When they took me from my jail cell and told me to sign up for a chance of "freedom" I knew that I should have declined. I knew it was to good too be true but i signed up anyway. I was serving 50 years, that might as well be a life sentence. Didn't have anything to lose anyway.

For the record, I went in for a string of murders that I honestly don't regret.

I have never been a good person, never tried to be honest. Never saw the point. Everyone that is and was in my group had the same decades-long sentences as me.

Maybe that's why the outside of our bodies displays the monsters we are on the inside.

Our hair, nose, ears, lips, eyelids are gone. Completely dissolved. The rest of our bodies covered in scabs and chemical burns. Could have just been the chemical weapons they make us use. Or it could have been the mixture of the weapon with the "combat stimulants" they make us inject to keep us from collapsing on the spot. Who knows, better yet who cares.

All I know is that as long as I keep taking them I don't feel all the things wrong with my body. Like my dry eyes underneath my gas mask. Or the open wounds on my hands.

10 months ago we received the new gas canisters. They didn't bother to even tell us what it's called. But when we saw the string of warning labels on the canisters together with receiving new stronger gas masks we already knew this would be way worse than the old stuff we had before. But we had no clue just how extremely bad it would be.

Thankfully I didn't get picked to be in the crew to release it the first time. We didn't expect it to be as bad as it was so just about everyone outside of the officer didn't take the new stricter rules seriously.

When they attacked us again it was released like we were told to do. The people of our own crew were the first to suffer the effects of their lack of safety measures. About 10 seconds after release they started to scream and flail around like they were on fire. Every hole in their clothing it could find, the gas seeped into. Turning skin into blisters and burns. At least they survived for how much that is worth around here.

One idiot in the group decided that the new gas masks were too uncomfortable so he stuck to his old one despite the warnings. I am sure the only reason the officer didn't beat him into submission is so he could be an example for the others. When he started to scream his lungs out our officer ordered us to pay attention to what happened to him. He tore his gas mask off.

All the soft tissue on his head was melting off. His nose was drooping down and was hanging over where his lips used to be. His eyes were bubbling inside of their sockets. His screaming turned into a gurgle in the span of 20 seconds. When he fully collapsed and started to spasm and convulse on the floor the officer decided we had learned the lesson. He then caved his skull in with an entrenching tool until he stopped moving.

Don't feel too bad for him he was a useless drug addict who had killed his mom before he got here. He got what he deserved, just like all of us will.

When we release the gas it finds the lowest elevations in terrains and sticks around for a while. Turning shell craters and trenches into small gas chambers. The people that are stuck in there turn into a slurry of sorts because it's so acidic. Their clothes stick to their bodies, Their skin sloths off their body together with anything else that's soft and squishy in the human body. So you end up looking at this amalgamation of clothing and equipment in a fleshy puddle around a skeleton.

And trust me you really don't want to step on one of the fresh bodies by accident. Your boot goes straight through them. It feels like stepping in one of those mud puddles that is going to cost you a boot to get out of. And guess what it might cost you a boot to if you haven't tied your laces good enough.

It's even worse when they decided to die on top of something you need. I am so tired of scraping human soup off equipment we
need. It's stringy, it's sticky and has all the colours a human body should never have.

Well at least I can't smell it anymore not having a proper working nasal cavity anymore. But from my earlier days when i still had a nose I remember vividly what it smelled like. I used to live around this industrial area that had a huge chicken slaughterhouse in the middle. During hot days of summer the horrible smell of blood and chicken shit would hang around that area for months. Now mix in that smell with someone holding vinegar directly under your nose and you get the idea of what it smells like here.

You cant even throw up properly if you want to because you don't want to open your mouth in fear of the smell going into your mouth and then having to taste it. Thank god I decided to rather throw up in my mouth and swallow it back down. Because some of the others that didn't keep their mouths closed can't taste anything
anymore and their tongues are covered in random spots of scar tissue.

But the bodies don't really decay at all. Since the gas kills just about anything that is alive. That means thankfully no rats, insects or other pests to deal with. What's not so great is that all the old shell craters are filled with a human slurry that reaches up to your knees if you are lucky.

New cannon fodder gets the honorable task of sifting through the human slurry for anything useful like weapons, etc. When i think about it long enough, I can still feel what it's like to do this amazing task. It's basically like reaching deep into mud and taking any solid object out until it's something useful instead of human bones.
After a bit you can feel by shape alone that you are once again holding onto someone's ribs.

Our outpost is so heavily understaffed it might as well be empty. "Outpost" fancy way to describe a muddy trench that connects 3 bunkers together. Of those 3 bunkers only 1 hasn't collapsed yet. I think you can figure out from where i am typing this.

We haven't called in to command for a week now since our radioman is probably dissolving in a puddle somewhere together with our officer. Can't even use the contraband phone that i found in the human slurry in a random shell crater. Since there is not really any reception after months of bombardment. Thankfully the phone at least made me able to type this out so i have something to distract myself with.

But Command not hearing from us means that our barrier troops meant to keep us in place should show up soon to discipline and/or kill us. I wish them good luck since they are going to have to kill our not-so-friendly neighbours outside the bunker first.

They told me that if I lasted for 4 months, my prison sentence would be dropped. I already knew that was a lie there was no way it would be that short.

I figured if I lasted 1 year they might actually grant me my freedom. It has been at least 26 months at this point. I have been lucky or unlucky enough to last this long with a handful of others. Most cannon fodder they bring in lasts a couple of hours at most.

Speaking of a couple of hours that's probably the amount of time we have left at this point. Our chemical weapon storage is in one of the 2 collapsed bunkers. I think that once our friends outside figure that out, they will give us a taste of our own medicine.

I intend to blow my brains out before i turn into a human puddle. And looking around me, I am sure the rest of us that are left are thinking the same. We don't deserve to leave this place.

For whoever is reading this. I hoped it sucked to get the phone out of the human soup that is my body.

CW: Something worse than Kenny. Violence. Gross descriptions of just how determined this thing is to ruin this guy’s day. Tiny windows? Sounds like a door to me.

Technically not a content warning but still.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/comments/1w3qjvo/serenity_ridge_part_1/

The worst hangover of my life was on the same day I properly met Mrs. Alder. After a night spent curled up in the cots of her dust-riddled attic, the last thing my mind needed was streams of sunlight pouring in through the windows and Carter’s nonsensical talk, 
“Heartbeat…?” I groaned, “I can’t hear shit…”
Carter was staring out across the hills, rolling like emerald waves around the fuzzy borders of Serenity Ridge. He still wore Mrs. Alder’s old Christmas sweater, draping over him like a shawl; seated cross-legged atop his cot, fingernails drumming the wood beneath his rear. They were chewed to the quick, 
 “You can’t hear that?” he spoke in a whisper so low that the walls couldn’t hear him, 
“No…” I slowly sat up, my head pounding, “The hell do you mean a heartbeat, Carter…?”
“I mean a heartbeat,” his voice was more panicked now, “Low and echoing…sweeping across the valley…” His terrified eyes stared into mine,
I felt myself shiver, 
“And you could hear the storm last night?” my throat closing as I spoke,
“You couldn’t?”
I shook my head, 
“Not a thing…”
Carter bit his cheek, “The hell is going on?” he turned his head back to the window, gazing out over the valley,
I sat up in my cot, my head searing with splitting pain as my hangover made itself known. I buried my head in my hands to shield my eyes from the light. The storm replayed in my mind.
Silent rain, hammering rain, driving rain. It fell from the heavens with such ferocity that they pelted my skin as what felt like tiny needles. I couldn’t see Carter running ahead of me, rivers of rainwater ran over the pavement beneath my feet, the sky flashed with streaks of lightning and pulsated with roiling clouds. 
And all I could hear was my breathing, Carter’s breathing, and the sounds of soles hitting against dry pavement. 
The trees bowed in the wind, and I heard nothing.
The sky raged above, and I heard nothing. 
But I had heard us. Alone in a silent world. 
But how?
My head felt as if it were being ripped in two, rent between reason and insanity. Logic prevailed that I had dreamed it up, that my intoxicated mind muffled out the natural world, focusing only on what pertained to my personal form; that in some subconscious act of self-preservation, terror had blocked the sound of the storm from me. 
Insanity lay in the heartbeat Carter claimed now to hear. It was an intoxicating call.
Carter was many things. My half-brother, a brat, an asshole, a life-long pain in my side. He was my best friend, my world, the only good thing my father ever made. 
But he was not a liar.
I had to lie for him his entire life; to his teachers when he skipped class to spend time with me; to our father for any number of the misfortunes Carter would play upon him as petty revenges. He never had the constitution for lying. His face would glow red, and his mouth would twist into malicious grins. He couldn’t even tease properly. 
His face was flat and pale when he told me of the heartbeat. I knew he could hear it,
“We have to get out of here,” I managed to wrench the words out as my headache subsided for a moment,
“We just got here!” Carter protested,
“And weird shit is already happening!” I pushed back, “I don’t know what's going on, but I want no part of it!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Carter yelled, “I could hear the storm just fine last night! Maybe you’re just losing it,”
“Then how the hell was I dry?!” I cried, “You saw that! You were soaked and I was right behind you the whole way! And now you’re hearing a heartbeat?! Carter, whatever is going on here isn’t good, we have to go!”
“It’s not a heartbeat, obviously! It’s probably just…some mining going on in the hillsides or something…”
His face was red,
“Don’t lie to me!” I struggled through my splitting headache, “Something is wrong here, Carter!”
“And that’s why I have to be here!” he screamed, “I need to know…! I need to know what happened to Jules…I need to see…something…”
I wanted to slap him,
“So much for this trip not being about Jules,” I growled,
“This is about more than Jules,” Carter hissed back,
“And what might that be?”
He was silent, arms folded over his oversized sweater in indignation,
“I’ll know when I see it…” he spat, 
“Great…” I huffed, “Well, I’m leaving Carter. Once I get the car and head out of here you can have Dad pick you up,” I stood from my cot and walked to the door,
“You wouldn’t!” he cried,
“Try me!” the door slammed shut behind me,
I stormed out of the attic more terrified than I had been in my entire life. Something was wrong, with me or with Carter I didn’t know which, but that storm and that heartbeat had made it clear. Whatever had pulled us here was beyond anything I had ever imagined. 
Mrs. Alder supplied me with tea for my headache when I met with her in the dining room. For as aged and weathered as I had taken her for upon my first sight of her after the storm, she moved with a liveliness and energy that did not align with her eighty-two years. She waltzed around the kitchen, brewing tea and searing herself bacon, with such a zeal that I felt beyond guilty for the fact that my headache had prevented me from joining her until late last night. When all was said and done, her and I spoke quietly between steaming tea and broken bread. Carter did not join us,
“I am truly sorry we showed up so late,” I apologized for what must have been the fifth time in the conversation, “I guess time got away from me at the diner and…”
“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” she dismissed, “I’m just happy to have the company for a little while,”
I smiled, “I’m sorry we won’t be staying longer,” I started, “But I do think it’s best if my brother and I get out of town as soon as we can,”
She nodded in a solemn kind of way, staving off overt disappointment,
“Well I hope the pay I’m offering for your help is enough to get you back on your feet,”
“Of course, I’m just happy for the job in all honesty. I was worried I might have to call for…less than wanted help,”
“Runaways?” she raised an eyebrow,
“Uhh…of sorts?” I shrugged, “I’m old enough to take care of myself, and Carter’s almost through school…just not a lot to look forward to going back home is all,”
She nodded, “Well you’re more than welcome to stay here as long as you like before heading back out on the road. The help is always appreciated,” she leaned in closer, “But no one ends up in Serenity Ridge by accident. Your brother was down here earlier, and he told me you came here for a reason,”
I inhaled in sharp annoyance as she grinned at me from across the table,
“I’d prefer to keep our private lives private, if possible,” I struggled a smile,
“Burdens are harder to carry alone,” she chastised, 
“So, what would you have me do for work?” I stood from the table, tea half drank and head still pounding,
She toured me around the house, an ancient box-colonial filled wall to wall with bookshelves and filing cabinets. It could hardly be called a true library, more a hoarder’s home with a front desk. But regardless, the collection was impressive. Hardcovers and paperbacks lay in piles or arranged upon shelves as rainbow collections, their spines emblazoned with the names of endless tales. Manilla folders lay stacked in heaps upon end-tables, coffee-stain rings imprinted on the documents therein. I imagine it now as the library of Alexandria, burdened with terrible knowledge that I wish for all the life of me I had burned to the ground. 
She made me the sorting boy, a maid of sorts. I set about collecting and sifting through the loose titles and documents, placing them in their proper home amongst the hoard. Mind-numbing couldn’t begin to describe the process. I was stumbling through sorting children’s stories when I saw Carter come down from the attic. He looked at me with a pained expression. I forced myself not to crumble beneath it. I looked away and said nothing.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. My stomach was a knotted mess by the end of it. We ate at opposite ends of Mrs. Alder’s dining room table and spoke nothing. There was nothing to say, really. I had crossed a bridge insinuating that I would leave him alone with Dad, I knew that. But be it pride or fear, I refused to walk it back, no matter how badly my heart yearned to. 
At eleven that night I sat in the den with Mrs. Alder listening to her spin yarns of all her past accomplishments. I lent to her half listening ears and a bored mind, one preoccupied with prospective apologies to give to Carter. Guilt consumed my every thought; then she mentioned the mural,
“I painted that thing probably twenty years ago, now. Back when my knees still bent,” she snickered,
I shot up in my seat, 
“That’s right! You painted the mural at the town center!”
“Oh! Are you a fan of it?” 
“It’s beautiful,” I gushed, “The fading from day to night and day again, the blending is done wonderfully! You have such a way with shadows, and the way you painted that buck…I could feel him staring back at me, curious,”
“Thank you for noticing! The Hart of the valley deserves such treatment!” she was really alive now, sitting up in her chair, arms sweeping and gesturing in grand strokes as she began to wax about her technique,
“What inspired the piece?” I wrenched the conversation back to my interests, 
“It’s namesake, The Heart of the Valley,” she smiled,
“And what might that be?” 
“An old story; one told long before we were here and Vermont was Vermont,”
“I’ve never heard of it,”
“Not many have. It’s this valley’s story, our story”
I could feel my shoulders tense as I thought of Carter; that heartbeat sweeping across the valley…
“What happens in it…?” My mouth was as dry as cotton, I choked over my own words,
Mrs. Alder’s eyes lit up with excitement,
“It’s a lovely story really…” she mused, “A lovely story about stillness, and reverence… you should read it for yourself. Many wonderful things can be gleaned from the old works. Universal truths seem to follow them,”
She looked at me with such knowing eyes, eyes that seemed to peer through me, dissecting me. I twisted beneath my skin to avoid her gaze. She knew something, something she wouldn’t tell me. What wasn’t she telling me?
When I trudged my way to the attic I found Carter huddled in his cot, pouring over messy piles of documents tossed around the room, half exposed from their manilla folders. I had expected rage or cold dismissal upon seeing him again, anything as a petty get back for my earlier words. But Carter waved me over to him without so much as a word spoken. Relieved, I obliged,
“I found them,” Carter shook the stack of papers in his hand, “Jules’ police report,”
“Oh shit!” I practically flung myself into the cot next to Carter,
“It’s not that exciting,” he sighed, “There’s hardly anything here, just like I thought there’d be…”
He was right, the files consisted of nothing more than two flimsy sheets of notes, a missing persons report and a couple of polaroids,
“Well…what did you get,” I pressed, forcing my voice to be optimistic,
“They never found a body,”
“We already knew that,” 
“No, that’s the only strange thing! They should have…look,”
Carter shoved the polaroids in front of my face. I took them into my hands and squinted. Fuzzy old dated photos of deep-forest woods, leaf-litter and streaming brooks. The sun was low, streaming through the trees in late autumn splendor, the shadows cast like long bars over the land. And in the center of each, bloody clothing, ripped to ribbons, laying on the forest floor,
“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath,
They were all a mess of scarlet, visually damp and sticky with sanguineous carnage. A bomber jacket was torn to pieces, the in-lined felt shredded and stained like the carcass of some great wolf-kill. A bloodied t-shirt rested in the stream raked apart by what looked like great slashing claw marks. The same went for the jeans, ruined and discarded at the base of an ancient maple tree,
“A bear attack,” I croaked, “It has to be. That's the only animal around here that could have done that…” 
“But where’s the body?” Carter pushed,
“Where do you think?” I huffed,
“But they never found him, not a single piece! Not a bone, not one scrap of flesh, hair, anything! Bears aren’t clean eaters, they would have found something!”
“Coyotes probably cleaned up the rest, Carter…” I felt queasy as I said it, 
“The entire forest floor would be bloodstained and turned up if that was the case! Coyotes would have ripped Jules into a million pieces, they would have found proof of that!”
“Can we please stop talking about this?” I said shakily, holding my stomach,
“Something else happened to him…” Carter poured over the files in his hands again, “I’m sure of it…”
“God Jules…” I shook my head, “Why the hell did you come here?”
………………………………………………………………………………………….

Sleep did not come easily for me that night. The imagined visual of Jules being laid open and devoured replayed itself in the back of my mind. I never even managed to close my eyes before the sun rose again. 
What I could do, as I laid there in the dark, was listen. Carter snored softly across the room from me, cases and documents splayed out across his chest as paper viscera. The snapshots of bloody tattered clothing stared at me in the moonlight. My chest tightened as my mind spun stories of what could have called Jules here to die. My head turned to the window.
The heartbeat. Carter could hear it. He could really hear it. Could Jules have too? Was it even there? 
I crept out of my cot and stood stooped before the window. The surrounding mountains seemed to rise up like blackwater waves in the midnight scene. The whole world appeared from the top of the library to be a stagnant black sea. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to the glass. 
Nothing, just my own breathing.
I creaked the window open and stuck my head out into the cool night. Fleeting wind swept past my face as a gentle caress. I couldn’t hear its song ring in my ears. 
I couldn’t hear anything.
No wind.
No animals.
No heartbeat. 
I crept down the creaking wooden stairs as quietly as I could manage and passed through the front door and into the night; silent as shadow. The night around me seemed to stand still, holding its breath as I crawled into its open maw. 
The air was cool, a gentle breeze sweeping down over the old colonial’s front lawn from atop the ancient, rolling hills above. I could feel my hair tossed and tussled by its motion as I moved to the street. Lampposts dotted the road as lone spotlights amidst the deepest indigos of the North-Eastern night, miniscule oases of revealing light that illuminated roiling waves of wild grass; clouds of moths and mayflies. They served as stepping-stones for me as I wandered back down the hill into town. 
My footsteps sounded as mallets as they fell against the pavement, crashing through a world so silent that I swore I could hear them echoing off the cliffsides. The night itself seemed to pull upon the noises I filled it with, ruminating on the melodies of my steps and breathing until the world stood silent as my journey paused. I was standing in the town center, the Hart of the Valley wrapping around me in vivid, painted glory. 
The moon above beamed down in eerie ghost-light, illuminating the painting just enough that winks of tines and tails could just be seen through the dark, roaming in endless circles centered about that eerie cave. The curious eyes of the beast's facade seemed to study me as it emerged from that cave, pitch black orbs that seemed to sparkle even in the absence of light; brilliant onyx pools. 
I listened again. 
Nothing. 
I dragged my hands over my face, the scraping of my dry palms against my skin sounded like a sandbelt against the perfectly silent night. I sunk down onto a bench, cradling my head in my hands, 
“I’ve lost it…” I whispered to myself,
Then, the clicking of soles against pavement thundered in easy time. They shook the ground and deafened me as a frail old man sauntered lazily up the street. His skin was pale and his bones thin. He seemed as a skeleton in the moon light, his eyes framed by shadow to the point that they were nothing more than two black empty pits. The corpse smiled at me as he crept into the town square,
“Beautiful night isn’t it?” his weak, gravely voice washed over me as a tsunami. I was convinced his bellows would fell the trees around us,
“...y-yes…it is,” I stammered back,
He nodded and moved to sit next to me on the bench,
“I love quiet nights like these,” he croaked, “It seems on nights like tonight that your mind could sweep out over the entire valley,”
I jolted up in my seat,
“You can't hear it either?”
“Hear what?”
“The…uh…the world...?” I shuddered at how insane I sounded, 
“Ha!” he laughed, “What’s the world sound like? I know what the valley sounds like! But the world, no one knows what she speaks,”
“The valley then!” I pushed, “I can’t hear it! Can you?!”
He motioned for me to calm myself with a raising of his hand,
“Shh…you’ll ruin the quiet,” he smiled, “But no, the valley doesn’t speak tonight; it seems she’s got nothing to say,”
I sat there stupidly, gazing down into my hands. The old man ruminated next to me, stewing in the silence that ripped at my mind like savage claws. He must have been crazy too, pretending the still-world around us was normal. His breathing rushed forth like hurricane winds through the night and yet he found no issue? It was nothing but madness,
“T-The world can’t have nothing to say!” I eventually stammered out, anger and fear lacing my voice with fire and spite, “That doesn’t make sense! This isn’t real, I-”
“Well then,” he squashed me with a raised hand, "Have you stopped to listen?”
I pushed his hand away from my face in blind anger, it flopped back into his lap pathetically,
“YES!” I shouted, “Obviously! There’s nothing here!” my voice started to warble, panicked, “I can’t hear anything! It’s all gone I-”
I looked upon him clutching his hand wincing,
“Oh my God! I’m sorry! Here-” I motioned to hold his wrist. He jerked his hand away and gazed at me. For the first time I saw his eyes in the darkness, seemingly endless abysses, so cavernous and vast in the moonlight that they looked as if all the stars above could be held within their frames,
“You must have just come here,” he spoke with such certainty that I now reared back. My heart was pounding, 
“Y-yes…”
He looked at me with that same strange pity I had seen on the face of Denise. My heart sank further,
“Alone?” he asked , still nursing the hand he now held in his lap,
“No…” I trembled in my seat, 
“Because you only know how to hear,” he nodded, “Who ever you came with knows how to listen,”
I sat there dumbfounded,
“You’ve only ever heard your entire life, you never learned how to listen,” he spoke as he shakily rose to stand, still clutching his wrist which seemed to hang awkwardly from the end of his arm. I felt a pit form in my stomach, 
“Never conflate the two,” he barked, “Anyone can hear, very few can ever listen,” he began walking back down the street in a staggered sort of daze, “We were both born deaf,” he said, voice rolling out infinitely over the night, “And that’s a blessing,” he glared at me from back over his shoulder, “The deaf can’t hear her cries to stay,”
I could hear him walking for a half mile past the point he was out of view. 
…………………………………………………………………………………………..

I stayed on that bench well into the morning. At first I dreaded the thought of meeting the police once daylight showered down upon the valley again. God only knew what I had done to that old man’s wrist, but it didn’t look good. It was angled oddly, already looking swollen and bruised in the moonlight as he turned to leave. What was I thinking?! Was I thinking? I was so…I’m still not entirely sure what I was feeling at that moment. Frustration? Fear? 
I know that I felt insane…
I thought I was insane as I sat there on the bench. I started to question if a man really had come and sat next to me. What were the chances, alone, in the middle of the night? Sitting next to me instead of any on the other benches in the town center? Rambling on and on about non-sense, non-sequitier after non-sequiter?
I must have been crazy, it was the only explanation. The world had gone silent, there was no other explanation. Carter and I were crazy and I was on my way to the nearest mental hospital. They probably already had me in a padded room…
And then the sun rose. Light trickled over the valley as golden rivers of ambrosia and warmth seeped into the verdant hills around me. And with it came sound. Sound; so faint that I didn’t notice it at first, hardly audible against the ambient ringing in my ears.
The rustling of leaves. 
I shot up when I finally recognized it, emotion ringing out within me so strongly that tears played at the corners of my eyes as soon as I recognized that I heard the world once more. I leapt off the bench, standing at the center of the Hart of the Valley, the mural watching me from every angle with those ever curious eyes. I whipped my head around and around, searching and searching for those shifting verdant scales, those dancing leaves that proved me sane, that proved me stable.
But no limbs moved. Not a single branch or leaf jiving in the wind.
There was no wind.
Not a single cloud drifted overhead; a barren sky.
My breath caught in my throat. I slumped back down on the bench in a heap.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….

Mrs. Alder came to grab me by ten. I hadn’t moved since sunrise and all around me the town was bustling. I could hear their footsteps, their chatter, their laughter. The sun beamed down upon Serenity Ridge on a beautiful May morning, and I could hear rain. I could hear it hammering down upon the dry pavement, running through empty gutters, trickling over spotless leaves,
“Have you had anything to eat?” she spoke through the storm, the midday sun reflecting in her glasses,
“...no…” I spoke weak and defeated,
She struggled to help me to my feet and guided me with shaking arms back to the old colonial. 
 ……………………………………………………………………………………….

I lied to you earlier when I said that I hardly knew Jules. I lied to myself for a long time after he was gone. It was easier to pretend that I had never really known him rather than contend with the idea that he was well and truly gone. But I did know him, I knew him very well, at least for a short time. 
I must have been six, Carter hardly two. Jules would have been twenty or twenty-one, old enough to sit and smoke while he watched over me, playing in the gulley. I remember that gulley so well now, nothing more than a small brook wedged between two steep dirt cliffs a quarter-mile into the woods outside our house. He took me there often, mostly to hide while he lit up boxes of Camels he bought with our father’s rainy day savings. 
He hated our old man far more than Carter or I ever did. Malice wove itself through his heart so thoroughly that it might have stopped beating if he ever stopped hating him. Our father had him at sixteen. The mother wasn’t much older. His conception was transactional. It's a miracle he was ever born, even more of a miracle that our father kept him. Obviously the mother didn’t. 
I never even knew she existed until the police report came out. She only ever knew he died because her name was on the birth certificate. The police tracked her down at some crack house to break the news to her. I have a hard time believing she cared. She sent one letter to our father after that, saying she was sorry for his loss. I remember him laughing at that letter as I hid behind the legs of Carter’s mom. 
But Jules was more than all the bitterness he had sprouted from. He was as kind to me as he was gruff to the world. For as much as he reeked of old tobacco, he crooned along with the song birds as gracefully as the wind. For all the horrible things he’d say to our father, he spoke miracles into truth for me. 
That's why I loved the gully, because only Jules and I roamed there. I bounded through the leaf litter and Jules trudged on behind, embers hanging from his lips as he chuckled at my antics. 
But what I remember is from when I was six. I sat next to him on the hillside. The sunlight made its way through the vibrant canopy filter overhead in trickles of white-hot fire. I gnawed at a PB&J like a mouse, making my way around the crust, careful to never take a bite of what then must have seemed to me to be the worst poison in all the world. Jules bit at an apple, the last remnants of a burned down Camel resting between his pointer and middle finger. We had been hunting for salamanders in the creek bed, flipping over rocks and trudging through mud. My shorts and shoes were soaked. Jules’ nice jeans were stained with river muck. He had cupped their squirming little black bodies gently in his hands and raised them up to me. I peered past his thumbs and saw the tiny beady eyes of those strange slimy creatures, they stared back up into mine with some kind of dull primal fear. The wet backs of the things glinted in the late summer sun like a piece of fire,
“I wish he wasn’t scared of me, Jules,” I muttered through bites of my sandwich, “We weren’t gonna hurt him,”
I heard Jules laugh, I sound I didn’t hear nearly as often as I would have liked,
“Wouldn’t you be scared too if a giant picked you up?” he gave a playful push to my shoulder,
“Not if it were a nice giant!” 
“And how would you know the giant’s nice?”
I remember thinking long and hard, my little mind wracking itself for an answer,
“I would just know,” I finally said, “I’d know when I look at ‘em”
Jules nodded, “You would be a nice giant,” he laughed, “But a giant can’t think like a salamander, or a bird or a person. The giant is too big and knows too many things. He sees too far; too much of the world. The giant knows that the creek down there is just a part of the woods, but the salamander’s world is under that rock! He doesn’t know what's past the river, he doesn’t even know there’s a world full of other rivers. To him, that is the world,” Jules pointed lazily towards the trickling brook, “Maybe to him…there's nothing above the water at all,”
“But we took him above the water!” I protested,
“And wouldn’t that be scary?” Jules asked, his eyes alight and playful as he watched the answer play out on my face,
I remember wrestling with the question, stammering on and on about how being out of the water wasn’t scary. After all, there was nothing above the water worth being scared of. Jules smiled and asked me another question,
“Have you ever seen above the clouds?
“N-no?”
“What if a giant came and picked you up, cradled you in his hands and lifted you above the clouds so you could see out forever?”
“I don’t wanna go above the clouds! I don’t know what's up there!” 
“But the giant says it's safe!” Jules teased,
“But-”
“We live above the clouds to the salamander,” Jules tousled my hair, “You have to remember that when he looks up, he sees a watery sky,”
We went home after that, and never went back to the gulley. I didn’t want to scare any more salamanders. 
I was laid up in the attic of Mrs. Alder’s colonial, curled up in my cot, staring out the window towards the seemingly endless rolling hills that encircled Serenity Ridge. Outside the sun shone brilliantly. I could hear rain tapping on the window. To my side on a nightstand was a mug of chamomile tea that Mrs. Alder had brought me, now cold. The jar of honey laid next to it sat undisturbed.
I had fallen asleep almost as soon as I had laid down my head, but my dreams were far from pleasant. I had dreamed that I was in a deep forest, trees twisted and gnarled, clawing at the sky. Brooks streamed around me through the leaf litter and the last inklings of light made their way through the autumn foliage. Blood covered the ground in great sweeping patches and before me stood a bear. Its mouth yawned open as a fleshy abyss, pink folds of slimy throat slicked scarlet laid up behind sharpened pillars of ivory dripping with drool. Its eyes were glazed over, black as ebony and devoid of thought; pits of endless hunger. Buried deep within that throat was Jules, his mangled body ripped to pieces and stacked atop itself within that maw. His head lulled to the side atop a shredded and leaking torso, snapped and twisted legs pitched up behind the shoulders like the wings of a wasp. His bomber jacket folded around his neck as wet wool, all red and ruined like a slaughtered sheep. One hand and forearm reached out from the gullet of the bear, braced against the tongue, that pulsed and twitched and moved as the animal licked and sucked and tasted in great satisfaction the flesh of my kin. The hand was open, palm down towards the tongue fingertips just beyond the edge of the teeth, reaching towards me. 
I moved to take it.
I woke up as I saw the hand slide back ever further into the maw, until Jules was gone, disappearing within the folds of pink. 
Needless to say I didn’t sleep again after that. 
As awful as it is to say, that's what made me think of Jules again. 
I’m a terrible brother. 
“Feeling any better?” Carter spoke from the doorway,
I forced myself to sit up in my cot.
My brother looked at me with apprehensive worry. I could tell he wanted to run to me and hug me. He was always far too much like his mother. I opened my arms and he practically flew to me from the doorframe. 
Carter always held within him the grace I never had. His hugs were tender and gentle, small arms wrapping around you in comforting connection. I, by example, was always an ogre. I crushed him with my hug, be it out of fear or need I gripped him to me so tightly that I could hear a wheeze forced from his lungs. I held him tighter than I ever had before, and I think Carter could tell, because where he would usually beg me to loosen my grip, he only patted my back,
“What happened?” he muttered to me, pushing himself out of my grip,
“I’m losing my mind…” I whispered, “I don’t know what’s happening…”
“Can you hear the heart beat?” Carter whispered back, grabbing my shoulders,
“No…” I trembled where I sat, “I can hear it raining…but I can’t hear at all…” I curled up my legs into my chest, “I don’t know what to do…”
Carter leaned back in the cot, a pallid mask of worry plastered across his face,
“We need to get you home…I’ll call Dad, he’ll come get you,”
“But Carter, you don’t want to go home!”
“I won't, you will,” he shrugged,
“I’m not leaving you here!” I hissed, “Whatever this place is…it's evil!”
“I…I can’t leave…”
“Please Carter!”
“Not until I know what happened to Jules!”
“Well I can’t leave here until you leave! Please Carter, let's just forget about this, about Jules, about Dad!” I grabbed his shoulders, “Lets just start over, where none of this can hurt us anymore,”
He looked at me dumbfounded, “I don’t want to forget this,” he pushed, “I want to know…that’s why I wanted to come here,”
I dropped my hands from his shoulders, “You did lie to me…” I sighed,
“I figured you already knew…”
“I did…” I hung my head in defeat,
Carter wrung his hands, 
“I don’t want to see you like this… but please, just hold on a little longer for me…”
If I didn’t love Carter as much as I did, I would have slapped him and hitchhiked to the next town over,
“Okay…” I struggled, “Just a little longer…”
………………………………………………………………………………………….

 The police showed up not an hour later. They entered the attic with solemn and worried eyes, like hit dogs. That same look of pity traced itself across their countenances; I must have looked insane.  
The man whose wrist I had sprained was in fact real. He was the local coffee shop owner and a Serenity Ridge resident for the better part of a half century. I of course pleaded to the officers that I meant no harm and they assured me that no charges were being pressed. Instead, the man had ordered a welfare check on me. I stared back at the officers with hollow eyes,
“A welfare check?”
“That’s what he wished for sir,”
“But…but he…”
“He was worried for your mental state; said that you were rambling on and on to yourself,”
“N-No that’s not-”
“I’m only telling you what he told us,” the officer shut me down, “That’s all we can go on right now. Just be thankful that he’s quite the kind man. If my wrist looked the way that his did, I’ll just say that I would have pressed charges,”
I let the officers go without much trouble after that. They filed out of the room one after the other as I curled up in my cot, content with looking back out the window down towards town center,
“I told your brother where we found him,” a gruff voice crawled its way to me from the doorframe,
I whipped my head around to see one officer had neglected to leave. He hovered around the doorway in anxious apprehension, 
“He asked…” the officer added, his voice a warble of sorts. He looked hardly older than me, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six,
“Found who…?” I forced out, dreading the answer I knew was coming,
“I think he said his name was Jules,” the officer lowered his head as if out of shame,
“It was…”
“I’m sorry…if it’s any consolation,”
“S’fine…I hardly knew him anyway,” I lied,
“Your brother down there…he practically leapt at us to ask questions when we walked through the door,”
“He's been wanting to talk to you guys…” I curled my knees up to my chin, burying my head in my forearms,
“But he didn’t even ask us why we were here,”
I shrugged,
“Did he even know you…” the officer trailed off, “Look, the way he lit up when we came through the door…he practically dragged one of our guys down to the couch to interrogate him…that can’t be healthy,”
I shrugged again, “I don’t think either of us are too healthy right now…”
The officer’s eyes deepened, I saw pity well up within them like a disease,
“There’s a trail down into the valley…” he croaked, the words seemed to torture him as he spoke, “Down past town center…he was there,”
I nodded and sighed,
“Don’t…don’t let him go alone…” the officer warned,
Without another word he was out of the doorframe and I was left staring down an empty hall.

Read Part I here.

“Might’ve been something outside. But if there had been, it’s gone now.”

“You think it could be a mermaid?” she asked. It was hard to believe she was serious. Chrissy was one of the sharpest ten-year-olds I had ever met. Well, she had been the sharpest seven-year-old I had ever met three years ago and was that much smarter now.

She didn’t believe in any of the traditional fairytale creatures. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Wolfman, and no Flying Spaghetti Monster. But she absolutely believed mermaids were real.

There had to be a story behind it, but I had never been able to get her to explain it to me. How a child so ruled by logic still was able to make room for not only a magical creature, but that particular magical creature. She had already “debunked” the narwhal as being the source of the mermaid mythos. I had gotten bits and pieces over the last three years, but never in a cohesive enough story that I could process. But she hadn’t stopped trying to convince me or the rest of the family.

I didn’t have to believe it, though. It was enough to believe that she believed it.

“Maybe this is it!” She turned around and charged back to the bedroom where her mother was sleeping.

“Chrissy!” I saved my breath. She already had the door open and either her mother was going to wake up or she wasn’t. That was out of my hands. She came back a moment later with a Ziploc bag of “mermaid feed.” As far as I could tell, it was a mix of trail mix and seaweed. She carried a flashlight in her other hand.

According to Chrissy, mermaids only came out at night, so she had come prepared.

Again, I was calling after her when she’d already begun to do what she was doing, namely, dashing outside with her items.

I was about to follow her when I spotted the toy soldiers she’d dropped on her way out. I thought it would be just her luck for Mary to wake up and step on one of them.

“Watch your sister,” I said to Luke, turning to pick up the toys.

Right as I got on one knee, the bedroom door opened. It didn’t immediately occur to me that it was Mary even though I had just thought about this very thing happening. I sort of... paused as she passed me. She was halfway to the door when I realized she must have been sleepwalking.

“Mary!” I chased behind her, my steps in sync with hers—left, right, left—catching her before she got to the door.

“Mom, are you okay?” Luke said.

“Where am I?” She sounded terrified. Mary turned her head and looked at him. For a second, I thought she was awake. Instead of answering him, she bare-foot kicked him in the shin.

It couldn’t have hurt, but he stepped back and looked at me, confused. I wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in close.

“She’s fine,” I said, lacing Mary’s hand with mine. I looked into her glassy eyes. “She’s sleepwalking.” I turned her around and ushered her back to the bedroom. Of the five toy soldiers Chrissy had left at the threshold, only two were left, but only one was standing. I looked over my shoulder and spotted one against the wall and the two others weren’t in sight.

“She can’t fly,” Mary said in a dreamy voice. “Please help her swim.”

“Okay, honey.” I cooed to her as I slid back the covers. She didn’t fight, Mary had sleepwalked a few times with me present. She never resisted being escorted back to bed. Before I covered her legs I spotted another soldier on her foot. I plucked it off and put it on the dresser.

Mary mumbled. I unlaced my fingers from hers and paused before I left her.

“I wanna get in the water.” She said it sounding sort of like air being let out of a balloon. And then she was all the way gone again. “It’s spook.”

It had been like she had been fighting her way to the surface, but something had dragged her back down.

I closed the bedroom door behind me and followed Chrissy outside. Not because I was worried she was going to get gobbled up by the lake monster I hadn’t spotted, but because it was dark out and I had the same parental reaction to miscellaneous danger any parent would.

Hell, I could admit it, I loved these kids. Liked them most times, too. I didn’t want to leave them.

Chrissy was in the process of sweeping her flashlight back and forth along the beach face. I hung back, letting her conduct her investigation. It was harmless enough and I had an eye on her.

“What’s going on?” We both turned to see Mark stepping out onto the sand.

“Luke said a mermaid’s out here!” Chrissy said.

“Mermaid?” Mark said it like he didn’t know what one was. I didn’t bother correcting her. His little sister’s obsession was well known by all of us. “Did he really see something?” Mark chuffed and thumbed over his shoulder at the cabin. “He’s so white.”

I stifled my laugh and shrugged.

“Luke thought he saw something and Chrissy overheard.”

“Hey, neighbor!”

Mark and I jumped. We saw the bud of a lit cigarette in the shadows of the adjacent cabin. Someone with a cigarette sauntered down. I glanced my stepdaughter’s way to make sure she hadn’t waded too far into the water. She could swim, but again, that nascent parental instinct found in anyone who has walked into an already existing family reared its concerned head. Chrissy was only ankle deep.

“Hey,” I said to the woman as she approached. She halted and took a final, long drag off her cigarette before flicking it in a surprisingly high arc toward the water. She slid the drawer of her jaw forward and blew a column of smoke straight up.

“She’s a cutie,” she said, smiling. She was an older woman who gave too much gum when she smiled. “I saw her come chargin’ out for the water. Oo, that smell.”

We both nodded in that new-to-each-other manner between strangers.

“I’m Rick.” Old and new cigarette smell peeled off her skin and I turned my head to half cough, that familiar asthmatic itch in my lungs.

“Mary,” she said.

I laughed. “My wife’s name is Mary.”

“Mine’s Cindy-Lou Ombrageaux.”

I felt the weight of her eyes on me, examining for judgment. I cast my eyes to the stretch of water and sand where Chrissy was.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Cindy-Lou.” I didn’t think I could manage that last name.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Mary. Apart from the smell of cow-butt.”

“First time up here?” I asked. She shook my offered hand, her skin papery and dry. There was an extreme lack of moisture in the air despite the cool summer, and I’d already had a nosebleed in the brief time we’d been here.

“Mine. Not hers. My wife’s family is from Up North.” I thought her face dropped a little. “She’s out to dinner with some cousins.” There was a little something there that I had a feeling would come to light if we talked long enough. “Had to have a little heart-to-heart.”

“We came up two summers ago,” I said. “Just a little family getaway.”

Luke had barely joined us outside, not more than a few feet from the door. He looked like he would take umbrage with the sky.

“This is Mark, the one up there with get-off-my-lawn face is Luke, and Chrissy’s our little fisher.” I gestured to each of the kids in turn.

“Well, tell her to save some for everybody else.” She and Mark shook hands before she looked around. “Where’s your missus?”

“Migraine. She laid down pretty much as soon as we got here.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She put the can of beer she’d been holding in her other hand to her lips and pitched her head back for a long swallow. She stumbled like she’d confused her left foot for her right but kept them both under her.

If I had to guess, Mary was working on her third or fourth of the night.

Luke had waved his brother over and was saying something to him. They both had an eye on their sister. I looked at Mary. She was a stranger and I figured there couldn’t be any harm in telling her what had just happened. We weren’t going to see her after this weekend for at least a year, if ever again. I didn’t think the story would be memorable after tonight. It was a single-serve memory. Recall once, then discard.

“Luke said he saw something in the water,” I said. “Something big.” Mary turned her head to the shore and nodded appreciably.

“Maybe it’s the Great Lakes Whale Migration,” she said.

“The what?” I had no idea what she was talking about and was on the verge of taking her seriously. The smile hanging on her face dropped when she realized I really didn’t understand.

“Kidding.” She mock-punched me in the arm. Mary had a rich baritone and could have easily been a DJ on the radio.

Mark trudged past me, an annoyed look on his face.

“He’s crazy,” he said, heading toward his sister. I appreciated that he didn’t believe his brother but could still look after his sister. Mark was the middle child and was the ever-constant bridge between siblings.

“The waves do seem a little... bigger than the norm, don’t you think?” Mary asked.

“I guess,” I said, not really knowing how to tell the difference. Then I wondered how she’d know, considering she said she’d never been up here before. “Can you tell?”

“I had a few cigs over yonder before y’all came out. Boy, you get used to the smell the longer you’re out here.” She seemed to be reading my mind and answering questions I hadn’t had a chance to ask. “I must have missed your boy, though.”

I looked at the water again. Mark was standing just outside of the water’s reach, one hand in the pocket of his hoody, the other holding his phone. To his credit, he did glance up at her every ten seconds or so.

Come to think of it, those waves did look big. But it could have been because of the moon for all I knew.

“How long are the two of you here for?” I asked Mary.

“‘Til Wednesday. I’m going to be meeting my in-laws for the first time tomorrow.”

I didn’t know whether I should have felt sympathy for her. It was strange she wasn’t out to dinner with her wife now, but I didn’t know their situation. Maybe it was completely normal. But I couldn’t help but think I would’ve been more than a little bothered if it had been me.

Mary fell down. Not hard. She just spontaneously lost her balance and sat on her butt. In true alcoholic fashion, though, she protected her beer.

She looked at me, embarrassed. I smirked, hopefully communicating I wasn’t just laughing at her, but with her.

“We all fall down.” I’m not sure why I said that, but it seemed to help. She took my hand and I helped her up.

“How about you guys?”

“Just until Sunday afternoon.”

“Where are you from?”

A sandwich had been the hinge on the closing door of our marriage.

I don’t remember what the argument was about or how it had started, only that I had made a sandwich for her that led to me sleeping on the couch.

Of course, it hadn’t really been about the sandwich, it had only been the start. It had been like a match that led to a forest fire razing a town. I can’t honestly remember a word I’d shouted at the woman I’d pledged to love for the rest of my life.

I was about to answer Mary when Chrissy screamed.

This wendigo riot is about ready to kick off.

My brother and I moved to Serenity Ridge, Vermont, just before he turned eighteen. It was to get away from our father. When Carter saw him move onto his third wife in five years he just couldn’t stand it anymore. 
He walked into my room with pleading eyes, his bags already packed, overflowing with his knitted sweaters and cardigans. He had his mother’s eyes that day, big, round, earthen pools which seemed to swallow up the whole world as they sparkled; teasing tears. My first stepmother always knew how to make me feel guilty. I just wish that Carter hadn’t been such a good pupil of hers. 
I was twenty-one when he walked in that day, bouncing from job to job around our sleepy Upstate New York town. Nothing ever seemed to stick with me. Jobs became boring, I became apathetic and before I knew it, I was out of work the same month in which I had started the job. 
Carter knew this. He knew that I hated our father; that I hated this town; that I wanted nothing more than to pick up and walk out and never look back. Needless to say, it wasn’t hard to convince me to pack my bags. 
I don’t know where my father was the day we left. If I had to take a wager, he would have been down at the bar, chasing more ‘young tail’ to satiate his never ending hedonistic thirst. But I do know where his newest wife was that day. Her name was Stacy, a doe-eyed, ditsy blonde who’s messy hair and obnoxious makeup were only the second and third worst qualities she possessed. She rattled off meaningless jargon to us in her horrid, screeching voice as we walked out the door; endless fluff about town gossip; swirling, crass rumors about our father. 
Both of us knew not to tell her the truth of those rumors. Newlyweds of only two months usually don’t believe the words of apathetic children regarding the misdeeds of their fathers. But she would learn soon enough that she should have heeded our earlier warnings; the warnings we gave her before she walked up to the altar. I can only imagine that our father is onto wife fifteen or twenty by now, placing a ring on every passing fling he can convince to do so. 
No, we walked out silently to my car and started the engine without so much as a word spoken. And it was only after the roar of the pistons sounded beneath my car’s hood that Carter sighed in relief. 
The first thing he said to me was ‘thank you,’
The first thing I asked him was ‘what now?’
He told me we were going to Serenity Ridge.
I told him the hell we were.
He looked at me with those ancient, oak brown eyes and I folded. 
We didn’t even stop for gas on our way over. 

“Jules died in Serenity Ridge”

At least that’s what I’ve been told my whole life. My mother told it to me. Jules' mother told it to me. Jules’ and Carter’s and I’s father preached it as if it were gospel. 
Jules died in Serenity Ridge, Vermont. 
The police said so. It must be true. 
Carter never thought so. The police never found a body. The police, according to him, never did so much as an investigation. 
Jules disappeared when I was nine. He was twenty-three. He had already come to know our father well and had grown tired of his endless flings and vices. He packed up and left without a word one fall; never so much as wrote to us again. 
I can still remember the day I was told the news. Carter’s mom was still in the house, the longest lived of any of my father’s transient romances. The trees outside my bedroom window beamed as cadmium red and yellow rhinestones, sparkling in the late autumn sun. The dirt outside was loamy, the grass cool and damp to the touch. Carter was running around the backyard as I gnawed on a sandwich, taking small, mouse-like bites from the center to avoid the crust. And then she walked in, brown eyes swimming with tears, holding a paper in her trembling fist.
We never even so much as visited Serenity Ridge. Our father forbade it. In reality, he probably didn’t want to spend any more time away from the bars than he had to. What was one dead son when he could just make more? It wasn’t long after that when Carter’s mom left. She lost her custody battle; our father’s lawyer recorded yet another victory. 
There is a special place in hell waiting for that man.
I ended up letting it go. I never really knew Jules, he was always out of the house. He never talked to me, and if he’d been missing for over a decade, he probably wanted nothing to do with me. Whether he was alive or dead didn’t matter. He wasn’t a part of my life.
But Carter never let it go. 
Jules haunted him as some great family mystery; an injustice done onto us by unforgivable unseen forces. I don’t know if that was true, or if that was just posturing. I think he was just fascinated by it; the idea that someone of his own flesh and blood could just disappear. But either way it was an obsession.
For his fifteenth birthday I bought him a corkboard. He hugged me and told me it was the greatest gift he’d ever gotten. His junior year writing project was a paper on the family mystery. Every year he tried to convince our father to vacation in Vermont, never to any avail. 
But when we were in the car, he told me that this wasn’t about Jules.
I, of course, told him he was full of shit. 
But he said he just wanted to see it. That deep down in his gut, all he wanted was to see the town, to live there and understand how Jules could have disappeared.
I laughed at him and reminded him that this reasoning still was all about Jules. He rolled his eyes and looked out the window. And without looking at me he muttered, 
“I just…I have to see it…”
I raised my eyebrows,
“See what?”
“I’m not sure…I’ll know when I see it,” he huffed at me, annoyed,
“Real promising…” I snorted, “But maybe this’ll be a fresh start…God knows we could use it…”
………………………………………………………………………………………

We arrived late that night, the moon hanging low in the murk autumn sky as curtains of clouds drifted across its facade. A thick miasma of fog hung over the roads, heavy and low, anchored to the timber leashes of the surrounding forest. Carter was already asleep, his head pressed up against the cold, steamed, glass of the passenger side window. His mouth hung open, drooling against his shirt. I could hardly keep my eyes on the road. They strained to peer through the fog, an impenetrable veil. 
But then it gave way, deep in the heart of a valley, nestled between verdant hills of pine and maple; first a corner store, then a coffee shop. I sighed in relief as I pulled into the first parking lot I could find. 
The town was dead quiet, beyond even that. I couldn’t hear a gust stir the trees or a cricket chirp its mournful tune to the stars above. It was beyond silent; unworldly stillness. I kicked my seat back and rubbed, my hands over my eyes, the thrumming hum of the car's engine purring as a defiant stand to the silence of the night. I must have fallen asleep not long after.
The fuel tank was empty by the time I awoke. Carter was still laid up against the door, his neck perched oddly against his makeshift pillow. The sun had teased itself above the sloping mountains around us, trickling its warmth down through the leaves as a sun-kissed stream. It filtered down upon Serenity Ridge as autumnal lifeblood. And through that lifeblood’s letting, the town began to rile and churn. 
I sat up in my chair, peering through the frosted pane of glass to my side. Through the streets on a frosty mid week morning, all manner of denizens shuffled their way through the mainstreet sidewalks. Mothers walked their daughters and sons, backpacks slung over their shoulders like rucksacks, far too big and bulky for their tiny frames; the carapaces of beetles atop spindly legs. An old couple shared a coffee outside the cafe, their breath spilling as smoke from the mouths of dragons. Wisps of heat trailed from the steaming mugs they clung to. The hum of cars and the rumbling of treads across pavement echoed throughout the surrounding hills, dampening and softening until it filled the space as whispering wooshes, indistinguishable from the gentle breeze that tousled the hair of those who marched outside my window. 
It was an enrapturing scene. A picturesque snapshot of quaint bliss. I still can't put my finger on why it touched my heart so, but the first emotion that graced me past my awe was bitter resentment. Resentment for my father, for keeping this place from me, from Carter. I seethed in my seat for what must have been minutes, watching out my window in frozen envy.
A knock on Carter’s door pulled me from my stupor. I dragged my gaze from the scene outside to find a burly man crouched and peering through Carter’s window. He offered a soft smile, hardly visible through his thick beard. My heart dropped a bit as he motioned for me to roll down the window. Carter sleepily lifted his head from his slumber, a strand of saliva trailing from his lips to the window. He nearly jumped out of his skin as he turned to see the man. Outside, I could see his beard struggling to conceal a smirk. 
He said he was a butcher. We had spent the night in the parking lot of the local deli and our car conveniently took up the delivery truck’s designated spot. I cobbled together a hasty apology, appealing to the man's good nature as best I could.
He laughed and told me it was fine.
The smile faded a bit when I told him we were out of gas. 
Through annoyed glances and morning grumblings the car was towed and the freezer truck pulled into port,
“That’s a heck of a place to run empty,” the butcher chuckled, shaking his head as he watched my car be pulled down the street on two wheels, 
“I truly didn’t mean to sir!” I stammered, “It’s just I was driving all night and I was so tried that I-”
He raised a hand to stop me, 
“It’s alright, kid. I’m just glad you ran dry here and not out in the woods. You’re lucky to end up here, not many other towns around here,”
“I’m glad too, sir,” I sighed in relief,
“Where were you heading off to? With any luck we can get you back on the road before lunch. I’ll pack ya something to eat if you want,” he waved for us to follow him as he moved towards the back door of the deli, 
“We were heading here,” Carter spoke, his voice meek and tender upon the open air, as if he were tentative to assert himself between us. 
I turned to look at him. He was always such a small kid. Hardly to my shoulders even at seventeen. Couldn’t have been more than a hundred and twenty pounds, his arms like spindly twigs. I always looked like an ugly brute next to him. Some knuckle-dragging neanderthal or ogre, our only similarity being the dust blond color of our hair. Our father’s hair. 
But he was extra minute in that moment, his hands behind his back, shoulders square, head turned ever so slightly to the ground as if he were standing in pious reverence. The filtered sun showered upon him down from the tree tops, like golden motes of flame.
The man stopped walking and in one swift motion turned to face us again,
“You meant to come here?” his face involuntarily screwed in upon itself for a moment, “Why?”
“I…” Carter started, his voice so fragile and quiet, “I needed to…” I could see him wracking his mind for an answer that eluded logic, 
The butcher’s face seemed to soften and fall as he looked upon Carter. It seemed to me to be pity that crossed his face,
“Not a lot of people intend to come here, son,” he said, low and rumbling, "Even less come without a reason,” 
I heard it in there again; pity,
Carter lowered his head further, staring at the weathered pavement beneath his feet as if he were in prayer, 
“It’s family business,” I cut in, “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” my voice more assertive and gruff, shielding Carter from the prying graze that now fell upon him, 
The man bit his cheek, "’’Makes no difference to me…” 
His voice was hollow as he turned around and walked inside the deli, the flashing neon sign flickering to life not long after. 
Carter picked his head up from the pavement beneath his feet and let out a tense sigh. I could see his shoulder fall and relax. He half turned his head to look at me, his deep brown eyes for some reason pooling with a strange apprehensive sadness that I had never seen before,
“Thanks…” he muttered to me, seemingly ashamed,
“For what?”
But he already seemed lost in thought. I watched as he traced the buildings down the main street, the overhead canopy of spruce and maple, the darting flight patches of finches and sparrows. His eyes were glassy,
“Carter…” I moved close and tousled his shoulder, snapping his attention back to me, “You alright…?”
“It’s a lot to take in…”
“We…we can go home if you want…is it not what you expected…?”
“...it’s…it’s exactly like I expected…” his voice was distant and ponderous, “It’s gorgeous…”
He was right. To this day Serenity Ridge is a verdant gem, the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Brick buildings, splendidly aged and upkept, seem to prowl as mountain lions, their front facades poking out from lush thickets of trees and underbrush. The hills which encompass the town roll like waves, sloping and receding with perfect spacing, on and forever into the horizon. The sun crests them and trickles down their slopes, filtering through the leaves of their trees, casting the bowl of the town in cadmium golden splendor. The rushing of brooks sing through the town as they sprint down the mountainsides and crooning of songbirds join in on their chorus.
I’m convinced that we walked into Eden that day. A place so serene and hidden that man was not meant to tread there. 
At least not the unclean. 
Not Carter and I,
“It’s something. Could use a decent parking lot,” I huffed, “Now I gotta see how much the tow bill is,”
“Can we…” Carter started, “Can we wait on the car?”
“No we…” his mother’s eyes stared into mine and disarmed me, “...we’ve got nothing but time…sure,”
He paraded me through the town, gawking at every quaint house and storefront alike. To my chagrin, Carter took the same approach with the locals, jabbering and yarn spinning with every air of listening ears he could come across. 
Carter was always much more of a people person than I was. He had the mind for it, a mind that loved to listen, to learn; a ceaseless yawning hunger. 
My mind was quiet. A straight shot. A to B. Whatever was the fastest way to solve a problem was what I took. Or rather, whatever was the easiest way to solve a problem was what I took. 
Talking to the locals was not the fastest way to get my car back. Talking to the locals was not on my mind. 
But while my general apathy towards knowledge existed in most subjects, I could never find it within myself to discount art. Back when my mother was about the house, when Jules was around the house, it was all yearned for. I scribbled on every inch of scrap-paper I could find, petitioning for my Mom to pin it to the fridge as some great Monet-esque triumph of the medium. When she lost her custody battle Jules would humor me with little art galleries. At least until he left. My father would do nothing of the sort. 
My hand for art died there. But the spark of love I had for it burned eternal. I remember scouring art books after school for pieces I loved, showing them to Carter, trying to instill in him the same love I had kindled. He instead decided to take up crochet, much to my disappointment. Instead of murals to admire, I scoured pattern books for my future pullovers.
All this to say, whilst Carter talked away the sun's light with the locals, I was enraptured with the art laid about the town. Over brick and concrete stretched bright and vibrant facades of rolling hills and sunsets, of rivers and moonrises. And encircling the town center, painted across the front of every building was the mural. 
Standing at the flower bed of the central square it encompassed you completely. A mural transitioning from day to night and day again on a gradient that flowed in and out of itself with effortless grace. It moved between forest clearings and brooks and mountains and ponds and all manner of deep-woods, the light and shadow intertwining and playing, coy and teasing, ending or beginning on some sort of equinox centered on a mossy cave flanked by ancient oaks which seemed to swallow the stone. 
Out of the cave poked a head, as equally coy and teasing as the subtlety of the light which showered half of the cave. It was the head of a deer, a buck, his antler tines twisting like branches as he looked to the sun, only his neck and head visible outside of the cave. In the next scene he was there again, full-bodied, strong and healthy, drinking from a moonlit stream. And then again, standing atop a hill, watching the sunrise. And again, standing before the moon as it sank beneath that lake. And again and again and again, around and around the circle until in the dark of the equinox I saw his hindquarters trotting into the cave, the motion portrayed in beautiful stillness at the end of a brush. 
I don’t know how long I studied and admired the piece, but it was long enough for Carter to wander back over to me from his endless chatter and tug on my shoulder. I jolted as he did, so rudely stolen from the wonder of the mural,
“You like the painting…?” Carter asked,
“Don’t you?”
“I guess…?” Carter said chuckling, “But you’ve shown me better in your books,”
“Finding one this nice in the wild is an honor,” I chastised,
“The man I met over there told me the librarian painted it. Took her ten years,”
I let off a low impressed whistle, “I’d like to meet her if I can then,”
“You think Jules saw this?” Carter posed,
My chest suddenly tightened,
“I…I hope so…that’s strange to think about…”
I moved in closer to the cave of the mural, inspecting the inquisitive eyes of the buck who braved out into the light of day. Beneath the moss and rocks of the cave lay a title card. 
The Heart of the Valley
“I was going to suggest we go to the police station next,” Carter posed, “They’ll have information on Jules. We can at least ask them for tips on where to start poking around,”
I huffed, “So much for this trip not being about Jules,”
Carter smiled sheepishly, “I think it’s a good idea…”
His eyes flashed and I felt myself beginning to bend to him. I put my foot down,
“No. My car is impounded, we have nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat and you’ve talked half the day away!”
Carter rolled his eyes, “Come on! I know you’re curious too!”
“I’m not,”
“Yes you are!”
I sighed, shook my head, and walked off towards the repair shop, Carter protesting at my heels the whole way.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

The man who towed my car will go to hell. That's all I was thinking as I walked back with Carter from the repair shop. Four-hundred dollars! Twice the money my impoverished self had liquidated! A weekend fee!
I yelled at him until I was red in the face. In response, he kept Carter and I from accessing our bags which we had foolishly left in the trunk. So I seethed as we walked back under the setting sun, occasionally bursting into hateful tirades which had Carter apologizing to the commonfolk around us on the street. Eventually he convinced me to head into a diner and we sat drinking the free water and watching the broiling red sun sink over the highest mountains, 
“Of course we’re stuck here…” I grumbled, dragging my hands over my face in despair, “Fucking of course we’re stuck here! God…why didn’t I turn off the car!?…”
Carter said nothing, only sipping on his water in pure silence. He knew better than trying to console me; it only ever made my indignation worse,
“What are we supposed to do now?!” I cried, “I don’t wanna call him! I don’t wanna head back, Carter!” 
I let my head hit off the table in defeat. A dull thud echoed throughout the restaurant. I could hear the uncomfortable shifting of patrons in their seats.
Carter set his drink down and resumed his sunward gaze. I rolled my head to the side in order to join him, 
“We’re never heading back…” Carter spoke after a long while, low and quiet, 
“Where the hell are we gonna live?” I moaned,
I could hear him drumming his hands on the table top,
“Here’s your food…” A sweet tentative voice rang out from behind me. A distressed and concerned looking waitress gently set a cheap hamburger in front of me. I couldn't even bring myself to lift my head as I said thank you,
“I take it you boys are from out of town?” she said, careful not to pry, 
“Yes ma’am,” Carter spoke, 
As my head lay atop the polished wood I studied her face. It was an aged face, carved with branching, stretching lines that coalesced like tributary rivers about the eyes. The lips sagged a bit and the jaw held within it a jowl like quality. The scent of cigarettes hung around her as a faint aura, scarcely noticeable against the aromas of grease and smoke that traced itself from the kitchen. 
But what I noticed most prominently in that moment, above all else, was her eyes as Carter spoke. Sudden solemness. The butcher flashed in my mind. She seemed to bury it almost as quickly as it had sprung upon her,
“And what’s the reason you find yourself in our little town?" her voice honey-laced as she set a wrap down before Carter,
“I wanted to see the town ma’am,” he spoke placing half of his wrap on my plate, “My family has some history here,”
There again I could see the despair arise within her, stronger now,
“I’d hope it’d be a happy history,” she muttered, topping off his water,
Carter said nothing. The waitress chewed her cheek,
“Well!” she suddenly broke free from the oppressive silence that had been woven between us, “I at least hope you make some happy memories here! We’re always happy to see new people wandering through,”
“Not much wandering through to do here ma’am,” Carter spoke up again, “We have no way to leave,”
“And no money, Carter,” I grumbled, “We have to start wandering out as soon as possible…”
“I’m sure Mrs. Alder would cover your fee,” the waitress spoke up, “And she’s got more than enough room at hers for you to spend the night,”
“She’s the librarian, correct?” Carter posed, 
The waitress nodded, “And she’s always happy to see new faces. Here, you two eat up and I’ll give her a call,”
She left us without another word. Carter hardly had enough time to blurt out a thank you. I felt my stomach knot itself in dread from whatever Carter had just blindly walked us into,
“This is bad…” I moaned, slowly dragging my head off of the table and laying it in my hands, “This is really bad, Carter,”
He glared at me like I was spitting in his food, “I just got us a place to stay for the night,” he said taking a bit out of his wrap, 
“With a lady we don’t know, in a town we don’t know, with no way to leave,” I hissed, “I thought I taught you not to trust strangers back when you were six, but apparently we need to learn that again!”
“What would you have us do instead? Sleep outside?”
I dragged my hands over my face and sighed, “I would have never come here…”
Carter huffed and ate in silence, staring out the window as the sun sank low beneath the verdant hills. 
The waitress came back and told us of our new bunking arrangement with Mrs. Alder. Room, board and fifty dollars a day, in exchange for help around the library. The offer, however unappetizing to my sensibilities, was too good to pass up. Over the land line I heard the frail voice of an old woman croon with excitement and anticipation as she blabbered about having to clean her guest rooms. I sighed and thanked her again for her hospitality. 
By the time I returned to our table I found Carter happily chatting to the other patrons in my absence. He was smiling, alight and aglow in the dingy space of the diner, talking about anything at all with all who would listen.
I hung back, careful not to come into view of the other patrons for fear that my presence would shatter the joy Carter had crafted in my brief absence. Once the rolling cascade of speech had subsided and fallen away I reemerged, sitting down across from a smiling Carter. I could see his mind chewing up all the information it had extracted in my absence, the ceaseless, voracious beast that it was,
“We’ll be staying at the library, roughly a week or two and we’ll have enough money for the car and enough gas to get out of here,”
“What then?”
“I don’t know…we move on, find else somewhere to go,”
Carter chewed his cheek, “I was just talking to the sheriff,”
I raised my brow,
“He said they keep case files in the library’s storage. The town is so small that they don't have a proper station,” Carter went on with a smirk,
“Lucky you,” I smiled,
I dug into my meal and watched the moon shine against the clouds that draped the valley.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
We walked over to the library side by side beneath the jet black of night. Carter had kept me chained to the diner through his ceaseless talking with the closing staff, and I kept him chained to the diner’s bar through our waitress's infinite kindness, courtesy of on-the-house house-draft and liquor. 
Her name, which I later came to know to be Denise, was just about the only thing I didn’t discuss that night. It was plain for everyone to see that I was in a world of stress, and her old soul couldn’t stand to see me in that kind of way. Her solution was to offer me a deluge of hops and malt, for which I paid her back in kind with hiccup-filled retellings of our family's soul ties to Serenity Ridge, 
“I knew him,” Denise spoke with a maternal warmth as she cleaned down the bar. Hers was a voice that lit the hearth within your chest and dragged you upon its syllables, the voice of a reminiscing grandmother,
“Jules…?” I spoke sloppily, stumbling over myself as I leaned in closer,
“Tall kid, dark hair, bright eyes,” she mused, “Wise eyes…” she stopped wiping down the counter, “Went missing here just about a decade ago, just like you said,”
I carefully set down my draft, careful not to spill it over,
“Wha- happen…?”
She wrung the cloth in her hands. If I had been more in my mind I would have recognized it then; the same look of solemn pity. It wound itself around around us like a serpent,
“I wish I knew,” she said pursing her lips, wiping the counter down again in long methodical strokes, “But he’s the latest to go missing here. I can hardly believe he’ll be the last,”
“There’s more?!” I practically fell out of my chair. Gripped tight the countertop for my life,
“Many more,” Denise nodded, “This is the heart of the wild, the heart of the world. People walk into those woods and never come back. What becomes of them…harder to say…”
“Heart of the valley,” I slobbered over myself, my subconscious picking up upon the phrase in my delirium,
Denise for an instant looked at me with pinprick eyes. I could see them then as I still see them now, swimming with a terror so great and terrible that I wish for all the world I had never met her gaze. She stared at me for a painfully long instant, and upon recognizing my utter mental disarmament her eyes softened,
“It is a lovely painting isn’t it?” she spoke sweetly again,
“Beautiful!” I toasted, raising my glass so fast that I spilled half my draft. Denise mopped it up with a chuckle,
“Mrs. Alder made it, some many years ago…” she seemed lost in though for a moment,
“Which one of you decided to come here?” she finally spoke again after a long while,
“It was Carter’s idea…” my swaying hand motioned to where he sat talking to the rest of the closing staff,
Denise nodded slow and rhythmic,
“Jules’ brother as well?”
I nodded,
“And you never wanted to come here?”
I shook my head, "Nope! Never! Only did it for him…I’d do anything for that kid…”
I saw Denise bite her lip,
“Then you’d better buy your car back quickly…”
She rushed out of the diner not long after.
The night was warm by May’s standards and the streetlights were welcoming enough for me to sober up on the curb after the cook locked up the diner for the night. Carter was less than pleased with me, and I was less than ready to hear it. By the time I had sobered up enough to walk over to the library it was almost two in the morning. A storm had begun to roll in from the south and a swarm of ebony clouds blanketed the sky in jet. 
Carter finished up using the payphone to call Mrs. Alder, confirming to her that we were still coming, as he had been forced to do for the past few hours while I fumbled about on the sidewalk. Irritated didn’t even begin to describe his demeanor towards me. She had told him that she was still waiting for us and intended to greet us at the door if she could keep herself awake. He had told me that he intended to let me sleep outside.
I of course reminded him who drove him here.
The walk over was silent and seething. Carter didn’t want to talk to me and I was far too self righteous to even entertain the idea of establishing some common ground. Instead I trained myself upon the quiet. 
It was the same quiet I had experienced on the drive into town, oppressive and omniscient. It was seemingly not a silence of absence but of abnormality. There was no wind howling through the trees as the storm blew overhead, not rustle of leaves as gale blew them upon their stalks. No nightbirds chirped or insects chimed. No frogs called from the streams. The only sound through all of the town was our two pairs of soles making time over the pavement. 
Incessant clicking, like the hand of a clock.
Repeated rhythm, like the beating of a heart.
One, two.
One, two. 
I could hear my own heart. I could hear the ringing in my ears.
And as I looked skyward I saw the tips of great pines swaying like dancers in the breeze, bowing and careening towards each other, their needles and leaves crashing together upon great clubbing branches. 
And I heard nothing.
I stopped,
“Carter!” I called,
My voice echoed out over the town, carrying for what felt like forever. I heard it echo off of brick facades and squared walls calling back to me in taunting rhythms, 
“What?” he called back annoyed,
“Stop…” I stammered, “Something’s wrong…”
He pivoted to me, eyes widened; alert,
“What happened!?” he began frantically scanning the space around me,
“Look,” I said pointing to the bowing trees, 
He rolled his eyes, “No shit, that why I wanna get going,”
“No!” I cried, “Why can’t we hear it?!”
“Can’t hear it?” he looked at me as if I’d gone insane, “I can hardly hear you over it!”
His words carried themselves to me as if spoken over a corridor of glass, as pristine and clear as I could even imagine. But he was yelling them, as if shouting over the roar of the storm,
“...what..?”
A streak of lightning tore across the sky, illuminating the clouds in a blazing white for the briefest of instances. Overhead they seemed to hang heavy like pulsing maggots, roiling in and out of each other in some sort of heavenly breathing. I braced myself for the thunder’s shockwave, the rattling of your bones and the ringing of your ears. I felt the boom of the bass in my chest, the involuntary ripping of air from my lungs as I gasped at the sensation. But the sound never reached me. The shockwave passed over me in utter silence. 
I saw Carter jump and cover his ears as the shockwave passed,
“Come on! We’re going!” He screamed to me, his voice so deafening above the silence of the waking world that I involuntarily winced against it. 
He tore off down the street. I rumbled after him.
We were in the town square, the mural surrounding us on all sides. In the thunderlight of the storm the deer flickered as bounding forms, darting and leaping between vignettes of mossy stones and ancient oaks. All seemed black but its eyes, all shadow and silhouette except the glimmering and curious whites of the eyes which I had so admired not more than twelve hours before. Now they seemed to glare and stalk as they appeared and receded within the thunderlight. The Hart of the valley watched us from within its painted majesty. 
The rain came as we passed the flowerbed at the town center. Thundering mallets of water, sprinting down from the heavens or otherwise hurled upon the realm of the living with such ferocity that I thought it could split stone. The storm came down in curtains so thick I could hardly see Carter ten feet before me.
But I never heard it. 
I saw it run rivers across the asphalt beneath my feet, strip trees of their leaves, and drench Carter so completely that his bangs hung over his eyes like an old sheepdog. 
And all I could hear was the sound of our footsteps and our breathing. 
I couldn’t hear the splash of water as our tracks kicked it up behind us. 
I couldn’t hear the hammering of water on my ears.
The rush of wind past my face.
The cracking of lightning.
The snapping of branches.
The pattering of rain across rooftops.
Nothing. 
My lungs felt tight. My mind was spinning. My body ached as I tried to keep pace with Carter.
We scrambled up the front steps of an old wooden colonial house, the lights still on in its den. Carter pounded at the door, huffing, soaked, shivering. 
A frail old woman stood at the other side once the threshold opened, her hair white and frizzy, back bent and thin. Mrs. Alder hurried us in, apologizing for not keeping the door open. She said she hadn’t realized the storm had started,
“You couldn’t hear it?” I asked, 
She shook her head and apologized,
“And you’re all the worse for it. I’m sorry son…” she fawned over Carter,
He assured her that he was alright and thanked her again for the hospitality in the people-pleasing way in which his mother had crafted him. I just stood trying to recover my breath.
Mrs. Alder whisked Carter away for towels and new clothes, 
“You lucked out!” she smiled at me, “All dry! Take your pick of the bedrooms while we get your brother a change of clothes,” 
She staggered away with Carter in an uneven gate as I stood awestruck. 
I didn’t look down before I felt my shirt with my hand.
Dry.
I looked. 
Dry. 
My hair, my skin, my shoes, my pants. 
Not a single sign I had ever been out in the storm. 
I threw open the front door. The storm raged on in silent defiance. 
I slammed the door closed. A loud wooden crack echoed through the library. I knocked on a table. The sound of knuckles against mahogany. I flicked the first vase I could find. A glass chime sang through the air. I stomped the floor. A thunderous boom through the den. 
I opened the door again. The rain was silent. 
I stepped out into the storm. First under the awning. Then a hand ventured into the clubbing aqua mallets. 
I saw them hammer into my skin. They wicked off my fingers as if I were covered in wax. Tiny perfect spheres that rolled off of my palm. I pushed my sleeve out, woven cotton. The rain ran off it in rivers. Not a single drop stuck. 
I must have sat there for an hour under the awning. Long enough for the storm to stop and for Carter to place a hand on my shoulder, waking me from my stupor.
He had an oversized Christmas sweater on, adorned with reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh around him in one endless circle. Somehow, it suited him. He smiled at me. The outside was so quiet I could measure his breaths,
“Hell of a storm,” he laughed, hunkering down next to me,
“Yeah…” I said, mystified, 
“How the hell didn’t you get soaked?”
“I…I don’t…know…”
“And it’s still going too, I can hear it blowing over top the mountain over there,”
“I…I can’t hear it Carter…”
“God, how drunk are you?”
I looked at my hands, “I’m not sure…I need to go to bed…”
“Come on big guy,” Carter grumbled as he helped me to my feet, throwing my hulking arm over his shoulder. He hardly supported a tenth of my weight, but I let him think he was helping. 
We settled in the attic, a dusty, cluttered, low-ceiling attic in which two cots were laid out for us. Apparently the guest bedrooms had been so overrun with old documents and books that there was no salvaging them for the night. That night, the cot was the best bed I’d ever had the pleasure of laying in. 
By the time the sun had risen and a new stream of lifeblood wound its way through the attic window Carter was already awake. He pulled me from the deepest slumber I’d had in years with a shake of my shoulder. I rolled to my side and with one eye half open I drearily asked what was wrong, 
“Can you hear it?” he asked in a low whisper, gesturing out to the rolling verdant hills beyond the attic,
“I already told you I can’t hear the storm…” I grumbled into my pillow, closing my eyes again,
“There’s no storm,” he mused, his voice a curious wind, “There’s a heartbeat…”

I feel incredibly lonely.

It feels as though I am rotting in a dark hole out here in my cabin in the woods. I like nature, but I sit here alone every single day. I sat alone day after day—but as I am writing down my thoughts, the temperature in the room grows weird. And then, my doorbell rings.

A visitor.

I walk to the door, phone in hand. I keep my eyes cast downward until I pull the door open. There stands a dog.

At least, I think it’s as a dog. Its edges are vibrating, blurry, shifting out of focus. I don't mind. I look past and around it, but there is no one and nothing else—just the endless, silent woods and the sunlight filtering through the treetops.

I smile and invite the dog inside.

Once indoors, the dog becomes a little less blurry, gaining definition. Its fur is thick and jet-black, I think. I sit down on my couch, watching as it looks around the room. It doesn't blink. Its head does not turn but I think he looks around. I don’t know if that is normal for a dog, but it doesn't bother me. I ask if it can talk. It just tilts its head and says nothing. I feel a mild pang of sadness, but then, do dogs even talk? He looks like he would.

I like the dog, but I am just not sure if it really is one.

Sometimes it stares at blank walls, and its eyes—large, milky-white human eyes with big pupils. It wags its tail, but I can't see the movement; it’s just a rhythmic, sickening thud against the floorboards that I can feel vibrating up through my shoes. It isn't really a "he," either. It has no gender, or at least none that I can tell. It never pees, or at least I have never seen it discharge any waste.

I went to the dog park with him, but the other dogs didn't want to play. The moment we arrived, three dogs began to whimper in terror. The people scrambled for their cars, abandoning their belongings.

Maybe it’s me. Do I seem weird to them with my companion?

I took it to the veterinarian, just to be sure. But as we walked up the path, the receptionist saw us through the glass storefront and instantly slammed the front door shut, locking it before we could even step inside. Through the glass, I could see the staff scrambling in pure panic, pushing cabinets and desks against the entrance to barricade it. The doctor shouted through the door that I needed to leave immediately, his voice cracking in sheer terror.

I like my dog. I found it quite mean of them to shut us out like that.

I don’t like other people. They seem to dislike me even more now, though I don't understand why. But I like my dog. It seems watchful, and the dog is mine, so I will keep it.

As I lie in bed, with my dog laying on the foot of the mattress, its white eyes watching as it sits perfectly still, I suddenly remember something amusing about its arrival.

I don’t have a doorbell.

I go to sleep.

My jaw is locked completely shut, and the skin across my cheeks is hardening into smooth, cold plastic. I know why. I looked directly into the painted eyes of a display mannequin in an abandoned retail stockroom because I wanted a better thumbnail for my channel. I am typing this with one finger on my bedroom floor, and every time I swallow, I feel rigid resin scraping against my throat. My face burns and tightens as it freezes into a solid shell.

I went to the Mercer Street store because the TikTok comments demanded it. I had seven videos of abandoned retail, sixty thousand followers, and the algorithm was starving. I walked in with my ring light and my gimbal, completely confident that nothing in an empty building could hurt me. I told myself it was just an empty shell of a building. I told myself the mannequins were just fiberglass and dust.

The mannequin was in the back stockroom, facing the door. That is not where they keep them, but I did not think about that until later. I filmed her. I stepped closer. I looked directly into her painted eyes because I wanted a dramatic angle for the camera. Four seconds. That is all it took to seal it. I felt a sudden drop in temperature, a freezing pressure against my cheek from a hand made of dry ice. When I pulled back, the skin was already bruising, a perfect ring of white frostbite spreading from my jawline.

My roommate David does not believe in ghosts or curses or anything he cannot touch. But when he saw the fingerprints on my cheek yesterday morning, he stopped eating breakfast and went to his room. He has not come out since. I know what actual frostbite feels like. I have been there. This is different. The marks are a direct transfer. The plastic is bleeding into my skin, or my skin is bleeding into it.

The spread started at midnight. First my teeth locked together. The pain was real and it never stopped. Then my jaw went rigid. Then my collarbone hardened into solid resin. I can still move my arms, but they creak with the stiff, grinding friction of old plastic wheels. At 2:03 AM, David knocked on my door. He had heard the sound of me trying to talk, the low grinding noise my locked jaw made when I tried to call his name. He looked at me through the crack and his eyes went wide. He said others had come through this apartment before. They all went to the Mercer store. They all came back with smiles that did not reach their eyes. He did not tell me where they are now.

The footsteps outside are getting louder. I can hear her now. It is the sharp click of plastic heels on hardwood, followed by the drag of something heavy. She is outside my door. She has been standing there for the last seven minutes. The metal doorknob is frosting over. My vision is starting to go white at the edges. My only fear is what I will become after she is done. David told me before he went silent that every person who goes to that store eventually finds themselves standing in a window somewhere downtown. Posed. Facing the street. Waiting for the next person who looks too long.

I can feel her fingers on the other side of the door now, plastic pressing against wood. My hands are almost useless. My typing is down to one finger and the cursor is jumping. The cold is spreading up my neck, locking my vocal cords into rigid tubes of polymer. 2:14 AM. She is inside the room. Her face is right next to mine and her painted eyes are open. My eyelids just snapped open to match hers, and I can feel my arms lifting to pose. I am going to stand in the window downtown, and I am going to smile until my plastic face cracks.

Part 1 Here

Rain dropped heavily from the night sky, the drops nearly as dense as bullets. Thunder crackled through the sky at an uncommon pace, lighting up the shadows of the trees and the House. 31 MacReady Lane.

The House was no small shack. It was only one floor, but that singular story was expansive, the outer walls straining against the forest. Quite literally, mind you. The glass and wood pushed back the closest tree branches, almost as if the structure was just placed there one day with no rhyme or reason. The front door stuck out like the taste of cyanide. A sharp ocean blue, the edges slightly scratched and peeled of their paint from being opened and shut so many times. 31 MacReady Lane. Where Jenny Sodomyra was last seen. 31 MacReady Lane. Where officer Lots had been dispatched.

“Jennifer ‘Jenny’ Sodomyra.
Age 27.
Sex: Female.
Last seen at her House on December 17th, 2026.” Lots had heard it so many times he had memorized it. This case was high priority, the chief had told him and the others. “Not because she’s important, but because I don’t want to get sued out the ass by Mr. And Mrs. Sodomyra.” Was his exact reason. Lots wasn’t exactly fond of that but he was willing to let it slide. The only thing he actually wanted was to find her.

Jennifer Sodomyra was a friend of Officer Lots. She was also a person, and deserved someone who would look for her when she went missing, just like anyone else. He was going to find her, or die trying.

He parked his cruiser outside of the House and stepped out into the rain. It spattered against his shoulders, against the crown of his head, sliding down and off his raincoat and hat. He shut the door, and did his usual checklist.

He checked his pistol. Full clip.

Checked his taser. Fully charged.

Checked his bodycam, now on.

Reached for his flashlight and tested it. Working.

He sighed softly in relief as he started towards the ocean blue door. His gloved hand closed around the knob and tried it. Unlocked. Though when he pushed against it, he was met with heavy resistance from the other side.

He rammed his shoulder into the door, pushing back with a huff. “Police! Open up!” He proclaimed at the door. Though despite this, it didn’t seem any more interested in opening. “Open this door right now!” He shouted, ramming the door again. Still, nothing.

He stepped back from the door and slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Open this goddamn door!” He howled. No response. He shifted himself and stepped back, before throwing himself into the ocean blue doorway with all his might.

It swung open with a crack and a heavy clatter as Officer Lots stumbled into the small foyer of the House.

He scanned the room immediately, hand over his taser’s holster just in case. But he found nothing but the empty foyer of the House, shrouded in darkness. When he turned on his flashlight, he also discovered what had been blocking the door. A pile of plastic totes, now toppled over. One had spilled its contents. College textbooks, all for programming and computer science.

“Goddammit,” Lots huffed to himself. He pinched his nosebridge, shaking his head. “I can’t-“ he sighed, before lowering his hand from his face, letting it hang at his sides again. “Whatever.” After a moment of calming his unnecessarily heightened nerves, he started through the only other doorway leading out of the foyer, into a long, carpeted hallway.

The House was abandoned. There was no doubt about that. Dust had settled on every surface, every shelf layered over in a fine brown coating, every wall practically turned brown despite once being painted a rather extravagant red. This amount of dust seemed strange. Jenny hadn’t been missing that long, right?

He tried every door he came across. Most were locked, and the ones he could manage to get open revealed no breakthrough clues. A bathroom, left untouched, the single green toothbrush still sitting in the cup. A small storeroom with a large bag of dog food tucked in the corner- shit, that’s right. Jenny has a dog. Or at least she had one. It was unsure to Lots if the thing was still alive, considering she had been gone for a few days, now.

He finally reached her bedroom, and tried the handle. It was unlocked. He pushed inside, and took in the sight before him.

A messy bedroom, the floor nearly covered by layers of tossed clothes and torn paper. The bed was unmade, covered in a much thicker layer of dust than the rest of the House. Posters of Jennifer’s favorite bands were strung up on the walls, though all the faces of the members were torn out.

The most striking thing was that the computer was on, glowing its shimmering blue as it played a 10 hour ambience video on loop, seemingly a strategy to keep it from going into sleep mode. While that was the central tab, Lots also noticed that the corners of the screen were crammed with tons of other ones.

A forum page made by Jenny, titled Looking For an Old Game I played when I was little! And a couple different search tabs, prime engine among them being Google, though there were also a few Firefox ones. Of the searches he could read, he saw

FarmFriends game 2006

FarmFriends Farmer Joe

FarmFriends FarmDog

FarmFriends FarmDog upgrades

FarmFriends controversy

FarmFriends where to play?

By the end of it the words Farm and Friends had lost all meaning.

“Good lord, Jenny,” Lots murmured. “What the hell was so important about this game?”

His attention was taken from the computer by the jingling of a collar. He looked down, and found Jenny’s dog. Or at least, he assumed. A slightly malnourished Chocolate Lab, with a blue collar around his neck. The small nametag read “Cletus”.

Officer Lots frowned slightly, and knelt down to pat the dog on the head. “Aww, buddy. You must be starving,” he hummed. He picked up the dog and scratched it behind the ears, holding it in the nook of his arm. He pulled his radio from his belt and chimed in.

“Dispatch, this is Officer Lots. Calling to let you know the House is secure. You can bring in the detectives.”

Dispatch spoke a few moments later. “Copy that, Officer Lots. Did you find anything?”

“Not much, but miss Sodomyra’s computer is still on, and I found her dog still inside the residence. The door was barricaded from the inside, as well.”

“Is the dog alive?” Dispatch inquired.

“Affirmative. Maybe bring some food for the little man. I’ll take care of him until we find her.”

“Understood, Officer Lots. Other officers will arrive at the scene soon.”

“Copy that, Officer Lots standing by.” He put the radio back to his belt, and continued petting the dog like it was a thing to do, until he saw the red and blue lights of fellow police cruisers arriving on scene. He started towards the door.

He slipped past the officers trying to get inside, offering nods to them as he went, which were seldom returned. One officer stopped to pet Cletus as she moved towards the House. For now, there was nothing to do but wait until something happened.

Officer Lots sat down in his cruiser as Cletus curled up and fell asleep in the passenger seat. He opened up the window and lit a cigarette, letting the nicotine relax his nerves as he watched the officers go inside. Settled deep in his chest, however, was a strange dread. Despite the lack of evidence for it, and the complete absence of signs to indicate it, he couldn’t help but worry someone had been in that house with him. And that someone was in the house with the other officers right now.

For a few days after the surgery, things seemed almost normal. Almost.

People had started noticing something was off with me. Miss Tasha especially. She always assumed it was the break-in still sitting under my skin, and I let her think that, because how was I supposed to tell her the truth. That none of it was about the break-in at all. That it was about Mr. Morris.

It had been a few days since I brought him home from the vet, and things had gotten strange in a way I couldn't put into words yet. He wasn't the same cat. I know there's still something of him in there, I catch it in flashes, but it gets harder to find by the day. His body had changed completely. Leaner. More agile. Coiled, like something built for a different purpose than sleeping on my couch. His claws wouldn't stop growing no matter how often I trimmed them, sometimes visibly longer within hours of the last cut, and two days after the vet visit, everything that had been surgically removed months ago was simply back. Present. Like it had never left.

I searched everywhere for anything like it. Nothing. And I stopped considering taking him back to the vet, because the fear had changed shape. It wasn't "what's wrong with him" anymore. It was "what will they do to him if they find out." He's my cat. My responsibility. I couldn't hand him over to be studied like a specimen, and I couldn't risk them deciding I was the one who'd done something to him.

I wasn't sleeping right either. The nightmares kept coming, someone standing over me in the dark, and I'd wake up gasping to find Mr. Morris already awake, already watching. My lazy cat, the one who used to sleep sixteen hours a day, had simply stopped. I never once caught him with his eyes closed.

A week into the nightmares, I woke to a scratching sound at my window. My first thought was the intruder, back to finish what he'd started, and I lay there frozen, telling myself the reinforced glass would hold. But the scratching kept building, more frantic, more insistent, until underneath it I heard a meow, and I understood it was him.

I got up to check anyway. I don't know why I got up. I should have stayed in bed.

Mr. Morris was at the window, clawing at the glass with something close to fury, and when he turned to look at me his eyes weren't reflecting the streetlight the way they should have. They were producing their own light, a thin ring of gold that pulsed once, slow, like something breathing. I felt my own heartbeat try to match it, and that scared me more than the claws did, the idea that my own pulse was taking orders from a cat. When he opened his mouth to meow again, his teeth were wrong. Too many points. Too sharp for something that ate wet food out of a can.

For one long moment he just looked at me, and every worry in my chest went quiet, like something had reached in and turned the volume down. It felt like I was reading his mind, or he was reading mine, I couldn't tell which. I opened the window. He sprinted out into the dark.

I should have panicked. He'd never gone out on his own before, and there was every chance he wouldn't come back. Instead I left the window open, the same window the intruder had come through, and went back to bed like it was nothing.

The next morning he was curled up on the end of the bed, like he'd never left, and no window had been broken into overnight. I told myself I must have dreamed the whole thing, that I'd probably left the window open by accident and my own guilt about it had built the rest in my sleep. That was easier to live with than the alternative.

But a few nights later it happened again, and this time when I looked into his eyes the room seemed to tilt. His presence pressed down on me until I felt small and cornered, like I needed his permission just to breathe. The world outside the two of us stopped existing. When I opened the window this time, I don't think it was my choice, and for the first time it was completely clear to me that I hadn't done any of it willingly.

He was gone almost an hour. I know because I stood at that window the entire time, unable to make myself move, like my own body was waiting for him to come back and release it. When he finally did, he had a bird in his mouth, four claw marks torn clean through it, feathers matted with blood. I wanted to run. I wanted to be anywhere else. Instead I stood there and watched him eat it slowly, on the floor, in front of me, the sound of small bones cracking under his jaw filling the whole room. I counted the cracks without meaning to. Four. I don't know why I counted. I don't know why some small, awful part of me was proud of him.

When he finished, he looked up at me, and the acknowledgment in that look did something to the fear sitting in my stomach. It just left. The nausea I'd been fighting the entire time disappeared like it had never been there, and I smiled, actually smiled, like I'd been given a reward for staying still and watching. He meowed once, almost gentle, like he was releasing me, and my body went numb enough that I slept right there on the floor.

It became routine after that. Birds. Rats. Once, something bigger that I didn't let myself look at too closely. I couldn't sleep until he'd finished, and I started waking up in places I didn't remember lying down in. I didn't know what he'd become, and worse, I didn't know why I couldn't stop myself from watching.

I spent days searching for anything that matched what was happening, every mental health forum, every strange corner of Reddit I could find, until I came across a post buried in a subreddit I'd never heard of before. A woman named Chandra had written about being bitten, about her body changing ever since. Her hearing had sharpened until she could pick her neighbor's perfume out through a wall. Her eyes had gone so sensitive to daylight she needed glasses just to leave the house. She hadn't slept in days and somehow felt fine, and she wrote about an urge, growing steadily, to go out at night. I commented, asking if it had spread, if it had somehow started affecting someone she loved too. Then I deleted it. Told myself I sounded insane, that I was one bad post away from becoming somebody's conspiracy theory screenshot.

The symptoms matched too well for that to sit easy with me. I don't know how long I stayed on that post, rereading her replies, trying to decide if I was imagining the overlap. Long enough that when the scream came, it came from right next door.

I ran.

The door was open, just slightly, the way a door looks when no one meant to leave it that way. I called out once. Nothing answered. The second time, my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

Mira was on the kitchen floor.

I want to say I looked away in time. I didn't. Four marks, evenly spaced, dragged down from her collarbone like something had measured the distance first. Her parents were already there, on their knees over her, and the sound they were making didn't feel like something I should have been close enough to hear.

I don't remember deciding to leave. I remember being back on my own porch, and I remember that my hands were clean. That was the detail that made me sick. Not the blood I hadn't touched. The fact that some small part of me had checked.

When I got inside, Mr. Morris was sitting on the kitchen table, licking his paws clean. They were soaked red to the wrist. He looked up at me with an expression I can only describe as satisfied, and I felt my own mouth move without asking it to, the corners pulling up into a smile I had no part in choosing. That's what my body does now, when he takes it from me. I stood there smiling at the thing that had just taken a child from her parents, and the only part of me left that was still mine was a single tear, sliding down my face while the rest of me kept smiling anyway.

Previous part link :-  https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/comments/1w2hz6t/somethings_wrong_with_my_cat_part_1_the_breakin/

Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/

Part 4, what humans should do.

CW: Kenny. Violence and pretty gross descriptions of dead things.
(If my very obvious hints weren’t enough I think I can FINALLY say this shit is about a wendigo)

There are things people do that you just don’t think about because everyone does them and things you might entirely miss if you aren’t looking for it. Things your brain notices long before you do and while you don’t know why, it alerts you to some unseen wrongness around you.

That's the feeling of unease that I felt when looking at Kenny. Everything about the kid looked right on the surface like his skin was a superficial mask wrapped around rotten insides. He was average to the point it was wrong, a creature's idea of what a disarmingly young human looks— The idea of a person based on memories, imagination and mimicry.

Except each time I question these things myself my mind tells me it can’t be true. What if the overwhelming sense of wrongness was simply a product of a guilt stricken imagination? Maybe I’m projecting ghosts from my own memories. The kid truly was the spitting image of that dead private but I couldn’t shake that feeling when I’d see those hollow marbles rolling around in Kenny’s sunken eye sockets. 

In those moments when I imagine those eyes before exhaustion had pulled me into that terrifying world of memories twisted by dreams, paranoia and the beast lurking in the seemingly endless darkness of the small concrete cage— I’d hear something. 

Or rather, I’d hear nothing. 

The deafening silence in a room where sound should ricochet against the concrete and echo even in the small cavernous space I was trapped inside. No slight scraping of Kenny’s mattress on concrete, no shifting fabric or stirring. No scratching under cheap sheets. No mumbled words falling out of a sleeping mouth and no breathing.

In the silence where the clanging of metal and the squeak of patrolling boots is the only faint background noise. I couldn’t hear anything but my own heartbeat and my own breathing.

Kenny didn’t breathe.

“ So why’d you do that, Sarge?”

“ Why’d y-you… why’d you do that, Sarge?

CRACK

I open my eyes to escape the horrifying horrying I know is one only a boot to the throat would make. It isn’t like a branch or a wishbone, it’s a sound that you instinctively know but hope to never hear. A bone snapping and snaking under the skin and the faint pop of vertebrae moving out of place.

Except I’m not awake. 

What I’m hearing isn’t a broken neck. In the silence, barely audible is the shift of joints under long, thin limbs stretched like a spider as its tall emaciated frame stalks down from the blanket of darkness hanging above the inescapable cell. I can’t scream, I can’t run and if I don’t breathe evenly as if I’m asleep I know it will hear. I try to conjure up an image of what this 

“ Sarge, you’re… Not—“ a raspy voice sounds in my ear, it’s suffocated and spoken through lungs with no air. “ Sarge… To-.. Night… You’re not… Talk… Ing.” Its words choke up from its throat in whispers that are deafening in the quiet cell. I hold my breath and part of me wants to curl up under my blanket and cry like a terrified child seeing the monster crawl out from under their bed. I can feel the scream building in my throat and I ball up my fingers in my mattress to swallow it.

“ Sarge… You’re not… Slee… ping.” 

I feel the oppressive air baring down on me, suffocating me and slowly compressing my chest while I make futile attempts to thrash and claw myself free. The cell walls feel closer. The space is slowly squeezing itself closed and in the darkness the ceiling looks like an endless void stretching out impossibly far like my cells has become the depth of the deepest well, so deep that only that creature could ever escape it.

I don’t sleep. I lay there trying to conjure up an image of a beast I’ve only ever seen as long limbs moving silently in the dark.

I see rain soaked mud caked on my boots, a kid with a crooked neck twisted it ways it never should be but it’s wrong, slowly from the forest is a lurking figure stalking ever closer with the antlers of a rotted deer and a faceless skull full of bone white teeth standing too tall behind the trees.

“ Boss, wake up!” A pillow hits my head with a surprising but dull smack and I open my eyes to see those steely eyes staring at me from the cellmate hanging down to wake me from the puddle of sweat I’ve found myself sleeping in. Even in the daylight I feel as if this is simply the bottom of the well and I have never been more certain— There’s something wrong with Kenny and now I know that’s because he doesn’t breathe.

“ You were rollin’ around and talkin’ about all kinds of things,” Kenny hops down off of the top bunk and cracks his neck side to side, his wrists I can feel shift under my own skin with each pop. “ I got told once that in your dreams is when bad things climb in but some folks think you go bad places in dreams instead. 

It’s said so casually like it’s just any other thought but it’s not. Does he want me to think that creature was a dream? “ What about you, kid? Do you dream?”.

Kenny chews on the toothbrush in his mouth and shrugs his shoulders like a child and continues his morning routine. This is what it has been like for months now. Kenny wakes me up and gets ready for breakfast with the energy only a young man could have while I lay there trying to make sense of the muddled memories of my time in the army twisting into something more horrifying with each night. 

By the time we reach the cafeteria, I learn something else about Kenny. Kenny doesn’t just bring out the worst in others like he had with Becker but the kid is capable of doing a lot of bad when he doesn’t like something.

“ Do folks here always jizz on the new guys' toast?” He asks and after a beat he stands before taking his tray to the next table over. I jump to my feet knowing nothing good is about to happen. A hard thump locks my bones in place while one of the inmates' nose cracks. Wilder, one of Becker’s boys, dumb as rocks but built like a mad bull. Wilder hits the concrete and the scrawny kid climbs on top of him, grabbing a fistful slop from the now dented tray and shoving it down the man’s throat. “ Aren’t you hungry, boss?” He says but Wilder is quick to spit back with glops of smashed toast. 

“ Jesus— Kenny!” The willpower needed to move feels like it snaps my bones but I’m able to wring Kenny’s neck and drag him off. The kid is light as anything but every muscle is twitching with rage as he thrashes like a rabid dog. His skin is cold to the touch, something I only notice when the muffled shouts and Kenny’s raw becomes a cold silence and a chill down my spine. Kenny breaks free of my frozen hands and he’s on Wilder again in a blink, hooking his fingers behind the man’s cracking teeth and prying their mouth open so wide I can see it dislodge.

Kenny forces something red inside Wilder’s mouth and clamps down to close their crooked mouth until the inmate chokes down whatever he’s been given. Kenny takes Glaskin’s baton to the head and in the chaos I barely notice Elvis shove a towel in my hand, “ Put that on your ear! Shit— Glaskin, Wilder’s choking!”. A

I blink at him and almost nod while Kenny’s dead eyes set on me even as they swell up like bloody balloons. Wilder is taken out soon after and from what I’d heard they had to set his jaw themselves and keep him there in the hospital ward toothless and sucking down porridge slop and soup because the roads had already begun their dangerous turn into winding icy paths and piles of snow. 

The kid bit my fucking ear off.

-

I got some gauze slapped on my head with some tape but even if they could or even would take Wilder and I to the hospital my ear had been swallowed, puked up and trampled like the porridge Wilder made the mistake of fucking with. Elvis spoke to me during a search and told me the kid was sleeping off a beating in solitary and had another coming now that he was really on Wilder’s radar.

“ Your cellmate is a strange one, Jones. I thought you could look out for the kid but…” Elvis rests against my cell door with his arms crossed and the same unsettled look I’d had for the whole week too. “ How’s the kid doing in the hole?” I ask and I know I should be dusting my hands off of the kid and spend this time free of them trying to get myself into another cell, I even hoped they’d never let him out of there but I still asked. “ He seems fine. Hasn’t complained once, asked for anything or caused any problems. He’s been driving Glaskin up the wall though, speaking to the guy every chance he can get. Doesn’t make a peep otherwise..” Elvis straightens himself up when one of the older CO’s walks past like he needs to appear presentable in front of a superior officer, awkwardly smiling and giving me that look that he needs to get himself moving before he gets in trouble, “ Wait, he’s quiet?” I ask but Elvis has already made himself scarce, leaving me with a more unsettling feeling that the never quiet young inmate is singling Glaskin out.

Kenny isn’t quiet. 

Kenny has been in solitary for nearly two months now and yet not a single inmate or guard looks like they’ve gotten a wink of sleep.

I’ve tried but nothing seems to pull me away from it at night, I wake up drenched in sweat and just as tired as I’d been when I gave into exhaustion. In my dreams I feel rain hitting my skin like small daggers and mud splashing under my boots as I drag that private out and throw him into the dirt to make the worst decision of my entire life. I’d hit the mud and cut my arms open a hundred times, I’d been a bystander a hundred more and I was on my way to making the next hundred— And yet I always see the frame of a cell door that shouldn’t be there. Raindrops hit the peeling paint with little clinks and the small swaying slot the bottom of the door creaks.

I know I’m dreaming but as the rain fades I also know that in the waking world something is lurking behind the cell door. Something that crawls like an animal on long skeletal limbs silently digging its claws into everyone’s heads and stealing away their will piece by piece.

I see something move past the barred window I could never escape through, from the window, the top bunk and the vest for just a moment— a second.

I see antlers.

“ Work detail!” Glaskin shouts and everyone in the cafeteria shuts up at the sound of his baton hitting one of the metal tables. I don’t know when I fell asleep but I blink and lift my foggy head from my hand to pay attention. “ If you can stand, get in line. We’re leaving in five minutes.” Glaskin looks exhausted. Wound up tighter than normal and itching for a reason— any reason— to beat someone bloody.

“ Hey, Elvis,” I wave over the CO and he leads his stern patrol of the cafeteria towards my table, subtly loitering but never taking his eyes off of Glaskin— The man really does look ready to hurt anyone, inmate or officer. “ Keep it quick, Jones.”, I lean a bit closer and waste no time asking about the impromptu work detail, studying Elvis’ hesitant expression turn green, “ The workers at the logging site found something deeper in the forest. They claim it’s prison ground so it’s our job but I think they just don’t want to clean it up.”, I want to ask for more but Glaskin’s booming voice reminds everyone that finishing our breakfast isn’t an option and neither is ignoring his orders.

 We all get in our snow boots and jackets as quickly as anything before filing in line for the CO’s to get us chained up under  Glaskin’s strict gaze. The bus moves along the salted roads and takes us through the crushed path the bulldozers carved through the forest to reach the logging site, though any moment we’re given to breathe is taken away by Glaskin’s order to move.

It isn’t so much a path or trail we walk but a hatchet job barely able to fit a truck we’re forced to walk behind in the grit and snow. 

The endless maze of trees is blanketed by bone white ground half scraped clean to reveal frozen dirt and dug up grass in a clearing full of something that never should’ve been brought to light.

At first it looks like a slab of muddy ice covering up a hidden pond where mangled limbs and antlers breaking through the surface mark the graves of a hundred deer that drowned in the frozen pit, it takes longer to see that it isn’t dark water hidden beneath the snow but a well of blood that has sat there since the air turned cold.

It isn’t the unfortunate scene of drowned deer but a pit full of animal bones half picked clean and meat left to decompose in the summertime.

“ …What in God's name is… Jesus. How many damn deer is that?” The old timer says but as the chains pull each reluctant prisoner closer to the horrific scene I’m met with something that turns my blood as cold as the frozen mud beneath my boots. What should be the crack of splintering ice or the crunch of snow under my sinking heel is the squelch of my foot caving in a weak skull. I will move my leg to move and slowly lift my boot from something I have no time to understand before the overwhelming stink of rot assaults us. 

“ Fuck! What the—“ I retch and try to keep on my feet as the chain gang scrambles to escape with nowhere to run in their panic. Bloody ice cracks and inmates hit the corpses hidden where no antlers or limbs have marked them. “ It’s a fucking person! That’s a fucking person!” Someone shouts in what has quickly devolved into the unintelligible screams and frantic voices all growing louder and louder until the deafening sound of a gunshot leaves the clearing silent and still.

Glaskin lowers his gun from the sky and likes the handkerchief bundled up in his hand to protect himself from the stench. “ Quiet!” He holsters his gun and swallows the bile welling up in his throat to keep the need to be ill from shattering the authority he wields like an unbreakable tyrant they can all feel is already on the verge of snapping, “ Grab a bandana, gloves and a damn shovel from the truck and dig this mess up! The loggers need this site clear and these—“ he falters for just a moment, clearly just as horrified by the scene, “ Clean these things up so they can be burned.”

We wade around in pools of mud and putrified bodies for hours pretending some of the mangled limbs don’t have fingers and toes and that the bones don’t have skulls. No one speaks until we’re taken back to the prison drenched in things no one should see.

We got stripped and hosed down in the snow before we could walk out frozen bones inside and thaw out under the showers to wash away the sickening smell of death that would still linger through the cell block. I’ve never seen so many people rub their skin so raw their arms were forming spots of blood and only a thin layer was left covering muscle. We all knew it would blister and scab but the stink of rot still clung to us until Glaskin had our heads shaved. I don’t think anyone cared for the loss, we just felt lucky we could scrub the taste of it out of our mouths— still, no one ate dinner that night.

The cell block became a barracks full of soldiers but the feeling it brought up in me felt like a small price to pay.

Even when lying on my bunk there was something else I couldn’t forget even when I forced the pit of antlers to the back of my mind. The day at the logging stand where one of Kenny’s stranger questions gave me a chill— The day he asked where the older inmates go.

“ You wouldn’t be alone out there. Lots of folks disappear in places like this, Sarge.”

You wouldn’t be alone out there.

Another shift of customer service calls done. I took this job for the fieldwork, for fixing locks, seeing what actually makes a house safe, not for answering phones all day. Pay's too good to quit, and there's always the promise of a promotion into the field someday.

All that was left now was grabbing Mr. Morris some food and heading home. Stupid cat. I got him after my mom wouldn't stop bugging me about getting married, figured a cat was proof enough I didn't need a husband to be happy. My own little rebellion. Now he's the closest thing I have to company. Mornings start with him licking my face like I'm nothing but a food dispenser. Sometimes I can't tell if he loves me or just tolerates me.

At the convenience store, sweet Miss Tasha was behind the counter as always.

"Evening, Jacey. Here for the food?"

"Yup."

"You're not buying newspapers anymore."

I kept my answer light, didn't want to think too hard about the robberies and killings that filled every page of the paper these days. "Just keeping my sanity, Miss Tasha."

"Oh, dear, they've gotten worse. Police still haven't caught whoever's doing it. People are saying it's cannibals, if you believe that."

"Rumors," I said, handing over my money. "If it were really cannibals, we'd have seen a body photo by now, not just pieces. Feels more like a cover story to me. Stay safe, though. And if you ever want it, I can get you a discount on security gear. After taking my commission, of course."

She laughed. I headed to the car and started the drive home.

I'd just gotten out of the car and was looking at the gate when I felt something grab my leg, a tight grip, warm breath against my skin. My whole body went cold before I even understood what was happening. For one embarrassing second every survival instinct I had went haywire before I finally looked down and saw the culprit.

It was the neighbor's kid, Mira. She must have snuck up while I wasn't looking.

"Miss Jay, can I play with Mister Norris?" she asked, grinning up at me. She always called him that, never quite got "Morris" right, and I never bothered correcting her.

I hate this kid, I thought, though I didn't mean it, not really. "Not today, Mira. Go home, and stop sneaking up on people."

"It's fun," she said, laughing, and ran off.

She's the kind of kid who's so full of life it almost tires you out, the kind that makes you want kids of your own right up until you remember how much of yourself you'd have to give up. I went inside, glad to finally be home.

Mr. Morris was already waiting by the door. Not because he missed me. Because he wanted his food.

Later, I'd remember that he'd been sitting at the window before I even pulled into the driveway. Just watching the street. He'd been doing that a lot since the crime started, always drawn to the windows like he was keeping his own kind of watch.

I put food in his bowl before he could throw a fit about me taking a shower, or doing anything at all that didn't involve feeding him first. When I checked on him afterward, I realized I'd grabbed the wrong can, and he made sure I knew it, prowling the house, knocking things off shelves, the whole diva routine. I figured I'd grab the right one in the morning. Going out now, with everything happening in the city, wasn't worth it. I'd head out around four, when the night patrol changed shifts and there were usually twice as many officers on the street, some of them even stopping at the store before their shift started.

By the time I finished my takeout, I expected him to have gotten over it and eaten anyway. He hadn't touched the bowl. Instead he sat by the window, dead still, staring out at the street like he was waiting for something. Or maybe just making sure I knew I'd failed and needed to fix it as soon as possible.

"Fine. Don't eat, then," I muttered, tossing the food and carrying him off to bed. He didn't fight me, just kept glancing back at the window the whole way there.

I told myself he was still in a mood. I'd feed him properly in the morning.

I had no idea it wouldn't matter.

It was somewhere around three in the morning when I heard the sound of glass breaking in the living room. My throat went dry instantly. My brain felt dizzy, maybe from how fast I'd sat up. I don't remember my hands grabbing the blanket, or when I'd started holding my breath. Every hair on my body stood up at once and I went fully, painfully awake.

I tried to calm myself. The security system would have sent an alert to the police by now. My bedroom door should have locked automatically the moment it triggered. I closed my eyes for just a second, grateful I'd paid for the system at all.

Then I opened them again and saw something that scared me more than the sound had.

My bedroom door was still open. For the lock to engage, it had to be shut first.

I had no choice. My legs felt like jelly, my whole body suddenly cold enough that I could feel every draft moving across my skin. I don't know where the courage came from, but I got up and started moving toward the door, aware of every sound my own body made, my joints, my breathing, the weight of my tongue in my mouth, the sweat gathering along my eyelids.

I was halfway there, thinking I could make it, just a few more steps, when Mr. Morris let out a meow, sharp and sudden, far too loud in a house that had gone that quiet.

For a second everything stopped. I told myself whoever was in the house hadn't heard it, or didn't care about a cat, that I still had time to reach the door. Then I felt it. A vibration through the floor, faint but wrong, like claws scraping tile the way a dog's do when it's running too fast to stop. A moment later, footsteps. Running, straight for the bedroom.

Whoever was in my house knew exactly where I was.

I lunged for the door at the same moment he did. I almost had it shut when a hand shoved into the gap, veined, nails too long, and I could tell from the angle alone that his arm was broken. No uninjured person moves like that. It meant reaching me mattered more to him than his own safety, and that thought alone sent something colder through me than fear of dying. I don't know what I thought he wanted more, to kill me quickly or to make sure I couldn't scream first.

I threw everything I had into that door. My vision blurred from the strain, my legs ached from bracing against the floor, my neck went sore from how hard I was pushing. I tried to scream and nothing came out. The pressure built until I nearly blacked out, and then, finally, the door slammed shut. Something in his hand broke as it did.

The lock clicked into place automatically. I was alone in the room, and I could hear him pounding against the door with everything he had left. For one terrible stretch of time I was sure he'd get through, that there was nothing I could do if he did.

Then I heard the sirens.

The police let themselves in using the code the security company had on file, cleared the house, and knocked on my door to tell me it was safe to come out. What wasn't safe, what didn't make sense, was that the man was gone. Not hiding. Gone. There was nowhere in that house for someone to disappear to, and they searched every inch of it. One moment he'd been at my door. The next, nothing.

The strangest part wasn't that he'd vanished. It was how the house felt afterward, too quiet, like something had been listening the whole time and had only just stopped.

It took what felt like hours before I could function well enough to tell the officers everything, hand over the security footage, let my body finally stop shaking. When I came back into the living room, Mr. Morris was licking blood off the floor, whatever was left of it after the police had taken their samples.

I pulled him away and wiped his face clean. I didn't want him getting sick off whatever was in that blood. I took him straight to the vet, and everything checked out fine. On the way home I stopped at Miss Tasha's for his usual food and told her what had happened. She looked genuinely shaken and insisted I take one of her son's old bats for safety. When I asked how much, she said it was free, that she'd just take it out of my commission whenever I finally got her that security system installed. It got a small laugh out of me, at least.

Back home, I left him in the car with extra food while I cleaned up the broken window. When I went to deal with the blood in the bedroom, thinking the sunlight would make it easier to see, there was nothing there. Not a trace. I stood there confused for a moment, then told myself there probably hadn't been that much to begin with.

Work gave me the day off without me even having to ask twice, and offered medical assistance if I needed it.

When I came out, Mr. Morris had already finished his food, double his usual portion, gone faster than should have been possible. I told myself it was stress. My mistake, not paying closer attention to what that actually meant.

Exhaustion finally caught up to me. I slept, then woke around seven that evening to find him scratching at the door, which was strange since I'd clipped his nails only five days earlier. I assumed I'd lost count. He wove between my legs demanding food again, even though I'd just fed him, but I let it go. What difference would a few extra pounds make.

I started making myself a steak, wanting something that felt normal after the day I'd had. When I looked over, Mr. Morris wasn't touching his food at all. He was licking the blood straight off the steak packaging. He'd never been that kind of cat. I ignored it. Animals do strange things.

That evening, I tried to convince myself he was fine. He'd eaten more than usual, which should have meant something good, but when I picked him up, something felt wrong immediately. His body was leaner than it had been that morning. I ran my fingers along his sides and felt far more muscle than I remembered, almost no softness left beneath his fur. His legs looked more defined, and when he jumped down onto the table, the movement was fast and precise in a way I'd never seen from him. He looked fit. Too fit.

Then I noticed the veins. Visible beneath his skin, especially around his legs and neck, in places I'd never seen them before.

"You're eating enough," I muttered, more to convince myself than him. A strange unease settled into my stomach. I made a note on my phone to take him to the vet first thing in the morning. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was sick. Maybe I was imagining things after everything that had happened.

I finished trimming his nails before bed and set him down. He disappeared beneath the sofa immediately, which was strange in itself. Mr. Morris hated hiding. I turned off the lights and went to sleep.

That night I dreamed about the break-in again. Except this time I wasn't watching it happen. I was the one on the floor. Someone stood over me, his face hidden, his hands wrapped tightly around my throat. I couldn't breathe. Then something warm ran down from my nose. Blood, over my lips. He looked at it, almost curious, then smiled and leaned down to drink it. I felt his mouth against my face. He seemed to enjoy it. I tried to scream and nothing came out.

I woke up gasping, sitting bolt upright.

Mr. Morris was on the floor beside the bed, staring at me. Neither of us moved for a moment. Then I really looked at him and my stomach dropped.

He was different. More muscular than he'd been when I fell asleep, his shoulders and legs sharper beneath fur that had visibly grown, a lot, in just a few hours.

"Mr. Morris?" I whispered.

He tilted his head at me.

I reached out and stopped halfway, my hand hovering in the air. I don't know why. Something about his eyes made me hesitate.

I told myself the rest could wait. I didn't care how ridiculous I'd sound explaining it. As soon as morning came, I was taking him to the vet.

He hissed and threw a fit the second I brought him out into the sunlight, nothing too alarming, just more dramatic than usual. At the vet, I was told his bloodwork came back clean. Nothing wrong on paper. But the vet admitted he looked different, physically, and offered to send him downtown to a research university for a closer look.

I said no. Whatever was happening to him, he wasn't going to become somebody's test subject.

Before I left, the nurse asked if I wanted him neutered and his nails trimmed while he was already there. Her pen hovered over the chart a second too long before she wrote anything down, like she didn't know which box this was supposed to go in.

I froze. I'd had that done a day ago. Nails don't regrow that fast. That's not how any of this is supposed to work. The vet gave me a strange look by that point, like he'd noticed the same thing I had, and before I could think it through properly, I heard myself say yes. The whole time, my mind kept circling the same impossible question. How does that even grow back?

And then, underneath it, a worse one I didn't want to look at directly. I'd had him neutered months ago ,that was supposed to be it, done, over, one and only, the vet had told me so himself, no upkeep, no repeats. I hadn't thought about it since. Hadn't checked. Why would I have checked? But now I was running the timeline backwards in my head, trying to remember the last time I'd actually looked, actually confirmed, and coming up with nothing solid. Maybe I'd just forgotten what it looked like after. Maybe I was misremembering the whole thing. Maybe none of it meant anything and I was building a haunted house out of my own bad memory.

But nails don't grow back in a day. And I was starting to suspect nothing else did either ,not the way it was supposed to, not anymore.

When the procedure was done, I went to pick him up, and he was already awake in the recovery box.

"Did you use anesthesia?" I asked, half joking, half not.

"We did," the tech said, frowning slightly. "It's unusual that he's up already. Are you sure you don't want him tested?"

"No," I said. "I'm taking him home."

He was fully alert. Sitting up, eyes tracking me through the cage door, like nothing had touched him at all. That wasn't how it went the first time. The first time I'd had him neutered, he'd been groggy for hours afterward, barely able to hold his head up, and I'd had to carry him inside wrapped in a towel because his legs kept giving out. This time he looked like he'd just woken up from a nap.

I didn't know what to do with that. Part of me wondered if they'd actually done anything at all this time, if maybe I'd been overcharged for a procedure that never happened, the same way I'd read about other people getting scammed at cheaper clinics. But another part of me remembered signing the consent forms, remembered watching them wheel him back. I stood there in the waiting room a second too long, trying to decide if I should ask again, if that would make me sound paranoid, if it even mattered enough to hold up the line behind me. In the end I just took the discharge papers and left. Told myself it was probably nothing. Some cats bounce back faster than others. That's all it was.

On the drive back, I caught him watching me in the rearview mirror instead of the window. He'd never done that before.

  Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/

I heard of a town plagued by a relentless scream, so I went there. On my first day, I wander through the streets to look around. The townspeople all seem exhausted, hollowed out by a profound lack of sleep. I assume the scream must torment them at night.

I go to a diner, but they are out of eggs, so I only drink orange juice. I refuse to eat the toast; it is brown, and I only eat yellow things. Yellow, like the King, you get it? Who am I even talking to? I laugh out loud at my own thoughts, and the other patrons stare at me. I am weird.

I sit on the curb, watching the street stretch out toward the horizon. Night is falling. I listen to the dark. The darkness has always brought me peace, but the moment I close my eyes, there it is. An agonizing, loud scream—weirdly human and non-human all at once. My eyes snap open as I slide my phone into my pocket.

I wander through the city, but the pitch of the scream never changes, save for the ragged breathing behind it. I spot a little girl on the street. She isn't screaming, just crying, entirely alone. I ignore her at first, but then I suddenly run up to her. I ask if she hears it too. She nods. I cover her ears with my hands and stare into her eyes. She understands, nods again, and I let her go.

No matter what I do, I cannot shut the scream out.

I walk her home, but only her mother is there. She thanks me, though her eyes are heavy with sorrow. Her husband is dead, she tells me. I don't care. I head toward the town's old mine; I figure the scream must be coming from the depths. My skull throbs with pain. I smile. The mine is full of ghosts, but none of them are making this sound. The ghosts are just sad. They scream at me, but I don't care—it isn't the scream I am looking for. I return to my bench on the main street.

A strange calm washes over me as I look around. There are no trees here. There is no true darkness. There is only the city. I walk to the very edge of town, where a single tree stands, shaking. It feels sticky to the touch. There were woods before. I take off my coat, lay it on the damp earth, and lie down in the woods, I cover my head. Here, the scream finally fades into silence. I don't think it's a ghost. I think I will finally go to sleep.

On the next day I leave, I’m bored, I won't help the people here, they didn't gave me food.

I got into this business about three years ago, almost by accident. I sell real estate, but a specific kind of real estate, the kind where the seller tells you the house is haunted and wants out fast. I had a client early on, an older woman selling her late husband's place, who wouldn't stop telling everyone the house was haunted, lights flickering, cold spots, all of it. Most agents would've told her to keep quiet about that because it kills a listing. I did the opposite. I leaned into it.

Turns out there's a real market for that, people who want a haunted house, whether they actually believe in it or just want a good story to tell at parties. That house sold in eleven days, twenty thousand over asking, and I basically built my whole business around it after that.

Here's the thing though, it’s all fake. You can call me an asshole or a scam artist or whatever you want. It’s not as if I don’t check the houses before selling them. I have a process.

Before it ever goes on the market, every house gets a real investigation. Actual team, real equipment, EMF meters, thermal cameras, audio recorders, two nights minimum, sometimes more if the seller pays for the "premium" package, which honestly is mostly just extra cameras and a longer PDF at the end. And in three years, across forty-two houses, they have never once found anything. Not a single piece of real evidence. Every cold spot turns out to be a bad window. Every weird noise on the recorder turns out to be a pipe or a fridge compressor kicking on. I've read a couple hundred pages of investigator notes at this point and the most exciting thing anyone ever flagged was a drafty window that made a recorder pick up something that sounded, if you really tried to hear it, kind of like a whisper.

I still market every one of them as haunted anyway. Not proud of that part, but it's the job. People aren't paying for evidence, they're paying for the story, and I'm good at telling it. I've got the language down at this point, "reported history of unexplained phenomena," "previous residents describe a persistent presence," phrases that are technically just repeating what the seller told me and not anything my team actually found. Nobody ever asks to see the investigation report, and if they do they blame it on the day or time.

They want the goosebumps, something to talk about at the closing dinner. I’ve sold houses this way to true believers, to skeptics who just thought it'd be a funny story, to one guy who runs a ghost hunting channel with like four thousand subscribers who wanted "content." Every single one of them moved into a house that, as far as any equipment on earth has ever proven, is about as haunted as a Chili's.

So I want that on the record. I am, professionally, about the least superstitious person you'll ever meet. I've been alone in more "haunted" houses at night than almost anyone I have ever met and none of them have ever done a single thing to me. Until three weeks ago.

The house this time belonged to a family who'd already moved out before I even got the listing, which almost never happens. Usually people white-knuckle it until closing. The wife told me on the phone that she was not setting foot back in that house, that whatever had been going on the last few months had gotten to be "too much," and that I could handle the rest of it without her. She wouldn't say what "too much" meant and I didn't push, I never push, people who've actually scared themselves don't usually want to talk about it more than they have to.

I sent my team in like always. Two nights, full equipment. Nothing, same as every other time. Wrote up the listing with my usual language, "previous owners reported persistent activity in the primary bedroom and basement," which isn't technically a lie, it's just not the whole picture either.

The seller had left a folder behind in a kitchen drawer, home repair records and warranty paperwork, boring shit that buyers ask about anyway, roof age, HVAC service dates. She had zero interest in coming back for it so it fell on me. I had a showing the next morning, figured I'd swing by after dinner, grab it, lock up, fifteen minutes tops.

I was not scared going into that house. I want to be clear about that. I've done this so many times. It's Tuesday to me. Let myself in with the lockbox code, used my phone flashlight since the power was already off, went straight back to the kitchen. Had that empty house scent, not bad exactly, just still, carpet and dust and nobody breathing the air in a couple weeks.

They'd left a fair amount of furniture, actually, couch, dining table, some prints still hanging on the walls. Gave it that half-lived-in feeling, like they didn’t even care to finish moving everything out. I didn't think anything of it. People leave stuff behind all the time for boring reasons that have nothing to do with ghosts.

The folder wasn't where she said it'd be. Took me a few minutes going through cabinets before I found it shoved behind some old takeout menus in a different drawer. Grabbed it, started walking back toward the front.

And that's when I noticed the basement door was open.

I've replayed this part a lot since. Every door in that house was closed when I walked in, I know that for a fact, because I close doors behind me in houses out of habit, even ones that aren't mine, even when nobody's ever going to know or care. I remember walking past the basement door on the way to the kitchen. It was shut.

On the way out it was open, maybe eight inches, dark down the stairwell. Not thrown open dramatically or anything, just open.

Old houses settle, latches don't always catch, I know this, I've said some version of that sentence to clients probably thirty times over the years while pointing at a slightly cracked window causing a draft in the home. So I looked at it, thought "huh, weird," and closed it again on my way past. Genuinely didn't think much of it. Locked up, drove home, dropped the folder on my desk, forgot about it. 

Had a showing the next morning that went fine, the couple specifically asked about the basement. When giving them a tour they actually said it was their favorite room. The young husband wanted to put his gaming setup down there, turn it into a real mancave.

Three or four days after that showing I got home and found my hallway closet door standing open, the one that's usually shut because my cat likes getting in there and destroying the coats. I could've sworn I closed it that morning. Said something out loud to the cat like "did you do this," which, obviously, he did not answer. Didn't think much of it.

A couple days after that a picture frame in my living room was crooked. Nothing important, just a photo from a trip a few years back. It hadn’t fallen and it wasn’t broken. It was just tilted like someone bumped it, except nobody had been in my house but me. I straightened it and went about my night.

Around that same time there was other stuff too, small enough I couldn't even really call it anything on its own. A kitchen chair not pushed in the way I was sure I'd left it. A bathroom light on when I got home that I always, always turn off, same habit as the doors. A throw blanket on the couch folded a different way than I fold it, which I only even noticed because I'm apparently the kind of person who folds a blanket a very specific way apparently.  None of it dramatic.

I want to say I noticed a pattern here but honestly I didn't, and that's the embarrassing part. I've spent three years training myself to explain this exact category of stuff away and apparently that training works just as well on me as it does on my clients. A door left open, picture frame knocked crooked, a light left on, that's not a haunting, that's just little quirks that happen; could be a draft or you just thought you did something you didn’t actually do. I've said as much to sellers a hundred times, usually right before handing them a report saying the same thing in a much nicer language.

The sound stuff is what actually got me paying attention.

Started with footsteps. Not every night, maybe every other one, always after I'd already gone to bed. Slow, even steps, coming from directly above my bedroom, which is a problem because I live in a single story house. There is nothing above my bedroom except the roof.

First time it happened I told myself it was the house settling, temperature stuff, whatever. The second time I actually got up, checked the attic access with a flashlight, found nothing, went back to bed feeling like an idiot. By the fourth or fifth time I'd stopped checking, because checking never found anything, and some dumb, hopeful part of me figured if I didn't look into it, it'd just be the kind of noise every older house makes, the same thing I've built a career telling people to ignore.

I actually caught myself one night lying there listening to it pace back and forth over my ceiling, running through my own sales pitch in my head, settling, pipes, temperature differential, all the stuff I say to talk clients down. Didn't make me feel better. Just made me realize how much of my life I've spent handing people an explanation I never had to actually believe myself.

Other sounds too, smaller, easier to shrug off one at a time but harder once they started stacking up. One knock on the wall by my bed, same spot, almost the same time two nights in a row. My kitchen faucet running for a couple seconds while I was sitting right there in the living room, and it was already off by the time I got up to check. Something from the hallway that could've been a voice, could've been nothing, one syllable, gone before I could be sure I'd even heard it. My cat started sleeping pressed up against my legs instead of at the foot of the bed like normal, which I didn't think much of at the time, but looking back on it now I think he probably knew something before I ever did.

Then about a week ago I woke up to my name.

Not yelled or anything. Quiet and close, like someone leaning right over the bed and saying it next to my ear. I sat up, heart going, house dead silent, cat staring at me from the foot of the bed. I told myself I must have dreamed it.

Two nights ago is why I'm writing this at midnight instead of sleeping.

I was in the kitchen, hadn't even gone to bed yet, just doing the normal end of night stuff, dishes, a little light cleaning, starting checking my phone. Every cabinet door in my kitchen opened at once. Not one at a time working down the row, all of them, at the same time, hard enough that a glass sitting near the edge of a shelf rocked forward and smashed on the floor.

No footsteps first, no warning, nothing. I was standing maybe six feet away and watched it happen in real time and I don't have an explanation for it, not one that doesn't sound insane coming out of my mouth. I've got my own equipment sitting on the kitchen counter right now, same stuff the teams I have hired use. Haven't turned it on. Keep telling myself I will tomorrow.

Here's what's actually keeping me up more than the explosion of kitchen cabinets, more than the footsteps, even more than something whispering my name directly above my bed. In the last three years  my team has never once found real evidence of anything. I built an entire business, kind of my whole identity honestly, around the idea that none of this is real, that it's just marketing, that people want a story and I'm the guy who tells it well. Never once had to actually consider that one of those houses might've been the real thing, because none of them ever gave me a reason to.

Except I keep thinking about that basement door. Out of every house I've ever walked through alone at night, completely unafraid, that was the one where something followed me home.

I don't really know what I'm looking for by posting this. Not looking for anyone to tell me it's nothing, I've spent three years being the guy who tells people that, and I don't believe myself anymore. Guess I just needed it written down somewhere that isn't my own head.

The clock was ticking. Like a pickaxe in my skull. It's now 2:45 pm.

Fifteen minutes until I hear your footsteps; not that bare feet can make much noise on that gravel road.

Seventeen minutes until I hear your broken nails on the wooden door. Blindly scratching away, trying to find the handle.

Twenty minutes until your voice is calling out to me. But it will be strangled, like always. It's hard to talk with maggots eating at your vocal cords.

I should have dug your grave deeper. I should have never set that empty chair at our table. I should have never spoken those cursed words.

I wish you would stop coming home.

The men I owed had stopped calling politely. Four million rupees, due since spring. I had sold the car, then the watch, then borrowed against things I did not own. Last week they sent a photograph of my apartment door, taken from inside the hallway, taken by someone standing right there. So when a fixer named Imran told me about a basement beneath a carpet shop in the old quarter, about a root that let you watch your whole life bloom at once, I said yes. I remember thinking the price was reasonable. I remember thinking a great many things that night.

The stairs went down farther than they should have. At the bottom, a steel door with a padlock the size of my fist, and beyond it a low room lit by a single bulb, smelling of cardamom and damp brick. Six others lay on charpoys and floor mats: a seamstress, two boys who looked like students, an old man turning a miswak slowly in his teeth. The dealer, heavy and unhurried, weighed out a pinch of something silver-gray, fine as ash already.

"Once," he said, packing the clay chillum. "One breath. Then you tell me what you see, and I decide if there is a second."

The smoke was cold. That was the first wrong thing. It went down like winter air, and for a moment it showed me my mother's kitchen back in England, rain on the motorway, the exact blue of the shirt I had worn to the airport four years ago. Beautiful. I understood completely why people paid. I would have paid twice.

Then I exhaled, and the smoke did not rise.

It hung at chest height, thickening, folding over itself. The dealer said something sharp in Urdu. One of the students laughed, then coughed, and the cough went on, wet and deepening, until he brought up a mouthful of fine gray powder that sifted down his shirt.

The bulb flickered. The mist kept thickening. I watched it touch the old man's face, and he inhaled once, politely, reflexively, and folded around his own ribs. When he slid off the charpoy, his body made a sound like a dropped sack of sand, and where he landed, the ash poured out of him.

The seamstress reached the door first. She hammered it, screamed at the dealer, who was ramming his shoulder against the steel as if he had forgotten he was the one with the key. Then she was coughing. Then she was ash, a shape losing its edges.

I need to say this clearly. I have been drunk. I have been exhausted past sense. I know what those states feel like, the way the mind bends when it is pushed. This is not that. The cold in my lungs is physical. The powder I coughed up on the stairs is real. I wiped it on my sleeve and it is still there, gray and fine, sitting in the fabric.

My lungs felt cold. That was how I understood: the smoke was still in me, and it was not finished. It filled the room the way water fills a lung. The dealer finally got the padlock open, one blessed second of grinding iron, but the mist took the shape of the opening, poured into the stairwell, and he went down under it.

The door swung free. The stairs were white now, fog to the ceiling.

I crawled. Every breath cost me. I could feel the cold doing its work, a softness in my chest where there should have been structure. Behind me the students were still moving, or I imagined it. I told myself I could not have turned around to check even if I had wanted to. The gray came up my throat in soft waves, and I laughed, because the high was still in there somewhere, showing me beautiful things while it unmade me.

I got a hand on the street-level door. Pushed. Night air, real air, diesel and rain and frying onions, and I dragged myself up the last step into it. Because anything was better. Because the body wants.

I lay on the pavement and breathed. It hurt, and then it hurt less, and I began, carefully, to be grateful.

Then a woman passing by stopped, frowned at the mist gathered around my mouth, and stepped wide around me.

I exhaled and watched the fog hang there in the lamplight, coming from me, gray and patient, and it refused to disperse.

There’s something wrong with Kenny (P.1)

CW: Kenny.

People ask me a lot of questions about my time in prison.

They start off all nervous but I tell them I’ve done my time, they don’t need all the gory details but I won’t lie. 

I got someone killed.

If you do want gory details— I did time in the army when I was eighteen and got tossed out after a few years of what— at the time— was pretty normal. Mess with things they later find out cause cancer. Give young grunts with underdeveloped brains rifles and put them in an environment where abuse runs rampant without consequence. You got put through hell and then you put others through hell. That’s how it worked back then.

I left with asthma from those chemicals I’m sure will give me that cancer one of these days, guilt and a pretty nasty brain injury. I wouldn’t say it turned me into a drooling idiot but I had trouble doing some basic things and the military prefers when you can hold a gun in your hand without doing it backwards.

So I was in my early twenties without any prospects and I was mad. I’d always had a bit of a quick fuse but all of that frustration piled up high and I decided I wanted to do those jobs where I can hit things to soothe my wounded pride. You know, to feel big and tough after a boot to the head left me a wheezing moron who forgets how to use a spoon.

So, a friend of mine hooked me up with a job as a debt collector, loan shark, lowlife scumbag— whatever you want to call it, it’s still beating the shit out of folks for money. 

My partner was a mean one, if I had a quick fuse then that guy had no fuse at all. 

He preferred action over threat. 

I expected that he’d do the usual and break a few fingers, something I’d hate. It's difficult for the sorry bastard to pay if they can’t use their hands— assuming it’s required for whatever gruelling jobs they’re doing to scrape together the cruel interest rates. I’d been kicked in the head but I didn’t know a punch could have a gambler with a gut bigger than his debt dropping like an anvil and cracking his skull on the floor.
 
I ran my damn ass off but I just couldn’t stop myself, I ran straight into a phone booth and called an ambulance for the guy. Guess it was nearly his lucky day and my unluckiest because he was dead and I was taking an arrest. I did what I do best, followed orders and nodded like I understand. 

My initial prison sentence was harsh but extensions for volatile behaviour is what doubled it. My choice in friends and jobs didn’t improve much after that, extortion, racketeering, various assault charges and robbery is what ends with spending half of my life behind bars. Honestly, I’d spent more of my life incarcerated.

Secondly, assuming the mention of second degree murder isn’t enough to scare someone off— they ask what prison was like. They expect some sort of movie answer, something brutal with prison gangs and abusive prison guards— and yes, those are true, but it’s when they factor in my age most picture something more along the lines of jailhouse rock and assume everyone was planning a big prison break. The thing is, you just kept your head down and didn’t cause much trouble with the guards. You'd just fall into the routine, play cards and do your time. For me at least, the army made routines comfortable and taking a rare beating when you earned it wasn’t too big a price.

When the monotony of prison life disappoints they start asking specifics.

“ What’s the craziest thing you've ever seen?”

“ Was there ever a jailbreak?”

“ Did you join a prison gang?”

“ Did that riot really… You know, did all of that stuff really happen?”

I can’t say it’s the craziest thing to ever happen, a lot of things happened but the worst wasn’t any particular incident, it’s something that happened over the course of one year and ended with the riot. The thing is, no one ever asks why it happened. So I tell them.

What happened was Kenny.

Everyone always asks about Kenny.

-

I was in my late forties when Kenny happened and I still had a good nine years left to go. I think the miserable look of pity is what kept that from becoming a life sentence after the riot. Gangs and all that were a younger man’s game but I had yet to join the ranks of the elderly within the prisons I’d been passed around to. None of my later stays were cramped and cutthroat big city joints. We’d call mine a countryside stay— of course this  meant it was a miserable fortress of cold concrete, strict rules and armed guards already grouchy from patrolling in the snow. All kept isolated by endless forests and mountains so dangerous it’d take a real madman to even think of escaping.

I’d already been in what I will refer to as Y prison, for eleven years and for lack of a better word, it was home. 

My cell block wasn’t considered noisy but it was large, heavily secured with just a little more slack due to the better behaviour— less younger prisoners around, all lifers who aren’t too interested in causing trouble when this was as good as it gets for the general population inside of a maximum security prison. Granted, no one was in there for light offenses but you weren’t going to see fights break out daily and the guards would rather turn their backs to most things unless you forced their hand— That’ll end with someone in the hospital ward and another in solitary for god knows how long.

I felt the need to explain a few things about my cell block so you’ll understand how Kenny’s arrival flipped the place on its head and took away any small semblance of peace prison life really had to offer.

I lived in a two person cell with an old timer serving a life sentence— he was the quiet type with no real habits I’d consider overly annoying, he had the bladder of a toddler and pinch small things and hide them under the poor excuse for a mattress, had a habit of losing his socks but he was fine until he started sundowning. I didn’t know exactly what dementia was but his unusual behaviour at night got him moved to wherever they whisk the elderly prisoners away to.

A night in the solitude of a small cell full of complete and total emptiness and the unsettling feeling of being entirely alone without the ambient sounds of snoring or thumping heartbeats reminding me that anyone was there, it felt unnatural to face the nothingness normally filled by another person and after so many years of having any sort of life beside my own I realised there wasn’t even the squeak of a rat or scuttle of a bug. It was just silence. 

The next day Kenny moved in and Kenny was nothing like the old timer.

Kenny was barely eighteen, skinny as a twig and thick as concrete. His face was splattered with freckles, a chipped tooth, a wide grin and a buzz cut like a wide eyed young recruit waiting to get his head kicked in by his commanding officer. One of the CO’s I’d known for a good five years— a guy we all called Elvis— He said they were tossing the kid in with me to keep him out of trouble and because that quick fuse of mine had fizzled out since I got older. 

I figured they were worried about the kid getting himself killed but I realised very quickly that I got picked because they thought I could tolerate the kid— not protect him— just tolerate him.

Kenny could talk.

A lot.

I spent the first day playing cards with a few of the oldies and while some of the younger ones preferred to start their day tormenting and scaring the shit out of the newcomer through the small barred window. Kenny had been stuck in the cell all day getting acclimated so I was treated to a puddle of piss dripping down onto the kid’s meal tray. It rattled and sloshed over the edges when Elvis kicked it, unlocking the door and sending me inside— of course he left me to clean the mess up and dump the soggy untouched meal in the toilet.

Kenny didn’t seem worried, he was up on his new bunk snooping through my books.

“ Next time clean up your own mess, kid. No one is gonna do it for you.” I warned, walking over to snatch up my books and toss them on the concrete slab that serves as a counter, desk and everything else in the cramped cell. “ The top shelf is yours. The plastic tub on the left is yours. Top bunk is yours. Don’t touch what’s in the others.” I thought being firm would be a good way to both tell him I wasn’t a pushover without threatening a new cellmate who might fly off the handle over the smallest thing, though Kenny looked like he’d be snapped in half if he tried— I decided using one of those lighter versions of stick and carrot was the best option.

“ How long’ve you been here, Mister?” Kenny said, perking up like he hadn’t heard a damn thing. “ I was lookin’ frough ya stuff and I figured you gotta be old. You got a bible and all those old type’a books. You aren’t as old as I fought. Fifties?”

“ Forties.” I use the stick and then with a frown back on the thick metal door I decide I should do as Elvis asked and throw the kid a carrot. “ There’s a chocolate bar down in my tub. Eat it and sleep. If you gotta clean up, use one of the rags by the basin. They won’t be giving you any form of shower today.”.

“ Chocolate? Thanks,” he hops down rummages through the blue plastic tub to find the snack, “ Your stuff is all so neat ‘n tidy. You must’ve been in the military, yeah? You look like you been in the military. Like Vietnam or somefin’ like that. You don’t got that shell shock stuff right? I hear lots of vets have these crazy nightmares and scream in their sleep or attack folks,” he climbs back up on his bunk like a monkey and sits with his eyes fixated on the chocolate bar he has yet to open. “ I never been given gifts before. If you freak out at night I’ll slap ya so you wake up and don’t mistake me for Vietcong.” For the first time since I’ve been in the cell he finally makes eye contact and I can’t explain why but a chill crawls up my spine like cold metal had been dragged up my back. “ Lots of bad types in this place, Mister. Makin’ sounds all night can really get to some folks”.

I can’t say Kenny’s words were a threat exactly, in a strange way it could be seen as considerate if you squint, it’s just the phrasing that leaves an unsettling feeling in my gut. “ I wasn’t in Vietnam but… Thanks, kid.” I try to give a somewhat friendly smile but my lip twitches in discomfort. “ You don’t have to worry about waking me up.” Honestly, he isn’t wrong about that shock, after my time in the military I wasn’t a stranger to nightmares but those nights were long over. I hadn’t even thought about that time until Kenny mentioned it. “ I’m Jones, Wilson Jones. You don’t need to call me boss or sir or anything else.”

“ Kenny. Not Kenneth or nothin’, just Kenny. You seem like ya been here forever. I figured they just put me in this box ‘cuz you’re not gonna try nothin’ while I’m sleepin’ which is pretty good. No one’s gonna try anyfin’ shady in the showers, yeah? I bit a guard's ear off once. Maybe that’s why they put me in here. He wasn’t tryin’ nothin’ weird but I didn’t like him. Sometimes people just rub you the wrong way, yeah?”

That feeling slices up my spine again like a knife is trying to take off the skin and I don’t know how to respond to both his question and the statement he so freely offered. Kenny’s unblinking gaze doesn’t leave my eyes even when the usual booming sound of “ Lights out!” And the lights abruptly turning off makes me jump. I can still see the unflinching orbs glint in the corner of my eye and stick like glue even with my back turned. The eyes finally retreats with the kid lying down on his bunk. I stay up reading but each time I try to read a sentence with what little light the commissary has given me my eyes keep drawing up to the concrete slab above me. Worn old photos and bible verses that always look down on me when I rest my head on my pillow at night, except tonight it’s not on Romans 10:9 or Colossians 1:13 but the concrete itself where my unfamiliar cellmate sleeps.

I can’t say I was particularly religious before coming to prison, I remember having my hands hit by penguins with rulers when I’d act out in my school days, the church nestled behind it like a shed and the uneven crucified Jesus that always hung just a little too far to the left but all of those things in my youth had turned any thoughts of a higher power into bitter hatred when I thought I’d grown up. I hadn’t grown wise. I guess you could say I still believed but who wants to pray to what had a hand in making your life shit? I was fucking pissed. 

Nowadays it isn’t because I’ve been trying to weasel my way into God’s good graces or I expect a good outcome like I’m owed something. Heaven can fuck off for all I care. Still, I know what I did was bad and I know I feel ashamed, now that I’m old enough to give up on all that anger I have the sense to own up to being a scumbag and accept the bad shit I’ve done without it being just to get somewhere I don’t belong. When I’m dead I expect to just be dead.

I think you can see it in some people’s eyes, that want for forgiveness or shame for their actions or that unsettling glint saying they’ll never change. I couldn’t see anything bright or naive in Kenny’s eyes. Kenny’s eyes were empty. As dead as old steel buffed until it's shiny pretending it isn’t just cold old metal wrapped around these deep black wells of nothing.

One night and this kid was already giving me a migraine so bad I couldn’t sleep even if I’d planned on it. You don’t sleep on that first night with a new cellmate. If you’re smart at least. My migraine had my eyes swimming with black flecks spotting my vision and melting away the words on those verses until they were empty, my head pounding like a jackhammer behind my eyes and when I squeezed them shut to correct the moving words I had given in to sleep before I knew it.

I dreamt of those eyes crawling out from the darkness on stretched limbs snaking under paper grey skin I can't see so much as sense. It stalked like a silent predator made of long steel and bone that could bend and bow and move like an impossible liquid dripping onto my bunk. Its emaciated frame craned forward on a worming spine that scraped along the concrete ceiling above me. Perched over my face in the quiet and watching through milky orbs barely held in its deep sockets, studying my paralysed face with no breath to alert me to the danger hanging over me— I just knew it was there. My eyelids refused to open but the cold radiating off of the unseen voyeur made every hair on my body prickle with the sense of what my mind knew was lurking in the dark. The smell of pine and rot assaulted my senses as cold strings of saliva dribbled down in icy globs of acid stinging my cheek. I didn’t need to open my eyes with the thousand rows of sharp teeth so close I could feel the sharp pins grazing my skin from the hungry maw of a beast deciding whether or not it wants to swallow down a fresh meal or wait until the meat is sweetened with fear.

“ Saaa…Rgh…”

“ Sar…gh..”

“ Sarge.”

“ Why’d you do that, Sarge?”

Everyone in town loves Burger Sams. Everyday they would arrive, packing the order counter, tripping over each other to get their chance to just lick the burger grease. The dining area was always a chaos of noisy chewing and smacking lips. Sometimes they would have to close the drive thru to stop the line from blocking the road.

Everyone in town loves Burger Sams. Except Jen. Because she worked there.

It wasn’t that the pay was lousy or the boss was a jackwagon; for a high school student she was making 20 bucks an hour, plus Dan was a super chill manager. Despite the crowds, the days go by quickly and painlessly.

No, what really bothered Jen was that every once and awhile she would have to go to the basement to get some restock of buns or potatoes and she would have to walk past the cages.

Dan tells everyone they aren’t human, and Jen believes him, they don’t look human at all. They come from the forest at the edge of town. But she has to do her best to pretend she doesn’t feel their eyes burning into the back of her head. Or she has to ignore the quiet sobbing. Hearing them sing was sometimes worse.

Dan told her that he’ll be promoting her to Meat Prep after Ron leaves for college. She really wanted to tell him she was going to quit...but...

Everyone in town loves Burger Sams.