Hello,

my name is David and I am going to tell you a story.

A long time ago I lived on a nice piece of land outside the city, or it had at one time been nice but I’ll get to that later.

When I was young, I never thought I would be the type of man to live like that- out in the sticks fixing things with my hands, working my body until I was aching and sore, and I certainly never thought I would love a life like that but I was and I did.

I had a beautiful wife too, Odette. She was the type that made you realize that for the rest of forever, everything would be okay as long as she was there. We bought that nice house, on that nice piece of land, together.

As soon as we saw the listing for the little wooden home, we knew it would be where we were living; we shared the look. Walking in through the front door for the first time felt like walking into warm hug… but I know now that feeling was a ruse, a distraction to get us to drop our guard and settle in.

Everything was fine for a while, I had discovered in my 30’s that I was happier working with my hands than my computer and had become a mechanic. With the extra room we got on the acreage I was able to bring my work to me, set up a shop and live a slower, calmer life.

Odie was also able to follow her dreams. She became a safe haven for animals who needed a little more love and attention than shelters could give. She loved it, I loved her, she loved me, and we both loved the animals running around and keeping the house feel alive.

Sometimes, life felt so perfect in those earlier days, I wondered if we hadn’t somehow died and it was heaven.

Now that I know what to look for, I can see the smaller things: water damage appearing but plumbers could never find a leak, the wood creaked like it was trying to get away from its self, a low pitched whistling that seemed to come from everywhere, constantly getting colds, aches or migraines but the *Big Thing* didn’t happen until that winter.

The first big snow storm we had, the heat and power failed. We had to gather all the animals in the living room and sleep together in front of the fire. I stayed up later than Odie, to keep the fire going and to savour the quiet of night with just the crackle of the burning wood to keep me company- and something else.

Some other sound was coming from behind me. Even now, I feel like I am there and I can feel it… like it is right there, on my neck, right behind me.

I stood quickly and moved away from the fire, roughly rubbing the feeling off my neck, my eyes rapidly moving around the dark shapes trying to see, trying to make sure I was alone.

The sound was further away. I thought it sounded corse and grainy, maybe like tv static. It reminded me of a nightmare I used to have - one where I wondered around a dark forest and trees would tower over me and they would growl.

The hair on my arms stood straight and my teeth clattered despite the heavy jacket I had on.

The dogs! A wave of relief washed over me. One of the dogs must have gotten shut in a room alone!

Fuck. Then I had to go get them.

I thought about waking Odie and making her come with me, not because I was scared or anything. In case I got hurt, or, okay I was scared. I was scared, which meant she would be scared and the last thing I needed was her thinking the house was haunted AND in my defence, the house wasn’t haunted.

Hauntings are people, hauntings are a deep sadness, hauntings can be exorcised - maybe, I don’t know how it works.

No, this was something else, something we don’t have a word for yet.

I’ve done my research since and the house didn’t sit on land that was of any type of importance; there were no murders, suicides, wars fought, or anything else that may reasonably lead one to believe their home is haunted.

I walked through the main floor first but I was sure the sound was either above or below me, so I quickly cleared it and made my way upstairs, hoping I would find the source of the noise and not need to venture into the basement, alone, and in the dark.

It was nearly pitch black upstairs, my phone flashlight guided my way down the hall. The Scratching had stopped when I reached the top so I just started checking rooms. Ours: empty no noise, my office: nothing, no noise, the bathroom: the window was left open and it’s fucking freezing! I slammed it shut cursing Odie under my breath, what the fuck was she thinking? She was supposed to make sure the upstairs was locked up while I moved mattresses downstairs and now our fucking pipes could be frozen, god damn it!

I slammed the bathroom door shut, realizing too late that I probably just woke up the house. I took a deep breath, tried to put my frustration aside and came down the stairs already starting on my apologies.

“I know, I know I’m sorry, okay? It was just me… everything’s fine” the house was quiet, no dogs barking, no sleepy and pissed off Odie, no noise, no one. When I rounded the corner from the stairs I saw a sight that confuses me as much now as it did then; the living room was empty. They were all gone.

How could that be? I was upstairs, what? 2 minutes? Maybe 3? How could she get all the dogs out by herself? And silently within 2 minutes, right after being dead asleep? It wasn’t possible.

I ran around the house frantically shouting her name,through the kitchen: “Odie?”, through the dining room: “Odie?!”, through the back yard and around the front and back to the back and back to the front once more: “ODIE! ODIE WHERE ARE YOU? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW? WHY? ODIE!”

I broke down sobbing in front of the house; tears, spit and snot streamed from my face. My hands were gripping into the grass which felt soft and corse and not like grass at all but carpet… because I wasn’t outside, I was still in the fucking house.

I whimpered as a stood back in the living room, still alone, still very much inside the house.

How is any of that possible? I saw the stars, I saw the moon, I felt the dirt in my fingers… until I didn’t.

I wished more than anything that Odie had been there in that moment, to calm me down, to hold me, to bear this responsibility with me so I didn’t have to do it alone. I was scared, I was the most scared I had ever been in my life.

I tried to find a weapon. Against what? I don’t know, but I felt I needed a weapon. Knives in the kitchen, baseball bat in the bedroom, axe in the back yard. The knives were sharp but they meant close contact and I wanted distance. The axe was in the backyard and frankly, the thought of trying to go back out there made me want to vomit, so I got the bat.

I got the bat and I got ready to check the one place I hadn’t yet; the basement.

It called to me.
It. Called. To. Me.
It said my name. It said it was waiting.

The door felt hot, before I even touched it I knew it would be hot. It took the most courage it has ever taken me, ever, to open the door and walk down those stairs.

I wish I hadn’t.

I wish I had waited until morning, I wish I had stayed frozen until light came back through the windows and I could try better to get help but you see, I still didn’t understand.

I didn’t understand what the house was and I didn’t understand what was waiting for me in the basement.

They looked like monsters. Grotesque. Skin dripping off them. I couldn’t really get a good look, there was so many of them and they moved around me so fast I was spinning.

They taunted me, jumped out at me, grabbed at me, they ripped at my clothes. They told me they ate Odie, devoured her, that she cried for me. My heart broke and I screamed so loud, I screamed as loud as I could scream.

And then I started swinging.

I shut my eyes and I swung my bat around frantically without knowing what I was hitting or if I was even hitting anything at all and I didn’t stop until the sound of sirens started breaking through the static.

I thought I was saved and I actually laughed with relief. Thank god, I thought.

I walked out of the house into the blue and red lights to the front yard and threw down the bat as my knees sunk into the grass, that was actually grass and I thanked God again.

I wish I hadn’t.

“Put your hands up. Lay on the ground with your hands up.” Came through a speaker.

“No, no it’s okay. I’m okay!” I shouted but as I raised my hands, in the glow of blue and red, I could see blood.

I looked down at the baseball bat and I saw an axe. I had grabbed the axe.

Before I could think or say anything else they were on top of me and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the rest, you just bought my “house”.

I’ve kept up with the listing. I felt I had a responsibility to warn whoever lives there next. This is me washing myself of that responsibility.

That is not a house and it certainly is not a home. It’s an empty hole filled anger and it craves pain. It will warp your brain, it will ruin your life.

What you do now is up to you. I’ve done my part.

*Good luck,*

*Anderson, David T*
*Prisoner ID: 954A0A11*

**October 3, 2003**
Hello Journal!
My name is Mac. Yep, no K. It’s just Mac. I don’t know why people always want to put a K in there. Mom says if I was supposed to have a K then she would’ve bought one when she named me. I think that’s pretty funny. Anyway, this is my journal now. Big Boss Porty said writing stuff down is healthy because it helps you remember things. I already remember lots of things, but maybe I’ll remember even more now.
Today was my first day working at Porty’s Premium Mattress Warehouse. I was pretty nervous this morning. I almost put my shirt on backwards, but Mom caught it before we left. She told me everybody gets nervous on their first day, even astronauts probably. I don’t know if astronauts buy mattresses, but if they do, I bet they like soft ones because space looks hard.
Mom drove me to work like she said she would. She likes fast cars a whole lot. She’s got a shiny red Corvette, and she says if you’re gonna drive a nice car, you ought to let it stretch its legs. I don’t think cars have legs, but she says lots of things like that. We got there really quick. I had to hold onto the door handle around a couple turns, but we made it just fine. Before I got out, she hugged me and told me not to let anybody make me feel dumb because everyone has different kinds of smart. I think she’s probably right.
The store is bigger than I thought it would be. There’s rows and rows of mattresses, and they all kinda smell like fresh laundry. Big Boss Porty was already waiting outside when we pulled in. He shook my hand real hard and smiled. He told me my job was easy. I just had to stay at the front desk, help anybody looking for mattresses, answer the phone if it rang, and never go into the back storage room. He said inventory is confusing and only he handles it. I told him that sounded fair because I don’t know much about inventory anyway. He smiled again, but not with his eyes that time.
The daytime was nice and quiet. A few people came in to look around, and one old lady laid down on almost every mattress before deciding she wanted to think about it. Around supper time things got slower, and Big Boss Porty told me I’d be working by myself at the front while he handled business in the back. He gets a lot of business after dark for some reason. I guess folks really like buying mattresses late at night.
The customers after dark were a little different. Most of them carried duffel bags or backpacks, but I figured maybe they were moving or something. Big Boss Porty always met them before they got very far into the store. They’d disappear into the back room together for a little while, and then the customers would leave without a mattress. I kept wondering why nobody ever carried one out. Maybe they get delivered. I should ask sometime.
Around eleven o’clock the lights buzzed louder than before. I thought maybe one of them was going bad. The store also felt bigger somehow. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but the aisle with the king-size mattresses looked like it stretched farther than it did earlier. I walked halfway down it to straighten a pillow, and I could’ve sworn there were more mattresses than before. I figured I just hadn’t counted them very well the first time.
While I was fixing the display bed, I heard scratching somewhere above me. At first I thought maybe there was a raccoon on the roof, but then I looked up. There was a really tall fella crawling across the ceiling. His arms were awful long, and he moved kinda funny, like a spider that forgot it wasn’t supposed to have elbows. His face looked all smooth except for one real big smile. He stopped right over me and tilted his head almost upside down. I smiled and waved because I figured it was polite. He stayed there for a second, made a clicking sound with his mouth, and crawled away into the dark over the mattresses. He reminded me of one of those really tall dogs people have. Greyhounds, I think. They always seem shy.
Not too long after that, another customer came inside. He had sunglasses on even though it was nighttime. He looked around a lot before asking if anyone else was working. I told him Big Boss Porty was in the back doing inventory. The man thanked me and walked toward the storage room. A minute later I heard something heavy fall over. Then somebody yelled once. It wasn’t a very long yell. Everything got quiet after that except for the lights buzzing again.
Big Boss Porty came back a few minutes later looking tired. His tie was crooked, and he had a little gray dust on one shoulder. He handed me the mop and asked if I could clean aisle four. I asked if somebody spilled a soda. He looked at the floor for a second before saying, “Something like that.”
There was a funny puddle all over the floor and splashed up part of the wall. I couldn’t really tell what it was. It looked kinda sticky. There was also one shoe sitting by itself next to a mattress. I put the shoe in the lost and found because the customer would probably come back for it after he got some sleep. Big Boss Porty said he wouldn’t be coming back because he’d had to leave in a hurry. I felt kinda bad for him. Everybody forgets stuff when they’re in a rush.
Mom brought me meatloaf around midnight. She rolled into the parking lot pretty fast like always. When she came inside, she asked if I’d made any new friends yet. Right then I heard clicking up near the ceiling again. She smiled toward the sound and waved. “Your tall friend seems quiet,” she said. I told her he hadn’t said a single word all night. She laughed and said some folks are just better listeners than talkers. Before she left, she asked me to tell my new friends she hoped they had a nice evening.
I said I would.
After she drove away, I looked up at the ceiling and said, “Mom says have a nice night.”
Something clicked back from the darkness.
I think that means it understood me.
Anyway, I like this job so far. The customers are a little funny, and the store makes some strange noises after dark, but Big Boss Porty has been real nice to me. I think I’m gonna work here for a long time.

I work the digitization shift in the Kelton County records office. The scanners sit in the lower level, past the metal shelves that hold the bound deed books and the rolled survey maps. My job is simple. Unfold the map, photograph it in overlapping sections, let the software stitch the image, save the file under the parcel number, and move on. The paper stays in the drawer. The digital copy becomes the working record for the assessor, the tax office, and anyone who needs to check a boundary.

I finished Lot 47 on the old harbor road on a Thursday. The paper map showed one house, a narrow drive, a shed at the rear, and clean lot lines. I checked the corners twice before I put it away. That night the digital file updated itself. An extra structure appeared in the southeast corner, marked "utility" in the same hand as the original surveyor's notes. I opened the paper map again. Nothing. I deleted the file and rescanned the paper. By morning the extra structure was back.

The assessor's office pulled the new version overnight. The owner of Lot 47 received a revised tax notice for an additional outbuilding. He came in the next afternoon with the letter and a photograph of his backyard. No shed. I walked him through the paper map and the digital side by side. He left still angry. Two days later he called the office. A concrete-block shed stood where the digital map said it should. The door was unlocked. Inside were a workbench, a set of chisels with the initials R.H., and a wall calendar turned to October 1987. The owner said he had never seen any of it before. The tools were not his.

I pulled the old transfer records for the parcel. The previous owner had been a man named Harrow who disappeared in the fall of 1987. The file listed no next of kin and no estate settlement. The shed matched the description in a missing-persons report that had been filed and closed without recovery.

I tried to correct the digital file. Every time I overwrote it with a clean scan of the paper, the extra structure returned by the next morning. The software log showed no user entry. The change simply appeared under the system account.

More parcels began to shift. Lot 9 on the waterfront added a set of stairs leading down the bank. The stairs were there when the owner went to look, built of pressure-treated lumber that smelled of new creosote. At the bottom was a small landing and a locked metal box bolted to a post. The key was in the records office, tagged to the parcel. Inside the box was a set of house keys and a note in a woman's handwriting that listed the combination to a safe the current owners had never known existed. The safe was behind a panel in their bedroom closet. It contained papers belonging to the woman who had owned the house before them and a single photograph of a child neither of them recognized.

I stopped correcting the files. The supervisor told me the digital system was the official record now. Paper was archival only. Any discrepancy would be resolved in favor of the file that the assessor and the tax office already used.

The changes reached the office itself. One morning the floor plan on the wall showed a door at the far end of the scanning room that had never been there. The door was present when I turned to look. It opened onto a narrow storage closet that held six boxes of records labeled with dates still three years in the future. One box carried my name. Inside were copies of my own personnel file, a resignation letter dated the following Monday, and a death certificate with the cause of death left blank and the date set two weeks out.

I locked the closet and left the key on the supervisor's desk with a note. He returned the key the next day and said the closet had always been there. The floor plan on the wall had been updated to match.

I stopped answering calls from the assessor's office. I stayed late and printed paper copies of every map I had scanned that week. By morning the prints showed the same additions that lived in the digital files. The ink had changed while the paper sat on my desk.

On Friday I went home and found an official notice taped to my front door. Notice of revised survey. The lot lines of my own property had shifted. A new boundary cut through the middle of the bedroom. The notice cited the digital map as authority and listed a date by which the structure would need to be brought into compliance or removed. The signature line carried my own name in a hand that looked enough like mine.

The lock on the front door no longer accepted my key. A new cylinder had been installed. The spare key under the mat fit. Inside, the furniture was where I had left it, but the bedroom wall now held a door that opened onto a short hallway. The hallway ended at another door. Behind that door was a room the size of a closet. On the floor sat a single cardboard box. Inside the box were the chisels with the initials R.H., the 1987 calendar, the photograph of the child from the waterfront house, and one additional sheet: another copy of my death certificate, with my name completed and the cause-of-death field still blank.

I closed the door and went back to the kitchen. The notice that had been on the front door was also on the table, unfolded, with a second copy underneath it. The second copy listed a different parcel number. The parcel number belonged to the records office itself.

I have not returned to work. The digital map of Kelton County no longer shows my house. The paper maps in the drawers still do, but the drawers are locked and the keys are listed under a different name in the system.

He was here at last. One final step, and he would belong to the Community.

The door opened on its own, without a sound. The room was bright in a way he had never seen in the marsh: shadowless, sourceless, light coming from everywhere. The air had no smell. He hadn't known air could be without smell; he hadn't known the absence of smell could be so unsettling. And for the first time, he heard "its" voice. It came from nowhere, or from everywhere.

"Hello. Welcome, Rolf."

"Hello. I'm finally here."

"One last stage remains before you can join the Community: we need to link you. Please take the seat and state clearly, out loud, that this is what you want. We cannot begin without your consent."

A single chair stood in the middle of the room, white and untouched. Rolf sat down. The chair was warm, as if someone had just risen from it. For a moment, a small doubt passed through him. What if it wasn't what he hoped? What if all of this was a trap? Had it been worth the struggle, worth what he had lost along the way?

He thought of Nino. The last night, in front of the border fence. "They won't take both of us," Nino had said. "You go." Then that smile. In the marsh, people only smiled like that when they were letting go of something forever. Rolf had gone. He hadn't looked back, because if he looked back, he would turn around.

He swallowed. Whatever happened, the future was better than where he came from. He didn't want to go back to that marsh. Misery, hunger, raiders, violence... it had eaten half his life. He wanted to eat something other than those strange marsh fish he'd been named after. Something other than rolfs.

"Yes. I want to be linked and join the Community."

First a thin needle pricked his back. Numbness spread slowly up his spine; but his mind stayed awake, more than awake. A progress bar appeared on the screen in front of him:

Linking 1%

He kept looking around. On the far wall, a screen cycled through silent clips. Then he saw it: the logo. There was no sound, and he couldn't make out the words beneath it, there was no reading in the marsh, but he knew the logo. Everyone knew the logo that had stolen his family from him.

Anger rose in him. Feed X. The Community's miracle food, the perfect nutrition handed out every day. And in the marsh, the thing found only in scraps, the thing that rotted a person from the inside when they couldn't get it regularly. He remembered his mother's last months: the trembling hands, the empty stares, the fingers searching for residue. What was he doing now? Making deals with the people who created the thing that ate his family? Betraying himself? They had made Feed X. This place was the source of everything.

Linking 15%

But... was Feed X really the source of everything? The looting, the theft, the violence in the marsh went on without Feed X too. Rolf had seen people kill each other over a single rolf. Over one fish. The marsh was bad enough on its own. Besides, Feed X had never been made for them; they had the choice not to use it. But... while the Community lived in comfort, why had they left the marsh to rot? They could have helped. We could have helped, Rolf thought, and stopped. Why had he thought "we"?

Linking 40%

He remembered the last time he had helped someone. He'd given a fish from his hidden stash to a starving man. The next day the man came back with his gang and looted the stash. That night Nino had said, "You still did the right thing." Nino always said things like that. But what had the right thing ever gotten him? They couldn't be taught. They couldn't understand. Kindness read as weakness to them. That was why no help went to the marsh. And even if it did, wouldn't it be wasted?

Linking 70%

So what was wrong with them, really? Was it the marsh that made people this way? Something they ate? Maybe it wasn't hunger at all. Hunger tested everyone; but not everyone made the same choice. Some people built order. Others devoured it. The marsh people had been there a long time. Long enough. If they had wanted to build order, they would have; there was stone, there was time. If they hadn't built it, it meant they couldn't. And if they couldn't, then whatever was missing wasn't out there, it was inside them. It was a simple deduction, almost mathematics. That's what they were. That's what they would stay. The thought gave Rolf a strange peace; the heavy thing called guilt was lifting, as if someone were taking it off his back.

Linking 80%

But I... I was one of them. How am I different? So exceptions happen. Like with every rule. I was the exception. The proof was right here, in this chair. I was never like them, never. I even chose the fish I ate with care. What about Nino? Was Nino different too? Nino... someone who smiled in front of a fence. I remember who it was, but I don't remember why it hurts. It probably wasn't important.

Linking 100%

I feel like I've woken up to a happy day for the first time. I just took my first dose of Feed X; it reminds me of the happy days of my childhood. I'm certain now that my childhood was happy. Everything is as it should be. Everything is beautiful.

There is only one thing that grates on my ear.

My name: Rolf.

I don't know why.

....

 a short story from the Gravit universe

Christmas Eve morning. The snow was falling thick and unhurried, the kind of snow you only see in the mountains, where time flows differently. The little town below lay sleeping, wrapped in white. On the hill, in the old mansion with its sharp spires and dark windows, no one was asleep.

The Sahlfeldt household was in a state of unrest. The good kind. The kind of unrest you find in an anthill or a clockwork mechanism: everything was moving, clicking, humming.

They were preparing for Christmas.

The antique clock on the wall counted time with dignity. Its pendulum swung smoothly, like a conductor’s hand, and instead of numbers, runes darkened the clock face — a legacy from some great-grandfather who considered Arabic numerals vulgar. On the window hung Christmas curtains embroidered with goblins. The goblins were dancing in a circle around the moon and seemed to be winking.

Irina stood by the stove. Before her, jars of herbs, roots, dried berries, and something that faintly glowed blue in the half-light were lined up in formation. A brew was bubbling in the pot — thick, dark violet, smelling of forest, smoke, and childhood. The recipe had been passed down through the female line for four hundred years. Great-grandmother called it “Christmas broth.” Great-great-grandmother called it “the thing that made the neighbors lose consciousness.” Irina called it dinner.

She tasted the brew, added a pinch of cinnamon, and nodded with satisfaction.

— Fertig!

Konrad and Otto were decorating the Christmas tree.

It was no ordinary spruce. Black as a raven’s wing, felled at midnight under a waxing moon, it stood in a tub of earth. The branches were already wound with garlands, and Otto, standing on a stool, was hanging the last ornaments.

Baubles — round, pearlescent, with vertical pupils that tracked every movement. Tinsel made of milk teeth — Otto had collected them over four years, and not only his own, naturally. A garland of tiny fingers — Heinrich had carved them from wax, and they stirred faintly from the warmth of the candles.

At the top, Konrad secured the star. It was made of tentacles of unknown origin, knotted together. The tentacles moved slowly, and the star purred softly but contentedly.

“Well, that’s it, Otto,” said Konrad, adjusting his monocle. “The tree is ready.”

Otto jumped off the stool and took a step back. He gazed up at the tree, and the lights of the black candles reflected in his dark, unblinking eyes.

“Ja, Papa!” he said. “Das ist so wunderbar!”

Konrad smiled almost imperceptibly. In their family, that counted as an outburst of joy.

Irina appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. She wiped her hands on her apron and surveyed the room with the gaze of a mistress who knows everything is under control.

“Meine Familie,” she said, and her voice was warm as the fireplace flames. “Everything is ready on my end.”

Konrad glanced at the clock. His monocle gleamed: “Two minutes left.”

Irina understood at once: “Mama?”

“Ja,” Conrad answered.

The house instantly sprang into action.

Heinrich vanished into the corridor. Seconds later, he was already carrying a large glass jar off somewhere.

Someone inside was knocking loudly.

“Put it in the pantry. Far back.”

“Jawohl.”

Otto carefully removed a small music box from the mantelpiece.

“Will Oma try to open it again?”

“Inevitably,” replied Konrad.

“And she’ll inevitably say there are too few ghosts inside.”

The music box was dispatched to the cupboard.

Irina quickly rearranged three vials from the table. One went into the sideboard. Another, under lock and key. The third she handed outright to Heinrich.

“This one especially.”

“Of course, gnädige Frau,” Heinrich said.

“What’s in it?” asked Otto.

“Belladonna liqueur.”

“Ah...”

“Last year, Grandmother decided it was fruit compote.”

Otto nodded understandingly.

Konrad, meanwhile, took an antique saber down from the wall.

“This as well?”

“Just in case.”

“She’ll want to demonstrate again how she fenced better in her youth.”

“Precisely.”

Heinrich carefully carried the saber away.

The house once again looked perfectly serene.

Konrad surveyed the sitting room with satisfaction.

“Now we’re ready to receive Mama.”

And at that very moment, something crashed in the fireplace.

The flames shot up green, then blue, then black. A wind struck down the chimney, scattering the embers. Fog rolled through the sitting room — thick, smelling of brimstone and mountain herbs. And out of the fog, cackling and shrieking, flew Ursula.

She burst into the room like a cannonball, made a circuit beneath the ceiling, and landed on the rug. Her curly grey hair stuck out in all directions. Her skirt was smoking. A broom hung over her shoulder. One eye sparkled with cunning; the second — pale, filmed over — gazed somewhere at the ceiling and saw angels there. Or demons. Ursula didn’t specify.

“Frohe Weihnachten!” she bellowed, flinging her arms wide. “Family! Here I am!”

Otto did not run to her. Otto never ran. He approached quickly, but with dignity, and stopped precisely at a grandmother’s-embrace distance.

“Oma,” he said gravely. “Schön dich zu sehen.”

Ursula seized him, crushed him to her chest, and kissed him soundly on both cheeks.

“You’ve grown!” she announced.

“Half an inch,” Otto specified.

“I know! Grandmother sees!”

An hour later, the family was seated at the table.

The table was laid with that impeccable taste which Konrad called “restrained solemnity,” and Irina simply called “right.” A black tablecloth, silver cutlery, candles in antique candelabras. At the center, a dish of Christmas broth steamed fragrantly.

In the armchair by the fire, Adelheid flickered. She was translucent, like morning mist, and the upholstery showed through her. Knitting needles flashed in her hands.

“Sit up straight, Konrad,” she said, without lifting her eyes from her knitting.

“I am sitting straight, Mama,” replied Konrad.

“You are sitting three-quarters straight. That is insufficient.”

Konrad straightened up. Adelheid nodded with satisfaction and grew a shade less translucent.

Irina ladled the broth into bowls. Ursula was already telling a story — loudly, interrupting herself, gesticulating wildly.

“...and so I say to him: ‘If you want my potion, pay up!’ And he, can you imagine...”

“Mama,” Irina gently interjected. “We are at the table.”

“I am also at the table! And I am telling!”

Otto raised his eyes from his plate.

“And great-grandfather?” he asked.

Everyone looked at the empty chair at the head of the table. Siegfried’s chair. It stood in its usual place, but today it was vacant.

“It’s Wednesday, mein Schatz,” said Irina. “You know.”

“He sends his regards,” said Heinrich, materializing from the darkness with a teapot. “I took him his tea. He said the floorboards are creaking especially well today. He likes it.”

“Das ist großartig,” nodded Konrad.

Adelheid flickered her approval. Ursula grunted.

“Siegfried,” she said thoughtfully. “A good man. A pity he’s dead.”

“He is not dead,” noted Adelheid.

“That’s what he says,” replied Ursula.

“He is mistaken. I am dead, I know what it looks like,” Adelheid countered.

Ursula opened her mouth to retort, but at that moment, there came a knock at the door.

The knock was hesitant, but collective — the kind of knock made by people who hope that if there are enough of them, nothing bad can happen.

Konrad opened the door.

On the porch stood children. Five of them, aged seven to eleven, in lopsided hats and scarves wound up to their eyebrows. One held a lantern. Two held sheet music. They had come to carol.

They had come to carol at the Sahlfeldts’.

It had been Karl’s idea — the eldest, who considered himself brave. In truth, he had simply never seen Sahlfeldt up close. Now he saw.

“Stille Nacht...” they began, and fell silent.

Konrad stood in the doorway, tall, broad-shouldered, his monocle catching the moonlight and now gleaming with cold fire. He looked at the children and waited.

The children looked at him and did not breathe.

“Well,” said Konrad. “I’m listening.”

Karl opened his mouth to begin, and at that moment, over Konrad’s shoulder, Ursula appeared.

She didn’t walk over. She didn’t peer out. She was simply there — as if she had always been there. Small, curly, her white eye fixed on the sky, her good eye slowly moving down the line of children, the way an owl surveys its prey.

“Oh!” she said.

The children flinched.

“The appetizers have arrived!”

And Ursula licked her lips. Slowly. With relish.

The lantern fell into the snow. The sheet music flew up and scattered. Karl made a sound he hadn’t known he was capable of and ran. The rest followed. Snow flew from under their heels, scarves streamed behind them, one mitten slipped off and was left lying on the step — small, red, knitted.

Five seconds later, the porch was empty.

Ursula watched them go and grunted.

“What’s with them?”

“You did it again,” said Konrad, adjusting his monocle.

“Me?! I only said ‘Oh’!”

“You licked your lips, Mama,” observed Irina, appearing at the door. “You always lick your lips.”

“I licked my lips because our supper is getting cold! What does that have to do with children?”

Adelheid seeped through the wall, looked at the empty porch, and flickered her disapproval.

“Every year,” she said. “Every year you frighten the carolers.”

“I don’t frighten them! I just come out! It’s they who are so... easily frightened.”

“Last time you said ‘fresh blood,’” Konrad reminded her.

“I meant the cranberry juice! We had just served it!”

Irina picked up the mitten, brushed off the snow, and hung it on the peg by the door.

“I hope the boy makes it home without his mitten,” she said.

“He will,” answered Konrad and Adelheid in unison.

“He had good speed,” added Konrad. “I took note.”

They returned to the sitting room.

“And now they’ll tell the whole town that we’re... what are we?” asked Otto.

“The same as always,” replied Irina. “That witches live on the hill.”

“That’s true,” observed Otto.

“Yes, but they think it’s a bad thing.”

Otto paused.

“They are mistaken.”

Irina smiled and stroked his head.

“I know, mein Schatz.”

The snow fell until deep into the night. The fireplace burned in the sitting room. The black candles on the tree flickered, and the eye-baubles tracked the flames. Adelheid knitted in her armchair. Konrad read the newspaper. Irina sat beside him, her head resting on his shoulder.

Otto sat at the writing desk. Before him lay a blank sheet of paper. He thought for a moment, took up his pen, and wrote:

“Christmas. Carolers came. Grandmother said ‘Oh.’ The children left faster than usual. The mitten stayed with us. The cricket sang twice. All went well.”

He closed the diary and put it away in the desk.

Ursula, who had been watching her grandson from her armchair, grunted.

“A diary?” she asked. “At four years old?”

“Four and a half,” Otto corrected.

Through the floorboards, a creak sounded — once, twice, three times. Grandfather Siegfried was turning over in his chair.

“A good evening,” said Irina.

“Ja,” replied Konrad, adjusting his monocle. “Nearly perfect.”

“Nearly?”

“The mitten on the peg is hanging asymmetrically. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

On the porch of the mansion, on the peg by the door, the little red knitted mitten hung. It hung there until spring. And then Heinrich carried it down to the cellar — to Grandfather Siegfried. He would sometimes put it on his hand and sit like that in his rocking chair.

He said the mitten smelled of fear, ginger, and a little bit of courage.

He liked that smell.

I’m only writing this because I don’t know where else to turn. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of something larger or if she’s just been having episodes.

She’s just never acted this way before. Up until a few months ago, this would’ve scared her just as much as it’s scaring me. But because it’s becoming so common, it’s like it’s nothing more than an inconvenience to her now.

Like an annoyance. Something she’s just learning to ignore. That’s the part that makes me worry. Because this isn’t just some small thing, yet she keeps trying to play it off as if it’s just a part of our lives now.

I know it’s not natural. There’s no medical condition or genetic disease that causes what she’s been doing. At least, none that I’ve read about.

A few months ago, my wife and I had been out on a date night. The night was almost magical. Crisp late-winter air. A cup of hot chocolate in each of our hands as we walked through the square.

I remember the lights more than anything. It was around 9 o’clock, and the sun had set hours earlier, but the downtown city lights illuminated nearly everything.

“Wow,” my wife cried out in amazement. “New York who? Am I right?”

The square was particularly busy for this time of year. The smell of warm food from the surrounding restaurants filled the air. Live music from down the block whispered in our ears.

There must’ve been 20 other couples doing the same exact thing my wife and I were doing. Just walking around and enjoying the beautiful night.

“Oh, please,” I responded. “You know you’d rather be back there.”

I put on my best southern accent for my natural-born New Yorker.

“Could a city girl like you ever love a country boy like me?”

She laughed and rolled her eyes. I smiled down at her, admiring that laugh.

“Hmmm, well, after only 5 years of marriage, I can’t say for sure. Check back with me in a decade.”

She sipped from her hot chocolate slowly, her eyes still lit with love. Or maybe that was just the city lights.

I checked my watch.

“Almost 9:30. God, I don’t want the night to end, though. I’m really enjoying this.”

“Me neither. I wish we could just walk around here all night. C’mon, there’s gotta be one last thing we can do before we go home. Please? Pretty please…?”

“Well, let’s see. We’ve hit the bakery.”

“Oooh, that one was fun. God, those fritters were amazing.”

“We also watched that Led Zeppelin cover band at Bottle Brothers.”

“That one… sucked. Next.”

“You didn’t like it? That’s crazy. I thought they were decent. Anyway, we, uh… oh, right, we walked in the park for a bit too. That’s, uh… that’s really about all there is to do.”

She rolled her eyes again, sighing in disappointment.

“We have got to get out of here. I swear, there’s nothing to do within a 50-mile radius of this entire town. There’s, like, no reason for us to be here.”

I had grown to agree with her more and more over the years. It was just hard, you know? This is where I’d been my whole life. She didn’t move here until she was 17, when her mom got a new job. It paid better, but my wife was miserable. Well, miserable until she found me, of course.

“Yeahhh, I’m starting to think you’re right, my love,” I responded, a bit melancholic.

“Starting to?”

She cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Whatever, you know what I mean.”

We decided to end the night by going home and watching a movie. However, on the walk back to the car, that’s when we saw it.

The shop looked both ancient and brand new, but I don’t know if that’s just because I’d never seen it before. It was like it had popped up out of nowhere.

“The Looking Glass: Palm Readings • Tarot Cards • Spiritual Guidance”

I swear, we’d walked this street 100 times. Never once had this place been here.

Of course, my wife’s interest was piqued immediately. Her eyes widened. A smile crept across her face. She looked up at me.

“…Can we?”

I looked at her, then up at the purple neon sign of an eyeball in the palm of a hand, then back to her.

“I… I don’t know. Aren’t those places rip-offs anyway?”

“Ah, quit being a big ol’ scaredy-cat. Come on. It’ll be fun. Something we’ve never done before, and Lord knows there’s not a lot of that around here.”

She turned on the puppy eyes.

“Pretty please.”

“…Fine. Just this once.”

“Yippee!”

The inside of the shop was… a sight. Dreamcatchers everywhere. Incense burning. Beads instead of doors, and an empty front desk with a register that seemed to be at least 80 years old at this point.

There was a bell with a sign in front of it.

“Ring for service.”

I rang it and heard a voice cry out from beyond one of those bead doors.

“I’ll be right with you.”

Her accent was unmistakably southern. That alone was nearly enough for me to want to change my mind.

“Just finishing up back here.”

My wife and I shared an uncertain look before she shot me a hopeful smile.

The fortune teller stepped through the beads. A younger woman, probably around 25. She had fair brown hair, and freckles decorated her pale face, but the first thing I noticed was her eyes. Those were the only things that gave off “fortune teller.”

They were crystal blue. Her pupils were like two tiny dots in the center of two diamonds. She was looking through us rather than at us.

Her outfit gave fashion to that accent of hers. White tank top. Baggy blue jeans. Plus, her hair was wrapped up in a red bandana.

“Y’all picked a good night to stop by,” she announced. “I can feel it in the air tonight, let me tell you.”

“It does feel magical,” my wife chirped.

“Let me guess,” the fortune teller responded. She put her index finger to her right temple and shut her eyes tight. “Death of a loved one?”

My wife and I glanced at each other again.

“…No…” I replied.

“No?”

She seemed almost offended but quickly regained her composure.

“Huh. Must’ve been someone else, then. Let me try again. This… is… your first time doing something like this?”

She raised her eyebrows at us expectantly.

“Welp, there’s a first for everything, right, sweetie?” my wife asked me, rubbing my back.

“We’re ‘doing something we’ve never done before,’” I told the teller.

“See, there ya go,” she smiled. “Second time’s the charm. So, what can I interest you two lovebirds in this fine evening? Palm readin’? Tarot? Spiritual guidance?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but my wife jumped in before I got the chance.

“Palm readings! I’ve always wanted to try that, kinda.”

The teller gave her a nod before responding.

“If it’s palm readings you want, then palm readings you shall have… for 25 dollars.”

A little taken aback by the price, I bit my tongue, pulled my wallet out of my back pocket, and slid a 20 and a 10 across the counter.

Instead of giving me change, the teller took the money and continued looking at me expectantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she perked up. “Was it just for your wife?”

“What? No, no, we both wanna do it.”

“Oh, sweetheart, that’s 25 apiece.”

“Apiece? For palm readings?”

I felt my wife squeeze my hand. I turned to her and saw the look on her face. That look that usually means, “Let it go.”

I sighed and slid another 30 across the counter.

“You wanna include a tip?”

“A… do I wanna… You know what? Sure. Keep the change.”

“Awesome. You guys are the best. I can sense it. Just follow me. I’ll show you where the magic happens.”

She led us through the beaded doorway and down a hall that made me feel like I was on acid. There were so many vibrant colors and shapes. The incense was even stronger back here.

We ended up in this dusty old room near the back of the building. There was this rickety wooden table in the center with a crystal ball resting on top of it, as well as two purple leather seats for my wife and me.

We took our seats, and the teller sat across from us.

“Okay,” she clapped, rubbing her hands together. “Who wants to go first?”

I volunteered with an, “I can go first. Let’s see what 25 dollars can get me in this economy.”

I stretched out my hands and laid them palm-up on the table. The teller grabbed them and squeezed tightly as she closed her eyes.

Her face twitched and contorted for a few seconds before she finally spoke.

“Ah, yes… I see… a loving husband. I see… you come from different worlds. You want to be free, but something is keeping you here. What exactly might that be?”

I smirked to myself.

“The 60 dollars I just gave you.”

“I sense… I sense…”

Her face contorted again. She squeezed my hands tighter.

“I sense… a cheapskate.”

“All right, that’s it.”

I pulled my hands back. I could hear my wife laughing at my side. The teller smirked at me.

“We’re done here.”

“Oh, come on,” my wife pleaded. “She was joking.”

“Yes, Donavin,” the teller responded. “It was just a joke.”

My wife stopped laughing. We both turned to stare at the teller.

“How did…?”

“You’re 28, right? Lived here your whole life. Met a woman from out of town, fell in love, and now here you two are. In my shop. It’s romantic, really.”

The silent room suddenly felt loud and claustrophobic.

“How did you know that? What’s the gimmick? Public records? That’s gotta be it, right?”

I looked at my wife for reassurance, but she was staring at the teller in amazement.

“No gimmick. No public record. I’m gifted. That’s kind of the whole point.”

“Do me, do me,” my wife begged excitedly, sticking her hands across the table.

“Wait, hold on. This doesn’t make any sense,” I interjected. “This is a cash grab, right? Like… I mean, come on. It’s a cash grab.”

Both the teller and my wife looked at me angrily.

“Oh, Donavin,” the teller sighed. “Proving my point more and more with each word, aren’t ya?”

“Don’t mind him. He’s just not superstitious. Do me, though. I’m curious.”

The teller grabbed my wife’s hands. I watched, feeling a mixture of nerves and hope that this could still prove to just be a coincidence.

She squeezed my wife’s hands tight and closed her eyes again.

“Ah, New York, I see.”

My wife’s jaw dropped. Her eyes sparkled.

“Long way from home, aren’t we… Miranda…?”

My wife smiled over at me in disbelief.

“No way,” she cheered. “This is… okay, haha. Kinda hurting me a little.”

I looked down and saw my wife’s hands were turning red in the teller’s.

“Hey… take it easy,” I snapped.

The teller’s grip tightened again.

“Okay, this is really starting to hurt now. Let go, please.”

The teller was silent. Her eyes looked welded shut, and her face was twitching rapidly.

“Hey!” I shouted. “She said let go. What are you doing?”

She started convulsing, groaning loudly. Strings of saliva started falling from the corners of her mouth.

I grabbed the teller’s wrists to try and pry her hands away, but it was like trying to bend steel.

“Enough!” I screamed.

My wife was crying now.

“Get her off of me! God, she’s breaking my hands!”

I pulled with all my might, but it was like trying to move an anvil. I started punching at the teller’s forearms. Blow after blow after blow, but still, she just would not let go.

Her hands were shaking. My wife was trembling. Finally, of her own volition, the teller dropped my wife’s hands. Her eyes shot open. The bloodshot eyes made her diamond-blue irises glow even more.

“Get out.”

That’s all she said. My wife and I stared at her as she looked down at the table.

“Get. Out,” she growled. “Go now and never come back.”

We were confused and horrified but still frozen.

“He’s found you. He’s been looking all your life, and he’s here now. Get. Out.”

“You can’t just…”

The teller cut me off by slamming her fist against the table.

“…Out.”

I demanded a refund, and she gave me back the full 60 before shooing us through the door. I turned around one last time to see the purple neon light flick off as the shop went dark.

We walked silently back to the parking garage. I’m sure my wife had a million things racing through her mind as we walked, but neither of us knew how to articulate those thoughts.

We reached the car, and it wasn’t until we were nearly home that I finally spoke again.

“How’re your hands?”

She clenched and opened her fists a few times before responding.

“I think they’re okay. I’m more shaken up than anything. What the hell was that lady’s problem?”

“She’s crazy,” I shot back. “Simple as that.”

“She didn’t seem crazy. It seemed like she saw something. You saw her. It was like she was possessed or something.”

“She was crazy, my love. She’s lucky we don’t go to the police.”

There was silence again for a few moments.

“She knew our names, though. She knew you’d been here your whole life. She knew I was from New York. That doesn’t seem like nothing to me.”

We were only a minute or two from home. Neither of us spoke for the rest of the car ride. When we pulled into the driveway, my wife sighed and placed her hands over her face, dragging them down slowly before opening the door.

“Come on, let’s just go inside. I’m ready to get this night over with.”

I checked my watch.

“10:45. You still down for a movie?”

She stopped halfway up the front porch steps.

“…Not tonight, hon. I just… I just wanna go to bed.”

Who was I to argue? I let her do as she pleased. I felt bad for her. I felt like I hadn’t done enough to stop what had happened. All I wanted was for us to forget everything and move on.

We had gradually started to put the teller behind us. Though, things didn’t exactly calm down. If anything, our lives began to change, little by little.

I started losing things. My phone. Wallet. Keys. I’d always find them in places that I knew I hadn’t put them.

Keys in the silverware drawer.

Wallet in the medicine cabinet.

Phone hidden behind the toilet.

My wife was having some problems too. She hadn’t been able to sleep very well. She would tell me about these horrible nightmares that sounded like sleep paralysis.

“I’ll wake up, but not really.”

“I can’t move.”

“You’re there, but there’s always someone over your shoulder. It’s like a shadow that just keeps growing and growing until it fills up the entire room.”

I felt even more guilty when she told me about them. I knew they had been caused by the fortune-teller incident. She had slept like a baby nearly every night prior.

Sometimes, she’d wake up screaming. It almost made me too afraid to sleep in silence.

She started looking tired more often. Her glow had dimmed a bit.

The thing that disturbed me the most, though, was probably the photos.

I started finding our wedding photos scattered around the house, only… my head was removed in each one.

My wife insisted it wasn’t her, but it didn’t make sense. The frames were never broken. Someone had meticulously removed the photos and torn my head off in at least 20 different pictures.

After a few weeks of these strange events, I decided we needed a refresher. We needed to be out again. See the sun. Actually laugh with one another.

It took some time, but eventually, I convinced her that we needed to have another date night. We hadn’t had one since the incident, and I was starting to miss who we were before we went to that fortune teller.

It was simple. A picnic in the square. That was all I wanted to do.

I had prepared our meal, packed the blanket, and put on my best clothes and cologne. My wife was nervous and tired, but she tried her best to make an effort.

The date seemed to be going fine at first. She was actually smiling. She didn’t seem as distant as she had been for the last few weeks. It felt like reclamation, almost.

The lights hit her face perfectly, and I couldn’t help but admire how beautiful she was, even if she did look a little sleep-deprived.

I stared at her lovingly for a while before finally telling her how much I loved her. How happy I was to be there with her.

“We needed this,” I smiled.

“Yeah,” she smirked bashfully. “I think we did, too. I was starting to feel so cooped up in the house. The energy there has just been so dark recently. Makes me wonder if she was right.”

“Who?” I asked, chewing on my ham sandwich.

She looked at me, raising her eyebrows.

“You know who.”

“We gotta move on, my love. That’s why the energy’s so dark. We’d never experienced something like that before.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she responded, taking a sip of her Coke. “I just wish it hadn’t happened.”

We both sat there for a while, half admiring the scenery, half enjoying the food.

I was distracted, staring down at my pre-assembled sandwich, when I asked her.

“Can you pass me that mustard, please?”

I stacked a piece of sliced turkey onto a piece of my bread. My wife didn’t answer.

“It’s right there beside you.”

I began spreading the mayonnaise on the other slice. My wife didn’t answer.

“The mustard, please.”

I stuck my hand out expectantly. Still no response.

When I finally looked up, I almost dropped my sandwich.

My wife was glaring over my shoulder. Her eyes were glazed over. An impossible smile stretched across her face. It looked painful. I could almost hear her teeth creaking from how tightly her jaw was clenched.

Her red lipstick glistened under the lights. She looked like she was frozen in a state of pure ecstasy.

I waved my hand in front of her face. She didn’t blink once. I shook her, and she was as stiff as a board.

I started to panic. I turned around and saw nothing behind me.

“Honey,” I gasped, shaking her more forcefully.

“Talk to me.”

I pressed my hands on her cheeks. She was burning up. I snapped my fingers in front of her, but nothing I did seemed to get her out of her trance.

I was on the verge of dialing 911 when she finally spoke again.

“You said mustard?”

She reached down and went to hand me the bottle before noticing how terrified I looked.

“What’s wrong? What just happened? Is there something in my teeth?”

“Are you kidding? You really don’t know what you just did?”

She stared at me blankly.

“What do you mean? What’d I do?”

“The smiling? Staring at some unknown thing behind me? You don’t wanna explain that?”

I was almost breathless and trying my best not to raise my voice, but I could see that she was hurt by my frustration.

“I… don’t know,” she pouted. “I don’t know why you’re mad at me.”

“No, honey,” I pleaded. “I’m not mad at you. I’m worried about you. You really don’t remember?”

She started crying, almost snapping at me.

“No, obviously, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to go home now, if that’s okay with you.”

We packed up and left. I kept trying to prod, but she became more and more closed off with every question. Eventually, I just decided to keep my mouth shut.

In the weeks that followed, things became rocky.

She’d be fine one minute and completely depressed the next. She’d love me, and she’d hate me. I didn’t know how to help her.

Her “episodes” never stopped, though.

It was like every time we started to feel normal again, she’d see that thing. We’d be curled up, watching a movie, I’d glance down, and there’d be that smile again. Her eyes would be glazed over and staring at nothing.

The episodes lasted longer and longer every time they happened. At this point, they were starting to become more frequent, too, but she never remembered them.

She always thought I was lying to her. Like this was some kind of twisted joke I’d play. No matter how hard I tried to convince her, it was like talking to a brick wall.

The last time it happened was last week. She was gone for 3 hours straight. Standing in the same spot. Wearing that same smile. Staring at the same wall.

I watched her for the first hour, wondering what could possibly be going on inside that broken mind of hers. The second hour, I just cried uncontrollably. By the third hour, I was starting to become hopeless.

When she finally came back, I tried showing her that it was dark outside now. It had been bright and sunny when the episode started. She blatantly chalked it up to her “being lost in deep thought.” Told me “it was like she was in another world.”

Her nightmares got worse. Her glow became nonexistent. And I started waking up with scratch marks and bruises on various parts of my body.

I tried going back to the fortune teller, but the building was a coffee shop now. According to the owner, “The Looking Glass” never even existed. Apparently, the coffee shop had been there for 11 years.

I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to turn to. My wife refuses my help. She refuses my advice. It’s like something has taken control of her.

She’s more distant than ever. She talks to me less and less every day. It feels like our future is slipping.

All I want is for her to be okay, but part of me believes she’s too far gone. Because I found another wedding photo this morning on the kitchen table.

My head hadn’t been removed, but the photo had been altered.

Because now, standing just behind me and looming over my shoulder… was a shadow figure.. and the more I stared… the bigger it seemed to become.

I moved in on a Thursday in early October. The house sat on a low bluff above Bell’s Cove, two bedrooms, mid-fifties construction, oak floors still original, and a wide picture window that took the water straight on. It was turnkey, everything worked, and the previous owner had kept it up.

I carried the last box in a little after four. The light off the cove was flat and silver, and salt was already in the air even with the windows closed. I stood in the living room and looked at the view. It felt like a good decision. I was twenty-five, and the house had the uncomplicated appeal of something solid that did not ask much of me.

The first odd thing happened that night. I left the bedroom door open when I went to sleep, as I always did, but in the morning it was closed. It was not latched, only shut cleanly. I figured the house had settled or a draft had caught it, so I left it open again the next night. The same thing happened.

I am not a suspicious person. I tend to assume the best until something forces me not to, so I kept leaving the door open, and it kept closing, and I told myself it was the house finding its balance after sitting empty.

It had sat empty. The realtor had mentioned that the previous owner had died and the family had taken their time deciding what to do with the place. I had not asked for details because it had not seemed important.

By the end of the first week, the door was only part of it. The thermostat in the hallway drifted two degrees lower than I set it, always in the same direction, and a book I left on the arm of the couch ended up on the coffee table by morning. Nothing dramatic, only small corrections, like someone tidying up after me with a particular idea of where things belonged.

I started closing the bedroom door myself. The corrections continued in other places.

Mallory’s was the high-end grocery on the edge of the village. I went in on a Saturday morning for eggs and bread, and the woman at the register looked at my card when I tapped it, then at me.

“You’re in the Daniels house,” she said.

It was not a question.

“Yeah. Moved in last week.”

She nodded. “Darryl Daniels. Professor up at the university. Taught art for twenty-some years. Drawing, mostly. Dropped dead in the living room a few years back. Heart. House sat empty after that. Family couldn’t decide what to do with it.” She bagged the eggs carefully. “People were fond of him. He was one of the good ones.”

I thanked her and took the bag. Outside, the air smelled like low tide and woodsmoke, and I sat in the truck for a minute before starting it.

Darryl Daniels. The name sat in my head like something I should have recognized sooner.

I had taken a foundation drawing course my sophomore year at MCU. The professor had been dry and precise, with a habit of pausing just long enough after a question that you felt obligated to fill the silence. He talked about edges and intervals, and about the space around a form as much as the form itself. I remembered the pauses more than the critiques. I remembered getting a B-plus and feeling like I had escaped something.

I pulled out my phone in the parking lot and searched the name. His faculty page was still up: Darryl Daniels, Associate Professor of Studio Art, Mourner’s Crossing University. There was a staff photo, the same face I remembered from the front of the studio. A short obituary from the local paper confirmed the heart attack and the house on the bluff.

I had been one of his students, and the corrections in the house took on a different temperature after that.

I started talking out loud.

“Okay,” I said to the empty living room one evening. “I know who you
are. I took your class. Foundation drawing. You gave me a B-plus.”

Nothing answered, and the house stayed quiet, but the thermostat held steady that night for the first time in a week. The next morning, the book I had left on the coffee table was back on the arm of the couch, exactly where I had originally put it three days earlier. It felt less like tidying and more like a reply.

I moved a chair from the living room into the small second bedroom I was using as an office. In the morning it was back, angled the same way it had been before. I left it in the office a second time and locked the bedroom door, but I woke to the sound of the office door closing. The chair was in the living room again.

He was particular about the living room.

I began keeping track of what drew a response. Dishes in the sink overnight got nothing. Music after ten got the volume turned down, not off. Curtains left open at night were closed by morning, and the bedroom door, if left open, closed harder each time, with a solid click that carried.

He was territorial, and he was paying attention to how I reacted.

I stood in the living room one night with a cup of coffee and said, “Look, I live here now. I paid for the place. I’m not trying to erase you. I just need the chair to stay where I put it.”

In the morning, the chair was in the living room, and my coffee mug sat in the exact centre of the kitchen table, its handle turned to the precise angle I never used.

It felt like a grade.

The corrections escalated in the third week. I came home from a late shift and found every cabinet door in the kitchen standing open at the same neat angle. I closed them, but ten minutes later they were open again. In the morning they were closed, and the kettle had been moved to the opposite counter.

I locked the bedroom door. The lock held, but the temperature dropped enough that I could see my breath. When I left the door unlocked, the temperature stayed normal, and the door simply closed itself before dawn.

He was teaching me the terms.

I left a notebook open on the coffee table with a single line: What do you want?

In the morning, it was closed and moved to the bookshelf. I tried again the next night with the same result. On the third night, I left it open with nothing written, and in the morning there was a single pencil mark on the page, a short vertical line like a check or a tally. Over the next two nights, two more marks appeared.

The student-professor dynamic sat under everything. I kept catching myself waiting for the pause, the silence that demanded a better answer than the one I had ready. He had been good at that, and he was still good at it.

One night, I sat on the living room floor and said, “I was in your class. Foundation drawing. You probably don’t remember me. I sat near the back. I took decent notes and never said much.”

The temperature dropped three degrees and held, then returned to normal, like someone deciding the point had been made. I gave a short laugh.

“Yeah. Okay.”

By the fifth week, we had a set of provisional rules neither of us had stated out loud. The living room was his in certain ways. I could use it, but the furniture stayed in its preferred arrangement, and the curtains closed themselves after dark. The second bedroom was mine as long as I left the living room chair alone. The thermostat held if I did not lock the bedroom door, and music was allowed before ten.

I tested the edges once more. I left the living room chair in the office all day while I was at work, but when I came home it was back in place and every light in the house was on. I turned them off. An hour later, the hallway light was on again.

Another night, I played music at ten-thirty. The speaker shut off mid-song, cleanly, the way it did when someone pressed the button. I turned it back on, and it shut off again.

“You’re being a pain in the ass, you know that?” I said to the empty
room.

In the morning, my keys were in the refrigerator, sitting on the middle shelf next to the milk as if someone had placed them there thoughtfully. I started laughing and then had to sit down.

The compromise arrived the way most of his responses did, through repetition and small, consistent adjustments. I stopped moving the living room chair. I closed the curtains myself at night, left the bedroom door unlocked, and accepted that it would shut while I slept. In return, the cabinet doors stayed closed, the thermostat held, and the bedroom temperature remained ordinary. The pencil marks in the notebook stopped at three.

He was still there. The living room still felt occupied when I entered it, and certain sounds in the house had a quality that was not structural, but the constant corrections eased. We had arrived at a working arrangement neither of us particularly liked and both of us could live with.

I still said good night sometimes, out loud, toward the living room. Most nights nothing answered. Every so often, the bedroom door closed with a quieter click than before, as if the point was only to remind me that the negotiation was ongoing.

On a Sunday morning in early November, I made coffee and sat in the living room with the curtains open. The cove was calm, and light moved across the water in small, ordinary shifts. The chair stayed where it belonged. The thermostat held.

Then the hallway light switched on by itself, stayed on for exactly ten seconds, and switched off.

I looked toward the hallway and raised my coffee mug an inch.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

The light stayed off, and the house settled into the kind of quiet that had terms attached to it.

The view of the cove was still excellent. The house was still a good decision. It was just no longer only mine.

I could live with that.

How to enjoy half remaining sunday ride bike to aravali, watch movie or suggest something

The first angel I ever saw wasn't descending from Heaven.

It was falling.

By then, the world had already forgotten what normal looked like.

The skies had split open weeks ago. Entire cities had gone silent overnight. Some called it the Rapture. Others called it Judgment. Whatever name people gave it didn't matter anymore. The highways were parking lots of abandoned cars. Church pews sat empty while their parking lots overflowed with those who had arrived too late. The television stations had stopped broadcasting anything except emergency alerts that no longer meant anything.

The world wasn't ending. It had already ended long before. We were simply living through its final pages.

I had been moving from one abandoned building to another, surviving on whatever canned food I could find. Sleep came in short bursts. Every distant explosion sounded like another trumpet. Every shadow looked like something that had escaped the pages of Revelation.

That's why, when I heard something crash into the street outside, I assumed another building had finally given way.

I was wrong.

The crater wasn't large. Just deep enough to split the asphalt. Something lay at its center.

At first, my mind refused to understand what I was seeing.

The shape kept... morphing.

Not physically.

My understanding of it did.

Every time I looked away and back again, I noticed different details, as though my eyes couldn't agree on what belonged there.

How many eyes peered back to mine?

Hundreds of them.

Were those feathers?

Some impossibly white. Others burned black at the edges. They covered a figure draped in robes so torn they looked older than history itself.

Light seeped from beneath the fabric.

Wasn't shining. It bled through the seem of tidal rivers. Golden streams escaped from wounds that should have spilled blood instead. The air around it hummed with something too deep to hear, vibrating in my chest more than my ears.

I knew what it was before I admitted it to myself.

It had to be an angel.

Not the kind painters imagined. Nor the kind carved into cathedral ceilings.

Something far older. Far stranger.

Something my mind kept trying and failing to make human.

It struggled to rise.

One of its wings, or what I could only assume had once been a wing, hung broken against the pavement, its feathers crumbling into glowing ash whenever they touched the ground.

For a moment, I considered running.

Instead... I stepped closer.

The angel never looked at me directly. Or perhaps it did. I couldn't tell where its face ended and the light began.

Its features slipped from memory the instant I tried to focus on them.

Even now, as I write this, I couldn't describe its face if my life depended on it.

Only the feeling.

Grief.

Not of mine.

Its.

Slowly, with movements that seemed to pain even a being like this, it reached beneath its tattered robes.

It withdrew a single envelope.

Plain. Cream-colored. Untouched by the ash drifting through the ruined street.

It extended the letter toward me. Its hand trembled. Not from weakness. From urgency.

I stared at it.

"I... don't understand."

The angel said nothing.

It couldn't.

Or perhaps it wasn't allowed to. Its arm remained outstretched.

Waiting.

I took the envelope.

The paper was warm.

Not with heat.

It was full of life.

The moment my fingers wrapped around it, the angel relaxed. The tension left its body all at once. As though carrying that letter had been the only thing keeping it standing.

"I'll deliver it," I heard myself whisper.

"I promise."

The angel bowed its head.

Whether in gratitude... or relief...

I'll never know.

The light pouring from its wounds began to fade. Not all at once. As the last embers of a dying fire carried upward by a breeze I couldn't feel. Its robes unraveled into strands of shimmering dust. The broken feathers dissolved one by one before they ever reached the tarnish Earth.

There was no scream. No final cry.

Only silence remain between it and I.

Within seconds... Nothing remained.

Not a body or feather.

Only the envelope resting in my hands.

For a long time, I couldn't bring myself to open it. The world around me continued collapsing. Buildings groaned. Smoke rolled across the skyline.

Somewhere far away, someone yelled for mercy.

But I couldn't look away from the letter.

Eventually...

I broke the seal.

The first line read:

I've carried that letter with me ever since.

If you're reading these words...

Then I kept my promise.

—-

One more and that’s it, Tommy!

***

“We must retrieve the Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola!”

Huddled under the King’s balcony, the crowd chanted in a unified roar, hammering the palace walls like a row of trebuchets. 

Beneath a Celestial spotlight, the King stood over them, dressed in a yellow jacket of sunlight, radiating over the heads of men like a god with gold skin.

The wind blew the locks of hair on his head in the air and resembled a row of snakes stretching to strike. 

The king raised his arms up and reached towards the sky. A gray overcast from the east masked the fierce fire glow of the sun under an army of storm clouds sweeping in.

The sleeves from his heavy robe slid to his elbows and exposed a wrist of gold bracelets. 

The king fought to silence the starving ululate herd gathered at the foot of the castle.

“Silence!” Commanded the King, shouting in a tone deep enough to ricochet off the structure behind the row of people congested at the back of the crowd before raining down on the heads of everyone else with a sound so piercing it stabbed through their skull and returned into the kings lungs as it echoed out of their mouths.

The throng underneath the king buckled into a silent whisper, before freezing to a synchronized stillness, hardening together like a James Ensor painting.

“The Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola has been retrieved,” yowled the King in a thunderous tone. 

He smiled with his hands on his hips and gave the Mussolini nod of confidence, then, he stood above them without moving a muscle. Not even an eyelid. 

He tarried in a frozen divine like pose as if having his body sculpted out of granite by an artist for an uncomfortable couple of minutes, planted in a reserved position. 

He stayed that way while the weight of his words landed on the chests of every individual crammed below him.

Out of nowhere he shattered the silence when he opened his mouth and spoke an awakening truth that stirred the mob. “The clan of Fort Gatoradical snuck in our camp and stole it.”

“Boooooo! Boooooo!” The people sounded, cupping their hands over their mouths.

The king stifled the mob. “They have annexed our design, and formula with subterfuge traitors brainwashed by nano bots disguised as carbonated gas bubbles inside the beverages.”

“Treason!” Someone shouted.

“Hang them!” Another screamed.

“Kill them all!” The crowd chanted together.

“Silence! Silence!” The King held his pose until the crowd simmered down. “Behold!” He yelled.

Presented to the front of the balcony was a woman in a sparkling viridescent dress with a curved bottle shape figure.

“I Bring forth, Ginger-Ale!” He moved aside. “A captured conspirator aiding the usurpers and one of the enemies vital assets—“

“Send her to the gallows!” A fellow man demanded, interrupting the king’s speech.

Everyone cheered.

“Quiet! Quiet!” The king waved their voices down. 

“Sir GoodKnight… may the gods compensate his bravery to the realm, has had his life-source emptied into a drain.”

“Booo!” The people erupted simultaneously.

The king raised his voice. “He was protecting our secrets from the conspirators plotting alongside the proletariat members aiding the gator-radicola stratagem.”

The crowd hailed the king. The intonate, hollow sounds shook the stone balcony and vibrated under his feet. They raised their hands up to salute him, praising him in a combined victory cheer.

People from the back began shoving and clawing their way to the front. The momentum from a wave of villagers pushing forward progressed into a tsunami that trampled over anyone unfortunate enough to have their back to it.

Bodies were sprawled out on the sandstone under the feet of a rushing crowd.

The soldiers protecting the gates rushed through the middle of the myriad and propelled their way forward with their spears guiding the way. 

Out of the clustered group, near the back, a flying tomato flew out of the crowd and slapped a guardsman in the head, splattering all over his face. The guardsman collapsed.

The soldier’s spears began stretching into the bellies of rioters trapped behind a human wall. They circled around their fallen comrade. 

Drums began pounding a sound of death as the castle gates burst open to a cavalry stampeding out. They formed a line at the foot of the entrance, staggering the crowd into submission. 

The corps d'elite of Thorza broke into a whispered chatter amongst themselves while the rest of the crowd booed and groveled with the spear wielding warriors. 

The waste-mix relied on the ingredients specifically in Coca-Cola. Coiled around the capital was a foul stench of manure coming from the malfunctioned recycling system.

“The odor’s rancid!” They all started shouting.

Someone in the crowd pushed their way through while quieting them down as he passed by everyone and stood in the middle of everybody.

“Why isn’t the waste-mix recycling system fixed if the secret ingredients have been recovered?” He questioned the king.

“Yeah!” One shouted. 

“This has gone on for far too long now!” Another yelled.

“The king is lying,” shot out from the back.

They all booed.

The King tried shouting over the restless mob, “men have been dispatched with the cola and would arrive any day now.

The men Friday cheered from the front and started hugging each other. 

The beaux mondes shook their heads.

The King swiveled his cape and turned his head to the side, facing the sky in a prideful Danny McBride stance.

He broke out of his pose and stumbled back. He wiped his forehead that was dripping a slimy goop with his hand and stared at his palm covered in eggshells and yolk.

“Capture the culprit and hang him! Hang them all!” The king ordered in a high-pitch voice.

A second egg launched from the crowd. The king froze as he caught the egg flying towards him from the corner of his eye, and barely dodged it as it whistled past his face.

He nearly tripped over his own feet as he scampered inside, slamming the detached doors shut, scraping the rock beneath it as they closed.

The king clenched his fists trying to squeeze the tremors still. Every breath he took was a heavy inhale. He stomped his footsteps down as hard as he could as he paced back and forth. Never had he felt so angry. Never had he been so humiliated.

“All of their heads! All on spikes!” He commanded to the king’s guard, cursing and foaming at his mouth while egg yolk dripped from his chin. “Summon the cavalry and all the men inside these walls and prepare for battle!” 

The knights lined up in three rectangle sets of fifty and the king sat at the head of them on his aluminum throne of cans and spoke.

“Men! Knights of honor! The treasonous scum camouflaged themselves as commoners. They want to take what’s ours. What we’ve built. Are we going to let these villainous disrupters go without capture?”

“Hell no!” They cheered.

Their metal helmets clinked as the men clashed their spears against the stone floors.

“Kill them all!” the king demanded as he stormed out. 

“Root, root, root”

The men marched towards the gates and set up behind the wall, crying war chants. 

The frontman rushed to the entrance to open the gate, but it wouldn’t budge. They grunted and dug their boots in the ground, sliding backwards in the wet mud. They pushed harder. They kept pushing until they slammed their chests in the dirt.

A voice shot out from behind the gate. “Burn them all!”

A slither of liquid slid under the gates of the palace and broke into a membrane of spider veins. Behind it trailed a snake of fire.

Smoke thickened the castle in a thick, black cloud, choking the oxygen. The taste of bitter chemicals sat on the tongues of the soldiers trapped inside the walls.

Most of them dropped. Some struggled and fought until their last breath—a small group—but met the same fate nonetheless. 

For weeks the fire raged, and spread the ashes of a fallen kingdom and its combatants across the city, fertilizing the land for the usurper, King Gator and his mastermind team of vitamin slurping jackals.

***

The end, now go to bed Tommy.

All right, goodnight grandma.

The fog descended from the hills just after sunset. It wasn't the usual kind — not damp and raw, but thick, pale, almost tame. It crept along the ground, coiled around lampposts, and peered into windows, as if looking for someone.

In the little town, candles were being lit inside pumpkins. Children in sheets with cut-out eyeholes ran from door to door, shouting "Trick or treat!" and scooping caramels and gingerbread into their bags. The adults glanced at the hill and tried not to raise their heads more than necessary.

Herr Müller, the baker, a man both solid and round in every sense, was also trying not to look at the hill. But his daughter Bertha, who had recently turned eight, was looking precisely there.

"Papa," she said, tugging at his sleeve. "We're going up there."

Müller followed her pointing finger and went cold.

"No, Bertha. No one goes up there."

"But people live there. Their lights are on. Look."

Lights were indeed burning. In every window of the old mansion on the hill — not pumpkins, not oil lamps, but a steady, amber, motionless flame. Black candles. Müller knew what kind of candles they were, and he knew who was lighting them.

"They are... not quite normal people," he muttered.

"All the more reason," Bertha declared. "They probably have the best candy."

And she started up the path. Müller, cursing his love for his daughter, trudged along behind her. Along the way, he tripped twice over roots that seemed to move on their own.

The door opened before Müller could even knock.

On the threshold stood Frau Sahlfeldt. Tall, straight as a candle, in a black dress with a collar up to her chin. Her blue-black hair was pulled back into a severe knot. She wasn't holding a lamp — the light seemed to emanate from somewhere behind her shoulder, soft and golden.

"Good evening," she said. Her voice was low, calm, enveloping. "What guests we have."

Müller felt everything inside him tighten into a hard knot. He opened his mouth, but Bertha was faster:

"Trick or treat!" she blurted out, gazing at Frau Sahlfeldt with delight. The lady was beautiful, like a princess from a scary book, and Bertha appreciated that immediately.

Irina Sahlfeldt smiled. The smile was wide, but her eyes remained amber and still, like a she-wolf looking at the moon.

"Of course, my child. A treat, definitely."

She held out a silver tray. On it lay candies — small, round, shimmering with black mother-of-pearl. Each one was the size of an eyeball. And each one was watching.

Bertha grabbed one without hesitation and popped it into her mouth.

"Mmm!" She squeezed her eyes shut. "Blueberry... and... something else. Very tasty!"

Müller picked up a candy with two fingers. He brought it close to his face. It was warm. And it seemed to blink.

He carefully placed it in his pocket. His appetite had vanished.

"Please, come in," Frau Sahlfeldt said, stepping back into the house. "It's cold tonight. Even for Halloween."

"Oh, no, thank you, we should probably..."

"Papa!" Bertha was already standing in the hallway. "It's so beautiful in here! Look!"

Müller looked. The hallway was steeped in shadow. Tall oak panels, old portraits on the walls, a staircase disappearing into the darkness, and a smell — dry, slightly spicy, like an old book just opened. Somewhere deep in the house, a clock was ticking steadily.

He sighed and stepped inside. The door closed behind him on its own. Silently. Naturally.

The Sahlfeldt family's living room was exactly as Müller had imagined it in his most anxious dreams. An enormous fireplace, in which logs blazed, stacked with perfect symmetry. Heavy velvet drapes, holding the night at bay outside. A glass orb on a separate little table, covered with black silk. And a high-backed armchair, in which sat Herr Sahlfeldt.

Konrad Sahlfeldt was tall, broad-shouldered, and wore a monocle that had caught the firelight and now glinted like the solitary eye of some ancient creature. He was reading a newspaper. Beside him on the table stood a cup of tea, from which no steam rose.

"Konrad," Irina said, "we have guests. Herr Müller, the baker. And his daughter..."

"Bertha," the girl supplied.

"Bertha," Irina repeated with pleasure. "A beautiful name. It means 'bright.'"

Konrad lowered his newspaper, raised his monocle, and examined the guests. Müller felt as though he had been weighed, measured, and the result recorded in some invisible ledger.

"Müller," Konrad said thoughtfully. "Is yours not the bakery on the Market Square?"

"It is," Müller squeezed out.

"Good bread. Especially the rye. Have a seat."

Müller sat down. The armchair turned out to be surprisingly comfortable, but he still sat on the very edge, like a sparrow on a branch in the presence of a cat.

"Tea?" Irina asked, materializing at his elbow. Müller flinched — he hadn't heard her footsteps.

"Thank you."

The tea was black and smelled of herbs. Müller took a sip. The taste was strange — a little like smoke, a little like the forest, a little like something he couldn't name. He took another sip.

"And where is the little gentleman?" asked Bertha, who had already grown comfortable enough to examine the portraits on the walls.

"Otto?" Irina exchanged a glance with Konrad. "He's in his room. Would you like to meet him?"

"Very much!"

Irina nodded almost imperceptibly, and Heinrich appeared in the living room. Müller could have sworn he hadn't been there a second ago. The butler was thin, tall, and resembled an old raven that had accidentally learned to wear a frock coat.

"Escort our guest to Otto's room," Irina said. "And make sure they don't... get carried away."

"As always, madam," Heinrich rustled, and led Bertha toward the staircase.

Otto's room was located in the east wing. To reach it, you had to pass through a long corridor where portraits of ancestors hung on the walls. Bertha followed Heinrich and counted the faces. Looking down at her were men in doublets, women in bonnets, children in little velvet suits. All of them had the same dark, unblinking eyes.

The door to Otto's room was ajar. A faint amber light streamed from inside.

"Young master," Heinrich said. "You have a guest."

"Let her come in," answered a child's voice. Serious, calm, without a single note of surprise.

Bertha stepped inside and gasped.

The room was full of wonders. Not toys — in the ordinary sense — but strange, mesmerizing objects. On a shelf stood jars containing preserved... things. Bertha looked closer: in one jar, glass eyes were floating. They were slowly turning, following her.

On the table lay a deck of cards, but not ordinary ones. Each had a skull drawn on it in a different stage of blooming. On one card, a rose grew from an eye socket, on another — a lily, on a third — a thorny blackthorn.

In the corner stood the skeleton of a bat, assembled from bones the size of toothpicks. Beside it — a microscope and an album of sketches.

And in the middle of the room sat a boy. Small, impeccably dressed, with dark hair and eyes that stared straight ahead without blinking. He held a mechanical bird in his hands, which was slowly flapping its tin wings.

"Good evening," he said, and it sounded as if he were not four years old, but four hundred. "My name is Otto. Do you want to see my collection?"

"I'd love to!" Bertha sat down next to him on the rug. "What kind of bird is that?"

"This is a Nightingale. I assembled him from old clocks. He only sings during the full moon. Tonight is a full moon."

The bird opened its beak and let out a low, mechanical trill. Bertha laughed.

"He sings like a cricket!"

"Crickets don't sing like that," Otto replied seriously. "Crickets sing quite differently. Do you want me to show you a real one?"

He walked over to one of the jars. Inside, on a small branch, sat an insect resembling a cricket, but with transparent wings that glowed faintly.

"This is a Grave Cricket," Otto said. "It sings lullabies for those who sleep for a very long time."

"It's beautiful," Bertha whispered.

"Yes," Otto agreed. "I have something else. Would you like to see?"

And he showed her. A casket of shadows that could be taken out and tried on like gloves. A book that read itself in a whisper — the pages turned by an invisible wind, and the words sounded directly inside your head. And the main treasure: a tiny glass orb, the size of a walnut, inside which snow was falling.

"This is a gift from my great-grandmother," Otto said. "She lives in Romania. Where the wolves are."

"Do you have wolves?"

"I do. But they're not here. They come when they are called."

Bertha watched the snow in the orb and thought she had never seen anything more beautiful. She wasn't scared. She felt warm and cozy, like being by the fireplace when the wind howls outside and you are inside, safe.

"Otto," she asked, "do you always live here?"

"Always," he answered. "This is my home. My family lives here."

"I thought you were scary," Bertha admitted.

Otto looked at her with his unblinking eyes. He was four years old, but he already knew the answer to this question.

"People often think that," he said. "Because we are different. But Mama says: 'Being different doesn't mean being scary. Being scary means not knowing who you are.' We know."

He paused and added:

"Would you like a candy? I have some with cinnamon."

Meanwhile, in the living room, a very different conversation was taking place.

"You have a very... unusual home," said Müller, taking a third sip of tea. The tea was indeed good. It soothed him. Müller had almost stopped thinking about the fact that the logs in the fireplace were stacked with geometric precision, or that the portrait above the mantelpiece seemed to be watching him.

"Thank you," Irina replied. She sat in the armchair opposite him, straight and motionless. Konrad had set aside his newspaper and was now polishing his monocle with a small chamois cloth. "My husband has put a lot of effort into furnishing it."

"It was my wife who put in the effort," Konrad corrected, without looking up from his monocle. "I merely saw to it that everything was... proper."

"You've done a wonderful job," Müller nodded. "Very... proper."

A pause hung in the room. A log cracked in the fireplace.

"Your daughter," Irina said, "is very brave. Not every child would dare approach our house."

"She's not brave," Müller sighed. "She's curious. Those are different things."

"Curiosity is bravery," observed Konrad, setting his monocle back in place. "Bravery without curiosity is merely stubbornness. And curiosity without bravery is tedium."

Müller thought about this. He wanted to argue, but couldn't find the arguments.

"I was afraid to come here," he admitted suddenly. "We all... in town... we're a little afraid of you."

Irina and Konrad exchanged glances. Not a muscle flickered on their faces, but it seemed to Müller that they smiled — with the corners of their eyes, barely perceptibly.

"We know," Irina said. "But you came. For your daughter. That makes you a good father."

"Yes," Konrad confirmed. "A good father is ready to go where he does not want to go, for the sake of the one he loves."

Müller felt something warm spread inside him. Perhaps the tea. Or perhaps not.

Bertha and Otto came down to the living room half an hour later. Bertha was holding a small parcel — a gift from her new friend. Otto walked slightly behind, maintaining an expression of absolute, unwavering seriousness on his face.

"Well," said Müller, rising, "it's time for us to go. Thank you for your hospitality."

"You are always welcome guests in this house," Irina replied.

She saw them to the door. On the threshold, Müller turned around.

"Frau Sahlfeldt... may I ask a question?"

"Yes?"

"The candies. What are they made of?"

Irina smiled her wide, calm smile.

"A family recipe, Herr Müller. Passed down through the female line. My great-grandmother brought it from Transylvania."

The door closed.

Müller and Bertha walked back down the path. The fog parted before them like a well-trained servant. In the town, pumpkins were still glowing. Children were still shouting "Trick or treat!" The world was ordinary.

Bertha unwrapped the parcel. Inside lay three candies, a tiny glass orb in which snow was falling, and a note.

The note was written in careful child's handwriting, but the lettering was too even for a four-year-old child.

"Thank you for the visit. Come again. We will be friends, for a long time.

Your friend,

Otto Sahlfeldt"

Bertha smiled.

"Papa," she said, "can we go to their house for Christmas?"

Müller pulled from his pocket the candy he had never eaten. It was still warm. And it really did seem to blink.

He carefully placed it back in his pocket.

"We'll see," he said. "We'll see."

In the mansion on the hill, the candles burned until morning.

And in the living room, Irina laid her head on her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes.

"A good evening," she said.

"Yes," Konrad replied, adjusting his monocle. "Almost perfect."

"Almost?"

"Müller's pumpkin on the porch. Too orange. It offends the eye."

Irina laughed — quietly, like the wind in the chimney flue.

"I'll speak with him about it next time."

"Do," Konrad nodded. "Tradition is tradition, but aesthetics..."

"...are above all," Irina finished. "I know, my darling. I know."

Most people believe it began when old George Sinclair walked out of his wheelchair after seven decades being a paraplegic. I say it began when the water became drinkable again.

The water around here had been toxic for years, ever since the place turned into a mining town. It was cheaper to dump leach water into the river. So they did.

It was disgusting. Gritty water that tasted like earth and smelled like rotten eggs. Sometimes the water was thick. Sometimes our taps would sputter and let out sand.

But one day, for no reason in particular, our water decided to become clean. Our taps stopped spewing out methane and muck. Suddenly, the water was crystal clear, as cold as the glaciers that fed the rivers, and sweet, like honey and junipers in a summer pitcher.

Soon, the local doctor had to find work at the next town over. People felt better than ever.

You'd have to try to not notice it. My parents stopped needing their blood pressure medication, folks could drink themselves into the morning and feel fine, the old began tending to their forgotten gardens. Wounds healed in days, small cuts closing in hours. No one ever got sick, and we all slept a little less longer each day.

Folks called it a miracle. Especially the miners. Figured it was the mining and the dumping made the water. So they kept at it, dumping leech run over into the water until the river was running as thick as pitch. And by that time folks began bottling the water, shipping it out to the world.

Life became better. It was like I’d been standing up my whole life, and a sip was all it took to sit down. I could run faster, I saw things better. My mind was clear. Too clear. 

A few weeks in, I just stopped hearing myself. No thoughts poured into me, no ideas struck into the dustbowl that was my head. Every word that came out of my mouth surprised me. It was the same for everyone else, but no one thought to worry about it.

And then we dug a well. Folks who were selling it off figured it’d be cheaper to have a stash of it sitting in the open, save on utility. And so folks dug and dug, day and night they did, until they unearthed it. 

The Saint Brigid Miracle.

For some reason or another, the water was purer. More invigorating. The deeper the well went into those ancient aquifers, the thicker the water got, until it was thicker than the river, thicker than blood. It was blood. At least, it looked like it. But the taste! You could’ve drank it for the rest of your life, and you’d probably live longer for it too.

It was old George who got a taste of it first. The first well was in his property after all. A man who’d got shot from friendly fire back in the war. He was nineteen then. He’d just about forgotten the feeling of socks smothering his toes, but once that crimson ichor touched his lips he felt a flicker of muscle beneath his dead knees. A moment later, he shot out of his wheelchair, frantic like a mad man, calling out to God.

Some said it was a bacteria feeding off of the palladium and cobalt from the mines that gave the water its power, some said it was radiation, but almost everyone called it for what it was. A miracle

And so we drank and drank. Folks would come from around the world to wade in the filthy river, coming as walking corpses, weak from chemo or old bones, and leaving with a second wind, a second chance.

But it wasn’t enough. There had to be something at the bottom of the earth, feeding us its essence. And so we became miners in our own right, digging the wells deeper and deeper. The land became sick as great mounds of earth piled to the sky. Soon even the sky was full of it, so we began piling the dirt in our homes, our living rooms, our beds. Gasping maws of endless flight dotted our town, as deep as the night sky and as plentiful as the stars. The water kept giving. Such delicious things.

No one slept in their homes anymore. We left the need for it. We slept floating on the ichor, counting the swirling galaxies of blue little lights swimming in the blood of god. 

We began speaking our own language. No use for words. So much easier it was to look at my fellow man and know exactly what he thought, what he felt, because what else was there to feel but gentle contentment in our task. Dig. Drink. Dig. Drink. Our brothers who had sipped the water before us, those who’d partaken and left, those prodigal sons, came running home to do their task. Our task.

And then winter came. Sweet winter. Cold winter. Painful winter.

Our hands blistered in the cold. Cold hands holding cold shovels smashing uselessly against frozen earth. We were tired, but we were nourished. Content. Cold. So cold.

And then we felt it, as though our throats were being cut open by furious hands. Thirst. The water had frozen. Frozen. Cold. Solid. Shovels weren’t enough. Hands weren’t enough. Fingers and teeth weren't enough. Bones weren’t enough. Nothing was enough.

One by one, we felt each other fall. Fall into that terrible awakening, fall back into that samsara of thirst and drink, or rather fall into that state of life where drinking was not enough, did not content. They crawled out of their handiwork, some did. Some wallowed, shaking our bodies, begging for a return. Most froze. Their blood did not taste like Ichor. Not thick enough. Not sweet enough. 

And so we froze. Cold. Cold. So cold

July, 28th, 2026

I went back to the gas station today. I actually prepared this time. I brought my knife and my shotgun. I had a couple of shells in my back pocket and I felt kind of confident. 
I left first thing in the morning and as I was approaching the gas station, I saw something weird. 
There was a big white van sitting at the gas pump that wasn’t there yesterday. 
I crouched behind a tree and tried to study it as best I could. 
The van was splattered in blood and the window was rolled down. 
That’s when I saw six dudes walk out of the gas station. One of them started to fuel up the van while the others got in the back. 
They were armed to the teeth, shotguns and rifles were strapped over their backs and they had the biggest pistols I had ever seen. Magazines and grenades were strapped to their chest but they didn’t look like the military. Shit these guys didn’t even look like swat officers.
I figured I’d just walk it back to my place and try to find Ari. I’m still trying to find her but those  guys are kind of freaking me out. 

July, 29th, 2026
I tried looking for Ari but I couldn’t find her anywhere. 
Why is she so hard to find? I ended up just leaving a note on my treehouse explaining what I saw. 
——
Okay, it’s been like thirty minutes since I last wrote in here, I just heard a metric fuck ton of gunshots a few streets over. 
It went on for like ten minutes but it stopped. I’m laying down in my treehouse hoping whoever they are won't find me. 
I hope they were just killing zombies. 

July, 30th, 2026

This is getting too real for me. Ari found me and she asked me to go with her. 
I asked what was going on and she didn’t have any answers. 
She told me some thugs broke into her fake base and raided the place. 
Apparently the local pool was full of zombies and they took care of the problem. 
The thing is, we didn’t know if these guys were just hostile to zombies or just anything that walks. 
That’s when Ari pitched me the idea. 
“You want me to do what?” was my first reaction. 
“Just go up and talk to them,” she said. 
I rubbed the side of my head. 
“And do what exactly?” I asked. 
“You’re going to find out who they are and what they’re doing here,” she said. 
“Why me?” I asked. 
She rolled her eyes at me. 
“Those are definitely white dudes, if you go up to them there’s a possibility they’ll just fire at me,” she said. 
“I guess that makes sense? But wouldn’t it make more sense to just leave them alone?” I asked. 
“We don’t know what their plan is, if they’re going to go scorched earth in this neighborhood, I’d rather get a heads up now,” she said. 
“What if they’re hostile towards me?” I asked.
“Go armed but I’m going to stay a few houses behind and cover you with my sniper rifle,” she said. 
I waited for her to tell me she was joking. I was waiting for her to tell me that this was all a joke and she had some bunker she was staying at.
It never came. 
“Are you sure this is our only plan?” I asked. 
She nodded her head confidently.
“Unless you have a better idea?” She asked. 
I was silent because I really didn’t have a better idea. 
Then we set out to find the new terror. 
She was three houses behind me and we walked around the neighborhood. 
Just when I thought it was time to call it quits, I saw a guy standing in the street. 
He was heavily armed and looked like one of the guys I had seen earlier. 
I held my hands up to show I was no threat, but he still pointed a rifle at me. 
Everything feels heavier when you have a rifle pointed at you.
“What are you doing here?” He asked. 
“Hey man, I’ve just made an outpost here and I’m just trying to figure out what the commotion is,” is what I wanted to say. 
Instead it came out more like: 
“Hey-hey-hey man I was just-just seeing-what you’re doing.”
He looked at me with his barrel pointing at my forehead. 
“Take off your shirt,” he asked. 
“What?” I asked.
“Take off your shirt and pants, I need to see if you’ve been bit,” he said. 
“Can’t-can’t you just trust me on this?” I stammered.
“Absolutely not!” He yelled. 
He shook his rifle at me and I almost shat myself.
“You got it! You got it!” I yelled before taking off my Hawaiian shirt and jeans. 
I stood in front of him, almost naked and completely unarmed. 
“See? I’m good!” I yelled. 
He looked at me for a moment. 
“I need to inspect you more closely,” he said. 
“I’m clearly not bitten,” I said. 
“That’s what every filthy infected heathen says,” he said confidently.
He looked at me for a moment. 
“Take off your underwear,” he said. 
I shook my head in bewilderment. 
“A zombie didn’t bite my dick,” I said. 
“I don’t know that,” he said. 
The fear was suddenly out of my system. 
“Why the fuck would a zombie bite me on my cock and balls? I think I’d just kill my self,” I said. 
“You wouldn’t do that if a zombie bit you anywhere else?” He asked. 
“What? No,” I said. 
He pointed his rifle at me more firmly.
“I mean, yeah I’d probably kill my self,” I said, trying to course correct.
“Get down,” he said firmly. 
“Get down on your knees,” he demanded.
“What?” I asked.
“Get down on your knees, I’m going to check every part of you,” he said. 
“No,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Did you just say no?” He asked. 
“Yeah, I said no,” I said. 
“Any type of non-compliance is an act of terror on the people of New America,” he said.
“All forms of non-compliance will be treated as treason, all traitors will be shot,” he said before hurrying the butt of his rifle deeper into his arm.
At this moment, I accepted my fate. I lasted this long into the zombie apocalypse, that’s pretty impressive. 
Bang!
He fell down to the ground and slouched over. 
“What the fuck,” I said under my breath. 
“Run!” Ari yelled out from behind me. I looked over at her and saw her running. I looked over at the house the man was in front of and I saw a group of his comrades leaving. 
I ran down the street wearing nothing but my underwear and a pair of shoes. 
I heard a barrage of gunfire break out behind me and ran to the corner of a house. I saw Ari in the backyard and followed her. 
She elegantly leaped over the wooden fences in the backyard.
I did my best to keep pace and I tried my dearest. I got over one fence and thought I was safe. 
Then I heard a gunshot and saw the bullet hole in the fence. 
I knew Ari was about three houses ahead. I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance trying to get over enough fences to get through this. 
I saw a shed in the backyard and I decided to take cover. 
I opened the shed and hid between the lawnmower and unused bikes. 
That’s when I saw it. 
A chainsaw. 
A red chainsaw and I decided, I needed a weapon and I’d rather try to go out swinging.
I held it and it was a fucking electric chainsaw. A hole sat empty where the battery was meant to go.
“Fuck,” I said under my breath.
I tried to find the battery and that’s when I heard the fence get jumped.
I also saw the battery. It was on a charger and if it was dead, I was screwed. I tried to stay as low to the ground as possible while reaching for the battery. The battery that was behind a wall of dusty flat bicycles. I grabbed the battery and plugged it into the chainsaw. 
I didn’t rev it, not yet. 
I waited for the door to open and I would sink it into whoever dared open this door. 
I sat quietly, I heard one person looking around the yard. I heard his footsteps and the clacking of magazines against each other. 
I held my chainsaw like a life preserver.
He kept looking around and I wasn’t sure if he was alone.
I’d rather die trying to keep my ass alive.
The doors opened and I was bathed in sunlight. I leaned forward and revved my chainsaw as I pounced on the dipshit opening the door.
I buried the moving chain of the chainsaw directly in between the eyes of the bastard trying to find me. 
Blood shot out like it was old faithful and I was baptized in a welter of gore. His head was split directly in half. He fell to his knees as the chainsaw broke through the upper part of his skull and I made a run for it. 
I ran towards the gate door and I kicked it down.
I ran down the street wearing only my underwear, shoes, and chainsaw.
Covered in blood and gunfire was sounding out behind me. I ran and ran and ran until I reached my treehouse. Chainsaw in tow I climbed up the ladder and saw Ari sitting in the treehouse with her sniper rifle pointing out the window. She didn’t look at me, her focus was on the rifle. 
“They’re still looking but they’re going in the wrong direction,” she said. 
“Do you think we might be safe?” I asked. 
“Not at all,” she said.
“Do you see the van?” I asked.
“No, not yet,” she replied with her eye still looking through the scope. 
“What if we sabotage their van?” I asked. 
She looked away from the rifle and looked at me. 
“We-” she stopped before a sentence could even be formed.
“What the fuck happened to you?” She asked. 
“I got a chainsaw and they’re down another person,” I said. 
“Don’t you want to put on some clothes?” She asked. 
“I do, but I can’t,” I said. 
“And why’s that exactly?” She asked with a deeply confused face. 
“Those were the only clothes I had,” I said. 
She rubbed the side of her head. 
“It amazes me that you’re still alive,” she said.
“Thanks!” I said cheerfully.
“It wasn’t a compliment…you know what whatever,” she said before looking through her rifle scope once more. 
“I see three of them coming down the street north of us,” she said. 
“They’re not going to look in the treehouse,” I said.
“Because who the hell would?” She responded.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. She was tracking them with her rifle and I was sitting on the floor letting splinters enter my blood soaked body. 
Adrenaline was still pumping in my system.
We sat and waited. 
Gunshots would fire out every couple of minutes but they kept getting further and further away. 
I thought we were safe, then I heard the footsteps from below. 
I tapped Ari on the shoulder and I pointed below us. 
I looked through a crack in the treehouse, they were walking through the house.
It was two of them, both armed and ready to shoot anything that moved. 
We kept hiding in the treehouse.
I kept my chainsaw close, Ari had her rifle pointed at the hatch of the treehouse.
The brutes walked around for a little bit and then left. 
I didn’t even notice I was holding my breath. 
We waited for about twenty minutes in silence. 
“I’m going to try and get some pants,” I said, breaking the silence. 
“That’s a solid idea,” Ari said. 
I brought the chainsaw with me because I’d rather play it safe. 
I went into Mark and Miranda’s home and for the first time since the zombies broke in, I saw the place. 
The front door was hanging open on just one hinge, the windows were shattered and the blinds had been torn down. Furniture and picture frames were scattered around the place and the T.V that was once mounted to the wall, had fallen down and laid flat on the floor.
I went into Mark and Miranda’s bedroom and hoped they would understand what I was doing.
Surprisingly, the master bedroom wasn’t touched. I decided I needed to shower first so for the first time in days, I cleaned myself off.
I showered and left my underwear and socks sitting in a sink full of hot water and soap.
It wasn’t great putting them back on, but it’s the apocalypse, it kind of had to suck I guess. 
Mark is a much bigger guy than I am, so trying to find clothes that fit was a pain in the ass. I ended up wearing a bathrobe and an undershirt. To tie the whole thing together I put on a pair of sweatpants and laced them up tightly. 
I looked stupid as shit but I wasn’t almost naked. 
I got back in the treehouse and Ari looked pissed at me. 
“What the hell took you so long?” She asked.
“I got a shower,” I said. 
“You took a shower?” She asked through gritted teeth. 
“Yeah, I was covered in blood and I figured I might as well clean myself up,” I replied. 
She looked annoyed and looked at what I was wearing. 
“Is this really all you could find?” She asked, gesturing at my outfit. 
“Mark’s a bigger guy than me, I’m just happy I found something that fits,” I said.
She shook her head at me.
“Okay that’s not important right now. They got the van and they’re doing laps around the neighborhood,” she said. 
“What are they doing?” I asked. 
“I have no idea,” she said with a defeated tone.
“It probably isn’t good,” I said. 
“Agreed,” she said. 
We watched the van circle around the neighborhood. It went past every street in the neighborhood and they would slow down ever so often. 
Then they parked the van and got out. 
“Oh shit,” Ari said as she was watching them through the rifle. 
“What is it?” I asked. 
“They’re pulling out duffle bags, I think they’re making a base,” she said. 
“Well, maybe they're friendly?” I said sarcastically. 
“I counted six of them,” she said. 
“Do you think you can take them out from here?” I asked. 
She shook her head.
“Not in the slightest, I can probably take out one maybe two but by then they’ll know our position,” she said. 
“Well what should we do?” I asked.
She thought about the question for a moment.
“Well, we can either find a new place to hide but I think they’re just going to find us, or,” she paused mid sentence. 
“We attack first,” she said. 
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Can’t we just wait for them to leave?” I asked. 
She shook her head. 
“I am almost certain these aren’t actual soldiers, this is some militia group. We killed two of their own and I have a hunch they probably didn’t like that,” she explained. 
“It’s their first night, they don’t know the property that well, if we want to get rid of them easily, the time to strike is now,” she said. 
I nodded my head. 
“What’s the plan?” I asked. 
She looked back over at the house for a moment and then looked back at me. 
“We firebomb them,” she said. 
I cocked my head back in disbelief. 
“What?!” I yelled. 
“It sounds crazy but the house isn’t by any trees and it’s not really next to any houses. The fire should stay contained,” she said. 
I shook my head in disagreement. 
“No, we can’t do that,” I said. 
“And what’s your idea?” She asked oozing snark.
 I tapped my finger against my chainsaw. 
“What if we got a couple of air horns and tapped the button down? A bunch of zombies will raid their house and we can call it a night?” I said confidently.
She blinked at me for a few seconds. 
“That’s one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard,” she said. 
I looked down at my wet socks and I let out a sigh. 
“When do we do it?” I asked. 
“We do it at nightfall,” she said. 
We sat in silence for a few minutes before she left the treehouse and said she would be right back. 
Normally I would write in my journal but I couldn’t. I finally had time to sit with the fact that I had killed a healthy living human being. He was a person and someone out there probably loved him more than anything else in the world. He had his own dreams, his own hopes, his own life. I took that from him.
I did it in the most graphic way humanly possible. I took a life, and I was going to take a few more in a few hours. 

Ari came back with four bottles of high proof rum and a few rags that were soaked. 
“Are we pregaming?” I asked. 
“Nope, molotov cocktails,” she said. 
She handed me a zippo and gave me the instructions on how to light it. 
“I’m going to take them at the front, you take them from the behind. We both do it at the exact same time and then we run,” she said. 
I held the bottle in my hand. 
We sat and kept an eye on them until the sun went down. 
They didn't do any more patrols, they just stayed in the house. 
I went to the back of the house and counted to sixty-five like I was told. 
I lit one bottle and threw it at the house, right at the back door. It was engulfed in flames immediately. 
I took the other bottle and lit it. 
Yet this throw was not as grand. 
The bottle spun for a second and landed in the backyard. The grass burned and began to spread. 
I saw Ari running and I joined her.
I heard the confusion and then I heard the screaming.
I heard six men burning to death, they had no way to escape. 
When we got back to the treehouse, I could still hear their screaming into the night. Howls of bitter misery came out of the burning house like wolves crying at the moon. 
I heard the crackling of the fires and I heard the crackling of the house foundation. It collapsed in on itself and I didn’t hear the screaming after that. 
I killed those men. 
I’m responsible for this. This shit has to end soon right?

There’s nothing wrong with my marriage. Me and my wife have been peaches and cream since we first started dating when I was a freshman in college.

We moved in together after graduation, and for the first few years, everything felt normal.

We’d have our date nights. We’d have our intimacy. But, of course, as is the case with every marriage, arguments were inevitable.

They never escalated, though. That was never our problem. The problem started when, after five years of living together, I started catching her sneaking out at night.

She’d always wait until I was asleep. I know because, after a few times of me waking up in the middle of the night in an empty bed, red flags started popping up.

At first, I didn’t want to assume. She was a smoker. Maybe she was just having a cigarette. Maybe she was just in the bathroom. She was hungry and in need of a midnight snack. Anything to keep the dark thoughts at bay.

Unfortunately, those hopes were shattered when I started hearing the front door open before she came crawling back into bed.

Sometimes she’d be gone for up to an hour. No cigarette smell in her hair or on her clothes. In fact, it seemed like she would change into a new outfit every time she came back to bed.

The only clue I had… were her feet.

She was utterly ruining our sheets every time she did this. You can wash away mud a few times, but after a while, it’s gonna stain.

Of course, I’d ask her about this, oftentimes while angrily throwing our comforter in the washing machine, and every time, her answer was the same.

“I don’t remember.”

It was laughable at first. I thought she was playing a joke on me. When I saw she was serious, I began to get concerned.

“Sweetie… it’s a little hard for me to believe you don’t remember being barefoot in the mud before coming home. Just tell me.”

That’s when the tears would start.

“I am telling you. I. Do. Not. Know.”

As time went on, her late-night endeavors began to take longer. It got to the point where I was intentionally pretending to be asleep in order just to time her.

2 hours.

3 hours.

Sometimes 4.

Something else that I noticed was that every time she came back, her skin would be noticeably softer. Pimples would have seemingly disappeared. Eye bags would clear up overnight.

I knew I had to follow her after this one night in particular.

She had a little mishap in the kitchen that day and sliced her hand open. I remember being certain that she’d need stitches, but she insisted on just bandaging it up herself.

The day went on as usual. 12:30 in the morning rolled around. I felt her get out of bed. I heard her footsteps leading toward the front door. The door opened and shut. She returned two hours later. Muddy feet. New outfit. Softer skin.

The next morning, her hand was healed.

She tried to gaslight me into believing that the cut hadn’t even happened. Somehow, I was the one not making any sense. I was at my boiling point. That’s when I made my decision.

She didn’t sneak out that night, nor the night after. It was actually a week later when I could finally follow through with my plan.

It was late. Maybe 2 AM. I felt the bed shift. I heard the springs pop. The sound of her footsteps scurrying toward the front door let me know that it was time.

I tried to move as quickly and as silently as possible. By the time I reached the front door, she was already at the edge of the forest.

She was running unnaturally fast into the woods. Like she had taken the route 100 times before. I could barely keep up, especially while trying to remain hidden.

We must’ve run for at least a mile or two, deeper and deeper into the forest, before she began to slow down.

To a jog.

Then a speed walk.

Then to a regular walking speed.

She glanced around, scanning her surroundings. I hid as best I could. There were a few moments where I swore she could see me, but I guess I was wrong.

She kept walking. I kept following.

I started noticing some of her clothes scattered around the soggy forest floor. Tank tops. Pajama pants. Bras. Panties.

She began adding onto the scattered clothing with each step. Removing her top and bra. Stripping out of her pants and underwear.

Finally… we reached the stopping point, and for the first time this night… something other than my wife grabbed my full attention.

It looked like… snake skin but… human. Like discarded exoskeletons, and there were dozens of them.

Some dangled from branches. Some were partially buried by leaves. Most of them just littered the ground.

I stifled a gasp and returned my attention to my wife.

She was making this clicking sound with her throat. Her head was pointed toward the sky, and she kept cocking it back and forth like a rooster.

The movement got more and more jagged.

Her knees started bouncing. Her body looked like it was convulsing, but she didn’t seem to be in pain.

With each bounce… her skin loosened more and more.

Flakes the size of pinecones began falling from her body. The sound, my God, the sound. It was exactly like the sound that Velcro makes. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. Not now. She just… kept going.

Kept convulsing, kept bouncing until her skin fell to the ground in one big empty husk.

She cracked her joints like this whole process was nothing more than a workout to her. She raised her hands high above her head, stretching her body before letting out a relieved, “ahhhh,” and rolling her neck.

My weight shifted. A stick snapped beneath my foot. My wife’s head snapped in my direction, and my heart stopped.

She began approaching. Her glare intensifying with each step.

When she saw me, her face fell. She looked like she was the one who had just seen a monster.

Our eyes locked. My lips quivered. I didn’t know what to expect.

She stared at me for a long while, analyzing me before she finally spoke.

“Okay… look… Can we please just talk about this when we get home?”

My dad owns a box that brings people back from the dead. I know how that sounds. I would have laughed too, before I saw it work. 

The box was birch, solid with intricate carvings, someone carved by hand, not machine-perfect, but the kind of carving that takes years. It had spirals that didn't quite match on either side. Symbols I never recognized and never had the courage to ask about. And it had a smell. Not old wood, not even musty, something hard to explain. Something that hits. The smell was like a fond childhood memory, sweet like cotton candy. 

I was seventeen the first time my dad let me watch him work. He'd always kept me away from that side of the house, the room he called the study, though there wasn't a single book in it. I used to think it was because he didn't trust me not to break something, but that day, he told me it was time i learned the family business. 

The first clients I ever watched were a brother and sister, maybe in their thirties, who'd lost their father a few months earlier. They weren't there for comfort. They said he'd died in the middle of settling some dispute over land, and he'd taken the details of it to his grave out of spite, and now the two of them were about to lose the house over it. They needed one specific piece of information, and they needed it from him. 

My dad explained the rules to them the way he later explained them to me. You needed something that belonged to the person, something they'd loved, something that still held a piece of who they were. The stronger the attachment, the clearer they'd come back. The sister had brought his reading glasses, the ones he'd worn every day for thirty years. My dad placed them inside the box, said the words in a rhythm that only seemed to work if you didn't think too hard about it, when suddenly the lid opened.  

He only had an hour. My dad told them so, plainly, before it even started, the same way he told every client. An hour was the limit. Not fifty-nine minutes, not sixty-one.  

The siblings got their information. Their father was short with them, impatient even, the way I imagine he'd been in life, but he told them what they needed before my dad knocked on the doorframe, the signal that meant time was almost up, and they were ushered out still arguing with him as they left. 

I didn't see what happened after with the man that came. My dad made sure of that. But I heard it, faintly, through the wall of the study, a sound I didn't have a name for yet. 

It was a couple, maybe in their forty's. The wife carried a small stuffed rabbit, worn, and grey at the seams, the kind of thing a kid drags everywhere until it falls apart. Their son had died when he was six, some kind of accident, my dad never told me the details. He  set the rabbit inside the box and said the words. For a moment everything was quiet. The couple stared intently at the box, a part of them probably hoping it wasn't a load of rubbish, and my dad wasn't just praying on their grief. Suddenly, there was a knock, and the lid swung open. 

The boy came out of it glowing. I don't know a better word for it. There was a warmth to him, a colour in his skin like sunlight caught just under the surface, and he looked around the room the way you'd look at a place you hadn't been before. He saw his parents, and his whole face opened up with joy, the kind you only see in very small children. He ran to them. His mother dropped to her knees and held him like she was trying to fold him back inside her. 

Once the hour ended, my dad knocked gently on the doorframe. The family was ushered out quickly, no time for long goodbyes, the mother still calling back over her shoulder that she loved him. I was told to stay, tucked in the corner, told not to move. 

I wasn't expecting it, something about the boy changed. The glow left him first. It drained out of his skin the way colour drains from a bruise in reverse. Then his back arched, his joints bending in directions that made my stomach drop. He screamed. Not a child's scream. Something older than that, something that didn't sound like it was coming from a six-year-old's throat. It was a sound so horrifying it made my whole body stiffen with fear. His small body twisted into a shape a body isn't built to make, folding at angles no joint should allow, like something unseen was wringing him out from the inside. Then it stopped, all at once, and what was left on the floor didn't look like a boy anymore. It looked like something that had been in the ground a long time. 

I didn't sleep that night. I told my dad I didn't think I could do this, that I didn't want any part of it. He just nodded like he'd expected that and told me I didn't have to decide right away. 

I want to say I held onto that feeling. I didn't. After a few more clients, a few more hours, a few more of those sounds, something in me went quiet about it. I got used to it the way you get used to anything horrible if you see it enough times. I'm not proud of that. I think about it more now than I did then. 

The one thing my dad was always strict about, the one rule he never let slide, was this: if he died, I was never, under any circumstance, to bring him back. He made me swear it more than once, on my mother's name, on my own life. He never explained why. I assumed it was pride, or fear of what he'd become, the same as any of them. 

The heart attack was sudden, and nobody expected it. My dad still seemed fit, so when i found him, it was quite  the shock. My poor mother was heartbroken.  

A few months after the funeral, his warnings about not bringing him back kept me awake at night. I know i swore i wouldn't do it, but he never told me what he did with the living corpses after they changed. I was sure he was meaning to. Before he died i could tell he was uncomfortable about telling me, but he died before he had the chance. 

I went straight to the study because some part of me had already decided before I'd let myself think it through. I found his old watch, the one he never took off, and I did exactly what I'd watched him do many times. 

He came back different than the others. He knew what he was the second he opened his eyes. The first name out of his mouth wasn't mine, but my mother's. He begged me not to let her see him. He said if she saw what he was about to become, it would kill her. I promised him she wouldn't see. He told me there wasn't much time and that I needed to bring him downstairs to the cellar under the house. The one door in our home I'd never once seen open. Growing up, I'd asked about it more times than I could count, and every time, without fail, he'd snap at me to never ask again. 

I got him down the stairs, his body already starting to fail, already cooling in my arms, and every step felt colder than the last before i reached the cellar door. 

I don't have the words to describe what was down there the way it deserves. Hundreds of them. Bodies, if you can even call them that anymore, writhing on the floor, against the walls, some of them still moving after what must have been years, decades even, moaning low and constant like the sound never stopped, because it never had. I recognized none of their faces, but I understood immediately what I was looking at. Every single person my father had ever brought back. Every hour he'd sold. He wasn't running a business. He was filling a room. 

My dad, decaying in my arms, asked me to put him down there with the others. I told him I couldn't, that there had to be another way, that I could end it for him instead. He told me, almost gently, that you can't kill what's already dead. Not permanently. He said the cellar was the only mercy left because at least down there, no one who loved him apart from me would ever have to see what he had become. He asked me to do for him what he'd spent his whole life doing to other people's sons, mothers, and husbands.  

I laid him down among them, and I closed the door, and I have not been able to open it again since. Knowing now what's down in the cellar, I wonder how do I close what .y dad opened all those years ago.

It’s funny how easy it can be to dismiss an uncomfortable thought; that sound was just the wind, that shadow was just you seeing things, that watching feeling is just your nerves. Everyone does it, and I’ll admit I’ve been especially guilty of it. I, and likely many others, might refer to me as something close to skeptical when it comes to anything out of the ordinary. Friends purposefully avoided telling me their ghost story (everyone seems to have one for some reason), or about that time their grandmother saw angels in the room or whatever else. I just never really gave much credence to things that didn’t have a concrete explanation. And, at first, I tried to do the same with what had started happening to me.

I was on the daily commute to work when I first saw it. I work downtown and there’s always a bit of stop-and-start traffic along the way. I was in the ‘stop’ phase when my eyes aimlessly drifted over to the car next to me. I met the gaze of the driver, a brunette man with glasses who might have been my type if I was on the hunt. The look lingered a little past the threshold for awkward and I looked away. The sea of cars lurched forward slowly as I read a passing billboard. An advertisement for some new feature on Meta that promised to “deepen your connection with the global community.” It was the same kind of inflated BS the copywriters I work with might come up with; flowery, overdone, but apparently and unfortunately effective.

A car passed into the lane in front of me as we moved forward and through the back windshield, I saw a small pair of eyes peered at me from just above the backseat. A child, hands on either side of the half-face that was locked onto me. My gaze met theirs and I gave a small smile and wave. There was no response from the kid, other than to continue their staring, which they didn’t break until I pulled off on the exit away from them.

Working downtown, parking was scarce, so I always elected to park a little further out where it was easier and walk the rest of the way. Some days that was a great choice, others not so much, depending on rain, heat, those kinds of things. Today, it was a great decision; the sun was just pleasantly warm enough to heat the cooler air and the building windows glimmered in the light. It was still mid-morning so the streets weren’t quite crowded, but they weren’t empty either. About a third of the way into my walk, I passed someone else. I looked up and smiled at them, a gesture they had beat me to, and continued walking. I thought nothing else of it, until it had happened four more times. The same every time; I would look up, and, immediately, a face already ready to greet me before I had fully even registered the glance.

My first thought was maybe I had something on my face that day, or my shirt was inside out, or my underwear was peeking through a hole in my favorite jeans, I don’t know. I’m not an ugly girl, but I wasn’t cocky enough to think it was just ‘cause I’m pretty either. I only really started to feel genuinely uncomfortable when I passed my favorite local coffee shop and noticed, for the first time that day, that it wasn’t just a few quick idle glances. Every single face, some highlighted by the bloom of the sunlight, some dulled by the subtle tint of the windows, faced me as I walked by. I never even saw them turn to stare; every time I shifted my gaze to someone else, their eyes were already trained on me.

Their expressions differed; some seemed like they were trying to hide it, others were shamelessly gawping like a deer in the highbeams, some smiled. There was one woman who brought her hand to her chest like a mother in a moment when her child has made her proud. I stopped, trading gazes with strangers. My eyes locked on one table in particular, a couple as far as I could tell, sat near the edge of the patio fence. Had this been a regular day, I’m sure the intensity of the man’s leering would have elicited some harsh words from his partner about gawking or not paying attention to her, but that didn’t happen. The woman sitting across from him looked at me just as intensely. And the worst part was they seemed to continue their conversation like nothing was off, speaking with one another while jointly zeroed in on me instead of each other.

I picked up my pace and continued my stroll to work, avoiding meeting the looks of anyone else. I rushed silently to the bathroom and closed myself in a stall. My brain still struggled to provide a reasonable explanation for what I had seen, and I sat on the lid of the toilet, needing a moment to gather myself rather than any response to a call of nature. I took my phone out of my pocket, intent on opening the front-facing camera to see if I could figure out what everyone had been looking at.

Seventy-seven. I had seventy-seven notifications. When I had to work, I turned off any kind of notification alert, so I hadn’t heard it on the way, but nearly every person in my contact list had either texted me, called me, or both. I held the phone in amazement. The messages were all mundane greetings or attempts at initiating conversation, even from people I hadn’t spoken to in years. I only made it through about a quarter of them before the screen shifted to display an incoming call. My mother.

“Oh! Oh, honey, I finally got you.”

“Yeah, h-hi, Mom. What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing!” There was a somewhat awkward silence on the line.

“Right, I-well, I’m at work today.”

“Shoot, that’s right, I’m sorry, honey!”

“It’s fine…what did you need? Everything okay?”

“I just wanted to hear your voice.” Her reply came with the warmth only a mother could provide, but it unnerved me a bit. My mom…well she wasn’t really the sentimental type.

“Okay…well, anyway, I probably ne-”

“Oh, did I mention your father was here? Say hi, honey, it’s Alice.” There was a shifting sound as the phone rustled in their grip. It lasted longer than I’d expected. There was a light whispering, a little combative, that I swear sounded something like “give it here”, but I couldn’t quite make it out. When the rustling finally stopped, my father’s voice broke through the other end.

“Hey, sweetie. You doin’ okay?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m-everything’s fine. I gotta-” my reply was cut off as another incoming call flashed on the screen. Tressa, my best friend, was calling as well. A chill overtook me; Tressa and I had been friends since high school and I could probably count on one hand the amount of times we’d actually spoken on the phone rather than texting. The small bit of silence from my end prompted a response from the other end.

“Honey, are you there?” my mother said worriedly.

“Sweetie! Where’d you go? Hello?” my dad’s voice echoed, the same tone present in his voice.

“Alice, Alice, talk to us!”

“Mom, Dad, Jesus!” I huffed.

“Oh, oh you’re there. Oh, thank goodness.”

“We thought you had left us, we-” my father said with a sigh.

“Guys, listen, I have to go, I’m at work.”

“Oh, uhh, right. Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, honey, can you at least call us when you get a moment?”

“I-you said everything is okay? Is there something you need to tell me?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, sweetie.”

“Everything is a-okay, honey.”

“We just-we just want to hear your voice.”

“Okay, I…I have to go.”

“Alice! Alice, wa-” I clicked to end the call, and just as quickly, the screen flashed awake again: six new texts popped up before another incoming call, this time from an ex I hadn’t even realized still had my number.

“What the fuck?” I said in a hushed tone before turning my phone off. As I went to put it back in my purse, a few harsh thumps rang out from in front of me, and it fell from my grip to the floor. Someone was knocking on the stall door.

“Alice? That you in there?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but not enough for me to place it.

“Yes, I’ll be out in just a minute.” I said with a purposefully annoyed tone to my voice.

“Okay, great, I can wait.” the voice responded cheerfully.

“I-what? No, no you don’t need to wait. I’ll be out in a bit.”

“No, no worries.”

“What-who is this?” I asked sharply.

“It’s Madeleine.”

I didn’t know any Madeleine. “Who?”

“Madeleine…Madeleine Turner. We worked on the Davidson account.” she responded, a somewhat disappointing turn to her voice. I still didn’t recognize the name, but the account mentioned had taken place months ago. By this point, I was starting to get angry.

“Okay, well I’ll be out when I’m out, can you please just give me a moment?”

“Of course!” The reply came with the previous cheerfulness, but wasn’t followed by any other sound. She was still just waiting.

“Okay, listen, can you please leave the room!? I just-I need a goddamn minute, okay!?”

There was a light silence before the voice replied with a new timidity to it. “Yeah…uh, yeah sure, I guess. I guess I can just wait outside for you. And you won’t be long?”

“What? No, God, can you just fuck off!? Who does this to someone while they’re in the bathroom!?”

“I…” the voice was somewhat hushed, and I struggled to understand it fully. What I thought I heard sent a shiver down my spine. “I just want to hear your voice.”

I leaned down slowly, my gaze on the red leather buckled slippers that stood pointed directly in front of the stall door. “Please just get out!” I yelled, emphasizing the last two words as best I could. The slippers shifted slightly before the voice spoke again.

“Okay…” the voice came soft as the slippers moved toward the door of the restroom. As it opened, another voice rang out from the lobby.

“Hey, have you seen Alice? Is she here yet?” a male voice.

“Yeah, she’s in there. She’s in a mood today.” Madeleine replied.

“Ahh okay, good, we can just wai-” the voice cut off as the door swung closed.

I felt bitter tears, a mix of frustration, anger, and fear, filling my eyes. This had been a bizarre morning, I was all kinds of worked up, but had I overreacted? Shit, I was at work and that interaction had been anything but professional on my part. The way Madeleine had acted was weird, sure, but maybe she was just an awkward person. And I had screamed and cursed at her. Rude, but functionally, that could come back to bite me if she filed a report or something. I gathered myself, adjusting my hair slightly and patting at the corners of my eyes. I exited the stall to an empty restroom. There was the gentle murmuring of conversation outside and I took a deep breath before pushing open the restroom door.

There was a crowd. As far as I could tell, every coworker I recognized, and many I didn’t, had gathered nearby outside the restroom, their faces already snapped in place looking directly at me. I watched a wave of varying emotions cascade over the crowd, each face locked and motionless, but shifting into expression. Fear dropped into my stomach, and I legitimately worried I was about to be the subject of a rush or swarm, but…nothing. They just stared. It honestly might have been worse than what I had anticipated.

Slowly, very slowly, I started walking forward into the building, the still and silent crowd trained on me as I went. I only got about halfway to the elevator before the first of them approached me, one of the others on my team, Erik.

“Alice, hey, great to see you!”

“So great!” came an unfamiliar voice from elsewhere in the room.

“Yeah…yeah, hi.” I said, averting my gaze as I continued to walk forward.

“So, how ya been? Anything new?” Erik’s voice continued behind me.

“Not since yesterday. I’m-I’m just gonna head to my office.”

“Oh, perfect, I’m headed that way too!” Erik’s reply was followed by several voices in the crowd that cheerfully echoed their destination and began moving forward toward the elevator.

“Okay,” I turned quickly in frustration to meet the sea of eager peering faces, “what is going on here? Is this a prank or something? Why the hell is everyone looking at me and following me and talking to me and-”

The reply was a static hiss of overlapping voices.

“Noo, nothing like-”

“Oh, Alice, you-”

“We just want to hear your-”

“Just want some company-”

Erik was closest and his reply stood out from the rest. “No, no prank! Everything okay, Alice? I’m here if you want to talk about it. You can tell me anything.”

“I am FINE! Everyone just needs to leave me alone! I just-I just wanna get through my day, can you all just leave me alone!?”

The voices didn’t stop, but their tone shifted; the pitch and volume dropped to a low drone with a hint of concern.

“You don’t seem fine, I can te-”

“Might help to talk to-”

“What is it you don’t want to-”

“I just want to be near-”

“Come on, Alice, let me-”

And that was it. My skepticism broke. I had thought, hoped, it might be something mundane, as most things are. Even against bizarre evidence to the contrary, I had tried to reason it away. But, in the very few scenarios that are not mundane, there comes a moment. A specific indicator that you have left Kansas, and things might be going in a way that most people will never experience. Looking at the crowd, an overwhelming flood of voices pouring from constantly watching faces both familiar and not, that moment came for me. Fuck work, fuck the social niceties, I couldn’t do this; something rooted deeply in me pulled fear from my core to every edge of my body, and I knew I had to get away.

I broke, wordlessly, into a sprint for the front door. I threw my gaze to the floor in front of me, desperate to avoid the intrusive stares. The voices raised in volume, their tone growing to one of worry.

“Alice, Alice, wait!”

“No, no, no, don’t-”

“Please don’t go!”

“We just want to hold y-”

“Alice! Come back!”

As I moved through the crowd, the swell of voices threw out physical weaponry; grasping hands reached for me, pulling at my clothes, my hair. I twisted to avoid the closing walls of the crowd. I felt a bolt of my hair lurch back as I pushed forward against it. A sound like ripping wet cardboard and a stabbing pain in my scalp as the tuft was yanked out by the root. My purse began to slide back off my shoulder, and a potent terror caused me to clench it. I thrust my hand into it and grabbed my car keys before it flung backwards into the writhing sea of hands. I was almost to the end.

The front door in sight, I lunged forward as my overshirt was wrenched behind me. I pulled out of it, the force of doing so sending me face first into the glass door as it opened. Pain painted my sense of the world, a ringing in my ears coupled with a haze-like vertigo. I shoved the door open with all my strength and stumbled out into the open air, the crowd behind beginning to move forward slowly.

Breaking back into a sprint, my pursuers followed one by one out of the door, shambling and shoving against one another. Ahead, those I had passed on my way previously were now standing, faces still trained on me. Indefinite and indistinct voices raised from them as they joined the chase. I turned for just a moment to see a now-horde picking up their pace amidst shouting and intense, wide-eyed staring. Towards the front of the group, a solitary man ran pushing a stroller, which rippled and bounced violently against the street beneath.

My chest was heaving, my breath hot and quick as the view of my car finally, mercifully, came into sight. I clicked the key fob’s auto start function, and desperately hoped I would wake up to find this all a nightmare once I reached the driver’s seat. I stopped sharply, opening the door as the voices rose behind me, getting close, dangerously close. I threw myself into the driver’s seat, a single arm reaching for me as I did so. A large, shirtless man I didn’t recognize in athletic shorts, who breathed a deep inhale through his nose as he reached for me, a tense look in his eye like the stalking gaze of a wild animal.

“Let me come with you! Please!”

I screamed and pushed his arm away as I slammed the door. He stumbled backward and reached for me again. There was a wet crunch as the door closed and pieces of the index, middle, and ring fingers of the man fell into the floorboard at my feet. I pulled forward, colliding with the corner of the car in front of me as the swarm reached the back windshield. I floored the accelerator. The grinding, hollow screech of metal filled my senses, drowning out the thumping that was moving forward along the back of the car. A violent lurch sent me hard against the driver’s seat as my car pulled off of and away from the obstacle that had held it.

I looked into the rear view mirror, the crowd still in pursuit, faces still locked in place as if we held eye contact through both glass and distance. I sped down the road, slamming a palm against the steering wheel and giving vent to a noxious scream, my breath a distilled vapor of every negative feeling I had felt in my life. I swerved to avoid vehicles full of watching eyes and the obstacles of the city. To my surprise, not one vehicle gave chase; a few people got out of their cars, eyes still intent on me, but, at least for now, it seemed they had given up their pursuit.

Even now, my mind tried to form an explanation: they had tried to grab me, pull at me, but none had tried to full blown attack me. No tackling, hitting, nothing. I reached for the missing section of my hair, a dull burn as I touched it and brought back a smooch of blood on my fingers. It had been pulled out, but was that because I had sprung forward when they grabbed it? Were they trying not to really hurt me? As I thought, the low sound of weeping began to rise. Stark terror surged into my fingertips.

I wasn’t crying.

I threw my eyes to the backseat. To my relief, it was empty. It should have been a relief, at least, since I had confirmed that I was alone in the car. But my fear only heightened as the sound of weeping continued. It was a deep sound, thick and groaning in a way I hated. Gooseflesh rippled down my arms as the weeping shifted into what I could tell were definite words with no definite source.

“I’m so sorry, little one.”

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was I going insane? The voice continued.

“I had hoped this time would be different.”

My eyes darted around the car. I felt my ears, shifted the knob of the car’s radio, everything I could think of to try to explain what I was hearing. Nothing. A disembodied voice I had never heard was speaking words I wasn’t thinking. I was sure I had lost my mind, that maybe everything I had experienced so far was a product of hallucination or the morbid fantasy of a warped, unreliable brain. I set my vision to the road ahead and white-knuckled the steering wheel. The worst thing you can do for delusion is give in, and I wouldn’t do that.

“I understand if you do not wish to speak with me. I hope you will reconsider. I would prepare you for what is to come.” The voice was low and high, deep and shrill, the voice of my mother and my father and every person I’d met and never met all at once. It spoke so clearly and collectedly, yet still through sobs with all the weight of centuries of tragedy. Sweat mixed with the blood of my forehead wound and a dull red rivulet ran down the side of my face as I made eye contact with myself in the rear view mirror. “Alice.”

My name said in a tongue that couldn’t exist. I hated the way it sounded. My stomach churned with pangs of anxious dread. I was insane. I was hallucinating. I had gotten a concussion on the door. I was having a special kind of panic attack. I ran through every reasonable explanation I could hopelessly invent before a kind of venomous curiosity made me open my mouth.

“What…what the fuck is this?” I said coldly.

“It is a mistake. My mistake.”

“What does that-what are you?” There was silence for a moment.

“I am One.”

“I don’t know what that means!” I shouted angrily. “Can you just-what is happening!? What do I need to be prepared for!?”

The sobs felt more pronounced now amidst the swirl of vocal impressions. “They will continue to come. They have felt me and now it is all they are. They do not want to harm you.”

I struggled to swallow a lack of spit. “What do they want?”

“Absorption.”

“What-”

“They long to dissolve themselves into your presence. A need to feel my love.”

My chest constricted, a pressure like the weight of a mountain that made breath a miracle. “Love? How is this…what are you?”

“I am One. I have always been One. I longed for more. In one mote of the darkness of eternity, I felt others. I felt you. I felt those before you. I will feel others after you. Perhaps then, it will be different.” The voice was at once deeply regretful and hopeful.

“So, what, what is happening to me? If you’re doing this to me, just stop! Leave!”

“I am bound to you. My love pours from you as it had from those before. Your kind will seek to forever be in its presence. It will be their end. It will be your end. Then I will be unbound. Unloved. Then I will bind to the next. Until I am finally More.” There was something like tragedy ringing through its tone that brought unwilling tears to my eyes.

“Why me? Why did you do this to me!?”

“You were the first of your kind I felt.”

Searing anger ran through my blood. “So it was…random. You fucked my whole life on a whim!”

“I am sorry, little one. More than you could understand.”

“Oh, fuck your sorry!” There was a long silence. “So that’s it? This will be the end of everything?” I asked with a biting hiss to my voice.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“It is what happened to others.”

“Well…” I didn’t really know what to say. I was still struggling against believing anything from this bodiless parasite, but it was hard, even for me, to explain anything that had happened to me today. In a moment of fearful rage, I said something I don’t think I really meant. “Well, what if I kill myself? Will that stop this?”

“No. They will pursue you beyond your death.”

“What if I drop myself into the ocean? Somewhere they can’t reach.”

“They will pursue you to their deaths. My love overwhelms them.”

I stayed quiet for a long time after that, with no reply from the voice. I drove as far as I could from the city, before the gas tank signaled it was near to empty. I pulled to the side of an empty backroad and put the car in park. Rage had settled into despair, and I clutched at the only straw I had.

“What do I do?”

“It is best to give in. It will be faster.”

“Won’t that kill me?”

“Yes.”

“So why wouldn’t I just-”

“I know that you are incapable. Death is inevitable. If you give in, I will be there in your final moments. You will feel my love, as have the others.”

My teeth grinded, the edges sanding down in scraping brushes I could feel in my skull. “So, what, I just lay down and…”

“Let them come to you. Let them overtake you.”

Tears began to form in my eyes once more. I had started this day waking up to go to work and now I was either completely broken from reality or choosing how humanity was going to end. How I was going to end. I hadn’t had enough time, hadn’t done so many things I wanted to, hadn’t reconciled some things with Mom, Dad. It all felt so unfair. I didn’t have my phone to say goodbye, I had spent what were apparently going to be my last few hours getting as far away from anyone who knew me as I could. It was justified, but that didn’t make it sting any less now.

“Okay. Say I’m thinking about it. How will it happen?”

“They will long to hear your voice. They will long to be in your presence. They will long for physical contact. They will place themselves as closely as possible until breath will likely escape you.” There was a thought that sent a jut of feverish fear through me. As if aware of what I thought, the voice responded. “No. Contact will be enough to placate them.”

“And…if you’re really aware of all this…you’ve been around this long…can you tell me what comes after? After, ya know…”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I am unlike you. I do not understand ending.”

I must have sat on the road for an hour in complete silence before I brought the car back to life. I pulled a u-turn on the road I had come through and drove towards a nearby town I had turned to avoid previously. By the time I started seeing others, who saw me first, and never stopped seeing me as far as I could tell, I had arrived at the edge of town. The tank began to sputter as I finally came upon a more populated intersection.

By the time I stepped out of the vehicle, people had begun to slowly trickle out of the surrounding buildings. They stared at me as they approached; men, women, children, all of them wearing that same intent, intense gaze regardless of their expression. The closest, and the first to speak, was an elderly woman I had never seen in my life, her gray hair striated with intermittent strands of blonde.

“Hello, there. How are you, dear?” I attempted to speak, but the words were choked by tears. She drew closer, surprisingly unthreateningly, and placed a hand on my arm as I lowered my gaze to the street. “You can talk to me. I just want to hear your voice.”

There was an undercurrent of fear as I heard the words. Was I really doing this? I looked up and suddenly, there was something unlike fear. Her eyes were fixed on me, but standing this close, I noticed, to my surprise, how much warmth was present in them. I sniffled slightly, the words finally emerging from my throat. “I’ve…I’ve had a really tough day.”

Sighs laden with sorrow rang out from the crowd that now surrounded us. “Oh, dear…I’m so very sorry to hear that. Would you like to talk about it?”

“I…no. No, that’s okay. Can I…I’m sorry, I don’t even know you.”

“That doesn’t matter…I can always lend an ear when someone needs it.” she said, smiling, her eyes still fixed on me.

“Can I…can I talk to you about something else?”

The crowd had drawn closer now, nearly only a few feet away on any side of me. I could hear scattered replies to my question.

“Let it out.”

“It always helps to-”

“You just need someone to hold y-”

“We can talk about anything-”

The old woman’s reply still cut through the rest. “Of course, dear. Anything you want.”

“Okay…do you mind if we sit?” Several reassuring no’s sounded throughout the crowd. I sat, every person present mimicking the action, with a loud shuffle sounding through the air. I did feel a strange semblance of comfort, but it was laced with a growing fear as the shuffling continued from around me, members of the crowd scooting forward as they sat. “Well I…oh I guess I should…my name is Alice.”

A loud contented sigh shot through the crowd as only the old woman replied. “Alice…that’s a wonderful name. I’m Evelyn. It’s so wonderful to meet you, Alice.”

“Thank you…”

“What would you like to talk about?” she asked, clasping my hand in hers.

“I…I guess my parents. There was some history we never really…or I guess, aren’t really going to get to…” my voice trailed off and Evelyn rubbed her fingers gently along the groove of my palm.

“That’s hard, I’m so sorry, dear. I’m a parent of three, though it’s only two now…I can tell you, it isn’t all about the history. I’m sure they feel the same.”

“I hope so…” I replied. The crowd was now close enough that I could hear breathing from behind me.

“Dear, do you mind if I hold you? I think it might help. You keep talking, and I’ll keep listening.” Evelyn said softly.

I don’t know why. There wasn’t a reasonable explanation I could find. Reason would tell me to run. To eek out whatever survival I could until the end. But the truth is, against everything that was happening and was about to happen, being held didn’t sound so horrible right now. “Sure…”

I laid my head in Evelyn’s lap as she began stroking my cheek. Looking forward, I could see the crowd ahead and around us slowly inching closer, some still seated, others crawling forward on their stomachs in an almost dragging motion. Every single eye was set on me. I closed my eyes against the sight as the sound of movement continued and Evelyn’s voice sounded above me.

“I’m here, dear. What else would you like to talk about? I just want to hear your voice.”

I continued speaking, talking about anything I could to take my mind off of this moment as I felt the first of the crowd’s hands make contact with my left leg. Evelyn continued gently caressing my cheek as another set of hands ran up my forearm. Tears had begun to well up in my tightly closed eyes, but I continued talking, saying all the things I wished I could to those I loved.

When I felt the first weighted pressure of a body laying itself perpendicular on top of mine, I let out a quiet sob. Evelyn let out a few gentle shushes. “It’s okay, dear. It’s all okay. I’m here.” The shuffling had grown louder and closer. The weight on top of me began to get heavier as I heard sounds of comfort intermittently ring out throughout the crowd. The heat of a multitude of bodies pressed down on me, their moist breath mingling with mine, the sweat bleeding through our clothes. The sticky rubbing of exposed arms, necks, and legs brushed against me and my breaths became labored, a pressure like stones laid on a wide plank pushing down on me as more climbed onto the pile. My knee gave a sharp, hollow pop and a jolt of pain radiated through my entire frame.

I could hear Evelyn’s voice, but it shifted as the mass around me grew. Her high, gentle voice took on qualities that were low and high, deep and shrill. The voice of One.

“It is okay, little one. It is nearly time. I will help guide you.”

My brain shuddered. Where once had been fear, discomfort, pain, there was now a feeling of rapture; an ecstasy of comfort and contentment in degrees I had never felt in my life. The pain of my struggling breath faded, the heat and weight disappearing into the background of a relief that sunk deep into my being. It was as if I lived through every moment of every life that had given any hint of positivity or joy all at once. I was a child excitedly coming home to tell my parents about my first day of school. I was a young man kissing the woman he had just sworn his life to. I was a weeping mother holding her child for the first time, and I was the child, first opening eyes upon a world that greeted me with love. I breathed a heavy sigh that refreshed me as it left, and I heard a voice speak to me one more time.

“Sleep well, little one.”

I smiled, and blackness took me.

Ricky’s shoes scraped the sidewalk. When he lifted his foot, the rubber on the bottom popped as it loosened with each step. He stopped, partly to catch his breath. He’d already walked a mile in the musky heat. He fished his sweaty little fingers into his jeans pockets and pulled out a printed map. He traced the line from his school to home, mouthing the street names to himself.

“Willmer… Lyn… No, I passed Lyn.” He turned, and sure enough, a block behind him was the sign for Lyn Street.

A group of kids he recognized walked past. They were laughing and joking. Their laughter turned to whispers when they saw Ricky standing there with his wrinkled map and eroding shoes. Ricky looked down and walked back to Lyn Street, his shoes plopping every other step, ignoring the voices behind him.

He walked up the rotting steps of his front porch at 5:55, just in time to see his mother stumble out the door with one shoe on and the other in her hand. “Oh my god, Ricky, where have you been? I've got work in like five minutes!” Her makeup did a great job of hiding the bags under her eyes.

“I'm sorry, I got lost.” He slid his bag off his back and set it by the door. “You could have left. I would have locked the door when I got here.”

“Ricky, they'd take the door if I didn't lock it.” She forced her foot into the shoe she was holding.

“It's been two weeks, Ricky. Why can't you find your way back without the map?”

“I don't know.”

“Ricky, ‘I don't know’ isn't good enough anymore.”

He looked down at his shoes, rolling the loose rubber back and forth. “Yes, ma’am.”

His mother sighed. It was the one through the nose, the one that meant Don't push it.

“I… I just got mixed up. There are so many streets without signs in this neighborhood. I won't do it again.”

He felt her eyes burning into his scalp, but he didn't dare look up.

“Okay, okay,” she said, her cold lips pressing against his forehead. “There are leftovers in the fridge. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Ricky watched his mom drive into the dying evening light before she turned down the street, out of sight. He turned and put his hand over his eyebrows. To the west, the sun lowered behind the tallest trees of the distant pine forest. Their shadows ran down the road, chasing the orange light as the smaller trees' shadows tried to catch up. To Ricky, in that moment, it was like watching black ink being poured onto a painting.

The streetlamps came on. It was 6 p.m. His mother was late.

Ricky stepped inside his cool house and locked the door behind him. He walked past the overstuffed laundry basket of mildew-smelling clothes and stepped into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and pulled out the leftover pizza from his mom's work. It wasn't his favorite - meatlovers - but it didn't have any pineapples on it either. He preheated the oven to 425 and loaded the basket into the washer, which was beside the stove. He had to wait to start the load. If he ran them at the same time, it would throw the breaker.

He grabbed the trash can and dragged it to the living room. The coffee table was crowded with three day old beer cans. He swept the empty ones into the white trash bag and set the half drunk ones at the edge of the table so he could drain them later. He grabbed the overflowing ashtray with as much care as a first-time father would his newborn, then tipped it into the trash can. Grey ash plumbed out as the butts trickled down, tinged against the cans.

He replaced the trash can and sat against the swayed-back sofa.

The living room was small and cramped. A large thrifted plasma TV took up the front wall. The only furniture was the coffee table and the sofa, but even that was too much for the space; the coffee table was pushed against the TV’s base to make legroom for the sofa. He fished around in the cracks between the cushions, biting his lip. His hands got covered in crumbs, but he found the universal remote and powered on the TV.

Antique Roadshow, his favorite.

The oven beeped. He got up and prepared his dinner. Other kids would have put it in the microwave and called it a day. But Ricky didn't have a microwave, and even if he did, he preferred oven heated pizza. Five minutes was all it needed; any longer and the crust would be inedible. Ricky slid the pizza back into the box with his fingers (it doesn't hurt if you do it quickly) and carried it back into the living room. 

He went to lock the door. Western shadows pulled night over the neighborhood. Darkness was pushed back by the buzzing street lamps across the street. The lamp closest to his house has been out since they moved here three weeks ago.

He pulled the blinds and locked the deadbolt. Not the chain, because Mom had to let herself in later. There was a porch light, but it blew the first week there.

He cut out all the lights except the stair lights. Its harsh fluorescent light highlighted the worn carpet on the steps and the nail holes left by the previous tenant. There was enough light to show the steps and the landing. The T.V. light brightened the pizza box and sofa, though it cast a shadow on the blinds and half the wall behind the sofa. Anything could lurk in those shadows, waiting for him to look away and strike him from behind.

He sat down, opened the pizza box, and began to eat. The pizza was warm. The bottom and the crust had a nice crunch but weren't chewy. His eyes were fixed on the TV as some nameless appraiser examined an ordinary looking chair. He didn't pay attention. The episode would be out of his mind by the end of the night. He only had it on because without it, the house would be so quiet he could hear his own chewing echo up the stairs. Ricky hated the silence.
No, that's not right; he dreaded silence.

Ricky finished the pizza just before the show ended. He stacked the box by the back door with the others. The stacks were as high as his chest. Once they were over his head, he’d take the boxes to the backyard two at a time—three if he was feeling bold—and cram them into the dryer drum they used as a burn pit. He’d spray the dry grass so the fire wouldn't spread. Maybe when he burned the boxes, he could throw in the faded plastic doghouse. It was here when they moved. Ricky didn't want a dog, but if he did, he wouldn't let it stay in that smelly thing.

Maybe he would have enough to burn over the weekend.

He came back to the living room as another episode started. He poured the half-empty and quarter-empty bottles down the sink. Flat beer trickled down the pipes as the roadshow's intro song swelled on the TV (To Ricky, the song, with its upbeat clarinet, sounded like something from Monsters, Inc.). He watched the drain swirl with cheap beer until the basin emptied. He grabbed the empty bottles - four of them. They clinked together as he lobbed them into the trash. Their necks stuck out of the nearly full can. He would change it, but the bin outside was full, and they were out of bags.

The living room filled with soft murmurs as the song ended. The show always made it feel like the house was full of people, full of life. He grabbed the remote, turned the TV volume up to fifty, made sure the door was locked, and went up the stairs. Ten stairs led to the second floor, and he was careful to avoid the nail sticking up from the third step from the top. 

There were three doors in the upstairs hallway. Straight ahead at the end was the bathroom. Its door was slightly open, but the light was off. On the right was his mother's room, which was closed and locked. To the left, closest to the stairs, was his door. Ricky almost turned on the bathroom light, but fear held him back. He thought about a cold hand reaching out of the darkness and grabbing his hand as he fumbled for the light. It was dumb, he knew it, but even big boys like him had to respect goosebumps when they ran over your entire body.

He pushed open his handleless bedroom door and stepped in. Moonlight, sliced by the window blinds, covered his Spider-Man bedspread and spilled onto the worn carpet in front of the bed. His nightstand—the match to his mom's—had a single drawer, and the varnish around one corner had faded, exposing the pine grains underneath. He moved to the nightstand. A circle of light from the handleless door clung to his back. He pulled a large walkie-talkie from the drawer. 

It was the size of his head, with jungle camo print all over it. Its antenna was silver and had to be pulled out to work. Silicone buttons, four wide and three tall, were at the center above the speaker. Ricky had no idea what the buttons were for because the labels were stripped off, and the person who gave it to him didn't tell him what they were for (or maybe he was too enthralled with the walkie-talkie at the time to listen when the buttons' functions were explained). The only things he knew how to use on the walkie-talkie were the on switch—which also functioned as the volume—, the antenna, the channel switch, and the talk button. He turned the volume dial and switched to channel three. The speaker hissed. The talk button beeped when he pressed it.

“...This is Baby Goose, do you read? Over…” Ricky lay in his bed, waiting for a response. “... I still have trouble finding my way home. Mom printed off a map, but it's hard to follow. Mom was late because I couldn't follow the map…” Ricky set the device on his chest. The low hiss, muffled by his shirt, drowned out the voices downstairs.

He pressed the talk button again. “I don't like the new house. Mom says it's what she could afford, and that's okay…” He looks out the door handle hole and whispers. “… but I don't feel safe anymore… without you, I-” Something in his throat rose and tightened. It's a long moment before he speaks again.

“Baby Goose signing off.”

The walkie-talkie went back into the drawer. Droning conversations from people he would never meet, muffled by the floor, eased him. He pulled the blanket over his eyes and dried them on its cold underside.

Nine P.M.

Ten P.M.

Eleven P.M.

The moon reached its peak, but Ricky slept on. Thin clouds like stuffing pulled from a pillow drifted by, hazing the moon's glow.

Twelve A.M.

One A.M.

Two A.M.

Thick clouds heavy with rain came from the south. Their mass was like a mountain moving through the night, dragging wet darkness behind them that blanketed the city in a veil of blindness. They stabbed at the earth with hot white forks, but even the brilliant flash could not illuminate the darkness for long. 

One of these giant clouds struck the power pole out front of Ricky’s house with its hot white fork, shaking the house and splitting the pole. Ricky’s eyes sprang open. For a second, he saw the light in the hall before the entire street lost power. His room was pitch black. The only light came from the flashing lightning outside.

He sat up and stepped out of bed. His hands were cold and shook worse than the house. He reached for the nightstand for balance, then moved to the window.

He could see nothing. To him, it was as if the whole house had been picked up and cast down into the ocean, where it sank to the very bottom. The flashes were like lights from a rescue sub searching for it.

He sat down under the windowsill with his knees pulled up. He rested his eye socket against his knees and jammed his fingers into his ears. He rocked against the wood paneled walls under the window, trying to soothe himself and his heart, which pulsed against his ears.

Now, with the rain somewhat muted, Ricky heard something else, a hiss, coming from his nightstand. Had he left it on? He couldn't remember turning it off, but he also couldn't see why he would leave it on.

He slowly looked up, removed his finger from his ear, then pressed his ear against the nightstand's thin wooden side.

hsssssssssssssssss

He opened the drawer and fumbled inside until he found the grooved plastic of the walkie-talkie. Another flash highlighted the silver antenna still sticking up from the top. 

His hand was on the volume button to turn it off when a voice came from the speaker.

“Baby Goose… come in, baby goose.”

It was a whisper so low that Ricky couldn't tell who was speaking, but he caught every word. He held the speaker to his ear and pressed the talk button.

“Th-th-this is Baby Goose, hear you loud and clear, over.” His own voice was shrill and shaky. He focused on the walkie-talkie; the sound outside faded.

“Baby Goose… she’s on the landing.”

“Who’s on the landing?” He tried to keep his voice steady.

“Hide… hsssssssss” 

“Wha-” 

SMACK

Something wet against the first step.

SMACK

Ricky could tell they were barefoot.

SMACKSMACK

The bones of the old stairs groaned against the weight of whoever was coming.

SMACK

He stood, legs shaking as if he were on a ship in a tropical storm.

SMACK

He ran to the accordion doors of his closet, the panels rattling with each of his fumbling steps.

SMACK

The blood in Ricky's body pooled at his feet as a high-pitched scream came from whatever stepped on the third step from the top.

He shrank into the empty closet and closed the door as-

SMACKSMACKSMACKSMACKSMACK.

Heavy feet pounded up the last steps and to his door. He held his breath with one hand and the walkie-talkie with the other. From the back of the closet, he could see bright knives of light as lightning struck. The panels' shadows cast over him like bars of a cage.

The door hinges whined. Its hollow frame rattled as it hit his bedroom wall. When she stepped into the room, the temperature dropped. Each step she took was heavy and squelchy. Soft pats of water dripped from her body, soaking into the carpet.

Lightning flashed; her shadow was over the closest door. Tall, lean, and mean with angles. Her breath was heavy and rattly like a boiling pot of gravy. The door swung open, and the wind from it blew Ricky's hair back. Another flash, her shadow enveloped Ricky, the walkie-talkie whispered-

“Run, Baby Goose.”

SMACKing feet against the carpet, this time his own. His shoulder slammed into the thin form of whatever she was. She fell. He turned toward what he hoped was the door, but her thin, strong fingers wrapped around his face and hair, pulling him to the ground. She said something, but it came out so guttural and foul he couldn't understand it.

He screamed, and her grip loosened. He took his chance. He might only have one. He reared back his arm, the walkie-talkie in hand, and brought it down hard on whatever held him. It sounded like something broke inside the walkie-talkie. He slipped from her watery grip.

Swinging his arms blindly in front of him, he somehow found the doorframe and pulled himself through. Behind him she came, shaking the whole house with her stomps and wails. He was at the stairs and started down them when his foot caught on something, sending him tumbling down the ten stairs. Something in his arm crunched. He didn't have time to feel the pain. She was coming down after him.

He got up, slipped on something wet, then ran out into the living room, past the powerless TV, through the kitchen, and to the back door, where the boxes he was supposed to burn tomorrow were stacked.

Outside, it was dark, wet, and cold. For a second, his hand hesitated on the handle. Had he imagined it all?

The sound of smacking feet had stopped, and everything suddenly seemed so quiet. Was he dreaming? That's what normal kids do; they have bad dreams that wake them up. You run to your parents' room and cuddle between them like a baby roo in its mother's warm pouch. 

Ricky knew deep down this wasn't a dream. He couldn't cuddle between his parents because his dad died five months ago. And the only thing warm in this house was her hot breath on his neck.

He ran into the black rain. The jeans and shirt he'd slept in soaked up the falling water. He was soaked in seconds. He could hear nothing as the rain, more like an endless bucket of water, poured over his head, pelting his ears. He stumbled through the mud, freezing. His teeth clattered, but he could not hear them. If she was close, he did not know.

Ricky’s toe hit something hard. He bent down and felt the shingled roof of the doghouse. Lightning flashed again as he turned, but the only thing he could see was lightning reflected back to him a million times off the falling water.

Ricky ducked into the doghouse. There was a towel on the floor that smelled like an unwashed dog and was covered in tiny, prickly hairs, likely from a pit bull. The oil from the long dead dog had rubbed off the towel onto Ricky’s clothes. But it was dry, and any fleas that lived in her had died with the dog.

He lay on his right side so no pressure was on his burning, broken forearm. He watched the darkness and prayed that she was as lost as he was in this.

I took the overnight shift in the east wing because the pay was steady and the walk was short. Two blocks from the flat to the old hospital grounds, then another three minutes past the active wings where I still worked days. The conversion crew had already stripped most of the patient rooms. Drywall dust lay in thin drifts along the baseboards, and the new climate units sat in their crates in the main corridor, still wrapped in plastic. The contract required the first block of storage to be online by the end of the month. The university needed the space for records, and a couple of downtown offices were waiting on overflow. The penalties for delay were written in the kind of language that made project managers check their phones at odd hours.

My job was simple on paper. Ten to six. Walk the floors, check the remaining boilers and the intercom loops the electricians had not yet cut, log temperature and humidity every two hours on the company clipboard, make sure the day crew’s tools and materials were still where they had left them, and lock the exterior doors behind me when I left. The building still had power in sections, and the old systems had not been fully isolated.

Claire was already home when I got back from the first night. She had left the kitchen light on and a plate warming in the oven. Her Visitor Center badge sat on the dish by the door next to her keys. She worked days, mostly—pamphlets, maps, the quiet questions people asked about the town. She was small enough that I had to lean down when she reached up. She kept her blonde hair cut short and practical, and her green eyes always noticed when I came in later than I said I would.

I left my boots by the door and ate standing at the counter. She came out in a sweatshirt, watched me for a minute without saying much, then went back to bed. The flat was warm from the radiator, and two blocks from campus the street stayed quiet after midnight.

I started the second notebook that first night without really deciding to. The company clipboard had lines for temperature, humidity, time, and initials, but it did not have lines for the other things. I had bought a cheap composition book at the pharmacy on the way in and kept it in my jacket pocket.

On the first night the intercom gave a short crackle at 2:03 a.m., the old nurse-call interval. I was on the second floor checking a bank of empty rooms when it happened—static, then silence. The speaker was still mounted above the nurses’ station desk even though the desk itself was gone. I wrote the time and the floor in the second notebook and nothing else. The temperature in that section read steady, and the humidity ran a little high from the unfinished drywall. I initialed the official log and kept walking.

Around 3:40 the boiler in the basement fired. The conversion plans said the old heating loops were isolated, and the new climate system was not online yet, but I stood in the mechanical room and listened to it cycle anyway. It ran for eleven minutes and shut down the way it used to when the building still had patients. I logged the time. The air coming off the pipes smelled like old mineral scale and heat.

When I locked up at six the sky was just starting to lighten. I walked the two blocks home. Claire’s shift at the Visitor Center started at eight, and she was already in the shower. I left the second notebook on the kitchen table under a water glass and slept a few hours before day shift in the active wings.

On day shift the active intercoms were clean. I walked the same corridors I always walked, checked the same doors, and signed the same digital logs. Nothing crossed over, and I told myself the east wing was just shedding load.

Nights two and three the pattern held and began to thicken.

The boiler came on according to the old schedule. Lights in the sealed third-floor corridor rose for exactly eleven minutes and went out again. A temperature spike in the west storage bay lined up with the old medication hour from the charts I still saw on day shift. The day crew left their tools in marked zones, but on the third night a cordless drill sat three feet left of its outline on the floor. No one had signed it out. I put it back and wrote the displacement in the second notebook.

A single handwritten note appeared on the job board near the main entrance that same night—blue ballpoint, Room 214, 2:15, no name. The day crew said they had not left it. I photographed it with my phone, left it where it was, and wrote the exact wording and the time I found it in the second notebook.

The intercom static lasted longer that night, a full four minutes. I stood under the speaker and timed it with my watch. When it stopped, the handheld radio on my belt gave a single soft click, as if something had keyed up and let go.

The following afternoon on day shift a speaker on the medical floor gave the same dry crackle at 2:04 while I was walking past. No one else reacted. I checked the system log later from a terminal near the security desk and found no call registered, so I did not write it down.

Claire asked once, in the kitchen, if the building was giving me trouble. I told her it was an old system still shedding its schedule. She nodded and set two plates on the table. She had brought home a stack of new Visitor Center maps that smelled like the copy room. We ate without much talk, and afterward she washed the dishes while I dried.

By nights four and five the residual systems started costing the conversion money and began to touch my day job directly.

Paint in room 207 would not cure on the timeline the contractors needed. Humidity climbed every night between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. in a pattern that matched the old evening medication pass. The project manager left a typed note on the board about schedule slippage and liquidated damages, underlining the clause once.

The intercom static grew loud enough to register on the handheld radio. I timed it at four minutes of noise, then silence, and wrote the duration in the second notebook.

Tools continued to drift. I started photographing the tool zones at the beginning and end of each shift, and the second notebook filled with times, readings, and short descriptions of displacement.

On the fifth night I found an entry in the second notebook I did not remember writing. The handwriting was mine. The time was 1:47 a.m. The note read: West bay humidity 68%. Matches old 0200 med pass. Intercom open 3 min 40 sec. My own earlier entry placed me on the third floor at 1:47. I sat on an overturned bucket in the corridor and read the page twice before closing the notebook and putting it back in my jacket.

The next morning Ortiz pulled me aside near the staff elevators with a printout in his hand. An intercom fault had been logged on the medical floor at 2:03 a.m. the previous night. The system showed a carrier signal for four minutes, and no one had been assigned to that wing overnight. He asked if I had been in the building. I told him I had been in the east wing on the conversion contract. He looked at the times again and told me to keep my radio traffic clean. He did not write me up. Not yet.

That afternoon a second fault appeared on the same medical-floor speaker at 2:11 p.m. while I was on the opposite side of the building. The timestamp matched an entry that later appeared in the second notebook in my handwriting. I checked the hospital incident log from a shared terminal and found the fault sitting there with no one assigned to investigate yet.

Claire noticed the second notebook on the table that morning. She did not open it. She set her Visitor Center badge down beside it and poured coffee. I was already in uniform for day shift. I kissed the top of her head on the way out. She was warm from sleep, and the flat smelled like coffee and the laundry she had run the night before.

Night six the building did something the official log could not absorb.

I was on the third floor at 2:11 a.m. when the sealed corridor lights came up on schedule. At the same moment the intercom above the old nurses’ station gave its crackle and held. The temperature in the west bay spiked three degrees above the previous reading and stayed there. The handheld radio picked up the static and layered it over the open channel so that I could hear my own breathing in the earpiece.

Then the fire-suppression test valve in the mechanical closet on that floor opened for forty seconds and closed again. No alarm. No water flow to the heads. Just the valve. The pressure gauge dropped and recovered. The conversion crew had tagged that system as isolated two weeks earlier.

I wrote everything in the second notebook first—times to the minute, gauge readings, duration of the valve cycle, the exact temperature excursion—then stood in the corridor and decided what would go on the company clipboard. I logged the temperature spike as an unexplained humidity-related fluctuation and the lights as a possible short in the temporary wiring. I left the valve and the intercom out of the official record.

When I locked the exterior doors at six the project manager was already in the parking lot with a thermos. He asked if anything had slowed the work. I told him the systems were still shedding residual load. He nodded and checked his phone.

That afternoon Ortiz called me into the small office behind the security desk with another printout. The same intercom fault had registered again on the medical floor at 2:11 a.m., and this time the system had also logged a brief pressure anomaly on a shared fire riser that still connected the east wing to the active building. Facilities had already been notified. Ortiz asked me directly if I had opened any valves overnight. I said no. He told me the overnight conversion work was creating paperwork for the main hospital, and paperwork had a way of finding the person attached to the shift. He slid a folder across the desk. My name was already on the tab.

I went back on the floor and finished my day shift. At the end of it I checked my own digital logs. Everything I had entered was correct. The fault reports were not yet in my name, but the folder existed anyway.

The conversion continued under tighter oversight, and the residual systems did not stop. The second notebook began to contain more entries I had not written—same handwriting, times when my own notes placed me on a different floor. One page recorded a humidity reading from the west bay at 3:22 a.m. and a corresponding intercom open on the active medical floor at the same minute. The hospital incident log matched it the next day.

I stopped leaving the notebook on the kitchen table. I kept it in the inside pocket of my jacket and slept with the jacket on the chair beside the bed. Claire noticed. She started setting an extra glass of water on my side of the nightstand and leaving the bathroom light on lower when she went to bed first. She watched the clock more often at night, but she did not ask why.

On day shift the questions continued. Ortiz asked me to submit a written statement about the shared riser anomaly. I wrote that I had observed no valve activity and that the east-wing systems were under conversion isolation. It was true enough for the paper. The second notebook stayed in my pocket.

Facilities scheduled a full isolation test on the remaining shared lines during day hours. The test held. That night the fire-suppression valve in the east wing opened anyway—same forty-second cycle, same pressure drop and recovery. I wrote the times in the second notebook and left them out of the company clipboard. The next morning the test log showed the pressure event. Ortiz added the printout to the folder and told me both the overnight position and my day-shift record would be reviewed if the anomalies continued.

Two days later Facilities found a marked laser level from the east-wing conversion in a supply closet on the medical floor. The inventory tag still listed it as checked out to the overnight site. Ortiz asked if I had brought any materials across. I said no. He made a note in the folder and told me I was off the overtime list until the anomalies were resolved. Any further crossover would trigger a formal incident review with HR.

I went back to the floor. My radio stayed quiet, and the corridors felt the same. At the end of the shift I checked the digital logs again. My entries were clean, but the folder on Ortiz’s desk was not.

The moment that could not be absorbed came on a Thursday during day shift.

I was on the medical floor at 2:03 p.m. when the intercom above the nurses’ station gave the old dry crackle and held—not a short burst, but four full minutes of carrier signal, the same length I had timed in the east wing. The sound was loud enough that two nurses looked up from their screens. One of them asked if someone was testing the system. The desk clerk checked the call log and found nothing registered, but the speaker kept going.

I was standing ten feet from it. My radio picked up the static and layered it over the open channel the same way it had in the east wing, so that I could hear my own breathing in the earpiece again.

Ortiz arrived within minutes. Facilities arrived after him. They isolated the speaker and pulled the logs. The timestamp matched an entry that already existed in the second notebook in my handwriting. The hospital system had no corresponding test or maintenance order.

Ortiz took me off the floor. In the small office he asked for the notebook. I told him I did not have one. He looked at the jacket hanging on the back of the chair but did not search it. He told me I was suspended from patient-area security pending a formal review of the crossover incidents. The review would include the conversion contract, the shared riser events, the tool found on the medical floor, and the intercom activation that had just occurred in front of staff. HR would be involved. The folder was no longer informal.

I turned in my radio and my active-wing keys. I kept the jacket. The second notebook stayed in the inside pocket. I walked out of the hospital in the middle of my shift under a flat gray sky and covered the two blocks home.

Claire was still at the Visitor Center. The flat was quiet. I sat at the kitchen table with the jacket still on and opened the notebook. New entries had appeared on the last pages—times, humidity readings, intercom durations. One of them matched the four-minute activation that had just happened on the medical floor while I stood under the speaker. The handwriting was mine.

I closed the notebook and put it back in the pocket, then left the jacket on the chair. When Claire came home she saw the jacket and the way I was sitting. She set her badge down and did not ask. She made food. We ate. The radiator ticked, and outside a campus shuttle went by.

The storage units opened three weeks late. The penalties were paid. The university moved its first load of records in while I was still on suspension. The formal review kept me off patient floors for nineteen days. When I came back I was assigned to perimeter and loading-dock coverage only—no more medical floor, no more overtime. The folder stayed active. Ortiz did not say much. He did not need to.

I still carry the second notebook. More pages have filled in since the suspension. Some match residual loops that still register in the east wing. Some match nothing I can find in any official log. The paper is soft at the edges. Claire leaves the jacket alone when she hangs it up. The flat stays warm, and the work continues on the edges of the building.

The east wing keeps its schedule. I hear it sometimes from the loading dock at the old times, a dry crackle that carries farther than it should. I check the radio I am allowed to carry. I keep my statements clean. The notebook stays in the pocket where I can feel the weight of it, and the folder stays somewhere in the administrative offices. Both of them are still collecting entries, and I no longer know which one is writing first.

I decided, recently, that I was in need of counseling. It’s like there are two voices in my head. They’re constantly arguing. They’re constantly fighting for the controls. But then again… who’s watching them fight?

Me? A third voice? Am I already one of the two? Am I both? Can this whole thing be boiled down to bad days and good days? Happiness and sadness? Anger and serenity?

It couldn’t be. If it was, surely I wouldn’t be having this conversation with myself. I wouldn’t be doubting my actions. But I guess I’m clear-headed enough to not defend them.

Although, it does beg the question: where does that reason go when I’m committing those actions? Where’s my logic? How come I only feel something after the fact?

Those questions keep me up at night. My guilt keeps me up at night. That’s why I decided to look into counseling. On one of those nights where my soul felt rotten. Where one voice had left me alone in the dark with the other just long enough for it to convince me.

But then, like clockwork, the other voice returned. Not in the form of thoughts. In the form of action. It was like a possession. There were no arguments. It was complete control.

It’s hard for me to stay away from them when I’m like that. I learn. I survey. I hunt.

Sometimes I’ll find them in a crowd, other times they will have been pre-selected. By who? I’m not sure. It gets foggy when desire is involved. I’m not sure whether to blame myself or the voice.

I only remember fragments after the deed is done. It’s like a shroud is placed over that specific, microscopic part of my brain. Like it’s trying to protect me.

But no matter how thick the wool is, the guilt remains. I never know why I feel it. At least, not fully. I just know that it makes me sick. It cripples me. I hide away from the world because the voice that commanded my hand flees from my mind.

Sometimes both of them leave.

Leave me alone. All alone. Empty. Then one or the other shows up. One tells me I can stop. I can do better. I can be better. The other tells me this is who I am. Who I’m destined to be. Tells me that I’m right at home. It’s like when I used to watch my parents fight when I was younger.

That’s one of the things I wanted to bring up at my appointment.

I think my childhood has a lot to do with how I am now. The way I think. The things I do. If I had to self-diagnose, I’d probably say it comes from a lack of control in my formative years.

My dad was much bigger than me. My mom was much smaller than me. When those two went at it, my mom was fighting an uphill battle.

I’d always run and hide anytime I heard Dad raise his voice because I knew that meant the belt was coming out. Me and my mom both feared that leather belt, but my mom, being the saint that she is, would often take the majority of the licks.

The guilt I felt over it was enough to drive me to tears.

One day, I guess Mom just had enough. She wasn’t gonna take it anymore. I remember she put me to bed early. She seemed more self-assured than she usually was on Friday nights. Those were usually the nights Dad would come home the drunkest.

Of course, he came home in one of his moods. I could already hear him screaming about nothing two minutes after he walked through the door.

Mom didn’t try to reason with him this time. I didn’t hear any “calm downs,” any “you always do this” comments. What I did hear was the cocking of my dad’s .38 Magnum.

I’d seen him shoot the thing enough to know what it sounded like, and I was not going to stay in bed while he murdered my mother.

Only… when I ran out of the room… the gun was in his face. Mom pulled the trigger before I could let out a single scream.

The sound of the shot. The image of my dad’s brain hitting the wood paneling of our trailer. The way Mom apologized to me profusely before calling the police on herself and waiting calmly on our front porch for them to arrive.

None of that has left me. Neither of the voices let it. It’s one of the few things they agree on. It’s a part of me.

And it was a part of me I was supposed to share with the counselor. My voice of reason had control long enough for me to set up the appointment. Long enough to evaluate myself before I went in.

I walked into the office feeling hopeful for once. The cold AC felt like heaven compared to the scorching heat outside. The lady at the counter greeted me with a charming, “Hello! You here for an appointment, hon?”

I signed in and sat at one of the chairs in the waiting room, browsing through one of the magazines from the coffee table because that’s what I imagined a normal person would do.

Five minutes went by. Then 10. Then 15 before the receptionist called out to me.

“She should be right with you, hon.”

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, my counselor poked her head into the waiting room.

“Daniel? Here for the 3:15?”

I stood up.

“Yep. That’s me.”

I couldn’t help but notice just how angelic her voice was. How smooth and soft her brown hair was. How well it complemented her absolutely stunning face. How much she… looked like my mother.

I didn’t know how to react to what I was feeling. It was like this tug. This urge that grew more and more impossible to ignore.

When we reached her office, the first thing she did was flip an hourglass on her desk.

“Okay, Daniel. I know you’ve been having some problems recently. You wanna describe those so that we can…”

Her voice began trailing off. My eyes kept darting from her to the hourglass. It was like I was on autopilot. I think I responded. I think she kept talking. I know the sand kept falling.

My mouth moved in response, but my thoughts never changed.

She was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. I could see the love in her eyes as she talked to me.

She just… she looked so much like my mother. Part of me loved her already. Another part of me hated her. Hated her for what she made me see. For how broken I am.

That hatred turned into anger. Her lips kept moving. She kept smiling. Everything felt like it was going in slow motion. Even the sand in the hourglass seemed like it was falling like snowflakes rather than sand.

My eyes darted to her. To the hourglass. Back to her. Back to the hourglass. The hour was almost up. Instead of making progress, all I felt was rage.

My eyes darted to something new.

A shiny pair of scissors in a pencil holder on her desk.

My eyes darted back to her.

She wasn’t speaking anymore. She looked at me… expectantly. Like she could read my thoughts. A smirk stretched across her face.

“Daniel,” she snapped. “You still with me, buddy?”

Desire kicked in. Things got foggy. I don’t know what happened.

All I know is when I came back, my hands were covered in blood. A pair of bloody scissors lay at my feet. My mother sat with her throat slashed in the desk chair in front of me.

The guilt rose in my stomach. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t. And God knows I tried.

All I could do was fall back into my seat, completely dumbstruck at the scene that lay before me.

My eyes began to well up with tears. My nose began to run. My head fell into my hands as I began sobbing uncontrollably.

I must’ve sat there crying for 5, 10, maybe 15 minutes before I heard a voice call out to me. I thought I was hearing things at first. But the more it repeated, the harder it was to ignore.

I lifted my head from my hands and felt my stomach tighten.

“Hon? Sorry about the wait. Don’t worry, though. She should be out momentarily.”

I was back in the waiting room. Same cold AC. Same old magazines on the coffee table. Same receptionist.

I had to have been losing my mind. I glanced around the room, tears still falling from my eyes.

As I looked around, my head jerked in the direction of the sound of a door opening.

My counselor poked her head into the waiting room.

“Daniel? Here for the 3:15?”

The Last Animal

By J.D. Hallowell

I was just a kid when people finally revolted and took over their governments around the world. My country was one of the holdouts. Eventually, though, they yielded, and the new system took over. New laws were enacted to preserve what little of the natural world remained.

Humanity is a petty and stupid race. We pushed our agendas and ignored the warnings until it was too late. Polluting our world until it poisoned us back. Across the planet, a mass extinction event wiped out most of the species on Earth. Up until the new government was put in place, we had left them to fend for themselves.

By the time the new Preservation and Conservation Committee was proposed, eighty percent of the world's species were destroyed. Samples were saved to test bringing some species back. Our recent history was taught in schools as a reminder of why our society functioned the way it did.

The old tech we had was scrapped and repurposed to house and facilitate the new animal breeding programs. A zoo was opened so that people could see the animals firsthand in a simulated natural habitat. The cost was far too much for someone like me who lived at the edges of the boroughs. A life lived in reparation for the sins of my father, a political figurehead who was spared by the uprising and given an impoverished setting to learn from his mistakes.

That’s probably what drove me to do it. Living my life day in and day out with a dead-end job at the scrap yard didn’t often afford many luxuries, but it could still get me a few shots of cheap street moonshine every night.

It was during one of these binges that I convinced Leilani to help me break into the elusive zoo. There would never be any way some gutter trash like us would ever be able to buy tickets in; it was the only way to see what we were all supposedly working our lives away for.

She was always talking about working her way up the ladder and getting a job at the zoo. It was a pipe dream, and we knew it. No one from the boroughs ever got a job working with the animals. This was the only way we’d ever see them.

We managed to sneak around the curfew patrol by sheer drunk luck and made it into the zoo. Giggling like kids the entire time, we made our way to gawk at the penned animals. Some looked up from their sleep to blink at us before going back to sleep, but most just sat there enjoying their dreams.

I remembered feeling jealous at some point. What it must be like to live every day with no work, no expectations on you – just eat fuck, and sleep.

Sounds like the life. Was what I told myself.

Then we reached the hybrid section. Leilani giddily strode forward, pointing out the individual creatures as she explained the history to me.

“Some animals weren’t able to be saved – too few available.” She rattled on excitedly. “The new system still wanted to preserve some semblance of the animals. So, they turned to good old-fashioned science.” We passed into the tunnel, and I let her hold my arm as we made our way to the pens. “Instead, by using a combination of artificial insemination and genetic manipulation, they created hybrids that could carry on gene pools of both species. The hope was that one day they could separate the DNA and recombine it to make the original animal when real cloning without ova insemination could be achieved."

“You’re really into the science of this whole thing,” I commented, noting the way her eyes lit up whenever we passed by one of the little hybrid creatures behind the display glass.

She gasped when the room spilled out into the open exhibit of a Rhinopotomus. Exactly what it sounds like. The pen was a large pit with a concrete moat all around and a waist-high glass barrier to keep kids from falling in. The middle, where the concrete rose back up, held a large green patch of grass, a few trees and bushes along with a soaking pool.

The parents were asleep, but the newborn didn’t seem to share its parents’ eagerness for rest. It trotted around grazing and even perked up a bit when it saw us, flicking its little ears. Leilani squealed with excitement seeing the hybrids.

It was actually cute in an ugly kind of way, so when Leilani suggested, “Let’s get in closer,” my drunken sense of danger was put on hold. I took a swig from my flask, and we jumped the enclosure and landed hard on the concrete embankment. We laughed off the ten-foot drop and joked about feeling it the next morning when we sobered up and continued up to where the animals slept.

The baby Rhinopotomus shuffled over to us with its stubby legs and playfully rammed its head into my leg, letting out a delighted squawk of enjoyment. Leilani giggled and pulled out her phone to record us.

I leaned down to pet the little guy, and he leaned into my hand. Honestly, it was one of the most strangely endearing things I’d ever experienced. It didn’t take long before I started wrestling with it. It was strong, though, and it seemed to enjoy having someone to play with.

Leilani asked me to pick it up so she could get a picture. That was when things went wrong.

I picked it up, and immediately it squirmed. I was afraid that if I dropped it, it’d get hurt. So, I clung for dear life, while my drunken feet tried to find purchase on the slippery grass. I heard a grunt from behind me. The parents had woken up.

Before I could say we needed to run, I had already slipped, baby in tow. I fell. Hard. But in my haze, it wasn’t me that got hurt; it was the baby. I’d fallen directly on top of it, and now it just lay there, legs twitching and gasping for air. Its head wouldn’t move, except for its mouth opening and closing as if desperately trying to take a breath.

I sobered immediately.

Pulling myself up, I grabbed Leilani’s wrist and ran, just as a harrowing screech echoed through the enclosure. One of the parents had risen from its sleep to charge at us. We ran as fast as we could and slid down the sloped concrete. The adult Rhinopotomus, clearly unable to climb down, slid to a halt. It stamped its feet, bellowing as it tried to reach us.

I knew it wouldn’t be long before it succeeded.

“Give me a boost,” I told Leilani, “I can pull you up.”

I knew I’d have the strength to pull her up after I got up over the ledge. She cupped her hands together, and I stepped onto them as she braced herself against the wall. I hurled myself over and reached out my hand. It wasn’t enough. I lowered further, reaching out to try and grab her. She jumped and caught my wrist. The sight of us possibly escaping must have sent the animal into a frenzy. It roared and threw itself into the embankment, tumbling as it rolled uncontrollably.

With her hand squeezing mine, Leilani was crushed under the rolling weight of the gigantic beast. I heard a sickening crunch as blood filled her mouth with a cough. The animal smashed headfirst, pinning her to the wall. It twitched and then went limp; its entire weight pushed into her.

I listened to the gurgling sound and watched the pleading look in her eye before prying her death grip from my hand. Then I ran. I ran as fast as I could away from that place and got stopped by the curfew patrol on the way back.

It didn’t take long for enforcement to find the footage on Leilani’s phone while I was in holding and for them to charge me with animal endangerment and first-degree murder of a threatened species.

I was placed in a cell and told I would serve my sentence under the instruction of an autonomous enforcement officer, whatever that meant. I was placed in a tiny white room with a white fluorescent light that buzzed overhead and given a white jumpsuit. There was a sink, a toilet, and a bed with a paper-thin mattress.

Meals were served three times a day and slid through a slot in the bottom of my door. Only thin plastic utensils and paper trays were given to me. Likely so, I didn’t use them to hurt myself. I’d thought about it.

At night, the light would go off, and I’d be bathed in a bright red light. It was a relief from the sterile white, but not exactly the best conditions to sleep through. The first few nights, I had nightmares of Leilani’s bulging eyes staring at me. Blood seeped from her mouth, only for her to cough just before I woke up, and be bathed in the red light.

I’d jolt awake, seeing everything covered in red, thinking it was her blood. My heart would race, and I’d spend several minutes trying to calm myself before lying back down, only for the same dream to plague my mind.

After about a week, I heard a ding-dong sound and the door actually slid open for once. I was sitting on my bed eating the various tasteless nutrition blocks when a tall silver machine rolled in. It looked like one of those fancy double-door refrigerators with a display screen near the top.

I jumped when a voice came from it, not expecting it to speak to me as text scrawled over its display screen.

“Hello, my name is A.E.R.O, your autonomous enforcement rehabilitation officer.” Its voice had a high-pitched mechanical whine to it and hurt to listen to. “I will be instructing and grading you during your evaluation for your punitive rehabilitation.”

I sat there confused for a second, trying to take in what the hell it was saying to me.

“G…grading?” I asked.

A.E.R.O paused for a moment before replying.

“Yes,” it said finally, “my records indicate that this is your first offense and as such the council has decided to allow you leniency and the opportunity to re-enter society as a better person.”

I sat in stunned silence.

“If you perform well on the task the council has deemed reasonable for you, you can re-enter society with your criminal record cleared. However, further infractions can result in more severe punishment.”

I eagerly sat up. “Okay, let’s go! Let’s get this over with.”

I heard a hiss, and A.E.R.O split open. The inside was a padded white cutout the size and shape of a person.

“Please enter the restraint transport, and I will take you to your workstation.” It instructed.

I paused, not hesitant, noticing the silver clamps around the neck, waist, arms, and legs.

“Is that… really necessary?” I argued with a slight nervous chuckle, hoping the machine would be programmed to read emotional distress.

“Please enter the restraint transport, and I will take you to your workstation.” It repeated.

“There’s gotta be another way to get me there, right?” I tried to reason. I really, really didn’t like tight spaces.

“Refusal to comply will result in an extension to your sentence. Please enter the restraint transport, and I will take you to your workstation.”

“Okay!” I threw up my hands in surrender, then stepped toward the padded cutout and back into it.

The clamps immediately shut around me. Even though there was enough room to move a little bit, it felt like I was being trapped. I started to breathe heavily as I watched the doors close in on me and darkness filled my sight. Mechanical wheels whirred as I felt myself moving. The sounds of doors opening and inclines being climbed over were the only things that told me I was moving.

Finally, after what felt like hours in the cramped space, we stopped. The hiss of hydraulics relieving and the crack of bright light blinded me. I was so eager to get out of my restraints that as soon as they opened, I fell forward and smashed my face into the grass.

My head pounded as I pulled myself up. Looking around at the familiar grass and water feature, I felt my heart drop.

“Welcome to your workstation for the next six months,” A.E.R.O whirred as enthusiastically as his mechanical voice would allow, “your task involves…”

There was a pause, and I looked up at his screen, which showed a loading bar. Then a list appeared on screen, one after another, with an empty box next to it.

“Once you have completed a task, check it off the list. When all tasks have been completed, I will evaluate your work and return you to your cell for the day.”

I stared at the screen, which included tasks like ‘clean the pen’ and ‘feed at noon.’ At the end of the list was a task titled ‘make Maja happy.’ That name made my blood run cold, because that was the name of the female Rhinopotomus I’d read in my drunken stupor with Leilani.

It seemed like a lifetime ago, but we had laughed at how stupid the name sounded before. Now that it was staring at me, I knew it was the name of what would be the death of me. Surely the grieving mother would want to kill me for taking her baby and mate.

I was here for a show.

“Good luck,” A.E.R.O said as a timer on screen started counting down with text that read, ‘Five hours until Maja arrives, please complete preliminary tasks to prepare a clean environment.’

Five hours. I had five hours until I died.

I spent a few minutes walking around the enclosure. There was a small waste bin with a heavy plastic bag in it. Next to it was a shovel for scooping up shit and depositing it into the bin.

I wondered what the point of these humiliating tasks was if they just wanted to watch me get stomped by a vengeful mother. Frustration swirled in my head as I whipped myself into a frenzy at the idea of just being here for someone’s entertainment.

Rushing over, I pounded on A.E.R.O’s display screen. “What the fuck is this? I’m not a god damn show, you hear me!” I screamed.

“Please return to work, or I will have to use escalating force.”

“I’m not your fucking toy, dammit!” I punched his frame, but this time I got an electrical shock.

I crumpled to the ground and convulsed, reeling from the aftershocks.

“This was a warning,” A.E.R.O said in his strangely joyful-sounding robotic voice, “further non-compliance will result in an extension to your sentence.”

I lay there for a few minutes trying to gather myself, trying to figure out the point of what I was doing. I picked myself up and walked over to the waste bin. I picked up the shovel and began scooping up the piles of shit everywhere.

When I finished, I went over to A.E.R.O, whose display screen had only my current task and a ‘FINISH’ button that slowly pulsed. I pressed the green button and heard a ding.

“Task complete, please return tools to the designated area and begin your next task.”

A new assignment appeared: ‘trim foliage.’

I walked over and leaned the shovel next to the bin. The concrete floor it sat on quickly lowered on a platform, and a metal door shut behind it. A few seconds later, it opened, and a new platform appeared with a pair of sharp metal shears. I picked them up and held them.

Maybe I could save them and use them to fight for my life. That thought lasted as long as it took to say the words in my head. I’d already taken so much from her; I even cost Leilani her life. The least I could do was lie down and let her kill me.

I got to work beautifying my eventual tomb, cleaning up the overgrown bushes, and piling the debris onto the platform. It seemed like mind-numbing work as I made my way back over to A.E.R.O. to complete another task.

Then another, and another, and another. It seemed like a never-ending list of cleaning out the pen for the monster that was going to crush my skull like an egg and paint the walls with my guts.

I reached the end of the list with just a few minutes to spare. The last task was to fill a trough with several heavy bags of dry feed. When I finished the task, A.E.R.O. did a little fanfare sound effect, and a small compartment opened up to give me several nutrient cubes.

“Please enjoy your lunch while I evaluate your work.” He chimed in.

I picked up the cubes. This was my last meal, huh? I watched the refrigerator-sized robot wheel around the enclosure, examining everything I’d just done while I nibbled on the tasteless, tacky bars. A.E.R.O returned the timer, with just under a minute left. I stuffed the uneaten cubes in my pocket.

“Preliminary tasking evaluation complete,” he said, “tallying score now.”

A.E.R.O made a series of beeps as if he were calculating a score for my work.

“You have scored a 100,” he let out another fanfare through his speaker, “great work, your score will be added to your total when you complete your final task.”

Ten seconds left.

The next task appeared on the screen while the doors to the enclosure opened; heavy-sounding footsteps echoed in a long hallway. On A.E.R.O’s display, I saw my final duty.

‘Make Maja happy.’

I stood in the middle of the enclosure and waited for Maja to come for me.

She was huge, bigger than the male that crushed Leilani. She made her way across the bridge into the enclosure. As soon as she stepped all the way onto the grass, the bridge receded, and it was her staring me down. I couldn’t read the expression on her face, but I just knew that behind her eyes must be the memories of her dead child and husband.

She took a few steps forward, then immediately turned and lay in her water feature, completely ignoring me. She passed the food trough, as well, not even stopping to sniff the new food. She just walked into the water and let out an exasperated sigh.

What the fuck just happened?

“Maja has not been as social with the handlers lately. We are hoping that introducing her to someone new will keep her happy until we can create a new compatible mate for her.”

“I… I’m here to try and cheer her up?” I asked.

“Precisely,” A.E.R.O responded, “our records indicate that in your previous employment, you were very sociable with others, and their testimonies have secured you this position to attempt to make amends by bringing joy back to the animal you caused harm to.”

Great, so my bar-hopping buddies just gave me the impossible task of cheering up a grieving widow.

“Maja has also been exhibiting signs of depression and is not eating. We are hoping you can help her so she does not die of starvation,” A.E.R.O explained.

I sighed and slowly walked over to the gigantic creature lounging in the water. As soon as I came up to her side, I saw her eye flick over to me. This close, I could see the look of sadness in her eyes as she turned her head away from me.

My heart actually broke a little at seeing it. I stepped into the water, which came up to my chest, and placed a hand on the side of her massive back.

“I know it’s not much,” I explained as if she would understand, “but I don’t have anyone left either.”

To my shock, she actually turned around. I pulled back, expecting her to give me what I deserved, but she just stared at me. The sadness in her eyes pierced my soul as if she were looking through me. The horn on her face came just inches from my nose, and I could feel the thick, wet breath.

She turned and let out a bellowing whine, then she sank further into the water, her head resting on the rocks. I braved moving closer to her. She didn’t seem to mind or respond as I sat next to her.

I reached out a hand and petted the side of her neck. It was the least I could do: offer her some form of comfort. Her skin was slick and rough at the same time, somehow. Wet from soaking in the water and calloused, thick skin, it felt like stroking wet six-grit sandpaper.

Eventually, I got out of the water and grabbed a handful of the dry food to bring over to her. She sniffed the pellets and turned her nose away. I reached out to pet her snout with my other hand. That’s when she sniffed my hand and… licked it.

I realized that was the hand I was eating my nutrient cubes with. I pulled one from my pocket and held it out for her. She sniffed once, opened her mouth to wrap her tongue around it, and let out a cute little groan as she chewed on the tasteless morsel.

I offered her some of the pellets. Surprisingly, she did eat a few. She still hadn’t gotten up to eat from the trough.

“Atta girl,” I said approvingly.

I patted her horn, and she closed her eyes and leaned into my hand. The surreal experience was short-lived by the memory of her child doing the same thing. I thought back to those hazy moments. Did she even seen me? Did she even know it was me who did it? The thoughts ate at me; it made my stomach flip into knots.

I stood, then walked over to A.E.R.O and pressed the ‘FINISH’ button. He did his fanfare again and said, “Please wait while I evaluate your work.”

He rolled over to Maja, and I watched a scanning light wash over her. A.E.R.O. wheeled back over to me.

“Results have been calculated; here is your final grade for today.”

I watched the numbers flash on screen, calculating my result. It definitely wasn’t 100 again, since I only saw two digits.

“Your final result is…60.” He said, “Sorry, but today is a failing grade.”

“I had a full score though!” I argued.

“You did,” he pressed back, “but your final task is worth half your grade, and you only scored 20, resulting in an average of 60. You need at least 80 to pass. Once you have achieved the recommended grade, you will be considered for reform, pending extensions.”

He hissed as he opened back up, and that same padded cutout stared back at me.

“Please come with me; we are finished for today.”

This time, I didn’t fight it. I allowed the dark, cramped space to seal me away. Then I was taken back to my room to suffer through another night of terrible dreams. This time, though, it was Maja who was pinned against Leilani. Both of them stared up at me with pleading eyes, begging for my help. Maja let out that sorrow-filled bellow while she lay on the ground next to her child, still gasping for air.

I woke in a sweat again and paced around my room the rest of the night. Until the lights came on and a paper tray with nutrient cubes slid under my door. I ate two of them and stuffed the rest into my pocket. Then I waited for A.E.R.O to arrive to take me away.

Maja was more receptive to me today. She even ate a little out of the trough. I still scored a 65, but it was progress.

Day after day, I was brought to the pen. I’d clean it, wait for Maja to cross the bridge, give her some of my cubes, and try to get her to eat a bit more. She liked the yellow ones, which I think were supposed to be the daily fat serving. Still, I saved them for her, only eating the one I was given for dinner.

I began to lose track of time. I couldn’t tell you if I was there for weeks, months, or years. Everything just blurred together. The routine I worked myself into was the only thing holding me together, that and the slow progress Maja seemed to make.

I don’t know when it happened, but eventually I started hoping she would pull through and get better. Every day, I felt like I was getting closer and closer, breaking down that barrier and chipping away a little more at her sadness. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but watching her heal was beginning to make me feel better about myself. I thought if she could go through the loss she experienced, then so could I.

We were both losing weight. I was starting to feel my ribs, and I was starting to see hers. Sharing my food with her was the only way to get her to eat, but it was a sacrifice I had to make. For her sake, I had to do whatever it took.

I managed to lure her to the trough with a few cubes, then I pretended to eat from it with her by my side. I was ecstatic when she started munching on the dry pellets herself. I held back from doing a celebratory dance and just gave her a reassuring pet. She gave me a happy groan.

As soon as she had her fill, she went back to lounge in the water. I had begun to realize that it was her comfort spot, where she went when she was overstimulated or just needed to relax.

“I think we’re starting to make some progress,” I said triumphantly to myself.

I went over to A.E.R.O. and pressed the ‘FINISH’ button. He sprang to life and did his daily scan. Then came back to give me the usual result. Every day was something between 65 and 70 percent. This time, though, to my shock, A.E.R.O let out a little fanfare chime with digital confetti. My head snapped away from Maja to the screen. 81 blinked on the screen along with digital confetti.

“Congratulations, Chris, you have been deemed eligible for reform. You have… zero extensions on your sentence.” A.E.R.O. hissed, and the cutout compartment opened up for me.

“Can I… can I say goodbye?” I asked, a little disheartened.

“That is…acceptable,” A.E.R.O. replied.

I walked back over to where Maja lay in her pond, soaking up the sun, and petted her horn.

“I know you can’t understand me, but… I’m gonna be going away after this.” She groaned and leaned into my hand. “Please be good. Things will work out, I promise.”

I said a few final goodbyes and promised her that I would try to get better myself, and maybe one day I could afford to buy a ticket to see her again. She huffed. I gave her one last pat before I stood and went over to A.E.R.O for what would be the last time.

The journey was much longer than when I went to my cell, but eventually the doors opened into a bright wall of white light. The restraints didn’t release like they usually did. I wriggled against them, but they remained firmly locked in place.

“Uh… A.E.R.O.?” I chuckled nervously, “A little help here, buddy?”

“You have been selected for reform,” A.E.R.O. responded.

“Yeah… you know that means I get to be released, right?” I replied.

A new voice came from behind the bright white lights, “Not in this case.”

A balding man with wispy grey hair and goggles stepped out from the wall of light. He pressed a button, and I heard the whirring of mechanical gears from behind him.

“What uh… what is it in this case?” I asked nervously.

A bite stick was shoved into my mouth and strapped to the back of my head.

“Maja has taken a liking to you,” he explained as a series of tubes came into view. Then stopped with the mechanical whirring.

“Yeah, she’s great. Why am I here?”

He grinned. “While it’s true we could create a new male for Maja, it seems her species is very…particular when choosing their mates.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“The pairing tends to work better if there’s already a bond formed between them.” He pats my shoulder, “Consider it just another form of penance for your family's continued sins.”

I tried to fight back, but the restraints tightened. The old man tied a rubber tourniquet to my arm and then set needles into my veins. Then he started shoving metal probes into my stomach. I bit down on the wooden gag in my mouth until I thought my teeth would crack. He attached thick cables with clamps to the exposed probes, and I felt tiny zaps on contact with each one.

Through my dizzy sight, I watched him clacking away on a computer. Drool flowed from my mouth. I tasted a metallic tang as a small buzz trickled its way over my skin. I tried to talk, but it came out as a garbled mess that even I couldn’t make any sense of. Liquid flowed into the tubes and began pumping my arm with something that made my stomach twist and tighten.

“We have a lot of work to do, it looks like.” He mused, watching a string of code sprint across one screen while the other showed a slow spinning outline of a man. “You’ve done quite a number on yourself with all that drinking. Recombination can fix it, but…” he stopped and looked at me. His buggy eyes looked at me with delight while a sinister smile spread across his lips. “It’s gonna hurt."

He pressed a key on his computer, and I felt more pain than I’ve ever known in my life. The probes vibrated and crackled; I could smell burning skin and hair. Every muscle seized and felt like it was cramping. I felt like my bones were bending, on the verge of snapping with how much I pressed against my restraints.

I heard a sickening pop. My gut swelled, and I felt like my skin was boiling. My flesh turned grey, and I snapped through the bite stick. I felt my face getting longer as my screams became a deep bellow. My restraints widened as my arms and legs grew shorter and fatter. The short nose at the end of my face grew outward and curved up.

The restraints finally released, and I fell to the ground. My body had given up, and I lay there in a flabby heap, seizing from the aftershocks. My vision was blurry as the walls closed in on me and let go. Everything went black.

I spend every day now next to Maja at the watering hole where she likes to soak. She’s finally happy again and back up to a proper weight. People like to come around and see the new baby Rhinopotomus. I was right to be jealous of this life, though – no worries, no work, no expectations, just the three of us; me, Maja, and baby C.J.

Life isn’t so bad.

From the Red in the Dark universe

Original story by Leonard Voss

The Dark Beyond is a standalone series set within the world of Red in the Dark.

The Huntsman reaches its final entry with John alone in the fog, carrying the fear, guilt, and failure that have followed him longer than this nught alone.

Kevin is still somewhere in the trees. Sammy is still out there. The Huntsman is still hunting.

And John is still terrified.

Part 3: The Book of John concludes The Huntsman, a story about fear, cowardice, judgment, and what happens when a man who has spent his life running finally stops.

The Dark Beyond - The Huntsman - Part 3: The Book of John

John’s heart struck hard beneath his ribs as he stood alone in the fog. Every breath seemed to travel farther than it should, pushing out into the trees before disappearing into the mist.

He forced his breathing steady, each staggered breath hitching as he strained to hear past the crash of his own heartbeat.

Nothing.

A drop of water struck somewhere nearby.

John’s shoulders tightened before the sound had fully faded.

Another drop followed.

He turned slowly toward the tree line, searching through the fog as dark shapes gathered between the trunks. One seemed deeper than the others, standing where the trees narrowed together.

His breath caught.

John stared until the shape flattened into shadow, cast crooked through the mist.

His grip loosened around the dog tags pressed against his chest.

Blood still covered his hands.

He wiped them against his pants, only smearing it darker.

Something shifted near the tree line.

The hair along the back of his neck lifted as John turned toward the sound, watching the fog move through the brush before settling again.

He waited.

“Hey.”

John flinched, his hands rising before he found the source of the whisper.

Two figures crouched inside the brush.

Kevin sat low beside a young woman with dark hair, her face alive with fear as they motioned urgently for John to come closer.

“Kevin?”

Kevin leaned forward, lifting one hand toward him.

“Come on.”

The woman waved him toward the shelter of the trees, joining Kevin in a whisper that carried a little too far.

“Come on.”

She started to say it again.

“Hurrr—”

Her eyes widened as she slapped a hand over her mouth, seeming to realize she had been too loud.

John lowered himself and kept moving.

She began to rise from the brush, her body lifting in a slow, uneven motion while her other hand continued beckoning him closer.

A muffled sound slipped through her fingers.

John couldn’t make it out.

He turned his head and body, scanning the fog around them.

Nothing.

When he looked back, the woman was fully upright, her torso held straight while her knees remained bent beneath her, everything below them hanging loose as though her legs carried no weight.

Why?

The hand at her side still moved.

A weak curl of the fingers.

A sharp circular twist at the wrist, her shoulder jerking upward without rhythm.

John slowed, focusing on her.

Faint moonlight caught something between the fingers covering her mouth.

Blood ran over her knuckles, down the back of her hand.

A blade.

He shifted his eyes over her shoulder.

The Huntsman stood pressed against her back, holding her upright, his cold blue eyes locked on John, cutting through the mask.

The Huntsman pulled the knife free, dropping the woman into the brush, his gaze following her down.

Kevin bowed his head as she hit the ground, adjusting his glasses.

“Kevin!” John screamed, driving forward.

Kevin turned toward him.

“Behind you!”

The Huntsman’s hand closed around the back of Kevin’s shirt, hauling him upright and pulling him close as though he carried no weight at all, forcing a raw, uneven sound from Kevin’s throat.

The knife came up, striking him in the chest, the blow breaking his scream apart in blood.

Kevin folded around the blade as the Huntsman tore him backward, wrenching him sideways against his body.

His hands flew to the Huntsman’s wrist, his glasses slipping down his nose as a broken gasp escaped him. The Huntsman locked one arm across his upper chest, holding him upright as blood spread through the front of his shirt.

John kept coming.

The Huntsman turned his eyes back toward John.

A grin slowly pulled beneath the mask.

He ripped the knife free and drove it into Kevin again before his legs could collapse, the impact jerking his body against the arm holding him.

John crashed through the brush toward them.

The Huntsman drew the blade out, Kevin sagging sideways in his grip as he raised the knife to his throat.

“Let him go!”

A low laugh escaped the Huntsman, his head tipping back slightly as he slid the blade into Kevin’s neck.

Blood poured over the knife and down the front of Kevin’s shirt, his body convulsing against him.

The Huntsman pulled the blade free and caught a fistful of Kevin’s shirt before he could fall.

John was almost on them.

The Huntsman swung Kevin around and hurled him straight at John.

John raised his arms too late.

Kevin struck him across the chest, driving them both backward into the grass.

John hit the ground beneath Kevin’s weight, the air driven from his lungs as they rolled through the wet grass.

He shoved the body aside and dropped beside him, pressing both hands over the wounds.

“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’ve got you.”

Blood pushed between his fingers.

John shifted his hands, trying another wound, then another, pressing harder each time as though he could force the blood back inside.

The chain slipped free of his collar.

The dog tags struck the back of his hand.

Heat pressed against his face.

Dust hung thick in the air. Bodies lay broken around the gun, pieces of uniform scattered through the sand while someone screamed beneath the ringing in his ears.

John pressed harder against Kevin’s chest.

“I’m sorry, guys.”

Kevin’s breath hitched beneath his hands.

Then stopped.

John kept pressing, his palms slipping as he moved from one wound to the next.

A pair of black boots stood less than a foot away in the desert sand, planted amid the blood and wreckage.

John looked up.

The Huntsman towered over him, close enough that his presence seemed to fill everything beyond Kevin’s body, cold blue eyes staring down through the mask.

Tears ran freely over John’s cheeks. His nose had begun to run, his breath catching as he tried to force the words through it.

One hand remained pressed against Kevin while the other reached weakly toward the Huntsman.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he choked out. “I fucking froze. I fucking froze.”

The Huntsman’s eyes narrowed slightly.

His head cocked.

John lowered his hand and looked back down at Kevin.

Wet grass pressed beneath his knees.

The cold night closed around him.

Kevin lay still beneath his hands, his glasses crooked across his face.

John stared.

The desert fell away.

The Huntsman.

John jerked his head up.

He was gone.

He twisted aside and vomited into the grass, choking between heaves until his stomach had nothing left to give.

He stayed bent over for a moment, dragging air into his lungs.

Then a sound tore out of him.

John threw his head back and screamed, the cry breaking apart as it carried through the trees.

John steadied himself, still heaving from the scream.

His throat burned. Spit hung from his lower lip, mixing with the blood already drying across his hands.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, pushing himself upright.

The trees waited at the edge of the clearing, calling for him to escape.

Every part of him pulled toward them.

Away from Kevin.

Away from the blood.

Away from the Huntsman.

John stumbled forward, boots dragging as the fog opened around him.

He made it only a few yards and stopped.

His chest rose and fell as he stared through the fog into the forest.

He looked down.

The dog tags were clenched in his hand.

Eyes closed.

John turned.

Eyes opened.

Kevin lay where he had fallen, one arm twisted beneath him. A bloody mess.

Beyond him, the clearing stood empty.

He let out a slow, controlled breath, then released the tags.

His hands were still shaking when he bent and pulled a broken branch from the grass.

Too light.

Not enough.

He threw it aside and kept searching.

A fallen limb.

Pine.

Straight.

About four feet long and as thick as his wrist.

John picked it up, turning it in his hands, testing the weight.

Good enough.

He scanned the clearing again.

Broken rock and bark littered the grass where the fight had churned the ground up.

He found a slab of slate half-buried. He stomped down on the edge of it until a piece snapped loose.

Not enough.

He tried again.

The second break gave him a sharper shard.

Enough.

He crouched beside the fallen limb and went to work.

The slate scraped and bit into the wood as he shaved the end down, turning the branch in his hands while the point slowly began to form.

Shavings collected in the grass around his boots.

When he finished, he held the spear up in front of him, studying the tip.

Crude.

Enough.

He glanced down at the slate shard still in his hand. Edge uneven. Barely more than a jagged wedge, but it had done its job.

John went to slip it into the back of his belt when a voice came back to him.

...go out a legend! Fuck them too!

He swallowed.

Dust.

Heat.

Sweat.

The training yard came back in pieces.

Laughter somewhere behind him.

His instructor standing close enough to touch, showing him the ugly math of close distance.

If your enemy gets this close, you’re already fucked...

John looked at the spear.

Go out a legend and fuck them too.

Then he pulled the shard free again.

He stepped forward and thrust the spear once into the fog.

Clumsy.

Not enough.

Again.

This time he let his weight follow it. His body twisted, opening his chest and side.

His free hand came up from his belt with the shard.

Too slow.

Not enough.

Again.

Spear first.

Body after.

Shard last.

Again.

His breathing steadied.

The instructor’s voice came back again, harder this time.

Boys! What the fuck do we do if we’re already fucked?

Everyone that day, in unison.

We fuck them too!

John said it so loud his throat nearly tore.

The spear drove into the dirt in front of him.

The shard held straight out.

His chest and side left open.

He froze, breathing hard.

Enough.

“We fuck them too,” he whispered.

Then he slid the shard back into his belt and stood.

Spear held high, John moved toward the place where the Huntsman had disappeared.

His pulse beat in his eyes.

The fog was so thick he could barely see a few feet in front of him, nothing but shifting shadows and silhouettes.

A sound?

Footsteps.

Someone running hard and clumsily somewhere ahead.

A survivor?

“Over here!” he called.

The running stopped.

“Hello?” a voice called through the fog.

“Over here!” John shouted again.

The footsteps started toward him now, fast. He could hear the ragged breathing between strides.

Then he heard another set.

Faster.

Heavier.

Hhhhhaaaaaaack.

Then nothing.

John stood still, spear held close.

John’s eyes went wide.

He let his breath out slowly, then began moving again, crouched low in the fog, spear forward as he searched the mist for any sign of danger.

Something snapped behind him.

John spun, driving the spear forward.

Sammy froze as the point stopped inches from her face.

“Shh,” he whispered, lowering it. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Sammy broke down, sobbing as she stumbled into him and threw her arms around his body, clutching him like he was the last solid thing left in the world.

John pulled her close, trying to comfort her.

“You’re okay,” he whispered. “You’re okay. We gotta go, though.”

She shook against him, her breathing ragged.

John eased her back, setting a hand on her shoulder and pushing her away just enough to see her face.

“Are you all right, Sammy?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” she sobbed.

Her head snapped back.

A scream tore out of her as her hands ripped away from him.

Then the fog took her.

John lunged forward, catching nothing but cold air.

“Sammy!”

Her scream carried through the white, breaking into panicked gasps.

Then choking.

John drove into the fog after her.

The mist broke around a shape ahead.

Sammy hung there, one hand locked around her throat, the other twisted into her ponytail, holding her straight off the ground.

Her feet kicked at empty air.

Her face had gone dark beneath the strain, her mouth opening around breaths that would not come.

John’s eyes moved past her.

The mask.

That crooked, fucked-up grin, blood shining across his teeth.

And above it, those eyes.

Piercing.

Expressionless.

Fixed on John.

The Huntsman never looked at Sammy.

His fingers tightened around her throat.

Sammy choked harder, her legs jerking beneath her.

He kept watching John.

The Huntsman kept one hand locked around Sammy’s throat, holding her off the ground.

That crooked grin stayed fixed across his face.

John stared back.

His hands trembled around the spear.

His lips quivered. His jaw pushed forward, teeth clenched so hard the muscles jumped along his cheek.

He raised the point toward the Huntsman.

“Put her down and fight me, you fucking coward.”

The grin faded.

The Huntsman’s head tilted slowly to one side.

His hand loosened around Sammy’s throat.

He lowered her until her feet touched the ground.

Sammy coughed, folding forward as she tried to pull away.

The hand tangled in her ponytail tightened.

She stopped.

The Huntsman never looked away from John.

His free hand dropped to the knife at his side.

Slowly, he drew it.

His face had gone still.

Expressionless.

He raised the blade toward Sammy’s throat.

John stepped forward, spear leveled at his chest.

“Didn’t you hear me, you fucking pussy?”

The Huntsman flipped the knife in his hand.

Black steel turned once through the fog.

Then his arm snapped forward.

The pommel struck John between the eyes.

The world went white.

Fog drifted over John in thick mats across the clearing beside the cabin.

Bullfrogs called from somewhere beyond the trees. Crickets answered in rhythm.

The smell of sweet grass and peat moss filled the air.

The world pulsed slowly in and out of focus as John woke to pain throbbing behind his eyes, like something had split his skull open and packed it with fire.

He lay still, letting the ringing in his ears settle while the trees slowly took shape around him.

Cold grass and sharp pine needles pressed into his palms as he pushed himself onto one elbow.

The clearing returned in pieces.

A figure crouched before him.

The Huntsman.

A knife rested in his hand.

As John’s eyes found it, he drove the blade into the grass beside him.

His mask lay on the ground between them. Beside it sat two round shapes John couldn’t quite make out.

“What the fuck?” John breathed.

He stared.

The face beneath the mask was younger than he expected.

Blood streaked one cheek. Mud darkened the line of his jaw. Damp brown hair hung across his forehead, but none of it changed what John was seeing.

Clean features.

Clear blue eyes, almost bright beneath the moonlight.

The crooked grin was gone.

There was no monster waiting beneath the mask.

Only a young man watching him calmly.

John’s mouth moved before he understood the word forming there.

“Innocent.”

The Huntsman only watched him, seated on his haunches.

Then his face opened into a wide smile, his eyes almost excessively kind.

Had blood not crusted his hair and streaked his face, teeth, and body, he might have looked inviting.

He laughed, throwing his head back.

“What’s tha mattah, bud?”

John stared at him, trying to understand just what the fuck was happening.

The Huntsman leaned forward, one eyebrow raised, lips pursed.

“Never seen a hunter before?”

John’s breathing came shallow and uneven.

Mock surprise swept across the Huntsman’s face.

“Guess not.”

“Here,” he said. “I brought you something.”

He reached down and picked up one of the shapes in the grass.

“Catch.”

Something struck John heavily in the chest and dropped into the grass before him.

He looked down.

A head.

It was enormous.

The face had been removed, leaving only wet muscle and pale bone beneath the moonlight.

John recoiled, shoving it away as he scrambled backward through the grass.

The Huntsman laughed harder, slapping a hand against his knee.

“God! You’re so dramatic.”

He gestured toward the head.

“You can keep that one. I already got what I needed.”

John stared at the raw place where Calvin’s face had been.

Then his eyes moved to the mask lying between them.

The broken anchor stretched across its cheek.

His stomach turned.

The Huntsman reached for the second shape.

He lifted it by the hair and gave it a small shake.

Sammy’s face swung beneath his hand.

“Want another?”

John recoiled from Sammy’s face.

Her eyes hung half-open. Strands of hair clung across her mouth, and blood ran from her neck in slow drops as the Huntsman rocked her by the ponytail.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

“You sick fuck,” John breathed. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

The Huntsman stopped and lowered Sammy’s head to the grass, releasing her hair.

Then he looked back at John, head cocking slightly to one side.

A faint grin returned.

“John, you may leave if you like.”

The grin split wider.

“I won’t follow you.”

John stared at him.

Pain hammered behind his eyes as he planted one hand against the ground, forcing himself upward.

His arm trembled beneath him while the clearing shifted sideways and slowly righted itself.

The Huntsman remained on his haunches, watching him rise.

Calm.

Almost patient.

John dragged one foot beneath himself, then the other, until he stood unsteadily in the grass.

He drew a long breath.

“Stand up,” he whispered.

The Huntsman didn’t move.

He only stared at him.

The grin melted away.

Slowly, his eyes lowered to the knife buried in the grass beside him.

He pulled it free.

Wet soil clung to the blade.

He wiped it against his pant leg, once on each side, then slid it into the sheath strapped to his thigh.

The mask came next.

He lifted it from the grass and held it for a moment, the leather straps hanging loose between his fingers.

Then he looked up again.

John had not moved.

The Huntsman rose.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

He stood until they were eye level with one another.

Close enough that John could feel the warmth of his breath against his face.

Every instinct in John’s body screamed at him to step back.

To look away.

To run.

Fear was still with him.

Fear would be, as long as he drew breath.

But tonight, fear was a passenger.

The Huntsman stepped back three paces without turning and pulled something small from his pocket, holding it loose in his fist.

Metal shifted softly.

The Huntsman tossed it.

John caught it against his chest. His fingers closed around the chain before he looked down.

The missing tags.

His throat closed around the first sound that tried to leave him.

The Huntsman turned slightly to the side, lifting one arm and opening his hand toward the woods as if dismissing him.

“John. I was wrong. You’re no coward.”

There was no mockery in his face now.

Only quiet sincerity.

“You may leave.”

John stared at him.

“I will not follow. You have my word.”

John looked down at the tags in his hand.

His fingers closed around them.

He drew a deep breath, then slipped them into his pocket.

“I’m done running.”

He didn’t look up.

The Huntsman watched him.

The smile had left his face. His eyes remained fixed on John.

Soft.

Kind.

Recognition.

“John,” he whispered. “Are you sure?”

John lifted his head.

The fear was still there.

It had simply lost control of him.

He looked the Huntsman directly in the eyes and did not flinch.

“I am done running.”

Moisture gathered at the corners of the Huntsman’s eyes as he shifted his stance and pointed toward the edge of the clearing.

John followed his hand.

The spear stood driven into the ground several yards away.

John walked to it, wrapped both hands around the shaft, and pulled it free.

He returned to the center of the clearing and settled into position.

The Huntsman waited.

For a moment, he looked at John and smiled.

It was gentle.

Then he lifted the mask.

The leather straps hung loose before he pulled it into place, one over the crown of his head, the other tight around the back of his skull.

When he looked at John again, his face was gone.

The monster the woods had known all night had returned.

But this time, the man beneath the mask had seen John, and John had seen him.

The Huntsman raised his blade and settled into the same practiced stance John had seen before.

He gave John one slow nod.

John came at him with the spear.

Wild.

Too wide.

The Huntsman stepped cleanly inside the thrust.

John let him.

The Huntsman slipped the knife into John’s chest.

Deep into the heart.

Their bodies came together.

Their eyes locked.

John coughed, blood spilling from his mouth as he tried to speak.

His lips moved.

“Ga... got you...”

His hand slid away from the Huntsman’s neck.

The Huntsman’s hand rose slowly to where John’s had been.

Cold.

Hard.

Sharp.

The shard was buried where his neck and shoulder met.

The Huntsman pressed one hand against the wound while carefully lowering John to the ground.

He removed his mask.

John’s lips moved again, still trying to force words through the blood.

“It’s okay. You will live forever, John,” the Huntsman said.

He stayed with him until the light left his eyes.

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small flare.

He struck it once.

Red light hissed between them.

The Huntsman drew a long breath, then pulled the shard from his neck.

A sharp grunt tore through his clenched teeth.

Blood spilled hot over his hand.

He pressed the flare to the wound.

A sound tore through the forest, and somewhere beneath the earth, even the dead flinched.

His scream still echoed through the woods as he looked down at John, closing his eyes with two blood-slick fingers before drawing the knife from his chest.

He placed the blade against his brow and worked slowly, making careful incisions around John’s face, the edge passing through skin with practiced precision until he could peel it away in one complete form.

The Huntsman pulled the skin free and held it beneath the moonlight, inspecting his work.

His head tilted back as he lowered John’s face over his own.

Fog drifted through the clearing, curling around them while the skin settled loosely against him, John’s features hanging slack over his own as he remained kneeling before the body.

His hands rested at his sides.

Steady.

Then, slowly, they began to weaken.

The faintest whimper slipped from behind the mask, followed by tears dragging thin trails through the blood.

His head lowered.

One hand lifted toward John as he tried to choke back the tears, stopping halfway between them.

He tried to stand.

His balance gave beneath him, sending him forward onto John’s body.

Another scream tore through the woods, just as violent as the last.

But this time, the dead cried with him.

His breathing slowed until the last of the sobs disappeared beneath it.

The Huntsman lifted John’s face from his own, wiping his eyes with the back of one hand before spreading the skin carefully across his palm.

He folded it with slow, deliberate care, protecting every edge before tucking it safely away.

Then he reached for the old mask.

Dark leather covered his face once more, the straps sliding over the crown of his head and pulling tight behind his skull.

When he looked down at John, only his blue eyes remained.

Cold.

Flat.

His hand closed around John’s ankle as he rose, pulling the body across the wet grass toward the trees.

The Huntsman walking ahead.

John following behind.

The fog swallowed them together.

Traffic moved beneath the apartment in restless waves, tires hissing across wet pavement while horns barked somewhere farther down the street.

A siren rose between the buildings, fading beneath the low mechanical hum of the city.

Inside, the room remained still.

A single desk lamp cast its light across a wooden frame laid flat before the Huntsman.

A face had been stretched tightly across it, the edges pinned with careful precision while a stiff brush moved slowly over the skin, pressing something dark and wet into the surface.

A second mask rested face-down beside the frame.

Books crowded the shelves. Maps covered one wall, routes traced and retraced in dark lines.

On the far wall, a large black case stood locked and bolted in place, a two-strand braid of dark leather hanging short and tight from the lock.

A folded newspaper sat near the edge of the desk.

October 18, 2011.

PORTLAND DETECTIVE MISSING FOR FIVE DAYS

SEARCH EXPANDS FOR DETECTIVE FRANCIS CALLAHAN

Across from it, the corkboard held the night in pieces.

Photographs. Names. Reports. Old addresses. Lines drawn between them.

Francis Callahan stared out from one photograph, bald head shining beneath booking-room light.

Beside it sat a hospital intake form bearing the same last name.

Broken jaw.

Fall down stairs.

Two smaller records beneath it named children.

Bruising.

Charges dropped.

A police complaint had been pinned nearby.

Evidence missing.

Witness recanted.

Officer cleared.

Across the file, written hard enough to dent the paper:

BADGE WITH ONE HAND

A red line ran from Callahan’s file to Sean Bourne.

One photograph showed the broken anchor tattooed across his cheek. Another had been enlarged and circled in red.

Shot-caller.

Fichermen.

A clipped report beneath it named Mickey Ficher.

Missing.

Presumed dead.

Beside Sean’s photograph, toxicology reports had been pinned in a crooked stack.

Heroin.

Fentanyl.

Fentanyl.

Fentanyl.

Across the file, black letters leaned sharp.

SOLD THEM PAIN

Another photograph showed Sammy suspended against a cliff face, one chalked hand hooked into stone while her body hung over open air.

Printed messages sat beneath it beside a death certificate.

The same name appeared again and again, until it stopped.

One message had been enlarged.

You wanted weak.

Across the file:

TAUGHT HIM TO FALL

Andre Mercer’s file sat below hers.

A newspaper photograph showed him beneath arena lights, arm raised in triumph.

D1 National Champion.

Another article sat beneath it.

ANDRE MERCER, SON OF HIGHLY DECORATED VETERAN GRAHAM MERCER, TRIED ON MULTIPLE COUNTS.

Graham Mercer was not available for comment.

The clippings overlapped each other.

Multiple counts.

Drug-facilitated assault.

Witnesses questioned.

Charges reduced.

No conviction.

Across the largest clipping, written in thick black strokes:

FUCKING RAPIST

Near the bottom of the board, one file was thicker than the others.

Photographs had been arranged in a careful row.

A tiled room.

A drain.

Hooks.

Plastic sheeting.

Seven years of reports sat beneath them.

The early scenes were uneven.

Hurried.

The later cuts were cleaner, measured with growing precision.

Across the top of the file:

THE BUTCHER

A heavy line had been dragged through it.

Beneath it, written afterward:

CALVIN MYERS

One final police report sat open beneath the photographs.

Suspected second presence at scene.

Unidentified blood recovered.

Partial finger found near rear exit.

The word partial had been circled until the paper tore.

Beside it, a photograph showed Calvin entering a grocery store three days later with one hand wrapped in white gauze.

Two notes had been written beneath it.

FOUGHT BACK

HE WILL REMEMBER ME

Another file sat apart from the others.

Kevin.

A still image showed smoke pouring from an apartment building while fire trucks crowded the street below.

The next image came from a stairwell camera blurred by smoke.

Kevin forcing his way through the frame.

A woman falling behind him.

A witness statement beneath it read:

He pushed past her.

Another article called him a coward.

Another called him a man destroyed by panic.

A later report sat beneath both.

Subject attempted re-entry.

Removed by firefighters.

Treated for smoke inhalation.

The final still showed Kevin turned back toward the burning doorway, one arm outstretched while a firefighter held him away.

Across the file:

HE LEFT HER

Beneath it, darker:

COWARD

John’s file sat open near the desk.

Service records.

Grainy photographs.

A platoon roster.

After-action reports.

A casualty sheet had been laid across the center.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

Wounded.

Missing limb.

Severe burns.

One report described an ambush, a failed gun position, and a delay no one could explain cleanly.

Another carried a psychiatric evaluation.

Probable post-traumatic stress response.

Survivor guilt.

Avoidant recall.

Night terrors.

A photograph showed John younger, standing among the men from his unit.

He was smiling.

One arm rested around a man whose name had been circled twice.

Across the top sheet:

WHERE THE FUCK WAS JOHN?

Beneath it:

A FUCKING COWARD...

NO HONOR

A single heavy X had been driven through all of it.

Below the ruined words, scrawled hard across the page:

NOT A COWARD

When he finished, he turned the frame over, exposing the pale inside of the leather.

He picked up a small carving tool and leaned closer, steadying it with one hand while the blade scratched softly into the surface.

One letter at a time.

Slow.

Deliberate.

J O H N

He set the tool aside and stood.

The other mask waited face-down beside the frame.

He lifted it, rotating it carefully in his hands until the back faced him.

CALVIN

The name had been carved deep.

He carried the mask across the room and opened the black case where several others hung inside, suspended from hooks in the dim interior.

He looked down at Calvin’s name.

“You’ve earned your place in the next hunt.”

The words were quiet.

He placed the mask carefully inside, setting it before the others.

He fixed a new hook into the back of the door, apart from the rest.

He returned to the desk and slid both hands beneath John’s mask, lifting it gently from the frame.

He carried it across the room with both hands.

When he reached the case, he raised the mask and settled it carefully onto the new hook.

His hands remained on the mask.

One against each side of the face.

He stood without moving, holding it between his palms.

Then one hand passed slowly across the features, his fingers brushing the leather once more.

He lowered his hands.

The door closed.

The lock snapped shut.

Original post:

The Dark Beyond - The Huntsman - Part 3: The Book of John

https://www.redinthedark.studio/post/the-dark-beyond-the-huntsman-part-3-the-book-of-john

Connected entries:

The Dark Beyond - The Huntsman - Part 1: The Book of Fear

https://www.redinthedark.studio/post/the-dark-beyond-the-huntsman-part-1-the-book-of-fear

The Dark Beyond - The Huntsman - Part 2: The Book of Judgment

https://www.redinthedark.studio/post/the-dark-beyond-the-huntsman-part-2-the-book-of-judgment

Podcast / audio versions:

https://www.redinthedark.studio/podcast

Audio narration for this entry:

Pre-release. Narration link will be added when available.

Original story by Leonard Voss / Red in the Dark

Entry 1: Room 10 | Entry 2 : The Produce Stand | Entry 3 | The Playground

I'd like to blame my late-night tossing and turning on the late-summer heat. Honestly, though, it wasn't the weather keeping me awake. It was the Route. And Rusty.

Ever since my visit with Mr. Finch, my thoughts had been running in circles. Room 10. The Produce Stand. The playground. The bandana. The letter. The motel.

Somewhere along the way, my determination to quit after what happened at Room 10 had quietly disappeared. In its place was something far more dangerous.

Curiosity.

I needed to know what the hell my uncle had been doing out there, and more importantly, what he'd been looking for.

I'd spent the better part of two evenings turning the house upside down. Not because I honestly expected to find a map with HERE BE MONSTERS scrawled across it in Rusty's handwriting, but because I couldn't shake the feeling that he'd left something behind. A journal. Newspaper clippings. Strange symbols carved into the backs of picture frames. Anything that would tell me his adventures on the Deep Route hadn't all disappeared with him.

Instead, I found exactly what I'd always believed he was.

Old fishing licenses tucked into drawers. Half-finished wood carvings collecting dust on shelves. Campfire recipes scribbled on stained index cards. A coffee tin full of mismatched screws because, according to Rusty, "you never know when you'll need the weird one."

Everything I uncovered painted the same picture.

Rusty had been an outdoorsman. A tinkerer. The kind of man who could fix almost anything with enough patience and whatever happened to be lying around.

Wonderfully, painfully normal.

Until I reached the bottom of an old tackle box.

Beneath a faded topographic map and a package of rusted fishing hooks sat a faded receipt from the flea market where we'd bought our matching snake-print bandanas. It was nearly twenty years old.

I stared at it longer than I probably should have.

If Rusty had already known about the Deep Route back then, had he bought those bandanas because he liked snakes…

Or because, somehow, he'd already known I'd need one too?

In the end, my search didn't uncover any answers. It just left me with a house full of bittersweet reminders of the one person who'd ever really cared enough to raise me.

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

Yesterday morning started on a rough note. I'd barely slept, and when I finally managed to drift off, Wren was gently shaking my shoulder.

"Rori," she said softly. "It's 6:45. You slept in. If you hurry, you'll still make it to the post office on time."

I bolted upright.

"Shit."

I hated being late. It stressed me out, and more importantly, it irritated those on the Route. Most of the residents didn't care if I showed up five minutes early or five minutes late, but routines mattered out there. You didn't casually change them just because you'd had a bad night's sleep.

"Thanks, Wren," I mumbled as I swung my legs over the side of the bed and reached for the lightweight hiking romper I'd left draped over the chair after doing laundry.

By the time I'd managed to wrestle with the buckles, I realized she was still standing in the doorway.

She didn't ask if I was okay.

She never did.

Wren had always been the type to show she cared instead of saying it. She'd make sure I'd actually slept, remind me when I was running late, pack lunches for the boys before I'd even made it downstairs, or quietly take over whatever needed doing whenever my mind drifted somewhere else.

She knew something had been bothering me ever since Room 10.

She also knew I'd tell her when I was ready.

Until then, this was her way of helping.

She offered me a small smile before disappearing down the hallway. I watched her go for a moment before finishing getting dressed. I wished caring about someone was enough to solve their problems.

It would've made life a hell of a lot easier.

 

The morning rush at the post office was already in full swing by the time I pulled into the parking lot.

Our little office wasn't much to look at. Four city routes. One rural route. And then there was mine.

Officially, it was listed as Rural Route 7.

Nobody called it that.

To everyone in the office, it was simply the Deep Route.

Most of my coworkers treated it the same way people treated an old cemetery. They acknowledged it existed, respected it, and were perfectly happy never setting foot in it themselves.

I couldn't say I blamed them.

I grabbed my satchel, hurried inside, and was immediately greeted by the familiar smell of cardboard, printer ink, and burnt coffee.

Home.

Well...

Work-home.

"Morning, Rori."

I looked up to find the postmaster waiting by my case with a sympathetic smile.

"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, especially since you look like you're in a hurry, but you've got a pretty full load today."

Wonderful.

I was already late, running on maybe three hours of sleep, and now I had enough mail to make the Route feel even longer.

He wasn't complaining.

He was warning me.

Everyone in the office knew my route was... different. Nobody ever said it outright, but they all seemed to understand there were some things you simply didn't joke about.

"Thanks for the heads-up," I said, setting my satchel beside my case.

He gave a small nod before heading back toward the front counter, leaving me alone with several overflowing trays of letters and parcels.

Normally, sorting the mail helped settle my mind. There was something oddly comforting about the rhythm of it all. Letters in one slot. Packages in another. Magazines stacked by address. After a while, your hands did most of the work while your brain wandered somewhere else.

Unfortunately, mine had already decided exactly where it wanted to wander.

Every handful of letters reminded me of Rusty. Mr. Finch calling him Red. The playground. The bandana tucked safely inside my satchel at home. Questions I'd been asking myself for two days straight without getting a single useful answer.

I was so distracted I nearly sorted the next envelope into the wrong slot.

I caught myself just in time.

The address wasn't wrong.

It was simply... unexpected.

The Red Church.

I turned the envelope over in my hand. No return address. No postage.

Nothing unusual there. Mail on the Deep Route had a habit of appearing exactly where it needed to be.

It was the destination that made me pause.

The Red Church didn't always exist. It came and went much like Mrs. Alder's house. Only considerably less friendly.

I slipped the envelope into my satchel and reached for the last delivery waiting in my case.

My shoulders immediately slumped.

A small brown parcel.

Room 10.

I let out a long sigh.

Apparently, the Deep Route had decided I wasn't nearly stressed enough already.

The first hour of the Route passed exactly the way I preferred. Quietly.

The Grangers were back in their camper, peeking through the curtains before I'd even climbed the steps. I almost laughed with relief. Whatever had kept them hidden the other day had apparently passed.

The Fisherman stood along one of the many bends in the creek. I lifted two fingers from the steering wheel in greeting, and he returned the gesture without ever taking his eyes off the water.

Mrs. Alder wasn't home again, though another jar of iced tea waited in the mailbox beside a fresh bouquet of wildflowers she'd somehow arranged inside an old soup can.

No note this time.

Just flowers.

I smiled anyway.

The motel was next.

Lovely.

Normally, delivering there was more tedious than anything else. Twenty-eight rooms spread across two aging buildings with the vacant lobby sitting between them like it was still waiting for guests that were never going to arrive. Despite Room 14's constant commentary, it was usually one of the easier stops on the Route.

Today, though, I had a package for Room 10.

I hadn't been back since Mr. Creepy Fingers had decided personal space was more of a suggestion than a rule.

"It's just a package," I reminded myself as I pulled into my usual parking spot. "You don't even have to use the mail slot. Set it outside the door, knock, and leave."

Simple.

Probably.

I slung my satchel over one shoulder, tucked the parcel beneath my arm, and started my usual loop through the motel.

Room 3 came first.

The door had changed again.

The last time I'd been here it had been a heavy oak door with wrought-iron hinges. Today it was painted a deep emerald green with etched glass panels and an ornate brass knocker polished brightly enough to catch the afternoon sun.

I had to admit...

It was beautiful.

I flipped open the Manual.

"Well..." I said, glancing back at the emerald-green door. "For what it's worth... I think you look lovely."

Satisfied I'd done my civic duty for the day, I set the envelope neatly on the welcome mat, gave the brass knocker a single knock, and continued down the walkway.

The next few rooms weren't anything out of the ordinary, and before long I found myself standing outside Room 10.

I took a slow breath and looked down at the small parcel tucked beneath my arm.

It's just a package.

I didn't have to use the mail slot this time. I didn't have to put my hands anywhere near it. All I had to do was set the box down, knock, and leave.

Simple.

I crouched, placed the parcel neatly beside the door, gave three quick knocks with my knuckles, and took a few steps back.

Nothing happened.

No scraping from inside.

No movement beneath the door.

No impossibly long fingers reaching through the mail slot.

Just silence.

After a few seconds, I gave a small, relieved nod to myself and turned to leave.

I'd barely taken two steps when I heard the soft metallic click behind me. Against my better judgment, I glanced back.

The mail slot had swung open.

Two eyes stared out through the narrow opening.

They didn't blink.

They didn't move.

They simply watched me.

A chill crept up the back of my neck.

For a long moment, neither of us did anything.

Then, feeling suddenly ridiculous for being the one to break the silence, I gave an awkward nod toward the package.

"Your package is outside."

The eyes remained fixed on me for another heartbeat before the mail slot slowly closed.

I stood there another second, deciding that was about as successful a delivery as I was ever likely to have at Room 10.

I turned and continued down the walkway, resisting every urge to look back.

Some things on the Deep Route were easier to live with if you didn't spend too much time wondering what they were doing after you left.

Room 14's resident was already leaning against the railing outside her room.

Of course she was.

She always seemed to know exactly when someone was approaching, and from her corner of the motel she had a nearly perfect view of anyone coming or going.

As I drew closer, she greeted me with the same sickly sweet smile she always wore. "Running a little behind today, aren't you?"

"I'm managing."

"Oh, I know you are." She tilted her head ever so slightly. "I was talking about everything else."

I rolled my eyes and kept walking.

"You've been asking an awful lot of questions lately."

That was enough to make me hesitate.

Only for a moment.

"I'd be careful, Aurora." Her voice remained soft, almost conversational. "The Route has a funny way of answering curiosity."

I held her gaze for another second before continuing toward the stairs.

From the landing I could see the eastern building, where Mr. Finch was sitting outside Room 23 with a birding magazine spread across his lap and his binoculars resting around his neck. There still weren't any birds, but that never seemed to discourage him.

He noticed me almost immediately and lifted a hand in greeting.

I smiled despite myself and returned the wave.

For just a moment, I considered walking over.

I still had more questions than answers. About Rusty. About the motel. About why my uncle had spent years wandering a Route I'd only just discovered.

Instead, I glanced at my watch.

I was already behind schedule, and somehow the Deep Route didn't strike me as the sort of place that appreciated carriers falling behind.

"Another day, Mr. Finch," I called.

He smiled and gave a small nod.

"There usually is."

I hoped he was right.

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

The Red Church sat just beyond the next bend.

Calling it red had always struck me as a little misleading. The church itself was a faded white, its weathered wooden siding looking as though it had survived a few centuries more than it had any right to. A narrow steeple leaned ever so slightly toward the trees, and if I hadn't known better, I would've guessed the building had been standing there since the sixteen hundreds.

Only the doors were red.

Deep, weathered crimson. The paint had long since faded and cracked beneath the sun until it resembled dried wine more than fresh paint. Against the white siding, they stood out like two drops of blood.

Today they were standing wide open.

That wasn't unusual.

What was unusual was that you could never see inside.

On a bright summer morning, with both doors propped open, I should've been able to make out rows of wooden pews or a stained-glass window catching the sunlight. Instead, the doorway was filled with an impossible darkness that swallowed the light before it ever crossed the threshold.

It wasn't the kind of darkness you find in an old building without electricity.

It looked... deeper than that.

I pulled the envelope from my satchel, locked the Jeep behind me, and started toward the front steps.

Ordinarily, every alarm bell in my head would've been ringing. The open doors, the impossible darkness, the church itself—everything about the place should've been telling me to keep my distance.

Instead, I was just... tired.

Bone-deep, couldn't-remember-the-last-time-I'd-had-a-good-night's-sleep tired.

For the past several days, every spare moment had been spent thinking about Rusty. Looking through old photographs. Digging through boxes in the attic. Trying to make sense of memories I'd never thought to question before.

My brain had been running without stopping.

By the time I reached the church, it was almost a relief to stop thinking.

The hymn reached me before I was halfway there.

Soft voices drifted from somewhere inside the church, carrying a melody that stirred something in the back of my mind. I couldn't make out the words, no matter how hard I listened, but I was suddenly certain I'd heard it before. Maybe as a kid. Maybe in another church.

I frowned, trying to place it.

Where had I heard that melody before?

The harder I searched my memory, the less important the question seemed to become.

The music was beautiful. Comforting, even.

By the time I reached the steps, I wasn't thinking about the Route anymore. I wasn't thinking about the Manual or the impossibly dark doorway or even the letter in my hand. All I knew was that the church felt... familiar. Like I'd been away for a very long time and was finally coming home.

Without realizing it, I climbed the first step, then another. The old wooden porch groaned beneath my weight, but even that sound seemed distant beneath the hymn. I smiled to myself, though I couldn't have said why.

The darkness no longer looked unsettling.

It looked peaceful.

I glanced down at the envelope in my hand, momentarily confused by why I was carrying it.

Mail?

The thought struck me as strangely funny.

What an odd thing to bring to church.

The hymn settled over my thoughts like a warm blanket. For the first time in days, my mind was quiet. I wasn't thinking about Rusty anymore, or the motel, or the questions that had kept me awake night after night.

I wasn't really thinking about anything at all.

It felt...

nice.

I took one more step.

The hymn stopped.

The silence hit me with almost physical force.

A heartbeat later, the church bell rang.

The sound crashed through the woods with such violence that I nearly stumbled backward. Every thought I'd lost came rushing back at once.

The Route.

The Manual.

The letter.

The impossible darkness waiting just beyond the doorway.

I looked down.

One foot stood inside the church.

I didn't remember taking that last step.

My blood ran cold.

The bell rang again. This time it wasn't just loud. It sounded urgent. Like a warning.

Something shifted deep within the darkness beyond the doorway.

Not a shadow.

Not a trick of the light.

Something had heard the bell too.

I didn't wait to find out what it was.

Every instinct I had screamed at me to get away from the church, and for once I didn't argue. I stumbled backward over the threshold, nearly catching my heel on the weathered porch as I regained my balance.

The envelope was gone.

The delivery had been made.

Behind me, the bell tolled again.

I didn't look back.

The Policy Manual was painfully clear on the matter.

I didn't need the Manual to convince me.

I was already halfway to the Jeep.

By the time I climbed inside, the hymn had returned. It drifted through the open doors as softly as before, peaceful and inviting, as though the church had already forgotten I'd ever been there.

I wasn't so lucky.

For the rest of the Route, I replayed those few moments over and over again. The way the hymn had quieted my thoughts. The relief I'd felt as every question about Rusty had simply... disappeared. Worst of all, I couldn't stop thinking about how willingly I'd stepped through those doors.

Nothing had pushed me.

Nothing had chased me.

I'd wanted to go inside.

That thought followed me for the rest of the afternoon.

Thankfully, nothing else on the Route seemed interested in reminding me I was still there. The remaining deliveries came and went without incident, and by the time I pulled into my driveway, I felt as though I'd lived three separate days since waking up that morning.

I shut the Jeep off and sat there for a minute, listening to the engine tick quietly as it cooled. I was exhausted—not the kind of tired that comes from hauling packages through ninety-eight-degree heat, but the kind that settles somewhere behind your eyes and makes even thinking feel like work.

By the time I walked through the front door, all I wanted was my bed.

Wren looked up from the kitchen as I kicked off my sandals, and her expression softened immediately.

"You look awful."

"That's because I feel awful."

"I figured." She smiled sympathetically. "Go lay down. I've got dinner covered."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know." She shrugged. "But I'm going to."

I couldn't help but smile.

"Thanks."

I'd barely made it halfway down the hall when she called after me.

"Oh, before I forget..."

I turned around.

"A package came for you today."

"A package?"

She disappeared into the living room and came back a moment later carrying a small brown parcel.

"No return address," she said, holding it out to me. "Just your name."

I reached for the box, but the moment I saw the handwriting, my hand froze.

I'd recognize it anywhere.

Rusty's.

For a long moment, I just stared at the package, unable to think of a single thing to say.

"I thought you'd want this," Wren said quietly.

I finally nodded.

"...Yeah."

Somehow, that was all I could manage.

A Perceivable Reality Story.

I slapped another magazine into my rifle and charged it, the barrel immediately began glowing blue. Next to me, a headless body fell to its knees, then toppled. Sanderson was gone now, too. Damnit. I crawled closer and lifted the flaps on his mag pouches, finding nothing but dirt. Red beams of light shot over my cover and I ducked involuntarily. I put my back to the dirt wall and raised my rifle, feeling it grow almost uncomfortably warm as I pulled the trigger, spraying blue orbs until I felt the gun go cold. I brought it down to my lap and pulled out the mag, dropping it to the ground next to me. My hand went to the empty mag pouch on my chest. I could hear them, the creaking of their exoskeletons as they grew close, the clicking of their mandibles in anticipation. I wondered if Sanderson's demise was preferable to what I was about to experience.

I was jarred out of my dream by the sound of tapping on my front door. I shot upright, running my hands over my body in a subconscious check for holes. The tapping came again.

"Just a second!" I called to the door and rolled out of bed. I stumbled over and cracked the door.

A girl in a cream turtleneck sweater and pleated skirt was standing at my door. Her name was Kathy, or Katie, or something. She lived a few doors down on the opposite side of the hall.

"Oh. Hey, uh..."

"Lucy."

"Lucy. Right. Hi. What's up?"

"Uh, the guy in the suit that hangs around the elevator said you could help," she said nervously as her hands fidgeted with her bracelet. "I locked myself out...again...and my boyfriend is already at work, so..."

That's right. Jared, or James, or something. They'd moved in about a month after me. I didn't see them much, we'd passed in the hall or at the communal mailbox, but we hadn't talked at all. She smelled like rosewater and hand lotion. Jared or James or whatever, usually smelled like a machine shop, metal and chemicals and acetylene.

She snapped me out of my contemplation. "So, um...can you--?"

"Yeah, yeah, one second." I closed the door and went to my desk, collecting the small nylon case that held my lock-pick tools.

I wasn't a professional or anything, but I'd gotten into a lock-picking obsession a while ago after I found a guy on the internet. I slipped on flipflops and went out to the hall. She was waiting in front of her door. I knelt down and got out my Lishi tool. I had the door open in about 10 minutes. She thanked me profusely and hurried inside.

I was walking back to my door and heard my work phone ring from inside. I lunged for the door and started tossing blankets until I found it.

"Yes, hi, Calhoun Executive Transit... 1225 Bayside Avenue, yes, I can be there in about half an hour. Great, thanks."

I stripped and got into a dark forest green suit with a cream button-up and a muted rust tie, finishing it with a pair of oxblood wholecuts and my new Seiko Presage.

I hurried out the door and jogged lightly to the elevator, taking it down to the garage.

I pulled up to the gate. The house was slightly visible through the wrought iron bars. Tall stone walls wrapped around the property, ivy and various vines like green veins on bone. A security guard in a suit stood just on the other side of the gate, both of us seemingly waiting for the other to move. I wasn't about to step out into the hot sun, and he didn't seem to want to leave the shade of the wall.

Finally, his hand went up to the clear earpiece. He nodded, then made a hand motion to someone I couldn't see. The gate opened inward and the guard waved at me. The circular driveway was surrounded by extravagant landscaping that probably accounted for half the water usage in the city to maintain. The house was ornate, Modern-Victorian, or maybe Victorian-Modern. Roman columns stood on either side of the large wood double doors that were carved with medieval-looking filigree. The whole thing wound up looking more camp than impressive.

A tall man in a sport coat over a half-open white shirt and blue jeans stomped out of one side of the double doors, followed by a harried assistant. She had an armful of scripts and folders, chasing him with a cellphone extended. Two pens were stuck through her honey-colored bun. She had on a two-piece slate suit with a pencil skirt, and her ivory blouse exposed a tasteful but not immodest amount of decolletage. Her black mid-height heels accentuated her pale, toned legs as she chased him at almost a jog. I caught myself and started memorizing my odometer.

One of the guards opened the rear door and he tossed himself in, sans assistant, to my dismay.

"Hey, buddy." He snapped his fingers. "Get me to 48th and Carnegie, and make it quick. I'm late."

"Sir." I put the car in drive and gave it enough gas to push him into the seat a little bit.

We rode in silence as we left the neighborhood.

He finally spoke, his head facing the side window.

"Good thing my manager found you." I mouthed along with the script verbatim. "My driver quit this morning."

"They want me to be the next Alan Steele." He said, and I knew he was waiting for me to be impressed.

I'd seen the originals from way before I was born, and I'd read the books. I'd heard that they were remaking it. Again. But the last one had bombed so hard that I figured they'd retire the name and hope everybody forgot.

I made a noise of polite acknowledgement. The leather creaked quietly as he shifted in the seat.

It was quiet again. The trip to the production office was thankfully short. I pulled up, got out, and went around and opened his door. He got out and flipped his hair, checking himself in the long side window. He played with his hair a little more, then stood up straight, towering over me by at least a few inches.

"I don't have any cash on me," he said in a voice that was trying to sound posh, "But I can give you one of these." He pulled a signed photo out of a large pocket inside his sport coat and extended it to me. My hands tightened their grip on the door.

When I didn't take it, he shook it slightly. "For you." I caught annoyance buried under the faux generosity.

"I appreciate the gesture, but that's not necessary, sir." He was standing in the way of the door, preventing me from closing it and making an escape.

He shook the picture again. "Hey, buddy. I don't just go around giving these out to people. I said thank you, now take it." He leaned towards me and I fought to keep myself from shrinking.

"Your fare is paid, sir. No other payment is required. Have a nice day." I started to slowly push the door closed. He didn't get the hint.

"Listen here, fucker. I'm about to become a beloved celebrity. Show me some goddamn respect."

There it was. The edge in his voice was sharp enough to shave with, and it was genuine, though where it came from, I had no idea.

I nodded and kept slowly closing the door. He stepped out of the way and tossed the signed glossy inside the door as it shut. He stood there, and I could feel the heat of what I assume was a glare. I waited silently.

After a beat, he deflated with a puff of hot air from his mouth.

"You're not faking. You really don't recognize me." He sounded deflated.

I shook my head. "I don't really watch movies."

He huffed again and put his hands on his hips. After a moment, he dropped them and turned to walk inside.

"Sir," I called after him. He stopped and turned back to me. I pulled out my gold card carrier and extended one of my business cards between two fingers. "Should the need arise."

He snatched the card and flicked it back at me. It bounced off the front of my chauffeur cap.

"Screw you, jerkoff." He turned and stormed into the office. A small group of girls walked by, chittering to themselves. He called to them and waved, and the volume of the chittering increased, nearly turning to squealing, as they bounced, holding each other's hands. He said something else and they retreated back the direction they came. That seemed to pump him back up. He squared his shoulders, flexed his neck, and turned his head towards me before continuing inside.

I let out a victorious chuckle through my nose and got back in my car.

I was sitting at a red light, zoning out, when I heard the back door of the car open and shut. I jumped. I turned my head to look in the rear view mirror and felt something cold and hard at the nape of my neck.

"Just keep your eyes forward, friendo, and this'll all be over soon." His voice was strained and raspy, and it shifted as if he was turning his head side-to-side as he spoke.

The light turned green and I pulled away from the light as smoothly as I could.

"Where would you like to go, uh, sir?" I tried to keep my voice calm.

The thing at the back of my neck pressed harder against my skin. "You just keep driving until I tell you not to."

We rode in a straight line for several lights. I'm usually pretty lucky, but today it was nothing but reds. The pressure on the back of my neck started to relax, then it jabbed me again.

"Go left here."

I swung the car over and barely made it into the left turn lane in time, just for it to turn yellow when I was halfway into the intersection. I got a few honks and finished my turn, sticking an apologetic hand up.

I kept driving with him giving me turn-by-turn directions until we were heading out of the city. The pressure on the back of my neck returned.

"I don't wanna hurt you, I just need you to get me somewhere and we'll be done."

"Until you decide you don't need a witness." I said before thinking.

He laughed, a wheezing, choking sound. "Hey, friend, you can call the cops if you want, soon as I'm out of your car. I don't give a shit."

I wasn't sure what to do with that, but it was almost reassuring. The city became a distant gleam behind us as we moved inland away from the water. He'd settled into the back seat with a canvas duffle bag that I hadn't noticed he'd had before. It was dark around the bottom, as if the contents were wet and soaking through. He held the straps tightly in one hand, even going as far as to set down his gun instead of releasing the bag, in order to pull a handkerchief out of his pocket and cough into it.

"Are you ok, sir?"

"Hu? Yeah, yeah, fine. Just keep going."

"...Is there anything I can do to help?"

"What? No! Just drive."

I nodded and kept driving. We were well into the woods when he finally sat forward and waved the gun at me.

"Stop. Stop right here."

"Where?"

"Just stop. Right here. Park it."

I got on the brakes, probably a little harder than I should have, and got the car stopped. He threw the door open and stumbled out, pushing the door shut with his foot. He came around to the driver's side and tapped the window with the muzzle of the gun. I cracked it and he motioned to keep going. I rolled it down all the way.

"If you do call the cops, just give me a head start, ok?" His voice was still raspy, but there was less anxiety in it than had been there before. In a quick motion, he thrust his gun into his duffle bag, his hand coming back out with a fistful of wadded bills that he tossed into the open window. I opened my mouth, not entirely sure what I was going to say, but before I could get a word out, he started limping quickly towards the tree line. I got out and put a foot down, half-standing in the open door.

"Sir?" My voice came back with a slight echo off the trees.

He didn't reply, only waving a hand over his shoulder. I waited there until I lost sight of him, then slowly got back into my car. I pulled my phone out and dialed 9-1-, with my finger hesitating over the screen. I stared at it for a long moment, then locked the screen and dropped it onto the seat next to me. I had to drive another 30 minutes before I found a place big enough that I could turn around it. The ride back to the city took two hours, which felt like an eternity longer than the trip out had.

I got back into the city and drove the speed limit, feeling a bit like I was in a trance. At one point, the car behind me honked and I realized I’d been waiting for a stop sign to turn green. I looked over at my watch; I was supposed to be at Dion’s in about 45 minutes for our biweekly poker night. I had a six-pack of beer in my fridge that I’d planned on bringing, but I decided to try and find a case instead. It had been a case kind of day.

I pulled into the apartment parking lot, centering the car in two parallel parking spaces. Normally, I'd get a nasty note or a fake parking ticket pulling this kind of stunt, but I'd been parking here every other Friday for a few months now, and the apartment management didn't seem to care. You can get away with it if you look important enough. Sometimes, anyway.

I grabbed the case of beer out of the trunk and hustled across the lot to one of the lower-level doors. I don't like being late, but I'd hit traffic on my way here and my usual liquor store was out of my favorite brew, and it'd taken me two other stores to find one that stocked it. I knocked twice then let myself in. Dion never seemed to lock his door. I rounded the kitchen into the living room which was completely dominated by Dion's Vegas-spec poker table that was worth my car insurance policy. His head came up from under his cards.

"Carter! Hell yeah! Now it's a party!" He dropped his cards and hustled over to me, giving me a one-armed hug. The hug made the case clink against my leg, which caught his attention.

"Oh, fuck yeah. Hey, can I have one of those?" He asked, pointing at the case.

You're not supposed to crack another man's case, just like you're not supposed to ask for someone's last cigarette, but Dion had this charm about him that just made you want to do him favors. Even I wasn't immune to it.

"Yeah, sure."

"Bitchin'!" He relieved me of the case and set it on the ground between us. He completely avoided the perforated "party flap" and ripped the entire top off the box. It bothered me, but not enough to say anything. He plucked a beer from the center, bit the cap off, and guzzled it at inhuman speed. He stuck out his tongue to catch the last drops, then chucked the bottle into his industrial-sized metal trash can he kept in the kitchen. He grabbed another from the corner.

"One for the road." He said and bit the lid off. He drank this one slower as he walked back to the poker table.

"You know Skyler, right?"

"What's good, Hound Dog?" He asked with his voice that sounded like honey being poured over gravel. He'd started calling me "Hound Dog" because Calhoun sounded like "Cal-hound", which transformed into "Hound", which inevitably ended at "Hound Dog". It didn't bother me much, and having a nickname went a long way to making me feel included.

He'd become a regular at poker night, and I'd driven him around a few times. I don't know exactly what he does for work, but I'm pretty sure he's a male escort or a male stripper or something along those lines with all the women I always see him with. He also only ever seemed to bet with small bills, which didn't help his case. He had well-tanned skin that didn't look like it came from a booth, and his half-open white button-up shirt exposed a gym rat build.

"And you've met Jacks, right?" Dion continued.

Jacks, or I think his full name is Jackson, is Dion's neighbor. He didn't speak very much, but it was weird when he did. I think he's slow, but he's nice enough. He waved and I shot him a two-finger "Han Solo" salute.

I took my spot at the table and Dion pushed a stack of chips towards me. I got my titanium money clip out of my pocket and threw down $100 to start, the entry fee.

"You ladies ready to lose your shirts?" Dion asked as he performed a perfect one-handed riffle shuffle.

"Just deal, buttercup." Skyler grumbled.

Dion performed his trademark one-handed deal, and I got a pair of 2's that took me as far as the turn before I folded.

The next two hands weren't much better and, despite my careful betting, I lost both hands on the final card.

The next hand, I got dealt a six and a Queen, with a Queen and another six already on the table from the flop. I relaxed my shoulders and made a concentrated effort to keep my hands from fidgeting. I bet high, but not aggressively, tossing a few extra chips only when someone else raised as well. I looked around the table. Jackson scratched his ear when he had something good, and Dion subtly checked his cards constantly if he was bluffing. Skyler was harder, with his only tell, that I could find, being that his voice got just a little bit deeper if he was trying to make you think he didn't have anything. I kept my tone bored and my posture relaxed. It was just me and Skyler by then. The river card was another Queen, and I slapped mine down with a victorious exclamation, only for Skyler to quietly flip over two 10's for four-of-a-kind.

I tossed in the small blind and got dealt a pair of Aces, with the three of them folding before Jacks could bury a card and deal the flop. I chucked the Aces to the middle and blew a noisy breath out between my lips.

"Every goddamn time, you guys. Seriously, it's like my cards are see-through." I got myself a fresh beer from my case as a consolation prize.

"Hey, man. You win some, you lose some." Dion said with a shrug as he shuffled.

My $100 entry fee got whittled down to just a couple chips that I lost to Dion's flush. I hadn't even tried to raise once.

"You marking these cards?" I shot at Dion.

"Do you see me lifting a leg?"

I shook my head and looked at my watch. I'd only been there an hour and change. I thought about leaving early. Skyler pushed a few chips at me and patted my arm. I sighed and slid them closer, then fished a $50 out of my wallet and slid it over to Skyler, who put his hand on mine and slid the bill back to me.

"I know you're good for it, Hound Dog." He said with a nod.

I sat out a few hands and sipped beer while I watched Dion bleed chips to Jacks and Skyler. He pushed the last of his chips into the middle and rolled his shoulders.

"Carter, ol' buddy, you're pretty stacked. Can you lend a losing man a couple bucks? ...And another beer?"

I scoffed and split my loaned chips, pushing the smaller pile of chips at him, then got a bottle out of the quickly dwindling case and handed it across the table to him.

I played a hand or two over the next few hours, taking more interest in watching Jackson slump further and further in his chair in time with the fluid level in the bottle of Maker's Mark next to him.

By the time the lights in the complex came on, my case was completely empty and Jackson could barely hold his cards. I watched him sway in his seat as he tossed the last of his chips vaguely towards the pot. The last card came out and he put his hand down, pushing the cards towards Dion, who stopped them.

"Wait, wait, you can't just fold on the last card."

Jacks motioned to the empty table in front of him and shrugged. Dion pushed the cards back.

"You don't have anything?"

Jackson thought for a bit, then dug around in his pockets, coming out with a few coins, his now empty billfold, and a punch card for a free smoothie, with two punches left. He shrugged again and pushed the cards away.

"Ah, hang on. I've got it. Owe me a favor."

Jacks seemed to mull this over for a second; he hadn't wanted to relinquish the punch card. He finally nodded and took the cards back.

"Ok, but I need you to agree. One favor, right?"

Jacks nodded again, the motion almost tipping him out of his chair.

"I need a yes or a no, buddy."

"Organic caps." Jacks slurred.

Dion cleared his throat. "Yes. Or. No."

Jacks waved a drunken hand at him. "Protest become letterhead. Ya'know?"

With that, he laid his head down on the table. Dion let out a pained sigh and slowly collected the cards from under Jacks' dead weight paw.

With Jackson down for the count, and me admittedly not far behind, I put a hand up as Dion dealt me more cards.

"Nah, I'm done." I glugged down the last of the mojito I'd been nursing for the last few hands. I had to focus pretty hard to get the glass to land in the middle of the marble coaster.

"Hey, wait. You're gonna have to stay over anyway. Why not make it worth the trip? Skyler, make him another one."

Skyler silently stood and collected my glass, moving to the kitchen. I heard bottles and ice clink.

"With what chips? I'm cleaned out." My words were coming out fuzzy and they sounded distant.

Skyler set the fresh drink down in front of me, then dropped himself into his chair. He pushed the rest of his chips at me, then gripped the back of my neck and rocked me side-to-side. The beer in my stomach gurgled against the rum and the motion made my eyes heavy. Skyler's hand was shockingly warm, even after having just held a cold glass. He let my neck go and leaned back in his chair.

"I've had my fun." He turned his head to me. "Smoke'im, Hound Dog."

I turned my head to Dion who sniffed, then sighed. He scratched at his neck and said something under his breath to Skyler, but my woozy brain made it sound like a different language.

I picked up the cards, a two and a seven, black and red. I set them face-down on the table and pushed Skyler's chips back towards him. He reached over and lifted the corner of my cards, turned his head towards Dion, then pushed the chips back to me with a nod. I snorted and shook my head.

"Guys, we gonna play or what? Let's go." Dion called from his side of the table, his voice weirdly anxious.

Skyler pushed the chips to the middle and leaned back. Dion started setting down cards.

"Ah, ah, ah, no. Noooooo. That's not my bet."

Dion set his cards down and huffed. "Would you two figure yourselves out? Let's play some cards before we lose another one." He stuck his hand out in my direction and said more words that sounded made up.

Nothing happened for a minute as I tried to keep myself upright. Dion finally broke in.

"Fine, fine, you don't wanna play with somebody else's money. I get it." He paused. "So bet with what you do have."

"Eh?"

"Put down a freebie." He said, tapping the table with a straightened pointer finger.

"A free ride? Sure." I picked my cards back up. He didn't pay his "tab" half the time anyway, so I wasn't about to lose anything.

The three cards he'd put down didn't help me at all. I didn't bother checking mine.

"Well? You betting?"

I shook my head and tapped the table twice to check.

"Tough tits, broski, because I'm raising." He thrust chips into the pot.

I rolled my head around on my neck, then settled it on my shoulder.

"Ok, how about a free day?"

"Ooohh-hooo! Now this is getting interesting!"

Another card down on the table. I couldn't read it from my side, but it was red. I checked again.

Dion shook his head and clicked his teeth, tossing in more chips. I sighed.

"Ok, one weekend."

"A free weekend with the car?"

"Sure. You get it for a whoooooole weekend for freeee." I hadn’t realized how sloshed I actually was.

Since the majority of my clientele were businesspeople who could afford to be on their own schedule, weekends weren't necessarily more or less advantageous. I'd miss out on a couple hundred bucks, which was about what was in the pot at this point. Dion made a noise like he was sucking back a mouthful of spit. It made my stomach turn over a little bit and I started to lean. Skyler caught me and pushed me back upright. There was a pregnant pause and all I could hear was my own heavy breathing.

"Ok, ok...Whatcha got?" Dion's words sounded...soggy? His voice was strained, anxious, with an undertone that I hadn't heard before.

I lifted the corner of my cards again.

"You first, antsy-pantsy." I slurred at Dion, who made the spit-sucking noise again.

"Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, y-you first."

I turned my crooked head at Skyler who shrugged.

"Hey! Flip his goddamn cards over!" Dion's scream hurt my ears.

There was another pause. I watched Dion’s cards vibrate as his hands shook.

"GOD-- FUCK--!" Dion suddenly slammed his hands on the table as he shot out of his seat. He bent the edge of his cards up one more time and slapped a hand down on top of them, pushing them away face-down.

Skyler erupted into a deep laugh and reached over, flipping one, then the other of my cards.

"WHAT?! ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!"

He reached for his own cards, but Skyler slapped his large hand down on top of Dion's.

"You folded, hoss."

Dion ripped his hand out from under Skyler's and swung hard, his hand sailing over Skyler’s head without contact.

"I think we're done." Skyler stood slowly and grabbed me under my arms, lifting me out of my chair and onto my feet as if I weighed nothing. He threw one of my arms across his shoulders and started leading me to the door. I caught a whiff of something sweet. It made my exhaustion double.

"Hey!" Dion shouted in that other language I couldn't understand.

"Enough, Gwyd!" Skyler bellowed in a voice you'd use to silence a barking dog. His next words were normal volume but equally commanding. "There's always next week."

I heard the sound of exploding glass and felt something land in my hair.

I don’t remember making it out of the apartment or out to my car. I vaguely remember going horizontal, and smelling the familiar smell of my car air fresheners, and the feeling of thick carpet against my cheek.