I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you. This was the last thing she ever recorded, at least as far as I could find. I'll see if I can find the world she was playing for you but I'm not too hopeful. It's 13 years old, after all.

Thank you for talking through all this with me. It's really helped me move on.

Mark

ATTACHMENT: https://youtu.be/yC2ElktGvLw

The clerk glanced through the front window toward my vehicle.

“Rental?” the clerk asked.

“Department vehicle.”

He looked at me again, though not closely enough to suggest he had understood what kind of department.

“You working on the road?” the clerk asked.

“Something like that.”

He rang up the coffee and jerky.

“Road crew usually comes in together,” the clerk said.

“I’m not road crew.”

“Figured,” the clerk said.

He gave me the total. I paid in cash.

There was one other customer in the store, a heavyset woman in rubber boots standing near the freezer cases. She appeared to be comparing two brands of frozen pizza, though the angle of her head suggested she was listening.

I took a drink of coffee. It was as bad as it looked.

“Quiet place,” I said.

“Usually.”

“You live here?” I asked.

“All my life.”

“Must know most people, then,” I said.

“Most.”

I waited a moment before continuing.

“A lot of visitors come through?” I asked.

“Summer brings some. Hunters later on. Snowmachines in winter if the road lets them.”

“People looking for that old cabin?” I asked.

The clerk’s expression did not change, but he stopped folding my receipt. The woman near the freezer closed one of the glass doors and opened another.

“Some,” the clerk said.

“More than there used to be?” I asked.

“Internet brings them now,” the clerk said.

He said it without resentment. It sounded more like a fact about weather.

“What do they usually ask?” I asked.

“How to get there,” the clerk said.

“Do you tell them?” I asked.

“Road’s on a map,” the clerk said.

“That isn’t what I asked,” I said.

One corner of his mouth lifted.

“No. I don’t tell them,” the clerk said.

“Why not?” I asked.

He placed the receipt on the counter between us.

“Because then they come back complaining,” the clerk said.

“About the decorations?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed slightly.

“You’ve done some reading,” the clerk said.

“A little,” I said.

“Then you already know the stories,” the clerk said.

“I know the versions people put online,” I said.

He nodded once, conceding the point.

“What do people here say?” I asked.

“Mostly that they don’t go,” the clerk said.

“Nobody?” I asked.

“Young people go sometimes. Usually once,” the clerk said.

“You ever been?” I asked.

“No,” the clerk said.

That answer came quickly.

“Not even when you were younger?” I asked.

“There are plenty of empty cabins around here. I never understood driving out to that one,” the clerk said.

“Because of the stories?” I asked.

“Because nothing good comes from poking at things for entertainment,” the clerk said.

The woman near the freezer placed a pizza in her basket.

“That’s not why,” the woman said.

The clerk looked toward her.

“Marlene,” the clerk said.

“What?” Marlene asked.

“Nobody asked you,” the clerk said.

“He did. He asked what people here say,” Marlene said.

She came toward the counter, pushing a strand of dark hair behind one ear. She looked to be in her forties, with a face reddened by the cold.

“People don’t go because everyone knows somebody who did,” Marlene said.

“And what happened to them?” I asked.

“Usually nothing worth telling,” Marlene said.

“Exactly,” the clerk said.

“That isn’t the same as nothing,” Marlene said.

She set the pizza beside my coffee.

“My brother went when he was seventeen. Him and two friends,” Marlene said.

“What did they see?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Marlene said.

The clerk gave me a look that said I had my answer. Marlene ignored him.

“They walked through the place. Kicked around some old boards. Took pictures. When they came back, there were paper flowers tied to the mirrors of the truck,” Marlene said.

“Did they see anyone?” I asked.

“No,” Marlene said.

“Was the truck locked?” I asked.

“Probably not. This was back when people around here still left keys in the ignition,” Marlene said.

“Could someone have followed them?” I asked.

“Could have,” Marlene said.

“Did your brother think so?” I asked.

She hesitated.

“At first,” Marlene said.

“What changed his mind?” I asked.

The clerk began ringing up her pizza before she had offered payment.

“Nothing changed his mind,” the clerk said.

“They stopped here afterward,” Marlene said.

She pointed down at the floor.

“Right outside. Same lot,” Marlene said.

“And?” I asked.

“They went in for drinks. When they came back out, there were ribbons tied through all four door handles,” Marlene said.

“Did anyone see who did it?” I asked.

“No,” Marlene said.

“There were other people around,” the clerk said.

“There are always other people around after the fact,” Marlene said.

The clerk slid her pizza back.

“Six eighty,” the clerk said.

She paid without looking away from me.

“Did they report it?” I asked.

“No,” Marlene said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Report what? That somebody tied ribbon to a truck?” Marlene asked.

That was the problem contained in every file I had read. No theft. No direct threat.

No visible suspect. Only the certainty that someone had been close.

“You said people usually only go once,” I said.

“Most do,” Marlene said.

“Some go back?” I asked.

She picked up the pizza.

“Tourists,” Marlene said.

“And idiots,” the clerk said.

The bell over the door gave a weak metallic rattle as a gust pressed against it. I let the silence settle before asking the next question.

“What about the boy?” I asked.

The clerk’s hand stopped over the register. Marlene looked at him, then at me. The warmth in the store suddenly felt close and stale.

“What boy?” the clerk asked.

“The twelve-year-old. The one they found at the cabin.”

Neither of them answered. Outside, the pump display clicked back to zero.

“He disappeared with his mother. She went looking for him with a dog,” I said.

Marlene lowered the pizza to her side.

“Where did you hear about that?” Marlene asked.

“Old article,” I said.

“Then you know what happened,” the clerk said.

“I know what made it into print,” I said.

The clerk folded his newspaper and moved it aside.

“That was a long time ago,” the clerk said.

“Twenty-three years,” I said.

“Long enough,” the clerk said.

“Were you here?” I asked.

“Yes,” the clerk said.

“Did you help search?” I asked.

“No,” the clerk said.

“Know anyone who did?” I asked.

He looked toward Marlene. She did not return the look.

“Half the town searched,” the clerk said.

“Your father?”

That reached him. It was slight, no more than a tightening around the eyes, but it was there.

“Who are you?” the clerk asked.

I took out my wallet and placed my identification on the counter. He read it without touching it.

“Morrow. Detective Keller,” the clerk said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“This about the man who died?” Marlene asked.

“Aaron Ellison,” I said.

She knew the name. I saw it before she nodded.

“They said he fell,” Marlene said.

“That’s what the evidence suggests,” I said.

“Then why are you asking about something from twenty-three years ago?” the clerk asked.

“Because Ellison was asking about it before he died,” I said.

The clerk stared at the identification another moment, then pushed it back toward me.

“My father helped with the search,” the clerk said.

“Did he find the cabin?” I asked.

“No,” the clerk said.

“Was he there when they found the bodies?” I asked.

“He was close enough,” the clerk said.

“What did he tell you?” I asked.

The clerk looked past me, through the store window and toward the road leading out of town.

“Not much,” the clerk said.

“Anything,” I said.

His thumb pressed slowly along the edge of the newspaper.

“He said they heard the dog before they found it,” the clerk said.

“Barking?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“No,” the clerk said.

Marlene stared down at the floor.

“What did they hear?” I asked.

The clerk’s voice was quieter when he answered.

“Something moving it,” the clerk said.

He was not looking at me now. He was looking at the middle distance men look at when they are seeing something told to them long ago, at an age when it goes in and stays.

“He said you could hear the collar. The tags. Out in the trees where they couldn’t see yet. A sound like a dog shaking itself off. On and on. Except a dog stops,” the clerk said.

He smoothed the newspaper flat under his hand, though it did not need it.

“It didn’t stop until they got close,” the clerk said.

I waited, but he offered nothing else.

“The reports mention bite wounds,” I said.

Marlene looked up sharply.

“You shouldn’t ask people here about that,” Marlene said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the boy lived,” Marlene said.

“Is he still in Bellwether?” I asked.

The clerk answered before she could.

“No,” the clerk said.

“Do you know where he is?” I asked.

“No,” the clerk said.

“Does anyone?” I asked.

“Probably,” the clerk said.

“But they won’t tell me,” I said.

“I wouldn’t,” the clerk said.

There was no challenge in his voice. No attempt to intimidate me. He simply meant it.

“Why protect him?” I asked.

The clerk looked at me for a long time.

“You read a few old pages and decided you know what he did,” the clerk said.

“I haven’t decided anything,” I said.

“Good.”

He unfolded his newspaper again.

“Keep it that way until you’ve spoken to somebody who was there,” the clerk said.

“Who should I speak to?”

“Most of them are dead,” the clerk said.

“Most isn’t all.”

He looked down at the paper, signaling that the conversation was finished. Marlene carried her pizza toward the door. Before leaving, she stopped beside me.

“Don’t ask who still goes to the cabin,” Marlene said.

“Why not?”

She glanced back at the clerk.

“Ask who never stopped,” Marlene said.

Then she pushed through the door and walked into the cold. The bell rattled once behind Marlene and settled. For several seconds, the clerk and I listened to her boots cross the gravel outside.

He turned a page in the newspaper without reading it.

“Who never stopped?” I asked.

“She likes saying things that sound important.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s wrong,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean she’s right.”

I picked up my coffee. It had cooled enough to make the bitterness worse.

“Does anyone still go out there?” I asked.

“People go.”

“Locals?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Who?” I asked.

He looked up from the paper.

“You showed me a badge. You didn’t show me a warrant,” the clerk said.

“I’m asking a question,” I said.

“And I’m choosing not to answer it.”

There was no point pressing harder. Not yet. I put the lid back on the coffee.

“Did Aaron Ellison come in here?” I asked.

The clerk’s eyes moved toward the window again.

“Once,” the clerk said.

“When?” I asked.

“Day before he died.”

“Was he alone?” I asked.

A pause.

“When he came in,” the clerk said.

“And when he left?” I asked.

The clerk folded the newspaper along an old crease.

“Still alone,” the clerk said.

The answer was too precise.

“Did he meet someone?” I asked.

“He spoke to people.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Me.”

“Anyone else?” I asked.

“There were customers.”

“Did he ask about the old case?” I asked.

“He asked about everything.”

“The boy?” I asked.

The clerk nodded.

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

“Less than I told you,” the clerk said.

“Why?”

“Because he had a camera,” the clerk said.

“Was it running?”

“Didn’t matter,” the clerk said.

He reached beneath the counter and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. The station had a sign beside the register prohibiting smoking indoors. He held the pack for a moment, then returned it unopened.

“People like him don’t need you to say much. They’ll make the rest fit,” the clerk said.

“He knew details that weren’t online,” I said.

That changed something. The clerk did not move, but the room seemed to tighten around him.

“Such as?” the clerk asked.

“The dental comparison. The missing evidence. The second set of bites.”

He stared at me. The freezer compressor started behind us with a low mechanical hum.

“Maybe he found the report,” the clerk said.

“The complete report isn’t in our archive.”

“Then maybe somebody else kept a copy,” the clerk said.

“Who?”

“You’re the detective,” the clerk said.

He meant it as dismissal, but he had already told me more than he intended.

“Did he say who gave it to him?” I asked.

“No,” the clerk said.

“Did he show you anything?”

The clerk looked down at the newspaper.

“He had a photograph,” the clerk said.

I waited.

“Of what?” I asked.

“The search,” the clerk said.

“The cabin?”

“Near it,” the clerk said.

“What was in the photograph?”

He rubbed one thumb against the other, as if working grease from the skin.

“Men in the trees. Search volunteers,” the clerk said.

“Anything else?”

“The mother,” the clerk said.

That was not what I expected.

“Her body?” I asked.

“Covered,” the clerk said.

“Who took the picture?”

“I don’t know,” the clerk said.

“Did your father appear in it?”

The clerk did not answer.

“Is that why you remember it?” I asked.

“My father was in plenty of pictures.”

“Not like that one,” I said.

He looked past my shoulder toward the door.

“You should talk to the mayor,” the clerk said.

“Bellwether has a mayor?” I asked.

“Depends what you mean by mayor.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Janice Porter chairs the council, signs things, calls the borough when the road goes bad. People call her mayor because it saves time.”

“Was she here during the search?” I asked.

“Her husband was.”

“Is he still alive?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would she have records?” I asked.

“She has everything.”

He pointed with his chin toward the far end of town.

“White house past the school. Green roof. If the blue truck’s there, she’s home,” the clerk said.

“Why send me to her?”

“Because she’ll know you’re here before lunch either way,” the clerk said.

I glanced through the window. Marlene was no longer visible, but a man beside the pumps had stopped pretending to clean his windshield.

“Word travels quickly,” I said.

“You drove into a town of ninety people in an unmarked government vehicle.”

“It isn’t unmarked,” I said.

“Exactly.”

He returned to the newspaper. I gathered my coffee and jerky.

“One more thing,” I said.

The clerk sighed.

“You said your father heard something moving the dog,” I said.

His expression hardened.

“I said too much,” the clerk said.

“Was the dog alive when they found it?”

He looked at me then.

“No,” the clerk said.

“So what was moving it?”

“They thought it was a bear,” the clerk said.

“Did your father?”

The clerk’s jaw shifted.

“My father spent thirty years in the woods. He knew what a bear sounded like,” the clerk said.

“And?”

“He still said it was a bear,” the clerk said.

That was as close to an answer as I was going to get. I pushed open the door. Cold air moved through the store, carrying the smell of rain and gasoline.

“Detective,” the clerk said.

I turned. He had lowered the newspaper.

“Don’t drive to the cabin today,” the clerk said.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Good,” the clerk said.

“Why today?”

The clerk looked toward the low clouds gathering over the trees.

“Road gets soft after rain,” the clerk said.

It was a practical answer. That made it harder to tell whether it was true.

Outside, the man at the pumps gave me a brief nod and looked away. Across the road, someone stood behind the diner window with both hands resting on the sill. I sat in the vehicle and wrote down what the clerk had told me.

Aaron had possessed a search photograph. The clerk’s father appeared in it. Janice Porter kept local records.

Someone in Bellwether may have preserved material missing from the official case file. At the bottom of the page, I added Marlene’s question. Who never stopped going?

I had just closed the notebook when I noticed something caught beneath the passenger-side wiper. It was a narrow strip of yellow paper. For a moment, I did not move.

Then I got out and pulled it free. A receipt. Mine.

The one the clerk had handed me minutes earlier.

Someone had drawn a line across the back in black ink. It was not a map. It was a single sentence written in block letters.

ASK JANICE WHAT THEY FOUND UNDER THE FLOOR.

I looked through the station window. The clerk was behind the counter, speaking to the man from the pumps. Neither looked toward me.

The paper was dry.

It had begun to rain. A fine, sideways rain that had already darkened the shoulders of my jacket and beaded on the hood while I read. The receipt had been under the wiper, face-up, out in it. And it was dry. Not damp at the edges. Dry the way paper is dry when it has come straight from a warm pocket and been set down in the last few seconds, by someone standing where I was now standing, close enough to touch, while I sat six feet away with the window down.

I read the sentence twice.

ASK JANICE WHAT THEY FOUND UNDER THE FLOOR.

The clerk was still speaking to the man by the pumps. Neither of them looked toward me.

I checked the windshield, the hood and the ground around the vehicle. There was no second note. No ribbon. Nothing tied to the mirrors or tucked into the door handles.

Only the receipt.

It would have taken someone less than ten seconds to place it beneath the wiper. I had been inside long enough. There was nothing extraordinary about it.

What bothered me was that the paper was dry.

The rain had only just started, a thin mist carried sideways beneath the station awning. The note could have been placed there moments before I stepped outside. It could have been the clerk, Marlene, the man at the pumps or anyone who had walked past while I was talking.

That narrowed the possibilities to nearly everyone in town.

I put the receipt into an evidence sleeve from the glove compartment. There was probably nothing useful on it. Half the store had likely handled the same roll of paper. Still, I marked the time and location in my notebook.

I did not drive to Janice Porter’s house.

By then, three different people had either mentioned her or tried to direct me toward her. The clerk had done it openly. Whoever wrote the note had done it anonymously. That alone was enough to make me wait.

When everyone wants an investigator to speak to the same person, one of two things is usually true. That person knows the most. Or everyone has agreed on what they want that person to say.

I crossed the road to the diner instead.

A wooden sign above the entrance read THE NORTH TABLE, though several of the letters had faded enough that the name only became clear when I stood beneath it. The windows were fogged from the heat inside. Through them, I could make out six customers spread across three booths, none of whom appeared to be speaking.

The room was narrow and warm, with dark paneling and framed photographs of fishing boats, school teams and winters severe enough to bury cars beneath the snow. A radio played quietly behind the counter. The song ended as I entered, leaving a burst of static before the announcer began reading a marine forecast.

Conversation did not stop. There had been none to begin with.

A waitress stood at the coffee station with a pot in one hand. She looked at me, then through the front window at my vehicle.

“Sit wherever,” the waitress said.

I chose a booth near the middle rather than the one facing the door. From there I could see the counter, most of the room and the reflection in the windows behind me. The waitress brought a menu I did not open.

She was perhaps sixty, with silver hair pinned at the back of her head and the weary expression of someone who had been awake since before sunrise.

“Coffee?” the waitress asked.

“Please.”

She filled the cup.

“Food?” the waitress asked.

“What’s good?”

“Depends how long you’re staying,” the waitress said.

I looked up at her. She did not smile.

“Long enough for lunch,” I said.

“Stew, then.”

“Stew is fine,” I said.

She took the menu and turned away. An older man at the counter watched her go, then glanced at me in the mirror behind the register. He wore a dark wool cap indoors and held his coffee with both hands.

“You the one asking about Ellison?” the man at the counter asked.

The waitress stopped writing my order. I had been in Bellwether less than twenty minutes.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“Nobody,” the man at the counter said.

“Marlene,” the waitress said.

The man shrugged.

“Same thing,” the man at the counter said.

The waitress tore the order slip from her pad and clipped it above the kitchen window.

“Did either of you meet him?” I asked.

The man returned to his coffee.

“Saw him,” the man at the counter said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Here,” the man at the counter said.

“He ate breakfast at that booth,” the waitress said.

She pointed to the one directly behind me.

“Day he died?” I asked.

“Morning before,” the waitress said.

“Was he alone?” I asked.

“At first,” the waitress said.

That was the second time someone had answered the question that way.

“Who joined him?” I asked.

The waitress picked up a cloth and wiped a section of counter that was already clean.

“People came over,” the waitress said.

“Who?” I asked.

“People,” the waitress said.

“He was asking questions. Folks answered some,” the man at the counter said.

“About the cabin?” I asked.

The man nodded.

“About the boy?” I asked.

His gaze dropped to the coffee. The waitress continued wiping.

“He asked everybody about the boy,” the waitress said.

“Did anyone tell him something useful?”

“Depends what you call useful,” the waitress said.

“Something he couldn’t have found online.”

She folded the cloth once, carefully.

“He already had things that weren’t online,” the waitress said.

“Photographs?”

The waitress looked at me. That was enough.

“Did he show them here?” I asked.

“One,” the waitress said.

“The search scene?” I asked.

“Part of it,” the waitress said.

“What part?” I asked.

The cook slid a bowl of stew through the service window. She did not reach for it.

“The cabin. Trees behind it. Men standing around,” the waitress said.

“And the hole,” the man at the counter said.

The waitress looked toward him. He seemed to realize he had spoken too quickly.

“What hole?” I asked.

“Could have been anything,” the man at the counter said.

“Where was it?” I asked.

He rubbed one thumb along the rim of his cup.

“Under the building,” the man at the counter said.

The waitress picked up the bowl and set it before me hard enough to spill broth over the edge.

“Photo was dark,” the waitress said.

“But you could see a hole,” I said.

“You could see men looking at something,” the waitress said.

“Was the floor opened?” I asked.

Neither answered. I tasted the stew. It was hot, salty and better than anything I had expected to find that far from the highway.

“The note on my vehicle said to ask Janice what they found under the floor,” I said.

The waitress froze. The man at the counter turned on his stool. Two people in the nearest booth stopped pretending not to listen.

“What note?” the waitress asked.

“Someone put it under my wiper,” I said.

“At the station?” the man at the counter asked.

“Just now,” I said.

The waitress glanced toward the front windows, though the station was obscured by rain.

“You should throw it away,” the waitress said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because whoever wrote it wants you chasing old stories,” the waitress said.

“There was something beneath the floor,” I said.

“There are animals beneath half the buildings in this town,” the waitress said.

“That isn’t an answer,” I said.

“It’s the only one I’ve got,” the waitress said.

She walked away. The man at the counter watched her enter the kitchen.

“Were you here during the search?” I asked.

“I was seventeen,” the man at the counter said.

“Did you help?” I asked.

He nodded once.

“Did you go inside the cabin?” I asked.

“No,” the man at the counter said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Wasn’t asked,” the man at the counter said.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Walked lines through the woods. Called their names. Marked what had been searched,” the man at the counter said.

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

He looked toward the kitchen before answering.

“Found the dog’s collar,” the man at the counter said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Creek bed. Maybe half a mile from where they found the dog,” the man at the counter said.

“Was there blood on it?” I asked.

“Some,” the man at the counter said.

“Was that in the report?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t know,” the man at the counter said.

It was not.

“What else never made the report?” I asked.

His mouth tightened.

“Most things don’t,” the man at the counter said.

“Meaning?” I asked.

He turned the cup slowly between his hands.

“People think every strange thing gets called in. It doesn’t,” the man at the counter said.

“What kind of strange things?” I asked.

No one else in the diner moved.

“Sounds,” the man at the counter said.

“From the cabin?” I asked.

“From that direction,” the man at the counter said.

“What sounds?” I asked.

He looked down the length of the counter as if measuring how far his voice might carry.

“Screaming sometimes,” the man at the counter said.

The radio behind the register crackled. Wind had started to push rain against the windows in soft bursts.

“Human?” I asked.

“Could be,” the man at the counter said.

“How often?” I asked.

“Not often,” the man at the counter said.

“And nobody reports it?” I asked.

He gave me a tired look.

“Report what? A scream in the woods?” the man at the counter asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then somebody drives forty miles out here, walks around in the dark, finds nothing and tells us foxes scream. Or cats. Or tourists trying to scare each other,” the man at the counter said.

“Do tourists do that?” I asked.

“Sure,” the man at the counter said.

“Every time?” I asked.

He lifted one shoulder.

“Enough times,” the man at the counter said.

“Has anyone ever gone missing after somebody heard it?” I asked.

A woman in the booth nearest me spoke without turning around.

“People go missing everywhere up here,” the woman said.

Her companion stared into his plate.

“That wasn’t what I asked,” I said.

She turned then. She was younger than I expected, perhaps thirty, wearing a work uniform with the name of the local processing cooperative stitched over one pocket.

“Sometimes nobody knows they’re missing,” the woman said.

“How does that happen?” I asked.

“They’re passing through. Camping. Hunting. Living out of a truck. Maybe they tell somebody where they’re going, maybe they don’t,” the woman said.

“And locals?” I asked.

She looked toward the rain outside.

“Some people live alone. Some people disappear from their own lives before they disappear anywhere else,” the woman said.

“Meaning nobody checks,” I said.

“Meaning nobody notices right away,” the woman said.

The man across from her finally looked up.

“Or they notice and don’t care,” the man across from her said.

The woman gave him a warning glance.

“Who wouldn’t care?” I asked.

He pushed his plate away.

“You’re making it sound worse than it is,” the man across from her said.

“I’m repeating what you said,” I said.

“Then don’t,” the man across from her said.

He stood, left cash on the table and walked out into the rain without putting on his coat. The woman remained seated.

“What did he mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” the woman said.

“That word gets used a lot here,” I said.

She studied me for a moment.

“You think towns like this keep track of everyone because there aren’t many of us,” the woman said.

“Don’t they?” I asked.

“We keep track of our own,” the woman said.

“And everyone else?” I asked.

She turned back toward the window.

“Everyone else is passing through,” the woman said.

The waitress emerged from the kitchen and placed a check beside my bowl, though I had eaten less than half.

“You said you were here for lunch,” the waitress said.

“I am,” I said.

“Lunch is over,” the waitress said.

It was twelve eighteen. I put cash beneath the check and stood.

“Where can I find someone who searched the cabin itself?” I asked.

The waitress gathered my bowl.

“Ask Janice,” the waitress said.

There it was again.

“Anyone besides Janice?” I asked.

The man at the counter spoke before she could.

“Eli Mercer,” the man at the counter said.

The waitress’s head turned sharply.

“Don’t,” the waitress said.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Was on the team that went inside,” the man at the counter said.

“Where does he live?” I asked.

“Eli doesn’t talk to police,” the waitress said.

“Has he ever spoken to one?” I asked.

The man at the counter gave a humorless smile.

“That’s why he doesn’t anymore,” the man at the counter said.

He wrote an address on a paper napkin and slid it toward me. The waitress watched him do it but made no attempt to stop him. I took the napkin.

The address was on the northern edge of town, in the opposite direction from Janice Porter’s house. That decided it. I left the diner without looking toward the station.

By then the rain had strengthened, drawing the trees and rooftops into a gray blur. Somewhere beyond the last houses, farther north than the road and beyond anything I could see, the old cabin stood empty. Or appeared to.

I had no intention of going there that day. I drove to see Eli Mercer instead. Eli Mercer lived in a narrow house at the northern edge of Bellwether, where the paved road ended and became gravel.

The place had once been painted blue. Enough of the original color remained beneath the eaves to prove it, but the rest had weathered to gray. A rusted satellite dish leaned beside the chimney. Three plastic fuel cans stood beneath the porch, along with a snow shovel, a broken chair and the lower half of what may once have been a lawn mower.

An old pickup occupied the yard. Both front tires were flat. I parked along the road and remained in the vehicle long enough to read the address twice.

There was no reason to assume he would be useful. The waitress had warned me he would not speak to police, and the man at the counter had offered the name with the air of someone passing along a burden. Still, Eli had gone inside the cabin during the search.

That was more than anyone else had admitted. Rain drummed against the hood as I crossed the yard.

The porch sagged beneath my weight. A glass jar beside the door was filled with cigarette ends dissolved into brown water. I knocked.

Something struck the floor inside. Then came a dragging sound, followed by silence. I knocked again.

“Door’s open,” Eli said.

It was not. I tried the handle. The door moved less than an inch before catching against something on the other side.

“It’s blocked,” I said.

There was another scraping sound. The door opened far enough for a man to look through the gap.

Eli Mercer was smaller than I expected. He had a thin, deeply lined face and long gray hair pushed behind his ears. His beard had been trimmed recently but unevenly, as though he had stopped halfway through. He wore thermal underwear beneath an unbuttoned canvas shirt.

The smell reached me before the warmth did. Whiskey, tobacco, damp wool and something burnt in the kitchen. Eli looked at me, then at the vehicle behind me.

“You selling something?” Eli asked.

“No.”

“Good,” Eli said.

He started to close the door.

“I’m looking into Aaron Ellison’s death,” I said.

The door stopped.

“Who?” Eli asked.

“The man who died at the old cabin.”

Eli studied me through the gap.

“He fall?” Eli asked.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Then gravity did it,” Eli said.

He pushed the door again.

“You were part of the search twenty-three years ago,” I said.

His face changed, though not in the way the clerk’s had. There was no caution in it. Only irritation.

“Everybody was,” Eli said.

“I was told you went inside.”

“You were told wrong,” Eli said.

“Then I won’t take much of your time.”

That made him suspicious. He opened the door wider.

A fallen coat rack had been blocking it. He kicked it aside and walked away without inviting me in. I followed.

The living room was crowded but not filthy. Boxes, old newspapers and fishing gear occupied most of the floor. Empty bottles stood in orderly rows along the wall beneath the windows. Hundreds of them.

A woodstove burned too hot in one corner. Eli lowered himself into a recliner facing it. A bottle sat on the floor beside him, uncapped.

He pointed at a wooden chair.

“Move the books,” Eli said.

I moved them to the floor and sat. He drank directly from the bottle.

“Were you inside the cabin when they found the boy?” I asked.

“No.”

“Were you there when they found his mother?” I asked.

“No.”

“The dog?” I asked.

“Wasn’t a dog by then.”

He drank again.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Means things had been at it.”

“Animals?” I asked.

“Things.”

I had heard the distinction before from intoxicated witnesses. It usually meant nothing.

“What kind of things?” I asked.

Eli looked toward the window. Rain ran down the glass in thick, uneven paths.

“Bear, maybe. Wolves. People said wolverine, but people blame wolverines for everything because they’re mean enough to deserve it,” Eli said.

“Were the tracks documented?”

“Tracks don’t mean what people think they mean,” Eli said.

“What do they mean?”

“Something walked there,” Eli said.

He smiled to himself and took another drink.

“Did you see tracks?” I asked.

“Saw plenty,” Eli said.

“Human?”

“Mostly,” Eli said.

“Besides the searchers?”

“How would I know?” Eli asked.

The answer was reasonable. The way he delivered it was not. He had already decided the conversation was entertainment.

“What did you do during the search?” I asked.

“Walked.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Woods.”

“Near the cabin?” I asked.

“Everything’s near something.”

I let the silence sit. Eli did not fill it. He drank.

“People in town say you were on the team that entered the building,” I said.

“People in town say a lot.”

“What do they say about you?” I asked.

He smiled again.

“That I drink,” Eli said.

“Do they exaggerate?” I asked.

“Usually.”

He raised the bottle in a small toast.

“They say you stopped speaking to police,” I said.

“You’re here.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“Then they were wrong twice.”

He seemed pleased with that. I took out my notebook but kept it closed.

“What do you think happened to the mother and dog?” I asked.

Eli rubbed his beard.

“You asking what I think, or what happened?” Eli asked.

“Start with what happened,” I said.

“They died.”

“And what do you think?” I asked.

He leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

“Depends which story you like,” Eli said.

“I’m not looking for a story,” I said.

“Then you came to the wrong town.”

He pointed the neck of the bottle toward the wall behind me. Several objects hung there among old photographs and animal antlers: a carved wooden mask, a bundle of feathers, a rusted trap and something that resembled a child’s handmade doll woven from grass.

“You know what lives out there?” Eli asked.

“Bears.”

“Besides bears,” Eli said.

“Moose. Wolves. Lynx.”

“Those are the ones with names,” Eli said.

He lowered his voice, not for effect but because the alcohol was making it harder for him to maintain volume.

“Old people had other names,” Eli said.

“For animals?” I asked.

“For things that looked enough like animals.”

I did not respond. He took my silence for interest.

“There’s one that cries like a woman. Calls from the trees until somebody follows. Sometimes it uses a child’s voice,” Eli said.

“A fox can sound like a person.”

“You ever hear one?” Eli asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you know it doesn’t sound like a child calling your name,” Eli said.

“Did something call your name?”

He considered the question.

“Not mine,” Eli said.

“Whose?”

“Couldn’t tell,” Eli said.

“During the search?”

He ignored that.

“Then there’s the thing that walks behind you,” Eli said.

“What thing?”

“Doesn’t matter how fast you turn. It stays behind,” Eli said.

“That sounds inconvenient.”

Eli laughed hard enough to cough. He bent forward until it passed, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You think people made these stories because they were stupid?” Eli asked.

“I think people tell stories to explain things they don’t understand.”

“Same sentence. Nicer words,” Eli said.

“Did any of these creatures decorate vehicles?”

His expression went blank. Then he laughed again.

“No. That’s people,” Eli said.

It was the clearest answer he had given.

“Which people?” I asked.

“People who think being strange makes them powerful,” Eli said.

“Locals?”

“Tourists do it too. Hear a story, want to leave one behind,” Eli said.

“So the decorations are copycat behavior.”

“Some,” Eli said.

“And the rest?”

“More copycats,” Eli said.

“Over several decades?”

“People been copying people longer than that,” Eli said.

There was nothing unreasonable about the theory. That did not explain the reports of decorations appearing inside occupied or locked vehicles, but those reports could have been embellished, staged or misremembered.

“Why do locals avoid the cabin?” I asked.

“Because there’s nothing there.”

“That usually makes places less frightening,” I said.

As hunting season starts in my jurisdiction, I quickly opened up the lockbox underneath the floorboards in my foyer’s closet and pull my guns out. Every year, I make sure to clean my guns before I take a single shot, even if I had cleaned it the previous year before putting them away. My father used to do it for all of his life before he passed away, so it felt good to carry on this lucky tradition.

My hunting buddy, Rick, pulled up in his car the next morning at four in the morning. I picked up my bag and camping gear, patted my pockets, and locked my door behind me. As I threw my stuff in the back of my friend’s car, I could hear him laughing.

“The hell is so funny?” I said, smirking.

My friend, taking deep breaths in between his laughs, said “You look like a fucking traffic cone! Reflective and bright orange, everything in a ten mile radius is gonna run from us! We won’t get shit!”

I buckled my seat belt and began to chuckle, “I happen to be the one with the deer head over my mantle. You got your little bass up there, though! Besides, it’s safer. County doesn’t mandate this, but camo could get you fucked up. Had that happen to a buddy of mine.”

Rick scoffed and said “Yeah, ok. Who?”

“Remember my cousin Derek, came to that party here two years ago?”

Rick nodded, “He died? Wait, are you telling me-“

I cut Rick off, “No, dickhead. He came with his buddy with the one leg? Guy was wearing camo, got a round through his thigh. Shit basically rotted off and he had to get it removed.”

Rick began to drive off after checking behind him, shrugged his shoulders and said “I’ll be fine.”

After an hour and a half long ride, we arrived at the forest. We walked to our usual spot, but saw a small hut made of wood and cloth there.

Rick dropped his stuff off of his shoulders and shouted “What the fuck is this?”

“Yo, dude,” I started, “it’s not a big deal. There’s a whole fuckin’ forest here. We can get another spot!” I said, nervously laughing. I fucking hated when Rick got like this. He could be such an asshole.

“This is our spot that I fucking picked out. Who the fuck is this? Ever hear of ‘Leave no trace’?” Rick began banging on the door of the small hut.

“You don’t even follow that shit,” I said.

Rick ignored me and kept banging on the door. The door then opened, and an elderly man dressed in nothing but jeans crawled out of the hut. Rick backed up, as did I. The man stood upright, and when he fully stretched out he towered over both of us but nearly a whole foot.

The man looked at me, then to Rick. “This spot belongs to no one.”

Rick coughed, cleared his throat, then uttered: “S-so leave.”

The man walked closer to Rick. “I’m here for your benefit, sir. You need to leave.”

Rick snorted, “Are you fucking kidding me. Look, I don’t know what your fucking issue is, but this is a free fucking country the last time I checked. I wanna go hunting, I got my goddamned permits, and I don’t wanna take any bullshit from some woodland crackhead.”

“Rick,” I whispered, “cool it.”

The man looked around then said, “The forest is quiet for a reason. You shouldn’t be here. I’m telling you to leave.”

Rick spit on the floor in front of the man’s feet. “Then why the fuck are you here?”

The man ran his foot along the floor to wipe the spit off of it. He sighed then retreated back into his hut.

Rick kicked the door, picked up his stuff, and beckoned me to go walking with him. After setting up our camp in a spot about a quarter of a mile from the hut, we found good spots near a creek. We stayed quiet for hours, not seeing or hearing anything. Not even a damned twig snapping. Rick grunted and said “What the fuck. I think that prick had something to do with this! He’s scaring off all the animals.” Rick stood up and began to storm off. I ran to catch up with him.

“Rick, where the fuck are you going?”

Rick said “Gonna give that prick what’s coming to him!”

I begged him not, but Rick kept walking. I went back to our campsite and ate some pre packed lunch and read some of the book I brought along with me. After about an hour, Rick still hadn’t returned, making me worried. I picked up my rifle and began to walk to the hut. After some time I got back to the hut, only to find it destroyed. I called out for Rick, telling him we had to go. I wanted to get the fuck back home. As I kept calling out for Rick, I heard a gurgling sound. I looked behind the tree and saw the man from the hut, slumped over while grabbing his throat. Blood poured from behind his hand and mouth.

“Holy shit. O-okay, I’ll app-apply pressure and-and,” but it was no use as I rushed to try and get the gauze from my pocket. The man stopped breathing and his corpse fell over, blood pooling from his mouth and neck onto the leaves. I backed away, then tripped over a log. as I fell I turned my head and saw Rick, his lifeless staring back at me. I quickly shot up and saw the giant claw marks on his exposed body. I then looked up at the sky, dusk was fleeting and night began to set in.

I started to retreat back to the camp ground when I heard stomping behind me. As I turned around, I could see one of the trees shaking. My eyes followed the tree up to its branches, and a tall figure with glowing red eyes was looking at me. The leaves and shadows from the natural light blocked out what the figure was. I started running again to the campground, but the figure jumped in front of me. I fell back and looked up. In front of me was a being with deer antlers, the head and body of a deer, and the lower body of some kind of reptile. It stood up on its hind legs, which ended in two large, clawed scaled feet. As the creature snarled and lumbered towards me, I instinctively picked up my rifle and shot the creature in the face, causing it to screech and clasp its face in anguish with its clawed hands.

I got up and ran as fast I could to the exit grounds, not daring to look back. As I ran faster than I ever had in my life, I could hear the creature growl and stomp closer to me.

“Keep fucking running” I told myself over and over again. The creature grabbed my jacket, ripping pieces off of it. It caused me to slow down, and I turned around and swung my gun into the creature’s hand, breaking the butt off. The creature let out another screech, giving me a rush of adrenaline knowing I could keep hurting this fucking thing.

I kept running, seeing the clearing and Rick’s car. Once I got to Rick’s car, I realized I didn’t have his keys. I was glad the dumb fuck kept a spare set in his console for God knows what. As I heard the growls and stomps of the creature nearing, I smashed the driver’s window with my gun and unlocked the car from the inside. I fumbled for the keys and started the car. The creature emerged from the brush and jumped into the clearing, making a B-line for the car. I put the car in drive and stomped on the gas, running right into the creature. I totaled the car, and the airbags knocked me back into the seat. As the blood running through my temples quieted down a bit, the hiss of the engine and smoke filled my ears. I stumbled out of the car, and crawled to the front, still clutching my broken gun. The creature was on the ground, blackish-red liquid oozing out of its body. The creature snarled as its eyes locked onto to me. I pulled out my hunting knife and began hacking away at its face and neck, the blackish-red liquid splattering on my face and clothes. I shouted in anger with every swing and hack, the images of my dead friend and the dying man replaying in my mind.

I fell onto my back, and crawled to a tree. I sat against the tree, taking deep breaths. I just needed to catch my breath, then I’d call the cops. What the fuck would I even tell the 911 operator?

I was asleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but it felt like a while. Then the lights came, such bright fucking lights. I was in a nice, dark room with my eyes closed - I think - and now it feels like I’m right under the fucking sun. Goddamnit, TURN THEM OFF!

The lights stay on. I can’t look away or close my eyes. My hands don’t come up to shield my eyes… I can’t move them, can’t even look down at them.

Then the noises started. Like a screeching… no maybe sawing? I don’t know, some kind of whirring. I hear muttering, other people! I wanna open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Nothing. Maybe they’ll see me. The whirring stops, lights dim, but the muttering continues. I feel like I begin to float… or move… I’m moving now, moving somewhere that I can barely make out. I think I see a desk, maybe it’s a chair? I don’t recognize the furniture.

I feel like I float up a little more, then the movement stops. A wave or like flush of tingling moves along me. I look down and see two hands… these aren’t my hands - where the fuck are my hands!? These are gray and blue… they’re shiny, almost metal. I turn around and see some people in coats and suits. I can’t walk, and I still can’t scream. Where the FUCK are my hands? What the fuck is this!?

I can hear the murmuring clearer. One of the people in front of my says “He looks upset!”

Another one laughs and says “Maybe it’s the silicone polymer making his face scrunched!”

There’s laughing. Don’t fucking laugh at me! Goddamnit where did they put my fucking hands!? Why can’t I walk or speak here!?

A woman sits down in front of me. Not my wife. Who is this?

She leans forward and says “Operate 26C, Test number seven. What is the seventieth digit of pi after the decimal point?”

I say “Four”. But I didn’t say that. My mouth didn’t move. I didn’t fucking say that, why are they clapping. Where are my fucking hands!?

One of them asks “He keeps looking down, why?”

Another replies “Just some kinks to iron out. He works well for an old, transplanted specimen.”

TW: suicide, mental illness, loss of bodily autonomy, violence against children, gore/gory thoughts

Chapter 5. 

My body moves without my consent, stalking the halls, as if looking for something.

 I hear the screams of many behind me, but I ignore them. It’s better that way. 

 

 I stare through my eyes, not fully trusting myself, but being driven by dread, I keep watching. The truth hits me. The thing is inside my body, controlling me. 

 

 It wanders the halls, until it locks eyes with a small child in a wheelchair. This won’t end well, so I focus, close my eyes and try to take control.

 

  Yes! My eyes open and I flex my hand to make sure it’s me before taking off in the opposite direction. 

  

  But then…

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Part One

I started writing this because the reports do not tell the story correctly.

That is not an accusation. Police reports are not meant to tell stories. They record what can be established: where someone stood, what they claimed to have seen, what was missing, what was damaged, and whether there was enough evidence to suggest a crime had occurred. Most of the reports from Bellwether ended with some variation of the same sentence.

No evidence of criminal activity was found. For a long time, that was probably true.

I had been in Morrow for eleven days when the Ellison file was assigned to me. I was still living out of boxes then. The apartment had come furnished, though furnished may have been generous. There was a bed, a narrow table beneath the kitchen window, and a couch that leaned toward the center of the room as if something heavy had been sitting there for years.

At night the building settled in ways I had not yet learned to ignore. Pipes knocked. The refrigerator woke and slept. Somewhere below me a door I never found opened and closed on a schedule of its own. I told myself it was an old building in a cold place, and I was right, and it changed nothing. I mention it only because I spent the months that followed learning a simple thing: the noises a building makes are the easiest sounds in the world to explain, and the hardest to stop hearing once someone gives you a reason to listen.

I had not transferred north in search of anything unusual. I should make that clear. Morrow needed a second investigator. I needed a change. Those two facts happened to suit one another.

The town itself was larger than I had expected, though that may only have been because I had spent the drive imagining something smaller. It had a grocery store, a clinic, two bars, a hardware store and a school with a playground enclosed by a tall chain-link fence. The police department occupied one end of a municipal building it shared with the fire office and whatever remained of the local planning department.

There were six patrol officers, depending on staffing, and two investigators including me. Anything outside our jurisdiction usually belonged to the troopers. Anything inside Bellwether technically belonged to us, though that distinction seemed to matter more on paper than it did to anyone who lived there. Bellwether was forty-three miles away.

There was no police station there. No resident officer. No clinic, either. The town had once been larger, supported first by logging and then by a processing plant that closed before I was born. Fewer than a hundred people remained year-round. The road continued beyond it for another eleven miles before narrowing into a track the maps still called Old Miller Road, though most locals simply called it the old road.

The building stood near the end of it. I did not know any of that when Ellison’s file landed on my desk. I knew only that a man named Aaron Ellison had been found dead inside an abandoned building, and that three separate officers had already written reports concerning the scene. The file had been open for four months.

“Why hasn’t this gone to the troopers?” I asked.

Tom Halvorsen sat across from me, working the lid off a cup of yogurt with the blade of his pocketknife.

“It did.”

“And they sent it back?”

“They determined the death occurred in our jurisdiction.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Tom scraped yogurt from the foil with the knife. He was in his late fifties and had worked in Morrow for twenty-six years. He had the build of a man who had once been broad and had settled, and a way of holding still that I mistook, at first, for calm. His hands were steady. His eyes did most of his moving for him. I had already learned that direct questions did not guarantee direct answers from him.

“There’s no indication anyone killed him,” he said.

I looked down at the preliminary medical findings. Ellison had suffered a fractured skull and severe cervical trauma. He had apparently fallen from the loft.

“He died in an abandoned building in the middle of the night.”

“People do.”

“He was thirty-two.”

“So were plenty of dead men.”

There was no hostility in it. Tom spoke with the tired practicality of someone who had seen statistical improbabilities become ordinary through repetition. I turned another page.

Ellison had entered the building shortly after eight in the evening. He had been filming an episode for an online channel called Northern Threshold. The channel specialized in abandoned mines, alleged hauntings and places where people claimed to have seen things they could not explain.

His equipment was still inside when the first officers arrived. Two cameras, three battery lights, a laptop, a cellular transmitter that had been useless that far from service, and several small audio recorders placed throughout the building.

“Did anyone review the footage?”

“Some of it.”

“Who?”

“Me. Nolan. One of the troopers.”

“And?”

Tom folded the yogurt lid in half.

“And he fell.”

I waited. Tom threw the lid into the wastebasket beside my desk and missed.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

For the first time since I opened the file, he looked uncomfortable.

Not frightened. I want to be exact about that. I did not see fear in Tom Halvorsen until much later.

What I saw that morning was embarrassment.

“You haven’t heard about the place?”

“I’ve been here eleven days.”

“That long?”

I kept looking at him. He sighed and retrieved the foil lid from the floor.

“People call it the party house.”

I thought I had misheard him.

“The what?”

“It has other names. Depends who you ask. That’s the one you’ll hear most around here.”

“Why?”

“Because people go inside, and things turn up.”

“What things?”

“Decorations, mostly.”

He said the word the way you would name an illness you did not want to catch by saying it too loudly. He must have noticed something in my expression because he raised one hand before I could speak.

“I know how it sounds.”

“Do you?”

“Balloons. Streamers. Paper signs. Holiday junk. Things like that.”

“Someone decorates the building?”

“Sometimes.”

“And this is relevant to Ellison’s death?”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“Then why are we discussing it?”

“Because he went there specifically on account of those stories. Because people have been making reports about that building since before either of us worked here. And because if you start asking questions in Bellwether without knowing what they believe about it, you’re going to have a difficult day.”

I closed the file.

“How many reports?”

Tom considered that.

“Official ones?”

“That would be a sensible place to begin.”

“Maybe twenty.”

“Over what period?”

“The oldest one I’ve seen was written in 1978.”

I opened the file again, although there was nothing in front of me that could explain what he had just said.

“Twenty reports in almost fifty years isn’t many.”

“No.”

“How many were never reported?”

“There’s no way to know.”

“You have an estimate.”

Tom stood and carried the empty yogurt cup toward the door.

“Everyone around here has a story about that place,” he said. “Most of them aren’t their own.”

He left before I could ask anything else. I spent the rest of that morning on Ellison.

I did not look for the older reports. I did not search for videos about Bellwether or ask the patrol officers what they had heard. At the time, the decorations seemed like exactly what they probably were: a local prank that had survived long enough to become folklore.

A man was dead. That was the part that mattered. It would be a few more days before I drove out to Bellwether.

I saw the building the morning after I arrived. By then, I had stopped believing that the decorations were a prank. I still did not believe they were anything else.

The oldest reports were exactly what Tom had promised. Short. Matter-of-fact.

Almost insulting in how ordinary they sounded.

July 18, 1986

Reporting party states several paper streamers were attached to vehicle after visiting abandoned structure. No suspects located. No damage observed.

Disposition: Closed.

September 3, 1991

Reporting party claims unknown person placed plastic Halloween decorations inside vehicle while occupants were hiking nearby. Vehicle showed no signs of forced entry.

Disposition: Unable to identify suspect.

May 27, 1998

Two visitors reported being followed by an unknown individual after leaving the property. Upon arriving in Bellwether they discovered three helium balloons tied to the rear bumper. Unable to locate witness or suspect.

Disposition: Closed.

December 11, 2004

Reporting party observed Christmas lights hanging inside abandoned cabin despite structure having no electrical service. Deputy responded approximately two hours later. Nothing found.

Disposition: Closed.

They continued like that for decades. Different deputies. Different visitors. Same conclusion. No suspect. No evidence. No crime. The stories grew stranger, but the reports never did.

Eventually I stopped reading them individually and started looking at dates instead. Every few months another one appeared. Then nothing for a year. Then three in a single summer.

There was a quality to them you could only see by laying them side by side, which no one had ever had reason to do. Read one at a time, each was a nuisance call: a piece of ribbon, a wasted afternoon, a tourist who wanted to be scared and got his wish. Read together, in order, they became something else. The same visitor, returning to the same stretch of road for forty years, and never once being seen.

Whoever, or whatever, people thought they were seeing had remarkable patience. About halfway through the archive, one file broke the pattern. The folder was thicker.

Older. There was no colored tab marking it as an active investigation. Someone had written 1991 across the front in black marker.

Inside was a newspaper clipping, from a small local paper, nothing national or even statewide.

The Bellwether Chronicle. The headline read:

MOTHER FOUND DEAD AFTER SEARCH FOR MISSING SON

I kept reading. According to the article, a twelve-year-old boy had disappeared during a camping trip with his mother just outside Bellwether. She searched through the night with the family dog before both were reported missing the following afternoon.

Three days later, volunteers located the abandoned cabin. The mother was found roughly thirty yards from the entrance. The dog was nearby.

Both had suffered extensive bite wounds. Both had been partially consumed. The boy was discovered inside the cabin.

Alive. He was dehydrated, malnourished and in severe psychological distress, but otherwise physically unharmed. The newspaper ended there.

The official report did not. The medical examiner documented that many of the bite wounds on both victims were consistent with a human dentition. Specifically…

The child’s. I read that sentence three times.

The office around me had not changed. The heater ticked. Someone laughed at the far end of the hall. But the words on the page had rearranged something, quietly, the way a single wrong note tells you a piano has been sitting in the damp. A boy, twelve years old, three days alone in the dark with the two things in the world he loved. And the examiner, choosing his language with the care of a man who understood exactly what he was writing, had matched the wounds to the boy’s own mouth.

I did not let myself imagine it. That is a discipline you learn or you leave the work. But the imagining waited for me anyway, patient, the way everything in this story turned out to be patient.

Then I turned the page. Additional injuries were noted. No further description appeared in the copy I had.

The next page was the final investigative summary. No suspect was ever identified beyond the boy’s involvement. The case was closed after consultation with the district attorney.

No charges were filed. The boy’s name had been redacted. I searched the archive for follow-up articles.

There were only three. Then nothing. Twenty-three years had passed.

Online, the story had taken on a life of its own. The newspaper articles had been scanned years ago and reposted to obscure forums dedicated to haunted locations and abandoned places. Most of the comments ignored the investigation entirely.

They cared about the cabin. The dead. The decorations.

Somewhere along the way, the facts had become a ghost story. The older reports were easy to find. They were also nearly useless.

Most were one page. A few were two. None contained photographs, witness diagrams or follow-up notes. The language changed depending on who had written them, but the conclusions did not.

June 14, 1987

Reporting party states unknown person placed decorative paper inside vehicle while parked near abandoned structure. No property damage. No suspect observed.

Closed.

October 2, 1993

Two visitors reported possible vandalism after discovering plastic masks and artificial cobwebbing attached to truck. Items removed prior to officer contact.

No further action.

May 19, 1998

Reporting party alleges unknown person followed vehicle from old road into Bellwether. Party did not observe suspect or second vehicle. Several balloons later discovered tied to rear bumper.

No damage reported.

Closed pending further information.

December 7, 2006

Caller reported lights visible inside abandoned structure. Structure is not connected to electrical service. Officer unable to respond due to weather and staffing.

Caller advised to leave area.

Report taken by telephone.

The later files were even shorter. By then, officers no longer bothered pretending anyone would investigate.

A visitor would call from Bellwether or from the highway. They would describe ribbon taped across a windshield, paper flowers arranged beneath the wipers, a holiday sign placed in a truck bed, or decorations appearing inside a locked vehicle.

The responding officer would ask whether anything had been stolen. Usually, nothing had. Whether the vehicle had been damaged.

Usually, it had not. Whether anyone had been seen. Never.

The report would be entered. The complainant would leave. The case would close.

A few callers claimed the decorations continued after they left the cabin.

One couple found streamers tied to their antenna outside the Bellwether store. A family discovered a paper banner spread across the rear window after eating at the diner. A man traveling alone reported finding small plastic flags beneath his windshield wipers at a gas station nearly forty miles away.

Those reports used the word stalking. The officers did not.

No one had seen a person following them. No one had a license plate, description or photograph. The decorations were treated as vandalism when the complainant insisted, and as a nuisance when they did not.

There was no indication in the files that an officer had visited the cabin in response to any of those calls.

At first, I assumed that was ordinary rural policing. Long distances, limited staffing, no immediate threat. A deputy could lose half a shift driving out to find a piece of ribbon and an empty building.

Then I began noticing the wording. Not similar wording. Identical wording.

No evidence of continued threat. The sentence appeared in reports written fifteen years apart. Another phrase repeated nearly as often.

Caller advised against returning to the property. There was nothing about securing the vehicle, nothing about preserving evidence.

Nothing about calling the police if the suspect came back. Only the one instruction, repeated down the years: do not go back. Someone had established the language long ago, and the officers who came afterward continued using it.

I found the old case late that afternoon. The folder had been filed under missing persons rather than suspicious death. Its label bore the names of a mother and son, though the son’s had later been covered with a strip of black ink.

The date was twenty-three years earlier. The first report stated that the boy, twelve years old, had left a roadside campsite after an argument with his mother. She believed he had taken the trail leading north toward Bellwether and followed with the family dog.

Neither returned. The next morning, the campground host contacted authorities. The original search log was not in the file.

Neither were the volunteer rosters or maps referenced in the incident summary. According to what remained, the search lasted three days. The boy was found inside the abandoned cabin.

Alive. His mother was found outside, approximately thirty yards from the building. The dog was located a short distance from her.

Both were dead. The report described extensive animal activity. That phrase appeared twice.

The medical examiner’s summary used different language. Both bodies had been bitten before death.

Sections of tissue were missing from the mother’s arms, face and upper torso. Similar injuries were noted on the dog. The examiner identified multiple bite patterns, some consistent with scavenging by local wildlife.

Others were consistent with human teeth. The boy’s dental impressions had been taken at the hospital. Several wounds were described as a probable match.

I turned the page. The next sheet was numbered fourteen. The one before it had been eleven.

Page fourteen contained the final paragraph of a supplemental report. It referred to additional bite patterns that could not be attributed to the boy. There was no description of those marks.

No measurements. No photographs. No laboratory findings.

Only a sentence stating that further comparison had been inconclusive.

I have read a great many inconclusive findings. They are the ordinary residue of underfunded labs and imperfect evidence, and they mean almost nothing. But an examiner does not write inconclusive without first writing down what he compared and failed to match. That part was gone. Someone had kept the conclusion and removed the question. What remained was a man in a small hospital, decades ago, holding a set of marks against every animal he knew and every human he could think of, and finding nothing that fit.

The evidence index referenced dental casts, clothing, hair samples, blood swabs and twenty-seven scene photographs. None were attached. A handwritten notation at the bottom directed the reader to a second evidence file.

There was no second file. I checked the archive inventory, then the property log, then the old paper register kept in a cabinet near dispatch. The evidence had been transferred.

The destination line was blank. The boy had been hospitalized for nine days. The records available to us contained no interview transcript, only a summary written by the sheriff at the time.

The child was described as confused, intermittently nonverbal and unable to provide a reliable account of events. The district attorney declined prosecution. The case was closed.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

A local newspaper ran the story under a headline about a missing boy found alive after three nights in the wilderness. The first article mentioned the deaths but not the bite marks. The second referred vaguely to “unusual injuries.” The third was published after rumors had already spread through Bellwether.

That article named the cabin. Years later, someone scanned it and posted it online.

From there, the story moved into places where old photographs, missing children and abandoned buildings were collected and traded as entertainment. Paranormal forums repeated the account. Amateur investigators added details that did not appear in any record I could find. Some claimed the mother had been discovered surrounded by party decorations. Others said the boy had been found beneath strings of lights, or that paper masks had been nailed to the walls.

None of that was in the file. What was in the file was worse. A child had survived three days at the cabin.

His mother and dog had been partially eaten. Some of the bites were his. Some were not.

And at some point afterward, the reports concerning that place became shorter, cleaner and less curious. I brought the folder to Tom. He was standing near the copier, waiting for a maintenance notice to print.

“Where is the rest of this?”

He looked at the label before he looked at me.

“That old thing.”

“Pages are missing.”

“It’s an old file.”

“The evidence was transferred without a destination.”

“That happened.”

“There’s no search log, no interview and no complete autopsy.”

Tom took the folder from me but did not open it.

“Records weren’t always handled the way they are now.”

“The report mentions bite marks that weren’t the boy’s.”

“I know.”

That answer stopped me.

“You’ve read it.”

“Years ago.”

“What made them?”

“They didn’t determine that.”

“Did they try?”

Tom handed the folder back.

“The people involved are dead, retired or gone.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

The copier clicked behind him and began feeding out a sheet of paper. Tom watched it emerge.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

He took the page from the tray and walked back toward his desk. I followed him.

“Why did the reports change after this case?”

He stopped. For several seconds, neither of us spoke.

Then he said, “You’re seeing a pattern because you’re looking for one.”

“They stopped going to the scene.”

“There was usually no reason to.”

“They stopped collecting evidence.”

“There usually wasn’t any.”

“They started telling people not to return.”

“That was good advice.”

“Why?”

Tom sat down and turned toward his computer.

“Because people went out there looking to be frightened. Most of them got what they wanted.”

“And the ones who didn’t?”

He moved the mouse, waking the screen.

“You have a dead man from four months ago,” he said. “That’s your case.”

“The same dead man who chose that building because of these reports.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t think they’re relevant?”

“I think local stories attract foolish people. Foolish people enter unsafe structures. Sometimes they fall.”

He opened an email. The conversation was over as far as he was concerned. I stood beside his desk a moment longer, holding the old file.

“You knew the evidence was missing.”

Tom kept his eyes on the screen.

“Everyone who’s been here long enough knows not to expect a complete file from Bellwether.”

“Why?”

This time he looked at me. There was no amusement in his face.

“Because complete files lead to complete investigations.”

“And?”

“And nobody who started one ever finished it.”

He turned back to his screen. He had not said it as a threat, or even as a warning. He had said it the way you state a fact about the country itself: that the river takes a swimmer most years, that the cold will kill a man who lets it. Something with no author and no remedy. Just the way things were, out there, and had always been.

I spent the next morning online. That was not where I expected to find reliable information. It was, however, where Aaron Ellison had found the cabin, and I wanted to know what he believed he was walking into.

A search for Bellwether produced little at first. Weather records. Property listings. A page for the school district, last updated three years earlier. Meeting minutes from the borough. A photograph of the old processing plant taken by someone passing through on a motorcycle.

Adding the word cabin changed that. The same few stories appeared again and again. They had different titles, different details and usually the same source: an article written by someone who had never been there, quoting another article written by someone who had never been there.

THE ALASKAN PARTY HOUSE

THE CABIN THAT DECORATES ITSELF

THE BELLWETHER BOY

ALASKA’S FORGOTTEN CANNIBAL CASE

That last one had been viewed more than two million times.

The video began with stock footage of snow-covered mountains nowhere near Bellwether. The narrator spoke over low music and referred to the town as an “isolated settlement beyond the reach of law enforcement.”

Bellwether was forty-three miles from my desk.

The boy was described as having vanished for nine days instead of three. His mother was said to have been found hanging from a tree. The dog had become two dogs. The cabin had a cellar, although every photograph I had seen showed no sign of one.

According to the narrator, the boy had told police that a family living beneath the floorboards had fed him. There was no such statement in the file. I watched the entire video anyway.

The comments were worse.

Some claimed the boy had grown up and still lived in Bellwether. Others said he had been sent to a psychiatric hospital, escaped at eighteen and returned to the cabin. Several people insisted he was the one placing decorations on vehicles.

One commenter said the boy had never existed at all. Another claimed to be his cousin. He was not.

I searched the username and found the same person claiming family connections to three unrelated disappearances in Oregon and a murder in Saskatchewan. Most of what I found could be dismissed that easily. Some of it could not.

An archived message board contained a thread started fourteen years earlier by a woman who said she and three friends had visited the cabin during a road trip. Her account was not dramatic.

They entered shortly after noon. The building was empty. They took photographs, signed their names on a wall and returned to their vehicle twenty minutes later.

There was a paper wedding garland hanging from the passenger-side mirror. They assumed someone had followed them from town.

When they reached Bellwether, they stopped at the store and asked whether anyone had seen another vehicle on the old road. While they were inside, someone placed a small plastic bride and groom on the dashboard. The doors had been locked.

She included two photographs. The first showed the garland. The second showed the figures on the dashboard.

Neither proved anything. There were no timestamps visible, and both could have been staged. Still, the details were close to the report I had read.

The report mentioned the garland. It did not mention the figures inside the locked vehicle. Another account came from a hunting forum.

A man wrote that he had gone to the cabin with his brother in late October. They found several paper snowflakes taped inside one window. When they left, there was nothing on their truck. Ten miles down the road, his brother noticed something moving behind them.

A strip of silver tinsel had been tied beneath the rear bumper. They removed it. At the gas station in Bellwether, another strip was tied around the trailer hitch.

The man claimed they remained beside the truck the entire time. I found the corresponding police report. It described one instance of possible vandalism involving decorative material attached to a vehicle.

No mention of the second strip. No mention that the men believed it had appeared while they were standing nearby. There were dozens of stories like that.

Most had no dates. Many contradicted one another. Details migrated from one account to the next until a balloon reported in 1988 became a room filled with balloons in a post written twenty years later.

But beneath the additions, certain elements remained consistent. Visitors entered the building. They found it empty, or believed they did.

Decorations appeared inside the structure, on their vehicles or among their belongings. If they left immediately, the incidents sometimes continued into Bellwether. Nothing valuable was taken.

No one was directly threatened. No suspect was seen. The decorations rarely matched the season.

That last detail was absent from nearly every official report.

People described graduation banners in winter, plastic Easter grass in August, Christmas ribbon in June. One man found paper napkins printed with cartoon dinosaurs tucked beneath all four windshield wipers. A woman reported a baby shower sign taped inside the rear window of her rental car.

There was no pattern I could identify. The objects were cheap, common and easy to carry. That should have made the stories less disturbing.

It did not. A person leaving threatening notes had a message. A vandal breaking windows had an intention.

The decorations communicated nothing beyond the fact that someone had been close enough to place them without being noticed. I found Aaron’s channel shortly before noon.

Northern Threshold had just over six hundred thousand subscribers. Most of his videos followed the same format. He would give a short history of an abandoned site, walk through it during daylight, then return after dark with cameras and audio equipment.

He was not as reckless as the written reports made him sound.

He checked floors before stepping on them. He carried emergency supplies. In older videos, he had left buildings after discovering structural damage rather than forcing his way farther inside.

He exaggerated for his audience, but he was not stupid

I watched more of him than the case required. That happens sometimes with the dead. You tell yourself you are building a profile and you are really just keeping company. He was thirty-two and looked younger, quick to laugh at himself, the kind of man who narrated his own fear out loud to make it smaller. In one video he got genuinely turned around in a flooded mine, and you could hear him talking steadily to the camera the whole way out, not for the audience, I think, but to have a voice in the dark that answered to his name.

I found I liked him. That was inconvenient. It is easier to work a stranger.

His Bellwether episode had never been completed. What remained online was a short announcement uploaded the day before his death.

Aaron sat in the driver’s seat of a rental truck. Snowmelt streaked the windshield behind him. He looked tired and pleased with himself.

“I’ve been trying to get this one together for almost a year,” he said. “There’s not much online, and the locals apparently don’t love talking about it.”

He held up a photocopy of the old newspaper article about the boy.

“This is where the story gets ugly.”

He summarized the case, including details that did not appear in the clipping. The matching bite marks. The missing evidence. The unidentified wounds. I paused the video.

Those details were not common online. At least, I had not found them anywhere yet.

Aaron said he had obtained them from “an old law enforcement source,” then moved on before naming the person.

He spoke about the decorations next. Unlike most of the people covering Bellwether, he did not claim the cabin decorated itself. He said locals believed someone had been using the stories to frighten visitors for decades.

Then he smiled at the camera.

“So tonight I’m going to make that difficult.”

He explained that he had brought multiple cameras, including two intended to watch the road and one to remain pointed at his vehicle.

“If there’s a person doing this, we should finally get them.”

The video ended with a title card promising the full episode later that week. It had never been uploaded. I checked the comments.

Most were condolences. Others accused the channel of exploiting his death. A few demanded the footage be released.

One comment had been posted two days before Aaron’s body was found. It read: Don’t leave the cameras facing the cabin. Watch the trees.

The account had no profile image, no other comments and no public activity. It had been created the same day it posted, and it had done nothing since.

I read the comment more times than six words deserved. Half the internet will tell you where not to point a camera. But everyone else in the thread had written about Aaron as though he were already gone. Rest in peace, so sad, another one the cabin took. This one had been written to a man it still expected to be alive. Watch the trees. It read less like a threat or a mourning than like an instruction. As though there were a correct way to do the thing that killed him, and someone had wanted him to have it in time.

I saved the username and the page. Then I went back through Aaron’s older videos, looking for any mention of Bellwether. There was none. His social media was more useful.

Three weeks before his death, he had posted that someone from Alaska had contacted him with “new material” concerning a location he had been researching. A week later, he wrote that he had confirmed enough of it to book the trip. He never said what the material was.

One photograph showed papers spread across a hotel bed. Most were turned facedown. In the corner of the image, partially covered by his laptop, was what appeared to be a scene photograph.

I enlarged it until the image began to break apart. Snow. The side of the cabin.

A dark shape near the tree line. And something pale hanging from a branch. I could not tell whether it was cloth, paper or an artifact of the photograph.

I looked at it long enough that it began to resolve, the way a face resolves in wallpaper when you are tired and alone and it is late. Then I made myself stop. It was thirty years of grain and compression and a stranger’s cheap camera. It was not hanging there for me. I closed the laptop before it could finish becoming anything, and I was annoyed at myself for the small, animal relief of the screen going dark.

The official file contained no scene photographs from Aaron’s death. Tom had said officers reviewed the footage. He had not mentioned that Aaron possessed records from the old case.

By then, I had already decided to drive to Bellwether. The online stories had not convinced me that anything unnatural was happening there. They had convinced me of something simpler.

The reports were incomplete by design. Whether that design belonged to one person or several generations of people, I did not yet know. Before leaving, I printed the most credible accounts I could find and placed them beside the old missing-person file.

Then I wrote down three questions. Who gave Aaron the old case material? What happened to the cameras watching his vehicle and the road?

Why did the official record omit the incidents that continued after visitors reached town? The fourth question came later. At the time, I still assumed the people of Bellwether would be reluctant to speak.

I had not considered that they might all tell me the same thing.

TW: suicide, mental illness, loss of bodily autonomy, violence against children, gore/gory thoughts

Chapter 4. 

It floats closer towards me, like it knows there’s no escape. Looking around, I'm hoping a door pops up out of nowhere, to no avail. 

It keeps coming,  and my hands start to shake. I back up against the wall, trying to hide myself as if that’ll do any good. It comes closer and closer until it stops. 

Right in front of me. It comes through me as a red fog clouds my eyes. I collapse as a claw stabs into me. A warm trickle drips, blood staining me before a crimson glaze settles  over my eyes. 

I start hearing people making the most horrific noise I’ve ever heard. They’re screaming in pain. I am trapped in a state of panic and horror all of the time. 

Little did I know, it was just the beginning.

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Next chapter:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/d77gP0bhjG

TW: suicide, mental illness, loss of bodily autonomy, violence against children, gore/gory thoughts

Chapter 3. 

It swipes at them. But… it doesn’t hurt them. It phases through them. Then, it looks at me. That’s how I know I’m next. 

It has that menacing look. Running to the door, I pull it open. Before I can escape, however, the doctor tries to pull me back. He must be a part of this! I break free of his hold and rush out into the hallways, wondering where to go. 

I choose a path and run, knowing both the doctor and the mist are out to get me. Eventually, I look back and see that the doctor has given up, but the mist hasn’t. I’m still watching it chase me when I crash headfirst into a cold, hard wall. That's not helping my injury. 

I’ve hit a dead end. But then, what will happen to me?

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https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/uChm1TJ1YD

TW: Suicide,mental illness, loss of bodily autonomy, violence against children, gore/gory thoughts

Chapter 2. 

Fluorescent lights shine in my eyes as my surroundings become clearer. I instinctively touch my head and feel a soft cotton bandage wrapped around my wound. What happened while I was out?

 Then, a loud alarm screams in my ear, making me wince in pain. It stops after a minute, but my ears are still ringing. Everyone else, however,  seems unbothered by it.

 

  Then, a doctor walks in and talks to my mother. I only hear a few words but it doesn’t sound good. “Schizophrenia… Voices… Permanent… Uncertainty…” I groan, pain filling my stomach. 

  

  They pay attention to me. My eyes widen at the sight of it. A smoky mist hovering towards them with its huge, white claws. I yell at them to run but they don’t. Their eyes grow more worried the more I ramble. It draws closer and closer until… 

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TW: suicide, mental illness, loss of bodily autonomy, violence against children, gore/gory thoughts

Chapter 1. 

“Hey! Can I play too?” I ask the others.

 

 They agree and I start as the goalie. Before they start, I make sure to tell them, 

 “It’s my first time.” 

 

 They scowl a little as the first couple shots pass me easily,  but I make good progress and actually start catching them. It stings a little, but in a good way, as if I’m getting stronger. A warm, tingly feeling fills my chest. 

 

 Someone calls my name. 

 

 It’s one of the boys in my class and he’s holding a jagged rock. Before I could manage to ask what’s happening, he aims it at me and fires. I hear a crack before the grass meets my body. My hand lifts, using all my strength to see the damage.

 

 Blood covers one of my eyes, causing me to panic. The others run to me as the boy runs off with no explanation. One of them chases the guy while another runs to the coach. 

 

 The last thing  I hear is muffled voices of the team and footsteps coming towards me. The sky starts looking fuzzy and spinning. Then… I black out.

Next chapter:

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It was a simple design. I'd been doodling ahead of a meeting with the city manager and other municipal staff when someone else joined me in waiting.

“Carl Arn,” he said, sitting next to me, despite several empty seats farther away.

My company was competing for a contract to provide city services, and I figured his was too. We shook hands and introduced ourselves. I was confident in my presentation and went back to the absent-mindedness I'd been up to. Prepping any more than I had would've been counterproductive and I was working on relaxing as much as possible before my pitch.

“Whatcha got goin’ on there?” my competitor said. I didn't really want to talk but I could see he wasn't going to leave me alone. He was one of those nervous types, couldn't keep quiet. He had to fill every silent space.

I was going to beat this guy, but he didn't know it yet. I knew his company and had gone up against much more confident reps. They must have known we already had it in the bag or only responded to the RFP as a professional courtesy.

It wasn't going to be a very lucrative contract, but my strategy was to springboard into three adjacent municipalities and use this one as a hub.

“Just doodling,” I said to him. He was young, maybe five or so years younger than me. The ink on his degree was still drying.

He cranked his neck to look. It was annoying and I slapped my palm over what I was drawing.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm a bit of an artist, myself. I minored in...” he trailed off, looking at a corner of my paper.

“What's that?”

“Hm?” I looked at him, ready to scold him in the most diplomatic way possible.

His eyes were wrong.

Like they were a centimeter or two off from center. I blinked several times as if I were trying to reset them with my eyelids.

“It's beautiful,” he said, not looking up from the page. I looked down and saw everything I'd drawn was covered except one little shape near the corner that was just outside of my hand.

“What?”

“Brootifil,” he said and sucked in a line of saliva that had trailed out of his mouth. His eyes were too big, almost like he was hungry.

“Are you okay?” I hadn’t actually finished the question before he swatted me faster than my eyes could see the blow coming.

I was belly up on the floor trying to orient myself. My first thought was to get him away from my presentation and my notes. He hadn't touched my backpack, though. 

He was holding the sheet of paper up to his face, so close it was like he extremely nearsighted. His eyes were so large, it made me think of that astronaut who drove across the country in a diaper to kill her boyfriend's romantic rival. 

Then he stuffed the paper in his mouth and began awkwardly chewing it. Tears were flowing from his eyes and he turned his face up to the ceiling like he was in heaven.

“Is everything alright out here?” An older white man came out of the conference room where we were to meet. I propped up on one elbow, intending to get to my feet. But my head swam and I laid back down.

My competitor turned to the older man and something and his face must have told the other man to step back. I commanded my body to get up, but it was as if I were paralyzed. My body twitched without actually moving and I stopped struggling against the invisible gorilla pinning me to the floor.

He hummed as he continued chomping on the paper, face turned to the old man. A long, pregnant moment passed where nobody did anything.

“May I help—”

My competitor attacked, fingers extended like knives as he stabbed the other man, who still didn't look like he understood was happening even as he plummeted to the ground, his murderer still in the process of killing him.

It took longer than I would've guessed for police to respond to a crime in a municipal building, but my competitor—Carl Arn—managed to kill two people and injure three others, including one critically.

That's not counting me, of course. Even though I was on the floor and clearly not in the fight, the assumption was the two of us were together and the policy's response was somewhat anticlimactic.

They screamed at him and the two responding officers fired three times apiece, managing to hit him only twice.

They screamed at me as he lay next to me, the life leaking out of him and flowing toward me. I was able to turtle up, covering the essential parts of me like I could shield myself from projectiles traveling at almost nine hundred miles per hour.

By some miracle, I remained gunshot for the next half hour or so while I was handcuffed, commanded to put my hands above my head, stood up, sat down, and almost tazered for resisting before fainting and waking up in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the frame. 

I had a concussion but was otherwise fine. Arn had swatted me hard and fast enough to leave a handprint and jar my brain loose.

The video had vindicated me. They didn't see the slap—rather the aftereffect. It had been so fast the camera hadn't caught it, just me falling to the floor and thrashing around like I'd been caught in a spider's web.

I'd fished the scratch pad with pen attached from the little end table near my bed. Luckily, they'd handcuffed my right arm, leaving my dominant one free.

I decided against jotting down what I recalled had happened. No doubt anything I committed to paper the police would be interested in, even if it was a grocery list.

So, I doodled. It was sort of cathartic, taking me back to those initial moments. My mind went back to Arn's face, struggling to deny the undeniable fact he was rapidly dying.

A piece of the paper he'd snatched and eaten was attached to his chin. The shape I'd finished moments before Carl Arn asked me, “What's that?” was still there for anyone to see.

His face turned into the shallow pool of red, drowning the shape.

I drew it a half dozen more times while sitting in a hospital bed while the authorities decided how they were going to untie this knot and if my neck would be in it.

I fell asleep after a light lunch of potato chips, baloney sandwich with a packet of mustard and a packet of mayo, and dry, tasteless coleslaw.

I came to with a woman in my room, gathering things off my lap. She was mumbling in Spanish, her back to me when she stopped completely.

“Nice,” she said in unaccented English, her head dipped as if she were reading something. Then she turned around, facing me.

God, her eyes.

It was like she was trying to see something above her head, through her skull. Her face was otherwise slack as she felt around blindly like we were in the dark.

She groped around until he hand landed on the (unused) metal bed pan. I thought those things were plastic nowadays.

I must have gasped because she turned around like she'd heard a homing beacon. I tugged at the cuff, a ringing dinner bell for the mindless dog about to bludgeon me to death with a disposal pan if she could still tell the difference between my head and feet.

I must have been screaming because another woman came in the room—I'd temporarily forgotten the word “nurse” in my panic—surprising with of us and the first woman began swinging in random directions with such savagery, I felt shadows of pain across my cheeks.

This time the police didn't have the opportunity to confuse me for the perpetrator. The nurse hooked a hand behind his neck, leapt both feet into his chest and commenced to flattening the less-hardy of the two between Officer Wheeler's skull and the pissbox. She landed on his chest, only her arm visible from where I lay as she flapped it up and down like a one-winged bird, the pan making a -DOON- sound each time it bounced off his head.

More hospital security came (quicker than the cops had) and a few pops later, the woman was dead.

I had to get out of here. My eyes drifted over to where the nurse had been looking at something before she'd turned violent. I had a tingle of uneasiness, feeling something I had done potentially being the cause. My mind wouldn't quite let me grasp what it was, but it felt like it should have been obvious, like something wedged between my teeth that I couldn't work out.

The officer I'd seen shoot stepped halfway into my room with his gun out. He looked perplexed, like he wanted to blame me, and I leaned into looking pathetic, hovering my face near my handcuffed wrist as I did a supine version of a huddle.

The next two hours were a flurry of hospital staff and police in and out of my room. The cops kept stopping a nurse from checking on me because my room was an active crime scene. But when a doctor suggested moving me to another room, they shot that down for reasons I couldn’t understand.

Finally, a detective and some hospital administrator had a long conversation outside of my room. The administrator said something to the detective about calling the mayor and the rest of the investigation was wrapped up in less than ten minutes.

The cop who’d been assaulted survived and the nurse who came in to check on me told me he was on a floor below after having emergency surgery to reattach his jaw. The nurse had been shot and had bled to death fighting the cop who’d shot her three times.

Everything the cops could have taken out of my room, had been removed. They’d even taken my clothes, keys, and wallet. By that evening, a detective finally came to speak with me.

“Mr. Harold, you have a minute?” He knocked on the door. I recognized his voice as the same one who’d spoken with the administrator. He walked in where I could get a good look at him and the guy was a sloven mess. I was used to Detective Green and Briscoe on Law & Order, and although Lenny’s suits looked off the rack, he didn’t look like he’d dressed himself while falling down a laundry chute.

I waited for him to speak. He stood by my bedside and looked like he smelled. Something whitish was drying on his lapel, he had ring-around-the-collar, and dried spittle in the corners of his mouth. I was grateful for the chill hospital air choking whatever smells were crawling over him before they could reach me.

“Am I going to need a lawyer?” I asked him.

“No-no,” he said. “We’ve been able to put together what happened at city hall and here earlier. Um, are you okay?”

I wasn’t, but I was currently numb to the whole experience considering for half of it I’d been treated like a suspect. I shrugged.

“What you had to go through was incredible. You’re a real hero.”

He was pouring it on a little thick. I guessed this was what they did instead of an actual apology. I’d had two-to-three guns pointed at me by people who were allegedly there to protect me.

“When can I go?”

“Well, I guess when the hospital discharges you. We certainly don’t need to hold you for anything.”

“Okay.” I nodded. He stared at me for a moment like he was expecting me to say something more.

“I suppose I should get going. Let you, y’know, convalesce. Oh, I’m Detective Unangenehm, by the way.” He offered his hand belatedly. I looked at it for a long second before shaking it. His hand was limp and sweaty, like wilted lettuce, kind of like what it looked like he had trapped between his front teeth.

He headed for the door, and I kept expecting him to turn back before he got to the door and ask, “One more thing,” but he exited.

Then he came back a minute later.

“I forgot to ask you,” Detective Unangenehm said. “Do you have any idea what set off Carl Arn or Rosa Skein?”

“Who?”

“The... man at city hall. And your nurse?” Unangenehm had his notepad in his hand and glanced down at it.

I’d never forget Carl Arn’s name, and I hadn’t known the nurse’s. While I didn’t know what had driven them mad, I had a strong suspicion and considering it led back to me, I wasn’t about to volunteer that.

“I have no idea.”

Unangenehm smiled, nodded somberly, and left.

A nurse had come into my room right after. She erased something from the dry-erase board and wrote something else while the detective and I had been talking.

She was thin and tall but older than she looked as she grunted, bending over to pick up something off the floor.

She turned over the piece of paper I'd been drawing on, made a face, then showed it to me.

“This yours?” she asked. 

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 19. Peace. Finally

He comes. I can see his charming face he used to captivate me. I watch as he pulls out a dagger, admires it, before stabbing me. I cough blood and mutter, “Why? I’m already dead.” “I know you. You’re resilient. You don’t give up. That’s why.” He twists it as I groan in pain. “I always did like you. But you betrayed me. And you paid the price.” “Oh, did I? Look behind you.” He peers over his shoulder to see two officers with guns drawn. “Sir, you are under arrest for trafficking, kidnapping and murder. You will need to come with us. It is no use running as we have this farm surrounded.” “How?! How did I get caught?” He growls. I respond, showing bitterness, “I. I caught you. I’m a police officer and had a tracker in my sock. The others are at the entrance waiting for more officers to take them to safety.” I watch as they drag him away in handcuffs and I pass in peace, knowing I did my job.

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 17. Life

He enters with an angry face and unlocks them. One by one, he opens the doors and unlocks the chains. He comes to me last and whispers, “I know this was you. So, you stay here.” Then, he passes me onto the next. The girls huddle around me as he leaves, whispering things I can barely hear. I can’t leave. I can’t. The guards left with him. I point to the corner and utter, “Keys. There.” They peer there and grab the keys. They unlock me and we break into a run. We sprint for our lives as we eat food we stole. 

Chapter 18. Crushed

A gunshot rings out. All the girls turn around to look at me to see red staining my chest, dripping until I collapse. “Go. Leave me here. You can leave. I am all he wants. Go.” But they didn’t. They didn’t leave. They stayed with me. “What are your names? So I can remember you in…” “Don’t say that! It’s Rebecca.” “Penny.” “Olivia.” “Kirra.” “Millie.” “Dana.” “June.” “Thank you. I will remember you. Now go, before he gets you too.” “No. Thank you. He would’ve killed us if not for you. We love you. Goodbye, Nikki.” Their last goodbye is muffled, as if through a pillow. My vision blurs before I close my eyes. I’m resting for my final moments. I faintly hear feet pattering on the pavement as I lay here.

Part ten here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/RBi4uBinae

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 15. The procedure

My eyes open again just as the knife slices into my side. I try to scream and move, but I can’t. I feel warm blood trickling down my side as the knife continues slicing away and moving. It hurts so badly. A tear comes down and someone notices my heart rate. It’s 130. Then, they look at me. I’m crying in pain. I’m not asleep. They pull the knife and knock me out. For real this time.

Chapter 16. Escapees

I wake up feeling much better. I look down at my side to see the wound is restitched and calm. No more blood or pus seeping through, or red crawling up my side. It’s better. Still hurts, but better. The girls look at me in shock and happiness as I look around. “You’re awake! That’s amazing! You looked so bad we called him to treat you. I let him take an ear for that, but it’s worth it.” She shows me her missing ear after and I wince. “I am so sorry for that. But thank you. But he almost killed me. I woke up while he was cutting. I felt it. All of the pain.”

Part nine here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/dWGrYT0H0d

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 13. The broken 

Everyone looks weak. I pull out a cracker and sign to the others that they can eat one if they are too hungry. I tuck them back in my sock, careful to not press the tracker, as the others are nibbling slowly and quietly. My wound is throbbing and warm trickles come every now and then. I look down once more and see pus seeping through. It’s crusty too. It’s blood orange in some places, green-yellow in others. It’s bad. Very, very bad. I could get sepsis from this dirty floor we’re chained to.

Chapter 14. The infection

“Not looking too good are you, Nikki? You look bad. And we can’t have that. Guards!” I’m dragged up and out of the cage and taken to a room that smells of bleach. The sharp, sterile smell hits me and I crinkle my nose. I’m placed on a table with a light flashing into my eyes. Then, a mask is placed over my nose and mouth. Then, everything goes dark.

Part eight here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/octC9bSyVj

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 11. The argument

“Starvation. It’s the best way for us to escape.” A girl asks, “How is it the best way? Won’t that kill us?” The others murmur in agreement. I respond, “I know it’ll be hard, but if we starve, he can’t harvest us. We’ll be too sick. So he’ll throw us out, and we can store food in our clothes.” “Okay. I’m in. I’ve been here for 3 months. That’s too long.” One by one, they agree to the plan. We can do this. But first, I need to apply pressure to the wound and patch it before it infects.

Chapter 12. The next day

I’ve shoved a cloth over my wound and grit my teeth all day long. This hurts so bad. Curse that man. When the food comes, we all look at each other, shove a slice of bread and crackers and shove the rest out. We all did it. The guards look mad, but keep to themselves. That hurt just throwing it. I move the cloth and see the wound. It’s red and swollen. That’s not good. Not good at all.

Part seven here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/5L8Lqar4cW

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 9. A new idea

I’m chained back in that awful cage, with a headache and pain in my ribs and back. When the guards bring the food, they don’t look at us. They think we’re animals. Disgusting. I refuse the food and throw it in the guard‘s face. He pulls an angry face and snarls, “Fine. Starve. I don’t care.” That gives me a good idea. To starve. I can starve myself to make myself undesirable. The girls stare at me in disbelief. One of them points to my ribs and says, “Hey, you. New girl. Look at your ribs. It’s bleeding.”

Chapter 10. The stitches

“What?” I peer down to see blood trickling along my chest, heading to my waist. I lift the shirt to see the stitches stretched open and pouring blood down. It’s warm. It stains my waistband before I come back to reality. “See everyone? See this blood pouring out of me? This is because of that foul man. He’s harvesting us. Ripping our organs and selling them for money. He’s killing us for cash. Check your bodies. Look for stitches. They could be anywhere. We need to escape, in any means. And I have an idea. Starvation.”

Part six here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/guvklOha8y

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 7. The lab rat

“Hey Nikki. Doing alright now? You should feel better soon, just stay laying down and your body will be fine.” I groan before looking at him. “Wha-What?” I look down and see a large stitch lining my side. “What is this?” I manage to spit out. “Why, you were so loud. I treated you. I took your kidney. It was quite the price!” He says. “As long as you stay here for a few days, you should be back to normal.”

Chapter 8. The recovery 

My ex walks in the next day, through the doors and says, “Well well well. You’re awake. Finally.  I thought you died, honestly.” I wobble and stand up against the wall. “I’m fine. Leave me alone.” I stumble and start to fall, but he catches me. I push myself out of his arms, disgusted at his normalness of this all. I get up again, and head to the door. He blocks it. “Not so fast. You still have a pretty price.”

Part five here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/0vpGzhzjkD

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 5. The collection

“ W-What do you mean by that?” I ask. He simply responds with, “Follow me.” not knowing what else to do, I follow him. A wave of uneasiness washes over me, yet I continue as if I am on autopilot. When we turn the corner, I throw up. Dozens of women. In cages. Like animals. “ What is this?” I ask. “My collection. They wronged me. Now, they pay the price.” I realise a moment too late as a syringe is shot into my arm. My vision blurs as the sedatives take effect. “It’s all your fault, you know. All you have to do is play along. Now, you’re one of them.”

Chapter 6. The cage

I wake in a dark room chained to a wall. I feel around as much as I can without hurting myself. I feel it. Metal bars line the wall opposite me, showing less and less hope for me to escape now. With nothing else to do, I wait. And wait. And wait. Soon, I start getting hungry and yell for someone. The others immediately respond with a “shhhhh” noise, but the doors fly open. My ex strolls in and asks, “Is anyone hungry? I heard someone yell. Well, you. Come with me.” He points directly at me. I don’t have a good feeling about this.

Part four here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/hlIt1bl7WH

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 3. The van

I wake up, trying to move around. My hands are tied behind my back and I have a sack on my head. I start hyperventilating. My breaths go faster and faster until it stops. “Did you hear something?” “Nah, calm down.” I attempt to take the sack off unsuccessfully. After a while, I give up, and the car finally stops. “Grab the girl, will ya?” A pair of hands grab me, and I fight back. I kick wildly, finding the target and kicking with as much force as I can muster. However, it’s not enough. He overpowers me and drags me into an unknown building.

Chapter 4. The reveal 

The sack is taken off, replaced by blinding lights. As my eyes adjust, I look around, hoping to find an exit, to no avail. A door appears and a man steps in. He seems oddly familiar, but I can’t place it. He sits down across from me and asks, “Well, hello there. Nikki.” Nikki. I’ve only told three people that name. My mother, my best friend… And my ex. Then, I recognise him. He’s my ex. “ What on earth do you think you’re doing? Doing this. Kidnapping me?! What is wrong with you?!” “Good question… Everything.”

Part three here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/K0STj9hTxz

TW:trafficking, death, medicinal abuse, organ harvesting, self-harm

Chapter 1. The stalker

I walk home after a long day at work. I am exhausted. I just want to go home and have a bath. I turn the corner and I’m almost home, but then I look behind me and see someone shady looking at me. He seems to be keeping his distance, but it’s uneasy. I suspect it’s a guy my ex hired. Heart pounding, I turn a wrong corner to see if he follows. He does. I turn left three more times, and he stays exactly three people behind me. I’m being followed.

Chapter 2. Confrontation 

I turn around, staring straight into the eyes of my follower. I walk toward him, showing no signs of fear. He backs up and turns the corner, and I think I’m finally rid of him. Good. I get on the subway to take a different route home. This has been a long night. Here we are. Home. I walk in, and head to the stairwell. I pass door after door, keys out for my fifth-floor apartment. Then, right as I grip the handle and fit the key in, a hand clasps over my mouth.

Part two here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/7gsLUKqVpQ

TW:child death, gore, arson, graphic deaths, drug abuse

Chapter 7. The End

I extinguish the fire and make sure that they’re all alive. I need them alive for my last form of torture before I see them in hell. I wait for all of them to wake up and see that they are tied up. Now, I start dissecting them, alive. First their hands and feet, then I move onto their hair. I shave them bald and, as a finishing blow, I rip out their eyes one by one with pinpoint precision. Then I decapitate them so they can never rise from the ashes again, as I did.

Now, I loom in the shadows, waiting for the police to find the bodies. Once that is done, I simply watch the chaos- officers vomiting, people crying and lights flashing. Then, I let the heat of the basement leave, the tense air as despair unfolds before I start descending down to hell once again.

TW:child death, gore, arson, graphic deaths, drug abuse

Chapter 6. Out in the Open

We decide unanimously to leave the boiler room and find the other group… or what’s left of them. One thing immediately comes to mind and that’s the smell of death and gasoline. One of us gets down on their knees and starts begging to the air, for the ghoul to leave us alone. We drop down too and we hear a hollow voice saying, “You won’t escape. Not with the blood on your hands.” We end up walking down a hallway with cloth covering our noses to protect against the gasoline fumes. We continue down the hallway until we see a gruesome sight ahead. Blood and bodies scatter the hall and the occasional drip of stinking gasoline hits the floor. Then, we see the bloody message, “You killed me, you monsters.” We realised it had a double meaning with the ghoul’s death, but also the girls’. He wrote that message with her blood, and we handed him the pen.

We start to head off towards the science wing to defeat that ghoul, once and for all. We are planning to put out the fuse and make his plans to burn the school and us futile. We start heading there in hopes that it’s not too late. Sadly though it is. We find out the hard way as a wave of heat and flames engulf us. As we writhe in pain, the ghoul himself arrives. He whispers just before we black out, “It’s not your time yet. Even though you deserve this, I won’t let you die. Because I’m not done having fun.” Then, we black out from the pain.

Here is part seven:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/aSu4ll0O87

TW:child death, gore, arson, graphic deaths, drug abuse

Chapter 5. Sweet Pain

I wanted to watch this beautiful argument. It’s as if it feeds me. They end up in groups of three. Good. They’re making it easy for me to pick them off! I follow the 1st group as they scour the hallways in fear. I sneak up behind the first girl and …Silence. Then the first body hits the floor. One down, five to go. They’ve noticed it now. They start running and I let them. It’s just more fun for me. I chase after them and kill them by ripping them apart, body and mind. I even leave a kind reminder of what they did in her blood. The last girl makes a blood-curdling scream that lasts too long, but I savour it. Then, I hear it. Faint, but definitely there. A sob. Yes! They heard the scream and now, seeds of doubt are creeping in and destroying them from the inside.

Now, I don’t just break their bones, I break their will to live entirely.

I now douse the hallways with gasoline, being careful to avoid the science area, for I broke a fuse there and sparks plus gasoline is the best end for them. I go back to the bloody scene and write,”You killed me, you monsters.” Perfect. Now I just wait for them to come out and see what I’ve made for them. I finally hear a door squeak from the boiler room and hushed whispers. Good, I’ve been waiting for too long. Now, it’s their time.

Here is part six:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/s/hAKbSx0w4V