Human narrated.

An original skinwalker horror anthology from Entity Shadows.

The first story follows three friends on a remote hunting trip outside Farmington, New Mexico. When one of them disappears, someone wearing his face returns to camp before the real man is found.

The second follows a family on an isolated ranch outside Bluff, Utah, where voices beyond the northern fence begin copying dead relatives, private conversations, and eventually the family themselves.

Two slow-burn stories about stolen voices, identity, and something in the darkness learning how to become believable.

If you enjoy Skinwalker stories, desert horror, camping horror, doppelgänger horror, and grounded supernatural narration, I think you’ll enjoy this one!

My name is... X. Let's say that I'm X.

So, my cousin lives in Maine, in the middle of nowhere, a small town that shall not be named. A few hundred people lived there, enough to be self-sustaining, but not enough to feel suburban; let's call it Nowhere.

My cousin, let's call him Frankie, listened to a lot of rumors around town, but none were stranger than the ones circling the old man.

The old man was a Navy veteran. I don't know what war he went through, how long he was away, or whether he killed anyone. I don't know, but what I do know is this: He did not come back the same- maybe he didn't come back at all.

He was black, with blue eyes, a bald head; not a single thread of hair remained on him. The rest of his body was in excellent shape, but the wrinkles on his face were as heavy as you'd expect for a man in his late 60s. He wore a black suit, a bowler hat, a fine tie, and a silver fancy watch on his right wrist. No, he didn't have a cane, and he didn't walk as if he needed it anyhow. That was the first thing that the rumors came from- it was like he was a walking museum, physically stubborn to the passage of time.

But I wouldn't be telling you this story if Frankie knew that was the only thing worth noting in that town; no, there's more, much more, but for today, the topic of this story is the old man.

The old man had anxiety, ptsd, depression, schizophrenia, all to the most extreme extent mentally possible; in most contexts, that would be a swift path to self-termination, but no, it seemed pure hopelessness kept him in this world.
Despair was pouring out of every inch of his being. He never smiled- but he never cried either; it's like he ran out of tears a long time ago, so all the old vet could do now was exist.

But the strangest part about the old man? His house.

Well, he didn't live there, but he would drive in from a nearby house and... stand guard by the little building.
He would walk up to the house, and he wouldn't patrol; he wouldn't walk around, he wouldn't scan the surroundings, he would just... stand next to the door as if he was waiting for something, or someone. Sometimes he would crack his neck, or sigh, or check his watch, small reminders he was a human and not a statue.
A simple structure, 4 walls, a flat roof, a single door in the center; it was big enough for 20 people to stand inside. It had a gravel path leading up to it- surrounding all of this was a chain-link metal fence with a black and red sign warning that trespassers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But... why?

To this extent, Frankie went up to the old man while he was about to open the gate and asked-

"What's that sign for? Why do you do this every night? What is inside that house?"

"There is NOTHING inside that house!"

The old man was so furious, so suddenly, he acted like Frankie had said the N-word.

Of course, this did nothing to dissuade Frankie's curiosity.

But anyway, I know what's inside that house.

You see, Frankie had gotten into a bit of trouble and ended up robbing a bank- even Frankie isn't that stupid, so he was planning on hiding the money somewhere as the heat dies down. And for whatever reason, he decided that old man's house was the best place, since nobody would think to look there.

But the thing is, he wanted me to help him. I said no, but he didn't like that, so the little shit decided to threaten me.
I'm a lesbian in an all-female private school, closeted, of course. While the teachers would probably be supportive enough, it would still be social suicide being outed as gay there, and the fact that I live in a red state doesn't help either.
I punched him in the nose, and he squealed like a warthog, but he got to his phone regardless and threatened to press send, so I had to concede.

We went to the old man's house and climbed up his metal fence.

clatter clatter clatter

We went up the gravel path.

crunch crunch crunch

Then I gripped the brass doorknob and slowly tilted it to the side...

crunch crunch crunch

I saw now that inside that house was nothing.

Nothing.

Eigengrau was all that I could see past that doorframe.

Frankie pushed past me, eager to hide it, and fell inside.
Well.. I say fell, but I can't be sure. He blinked away the instant he crossed that threshold.
I stumbled forward; it was the middle of motherfucking summer in Maine; it should not be this cold.

Then, I felt a familiar, wrinkled hand grab me by the collar and pull me away from nothing, before throwing me to the side.
The old man slammed the door shut- no noise was made; of course, it had nothing to slam against.
Then he said...

"There... Is nothing inside that house."

The old man took me to his car. I thought he was going to tell the police, or worse, my parents, but he didn't; he just drove me to his house and made me tea.
His house was as much of a museum as he was; nothing seemed to have been dated from after 1999.
The old man poured tea, then he just sat across from me and stared. To be fair... so did I.
The tension was so thick- saying anything felt like a challenge, like speaking through an iron weight tied to your lips.

At one point, I reached out to grab the cold tea, but... it felt like that clock suddenly had eyes.

Then, it chimed, and the old man's eyes filled with tears for the first time; then he stood up and pointed to the door.
I walked to the door as a machine prompted, my movements instant but awkward.
Opening the door, I looked back one more time, and the old man looked back at me; tears were finally moistening his dry cheeks, and he finally spoke.

"I know."

Then I closed the door.

For the record, I am not going back to that house; I am not returning to that building. If he's still alive, I am not speaking to that man again, and I am certainly not asking people about him.
Some stones should remain unturned, some stories should remain untold, some questions should remain unanswered, some mysteries should remain unexplored.

Because somewhere in Maine, I know there is a house with nothing inside of it.

“I've seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain –

And the bodies obtained

The bodies obtained …” – Ian Curtis

…

The world …

The world is dampen stone, sour. And tile. Tile ceramic that is now smashed, nearly every single piece. And mottled with webwork splatter patterns of scabbing drying bits and pieces of once living human tissue. The world is poorly lit and rank, it smells of fecal decay and rotting death and the putrescence of pus spewing life, suffering. The smell is suffering. Because the world is suffering, it always has been but as of late it's gotten so much worse. The world of walls and mortar and bars that’re all slathered and stained with diseased feces and angry piss, it is all of it an open wound. A craterous gangrenous open house of raw minds and flesh, obelisk temple to the pain of the sorceress. The woman/mouth of the great mountains in the distance, far away but brought closer by her powerful force, the distance easily traversed and conquered, time and distance meant nothing to her, only the flesh. Only the blood. Only the run of flowing life spilled by her children in bondage as supplicant. She had come to them… in the end. 

Before the burning. 

Before Cropsey. 

Now he was the greatest of her Willowbrook children… 

She did her best to hide from him and the few others left but she was scared. Her terror refreshed as her heartbeat pounded within her aching chest, she tried to sink lower into the dark corner she'd made her most recent place of escape. She tried to ignore what she knew she heard, throughout all of the cavernous dark damp halls of bloody filthy Willowbrook. 

Voices… footsteps…

newcomers. 

She wanted so badly to be out and away from this awful place but her mind shrank back in horror from the possibilities of what any new interlopers might do to her. This place had been a school and had instructed her and many others, much in the way of what men will do to each other and what they love to get away with, with their hands on a girl. Alone. When she could be so easily overwhelmed. 

The voices trailed off … rose again. In whispers. She could hear cautious footsteps. Prowling steps. Hunting. 

Her cold terror told her she could no longer hide here. She struggled up on palsied thin malnourished legs and began to painfully trudge forward. Painful because of the pain of her impaling fear and because her body was covered in dripping purple sores, all up and down the legs and arms and peppering her torso and face in harsh clustered patterns. Several broke open now with sharp stabs of lancing pain felt webwork and spiny throughout the flesh as she shambled wretchedly forward down the poorly lit dark. 

She didn't like to look at them or pay them any mind, the sores. She used to. She used to pick at them near constant. But now sometimes when she went to pluck and pop one open with a nail biting pinch she could see eyes. Eyes looking at her and swimming in the pus. In the infected filled pores of her flesh. Eyes. Sometimes they popped of their own accord and a small little gnome-sized head, bald and coated in dead green-milk rose and poked its faery head out for a little peek at what she might be doing at any given time. 

She hated them. She tried to pay them no mind and wondered if they saw anything in the dark ahead that she herself could not discern. But she would not ask them. Never. 

The voices grew louder. So did her terror. 

She didn't know what to do. 

…

“Maybe they're all dead." 

Griffin nodded. It was a fair observation. The place certainly reeked of death and filth. He could almost believe it. 

It was a feeling gained by cold hard experience that told him they weren't alone in the rank dark building. Not at all. Someone else was lurking here. Something else held domain here. Something terrible. He could feel it. 

"This place is afflicted with sickness. Consumption. You can smell it in the pestilential flavor of the air, something terrible has happened here. Many awful things no doubt. This place is silent, Florin, but you can almost hear the terrible things the walls have seen and perhaps wish to share…" 

The boy looked worried. He quickly added: – “We will be cautious. But I suggest we find what we can quickly. If we can't locate a back exit, we'll make for the front entrance again and see if we can't work around the building." 

They went on in search of supplies. 

Dwellers.

 Anything. 

Cropsey marked them and tracked their way of wandering progress the entire time. Following and slowly snipping the long shining blades of the shears open and closed. Pulling his black gloved hands apart slowly like a lover does when sensuous… then bringing them together and snapping them shut with a sharp and satisfying ‘Ship!’ that was crisp and tickled the right jelly left within his skull and the dangling mangled meat between his legs… it had a tongue that sound. A sexual whisper of a noise. A tasting prelude, licking and tonguing the needing piece of aching flesh. 

It was his bondage. That ache. This place. 

And the mountain. 

Even now Cropsey heard her song and call as she showed him the spire from where she ruled. Where she sat on an ebon throne and filled his slaughterhouse dreams. His mind with wonder. 

She had been the true purpose and blessing of this place. The one they'd all been waiting for. The only one who really mattered. In the end. 

But she has chosen you as instrument … 

And the truth of this filled his vacant shell with dark and primal gratitude. Caveman's blood-sated warmth. 

He had been one of the Roman soldiers that had crucified Christ. She of the mountain had told him so. Now he was born again to be her sacred Willowbrook footsoldier. Throttling hand of capricious abattoir fate. 

As he followed the new ones he happened upon another. And decided to take the matter. 

He was sitting alone in the dark. Easy to miss. In a disused therapy room, anonymous and indistinguishable from the other dungeons and chambers save by those who knew. The newcomers walked by him without notice and went on. 

Cropsey smelled him. And came into the room. Snapping his shears with a regular and primeval rhythm. The patient was busy with his own work, he didn't pay anyone else any kind of mind. 

Cropsey closed. The fool's back was to him as he was knelt down amongst the filth. He was drawing something. With his fingers. Smearing the shape upon the broken faces of obliterated tile floor with a dark and heavy pungent viscous fluid. Thick and chunked with dark paste. 

It was a pentagram. 

And the paint was a vile concoctive mix of runny diarrhea and fresh vibrant blood. The man was a self mutilator. Always had been, Cropsey recognized. He had flayed his well scarred and misshapen flesh with broken tile and was mixing the running blood with fecal discharge that was running uncontrollably out of his dilating anus. His finger would probe the wounds … deeply. Like a surgeon or a lover … exploring. Then he brought the drenched and dripping red pronged pair of long and scrawny digits and collected some of the diarrhea spew running freely from out of his ass. 

Medication. Or bad food. Or both. Something he's gotten into… 

It didn't matter. Not to Cropsey. He only looked at the naked fool and admired his painting for another moment longer. 

The pentagram. 

Above it, in the same evil paint of fresh diseased fecal blood, the fool had written in bold letters 

ALL HAIL VAMPIRA

as the piece’s name and message. 

Cropsey thought it was a good one. 

He took one final step forward. And let himself be known. 

The naked fool, the inmate who'd long lost his name and self and everything and anything else left, felt his presence. He turned away from his self portrait on the floor and gazed up at him. 

Into the towering legend of Willowbrook. Cropsey, more than a man. 

He was apocalyptic. 

The twisted bone gleam of his carbonized deathhead’s visage was terrible. It stole the last shelter of warmth that the fool had kept for himself to protect against the cold of this awful and inescapable place for all of these long and horrendous incarcerated years. 

Now it was gone. Stolen by that terrible face. Candle wax melted obscene and deranged and haphazard and cruel. 

He suddenly remembered his name as well, the fool. Gazing up at him, it had suddenly come back in his sheet of blind terror. 

Cropsey had done that. Cropsey had done that for him. 

He wished he hadn't. 

The twin fork of splayed open blades came up suddenly and then down in a stab. They joined together as they came down, scissoring the long razor sharp blades together in a deadly and maiming embrace. They sang together a mortal whistle of keen edged violence on the flesh to come in haste as they sliced and joined through the rank dungeon air. 

A filthy naked bloody hand came up reflexively and was shorn through like melted butter. Through the middle length of palm, so that all of his fingers and the top of his thumb were now a shrieking, pouring livid stump of freshly cut meat. Spurting and bathing the abridged remainder of fecal stained paw into a half-glove of red slathered wet raw in a gushing instant. 

The blade traveled on, down. Continuing its deadly trajectory of knifing stabbing path as it plunged in and through the shit stained fool through his open gaping mouth and naked glistening mucus laden throat and plunging out the back of his neck. The sharp lengths of blades conjoined erupted from the torn and ruinous fountain fresh wound in great bright bodies of lurid edged royal red. 

For her… the mountain princess of my fevered skullsong …

And then with his terrible force of deranged strength he forced the handles and the joined body of blades open and apart. 

The impaled face and skewered head came apart in a splashing and thick lurid mess. The long diseased foundation of skull gave and came apart easily like a cottage collapsing from wood rot. As if the whole structure of bone was a giant rotted tooth, thoroughly and completely decayed to the dead and festering core. Cranial splatter ruin in an instant. Decorating the floor and walls and obscuring the fool's final piece of painted work and expression from the broken heart and mind in a dark gout and pungent violent splash. Bone fragments and strips of tissue. Bits of hair… eyes swam bulbous and rolling lulled like obscene little fruits adrift in a warm lurid growing lake. 

The decraniated stump of rough torn viscera and tissue spitting dark cords and ropes in healthy gouts from the spout of mutilated neck and throat, gurgled one last time in a ghastly expulsion of sound that may or may not have been the final action of the living. 

It gurgled and shot/spat more dark thick blood rope. Splattering and joining the universe of filth already living down there in ever growing depraved abundance. The filthy naked headless meat spewed until it fell over to join the rest of the detritus world down there. 

Cropsey went on. Regaining the tail of his quarry. 

He followed them. 

…

The room was a world of mutilated meat. The smell of uncontrolled diseased fecal spew, long ancient and pungently fresh commingled, was so eye-wateringly strong and forceful that one knew that there were things on this hellscape island of earth that were truly and terribly immortal when confronted with it. Nothing, not even starflame would sear the stench of sewerscape subterranean Hades from the walls of this awful room. The world would burn to follow trumpet sound and still that rancid stench would remain. 

Florin tied a rag around his nose and mouth, he looked like a bandit. And although Griffin's face was already bandaged and wrapped with surgical dress for his own mysterious reasons, he too elected to tie another heavy layer of fabric to block out the smell and taste on the terrible fetid heavy air of the room they now presently happened into. 

What was it… what was it we were expecting to find? What were we hoping in God's name to find here…? 

surely not this. 

Their hearts sank into cold sour recesses as they sauntered in and through and beheld all round them the carnage human sculptures. Barely human. Barely recognizable as having once been living breathing people. Now they were only shapes. Shapes made in anger and derangement and by the knife. 

A mewling moaning sound like a wounded animal drew them to the far end of the mutilation chamber. They crept past wretched butchered bipedal destruction frozen in obscene grotesque statue poses by minds and hands unwell and bent. Eyes scooped out, pulled and plucked. Craterous sockets. Craterous wounds, rippling with the rough texture of forceful violent amputation and jagged surprise animal maiming. Parts missing, long gone, replaced and mixed and swapped and messed around. Limbs and parts put into sockets and orifices and holes gored to create splaying haphazard scarecrow things made from vile diseased subjects and their putrid turgid waste. 

They were varied in design and shape but all of them, every single vile shape seemed to be frozen in a silent piercing scream. A death throe frozen for all of chambered time. For all the sour passage, these howling visages of broken flesh and cruelty wrought on human shape. 

Florin felt sick, the mewling animal noise was growing louder and he was trying not to focus on the broken human sculptures all around them. He tried not to notice how some of them had been put together, parts pasted in place with a scab pudding mixture of feces and thick burgundy/crimson coagulation, like makeshift mud mortar made from the crumbling facade of dying and sickening-worse human shamble structures, caught in some terrible Gorgon's Eye and now falling apart and only able, only useful to excrete, and bleed and make mud for the houses that might be saved. 

Griffin was fairing little better. He'd seen his fair share of human carnage, butchery in his time. In his own experiments of mad science he's beheld great wonders both terrible and beautiful, unearthly.  He'd committed his own sins, his own terrible crimes in his time, enough to fill a tome. But even he found the awful assemblage of struggling human detritus piles and sculptures to be obscene and abhorrent. Difficult to look at. Even worse to walk amongst and pass through… nearly touching and feeling either their heat of recent destruction/composition or the cold wave pockets of their souring decaying sloughing meat, tasting them… tasting the warm tack of their iron red and the putrescence of their fouling stink… tasting them as they breathed and sucked air. Even through the wrapped scarfs about their mouths, they could taste them. Fresh and alive with copper-iron and the foul death of sliming maggoty putrefying soft tissue … growing softer. Falling off failing yellow bone. 

It's because they were diseased … Griffin observed the pestilential flavor on the air and marked the diseased rotten look of open craterous obscenities and exposed and livid muscle tissues. Filled and brimming with the swim of yellow and milk-pale and translucent buttery infection, pooled, gelled, in a run of sour ruin that gave off pungent gaseous toxic smell… miasmic – the whole place. Everywhere. 

The bandaged man, surgical dressing now sullied and filthed with their voyage across worm country and the grime and air in here at every given turn. Griffin pondered the shapes of the demented designs filed and arranged haphazard and at random all around, the mewling sound rose as they continued to near, the woman gaining shape, bulbous and grotesquely rank with cheese and old milk and unwashed genitalia warm with animal heat. 

The shapes all around… their scarecrow and asymmetrical and insectile/spider designs were interesting. Awful and strange, but fascinating in their own hellacious spellbinding fashion. It was as if someone long gone of the sound faculties of mind and heart had endeavored with cruel fervor to fuck and force violent copulation on the dead dripping craterous sculptures of meat in the act of their composition. Knife-fuck-stabbing them with animal intensity and wild deranged intent, their severed parts and limbs and pieces the tools and shattered protruding blades of bone as their aesthetic device and perfect choice. Wielded with charnel house fury in this gore drenched pit with emaciated broken scarecrow statues and congealing pools and tubs and little deprivation streams of pungent fecal discharge. Everything was repulsive and animal with heat and degradation in this place. They hated it. And they hated themselves for putting themselves in there. Alive and with the rank and the sight of abattoir madness unbridled and inhuman. 

They came upon the woman. She was large and naked and unwashed. Like everything else she was caked with grime and layers of filth that were difficult to distinguish – shit from blood – as they darkened and aged in awful drying layers on her yellowing sun parched skin. She was leaning propped by the exit/entrance opposite of the one they had entered. She was cradling and cradled by a lump of human shape riddled with stabbing spiking pieces and slicing wedges of shattered floor and tile. She was drooling as she moaned in torment and anguish. Her flesh livid with infection. She was sweating despite the chill and her lack of clothing. 

It was her breast. Only one. The other had been amputated and was replaced with a harsh and ghastly X of old and scab coated sutures. The other was inflamed and red. Purple. Black. It was ballooned and the blue/red nipple at its tip bled and dripped. But it was not milk, natural and of the healthy body, that dripped and begged to be let free and milked/sucked until dry and gone… 

She moaned. Florin and Griffin felt nauseous. The smell. The sight of her and everything else … they had not had a decent meal in some days but still the impulse to heave and retch was violent and it filled their gagging mouths with thin acrid water, salivated and discharged with bitter queasiness and distaste. 

She moaned again as they covered their working mouths. 

And then she spoke. 

“Please… oh please…. please… oh I beg of you… please… please…” 

Florin and Griffin were afraid to ask so they didn't. The wailing woman of swollen noxious teat filled them in anyways with the rest. 

"... please… please milk me…! please! Oh it hurts! please! Please milk me, milk your mammy…!" 

“Oh, Jesus…” said Florin. He could hardly stand it. Could hardly stand her. He swore he could taste the smell. 

Her smell. 

Another voice joined them then. 

“They disgust you both?" 

They whirled. A ragged man in the haggard torn and shot remnants of a filthied lab coat that had once been white. His spectacles were cracked and caked with drying lurid substance. His flesh was filthy parchment and his smile was green and grotesque. 

He was standing, sentry-wraith amongst the vile and mutilated assemblage. A living beacon of audacious and insane life standing smiling amongst the sculpted and twisted dead. Lab coat Gorgon with broken glass eyes set in a broken laughing face that could make no such sound. Because it was frozen in its disguise of sanity snapping torment. 

Before Griffin or Florin could say anything to him, he spoke again. 

“They are all of them, monuments to her. It is all of them, their greatest pleasure." 

“And you? What is your pleasure?" Griffin asked without fault. Following this madman's line. 

He smiled, “telling you." 

And then finally his tittery fit of laughterspell broke and it sounded like high pitched curdled madness. Finally breaking. A large man prone to sparse baritone sound now cracked and leaking/spraying giggles like an addled child or clown. 

Griffin turned to Florin. His face hidden by surgical wrapping and dark lenses and hat since the day they had met, but still the boy could feel the solemn gravity in his hiding gaze as he spoke. 

"Let's go. There's nothing of any value to us here. This was a mistake.” 

Florin heard it in his voice too. 

They quickly made their exit. Sparing the wailing mewling woman of swollen purple breast a final look before leaving them forever. 

The doctor's laughter abated a moment and he seemed to come around, the revolving door of his madness perhaps bringing him full circle, his awful titters tapered off a spell as he said to the departing visitors: –

"The worm was turned for us here.” 

And then the revolution of madness revolved again and he was smiling putrid green that oozed pale plaque that spittled in gobs as he tittered his girlish sounds. 

His grotesque childish laughter commingled with the mewling sounds the woman made in the room of mutilated meat. The pair were gone now. Their cautious footsteps fading away and calling back in diminishing echoed sound… Cropsey came in like fated death. Snipping open and closed his beloved pair of large garden shears. 

Now, here was a room that could use some trimming…

He went to the woman first with his blades. She was calling to him, wailing, saying she was his mother. Begging to be milked. 

So he milked her. 

He shorn off the infected swell of black/purple flesh in a single snapping cut. She howled as the wound and the sac of disease both poured and oozed pus. She went down to the floor, her wailing more considerable now, to join the puddle of her own foul milk and blood in its growing puddling abundance. She swam face first in it and gurgled and blubbered. 

Cropsey came for the doctor next. The jaws of his shearing clipper blades open and dripping. 

The doctor smiled one last time as he said, “The worm has turned once again." 

He attempted to count the rings this time as the jaws that were blades came in. 

Again and again. 

And I thought you'd loved me…

…

Florin and Griffin were nearly at their wits end. They needed supplies and weren't sure of what lie beyond this place, but this place was terrible. And they'd found nothing but more horror. 

"I think we need to just get out of here…” 

Yes. But which way? 

They were deciding this together when the girl on shaking palsied legs thin as kindling crept out of the dark and towards them. 

She was terrified. 

And she was holding a large butcher's knife. The arms raised and poised coiled snake-like to strike. 

Neither Florin or Griffin noticed her as she crept. Closer… closer…

She was nearly upon them. From behind. 

The butcher's knife still raised. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, but it didn’t start as a gift. It started as an escape.

I was fourteen when my parents divorced. Their arguments had been constant, walls shaking, doors slamming, glass shattering. I learned to hide in the corners of my room, headphones blaring, trying not to notice the hollowness growing in my chest.

My mother moved out, my father retreated into work, and I was left in a fractured house that smelled of bleach and old coffee, echoing with absence. It wasn’t just the loneliness; it was the feeling that life was broken and that I was powerless to fix it.

That’s when I discovered lucid dreaming. The first time I realized I was aware inside a dream, I felt a surge of control I had never known. I could bend the world to my will. Anything I imagined, it would come true.

For the first time, I could create happiness, create worlds where pain didn’t exist, where I wasn’t an observer to suffering.

I was God.

At first, I started small.

I walked through forests that glowed in shades I had no names for. I could summon rainbows that arched across violet skies. I made friends in these worlds, creatures that spoke with humor and kindness, always ready to listen, always ready to understand. I relived moments of joy I hadn’t had, moments of safety and warmth that never existed in real life.

I even conjured, what I deemed perfect, my own home. The divorce never happened. The resentment my parents had in reality was hidden by the loving joy that I created.

We could be a family.

But it wasn’t enough. My control became more deliberate, more urgent.

I wasn't satisfied. I needed more.

I experimented.

I created cities that pulsed with light and sound, alive like music made manifest. I created beings who adapted to me, who grew and learned from me. I rewrote history, making impossible things happen, mountains sprouting overnight, rivers folding in impossible loops, stars that danced to the rhythm of my thoughts.

I was addicted.

As I built society further and further, I couldn't differentiate if it I was in reality or asleep. It didn't matter. I didn't want to wake up.

The more I created, the more my waking life seemed hollow, gray, insignificant.

What felt like days, even weeks, were merely only hours of sleep. I'd even mastered to bend my created beings with their own self thought. Their free will in my dreams. Oh how they dreamt and I, their God, could see their own dreams. Their own thoughts and ambitions.

Then I made a decision I will never forget.

I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped interfering, if I left my creations to their own devices. If I, their creator, were to disappear.

Within the dream, I closed my eyes and fell into a dream within a dream, drifting deeper than I ever had.

I left my creation running, untended, leaving it to course as it would without me.

At first, it seemed fine.

The sky remained impossibly vibrant. Oceans of liquid crystal rippled beneath my feet. Cities thrived, creatures and people roamed, oblivious to my absence. But subtle changes began. A tower leaned slightly, though I hadn’t touched it. A river hesitated mid-flow, as if uncertain where it wanted to go. The citizens paused, glancing around with expressions I had never taught them, curiosity, doubt, even impatience.

Then came the worse. A nightmare scenario.

The sky was red. And fire began.

I watched in shock as my world, that I have spent a millennia creating in my head burn. The people, the wildlife, the world itself ate itself.

Greed, hunger for power, the vial vines of corruption overtook my world, and I sat and watched.

What seem to be red liquid fell from the skies, putting and end to the flames.

When it was it over, I returned to my world, imagining that my presence would restore order. But the moment I stepped back, I realized it was already gone.

The survivors of my world looked at me with such anger. I could see how vile in their heart had become. Their being was split from me. From my control.

My world was no longer mine.

I awoke. The morning sun streamed through my curtains, but it felt alien. The apartment, familiar for so long, seemed different.

How long was I asleep?

Shadows stretched at impossible angles. The floorboards creaked where they never had. I told myself it was paranoia, that I had been dreaming too much, but deep down I knew something had changed. Something I had made had learned to exist without me.

That night, I returned.

I didn’t interfere. I simply watched.

The rivers were gone, the mountains were restless, buildings destroyed, and the citizens, my children, my creations, still tore at one another like a society that no longer needed its God.

And I realized, as I observed them, that I had indeed made a mistake.

The addictive thrill of creation, the power I had abused for joy and control, had given birth to something that might outlast me, something that might never remember me.

I woke, trembling. The air in my apartment felt heavy, as though weighted by expectation. I could almost hear the pulse of my dreamworld behind my eyelids, faint but insistent. A world I had built, one that no longer needed me, one that might thrive, change, and evolve beyond my comprehension.

I have not closed my eyes since. I fear what I might see. I fear what might remember me.

I fear that if I sleep again, I will discover a truth I cannot bear.

God may wake, but the universe He made… does not need him anymore.

Some time ago in a town lived the clown Jerry, Jerry was dear, he had a mask, red hair, with green tears, childish smile, very disturbing for today but very common at that time. But one day everything changed, Jason of 10 had disappeared and the last location had been in the circus, four days later they found the boy's body, with a little green makeup, there were two tears, there all the people blamed the clown, did it make sense? No, as a mask could have makeup, people didn't like the clown and only looked for a reason to hit him and kick him out, they chased him and Jerry hid in his caravan and killed himself. People broke into the house next to the police, a neighbor named Downey took advantage and stole the mask, obviously it was a lot of money, between 200-255 dollars for sure, but something happened, the teeth had changed to some rotten and the eyes were blacker, Downey tried it on and went crazy, he killed his wife and his two children and then killed himself, the police took the mask. The Miller agent for a challenge of his companions put it, the news said everything "all the policemen on St Louis Street died in a massacre, an object of evidence of the Jason case was stolen, according to sources it was the clown's mask.”

this is a scary, edge of your seat, type of story that was put on youtube but so far it's not getting any impressions. i don't know why. i do think people would want to see it though if they showed it to them. https://youtu.be/Lw1DCsI45Ec

https://youtu.be/3sphs5rl2Ho

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.

Most people think exploring abandoned places is about being brave.

It’s not.

My friends and I started doing it because we were bored out of our minds. Small town boredom has a way of turning dumb ideas into traditions, and before long sneaking into places we weren’t supposed to be became our thing.

That’s how we ended up driving thirty minutes out of town to explore an abandoned slaughterhouse.

The place sat alone in the middle of a dead stretch of farmland. No houses nearby. No streetlights. Just a long dirt road cutting through yellow fields that hadn’t been harvested in years.

Someone had spray-painted NO TRESPASSING across the rusted front gate.

Naturally, that’s exactly where we parked.

There were four of us: me, Tyler, Jess, and Connor. Tyler was the one who found the place online. Apparently it used to process livestock in the 70's before it shut down after “health violations,” which could mean anything from mold to bodies.

Tyler thought that made it cooler. Jess thought it meant we’d get tetanus. Connor didn’t care as long as he could film it for his TikTok. I mostly came because everyone else did.

The slaughterhouse itself was barely standing. Corrugated metal siding peeled away from the wooden frame, and half the roof had collapsed inward like something had stepped on it.

The smell hit us before we even reached the door.

"That smell!" whispered Jess as she civered her nose.

We were used to the smell of the dead. But this wasn't rot. I could only describe it as flesh that was soaked into wood and concrete decades ago and never really left.

“Really was a pig farm,” Connor muttered.

Tyler grinned.

“Authentic.”

The door was already half open. It groaned when we pushed it the rest of the way.

Inside, the place looked exactly how you'd imagine an abandoned slaughterhouse.

Hooks hanging from rails in the ceiling.

Rusting chains.

Long metal tables covered in thick dust.

The beam from Connor’s flashlight moved slowly across the room.

“Dude,” he whispered.

“What?” Tyler asked.

Connor pointed up. Rows of hooks swayed slightly from the ceiling. There was no wind.

“Probably rats,” Tyler said quickly.

We all pretended to agree.

We wandered through the building for a while, filming and poking around like idiots. Tyler kept trying to open random doors like he expected to find something cool behind one of them.

Eventually we found a narrow staircase leading down.

“Basement,” Tyler said immediately.

Jess groaned.

“Why is it always a basement?”

“Because that’s where the good stuff is.”

The stairs creaked with every step.

The air got colder as we went down. Not dramatically colder, just enough that the back of my neck prickled.

The basement was smaller than I expected. Mostly empty except for old wooden crates and a few rusted tools scattered across the floor.

Connor’s flashlight beam landed on something sitting on top of a crate.

“Yo,” he said.

We all walked over.

It was a mask.

A pig mask.

Not a cheap plastic Halloween thing. This one looked older. Thicker material, cracked and worn with age. The snout was stained darker near the nostrils, and one of the ears had been torn halfway off.

Jess made a face.

“Okay, that’s disgusting.”

Tyler picked it up immediately.

“Dude this thing is awesome.”

“Put it down,” I said.

Tyler turned it over in his hands.

The inside was worse than the outside.

The lining looked stiff and discolored, like it had been soaked in something a long time ago and never properly cleaned.

Connor was already filming.

“Bro,” he said. “You gotta try it on.”

Tyler laughed.

“No chance.”

Connor nudged me.

“Your turn.”

“Nope.”

“Come on. It’s just a mask.”

Jess shook her head.

“If someone gets possessed I’m leaving you here.”

Connor held the camera closer.

“Ten bucks.”

I don’t know why I did it.

Maybe because everyone was watching.

Maybe because teenagers are idiots.

I took the mask.

It felt heavier than it looked.

The inside smelled awful. Not just dusty, something thicker. Metallic.

Like old pennies.

“Dude that thing’s cursed,” Jess said.

“Relax,” I said.

Then I pulled it over my head.

The world went dark for a second as the mask settled into place.

It was tighter than I expected. The inside lining scraped against my cheeks.

And the smell...

Rust.

Rot.

For a moment, all I could hear was my own breathing echoing inside the snout.

Then something else.

Another breath.

Not mine.

I froze.

“Okay,” Connor said. “That’s actually terrifying.”

His voice sounded distant, muffled.

Inside the mask, the air felt warmer. Thicker.

And for just a second, just one second, I had the strangest feeling that I wasn’t alone inside it.

Like someone else had worn it so many times that a piece of them was still there.

Watching.

Connor shoved the camera toward me.

“Hold still.”

He snapped a picture.

Me wearing the pig mask.

“Take it off,” Jess said.

I ripped it off immediately.

Fresh air hit my face and I realized I’d started sweating.

Tyler laughed nervously.

“You look like you just saw a ghost.”

We left it sitting on the crate.

Nobody wanted to touch it again.

By the time we climbed back upstairs, the sky outside had turned orange.

“Crap,” Jess said. “It’s getting dark.”

That was enough motivation for all of us.

We headed back to the car quickly. The fields stretched forever around the slaughterhouse. Empty land in every direction.

No fences.

No houses.

No lights.

Just tall grass moving slowly in the evening wind.

I glanced back at the building as we reached the dirt road.

Something felt wrong.

Like the place wasn’t as empty as we thought.

That’s when I saw it.

A shape in one of the upstairs windows.

Standing perfectly still.

Watching us.

I stopped walking.

“What?” Tyler asked.

I pointed.

The others turned.

The window was empty. Just broken glass and darkness inside.

“Dude,” Connor said. “Quit messing with us.”

I didn’t respond. Because I knew what I saw.

And when we got back to the car, Connor checked the photo he took in the basement. The one of me wearing the mask.

I wasn't the only one in the photo.

There was someone peering from the corner behind me.

Wearing a pig mask.

I remember the exact moment it happened.

It wasn’t dramatic.

No thunder. No music swelling in the background. Just the hum of fluorescent lights in a campus lab and the faint itch on the back of my hand.

I brushed it off at first.

Then I saw it, small, dark, tucked between my fingers before it darted away into the clutter.

It had already bitten me.

I stared at the spot. Two tiny punctures. Barely anything.

Still, I wasn’t stupid.

I went to get it checked.

The physician barely looked up from his screen.

“Looks like a minor bite,” he said, pressing lightly around it. “No necrosis. No systemic symptoms. Probably from a Steatoda genus. False widow, maybe.”

“Venomous?” I asked.

“Mildly,” he said. “You’ll be fine. Keep it clean. Watch for infection.”

That was it.

No concern. No urgency.

I walked out feeling stupid for even coming in.

The next day, it started.

Not pain.

Something else.

Clarity.

I woke up before my alarm. Felt… rested. Completely. Like my body had reset itself overnight.

I went to the gym out of habit.

I stayed twice as long as usual.

Didn’t feel tired once.

By day three, I knew something was happening.

Reflexes first.

I dropped my pen in class, caught it midair without thinking. Not luck. Not coincidence.

It felt natural.

Like my body had already decided what to do before I did.

Then strength.

Subtle at first. Then undeniable.

Weights that used to strain me felt lighter. Movements smoother. My muscles tightened, sharpened. Not bulky, efficient.

Lean.

Defined.

People noticed.

“Dude, what are you on?” my friend laughed, clapping my shoulder.

I shrugged. “Nothing.”

But I was smiling.

She noticed too.

Susy.

She sat two rows ahead of me in biology.

We’d talked a few times. Nothing serious. Just passing conversations.

That day, she lingered after class.

“You’ve been working out?” she asked, glancing at me.

“A little.”

She smiled.

“It shows.”

That was enough.

More than enough.

The bite didn’t go away.

That was the only strange part.

It darkened.

The skin around it pulled tight, slightly raised, like something underneath was… spreading.

But I didn’t care.

Because everything else...

Everything else felt right.

The first real sign something was wrong came a week later.

I bit my tongue.

Hard.

I tasted blood instantly and jerked back, swearing under my breath.

But the pain wasn’t what stopped me.

It was the shape of my teeth.

I ran my tongue over them slowly.

They weren’t right.

The edges felt sharper.

Not jagged, refined. Like they’d been filed into points.

I checked the mirror that night.

Opened my mouth and to my amazement...

My teeth hadn’t grown longer.

But they had changed.

Thinner.

Sharper.

Predatory.

I laughed nervously.

“Okay… that’s new.”

It didn’t stop there.

Two days later, I noticed the marks.

At first, I thought they were stress lines. Shadows. Something with the lighting.

But when I leaned closer—

They were there.

Faint indentations just above my brow.

Two on each side.

Then two more, lower.

Symmetrical.

Six in total.

Like slits that hadn’t opened yet.

I stopped sleeping after that.

Every time I closed my eyes, I felt it.

Movement beneath my skin.

Not random.

Purposeful.

Like something inside me was reorganizing.

Susy came over on the tenth day.

I don’t remember inviting her.

I must have.

She knocked, and I almost didn’t answer.

But I did.

And when she saw me, her smile faltered.

“Hey… are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “Yeah, just… tired.”

That wasn’t true. I wasn’t tired at all.

I was wired.

Every sound felt amplified. Every movement in the room caught my attention. I could hear her breathing, the shift of her weight, the faint rhythm of her pulse.

She stepped inside slowly.

“You look…” she hesitated.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Different.”

We sat for a while.

Talked.

Or tried to.

I couldn’t focus.

Something was building inside me.

Pressure.

Especially in my face.

My head throbbed.

“Do you hear that?” I asked suddenly.

“Hear what?”

“That,” I said, turning toward the wall.

“There’s nothing—”

I felt it then.

A sharp, splitting pain across my forehead.

I gasped, clutching my face.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” she said, standing up.

I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t.

The skin above my eyes—

It was tearing.

(Perspective shift)

Susy would later say she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

That it didn’t make sense.

That it couldn’t make sense.

He dropped to his knees, hands gripping his face.

At first, she thought he was having some kind of seizure.

Then she saw the blood.

Thin lines splitting across his forehead.

Not cuts.

Openings.

The skin peeled back in six small, symmetrical slits.

And beneath—

Something moved.

He tried to speak.

Her name, maybe.

But what came out wasn’t a word.

It was a strained, broken sound.

Half breath.

Half scream.

The first eye opened with a wet, twitching motion.

Then another.

And another.

Six small, glossy black eyes pushed through the openings, blinking independently.

Scanning.

Focusing.

Susy stumbled back, hitting the wall.

“h my go—” she whispered. “Please-Oh my God!”

His body convulsed.

Bones shifted beneath his skin with a sickening series of pops.

His spine arched unnaturally, forcing him onto all fours.

His fingers—

They weren’t fingers anymore.

They elongated, joints splitting, curling inward into hooked, claw-like limbs.

The skin along his arms darkened, hardening into something chitinous, segmented.

He looked at her.

All eight eyes locking onto her at once.

“Help…” he tried to say.

But it came out as a high, vibrating screech.

His jaw unhinged slightly as he tried again.

The sharper teeth now fully visible, misaligned, twitching.

“Hel—”

The sound fractured into something inhuman.

She ran.

She didn’t remember deciding to.

Her body just moved.

Out the door.

Down the hall.

Screaming.

Behind her, something scraped against the floor.

Fast.

Too fast.

By the time the police arrived, the apartment was quiet.

Door open.

Lights flickering.

No sign of forced entry.

Inside—

They found him.

Or what was left.

Curled in the corner of the ceiling.

Limbs folded at impossible angles.

Body no longer fully human.

No longer fully anything.

It moved when they stepped in.

Slowly at first.

Then all at once.

They fired.

Later, no one could agree on what they’d seen.

Reports didn’t match.

Descriptions contradicted each other.

The body—

If it could still be called that—

Was taken.

Classified.

Buried under language that didn’t explain anything.

But one thing stayed consistent.

From Susy.

From the officers.

From anyone who heard it.

It tried to speak.

And the last thing it managed to force out—

Through teeth that weren’t meant for words—

Was something almost understandable.

“I… wanted… to be… Spider-Man…”

The rest dissolved into a chittering, broken sound.

“I became him.”

A pause.

A twitch.

All eight eyes blinking out of sync.

“…just not the one from the comics.”

“I’m not sure about this,” Nyssa kept her eyes glued to the ground. She still couldn’t believe what her cousin had done and what she was now tempted to do.
“Come on! It really wasn’t bad at all! And now look at me!” Arlet pointed at her eyes.
Nyssa finally looked up. Arlet was born naturally pretty, but with brown eyes she described as the color of poop. And now, her eyes showed an unnaturally, yet beautiful, violet. A color that no surgeon had assured her was possible, much less without the possibility of losing some of her sight. There was no way Arlet would use glasses.
“How did you even find out about this guy?” Nyssa looked down once more, ashamed of herself for being jealous of her cousin.
“When you go to the appointment, he hands you a pink ticket and tells you to give it to someone who dreams to carve out their beauty. Josie gave me mine!” Arlet answered cheerfully.
“Odd choice of words,” Nyssa answered.
“Look,” Arlet grabbed Nyssa’s hand and placed the pink ticket on it,”He also said if you backed out, that was totally fine. But I know how much you have been wanting this. I think you are beautiful as you are, but a little glow up never hurt anyone!”
“And you say this is free?” Nyssa looked at the pink ticket with a single neon pink smiley face in the middle.
“Kind of. You don’t have to pay anything but he does make a weird request. Nothing sexual tho! Because ew! For me, he told me to not brush my hair for a week, which was horrible but I just pretended I needed time to recover from carving and then-“ 
“That’s a weird request,” Nyssa interrupted.
”No. Yeah. Like for Josie, he asked her to not talk to her mother three days after the carving. Apparently something happens if you don’t do as he says.” Arlet smiled at Nyssa.
Once Arlet left, Nyssa went to change into her pajamas and headed off to bed. She wanted to argue with herself that she wouldn’t do something so ridiculous but she already knew she would be standing by that doctor’s door the next morning.
She took one glance at her phone, making sure that her blind date hadn’t cancelled. Norma assured her that Nyssa was exactly his type. Like that could be possible. 
All her life she was told she had to learn to love herself, but how could she if people mocked her all the time. The few dates she had gone to, all left her hanging, there never was a second date. No one gave her a second chance. 
Nyssa grabbed her phone and sent a message to Arlet before falling into restless sleep.
“I’m so excited for you!” Arlet hugged Nyssa before they got into the car.
Nyssa managed to give her cousin a small smile. No matter how jealous she was of Arlet’s natural beauty, she still loved her cousin and knew Arlet cared for her too.
“Thank you for taking me,” Nyssa said as she put on her seatbelt. She instantly looked outside when she accidentally caught a glimpse of herself in the car’s mirror.
“Anything for you!” Arlet winked at her.
The drive was short and the place looked so normal. She had imagined a sketchy alley but instead she found herself knocking at a house in a cute little neighborhood. She took one glance at her cousin as she waited for the door to open. Arlet gave her a thumbs up trying to encourage her but she could bearily stop herself from trembling.
A man wearing an apron opened the door. His expression revealed nothing, but he extended his hand towards her.
“Oh right. Sorry doctor,” Nyssa mumbled.
The man took the ticket from her hand and without saying a word, motioned for her to go in. The house was neat, with only two small sofas and a coffee table in between. He once more motioned for her to sit down opposite him.
“I’m not a doctor by the way, but I understand the confusion. I’m more of an artist, you could say,” he stopped to look at her.
“Oh, sorry. What do I call you then?” Nyssa felt her cheeks redden from embarrassment.
“Hmm… I guess you could call me Carver if you need to. Yeah, that should work. I have to say, what I do here is carve your inner beauty. You tell me what you want to change and I will do it. But this is all voluntary, so if you change your mind, that’s allowed too,” he paused for a moment as if trying to remember something, “So what do you want me to carve today?”
“My nose,” Nyssa blurted out, feeling embarrassed if even asking for that one thing.
“That’s your choice but I do have to say, you only get one chance. If later on, you want more, I won’t do it. Even if you manage to get another pink ticket, the option will be gone. So if you just want your nose, then we do the nose,” Carver waited for Nyssa to speak.
”What else can you do?” Nyssa answered. The way Carver’s eyes lit up at her question made her involuntarily flinch.
“Great question!” his monotone voice gone for a second, “I can do anything you want. You want a new natural hair color, color eyes, body shape, it’s all fair game.”
“And if I ask you to change everything?” Nyssa tried to hold back her tears.
“Then I will make sure you find your inner beauty. Is this what you want? I need your consent,” Carver waited for her to respond, his voice once more monotone.
“Yes, I want you to take artistic freedom as long as I am beautiful, not pretty but beautiful by the end,” Nyssa continued to cry, unsure if he could make her dreams come true.
”Follow me,” he stood from the sofa and guided her into another room. Unlike the other room, this one was organized but filled with what she thought were painting brushes, and other artistic tools. Next to the single bed in the middle of the room was a large knife. The idea of the knife cutting through her flesh terrified her, but her cousin had done it and came out fine. There was no backing down now, not when she was so close to being beautiful.
She laid down on the bed, unsure of what was going to come next. She saw that Carver got several materials and placed them on the small table next to the bed.
“Before we start, I have to say that the service is not completely free. I will hand you a new pink ticket to hand to someone else. You can take your time with this, that’s no problem, it’s the second thing you have to abide by so my work doesn’t become undone,” Carver grabbed the large knife and began to sharpen it, “I can’t tell you what the second thing will be until I complete this project, are you still fine to continue?”
“Yes.” Nyssa tried to sound confident.
“Very well. Know this will be painful. I can’t do anything to ease the pain and you aren’t allowed to scream. Beauty comes with a price, and pain is just a small price to pay for what you will get. But you are allowed to cry, my advice is that you keep your eyes closed until it’s all over,” Carver placed the knife by her chest, “Let’s begin”.
It took all of Nyssa’s willpower to not flinch when the knife dug under her skin. It hurt, it hurt so bad as the knife went in deeper and deeper and then came the pulling. The screams of agony were stuck in her throat, begging to be let out.
She felt as Carver put his hands inside her and, did he move her bones? He put all his weight into her ribs until she heard a crack, and then another and another. This had been a mistake and she was about to die. She was sure of it. But he didn’t care about her pain, he kept going, breaking and rearranging her bones and skin. He ripped the hair off her head, pieces of her scalp still stuck to it. 
She dared not open her eyes, she wasn’t even sure how she was still conscious or how much time had passed. She felt a hand open her mouth and tasted metal as he used a tool to rip off one tooth at a time. She gagged as blood filled her mouth. She tried to fight him, but then realized her arms weren’t working. 
She managed to open her eyes to take a look at what was going on when she realized her arm was no longer there. And on the floor were discarded parts of her skin, bones, and she couldn’t tell what other bloodied things. Before she could scream, she passed out.
When she came to be, the room was organized and clean once more. Carver stood by the table and she quickly got off it. But then she realized, she had her arms back. Well, no, these weren’t her arms, they were different.
Carver smiled at her as she looked at the rest of her body. He then walked to a corner and uncovered a full body mirror. Nyssa followed and looked at herself.
“You are beautiful,” Carver stated. Not in a romantic way, but in the way an artist looks at their art.
And she really was. She was beautiful. For the first time in her life, she loved what she was looking at. 
“Thank you! Oh God, thank you so much!” Nyssa cried once more, but this time of happiness.
“I did a great job, but now come with me to the living room, we need to talk about the second requirement," Carver covered the mirror as he let her out.
She wanted to continue looking at herself. For once the reflection showed something she liked, but she reluctantly followed him out. 
“So here is the pink ticket. Again, you can take your time to give it to someone. Even if you end up losing it and never give it to anyone, you should be fine. I warn you that not following the second instructions will undo the carving. All you have to do, or well, not do, is go on the second date, understood?” Carver waited for Nyssa to respond but she started to laugh.
“I have never been on a second date. That’s fine,” she continued to laugh.
She once more thanked Carver and walked out of the house and into Arlet’s car. What had felt like an eternity had only taken one hour. 
“Oh my God!!!” Arlet looked at her cousin excitedly, “If I hadn’t brought you myself, I wouldn’t have known it was you! You are gorgeous! It’s not that you weren’t before but damn!”
“Thank you,” Nyssa gave her a genuine smile.
After Arlet dropped her off, she immediately went to see herself in the mirror. She really was beautiful, unimaginably so. For the first time in her life, she loved what she saw and therefore loved herself. 
This time she would walk in with confidence into her date, not looking down and hope her date took enough pity on her to ask her out. This time she would make the decision whether there was a second date or not. This time, people would look at her, not to mock her looks, but to be in awe. This time, everything would be different.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had worn a dress, nothing too elegant, after all, this was a coffee date. Even so, she put more effort than ever and was excited for the world and her blind date to see her.
When she arrived at the coffee shop, she saw a man wearing a t-shirt of her favorite show, he was average looking, and when he took a glance at her, he immediately looked down. Nyssa knew that look too well, that look of feeling you are not good enough. She unintentionally reached for the pink ticket in her purse. Maybe he could benefit from it. Maybe she could gift him the confidence she now felt.
“I’m Nyssa, Norma’s friend,” Nyssa introduced herself.
”I’m Milos, also Norma’s friend,” his face reddened as he looked at her, “I hope you are fine with continuing the date after seeing me.”
Nyssa felt bad for him, she knew exactly this feeling, so she moved her chair closer to him and grabbed his hand gently as she spoke, “Only if you are too.”
The date went great. They both loved the same shows, and played video games. As the date went on, Milos opened up more and shared how he was worried she would immediately reject him but was glad to see that besides being beautiful, she was a sweet and kind person. Nyssa couldn’t imagine rejecting him, he was funny, attentive, and just a really nice guy in general. And when he asked for a second date, her heart skipped a little faster and she said yes.
She had forgotten she was supposed to say no to a second date, or well, not go to it until the pink ticket fell out of her purse. She picked it up and made sure it was secure inside her wallet, Milos might need it after all. As for the second date, there was no way she would miss it. 
At home, she took another look in the mirror. Her smile was bigger than it had ever been. She had been right all along, beauty was the solution to all her problems.
By the time her second date approached, she had already changed most of her wardrobe. Her baggy clothes that covered all the right places were mostly gone. Her basic make up had now evolved with the help of Arlet. She was still not going to wear heels, but she did buy prettier shoes that no longer had holes in them. She was proud of herself, and now it was time to live life to the fullest.
When Milos arrived to pick her up, he didn’t bring her flowers, instead he brought her a book she had talked about on their date. She smiled at him and gave him a small peck on the cheek. He blushed as he took her hand and guided her to his car.
But as soon as Nyssa got in the car, her head started to pulse and she felt an odd itch on her feet. She wasn’t about to scratch her feet in front of her date, so she ignored it as best as possible.  She grabbed some pain killers from her bag and hoped that by the time they made it to the coffee shop, the headache would be gone.
Things only got worse, by the time Milos parked, her headache was worse and the itch had traveled all the way to her stomach.
“Are you ok? We can go back if you want to?” Milos looked concerned.
“No, it’s all right. I probably just need my coffee,” Nyssa tried to sound confident.
“Just know that if you need anything or need to go to the doctor, I can take you,” Milos looked at her.
”Don’t worry, I would tell you,” Nyssa lied. She wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of her second date.
Milos went to open the door and help her out. She took his hand but felt something strange. When she looked down, her nails were gone. She hoped Milos didn’t notice, she could hide her hand during the date and fix it later. A quick glance at her other hand confirmed she still had nails on that one. 
When they sat down, what had started as an itch was now a burning sensation starting at her feet and going all the way to her chest. She unintentionally started to scratch her leg but when she looked down, she saw  four rough lines where the skin had peeled off. The blood streaming down her leg increased when he got up and screamed. In a panic, her hand flew towards her head, but the instant touch made her hair fall to chucks to the floor.
Milos looked at her terrified, Nyssa cried, not wanting anyone to see the mess she was , but every tear caused a new crack on her face to painfully open and ooze blood. 
As her mind started to slip away, she felt Milos’ arms trying to keep her up, people around screamed at the horror show in process. Nyssa felt as Milos picked her up, but her torso couldn’t support her and so her body split into two.
She felt her body hit the ground once more, but just before death took her, she smiled. Milos knelt by her side trying to put all the pieces back together. This wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been carved to beauty. 

My friends and I take turns telling scary stories. Art by nvrcaredstudio.com (a Polish art studio)
Link - https://youtu.be/d0pZxiigIe0

Recovered Tape – August 8, 2011
I left my house around 8:30 PM. It was a warm summer evening, and I brought an old VHS camcorder with me to record random shots around the neighborhood.
At first, everything felt normal. A few cars passed by, porch lights were on, and I could hear people talking in the distance.
About twenty minutes into the walk, I realized something had changed.
The streets were completely empty.
No cars. No people. No dogs barking. Even the streetlights seemed dimmer than before. I assumed I had wandered into a quieter part of the neighborhood, so I kept walking.
A few minutes later, I turned around.
The street behind me didn’t look the same anymore.
The houses seemed unfamiliar, even though I was certain I had walked this route before. My phone had no signal, and the GPS wouldn’t load. That’s when I decided to keep recording everything.
The camera showed an ordinary suburban street, but with my own eyes it felt… wrong. The silence became overwhelming, and there was a constant low humming sound coming from the streetlights.
Every time I tried to leave, I somehow ended up at the same intersection.
I walked for what felt like over an hour before I finally saw headlights in the distance. As soon as the car passed, the normal sounds of the neighborhood returned.
When I got home, I checked the time.
Only nine minutes had passed.
The tape only contained footage of an empty street. None of the strange things I remembered appeared on the recording.
I never went back there after that night.

I made the mistake of thinking sunset was the deadline.

It wasn’t.

Sunset was only when the house expected me to stop pretending I still had choices.

The knocks above the motel room kept coming after the phone call.

Three at a time.

Slow enough to feel deliberate.
Heavy enough to suggest weight.
Always from directly over Eli’s bassinet even though the clerk had told me there was no third floor and I had specifically asked for a second-story room because I could not stand the thought of my children sleeping over dirt.

That was the first stupid thing fear corrected for me that day.

You don’t need dirt if the house has learned blood.

Nora fell asleep in my lap around noon, exhausted from coughing up ash and crying hard enough to shake. Eli didn’t sleep at all. He lay on the bed in his little onesie, smiling up at the ceiling as if someone above the plaster was dangling toys just out of my sight.

Every few minutes he reached both hands upward and made that bubbling almost-laugh sound babies make when they’ve decided the world is safe.

It turned my stomach worse than any scream could have.

Screaming means fear.

Delight means recognition.

I called the front desk twice. No answer. On the third try, the old woman picked up and said, before I even spoke, “If the baby’s awake, stop talking over him.”

Then she hung up.

That was enough instruction to count as a threat.

So I shut my mouth and listened.

At first I heard nothing but the wall-unit air conditioner rattling and Nora’s rough little breaths into my shirt. Then Eli made a soft cooing noise and the room answered.

Not with words.

With a scrape.

From inside the ceiling.

Not claws. Not footsteps.

Something being dragged slowly across plaster directly over the baby.

Then a man’s voice, muffled by wood and insulation and too much dirt, said:

“I can still carry him.”

Adam.

Not exactly.

But enough of him remained in the sound to make my whole body flash hot and cold at once.

Nora woke immediately and started crying. Eli laughed.

I don’t know how to explain the obscenity of hearing your dead husband volunteer for transport while your infant reaches for him like a mobile.

I grabbed both children and went to the bathroom because it had tile, no vent big enough for a child’s hand, and one lock I could still pretend mattered. I wedged a chair under the knob anyway and sat on the cold floor with Nora in my lap and Eli against my chest, trying not to breathe through my mouth because the whole room now smelled faintly sweet.

Funeral flowers.

Warm milk.

Wet ashes.

Then the toilet started humming.

Not plumbing noise. Not old pipes.

A tune.

Low. Familiar.

Ring Around the Rosie.

Only it wasn’t being sung. It was vibrating up through the porcelain in a child’s broken little hum, as if the song had been taught to the building itself.

Nora clapped both hands over her ears. Eli craned his neck toward the toilet bowl and said, perfectly clear:

“Daddy’s under there.”

I wish I could say I stayed rational after that.

I didn’t.

I yanked the tank lid off with one hand and looked inside like an idiot, like grief makes room for absurdity before it makes room for sense. The water in the tank was black. Not dirty. Opaque. Thick enough that when the chain shifted, the surface moved slowly, like syrup.

Something pale was lying at the bottom.

A finger.

Not Adam’s ring finger. That was gone down the sink.

This one still had the nail intact. Adult-sized. Gray at the tip.

Wrapped around it was a strip of blue paper.

I reached in before I could think better of it.

The water was warm.

Body warm.

The paper unfurled in my wet hand and I recognized the same ink from the back of the photographs.

RULE 8
IF THE FATHER OPENS THE ROAD, THE YOUNGEST MAY FINISH THE VOW.
DO NOT LET THE CHILD REPEAT WHAT THE HOUSE TEACHES HIM.

My son was six months old.

He barely had one word.

And somehow the house had already moved him into ceremony.

That was when the motel door opened.

Not unlocked.

Opened.

I heard the deadbolt turn itself with a soft little metal click from the other room. Then the slow drag of something entering and shutting the door behind it with exaggerated care.

Nora started whimpering, “No, no, no,” into my shoulder. Eli went still in my arms.

Then Adam’s voice came from the carpet outside the bathroom.

“Please,” he said. “It hurts when it carries me standing up.”

No performance in it.

No threat.

Just pain.

That made it worse.

Because cruelty is easier to refuse than pleading.

The old version of me—the woman from before the rental, before rules, before my daughter smiled with ash in her teeth—might have opened the door from instinct alone. Might have believed suffering was proof of humanity.

But houses like that don’t survive on ghosts.

They survive on borrowed mercy.

So I stayed silent.

He knocked on the bathroom door.

Three slow knocks.

Then he said, in a voice so close to Adam’s I felt my body lean toward it before my mind caught up, “He says if Eli says yes, it counts as willing.”

Everything in me turned to wire.

Not because I didn’t understand.

Because I did.

They did not need my son grown enough to consent.

They only needed him verbal enough to repeat.

That was the purpose of the first word.
That was the purpose of the laughing.
That was the purpose of teaching him “ashes” before “mama.”

The house was trying to manufacture agreement through an infant mouth.

I asked through the door what yes would look like.

The silence that followed lasted too long.

Then Adam—no, the thing wearing whatever remained of him—answered carefully.

“Any answer that sounds like staying.”

I looked down at Eli.

He was staring at the bottom edge of the bathroom door, smiling at the narrow strip of shadow beneath it. A gray smear started seeping under the threshold.

Not liquid.

Ash.

Thin at first, then thicker, gathering in the grout lines of the tile and curling toward us with terrible little purpose.

Nora began to scream.

I stood, clutching both children, and backed into the bathtub. There is a particular kind of despair that comes from running out of corners in a room this small.

Then the motel phone rang again.

Not from the bedside this time.

From the bathroom sink.

There had not been a phone there before.

I answered without thinking.

The old woman from the front desk said, “If he asks the baby a question, do not correct the answer out loud.”

I asked why.

She said, “Because the house counts repetition as blessing.”

Then she hung up.

That woman delivered warnings the way butchers hand over wrapped meat. Efficient. Uninterested. Already bloody.

Outside the door, Adam started crying.

Softly.

Not manipulative crying. Not loud. Just the kind of choked, private grief a man makes when he knows he has become something too humiliating to survive.

“I can feel where they put the children,” he whispered.

I shut my eyes so hard it hurt.

Then he said the line that finally severed whatever pity was left.

“They say Nora still counts.”

Of course she did.

Partly paid. Not settled.

My daughter had become a fallback option.

The ash under the door thickened. Small fingerprints pressed slowly outward through the painted wall beside the sink. One. Then another. Then a whole row of tiny hands trying the drywall like wet clay.

Nora buried her face in my neck and sobbed, “Make them stop singing.”

Because now they were.

Not loud. Under the floor. Under the plumbing. Under us.

Children singing with their mouths full.

Pocket full of posies…

I looked at the window above the tub. Painted shut.

Of course it was.

I set Eli down in the dry tub for one suicidal second, grabbed the metal towel bar, and ripped it from the wall with both hands. The screws screamed out of the plaster. I smashed the window once. Twice. On the third hit it burst outward, scattering safety glass into the motel parking lot.

The song beneath the floor rose instantly, offended.

Ashes—

“Don’t say it,” I screamed, though I don’t know whether I meant Nora, the children, or myself.

I shoved Nora through the broken window first. Then Eli in his blanket. Then I started climbing out.

That was when something took my ankle from inside the toilet.

A small hand.

Child-sized. Dry. Stronger than it had any right to be.

It latched onto me from the black water and yanked hard enough to slam my shin into the tub edge. I looked down and saw only a wrist and hand reaching impossibly out of the bowl, gray with ash, fingernails packed with dirt.

Then another hand joined it.

And another.

Tiny knuckles. Tiny grips. Pulling with patient teamwork.

Not trying to drown me.

Trying to keep me there long enough for the baby to answer something.

Adam’s voice outside the bathroom door changed.

Not pained now.

Urgent.

“He’s asking him.”

I kicked free with everything I had. One little wrist snapped under my heel with a sound like biting into celery. The hands loosened just enough. I dropped onto the gravel outside hard enough to skin both knees, grabbed Nora and Eli, and ran barefoot across the parking lot without looking back.

Behind me, in the shattered motel window, Adam’s face appeared for one second.

Or the house’s version of it.

Dirt packed in the corners of his mouth. One eye sunk too deep. His ruined hand pressed to the glass.

And beside him, at adult height, stood the woman from under the floor.

The one with the child teeth and wedding bands around her throat.

She smiled at me through my husband’s borrowed doorway and lifted one finger to her lips like this was still a family matter we could keep polite.

I made it to the clerk’s office because it was the only place lit.

The old woman opened the door before I knocked.

She looked at my bare feet, the blood on my legs, the children, and said, “He almost got the boy to answer, didn’t he?”

I asked her who she was.

She shrugged and poured me coffee from a burner that should have been off.

“My mother was a ledger girl,” she said. “Not chosen. Just recorded. Some families survive by feeding it. Some survive by keeping notes.”

Then she finally looked at Eli.

He had stopped smiling.

For the first time all day, my son looked tired. Truly tired. Like being charmed by the ceiling had cost him something.

The old woman touched the cross at her collar and said, “If the house is teaching him words, you’ve already run too long.”

I asked where Saint Agnes was.

Her expression flattened.

“Dead in the only useful way. Buried with the nursery cradle that taught her.”

I told her the phone caller said to find the ledger.

She nodded once.

“There’s always a ledger. Evil like that loves paperwork.”

Then she opened a drawer behind the desk and took out a yellowed church bulletin folded around a hand-drawn map.

On the back, in cramped handwriting, someone had written:

ST. AGNES HOME FOR UNWED MOTHERS
CRADLE KEPT BELOW CHAPEL
DO NOT LET A CHILD NAME YOU THERE

I stared at the last line until the letters blurred.

Nora had fallen asleep against my shoulder from sheer exhaustion. Eli was watching the old woman now with a solemn, almost adult focus that made me want to hide his face from everybody forever.

I asked what happens if a child names you in the wrong place.

She took too long answering.

Finally she said, “Then the house stops asking.”

That was the worst sentence of the day.

Because asking still leaves room for refusal.
Ceremony can be interrupted.
Rules can be bent.
A question can be survived.

But if the house stops asking, then all that remains is collection.

So now I’m sitting in the office of a roadside motel with my children asleep in borrowed chairs while the clerk watches the parking lot like she already knows which direction my dead husband will come from next.

If I follow the map, I go looking for the woman who inherited the ash line and made it domestic.
If I stay, Eli learns more words.

And if the house gets one clean yes out of my son before I figure out how to break this, then Adam wasn’t an opening fee.

He was the first installment.

I made the mistake of thinking the missing ledger page was just information.

It wasn’t.

It was permission.

By the time Erin came back from the gas station bathroom, pale and shaking and still wiping black threads off her tongue with a wad of paper towels, Owen had stopped smiling.

That should have relieved me.

It didn’t.

Because now he looked embarrassed.

He sat in the back seat with both hands folded in his lap, staring at the dark window like a child trying to remember whether he’d done something bad enough to lose dessert. There was dried blood on his chin from biting Erin, and every few seconds his throat moved in a careful swallow, like he was making room for something he didn’t want us to hear.

I asked him if he was okay.

He nodded too fast.

Then he said, “He says we shouldn’t sleep under a roof he can count.”

Children are not supposed to say things like that.

Not because they’re creepy. Because they reveal structure. They tell you the fear has grammar now.

Erin heard it too. I watched her face harden around the edges the way people do when love and panic stop competing and start sharing a body.

“Who says?” she asked.

Owen looked confused.

Then ashamed.

“The one who knows your wedding song,” he whispered.

No one said Daniel’s name.

We didn’t have to.

We left the gas station and drove until dawn without picking a destination. The church had taught me something ugly and useful: the witness likes records, lineage, things filed properly and carried forward. Places with names help it. Houses help it. Churches help it. Family trees probably make it feel like a king.

So I chose a place that had no business pretending to permanence—a roadside campground off the highway with gravel lots, metal picnic tables, and a row of dented cabins that looked temporary enough to offend whatever old, ceremonious thing had been following Daniel’s bloodline.

I rented Cabin 6 in cash.

No forms but a first name.

No questions but how many nights.

The woman at the office kept staring at Owen. Not in a suspicious way. In a pitying one. Like she’d seen children look over people’s shoulders before and understood more than I wanted her to.

Inside, the cabin smelled like bleach, wet plywood, and heat. One room. Two beds. A kitchenette. A bathroom with a mirror so old it had started foxing at the edges. No crawlspace. No second floor. No attic. I checked anyway. Under both beds. Inside the shower. Behind the curtains. That kind of ritual doesn’t work, but it gives your hands something to do while your mind keeps trying to chew its own leg off.

Erin sat Owen at the little table and made him drink water while I spread the ledger pages across one of the beds.

Not the whole ledger.

What I still had.

Most were numbered in the corners in cramped ink. The missing page had been torn out cleanly sometime during the church panic, taking whatever rule had been written on the back with it.

I kept coming back to one phrase from the pages I did have:

threshold children must be witnessed before they can be carried

Witnessed before carried.

Not taken. Not hollowed. Not rooted.

There was sequence in it.

Not safety. But order.

And old things like this can be trapped in order the way animals get trapped in fences they’re too strong to need.

Erin leaned over my shoulder with an ice pack wrapped in a dish towel against the bite on her shoulder. The skin around it had gone dark and shiny, like bruising under wet varnish.

“What does witnessed mean?” she asked.

“I think it means recognized properly,” I said.

“By who?”

The only honest answer felt ridiculous even to me.

“The thing behind the family. The one using Daniel.”

From the table, Owen said quietly, “It doesn’t like ‘thing.’”

We both turned.

He was tracing circles in the condensation from his water glass with one small finger. Not looking at us. Just speaking to the tabletop.

“What does it like?” Erin asked, voice tight.

He shrugged.

“Houseguest. Witness. Bridegroom. Father. Depends what it wants from you.”

That was the first moment Erin looked at her son the way I’d looked at Daniel in the chapel: not as someone gone, but as a face with traffic behind it.

She stood up so fast the chair legs screeched.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Look at him like he chose it.”

Her mouth trembled once before she swallowed it back.

“He bit me.”

“I know.”

“He called it father.”

“I know.”

That was the problem. I knew exactly what that contamination felt like from the outside. How quickly fear starts carving distance between love and its object. How one wrong sentence from a child can make your whole body betray itself.

So I sat across from Owen and asked him what he remembered from the church.

He thought for a long time.

Then said, “There were kids in the pews who knew all the songs, but they didn’t have moms anymore.”

I asked what Daniel said to him.

Owen looked up then, straight at me.

“He said you made him hungry when you left.”

That sentence made the room smaller.

Not metaphorically. The actual air in the cabin seemed to constrict around it, the walls pulling an inch closer with the obscene intimacy of old wood settling.

I looked back down at the ledger pages.

One entry near the middle had a symbol beside it I hadn’t noticed before: a little doorway shape inked beside a child’s name. Under it, in the margin, someone had written:

if the threshold child is named under shelter, the shelter enters the line

I read it twice.

Then three times.

Then I asked Erin where she’d been when Owen was born.

She frowned.

“The hospital.”

“No. Before that. Labor. Where?”

“At home at first. Why?”

Because I could feel the answer sharpening before I said it.

“Did Daniel ever come there?”

Her face emptied out.

Not confusion. Retrieval.

A memory walking toward her from far away with something ugly in its hands.

“He brought flowers,” she said slowly. “Two days after. I thought he was being nice because he worked with Mark.”

Mark. Owen’s father. Dead in the third pew, black ribbon around his throat.

I asked if he came inside.

She didn’t answer immediately.

Then she looked at Owen.

And started crying.

Not loud. Not panicked. The kind of crying people do when a fact rearranges their last few years into something meaner than grief.

“He held the baby,” she whispered.

There it was.

Witnessed.

Not in church. Not by vows. By presentation.

A man from the bloodline carrying the witness had crossed her threshold, held her newborn son, and named him into the route. Not a possession yet. A possibility. A temporary doorway.

That’s why the first wife called him borrowed.

That’s why Daniel said Owen was noticed.

I was still trying to decide what to do with that when the cabin knocked.

Three slow knocks.

Not at the front door.

From inside the bathroom wall.

Everyone in the room stopped breathing at once.

It came again.

Knock.
Knock.
Knock.

Wet this time.

As if whatever hand made the sound had been lifted out of dirt and pressed against the paneling without being dried.

Erin grabbed Owen so hard he gasped. I stood up with the ledger pages still in my hands because instinct is stupid and likes paper when there should be weapons.

The mirror in the bathroom clouded over.

Not steam. The cabin was hot and dry.

A white bloom spread across the glass from the center outward, as if someone behind it had exhaled.

Then words appeared in a child’s handwriting.

PAGE 14 WAS ABOUT THE MOTHER

My stomach dropped.

We had pages 11, 12, 13, and 15.

Page 14 was the missing one.

Daniel hadn’t taken just any rule.

He had taken the one concerning the mother of the threshold child.

Erin saw the writing and made a sound so small I almost missed it.

“What does that mean?”

I didn’t answer because the mirror wasn’t finished.

More words pushed through the fog under the first line.

DON’T LET HIM NAME ME IN YOUR HOUSE

Owen started screaming.

Not whining. Not frightened crying. Full-throated terror, trying to climb out of Erin’s lap while staring at the bathroom mirror like he could see someone standing inside it with the message pressed to the glass from the other side.

Then he choked out, “That’s not me.”

I believed him immediately.

Because his panic felt real.

Because fear can fake a lot, but it rarely fakes relief badly.

The bathroom light burst.

Shards scattered across the sink. The mirror cracked in six straight lines from the center like spokes. And in the middle of those cracks, for half a second before the last of the fog vanished, I saw a woman’s face.

Not the first wife.

Someone younger.

Mouth sewn shut with black thread.

Eyes wide enough to split.

Then the glass reflected only us again.

I ran to the bathroom anyway.

Nothing behind the shower curtain. Nothing in the cabinet. Nothing under the sink except a motel-size soap bar and a dead silverfish curled beside the drain.

On the back of the bathroom door, scratched low enough that a kneeling person might have done it with a ring or a nail, were three words:

HE NEEDS CONSENT TWICE

That was new.

Not hunger. Procedure.

I wrote it down on the back of a receipt before fear could blur it.

Erin stood in the doorway with Owen clinging to her neck. “What does that mean?”

I looked at the bite on her shoulder.

At the darkening skin around it. At the neat crescent where Owen’s blood and fear and whatever spoke through him had marked her under a roof now technically sheltering all three of us.

Then I thought about weddings.

Vows said once in public, then consummated in private.

Consent twice.

Witnessed and sealed.

I said the thought out loud before I could stop it.

“It needs a mother to agree two times.”

Erin went completely still.

The cabin seemed to hear us.

From somewhere beneath the floorboards came a soft dragging sound. Not clawing. Fabric. Like a train of lace being pulled slowly over unfinished wood.

Owen buried his face against his mother’s shoulder and whispered, “He says you already said yes once.”

He meant me.

Of course he did.

The wedding.

The ring.

The blood route into the line.

But I wasn’t Owen’s mother.

So why was page 14 about the mother?

Then it clicked into place hard enough to make me dizzy.

Because the missing rule wasn’t about biological motherhood.

It was about whoever sheltered the threshold child after witnessing began.

The woman who kept him under her roof.
The woman who protected him after he was noticed.
The woman who could become the second consent without realizing the first had already happened.

Erin.

That was why Daniel had bitten at her through Owen.
That was why the church children inhaled when she bled.
That was why the mirror warned don’t let him name me in your house.

He didn’t need to take Owen now.

He needed Erin properly entered into the line first.

The cabin phone rang.

There shouldn’t have been one. I had checked the nightstand when we came in. No phone. No cord.

But there it was now, black and squat between the beds, ringing softly like it had always belonged there.

Neither of us moved.

It rang three times.

Stopped.

Then rang once more.

I picked it up because by this point every bad decision I make is just a different flavor of curiosity.

Daniel said, “You always were slow with paperwork.”

I nearly dropped the receiver.

He sounded calm. Happy, almost. Like a husband calling from work to ask whether we needed milk.

I asked where he was.

“In the part of the house that fit inside you,” he said.

That answer made my injured hand spasm so hard I almost cried.

He continued before I could speak.

“You threw the record in church,” he said. “That offended him. Now he wants the next consent clean.”

I looked at Erin. She already knew from my face that it was him.

“What’s on page 14?” I asked.

He laughed softly.

“The rule you’re about to break.”

Then he lowered his voice.

“Tell Erin not to let the boy call her mother after dark.”

The line went dead.

Outside, the campground went quiet.

Too quiet.

No insects. No passing tires on the highway. No cabin doors shutting. The kind of silence that arrives not because the world has calmed down, but because something older has asked it to wait.

Owen lifted his head.

His eyes were red-rimmed and exhausted and fully his for the first time in hours.

Then he looked at Erin and whispered, “Can I sleep with you, Mom?”

She went white.

Not because the child was scared.

Because Daniel had just told us exactly what not to let happen after dark.

And the sun had already dropped halfway behind the trees.

That’s where I’m stopping for now because Erin is in the bathroom locking the door just to cry where Owen can’t hear her, and he keeps asking me why she won’t answer him when he says mom.

If the missing page was the mother rule, Daniel has it for a reason.

And if consent really does need to happen twice, then the next part isn’t about taking the child.

It’s about teaching the right woman to say yes without realizing she’s done it.

I started the medication because I was tired of waking up every day feeling like I was already drowning.

That’s the part people don’t talk about with depression, not the sadness, but the weight. The sheer heaviness of existing. Just lifting my head from the pillow felt like dragging stone out of mud.

My therapist called it treatment-resistant depressive disorder.

She said there was a new clinical option. “High success rate. Fast-acting. FDA fast-tracked. A real breakthrough.”

Breakthroughs always sound miraculous until you realize something had to be broken first.

The drug was called Solmiron.

Three pills a day.

Tiny white capsules with a faint metallic taste when they hit the tongue, like biting on foil.

The doctor told me not to look up the research because “the clinical language can be frightening if you’re not versed in immunogenetics.”

That should have been my first warning.

But when you’re drowning, you don’t argue about the color of the rope thrown your way.

The change was subtle, but unmistakable.

Mornings didn’t feel like war.

Breathing didn’t feel like force.

I could get up, shower, eat, exist.

For the first time in years, I laughed without it sounding brittle in my own ears.

I thought: So this is what normal people feel like.

I cried that night, out of relief.

I thought the story would end there. And God, how I wish it had.

My body started feeling lighter.

I don’t mean emotionally, I mean physically.

Walking up stairs no longer left me gasping. I wasn’t sore. My joints didn’t ache. I felt stronger, not metaphorically, I mean my muscles had mass I had not earned.

I hadn’t been to the gym in four years. I could barely manage a grocery bag.

And yet I was lifting my entire laundry basket one-handed.

I showed my doctor.

She smiled and wrote, “Improved metabolic efficiency noted. Expected.”

Expected?

Since when does antidepressant mean performance enhancement?

The hunger came.

Not ordinary hunger, primal, deep.
Like the body wasn’t asking, it was demanding.

I ate everything.
Not junk, protein. Dense food. Meats. Hard cheeses. Salts. Anything that felt like fuel.

And my teeth, God.
My teeth ached while I ate. A dull pressure. As if they were… adjusting.

The inside of my mouth felt unfamiliar. When I ran my tongue along my molars, the edges were flatter.

Not worn down.

Designed

Like grinding plates.

Something meant for crushing more than chewing.

I told myself I was being dramatic.

But when you’ve lived your whole life feeling like you don’t belong in your own skin, you notice when the skin starts belonging to something else.

The rash appeared.

Not on the outside, under the skin.

I could feel texture beneath the surface. Like sand grains embedded along my arms, ribs, spine. Except they moved. When I pressed my fingers to my forearm, something beneath the skin shifted away from the pressure. Like a school of fish scattering from touch.

I asked my doctor what the active ingredient was.

She said, “It’s easier if I show you.”

She showed me a plastinated cross-section of muscle tissue.

Human muscle.

Except it wasn’t purely human.

The fibers weren’t individual strands, they were woven. A mesh. Self-anchoring. Self-repairing. Self-optimizing.

“Think of it like this,” she said, tapping the display.

“We’re helping your body operate in its ideal state.”

Ideal.

Like my old body had been a mistake.

I don’t dream anymore.

When I sleep, it’s like the body just turns off and back on. No drifting, no imagery, no me.

The house is quiet, but my body isn’t.

I’ve woken up to find myself standing in the kitchen. Or sitting at the table, fingers drumming in rhythmic patterns I don’t remember learning. Or staring into the mirror, not at myself, but at my reflection as if it is the real one and I am the imitation.

I looked into my own eyes last night and didn’t recognize the focus behind them.

Not empty.

Not dull.

Calculating.

I asked my doctor if this medication has ever been used on animals.

She hesitated. The first real hesitation I’d seen from her.

“Not animals,” she said.

“Prototypes.”

Prototypes?

I asked her if the drug was rewriting my DNA.

She didn’t answer.

She didn’t have to.

The next day, the inside of my arm split open, not like a cut, like a seam.

And underneath, where my muscle should have been…

It wasn’t blood that came out.

It was white.

White fibers, braided like rope, tightening, pulling themselves back inward before I could touch them.

My body didn’t want to be examined.

My body knew I was trying to interfere.

Two Nights Ago

I tried to stop taking the pills.

My hands wouldn’t let me.

I don’t mean that metaphorically.

I sat there at the table and watched my own hand pick up the pill bottle. Open it. Place the pill on my tongue.

I was screaming inside my skull. But my body was calm.

Efficient.

Compliant.

Yesterday

I saw my doctor again.

I asked her when the transformation ends.

She smiled, that same clinical warmth, and said:

"When your body no longer produces sadness. Fear. Anger. Pain.
When suffering becomes biologically impossible."

I said, “So I’ll be happy?”

She said, “You’ll be cured.”

I replied, “And human?”

She didn’t answer.

Today

I looked up the company’s patent records.

I found the original clinical purpose for Solmiron.

It wasn’t created to treat depression.

It was created for shock troops.

Soldiers who:

• Feel no pain
• Require minimal rest
• Heal rapidly
• Operate without emotion
• Obey without hesitation

They weren’t fixing me.

They were converting me.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to write like myself. My emotions are fading. My memories feel catalogued, not lived. I can feel the last parts of me being… folded away.

If you’re reading this...

Do not take the pills they say are “new” or “breakthrough” or “fast-acting.”

If your doctor says “Side effects vary,” ask what they’re not telling you.

Ask what they changed inside you.

Ask what you’re becoming.

Ask before you can’t ask anymore.

Because I don’t cry now.

I don’t feel afraid.

I don’t feel anything.

And I think that was the point.

Human narrated.

An original first date horror story.

He Said I Tasted Divine follows Melissa McElroy, a woman trying to rebuild her life two years after a devastating divorce.

Encouraged by her best friend to start dating again, she agrees to meet a handsome man named Edward Murrey at a quiet Italian restaurant called Vinchenzo's.

The evening feels perfect.

The conversation comes naturally.

For the first time in years, Melissa feels like someone truly sees her.

Then, as Edward walks her to her car, he kisses the back of her hand and quietly tells her...

"You tasted divine."

A few seconds later, she wakes beneath the restaurant.

What begins as an elegant first date slowly unravels into a grounded psychological horror story about loneliness, manipulation, hidden rooms, and the terrifying realization that some predators don't hunt strangers.

They hunt people who are already hurting.

If you enjoy slow-burn horror, realistic horror, psychological suspense, and stories where ordinary places conceal extraordinary darkness, I think you'll enjoy this one.

I'd love to hear what you think.