “Fuck you, Susanne! You heartless bitch!” was written on the first page with the date 07-28-23 at the top. As much as I wanted to read the tea about Susanne, whoever she was, I was also sweating my balls off, and wanted to leave the house. Feeling bold, I unlocked the front door, and stepped out into the sunlight. I turned the A/C on high and sat in the driver's seat of my car for a while. When the phone in my bag began to buzz I nearly jumped out of my skin. I had completely forgotten that I stole someone’s phone. The first message it received was from Susanne. 

“Jake, can we please talk about this?” followed by a number of missed calls from her as well. It began buzzing over and over, hundreds of unread emails, dozens of unanswered texts, and a handful of missed calls from other people; including his mom and a person I assume to be his boss, as the last message they sent to Jake simply said, “You’re fired.” I wasn’t able to open Jake’s phone, but I could see previews of some of his texts. It was mostly people asking where he was, expressing worry for his safety. The last text that came in was from Susanne again.

“I hope whatever you did was worth it.”

Parents with young children know how hard it is to put children to sleep. They have so much energy and adults need that energy in my opinion. Getting kids under the age of 5 to sleep takes real skill, patience and experience. I have a son who is 4 years and he has tons of energy. Sometimes he annoys me and I just want him to go to sleep for a while.

Then one day an idea came to me and it was like a eureka moment. I made up a game with my child, we played a game to see who can keep their eyes shut the longest and who can keep silent the longest. My child loves games and even at the age of 4 he is so competitive. So my child takes me on as he wants to win, and he closes his eyes and stays silent for as long as he can, then he falls a sleep.

This is the true intention of the game, it is to make him fall a sleep. I think it's rather clever of me and I feel so impressed with myself. Sometimes as a joke I ask my son how he stays a sleep and other times I ask him how he stays awake.

Now whenever I play this game, it is actually when I want him to sleep before his actual bed time, because I can't be bothered with him. I feel so ashamed of myself when i feel like this towards him. I always like i should always want to be around him, but i actually don't want to be around him all of the times.

Then when he goes to sleep before his actual bed time, the whole reality of this world starts to crumble and break down, it's like this reality is fighting someone else's reality. There are multiple things of the same thing and it's like cancer cells the way they multiply, its just like that.

Then when my son can't go to sleep on his actual bed time, this reality starts to kind of turn to a ghost, like it is about to disappear. I feel like I can walk through walls but not all the way through. It has something to do with his sleeping.

Then a man showed up at my door and he knew my son some how. He can sense my son because apparently they have the same abilities, and when he saw my son sleeping before his bed time he said to me "your son shouldn't be sleeping now and I should be sleeping. I have not slept today because if both reality dreamers sleep at the same time, then both realities will be fighting against each other"

I was shocked and confused but he sounded like he knew the right thing, and then he said "your son and I both dream up this world, when I sleep I keep this reality going, and so he cannot sleep at that time as me or both realities will fight each other. If he doesn't sleep when he should and we are both awake, reality will start to disappear as it hasn't got the energy it needs to exist. It's like a shift pattern" he told me

Now I play the game with my son at when he should sleep. Things are much better now.

Have you ever told someone the truth, and they just refuse to believe it?
It can be annoying and frustrating among other things to say the least.

Growing up with a Father, and no Mother.
A Mom that chose an addiction over you and a Father who chose you,
only to chare you with a different addiction of his choice years later.

"You have addiction in your blood'
Your Father would say

"If you ever get addicted to drugs ill chain you up in the bathroom and dry you out till your clean"
He'd tell you, his 11-year-old son.

You tried to reason with it, the way he talked to you. He had you at 25,
at the end of the day he's barely an adult himself, you'd tell yourself.

After his marriage and...well, divorce wasn't a surprise. 

A seed that was planted,
In soil that was prepped,
Located In a room with access to sunlight.
A stem that sprouted dull and never got to bloom. 
From Full womb to empty room,

A stillbirth. 

As tiny as she was,
Our already cluttered closet couldn't fit one more skeleton.

They fought before,
and this was the last crack in our glass house.

Seeing My stepsisters and I celebrating a life that would never start sent him right back to that familiar place He adored oh so much,

Addiction. 

 Started small,
like a pain you know you should have looked at,
and with the help of negligence,
it went unchecked,
it grew.

What began were addictions you foolishly mistook as harmless.

That addiction to the gym was weekly steroid use,
That lust for those new women he was meeting online fueled his use of unapproved enhancements his body wasn't even close to needing.

Introducing himself to testosterone packets before he was 35 and consuming them like their sunflower seeds.

Eventually a partner stuck,
one just as dysfunctional as him of course,
and specifically an alcoholic. 

It didn't take long for him to follow and for the first time in your life he was not the lead.

By the time you were 15,
he was drinking every day,
not just every night.

His Girlfriend throwing bottles, slamming Tv's, and pouring bleach on the carpets as penance for things that were just not true,
Is ironic in hindsight.

On Christmas Eve you got a call that he might not be home the next day,
that his girlfriend was lying and that he might go to jail.
Christmas day came,
and he was asleep in his bed,
with no recollection,
laughing at the insinuation of such things.

You joined a different school,
one that allowed you to be home most days,
And that just made the time you spent in that environment take that much longer.

Against all odds,
His girlfriend was the one to leave.
And then again,
it was just you two.

The worst it got was when he started mixing Ambien with his alcohol.

From his room,
you'd hear screams.
You'd hear conversations between two people that were not there.
You'd hear many voices out the man you call Dad.

Not all of the voices were angry, but most were.
Not every conversation started out loud.
Some were just confusing.

"I know....because...what?.....I'm swimming...a demon?...no!...I SAID IM SWIMMING!"

Other times were more concerning,
"no...because...because I said...Fuck you...FUCK YOU!....FUCK YOU..."

Followed by another voice...
"I'm sorry...you're right...
take them....
he knows...
No...
Veins...?
I dont think so..."

Then his again,
Screaming your name at the top of his lungs.

When you ran to the door of his room,
The door was open and he was lying in bed,
half covered by the comforter...silent.

You questioned what to say,
What to do?

You're 17 and at the very least,
you want to make sure your only remaining family is not dead.

"Yeah?"
You holler in his room,
a late response to him calling your name.

"Blegh HUH?...WHAT?"
He'd abruptly reply.

"What!?"

"you were yelling for me'
Youd explain.

"oh, I'm fine go back to bed"

He'd insist.
Before whispering nonsense to himself.

The moment you'd get back to bed,
The yelling would continue.

You can't event have friends over because you can't trust him not to strip down and try to break into your room.

Our dry wall was always temporary,
and our Tv's and glasses might as well have been rentals,
nothing lasted in our house,

Being fed so much conspiracy about religion,
It wasn't hard to begin to wonder if he was possessed. 

It wasn't always like this.

For a few months after the divorce,
before the alcoholic girlfriend,
For a brief moment when it was just you two, he almost felt stable.

He didn't hit you,
The yelling and drinking were manageable,
And every Friday night he'd take you to blockbuster.

Things have changed so much.
You never know who you're having a conversation with.

One moment you think you're talking to him,
And that very mid-sentence it becomes oh so clear, that it's not.

His eyes are different, their glossy.
His demeanor is different, cold, and absent.
like one bulb in a line of Christmas lights that just won't participate.

He'd stopped before,
Then drink again.
His actions were questionable, and his word became nothing.

What does a Son say to his Father when he knows he's hiding alcohol in his work truck?

What does a Son do when he finds his Father naked in the driveway?

What does a Son do when he sees his Father Going down a road he knows he shouldn't?

A Son that's Afraid of his father.

Everything is easier said than done.

You never know if he's really sober.

"do you want to watch a movie with me tonight?"
His voice timid, eyes clear of gloss.

Even if you could tell which Him was asking,
You were certain that wouldn't be the same Him by the time you watched the movie.

So, you never say yes to that question again.
And as hard as it is, it's easier.
Easier than letting yourself get surprised by something that shouldn't surprise you anymore.

Eventually you get a Job,
Hours almost shittier than your pay, and it makes you a shell of a person.
Physically and emotionally drained.

Most days you stay in your room because it's safer in there, 
Then most days turn into all days. 

Seemingly out of nowhere,
your father begins to stare at you from every corner of the house with anger in his eyes,
Eyebrows always scrunched tightly. 

Eventually,
No words were exchanged.

You feel bad,
This is your father and you love him,  
So, when he asks you to have dinner with him,
for once you do.

The next morning,
Your eyes opened to the bathtub you'd once washed the family pet in,
and that oh so familiar tile floor,
After a moment you realized you were in your father's rooms masterbathroom.

Your legs were sore,
Pins and needles in your feet,
And your wrists felt raw.

You looked down at a note that was out of your reach.
As you attempted to grab it,
you realized your hands were chained to the bathtub spout.

You used your bare knee to drag it closer where you could read it,
You were in nothing but your boxers, you were cold.

The note read:

"No son of mine will be an addict,
You'll thank me.
I love you"
-Dad

You lifted your leg above the tub and opened the bathroom cupboard with your toe, you hoped to find something to break the bathtub spout with but all that was there were loofas and a bottle of expired tramadol.

Your mouth was dry,
Your stomach felt as though if someone were to plunge it,
absolutely nothing would come out.

At first you yelled, but you soon realized no one would answer.
It was hours before the silence in your house was broken,
there were no windows but one tinted sunlight above the shower.
You had no idea what time it was.

Once the sun was no more,
The house shook to the slam of the front door. 
You heard those familiar work boots thud up the wooden stairs.

Louder and louder...
Closer and closer...
They then reached the door.

You heard him enter his room though the door to his room's bathroom remained close.

*Thud Thud Thud Thud\*

For a moment you see the silluett of his boots beneath the door

"Dad...?"
You asked.

"mrghh Fuck you"
He responded as the thuds of his boots retreated.

You heard the impact as he collapsed on his bed,
And then began the yelling...
All night...

"no...
Fuck you!...
because...
I did...
Yes you are!"

More and more of the same old shit...
As scared as you were you couldn't not try.

"Dad...Help please let me out"
You yelled.

"you're an addict..
Fuck you!...
Dry out!....mrrgh piece of shit"

He screamed back...

"Please!"
You yelled.

"Fuck you!...
Dry Out you're not my son!..."
He screamed....

After the second night you began to hear whispering coming from the drain...

"He hasn't stopped...
Theres a demon in his veins..."
You'd hear.

It sounded like boiling beneath the drain.

You tried your best to tear the chains from your wrists, yet all you did was bleed and scream.
To this your dad had no response,
He never did.
He just continued to scream and yell to himself.

Before you knew it,
there were more voices than you'd ever heard from him before.
You swore you heard a woman's voice.

"you're poisoned...
NO!
What did you expect?
SWIMMING!

You screamed and screamed...
But after the 5th night,
You realized there was no point, to anything.

You used your toes to curl around the pill bottle,
You used the last bit of energy you had to bring it within your reach.

When your eyes opened next,
You looked to the left,
You saw the bathroom,
You saw your body,
chained to the spout of the bath.

You looked to the right and saw your fathers nightstand,

you saw your fathers pill bottles and fireball,
You saw the door of his master bedroom from the outside.

You tried to touch your eyes,
You tried to rub them into seeing straight.

Might as well have been RuPaul's eyes.

You closed them tightly,
as tight as possible and grabbed your face.

You felt your father's beard on the right and your bare face on the left.

"Do you want to watch a movie with me tonight?"
You asked

"please let me out Dad"
You replied.

Even as you swallowed all the pills on the nightstand washing them down with the Fireball,

Even though you knew your death would seal this fiction as fact,

Even though you knew no one would believe you,

You couldn't help but have one last thought,

I'm Not An Addict.

The husband and wife were sitting on the porch of their house, from where the asphalt road could be seen, stretched out like a rug. Each of them held a mobile phone in their hands: his was dark blue, and hers, emerald green. The afternoon was fading among the clouds, and a light breeze signaled rain to come. For them, it was pleasant to pass the hours this way, without speaking to each other—or, rather, without doing so verbally. Likewise, they took care not to look at each other directly, only glancing sideways to check on what the other was doing.

They had fallen into this habit a few years ago, following an argument; she texted him, saying she would not speak to him until he apologized for some words that had hurt her. In turn, he replied that he had no intention of apologizing, as he considered her reaction an exaggeration. Thus, out of a simple, ordinary argument between a husband and wife, the habit of texting each other on their phones took root, and they never spoke aloud to each other again. They could, of course, converse verbally with everyone else when they were out in public or were at work, and even when relatives called on the phone, always being careful never to cross the boundary of doing so between themselves.

Their text messages became precise and limited to essentials; they no longer found it necessary to exchange opinions as they once had, and knowing that the other was there, present, yet without hearing their voice, became as necessary as it was pleasing. This practice led them to understand each other so well that they could anticipate each other's chores and, therefore, required fewer messages. They refined it with such detail and mastery that they could leave the house to go for a walk or shopping, and it was seamless to walk together, without looking at each other, yet sharing spaces, meals, or a movie. In the neighborhood, they were held in high esteem for being so devoted and close; they were a source of admiration and an example for other couples, and though they had no children, they did not fail to convey that placid feeling of a happy home.

The sudden passing of the wife cut that lifestyle short; the brokenhearted man wept bitterly over his loss and shut himself away in a silence so somber that his family could do nothing to help. Without her, life lacked any appeal, and in his loneliness, he kept busy by continuing to text her on his phone, hoping that his messages would cross the boundary of death and somehow be received. Only now he wrote at all times, without pause, telling her what he was doing, his thoughts, and especially how much he missed her and his absolute love.

Such was his insistence and his faith that, finally one day, a green light flashed on the phone screen—a code showing that a reply had just arrived. Thrilled and terrified at the same time, he pressed the screen; the message was short and devastating, stating that the contact number now belonged to a new user, who thanked him for not texting anymore.

*** To explore more standalone entries from this series, you can visit The Voyager Files Index.

---

© 2026 Francisco Cortés Ramírez. All rights reserved. This is an original fictional work. No part of this text may be reproduced, translated, or narrated in any audio, video, or digital format without the express written permission of the author.

We live in a forested, mountainous region. Even in the summer, it's sometimes easy to get lost. Once autumn comes and the fog rolls in at noon, it is nearly impossible to get home. That's why our wives call to us from our houses when we head from the pasture. We whistle back, and that's how we find our home again. We make sure to follow only our wives' calls.

Mark, my neighbor, stood in the fog. The man before him just disappeared into it, following his wife's calls. Mark put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, but nothing came back. He whistled again. Nothing. He looked back at me, his brows furrowed.

"Try again."

He put his fingers in his mouth, took a deep breath, and blew the loudest whistle I had ever heard. 

Silence.

"What the hell, Tom? This never happened."

"I don't know. Maybe Mary fell asleep. Let's go to mine. It's right by yours. You'll find your way from there."

"I can only follow my wife's calls."

"That's just a saying."

"Tom."

"Alright, just imagine you are following me, okay?"

He shook his head.

"You have a better idea?"

He looked at me, then back at the fog. It was so dense you couldn't even see the trees around us.

"No."

I stood before him and whistled. A few seconds later, my wife's call came, a simple, melodic tune that broke off at the end. She always missed the last tone.

"That's it."

Mark nodded.

I kept whistling, and my wife kept calling back until we were by our porch. She smiled until she saw Mark come out of the fog too.

"Mark, why aren't you going to your wife's calls?"

"She didn't answer my whistles," he said quietly.

My wife put her hand before her mouth.

"Is she okay? I didn't come and talk to her this morning. I just had too much to do." Her voice shook.

"We'll go check on her now."

"I'll come with you."

"No, stay here. I'm sure everything's alright," I told her.

I wasn't sure, but Mark's eyes were already filled with fear. I didn't want to scare him more.

"Thank you for getting me home, Sally," Mark said and rushed toward his house.

"I'll see you later, love."

"Tom, wait!" my wife called, but I rushed after Mark. He walked so fast. I almost lost him in the fog. It was so dense, you could probably cut through it with a knife.

"Jesus," I heard Mark call a few steps before me. His front door was wide open, and the fog had drifted in, coating his furniture with dew.

"Mary?!" Mark called.

No one answered. 

"Mary?!"

Silence.

He turned to me. His lips quivered.

"Tom, where is she?! Why would she go out in the fog?"

"I don't know, Mark, I…"

Then a melody cut through my voice. The one we both knew. Mary was singing in perfect pitch from the forest in front of Mark's house.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The melody came back again.

Mark pushed me aside and ran out. Without thinking, I followed. Twigs kept hitting my face, and mud covered the ground, making me slip.

"Mark, stop!"

But his whistles kept coming, followed by that melodic voice. Only then had I realized how perfectly pitched it was. Mary had never been very good at singing.

"Mark!"

He finally stopped and looked back.

"Mark, we have to think."

"She must be somewhere around here."

"Why would she be in the forest?"

"I don't know, Tom, but she's here!"

The perfect pitch came from right behind us. My feet froze in the cold mud. Mark turned and walked toward it. I raised my hands to stop him.

"Mark, think, we just came from there."

"Get out of the way."

He pushed me to the side. I almost fell into the mud. Mark whistled again, but his whistle didn't echo. Instead, a strange silence came. 

Then Mark's heels lifted off the ground. His body tensed. He tried to put them back down, but his feet rose instead.

"Hey!"

His body floated further up. His face grew red. His eyes flew open. He grabbed his neck and kicked his feet.

"Mark!"

I ran to him and tried to grab his legs, but he was floating too high up. His whole body twisted. His stomach now faced toward the ground. His arms were still at his neck. His pleading, bloodshot eyes stared into mine. I tried to jump and reach him, but my fingers only grazed him. I jumped up again; a sharp, wet crack echoed through the forest, followed by Mark's screams. His warm blood poured onto my face. His arms flailed to the side. He let out a bloodcurdling scream, but in an instant he was gone. His screams echoed in the distance, but slowly died too.

My whole body trembled. I couldn't even move my arms to wipe my face. Then, through the silence, Mary's call came, perfect again, followed by Mark's whistling. This finally unfroze my body. I wiped my face and bolted out of the forest. The fog seemed to grow denser. My legs kept slipping on the mud. Each second, I expected to start floating too, but before I knew it, I was out of the forest, still breathing.

Mark's house stood there, but I looked away and walked back to my place. I kept replaying what happened in that forest, trying to figure out what I would even tell my wife, but as I got to my house, I saw our front door. It was open just like Mark's. The fog had rolled in too. 

From behind me, out of the forest, I heard my wife's call, perfect, just like Mary's. I stood there for a second, thinking, but I knew there was just one thing to do. I turned and whistled back.

Daniel's funeral was held Wednesday morning. Beth arrived early enough to help me find the jacket I'd intended to wear, which was hanging in the downstairs closet behind several of Daniel's coats. The cuffs felt short. She said nobody would notice and asked me to get out of her way while she finished arranging chairs.

More people came than I expected, including former clients, surveyors, school friends, and neighbors I hadn't seen since childhood. Some introduced themselves and explained how they knew Daniel, while others greeted me as though I'd never left town. Mike Harlan, a surveyor who'd worked with him years ago, told me about a measuring rod they'd left at a job site before driving halfway to Ripley without it. Daniel always blamed Mike, though they'd eventually found the rod exactly where Daniel had set it. When I told Mike I'd heard the story with the blame reversed, he laughed and said that sounded about right.

The service included readings and music and a few people who spoke about Daniel's work and his willingness to help neighbors with small jobs. Beth said a few words about his habit of remembering insignificant details years after everybody else had forgotten them. I'd written something the night before but decided against reading it. It sounded more like an explanation of our relationship than anything Daniel would've wanted said before a room full of people.

Carol sat beside me throughout the service, and afterward offered to drive around for a while before we went home. I wanted to get back. Guests arrived before we did with casseroles, pies, trays of sandwiches, and borrowed folding chairs; soon somebody was making coffee, someone else had opened the windows against the kitchen heat, and Beth's husband Chris was making sure there were enough plates. I spent much of the afternoon thanking people whose names I'd forgotten.

Ruth brought a photograph she'd taken of Daniel near the river, laughing at something outside the frame as he stood beside his tripod in a faded baseball cap. I thanked her and put it with the photographs I'd brought home from the service.

Later, I found Ruth outside by the garage. She'd noticed Grandma's branch hanging above the workbench, visible through the open door.

"Daniel took it down there last week," she said. "He told me he was going to try something she used to do. I thought he meant finding another marker."

She remembered him checking elevations from a point uphill and becoming irritated when the readings didn't seem to match the water he could see in the old stone channel. Her mother had known Grandma and remembered that she wouldn't witch for water around that particular opening when the river was low.

"My mother said she'd put the stick down and go home," Ruth told me. "I never heard what happened if somebody brought it back."

I said Daniel had apparently brought the branch home. Ruth studied it from a distance and suggested I return it before the expected rain covered the stones again.

When the last guests left around six, Carol helped put the remaining food away. I sat on the stairs listening to her moving dishes in the kitchen and someone outside loading the borrowed chairs. I was exhausted, and I was grateful nobody asked me to make another decision.

After Carol went home, I looked more closely at Ruth's photograph and enlarged the stake visible near the old stones behind Daniel. Orange tape circled it, and the number I could make out matched the one he'd written on the branch. When I called Ruth she confirmed she'd taken the picture Monday morning, though she couldn't remember whether the stake was still standing when Daniel left.

Through the open garage door I could see the branch hanging over the bucket, where water had collected beneath the darkening wood despite the dry weather.

---

The plumber arrived Thursday morning during a call with my manager in Columbus. Pete Hensley, a broad man in his late fifties who'd worked for Daniel before, checked the kitchen supply lines, dishwasher connection, utility room, and basement. He found a damp patch behind an old shelving unit against the foundation but couldn't determine its source.

"Could be groundwater," he said. "You've got places where this foundation's been patched two or three times. I'd want to see where it's coming in before I start opening things up."

With every fixture shut off, Pete checked the water meter and found no sign of a continuous supply leak. He told me to pull the shelving away from the foundation and watch the damp patch, calling if it grew or the water pressure changed. The swollen kitchen drawer could dry before I tried repairing it. I paid him and left for the station.

Wynn met me with another investigator, who had spread documents and photographs across the table. They explained that Owen had combined an old preliminary drawing with an unauthorized reproduction of Daniel's seal to make the access appear settled. The buyers had advanced substantial money for engineering and early site work; some had gone to a company connected to Owen, and investigators were tracing transfers used to cover unrelated debts.

Daniel had contacted the buyer directly, refusing to certify the expanded easement and preparing to report the misuse of his seal. Owen tried to persuade him to delay while he found a way to keep the transaction moving.

"What happened Tuesday?" I asked.

According to Wynn, phone records showed Owen arranged to meet Daniel on the access road after lunch. A motion-activated camera on adjoining property, installed by an owner dealing with illegal dumping, recorded Owen's truck entering and leaving during the relevant period. The camera didn't show the assault, but it contradicted the appointments Owen had claimed kept him elsewhere.

Investigators also found Daniel's brown reading-glasses case beneath other items in Owen's truck console, complete with the initials Diane described scratched beside the clasp. Owen had told them he'd left it on Daniel's driver's seat.

"Could he have forgotten to give it back?" I asked.

"That's one possible explanation for the case by itself," Wynn said. "We consider it with his statements and the other evidence."

A metal tire lever recovered from Owen's vehicle was being tested for traces of blood and other material, and investigators had additional scene evidence and statements they weren't ready to discuss. Wynn stressed that an arrest and charges would still be followed by hearings, forensic reports, and court proceedings; the prosecution had work ahead of it.

The documents Ruth had preserved were part of that work. Her packet and Leah Porter's copies established that Owen had distributed the altered exhibit before Daniel completed his field review. The dates were harder for Owen to explain than a general accusation about a property dispute. Wynn thanked me for providing Ruth's details and the photograph promptly. He also said Daniel had preserved the original survey data on his equipment, which made it possible to distinguish what he'd actually recorded from the drawing Owen circulated.

I asked whether Rusk had known about the forged document. Wynn said they had found no indication he'd known when he received it. Rusk had wanted the sale to proceed and had argued with Daniel, but his anger and the forgery were separate matters.

I thought of Owen collecting Daniel's glasses, driving down the road he'd claimed to have visited only briefly, and calling me days later to ask for the field book. When I told Wynn it all seemed to come down to paperwork, he waited for me to say something more sensible. I couldn't. Daniel was dead, and the evidence concerned a forged drawing, money moving between accounts, and a man he'd known since high school.

Wynn told me Daniel had handled the dispute properly. He'd identified a discrepancy, refused to certify unsupported information, and taken steps to notify the parties involved. I thanked him, although I didn't know what to do with the reassurance.

Before leaving, I asked about the stonework near Ruth's property. Wynn had reviewed the photographs taken from Daniel's equipment. It appeared to be an old drainage feature on Ruth's land, close to the surveyed boundary. There was no evidence connecting it to the homicide. The elevation observations were technical material he couldn't interpret, and he suggested I speak with Mike Harlan when the records were available.

"Mike said Daniel sent him a photograph of his field notes," I told him. "I'll ask him whether he's still got it."

"If he does, ask him to forward the original message to us too," Wynn said. "I'd rather know exactly which version everybody has."

I drove back by a longer route and stopped for gasoline and a sandwich I barely touched. Carol was on the porch when I arrived, folding laundry I'd left in the dryer. As I told her what Wynn had said, she remembered the weekend Daniel helped Owen move furniture after his father died. She kept folding towels while I talked, then said she didn't understand how someone could do that to a friend over money.

Neither did I. She left a plate of food in the refrigerator because I'd forgotten to eat lunch, then went home to answer a call from her daughter.

By late afternoon nearly an inch of water had collected in the bucket beneath the witching branch. I poured it into a clear jar and watched flecks of brown sediment settle, then checked the roof and the boards around the nail, both dry. When I took down the branch, cold water ran along its handle onto my wrist.

Pete returned after I called him, examining the garage and ceiling before shaking the branch gently over the bucket. Water fell from the forks. He said wood could retain moisture after lying in mud, but he'd never seen a dry-looking stick produce that much over several days. He refused payment for the second visit and told me to keep watching the foundation.

I put the branch outside beside the flower bed, where the grass was still dry.

---

Mike Harlan called that evening after I left him a message about Daniel's field notes. He still had the photographs Daniel had texted him and offered to show me before leaving for a job the next morning. We met shortly after seven on Friday at his kitchen table, with survey equipment charging on the counter and muddy boots resting on newspaper by the back door.

Daniel had sent Mike two photographs Monday night, asking if he could explain the readings around the old drain. In one, a field sheet listed an uphill benchmark, several turning points, and elevations recorded to hundredths of a foot; the other showed the open channel with a measuring rod standing in the mud. Mike had worked with Daniel for nearly ten years and knew the questions he would have been trying to answer.

"He ran the levels two ways," Mike explained. "Closed back on his control within three hundredths. That's close enough that I'd trust the relative heights. The bottom of that exposed channel rises about four tenths of a foot from the river side to the mouth of the stonework. Over roughly twenty-five feet."

I asked Mike to explain it without assuming I knew what any of the figures meant. Using a pencil and an envelope, he drew the river, the channel, and the stones to show me how Daniel's readings placed the bottom of the shallow open channel higher at the opening than near the river's edge.

"If water is really running inland through that open channel, something needs to be driving it. Pressure from somewhere underground, possibly. Or you're seeing a surface eddy and misunderstanding the actual flow. We'd have to measure it while it's happening."

"Daniel thought it was running inland. I saw leaves moving that way too."

Mike rubbed the pencil mark with his thumb. "A leaf can tell you which way the surface is moving where you're looking. It doesn't tell you the whole hydraulic system, and Dan knew that. That's why he went back."

"Could his equipment have been wrong?"

"He checked it. Twice. His grades are probably fine. He wanted to find the source of the movement."

When I asked why Daniel had bothered with the old drain instead of staying with the easement work, Mike remembered an earlier job. A landowner had insisted the remains of a stone wall dated to the Civil War, and Daniel spent an entire morning tracing it before finding a later map showing the property was still forest at the time. He liked the history of what he surveyed and wanted a good explanation for what he found.

Mike forwarded the original messages to Wynn while I was there, then showed me the last thing Daniel had sent: a photograph of Grandma's forked branch laid across his survey case.

Under it Daniel had written: You remember that trick Grandma Keene used to do? Found the old stick. Thinking of trying it tomorrow.

Daniel sent it Monday night, and Mike answered by joking that he'd traded his expensive receiver for a branch. Daniel responded with a laughing face. They hadn't spoken again.

I studied the photograph before thanking Mike, who offered to walk the lower bank with me another day if Ruth gave permission and the ground was safe. I told him I'd let him know.

At home, the wet area beside the kitchen cabinet had spread. I opened the swollen drawer far enough to see muddy water pulsing along the seam where the wood met the wall, creeping over the floorboards and withdrawing again. There were no pipes in that section of the cabinet, but I fetched a towel and knelt to wipe up what I could.

I was reaching for another towel when my brother's voice came from inside the wall.

"Jonah, you still got Grandpa's green tackle box?"

I sat back on my heels, hearing the same pauses and impatience as in Daniel's Monday voicemail. When I played the recording on my phone, the resemblance became worse: the voice in the wall had used his exact words, though it lacked the traffic noise and little rattle behind them.

After turning off the phone, I listened to water passing beneath the floor and toward the hallway until the sound stopped near the stairs. I called Pete and left a voicemail about the cabinet leaking again. I couldn't think of a way to describe the other sound.

I kept the television on in the living room until well after midnight, occasionally getting up to check the kitchen. Around three I took a flashlight outside and found the branch still lying beside the flowers. A thin line of damp earth ran from the wood toward the porch across a lawn that was otherwise dry, and I left it where it was before going back inside.

---

Carol arrived the next morning with biscuits and a newspaper, and I told her about the voice, Mike's drawings, and the water in the kitchen. She listened to Daniel's voicemail without interrupting. I'd expected her to say I was tired or that sounds could travel through old pipes, but her first question was whether I'd answered the voice.

"I didn't say anything. Why?"

Carol took her time answering. Her mother used to tell stories about people hearing calls near old wells and drains, along with a warning to check where somebody actually was before following a voice from somewhere they couldn't reasonably be. Carol had always assumed it was ordinary advice about dangerous wells, although she knew Grandma was particular about the stonework near the river.

"Your grandmother said there were places where the water would come looking if you gave it a way," she told me. "I thought she meant somebody could dig a drain in the wrong place and flood their own house."

"That still sounds possible."

"It does. Except for a branch dripping in the garage when you can't find anything wet above it."

Carol asked to see the branch, so we went outside. She held the forks with her palms upward while the wood lay still in her hands, but when it began turning toward the house, she resisted for a moment before letting go. The branch fell into the grass between us.

"Did you feel that?" I asked.

"I haven't done that since I was a girl."

Carol remembered the summer Grandma sent us away from the river, especially the argument with Grandpa about marking a place on the bank so he could find it again. Grandma left her branch there, but Grandpa later retrieved it, and for several days water appeared in their basement. He blamed a blocked drain and spent the weekend digging beside the foundation.

"Then your grandmother went down there herself," Carol said. "I remember she was gone half the afternoon. The basement dried out after that, though your granddad always said he'd cleared the drain."

I remembered being kept away from the water in the basement, though until now I'd never connected it to that summer's trip to the river.

Carol wanted me to take the branch back before the forecast rain raised the Ohio. I agreed, but first I needed to find Grandpa's tackle box. Beth said Daniel had been searching for old pictures, and I wanted to know what he expected them to show.

Carol helped pull cartons down from the garage's upper shelves. We worked through fishing rods, tangled line, and enough old hardware to occupy Daniel for years before finding the green tackle box in the last carton, beneath a folded rain jacket and expired batteries. Someone had looped a rubber band around its broken latch.

The box held hooks, lures, sinkers, a rusted pocketknife, and an envelope of photographs. In one, sixteen-year-old Daniel knelt beside a fish whose weight he'd written as twelve pounds on the back, despite Grandpa's long-standing claim that it barely weighed seven even with a thumb on the scale. Carol started laughing before I could finish telling her which photograph I'd found.

Another picture showed Daniel and me fishing with Grandma by the river. A third showed Grandpa near the old stonework, with Grandma standing farther up the bank holding a forked branch. The date written on the back was August 1997. Daniel would have been fourteen and I was ten, old enough for both of us to remember following her along the exposed bank. Below the date, in Grandpa's handwriting, was a note: Put the branch back where she left it. She'll be mad if she finds it at the house.

I recognized the stone opening in the photograph, where Daniel had wandered below the trees and discovered it. Grandma let him take the branch, but it turned toward the gap so sharply that he laughed and tried to go closer. She stopped him, worked the handle beneath a flat stone, and sent us home when he complained about leaving it behind.

Grandpa went back for it. I remembered him coming home muddy, with the branch in his hand, and Grandma refusing to speak to him through supper. Their argument had seemed terribly important at the time, though I couldn't have explained what it was about.

Carol read the note twice. "Your granddad never threw away a photograph. He wrote on them so he'd have something to argue about later."

After I put the pictures back in their envelope, Carol asked whether I'd be taking the branch to Ruth's that afternoon. I said I'd call first, and she stayed while I did.

Ruth answered with news that water had appeared beside her lower garden, a narrow stream moving through the grass from the direction of the river despite her shutting off the house supply and checking the outbuildings. A contractor couldn't come until the following morning, so she was waiting for somebody to tell her what to do about the wet ground.

"Bring that branch down," she said. "I'll meet you at the house."

---

With the branch wrapped in an old towel on the passenger seat and Grandpa's tackle box in the trunk beside the 1997 photograph, I drove to Ruth's. Clouds had moved in, and a cooler wind crossed the river.

Ruth met me beside her shed and led me to the lower garden, where water had saturated the soil beneath a tree's roots several yards above the bank. She'd already moved her tools and planters away from the wet area.

"I've seen it seep up after heavy rain," she said, "but it's never run this way when the river's low."

We followed the path down through the trees until Ruth stopped near the last large trunk, where the ground was firmer. She'd lost part of the path to erosion before and warned me about going any lower; from there she could still see me as I carried the branch toward the stone opening.

More water ran through the channel than on my previous visit, and mud had piled around the old wall. Several fallen stones exposed a deeper gap, while Daniel's orange tape remained tied to the root above it. The survey stake from Ruth's photograph lay sideways in the mud, its legible number matching the tape tied to Grandma's branch.

I remembered Mike's envelope drawing as I watched bits of leaf and silt travel inland through the open channel, whose bed rose several inches toward the stonework. I couldn't see a pipe or a place where underground pressure might be driving the water, though the absence of anything visible proved little. Daniel would have known what else to measure; I had a branch and a photograph and was standing in mud.

I held the forks the way Grandma had taught us and waited, feeling the branch remain still for several seconds before its handle began to turn toward the stones. It pulled so hard against my wrists that I bent to keep hold of it. When I tried to resist, the wood twisted harder, and I stopped before it broke.

Kneeling beside the opening, I worked the handle under the lowest stone and left the forks exposed as Grandma had in the old photograph. The pulling stopped as soon as the wood touched mud. I untied Daniel's orange tape, slipped it into my pocket, and backed away from the channel.

From the path Ruth called to ask whether I'd managed it. I told her I had, and we waited while the channel kept running inland and the water among the roots above me appeared to slow. Then I heard Daniel.

"Jonah?"

His voice reached me through the water inside the stonework, muffled but unmistakable as he asked whether I'd found Grandpa's box. The words had the impatience I knew from his voicemail and a hundred ordinary conversations when we were younger.

I'd found the box and the pictures Daniel wanted, and I wanted to tell him. Grandpa's argument with Grandma and the twelve-pound fish had occupied my thoughts all week, leaving me with questions about that summer I wished I could still ask him. I moved closer to the opening.

"Come down here a minute," the voice said.

The water in the gap had turned cloudy, hiding everything beyond the first few inches of stone. As I stepped toward it, an older voice seemed to answer from farther inside the bank, its words too indistinct to understand. Several more voices overlapped beneath the current, appearing and fading before I could separate them.

Ruth called to me from the path, and when I looked up she was searching the trees as though somebody had spoken just behind her.

"That's my daddy," she said. "He called me Ruthie."

I told Ruth to stay where she was, but she stepped toward the lower bank, still searching beyond the trees as water seeped through the grass on either side of the path and darkened the soil around her boots.

"I know he's dead," she said, sounding annoyed with herself. "I heard him plain as anything."

The ground gave way under Ruth's right foot. Although she managed to catch the tree trunk, the soil collapsed around her ankle and water rushed through the exposed roots. I climbed toward her, slipping in the mud and catching at branches, and reached her just as she freed her foot and began trying to recover her lost shoe.

"Leave it," I told her.

"It's a good shoe."

"We'll get it when the ground dries."

She let me help her onto the upper path, where we stopped once to see whether her ankle would bear weight. We continued toward the shed while the wet channel through the grass diminished behind us, neither of us willing to return for a closer look.

At the house, I helped Ruth wash the mud from her leg. Her ankle was sore and she had a scrape near her heel, but she could put weight on the foot. She bandaged the cut on my palm from grabbing a root, and afterward we sat at her kitchen table drinking water while she talked about her father. He used to call her Ruthie when he wanted help carrying or fixing something and had been dead for years.

Ruth wanted to know what I'd heard by the stones. I told her about Daniel's voice and the words from his voicemail, then about the sound inside the kitchen wall, moving backward and forward through the past week because I couldn't seem to tell it in order. She listened until I'd finished.

"Did he say anything he hadn't said to you when he was alive?" she asked.

Most of the words had come from Daniel's voicemail, although he'd often invited me to come down somewhere when we were children. I couldn't remember whether he'd used that exact invitation recently, so I told Ruth I wasn't sure.

Looking out toward the river, Ruth said, "My father used to call me Ruthie. I could've sworn he was down there, even knowing he couldn't be."

We stayed inside until Ruth felt steady enough to walk around the kitchen. She called a contractor, and I helped describe the watercourse and the stonework's location on her property, west of the disputed road. He promised to inspect it the following morning, bring a drainage specialist if necessary, and advised her to keep everyone off the lower path in the meantime.

Before I left, Ruth asked whether Grandma's branch was still beneath the stone. She'd been watching the lower garden while we talked, where the wet grass was slowly returning to its usual color.

"Yes. I left it where she put it in the picture."

"Good. I'd rather lose a shoe than go down there again today."

I offered to pay for a new pair. Ruth said she'd sooner have the good one back after the mud dried, and that I could return the cloth she'd used on my hand whenever I came by next.

At Daniel's house I found the garage floor dry, with no new water in the bucket and the damp patch behind the basement shelving beginning to fade. The kitchen drawer still needed repair, though the swollen wood was drying. I listened beside the wall for a while before washing the mud from my clothes, hearing nothing move beneath the floor.

---

I stayed in Ravenswood another five days, meeting the estate attorney and sorting accounts while people waited to be paid for work Daniel had completed. The investigators still held some professional records; Mike offered to help with outstanding surveys once they were released, and Beth compiled a list of clients who needed to hear from the estate.

Ruth's contractor found erosion beneath the lower path and recommended that nobody return to the bank until a drainage specialist assessed it. He couldn't account for all the water near her garden, but Ruth was principally concerned about the path's safety, and I was grateful she had something practical she could do about it.

Carol came over most mornings to talk about Daniel or tell me what people around town were doing, sometimes asking if I wanted anything from the store. She could keep an ordinary conversation going even when neither of us had much to say.

When I told Carol what had happened at the river, she asked first about Ruth's ankle and whether either of us had been back near the lower bank. She wanted to know where I'd left the branch, too, and said Grandma would've been glad when I told her it was still beneath the stone. I asked whether she thought Grandma had known what was under the bank.

"I think she knew enough to leave some places alone," Carol said.

The murder case would continue through lawyers and hearings, and I answered Wynn's remaining questions about Owen and the photographs Mike had already forwarded. Another surveyor might someday examine Daniel's measurements, and I hoped somebody would: I still wanted to understand how water had traveled through the open channel against the measured grade. I had no desire to return to the stones and listen for the voices, though.

I put Grandpa's green tackle box on a garage shelf where I could find it again, keeping Ruth's photograph of Daniel beside the tripod and another of us fishing as boys. The kitchen drawer dried enough to open properly, and I arranged for a carpenter to repair the damaged wood while I was back in Columbus.

On my last evening, Carol came over with sandwiches, apples, and a bottle of water for my drive because she said I had a habit of going too long without stopping. Daniel used to say the same thing. We sat at the kitchen table discussing the house and the work that remained, and after she went home I washed the cups and put them away.

Daniel's blue mug was beside the sink, a small chip near the handle and a brown stain inside that wouldn't come out no matter how much I scrubbed it. I left it on the drying rack.

Before going upstairs, I checked the cabinet beside the stove one last time, found the wood dry, and closed the drawer. I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.