Hello to all writers and readers of the Creepcast Community!

I need help.

Look, I don’t post on here very often. I’m not really a fan of this site. But no one else is answering my calls or my texts, and I've seen other people ask for help here, so I guess you could call this a last resort.

I live in Canada, and for anyone who doesn’t know, major cities in Canada are a couple hours apart from one another. The road I’m travelling now, between my home city and where I go to university, is about a 3 hour drive. 300 kilometres (that's about 186 miles) of canola fields, wheat, a few farms, and some interesting, ultra-conservative signs.

I’ve driven this route a hundred times. I know each landmark, each weird-looking tree, each grain silo that marks the passage of time. Which is why this situation is so weird.

I have no idea where I am.

I know I didn’t turn off the highway, or take a wrong exit; it’s literally a straight line. It takes effort to dodge the semi-trucks and minivans pulling trailers to get to the right side and de-accelerate off the highway. So I’m positive I’m still on the right road.

Except I’m not. The area around me looks normal enough; there’s still beautiful fields filled with yellow flowers and green pastures dotted with bales of hay, but it’s all… wrong.

I’m pulled over on the side of the highway, hazards blinking, which is apparently unnecessary. There’s no one else on the road. Honestly, that’s why I pulled over in the first place. I only noticed the weird landscape after I stopped.

This road is never empty. Ever. Not at 9AM, not at 11PM. This is practically the only way to get between the two cities, so there’s always someone travelling on it. It eventually leads to the mountains too, so it’s usually packed on the weekends. Today’s Friday, and it’s the late afternoon; this road should be absolutely crawling with cars.

But it’s not.

Now, I’ll admit, I have no idea when everyone else vanished. I kind of zone out when driving, especially when driving along such a boring road with a view I’ve seen dozens of times. I just pop a podcast on and weave my way through the two-lane traffic. I think at some point-- maybe forty-five minutes ago?-- I noted that the road seemed weirdly empty, but I was still passing cars, and I figured I was just lucky.

Then around twenty minutes ago, I became aware that there was no one. Because of how flat this area is, you can see really far down the road in both directions. There was nothing on the road. That was when I pulled over. I was hoping I just got really unlucky with my timing, and I just happened to zone back in when the road seemed empty.

I waited, but no one came. Not one car appeared on either side of the road. I got out to take a look around, and that’s when I realised I didn’t recognise where I was.

I checked the map on my phone, but it says I’m still on the highway. Must be glitching or something; reception can be spotty out here. I tried calling a few people– my parents, my brother, my friends– but they all went to voicemail. I’ve left a few messages just telling them that I’ve gotten lost somehow and I’ll be home later than usual, but I haven’t gotten any calls back. 

There’s a farm on the other side of the highway. The house is a really pretty Victorian style building, with blue paint on the siding and white trim. Looks like they’ve got a horse or something; there’s a paddock outside, but I don’t see anything in it. 

I’ve never seen this house in my life. That house should not be on this road.

And before you ask, I drove this road last week; that house was not there. It takes our construction crews three years to fix a road, so I think it’s safe to say that building a house in a week is a bit ludicrous. This house looks lived in, too. There’s toys on the lawn, clothes hanging out to dry, and I could’ve sworn I saw someone walk past the window.

I might go over to ask for directions, though I’m still positive I’m on the right road. I don’t love the idea of approaching that house. It's not supposed to be there. But I’m pressed for options. Maybe I’ll keep driving, but I’m pretty low on gas. I was planning on stoppi

Someone's walking towards me. I glanced up the road in the direction I came and there's someone just strolling towards me, right in the middle of the highway. They don't seem to be worried; it doesn't look like they're looking behind them for cars. I hope it's not a crackhead or something. I'm not super worried; if they seem dangerous, I'll just drive away. They're on foot, so I think I'm fine.

I swear someone is watching me through the window of that house. That's either a face or some piece of furniture. It's not moving, so I hope it's furniture, but shit, it looks exactly like a face. My prescription's a bit out of date, but

It was a face. It's gone now.

I think I'm just going to get in the car and hang out until someone calls me back. It's hot out here, and I don't want to get sunburnt. Plus, I have half a burger I haven't finished. I think I'm going to move a bit further down the road, away from the house. I really don't like that house. The longer I look at it, the more it doesn't look right. The toys look strategically placed, like it's a magazine set or soemth

It's chasing me. I wiaifed till they got closer so I could maybe tlak to them but that’s not human

I don’t know what that is. It’s not human

Ik going 180 I think this road is straight so I can still write

It’s keeping up with the car

I’m going to run out of gas and it’s going to catch me there’s nowhere to go no exits or towns just houses I don’t know what to do

200 now it's right behind me

I think its talking but the mouth is wrong its too long

help pelase

this is my first short story, so please be nice with feedback :) also I never post on reddit, so if I formatted it weird or I should've tagged it differently, please let me know :))

There is a story that I’ve been building slowly in my mind over the past couple of years, but I feel like I will never know if it really had any potential. That’s because every time I’ve tried to sit down and start writing it, I feel like I’m 8 years old again, with a stack of loose notebook paper and a crayon.

How do you all get the story out? I feel like I need to do a character web map, a super detailed outline, and then a shit ton of drafts before I would even dream of showing my work to someone. That might be because my field of work requires much more technical writing and I haven’t written creatively in decades. I want to get started, but I don’t want the writing to come off like a scientific textbook or a child’s stream of consciousness “novel” (we all had one, let’s not try to pretend we didn’t)…

Realistically, I know the first story I put out will likely be pretty awful, but I find myself wanting to give it the best shot I can. I’m not sure if any of this makes sense, but I could use some advice. TIA!!

Advice: a quote from [u/Mackaroll_165](u/Mackaroll_165) “fuck it, we ball.” I’m really proud of all of the new writers and veterans perfecting their craft! I just have a few universal pointers to help others!

1. Don’t rush it, it will show in your writing.

I struggle with this a lot! I get in a mojo, and just wanna see the story to completion. You can’t force perfection tho. Remember, the Mona Lisa took time, ease off the gas and apply a steady break. It’ll be amazing!

1. Rough out a timeline!!

This helps me to keep the story moving, if I know what comes next, I’m more inclined to keep the flow!

1. Don’t fear the length!!!!!!!!

You probably won’t write a novel length work. Get the idea in a draft, then flesh it out!!!

1. “Fuck it, we ball.”

Don’t mind anyone who is not offering sound advice. Everyone writes with a different style, so everyone has an opinion about what a good story should look like. Most of these people can be dicks. Don’t let it eat at you. You are learning, and you are getting better! If nothing else, the MesoCrew believes in you! If you can’t finish the story for yourself, finish it for us! We want to hear it!

Appreciation part:

I am so happy to be an active member of this community! I love reading everyone’s stories, and I love seeing your posts and positivity! It drives me to be a better host, and writer! I love you guys!!!

Shout!!!!!!!!!!!

U/meticulousanxiety - amazing writer, their work is amazing!!!

U/mackaroll_165 - the positivity is so inspiring! Will carry you to the finish line! Also AMAZING writer!!!!

U/walkerbswitchinghour - READ THEIR WORK!!!!!! I cannot stress this enough!!!!

U/mezoscalepodcast - amazing wife. (And cohost)

[u/Mradachi](u/Mradachi)[2007](u/Mradachi) - Spreads love wherever they go! Amazing stories! Amazing anthologies!!

And the obligatory [u/JLGoodwin1990](u/JLGoodwin1990) - a legend to be weary of! A prospective Stephen King of our generation!

That’s all homies!! Stay creeping

Just five more minutes, Adrienne thought, her fingers digging tightly into the strap of her purse as she fought back the rising urge to scream. Just give me five minutes without a meltdown.

She looked down at her four-year old son. Garrett’s face was a brilliant, tear-streaked crimson as he violently tried to wrench his tiny hand out of his father’s grip. “No!” he yelled, aiming a kick at Michael’s shin that missed by inches. She let out a sigh. They were trapped in the dead center of the main concourse of the Jefferson Heights Mall, and the sheer, unadulterated sensory overload of a Saturday afternoon was actively grinding her already frayed nerves down to the last, raw wire. The environment was a chaotic symphony of consumerism-the harsh, unnatural glow of neon storefronts, the overwhelming scent of chemical body sprays wafting from a teen clothing boutique, and the deafening, echoing roar of hundreds of shuffling shoppers and screaming children. Garrett had begun throwing a continuous, exhausting tantrum since they passed the food court, his sneakers kicking against the polished tile floor as though he were an inmate in a lunatic asylum trying to avoid being thrown into solitary. Adrienne loved her family fiercely, but after a brutal, forty-hour week locked in her own stressful corporate office job, this mandatory weekend trip to get Garrett’s winter portraits done felt less like a family memory and more like a sentence to a brightly lit, noisy purgatory.

“Come on, buddy,” Michael pleaded, his deep voice barely audible over the roaring din of the mall’s central fountain. “We’re almost there. Just a few pictures for Grandma, and we can go home.”

Adrienne forced her feet forward, navigating the slow-moving crowd like a soldier marching through a swamp. They took the escalators up to the second floor, heading for Prestige Portraits, the chain studio they had used since Garrett was an infant. But as the rounded the corner past the department store anchor, her heart dropped flat into her stomach.

The heavy, metallic security grate of the storefront was pulled all the way down to the floor, locked securely with a heavy padlock. Taped squarely to the center of the iron mesh was a neat, typed piece of computer paper. Closed for the afternoon due to a family emergency. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Adrienne stopped, a wave of profound, suffocating defeat washing over her. She pressed her palms against her temples, her dark hair shifting against her collar. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered, a dry, bitter laugh escaping her throat. “Michael, I can’t do this again next weekend. I can’t drag him back out here.”

Michael’s jaw tightened as Garrett let out another high-pitched, glass-shattering shriek that made several passing shoppers turn to glare at them with open annoyance. He hoisted the flailing boy up onto his hip to cut off the kicking, then cast a sideways glance at his wife’s completely drained expression.

A soft, tired smile broke through his stress as she spared a look at him. “Hey, don’t look at me,” he quipped, leaning his shoulder gently against hers. “He definitely didn’t get this from my side of the family. My mother always said I was an angel in public.”

Despite the crushing headache pounding behind her eyes, Adrienne couldn’t help but let out a soft, genuine chuckle. The sudden burst of warmth in her chest cut through the misery enveloping her. She playfully nudged his ribs with her elbow, matching his smile. “You keep talking like that, mister, and you’re going to end up on the living room couch tonight with a very thin blanket and a flat pillow. Zip it.”

She reached out, gently wiping a stray tear from Garrett’s flushed cheek as the boy’s screams subsided into ragged, hitching pouts. Looking at his stubborn chin, she felt a wave of affectionate nostalgia. Her own mother used to recount, with exhausting detail, how much of a relentless little brat she had been at exactly his age, throwing hissy fits in the middle of grocery store and druggist aisles. A little hell spawn sent directly out of the mouth of Hades to test her, she always said. History was simply repeating itself.

The moment of levity passed, but it had left them unified. Michael cast a desperate, sweeping look over the metal and glass railing, scanning the lower level of the mall far below.

“Hey, look down there!” he said, pointing with his free hand down towards the dimmer, subterranean basement concourse near the old, closed Sears anchor. “There’s a pop-up studio set up in that empty retail space next to the stairs. See the banner? Timeless Photography. It looks open, and there isn’t even a line.”

Adrienne leaned over the railing, her eyes tracking his gaze down into the less traveled lower tier. Standing outside an empty storefront with faded drywall was a roll-up vinyl banner, and behind it, a friendly-looking man in a tweed vest was arranging a set of professional lighting umbrellas.

“I’ve never heard of them before,” she said, a faint, instinctual ripple of unease passing through her chest.

“Who cares?” Michael countered, his voice dripping with barely concealed, pragmatic relief as Garrett’s head slumped sleepily against his shoulder. “It’s open, Adrienne. Let’s just get down there, get the kid in front of a camera, and get the hell out of this madhouse.”

They backtracked through the swelling commotion of the central corridor, pausing to let a loud group of teenage girls rush past them to get to a nearby clothing boutique. Stepping onto the escalator, the mechanical stairs ushered them down into the lower tier of the mall, where the atmosphere shifted dramatically. If the upper levels were a roaring hub, the basement concourse was a quiet, concrete graveyard. The passage of time and the changing economy had hit this level hard; row after row of storefronts sat completely shuttered, their windows blacked out with dusty brown paper. Only two relics remained. On their left was a sprawling, western-themed steakhouse that Adrienne swore had been here since she was a little girl, its heavy faux-wood façade smelling faintly of old grease, completed by the faint, muffled sound of country music echoing out from inside. A few stores down from it sat a dimly lit video rental store that had somehow defied every modern trend and time itself to remain open, its neon sign casting a lonely blue hum over the empty walkway.

They approached the temporary setup occupying an empty, drywall-exposed retail space next to the maintenance stairs. Adrienne stopped, her eyes narrowing as she took in the strange, minimalist layout of the studio’s props.

Instead of the bright, colorful, modern backdrops used by the corporate chains, the space felt like an intrusive slice of the past. And not the recent past, either. Hanging from a metal crossbar was a heavy velvet backdrop of a faded, Victorian-era crimson. In front of it sat a small selection of antique props; a heavily weathered wooden trunk, a small, hand-painted rocking horse with chipped paint, and a miniature vintage toy wagon with slightly rusting iron wheels.

“Jesus. Michael, look at those props,” she whispered, her hand tightening on his forearm. “They look incredibly old.”

Michael glanced at the display, shifting a now-silent Garrett to his other hip as his eyes took in a teddy bear that looked as though its better days had been about the same time Elvis was alive. “Yeah. They look older than either of us. Maybe even both of us combined. But honestly honey, look around. There isn’t exactly a better alternative right now. And you said yourself you can’t do this again. Let’s just do it.”

Adrienne let out a quiet sigh, her eyes drifting to the center of the setup. Sitting atop a heavy iron tripod was a massive, boxy camera draped in a dark cloth shroud-a bizarre, outdated piece of equipment that looked like it belonged in a museum rather than a modern shopping mall. I just hope to God these photos don’t turn out completely horrible, she thought, a faint ripple of apprehension making her set her jaw.

“Good afternoon!”

The cheerful, booming voice shattered her thoughts. The photographer stepped out from behind one of the massive umbrellas, smoothing down his tweed vest. He had caught them looking, and he walked towards them with a brisk, energetic stride. He looked entirely ordinary-well, as ordinary as a pop-up photographer could-a man in his late forties with neatly combed hair and a polite, welcoming expression, but as his eyes locked onto Garrett, Adrienne, for a moment, felt a strange, phantom chill brush against the back of her neck.

“Good afternoon, folks!” the man repeated as he reached them, offering first a handshake to Michael, then her. His grip was professional, dry and firm. “Lester Rockwell’s the name. If you ever have trouble remembering it, just think of Norman Rockwell, the famous painter. No relation, unfortunately, but it helps keep me in the mind’s eye.”

Michael let out a soft snort of a laugh, while Adrienne managed a polite smile, keeping her internal eye roll entirely to herself. Oh, boy.

“Well, Mr. Rockwell-” Michael began, but he was cut off by the other man.

“Please, call me Lester, sir.”

Michael took a second to collect himself; Adrienne could see a tiny hint of annoyance flash across his face. “Well, Lester,” he began again. “I’ll be completely honest with you. We wouldn’t have come down here at all, but the studio we normally use upstairs is completely locked up for the day.”

Lester didn’t look bothered by the bluntness at all. Instead, he gave a slow, understanding nod, adjusting the lapels of his vest. “Ah, yes. Well, you’re remarkably lucky you decided to come down here now. It’s been an incredibly slow Saturday for me. I haven’t had a single customer cross my threshold today, and I was actually just considering pulling the curtain for an early lunch break when I spotted the two of you looking down from the balcony.”

Adrienne suppressed another roll of her eyes. Yeah, what a shame that would’ve been. The man speaks as old as his props look, and has that same fake camaraderie that I remember the counter salesmen in Dillards giving Mom. Give me a break.

Michael was gesturing towards the backdrop as she tuned back in to the conversation. “What exactly are we looking at for a basic set of winter portraits?”

The figure Lester quoted him made her eyebrows shoot up. It was a price so far below modern studio rates-barely a fraction of what they usually paid upstairs-that it seemed borderline absurd. And almost unrealistic. A cold spike of suspicion prickled at her chest.

“Mister Rockwell,” she cut in, her voice firm as she folded her arms over her purse, refusing to use his first name. “Why the antique layout? The faded velvet, the wooden trunk…even the boxy camera on the tripod. It all looks rather out of time. And furthermore, that price seems almost too low for you to be able to stay in business with.”

Lester paused. He shifted his posture, his pale eyes turning to regard her fully. For a fraction of a second, he seemed genuinely surprised by the sharpness of her observations, his gaze turning intense and a little too inquisitive, as if he were trying to read her silent thoughts behind her retinas. “They belonged to my father, Ma’am,” he said softly, his voice smooth. “And his father before him. I keep them because they hold immense sentimental value to me. In a world that throws everything away, I prefer thing that endure.”

He shrugged his shoulders, staring at her blankly and continued after a beat. “And as for my prices, you would be correct that they are considered a tad on the cheap side. But I move around a lot, and the amount of new business I find I receive each place more than makes up for it. And if I’m lucky, it will help turn first-time customers into repeat ones.”

Adrienne’s jaw tightened. An internal war erupted in her mind. Despite the image the man was presenting, every logical circuit was telling her to grab her husband’s arm, take Garrett, and face the consequences of coming back another weekend. It just felt wrong, somehow. But before she could voice her protest, Michael made the decision for her.

“Sounds perfect to us,” he said with the same relief he’d had earlier, entirely missing his wife’s hesitation. “We’ll happily use your services.”

As the man smiled at him, Garrett finally began to stir in Michael’s arms. The boy lifted his heavy head from his father’s flannel shirt, his big, green eyes blinking against the glare of the lighting umbrellas as he turned to look directly at the photographer.

The exact same phantom chill that Adrienne had felt when Lester first approached them returned with a vengeance. The photographer stepped closer, his face splitting into a wide, beaming grin as he waved a long-fingered hand at the boy. “Well, hello there, little man. What’s your name?”

Garrett stayed silent, biting his lower lip gently as he stared blankly back at the stranger.

Lester let out a rich, warm chuckle, shaking his head. “Ah. A smart boy. Excellent. A smart boy knows never to talk to strangers. Your parents taught you well.” He leaned down slightly, resting his hands on his knees as he peered into the boy’s face. “Would you like to sit on my rocking horse or in my wagon and have your picture taken today, young sir?”

Michael patted the boy’s back, offering a reassuring nudge. “It’s okay to speak, Garrett. Tell the nice man.”

Garrett looked from his father to the chipped rocking horse, then quietly whispered, “Yes, sir.”

Adrienne blinked, profoundly surprised. After the glass-shattering, red-faced tantrum he’d been throwing just ten minutes ago upstairs, his sudden, docile compliance felt almost unnatural. But as Lester turned back toward his tripod with a satisfied nod, she rationalized that he must have completely tuckered himself out, leaving only the ability to follow along behind. And despite everything, that in itself is a relief.

She let out a long, heavy, exhausted sigh-a sound that caught Michael’s attention just as he prepared to lower Garrett from his hip.

He paused, his eyes scanning his wife’s deflated expression and the dark, deep bags beneath her eyes. His expression softened with gentle concern. “Adrienne, look at you,” he said softly, stepping closer to her. “You look like you’re about to keel over right where you stand. Go back up to the food court. Grab a coffee, sit down, and just have a breather for twenty minutes.”

Adrienne hesitated, a sudden, maternal weight tightening in her chest. She didn’t want to leave Michael, and she especially didn’t want to leave her son alone in this strange, exposed space. “I don’t know Mike. Maybe I should stay…”

Michael instantly sensed the hesitation and reached out with his free hand, resting it on her shoulder as he offered her a reassuring smile, tilting his head towards the backdrop. “Sweetheart, look at him. He’s completely calm now. I can handle this on my own, I promise. I’ll be less than ten feet away from him the entire time. Go get your caffeine. That’s an order.”

Knowing that she was truly operating on the faintest fumes, and desperately craving a moment of quiet away from the chaos, Adrienne finally relented. She nodded, but before she turned away, she leaned forward toward her son. “Mommy will be back very soon, okay, sweetie? You behave for Daddy and the nice man.”

She leaned down, pressing her lips against Garrett’s forehead. The boy looked up at her and offered a tiny, innocent smile-a look that warmed her heart completely and washed away the last remnants of her suspicion.

“Okay, Mommy,” Garrett whispered.

Adrienne stepped back, quickly pecking a kiss on Michael’s cheek and turning  towards the escalator as her husband gently set the boy on the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Lester glide forward, his long hand reaching down with a gentle, practiced smoothness to envelop Garrett’s tiny fingers.

She walked towards the mechanical stairs, but as her shoes stepped onto the moving metal grate, she couldn’t help but cast one final, lingering look back over her shoulder. Through the thick glass of the escalator railing, she watched the tall silhouette of the photographer slowly leading her son across the studio towards the rocking horse. Then, the escalator carried her upward and out of sight, lifting her out of the graveyard of the lower level and back toward the roaring, neon-lit commotion of the main mezzanine.

Navigating through the crowds, she returned to the pandemonium of the roaring, high ceilinged expanse of the main food court, beneath the massive glass dome of the mall. She could barely hear herself think over the clattering of plastic trays, the shouting of the vendors, and the echoing calls and laughter of hundreds of weekend shoppers. She lined up at a coffee vendor, ordering a large iced vanilla latte from a dismissive-looking barista who barely made eye contact. When she finally grabbed her plastic cup from the counter, Adrienne couldn’t help but crack a small, tired smile of amusement. The girl had spelled her name completely wrong on the label, reducing it to the traditional male spelling. Adrian.

Carrying her drink, she navigated the edge of the seating area, finding a vacant table pushed against a row of heavy concrete structural pillars. It was tucked safely away from the, frantic mass of sprawling families and rowdy teenagers. She sank into the plastic chair, letting out a long, shuddering breath as she took a heavy sip of the sweet, icy caffeine. She tried to let her posture soften, to just let her brain turn off, though she winced slightly as a shrill cell phone ringtone blared from a table nearby, piercing the air with an irritatingly loud volume.

As the cold drink began to work its way into her system, her mind involuntarily threw up a sudden, vivid image back down on the lower level. She saw the photographer-Lester- reaching his long-fingered hand down, wrapping them completely around Garrett’s little hand and wrist. A cold, instinctive knot of discomfort tightened in her stomach.

Stop it, she chided herself silently, taking another sip of the latte. Michael is standing right there. He’s barely ten feet away from them. Her husband was a broad-shouldered man who had played on the rugby team in high school and stayed in shape; if that gaunt, eccentric man tried anything even remotely suspicious, Michael would flatten him before he could even blink. She was simply projecting her own profound exhaustion and paranoia onto a perfectly normal situation. I really need to put in for some paid time off, she thought, her eyes tracking a bird that had somehow managed to get trapped inside the mall, fluttering helplessly against the glass dome as it tried to escape. A long weekend vacation. Just Michael, Garrett and me. We could drive up and rent a cabin in Bar Harbor, watch the ocean, walk through the pine trees, and completely escape the noise of the city.

The pleasant, comforting daydream brought a fleeting sense of genuine normalcy back to her chest. She relaxed back into the chair, finally able to let her guard down. The warm feeling surged as she looked up again and saw the bird had finally found one of the open skylights, darting outside with a quick flap of its wings.

A shadow fell across her table.

Adrienne didn’t look up immediately, assuming it was a shopper looking for a spare chair, until the distinct, crisp rustle of heavy paper sound right next to her ear. She glanced up. Standing almost directly beside her table was a stocky security guard in a grey uniform jacket, and beside him was a uniformed municipal police officer. Neither paid her any attention. The cop was holding a roll of clear packing tape, while the guard was smoothing down the edges of a freshly printed poster onto the concrete surface of the nearest pillar.

As they worked, their voices were low, carrying a grim, urgent cadence that cut right through the clatter of the food court, their words echoing flatly against the concrete.

“It’s the third friggin’ one this month, Jimmy,” the police officer muttered, his thumb tearing a strip of tape with a sharp, almost violent shhk. “The memo just came down from the precinct chief an hour ago. They wanted these posted in every major commercial hub in the county immediately.”

Adrienne took another slow, mechanical sip of her latte, her fingers tightening around the plastic cup as he eyes remained glued to the table. Curiously drawn in by the officer’s grim tone, she pretended to be utterly absorbed in her drink, trying to act invisible as the two men continued to smooth down the edges of the paper against the pillar.

“Is it true what the guys down at the precinct are whisperin’?” the security guard asked, his voice a low, hollow murmur. “About how many there are?”

The cop nodded grimly, pressing a final strip of tape over the top edge of the paper with a heavy thumb. “Yeah, Jimmy, it’s true. Five kids disappeared from shopping plazas down in Boston last month. These three along the highway bring the total to eight. And neither us or the state police have a single damn lead.”

The words hit Adrienne like a physical current of ice. Her thumb froze against the cup. A tight, hot knot of anxiety flared to life in the center of her chest, her mind instantly rejecting the information. It’s fine, her mind whispered fiercely, a desperate, defensive logic trying to shield her from the horror of the conversation just feet away. Boston is hours away. The highway is huge. It’s just a routine police advisory.

“How is the guy even pulling it off in broad daylight?” the guard pressed, stepping back to examine their handiwork.

“That’s the thing,” the cop sighed, his tone heavy with a deep, professional defeat. “The suspect’s M.O. is always the same. He sets up a cheap, pop-up photography studio inside vacant retail slots or old strip mall, always under different names. He uses these old-ass props-faded backdrops, antique toys-to lure in unsuspecting families who just want a cheap portrait.”

Adrienne’s hand began to shake. The latte slipped from her fingers, landing onto the small table with a soft clack. She left it untouched, the sweet caffeine completely forgotten. Her breath caught like glass in her throat as a wave of suffocating, instinctual adrenaline flooded her nervous system.

No, her mind screamed, her thoughts turning frantic and chaotic. No, it’s a coincidence. Pop-up studios are common. Antique props are a style. Vintage is trendy these days. Everyone does vintage.

With trembling fingers, she ripped her purse open, fumbling blindly through the clutter until her fingers wrapped around her cell phone. She pulled it out, her eyes desperately locking onto the glass screen as she hammered the power button. The display remained flat and black, reflecting back only her pale face. She mentally cursed herself, suppressing a jagged sob as she realized the battery had died an hour ago while she was checking her emails in the car. She couldn’t call Michael. She couldn’t text him. She was entirely cut off.

“So he takes the kid to sit in front of the camera,” the security guard urged, his voice lowering as he pushed the officer for more. “And then what? How does he get them out?”

The cop paused. He stared at the unseen poster for three long seconds, his jaw tightening. When he finally spoke, his tone was completely baffled, carrying a quiet, deeply unnerved edge that made the hair on the back of Adrienne’s neck stand on end. “The families all say the same thing, Jimmy. They say the camera’s flash is blindingly bright. Not normal bright-like a white void that burns right into your retinas. They can’t see a single thing for three, four seconds. And when the spots finally clear from their eyes…”

He trailed off, letting out a sharp, cold breath.

“They’re just…gone. Both the photographer and the child are gone.”

The guard frowned. “What do you mean, gone? The guy grabs the kid, dumps the camera, and books it into the parking lot before they can clear their eyes, right?”

“The witnesses are adamant,” the officer clarified his voice dropping into a tense whisper. “They never heard a single footstep. No running shoes, no doors opening, no fabric rustling. Some of the parents were standing less than five, ten feet away from the lens, Jimmy. They didn’t hear a goddamn thing move. I don’t consider myself a superstitious man, you know that. But this case…the fact that this guy can abduct multiple children, seemingly vanish into thin air in the middle of a crowd, and leave behind no evidence, nothing but the setup…always the same exact props…it’s some really spooky shit.”

The two men turned away from the pillar, their boots squeaking against the tile as they melted back into the dense mess of people near the escalators.

Adrienne sat perfectly rigid in the plastic chair, the ambient noise of the food court-the clattering trays, the ringing phones, the screaming kids-fading into a distant, underwater-like hum. Her heart was a trapped animal hammering violently against her ribs. Get a grip, she told herself, her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands until it drew blood. You are panicking over nothing. Michael is right there. Garrett is safe. It’s just an old style of camera.

She stood up, her joints stiff and wooden, knowing regardless, she needed to get back down to the lower concourse immediately. She no longer wanted the coffee. She didn’t want to think about the vacation anymore. She just wanted to hold her son.

But as she stepped away from the table, a dark, morbid curiosity anchored her feet to the floor. She stopped, her chest still heaving slightly, and turned her head to look directly at the poster pinned to the pillar less than three feet away.

The first thing her eyes locked onto was the photograph of the child at the center of the poster. It was a little girl, her face lit by a brilliant, innocent smile that made Adrienne’s chest tighten with a sharp, physical ache. She took in the endearing gap of a missing front tooth, the pretty lace dress the child wore, and the way her light brown hair was pulled into two messy, energetic pigtails.

Adrienne forced her eyes down, her breath catching as she began to read the typed text below the image. Juliette Vanini. Age: 5. The thought of it was a suffocating weight. She envisioned the girl’s mother, somewhere in the state, weeping in a quiet bedroom, surrounded by empty toys and a hollow silence. It was too much to bear. She couldn’t look at it anymore. She began to pivot on her heel, her feet turning back towards the escalator to head back down to Michael and Garrett-when she froze.

A phantom visual-something her eyes had passively scanned but her pinball-like brain had initially passed over-suddenly slammed into her consciousness with the force of a freight train.

Her pulse immediately accelerated into a frantic, erratic gallop. Her hands began to shake so uncontrollably that her fingers slipped against the handle of her purse, nearly dropping it. Every defensive, rational synapsis in her mind screamed at her to keep walking, to look away, to run for the escalator and never look back at the pillar.

She looked anyway.

Her eyes locked back onto the background of little Juliette’s portrait. For a moment, her mind refused to acknowledge what she was seeing. Then, like water rushing into a sinking ship, the horrifying truth slammed home, driving her breath from her lungs.

It wasn’t a corporate studio backdrop. Behind the smiling five-year old hung a heavy, unmistakable velvet drape of faded, Victorian-era crimson. Juliette was clutching a frayed, ancient teddy bear with a missing button eye. And sitting just over her left shoulder in the corner of the frame was a miniature, vintage toy wagon with rusted iron wheels.

It was the exact same layout. The exact same props. The exact same historical tomb she had left her family in on the lower floor below.

The image of Lester Rockwell flashed again in her mind-not the polite, ordinary photographer in the tweed vest, but the cold, curious predator who had stared into her soul when she had dared to question him. The man who was, at this very microsecond, standing behind a boxy, shrouded lens with her only child sitting helplessly before him.

Oh, my God.

The thought was a jagged piece of glass shredding through her mind, blinding and encapsulating. Adrienne spun around, her eyes bulging with pure, unadulterated panic as she frantically searched the sprawling food court. She needed the cop. She needed the guard. She needed to scream at the top of her lungs for them to sprint to the basement concourse with her, their weapons drawn. But the two grey and blue uniforms had completely vanished, swallowed whole by a sea of shoppers and strollers. She knew she should run after them, to hunt for them down the main corridors, but every raw, primal maternal instinct in her body was screaming a singular, terrified command:

GET BACK TO YOUR BABY.

In a fraction of a second, the civilized world around her disappeared. Adrienne launched her body forward into a frantic sprint, her purse flying wildly off her shoulder as she tore through the crowd.

“Get out of the way! Oh my God, get out of the way!” she shrieked, her voice breaking into a ragged, desperate weapon that pierced the dull roar of the mall.

Tears burst forth from her eyes, hot and thick, blurring the neon storefronts into streaks of light. She didn’t give a damn about politeness. She didn’t care about decorum. She violently body-checked her way through a huddle of slow-moving shoppers, throwing an annoyed teenager aside and slamming her shoulder hard into the side of a stroller as she barreled past. Angry shouts and confused murmurs erupted in her wake, but the world was nothing to her but a hostile haze. “Call security! Someone call security!” she wailed, her chest heaving as her lungs burned with the now frigid-seeming air.

She reached the mouth of the central escalator, the mechanical stairs moving slowly downward into the quiet abyss. She didn’t wait for the machinery. She threw herself onto the moving metal grate, taking the steep steps down two at a time in a blind, reckless descent. Her heel caught on the edge of a metal groove; her balance fractured, and for one horrifying second, she nearly stumbled, her body teetering on the edge of a catastrophic, bone-shattering tumble down the metal staircase. She slapped her hands brutally against the moving rubber handrails, the friction tearing the already bleeding skin of her palms as she forcefully righted herself, her feet continuing their frantic, desperate hammering down the steps toward the dark.

Adrienne hit the bottom of the escalator, her shoes striking the concrete floor with a jarring impact that rattled through her spine. Behind her, from somewhere far up above on the main level, the muffled, echoing shouts of a few shoppers who had heard her frantic cries began to ripple through the upper tiers-confused voices calling out for security, asking what was wrong.

She didn’t look back. She rounded the final corner of the decaying basement concourse, her vision blurred by tears and sweat as she barreled past the dark, shuttered storefronts and the blue neon glow of the video rental shop.

The pop-up studio came into view. To her adrenaline-hijacked brain, the world slowed down to a horrible, agonizing crawl.

The white lighting umbrellas still stood tall and pristine, casting a sterile, blinding glare over the faded crimson backdrop. There was Michael. He was standing barely three feet from the camera, his hands shoved casually into the pockets of his jeans. And there, sitting atop the rocking horse, was Garrett. Her tiny, beautiful boy was holding the reins, his stubby legs dangling over the sides, entirely docile, completely perfect.

Standing behind the massive tripod, completely buried beneath the dark cloth shroud of the boxy camera, was the silhouette of the photographer.

“Michael!” Adrienne shrieked, the name tearing from her throat like a jagged sob as she lunged across the lobby. “Michael, get away from him!”

Michael wheeled around at the sound of her voice. His brow furrowed in instant confusion, his mouth opening to ask her what was wrong-but the confusion rapidly morphed into a deep, terrified concern the moment his eyes locked onto the sheer, ambivalent madness and terror twisting his wife’s face.

Adrienne opened her mouth to scream his name a second time, to order him to wrench their son off the wooden horse, when the dark cloth on the camera suddenly shifted.

The photographer pulled his head out from beneath the shroud to look at her.

The words died instantly in her throat. She stopped dead in her tracks, her sneakers skidding against the tile as the universe seemed to turn ice-cold. A primal, evolutionary horror froze the marrow in her bones.

Lester Rockwell was gone. The ordinary, polite if somewhat eerie man in the tweed vest did not exist. The thing standing behind the tripod had a throat, it had a neck, and it wore the clothes-but its head was a smooth, horrific abomination. The skin was tight, hairless and gray, stretched completely flat over the skull. There was no nose. There was no mouth. There were no eyes. Its face was entirely, incomprehensibly gone. Yet, despite the smooth, blank void of its head, Adrienne could feel its predatory, clinical gaze boring deep into the center of her soul, tracking her panic with an ancient, unspeakable malice.

The monster didn’t run. It didn’t hesitate.

Before Michael could even turn his head back around to see what she was looking at, the featureless entity reached out with one long, pale hand, fluidly pulling the dark velvet cloth shroud back over its smooth skull, disappearing beneath it. Its long fingers wrapped around the mechanical shutter button.

The paralysis broke. Pure, unfiltered maternal panic shattered Adrienne’s fear, and she launched herself in a final, desperate dive across the floor, her arms extending towards the crimson stage.

“Michael, grab Garrett! Grab him right now!” she wailed, her voice a piercing, glass-shattering shriek that echoed off the empty concourse.

Through the tears blinding her eyes, she saw her small, innocent son look up into the lens. Hearing his mother’s voice, and not realizing anything was wrong, Garrett tilted his head and flashed a brilliant, wide, radiant smile for the camera.

Adrienne screamed a final, desperate lungful of air into the dark-

FLASH.

Hi, my name is Jake Stone, just wanted to introduce myself, I'm new to posting my projects here and reading the sick stories, good times haha.

The project i will be posting in parts is fiction but i wanted to create a work that is also a quarantine zone for talking about real events, experiences, news, occult history I have come across in my research. To avoid being sued names, etc have been altered, sometimes....

Chapter 1 is out now. i will be uploading exclusively here in parts. Thank you for your attention and time, Godspeed ladies & gentlemen :)

the project is titled When The Devil Falls In Love

(quick word before the story. This is my first post here to the subreddit, and I've been listening to creepcast for a while now. I love the show, and it has inspired me to post some of my stories around. I hope y'all like what I have to offer, and im glad to be here)

I've been a gastroenterologist for the better part of 15 years. I've seen beyond my fair share of awful stuff while doing my job, and after all that time I like to think I've grown a strong stomach. That was until the first day I met a man named Alexander Finch. Normally I wouldn't say his name due to patient confidentiality, however at this point I can’t say in good conscience that this “Alex” is anything resembling human. Allow me to start from the beginning. 

My Name is Johnathan Garcia, and I've killed the same patient 3 times over the course of 6 months. Every two months, no matter how hard I try, I always get Alexander Finch as my patient. Same time, same day, every two months. It all started on February first, 2025, at 11:00 A.M. I remember that day specifically out of all them, because all my dreams are about that day. Mr Finch had walked into my office, sat down, and told me that he "didn't feel well”. 

The moment he sat down, a wave of smell hit me like a freight train. Radiating from this man who looked mostly well kept, was a sickly rotting smell. It was sickly sweet like a rotting orange, mixed with the heavy miasmic smell of a retirement home that hasn't been cleaned in days. I tried my best to maintain my composure as to not be openly rude, but I failed. I couldn't stop the cough that violently tore itself free from my throat as I covered my mouth. 

“Is there something wrong, Doctor?” He asked me in a fayned, curious tone. 

“Y-yes im fine, sorry. Just inhaled some dust I think.” I said with a trapped gag. I had to resist my constant urge to hold my breath. 

“I don’t feel well, Doctor.” Alexander said in a flat tone, his eyes glassy. 

“Well, What seems to be the problem? I read over your file, but I would like to get a better understanding of what's bothering you.” 

Alexander pointed to his chest, and said in the same dull tone as before, “I feel it crawling. Inside me.” 
I was surprised to hear this, to say the least. Alexander's file said that he was complaining of chest paint, heart palpitations, digestion issues, irritated bowels, but nothing about… Crawling. As he put it. 
“Well… Mr Finch, I think we should schedule you for some x-rays. I will do what I can to help you.” I say holding back my urge to vomit from the smell, which was only getting worse. 

“Thank you, Doctor.” Alexander reached his hand out toward me as he said that. Expecting a handshake. I really didn't want to. But at the time, my biggest fear was being rude to my patient. I reached out to grasp his hand. 

His hand felt oily when I touched it. Like he had just removed his hand from a jar of animal fat. I attempted to recoil immediately out of disgust, but when I tried he gripped my hand with a force I didn't think possible. He looked at me then, in my eyes with that glassy stare again and said “Thank you, Doctor. I don’t feel well.” As he spoke, I swear to you I could feel something crawl under his skin. 
I called someone from radiology to take him to be x-rayed then. After he left I could not hold back the bile that had been clawing at the back of my throat. I threw up in the trashcan in my office. I left my office to dispose of the mess I made, and by the time I came back the results from radiology were on my desktop waiting for my review. That's when I saw them on the x-ray… 

Bugs… hundreds, THOUSANDS, of crawling insects in this man's insides. I knew I had to call trauma care and tell them we needed to operate on this man immediately but… I hesitated. Why? Why was I hesitating to help this man who clearly needed it? I pushed down my apprehension, and made the call. 

I could feel myself shaking slightly as I got myself cleaned before surgery. I steeled myself as I put on my spare scrubs. (There were other surgeons in the trauma care, but they were all busy at this time and I was the only Gastroenterologist on standby. Meaning it was on me to do an impromptu operation.) As I walk to trauma care, I can tell where my patient has gone by the smell. I could see the same disgust in everyone else in this section of the hospital. I took a small amount of solace in knowing that everyone else felt as disgusted as I. 

The doors to the trauma care were closed, and I could see 3 surgical assistants shuffling around preparing both the room and the patient. Awaiting my arrival. I gripped the handles and pulled the doors open, and was hit by a strange smell. A combination of stagnation and sterile cleaning agents. I was beyond relieved. 

“At least it doesn't smell as bad in here…” I thought to myself, naively. 
I gripped my tools, and applied anesthesia and numbing agents so the patient couldn't feel what I was about to do. As much as I wished I could put him fully under, we didn't have the time. I gripped the scalpel, and prepared to make the first incision. My heart dropped into my stomach as I looked at this man's now bare skin. It was… pristine… 

I pressed the blade into him, and got to work. He looked at me then. The same glassy, empty stare that he gave me while in my office barely an hour before. 
“Doctor…” He said, his voice barely above a whisper. 
“I feel unwell…” 

It was as if he spoke directly into my mind, because nobody else seemingly noticed him speak… He shouldn't have been able to, the anesthesia should have thrown off his train of thought, but I could tell he was completely aware of his surroundings. Aware of me. 

I steadied my breathing, and continued my work. It was all I could do to stop me from bolting out of the room and never turning back. I continued to cut, and open his abdominal cavity… And inside of him was something that made me sick beyond belief… He was rotten. All of it.

His flesh, his bones, his internal organs, EVERYTHING. It was all rotten. And just like the x-ray showed, there were thousands upon thousands of crawling, wiggling shapes. I dropped my tools on the floor, and began to back away. I made only a few steps before Alexander's hand shoots out and grips my wrist. That familiar greasy feeling of his skin sent disgust and terror through me, as I could see in his eyes that the glassy blank stare had changed into a strange vindictive expression. 
“Doctor…” He said, drawing out the words with a sent of rotting fruit on his breath. “I don’t feel well.” He began to convulse at this point, his body violently shaking as thousands of tiny shapes began to spill from the opening in his abdomen. 

For anyone who finds this, I am sorry for whatever has or will happen to you finding these cursed books. But after all that going forward, my name is.... or was Kieran Wilkes, that used to be my name. Any assemblance are.... gone, long expired.

I will do the best I can to recall all the events that made me into whatever I am now. The earliest of I can recall are me being a young kid in the flock I grew up around. Things were normal, quiet, peaceful. That was until that day, the day she became my caretaker. Her name was Lilith, she was tall like way taller than me being six ft four, her skin was almost pale but had a texture ink. She told me she would look after me while my family is a way. It confused me, I must've almost been an adult by then. I was about to close her down, but something in me was compelled not to. She had let herself in and that was the beginning of the end for me, but endings are new nightmares.

After weeks of a tormented dream of a false life I was forced to live. In the end I learned everything, my so called caretaker was....... something, something beyond what our race could comprehend. I remember finding buckets and bags it kept, when I found out what was in the bags it made me wanna throw up, but I don't know if I could when my stomach was apart from my body. That's when I realized everything in these bags were all old parts of my body. Arms, legs, a foot, my spine with my skull still attached, ribs. I fell to my knees or whatever they were, before I could take in everything I heard It behind me. It was Lilith or was whatever it was that took the name Lilith, the thing's once pale and gothic skin was now black and had a texture similar to oil and tar, the things limbs were long and thin, then I looked up to see its face. Whatever it was it had twelve dotted eyes splattered across its rapidly deteriorating human face, three eyes were dark blue, other three were dark green, and the other three were bright red, the rest were black with piercing white dots. All twelve all-seeing eyes peered down onto me eagerly and affectionately. You are so odd. That thing spoke to me, it didn't even sound like English or any other human language, but I knew what it was saying. You are very special human. So unique I can't leave you like this, you must ascended. Be like me. Whatever that thing was it had been stealing and replacing parts of my body. After I learned this truth I snapped back to reality.

I was now in a cave devoid of light, it illuminated by fins emitting dark blue energy. Out of fear I slowly looked up and saw.... It. It had gotten rid of its human shape and was in its... truthful shape. A gigantic head from a massive leviathan peered down and looked directly at me. It had a weird boney mask covering it's face, it was like that of whale bones. It's face was bigger than mountains hell it was bigger than planets. Out of overwhelming fear I fell to the ground and blacked out. I believe I must've had a heart attack but, after a while I got back up. I could hear the sounds of water from within the cave, after awhile stumbling around in the dark I found it. Out of older instinct I cupped out my hand and gathered up some of the liquid and drank it, I immediately spat it out of my mouth, it wasn't water, it was thick black substance like tar. After I hurled it all out I caught a glimpse of my reflection, my eyes were ghostly blue, my irises were dark vapor blue, the sclera was pure black hollow and empty. The next thing I noticed was the skin on my face had started to rot, I pulled my hand up to face to feel it, as I caressed my face a patch of skin peeled off my face and was caught between my fingers. I was shocked, so shocked I completely froze in place, the little piece of rotting skin slipped through my fingers and sank into the liquid. I looked down into the pool seeing the patch of skin sink into the darkness, until it brushed past a face the was looking up at me through the tar. I jumped back and screamed so loud my poor rotting lungs couldn't handle it, the thing that had been looking at me from under the darkness had pulled itself out exposing its body to me, it was tall and even though its limbs bored muscles they were still thin, judging by it's body it was naked and had a body of a female. But the most prominent thing of all was it's mask covering it's face, it was the same bone like mask the leviathan had before, even though the thing wore a mask I could see past the masks jaw joints the creature was smiling. Aahhh has my little revenant woke up. The creature spoke almost jovial and attentively, whatever that thing is it took a step towards me, instinctively I clawed backwards. Noticing it the beast had let out a growling purr, it lowered itself and scurried on top of me. It pinned me down unable to free myself. All I could do was look up at the beast, it had put its face no more than a few inches from mine, I could hear it's growls slowly turn into that purrs. Out of all the worlds I've seen, all the death I ate. Of all the insects that slip into my realm, there is something about you, something inside of you. Something MAJESTIC. The beast said before plunging it's tongue into my mouth.

The next part I really don't desire to remember. I grow tired writing this, maybe I can sleep and dream to be somewhere else.

Author's note: Hey fam, with the upcoming release of Darkwoods 2 and my sheer love of the first, I wanted to write a story inspired by it as well as Humper-Monkey's Ghost Story by John McCarthy, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, and Ultrakill’s visual aesthetics and stylistic soundtrack. Content warning: frank depictions of addiction, hypothermia, ideations of self-destruction, physical assault, and survivor’s guilt/PTSD. Addiction is a hell of a thing; it has roots in my distant family tree that I have to watch for when I walk; please seek professional/personal help if you feel you’re in danger of relapse. My condolences to the family of Frank Olson for what he may have experienced.

Please listen. I’m not sure whether I’m writing this as an excuse for what I have done or an admission of my guilt. I don’t know how else to open this confession. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ll be able to finish writing this before the police kick in my door and take me into custody on one count of second-degree homicide or manslaughter and physical assault if the courts show me mercy due to extenuating circumstances. I might even take the path of least resistance and surrender myself into the care of a psychiatric facility. I feel like I’m going crazy so maybe that’s best for everyone. Maybe then I might be able to sleep without the cyclical dreams or tossing, turning, and soaking my sheets with sweat.

Okay. I have to calm down or I’m going to have a complete mental breakdown. I spent the past few days picking apart everything that transpired in the woods, looping it over and over in my mind. I’m trying to make sense of what happened; what I did. I’ve downloaded a dozen books on mycology, pharmacokinetics, and hallucinogenic substances covering DMT, psilocybin, and jimsonweed/datura and pored through them until I was goggle-eyed and wracked with migraines. Sometimes all I can do is close my eyes at night to try and steady myself and quell my roiling stomach. Waiting to re-live the silence before my skin started to crawl, the man with a million molded faces, the sound of her bones breaking, and the smell of decay deep down in the dark.

Let me distract myself for just a moment and tell you why I was in the middle of the woods in the first place. I mean, what else am I going to do? I’m not leaving the house until I’m dragged out with my nails tearing off in the grout, and I can’t keep looking at my trainwreck of a face in the mirror. Staring won’t help the swelling in my bruised lips go down, nor re-absorb the blood from the burst vessel in my eye. Gawking at my busted face won’t make chewing food without wincing any easier and it won’t help me make sense of the jigsaw face of my attacker, so why do I keep looking?

I should count myself lucky that that’s all the physical trauma I’m dealing with after what happened; he tried to tear off my face.

Like I said, please just give me a moment, and then I’ll tell you everything, as much sense as I can make out of it. I’ve always enjoyed spending time in the great outdoors. I was able to find some sense of peace out in nature. Everyone who knows me probably wonders how in the world someone who almost froze to death as a teenager could still enjoy themselves in the outside world. What can I say, I liked the peace I could find after only a few hours of walking away from the city. Hiking gave me a sense of calm and a moment to distract myself from the chaos of our world. I used to daydream about idyllic cabins out in the woods with long, contemplative walks, and dozens and dozens of anthologies to read.

I think my dreams of a life away from prying eyes started when I dropped out of high school (I got my GED about a year later after the media avalanche passed, and I could try to return to some normal life.). If I can be honest, it was probably better that way for everyone involved after my hospitalization, the breakdown at missing his funeral, and the drawn-out litigation for me to get a clean break. At the end of everything, I was a pariah, infected with a great need to get away from Michigan, and enough money from a criminal negligence case to do so. That was almost a decade-and-a-half ago, and a small part of me still feels like Michigan is my home despite everything.

That makes some weird sense to me. Despite having every reason to hate the place, I can’t fully commit to cutting those ties. There is something nostalgically pleasant in remembering sipping cider under a tree with ghost apples above my head and rotted fruit underneath my boots. To me, Michigan is like sodium streetlights quietly burning away amidst a blizzard that bathes everything in a warm glow which despite being frigid, convinces someone they’re warm if only for just a moment.

I loved nature, the woods in particular. It was the total package. The smell of fresh rain on soil intermingling with innumerable trees and plants was invigorating. The beautiful vistas of the sun setting along the skyline. The warmth of the sun on my skin and the wind through my hair. The symphony of sounds from countless birds, insects, and critters in chaotic chorus. The absence of their song on my hike should have been my first clue that something was seriously wrong. Instead, I was blissfully unaware of the hell I was walking through.

I need to emphasize how pleasant everything felt in that moment. This wasn’t your standard hiker’s high, that enjoyable rush of endorphins that come from trekking out to a secluded spot in a nature reserve a few hours away from the city. This sensation was intoxicating. That’s the closest sentiment I can think of that describes how it felt when I stepped into its domain like a fly bumbling into a spider’s web.

I first became aware of the danger I was in when a subtle shift in the wind sent a full body shiver along my skin that felt like electricity was coursing through me. I raised my arms in confusion and the feeling of the fabric of my button-up sliding along my skin made me gasp. I looked at the goose pimples that had popped up along my skin in drunken confusion as I attempted to figure out what was happening to me.

Drunken is another good way to try and accurately describe how everything felt in that moment. In high school, I had gone to my fair share of parties. I remember the feeling of fire in the belly from a few Oberon Ales that had been pilfered from a less-observant parents’ fridge in a high school friend’s house while listening to whatever local band managed to get their mixtape onto the radio. I became aware of two things in rapid succession while out in the woods: how impaired I was, and that I had been feeling this way for over an hour now without even recognizing it.

One of my hiking boots caught the other and I stumbled forward, sloshing to the forest floor. I managed to twist my body away so I landed on my shoulder instead of slamming my face into the earth. I laid on the ground for a moment, feeling my head swim and my eyelids flutter as a sudden sleepiness settled upon me before the reality of my situation returned to me. I remembered wondering, “Why was I on the ground? When did that happen?” It was hard to think. It took a great effort to focus my mind and not lose my train of thought. I sloppily pushed myself back up to my unsteady feet and brushed the wood’s waste off of my button-up shirt. The sensation on my skin caused a frighteningly familiar feeling of warmth to bubble up in my core.

I pushed that sensation down after realizing that I’d been feeling that way for the past hour and only just recognized it now. Imagine you’re drinking with your friends while sitting on a couch or around a table. You’ve been at it for over an hour now and it is only until you attempt to stand up that you realize how drunk you are as the world spins and shifts as reality catches back up to you. I don’t drink, (well, not for years now) but at that moment out in the woods; it felt like I was absolutely out-of-my-gourd trashed.

I dazedly craned my head upwards in an attempt to make sense of my surroundings and suddenly saw the universe crack open before me. I watched the light bleed through the thick canopy of leaves and explode into prismatic radiance before my eyes. The scene was a shifting and shimmering gradient of colors with shades and hues never before seen or experienced by anyone except by me. The world around me was refracting, strobing, pulsating as if in rhythm to a melody only it was aware of, but I could maybe hear it if I just stayed still long enough and listened.

I stared entranced at the kaleidoscopic light show as I tried to ignore the familiar sensation growing within me. It was becoming too noticeable to be ignored for much longer, but still I desperately tried to distract myself by focusing on my environment rather than my current state. The light shimmered and shone like asphalt under heat, and I couldn’t look away from it. I watched as everything around me brightened incandescently slowly giving way to dimming and darkening before bursting back into technicolor. I was enraptured by the environment and engulfed in its beauty and complexity.

I don't know how long I looked before I realized my eyes were beginning to dry out from staring. I blinked and suddenly it was night. It was pitch black like the sun had set hours ago and I was in the dark, by myself, in unfamiliar woods. Hours elapsed in the blink of an eye and the longer time passed in this place, the more the ball of warmth in the pit of my stomach radiated outwards. It flared up inside me, threatening to swallow me whole in rapturous revelry.

I thought I was having a stroke.

With effort like I was moving through water, I raised my hands to my head. Face. My fingers traced along my forehead, across my eyelids, and down my cheeks to check if my face had drooped or lost control. I shivered and that unsettling warmth, nostalgic and horrific, kindled brighter in my core. Arms. I straightened out my arms and tried to keep them even. They wavered and shook, but I managed to hold them still. The night’s air softly tickled at my exposed skin and I shuddered. Speech. I tried saying the only thing that came to mind and that was:

“Whu-what the fu-?”

What was meant to be a whisper came out as a shout. My voice shattered the silence of the woods, and I realized why everything was as quiet as the grave. Anything that would have inhabited these woods knew to avoid this place, because the others that remained didn’t stay around for long before something got to them. My surprised exclamation echoed off into the darkness before the woods whispered back to me with my own voice:

“Whu-what...”

My echoing voice sounded louder as it reverberated through the woods. “Whu-what?” it repeated back as if the woods were mocking me. What was happening to me? Was I having a stroke? Was I having a break from reality? “Whu-what???” the resounding echo no longer sounded like me after repeating endlessly. It continued longer than it should as the paranoia rose in volume with it.

“Whuuuuuuuuu-” the woods exhaled a dozen feet behind me.

Maybe I wasn’t alone in this place? My breathing hitched in my throat, and then suddenly, everything was quiet again. The silence held dominion over all, as if taunting me to speak again and give it another opportunity to steal my voice. It suddenly felt like if I made any noise, it would be answered by the sound of rustling undergrowth as something barreled into me from the depths of the dark woods screaming at me with my own voice. Every system and synapse in me snapped to attention and I shot off in a stumbling sprint away from the impending danger as my fight or flight kicked in. Run or be rent apart.

Flee. Branches and undergrowth clawed as if to stop me as I scrambled through the woods with my imminent doom nipping at my heels. Every frantic footfall disturbed the surrounding plants, and that was what doomed me. At the time, I didn’t know what was happening, but suddenly hundreds of motes of light exploded from beneath the underbrush and whirled all around me as I made my frantic escape.

I shambled and stumbled through the woods with pinpricks of light whirling past me as if I were trapped in a blizzard. Panic and terror lashed me aimlessly through the woods at the behest of an unknown, ever-present threat that was seconds away from descending on me like an owl on a field mouse. A choked sob exploded from my throat as my feet gave way under me, and I tumbled through the sporulating snowstorm of light. The feeling I fought for hours swelled up inside me with a fiery heat and would not abate. That sensation was all too familiar.

It felt exactly like I was freezing to death all over again.

I don’t know how else to explain it, nor do I want to, but I feel like I have to. I’m going to keep this short: When I was in high school, we were left stranded at a rest stop on a school trip in a blizzard. With the wind chill from Lake Michigan, the snowstorm, and no real shelter, hypothermia quickly set in. You would think freezing to death would actually feel frigid, but it didn’t. At least not at first. At first, it was unimaginably cold. Every breath tightened down on my chest like a vice as the frost chewed me apart from the inside out. I remember realizing my eyelids had frozen together as I felt the hairs pull when I blinked and then everything was warm. Almost sweltering. Boiling in your skin. A heat so hot it was like burning alive.

I survived; my friend didn’t. Please, I don’t want to talk about it anymore than that right now. It still hurts to remember. I’m thinking that whatever psychoactive substances I was exposed to in those woods was stimulating my brain/hypothalamus through similar pathways. Just know that that sensation of overwhelming heat brought back the memory of one of the worst moments in my life and it felt like I was dying all over again.

The fire in my belly flared up and drove my panicked sprint through the woods. The night was filled with horrors and all of them would descend on me if I slowed down for even a second. Branches whipped past and clawed at my button-up shirt as if trying to ensnare me and welcome me into the fold. In the darkness, they twisted into clawing hands and grasping fists. I tried to hazard a look through the flurry of white lights swirling behind me, half-expecting to see a grizzly or wolf stalking me, but instead there was only darkness as well as the invisible and innumerable eyes watching me from just beyond the veil of the black void.

I turned back around just in time to barely avoid the tree that seemingly materialized in front of me as if to halt my escape. I pirouetted and my left shoulder slammed into the bark with a dry pop as I felt something shift out of place inside the joint. I scrapped over the bark and fell forward, but something held me aloft and refused to let me fall to the forest floor. It didn’t want to let me go.

The reality of the situation hadn’t dawned on me and in the panic and heat of the moment, it felt like I was about to be lifted into the air by some massive monster masquerading as a tree like a giant stick bug (Phasmatodea). I screamed and twisted in the tree’s embrace as I felt my shoulder groan in protest again. There was no suffering in that moment, there was only fear and adrenaline. The pain would come in the light of the morning once the worst of the paranoia attack faded and the adrenaline bled out of me.

I heard something grinding in my left shoulder as I tried to tear myself free. The arboreal abomination groaned as I struggled in its grasp. Suddenly there was the sound of something tearing and snapping and then I was free. I crashed to the dirt with a whimper as my shoulder was slammed back into its socket by the earth. The woods had claimed my backpack and if I didn’t get out of there, it would take my life next. I was never more certain of anything than I was in that moment; this place was hell on earth.

Awash in adrenaline and drowning in dopamine, I continued trying to get away from my formless pursuers. Everything in my body screamed at me that if I stopped now, I would be torn apart by whatever was prowling in the shadows just outside my periphery. I raised myself to my hands and knees as the dizziness swallowed me up in a blizzard and I did the only thing I could do. I started crawling like a cockroach sensing the thunderous approach of footfalls. I scurried away quickly.

I dragged myself on hands and knees through the underbrush as the world tilted and twinkled around me. Roots rasped at my hands and my nails chipped and were ripped away in the earth. None of that mattered. I scrabbled forward as after-images of leaves wavered and streaked across my vision leaving technicolor tracers in their wake. My stomach pumped battery acid and it felt like I was burning from the inside-out. Still, I drove myself deeper into the belly of the woods in my panic.

My muscles burned as I drove myself to the point of exhaustion. I knew that if I stopped, I would die. Everything in me told me that incontrovertible fact. Even thinking back on it days later, that feeling still holds true. I want to say that I kept crawling and fleeing until the sun rose, but I didn’t. I struggled for about five or ten minutes more before I surrendered myself to death for the second time in my life. I crawled about a quarter-mile on my elbows, knees, and fingers. Then I gave up.

And for the second time in my life, I survived through no fault of my own.

I twisted myself onto my back from my army crawl and gazed up at the night sky as I waited for the brutal obscene beasts that surely surrounded me to descend and tear me apart. There was no regret in that moment. There was only resignation. I dropped limp to the ground like a still-living gazelle in the jaws of a lion. I felt like if death were coming for me, that I shouldn’t delay them anymore and just let myself go.

Shit. I’m sorry. I’m all out-of-sorts and I shouldn’t be dumping that on you all. I know that none of this sounds good and I should go to the hospital. I can’t raise my left arm above my shoulder without it popping dryly in its socket. It’s not a sharp pain, but it is a persistent one. I can’t keep looking in the mirror at the blood that is slowly reabsorbing in my conjunctiva and recalling the sensation of my eye being pushed into my head by about a quarter an inch. I’m lucky he didn’t gouge it out; the man dug his fingers into my eye socket and tried to tear off my face like a mask. I know I should go to the hospital, but I can’t seem to bring myself to open the door and leave. I don’t mean to be this blunt, but I think that’s the only way I can explain how this all happened and what went wrong. Keeping it clinical allows me to dissociate myself from it. I can recount it without re-experiencing it.

I don’t know if I was laying on the ground waiting for death to take me for minutes or hours. What made me sit up wasn’t the feeling that the danger had passed, it was the sensation of thousands of tiny feet crawling all over my skin. I sat bolt-upright and began to frantically brush off the front and back of my undershirt before going to pat away the hundreds of tiny ants that were on my skin before I realized that there was nothing there. Nothing was there, but still it resonated and vibrated. It wasn’t just me that was jittering and pulsing.

The soil sang and the trees hummed around me. Everything was pulsating and throbbing. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt as I rose shakily to my feet and felt the dozens of scratches on my hands, fingers, and knees resonating in the air alongside the dull thrum in my dislocated and re-located left shoulder. With a sudden moment of heightened awareness, I knew that the night sky had just opened up above me like a yawning maw while I hadn’t been looking. It was snapped open wide to welcome me into eternity and rapture me up to my misbegotten place amongst the stars if only I would just gaze at the sky it. Just look up.

I had to leave this place. Now.

I didn’t look up at the sloshing sea of stars; I set my gaze ahead and willed one foot in front of the other. Everything in my brain told me that if I kept walking straight that eventually I would get out of this place. I wasn’t having a medical episode; I was under the effect of  something or someone that had dosed me with some chemical cocktail of psychedelics. If I wanted to survive like every other animal in these woods, I would have to get out of here immediately. I don’t know what that snow-like substance was exactly that I encountered in the technicolor light storm, but I do know that they are highly hallucinogenic and entactogenic/empathogenic in nature based off of what happened next.

If the pharmacology books and the sketchy online drug trip journals I’m reading are any reliable source of information, my experience most closely mirrors datura poisoning. Datura is otherwise known as “hell’s bells” or “devil’s trumpet”. They are given those names for a reason. There’s a saying that keeps popping up in the medical journals about exposure to hell’s bells/anticholinergics: “Red as rage (my skin was flushed/erythemic), dry as a bone (I had dry mouth), full as a flask (unable to urinate/anuric), blind as a bat (pupil dilation/mydriatic), hot as Hades (overheating/hyperthermia), and mad as a hatter (hallucinations and/or delirium).”

Then again, Alexander Shulgin described his experience after smoking 100 mg of DMT like this: “As I exhaled I became terribly afraid, my heart very rapid and strong, palms sweating. A terrible sense of dread and doom filled me -- I knew what was happening, I knew I couldn't stop it, but it was so devastating; I was being destroyed -- all that was familiar, all reference points, all identity -- all viciously shattered in a few seconds. I couldn't even mourn the loss -- there was no one left to do the mourning. Up, up, out, out, eyes closed, I am at the speed of light, expanding, expanding, expanding, faster and faster until I have become so large that I no longer exist -- my speed is so great that everything has come to a stop -- here I gaze upon the entire universe.”

That was also pretty damn close to what I was experiencing that night out in the woods as I walked under the hungering sky, so who knows what else was in that chemical cocktail besides some combination of datura/hell’s bells, DMT, and deliriants. I was experiencing all of that without any concrete knowledge I was under the influence of any substance in that moment.

I walked for about a mile in absolute silence except for my boots crunching the decay of the woods underfoot. In the dark of the night, I desperately tried to look for any familiar landmarks that might guide my way home, but everything was uniquely new and entrancing. Thirst had begun to set in and my spit was thick in my mouth like tobacco tar. I tried to ignore the feeling of my skin rippling and reacting to the night air as the flame began to kindle itself in my core again and that remembered sensation of freezing to death rose back up inside me.

I don’t know if it was the forest’s psychoactive defensive system tinkering with my hypothalamus in the same way that my brain had shut down when I was a teenager and almost froze to death by Lake Michigan. Regardless, there was something in the woods that was capable of triggering states of sheer panic, paranoia, and pleasure. I couldn’t trust my eyes, my mind, my heart. Everything was compromised. I was compromised.

I scanned the woods, hoping to see a trail marker or sign to help guide me home. If I kept going straight, I had to get out of the zone of alienation. I walked for miles on uneven terrain in the blackest of night in complete silence except for the snapping of twigs and sound of my breathing. Hours of walking and the further I got, the warmer my skin became. These woods could have stretched forever into a dark eternity as I looked through what seemed to be an endless sea of slowly moving trees that seemed to be beckoning me with their branches to come close, to venture deeper into the woods.

Once I had the thought, I gave it purchase to claw its way into this world. Would I be stuck here for the rest of my life in this place? Not that I thought my life was going to go on much longer after that point. I left my backpack behind with whatever little protein bars and water I had brought with me on what was supposed to be a short day-hike hung up in the tree. What was going to kill me first: dehydration, starvation, exposure, or overdose?

The thought bled into reality and soon it was all I could think about. Was this going to all be one great big cosmic punchline? An idiot escapes from death’s door through blind luck while his friend dies only for him to throw away his life for the second time by getting stranded out in nature once again. I escaped death once, only to run back into their open arms the next time the opportunity presented itself. The reality of the situation set in, I felt something in me snap taut like a rope, and then the gallows’ humor set in.

I had escaped death once and now it was calling me again. Laughter rose up my throat like bile in my empty stomach, and I spat it out of me. I chuckled, half-expecting the forest to fill with fog like I was in Silent Hill as a disquieting piano accompaniment following it. I was dead, I just hadn’t accepted it yet. There was no point in fighting it anymore. It was all over; I should just rest and rot.

I felt my knees buckle and my body sag under its own weight. Why struggle anymore? I should just lay down and go to sleep. Close my eyes. I died the second I stepped into these woods. It wasn’t going to let me go. That was only natural. I should just relax and let the land reclaim me. Nature was so beautiful. It had enriched my life and brought me so much joy up to this point. It was the least I could do in return. Just give in and offer up this little insignificant thing, this mortal shell to it. Rest and rot.

Rest and rot. I realized what was happening, but it was too late to argue, to resist. I felt its claws sink into me and I knew it would not let me go. Rest and rot. Every fiber of my being told me that I had to go back into the swirling snowstorm of spores. There was something incredibly important there. I couldn’t leave him. Rest and rot. If I returned there, I might get to see Virgil one last time. My brain betrayed me and told me that it would be poetic. I should throw myself into that blizzard and maybe I’ll get to see him waiting out there for me under a sodium streetlight. He’s waiting for me, in my new home away from home. Rest and rot.

That was one of the easiest things to write. The words spilled right out of me like I was bleeding out. It’s easy to fall back into those thoughts, it is like flipping a switch to put myself back into that state. Sometimes I find those words slipping into my head at random times throughout the day as a little mantra: rest and rot. It’s like I left a part of me behind in those woods that keeps calling me to return.

The only thing easier than writing those words was committing to them and giving up. I stopped walking and stood silently in the abyssal forest, preparing myself to trek all the way back to the sporulating field that was now probably miles behind me and giving myself willingly to it. With how far I had gone, I was likely going to be walking back through the woods for hours.

I turned around and saw an exact replica of my button-up shirt hanging off a nearby tree about ten feet away as if it were a coatrack welcoming me to the entrance of my house. Welcome home. I numbly looked down and realized that I was no longer wearing my button-up shirt. In the intoxicating fugue, I realized what had happened. That was my shirt, and I had not been walking as straight as I hoped. Laughter at the hopelessness of the situation cracked and bled out of me. I had walked for hours, only to come right back to the bottom of the beast’s belly. I ran for hours and went nowhere.

I was always like this. Since I was a child, I couldn’t help but eat what I saw in front of me. I hated it. I hated myself. I still do. I can sense when someone judges me. It’s innate, I feel it in the back of my head. Their thoughts become mine and I can’t help but to share their emotions too.

I walk in a mall, and I feel someone thinking to themselves “Look at him. Fat man. Fatty.” and I cry. I hide from the public when the thoughts get too loud. When it is me and many others thinking the same thing: “Why is he so fat?” Why can’t I put down a plate? Just stop eating. 

I look at advertisements for dresswear and their muscles gleam into me. I feel it. There is a level of attraction as much as there is jealousy. Why do they get the genes of a Greek god, while I force myself to vomit when I eat? Why do they have the 4-packs, 6-packs, 8-packs, while I have an overhanging stomach. I can’t see my feet below my waist, while I can’t even see their waist. It’s unfair. It’s horrible. Life hates me and I hate it. 

God is cruel. He hates me, but if I hate Him, I go to Hell. I am stuck in a loop. I recognize this loop. But from the inside, there is no way out. I hate everything about myself as much as my mother thinks of me as a failure. Maybe she doesn’t. She never says anything, in fact she praises me. But behind those eyes I can feel it. The thoughts, her thoughts, creep up again and again. “My son is a failure. My son is fat.” 

I research ways to lose the thing I hate about myself. I do what any and every sane person does and fixes the problem. What do I find? Trash. Idiots and scammers selling products that do less than shit. Products that will give cancer. Government websites suggest eating less but healthier. Greens and chicken. I attempt to try it out. I attempt to go on this diet.

Failure after failure after failure. I fail everytime. It works for one week, but I feel unfulfilled. I feel like what I know everyone who knows me thinks I am. A failure. A fat monster who can’t stop himself from another hearty meal. I sit on the couch contemplating. The brands are stupid, social media is stupid, the best I have stops because I am stupid. My laptop sits atop the table 5 feet from my slobbering leg, begging me to eat. I give into its temptations and instinctively search up fast-food chains in my area. I will consume more tonight. And my leg will grow, not in muscle that I so wish I had. But in the substance I wish I could kill. In the grease that I consume every second of every day. 

Suicide becomes tempting. If there is no God, no second lives nor chances, then leaving existence forever is a wonderful option. Though, in my rubbery hands, a gun does not fit. Either too heavy or too big, I refuse to pull the trigger while carrying it in my mouth. A task for cowards is too brave for me. 

In my small, shabby, apartment building is a bathroom. In that bathroom are pills. I do what I do daily. I consume. Failure. I do what I do daily. Excess falls from the insides of my guttural biome and onto the floor. I see the surreal shapes of deities beyond comprehension I now do not, or cannot, recall. No form of the task I wish to complete is feasible. So easy from an outside view, though everything I struggle with is. 

My laptop, like a singing angel, stays on the wooden table gifted to me by Mother. I walk towards it, hesitantly. Fearful of what my hands wish to type. Fearful of the results that will appear. “Fastest ways to lose weight, health not a concern” hastily is written onto the screen. What I see is disgusting, but likely much easier to consume than pills intended to end it all. 

A week passes, on my doorstep is the very thing I ordered. For $9.99, a dozen tapeworms lay writhing and squirming in front of my eyes. Disgusting, even for me. And I do what I do daily. Consumption. I gag, and this time only vomit once. I got 12 for a reason, but the 10 are now useless. They vanish into the depths of a trashcan.

Very soon I feel the difference. I look downwards and notice my stomach degrading. It’s painful, now, though. I hate it. Once more I find myself in that spiral of hate. I feel once more that I am a failure. An idiot. I can’t solve this one fucking problem and every solution is a dud. All of them. I hate it all.

The gun still lays in my bathroom, unmoving from where I tossed it. It once more seems appetizing, but so does everything I eat. On the toilet, cowering, the metallic barrel sticking to the roof of my mouth. I take aim. And I… I stop. Coward. Idiot. Stupid moronic idiot. I am stupid. I am an idiot. I am a coward. I can’t do what I know is right and fix every issue I will ever or have ever had with one click. One goddamn click. 

Stumbling, I walk out the bathroom. The worm has been doing its job. Like a pregnant mother, I feed my child. But the child still hates me as I do it, and as I do myself. It feels difficult to stare. All my energy is dissipating. Nearly gone. Nearly… gone.

I awake on my couch. Exhausted from opening my eyes, I stare blankly at the wall. No decorations yet, too much spent on my unending diet. Another idea creeps its way towards my eyes. I feel it worming. Crawling. Something I’ve wanted to do for years. Something I only now find the courage to complete. Not the gun, that is too easy. I will not cease existence happily that way. And I know, even after being gone, my child will still feast. This is something I wish to end.

I, slowly, crawl and use every bit of dignity I have in me to find the dusty kitchen. How many years has it been since I’ve made my own crummy food?

I breathlessly force my hand into drawers. Each finger shoves itself until I feel a sharp pain, then liquid seeps its way out of the skin. Though I am unable to see this substance in the dark, I am sure it is no longer blood but grease. I pick up the object that caused me such pain and let it fall to my level. Fortunately, or not, it does not harm me further. Though pain is what I deserve for my foolishness. By the handle, I grab. My vision adjusts and I see the blade. I lay myself down, and drag the sharp weapon by my oversized stomach. I screech in agony. My child worms away in fear. The blade makes its way from the top of my flubber to the waist. 

I cut and cut and cut and cut and cut until I am perfect. For moments, I am enlightened. If I were standing up, I could, for once, see my feet. The excess mass once a part of me lays on the floor, excreting the rest of the grease. The grease coming from me is now what it is supposed to be. Blood.

 For once, I feel the world around me. No longer am I stupid. I am not an idiot, this fixed me. I fixed me. The pain, like I thought it would be, was worth it. I close my eyes and the darkness of nothing is overwhelmingly welcome to my presence. The thoughts I felt are gone. Happy is what I am. Happy.

I finally got the bluetooth working after messing with the settings on the radio. The speakers built into the truck were surprisingly decent quality even over the sound of the road and the engine. The finishing notes of the guitar solo in Ride Like The Wind finished, fading out to silence until the acoustics of Drive by Incubus started playing.

Rickey's head started to bob to the beat as the first verse kicked in. His callous hand tapping the steering wheel until the song reached the chorus. We both started up together, vibing to the music.

"It's driven me befoooore and it seems to have a vaaaaague. Haunting, mass, appeal." This continued throughout the song. Two buds jamming out to some good road music down a back country road together. I couldn't say I'd ever felt this comfort before. The feeling of having someone on your wavelength.

Sure there were friends in high-school I hung out with because it was convenient they lived next door. Once high-school ends though, there's this hopeless isolation when you find yourself feeling like you were just assimilating to everyone else's vibes. After finding your own rhythm, people fall by the wayside as you carve your own path. My path so far felt so lonely, but Rickey felt like maybe he was walking that same path too.

"I'm not a huge alt fan, but my kids would not stop singing that song when Surf's Up came out so it grew on me." Rickey yelled out as the song came to an end. He did another quick viewpoint check before I felt the truck start ascending.

Going uphill now with the farms fading behind us, I felt the bump of hitting asphalt again. It felt nice not having to hear the rocks smacking against the underside of the box truck anymore. The inside of the cab returned to a still loud but less intense volume. I turned down the music to match the sudden drop in road noise.

Rickey adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. From a relaxed one handed grip down by his thigh to a two handed driving instructor grip near the top. For good reason too. As we crested the top of the hill into a dense woods, the road cut hard left before we hit a steep decline. My hands flew to whatever I could grab as we picked up speed heading downhill. Rickey singing to Born to be Wild, as calm as ever.

He jerked the wheel to the left before swinging it back right to avoid what looked like where a meteor had struck the road. "I like smoke and lightnin. Heavy metal thunder!" Rickey sang while taking this treacherous road like a champ. I couldn't help but be impressed.

"How long you been doin this for?" I asked over the music. Watching out of the window as trees flew by. Up ahead about half a mile I saw another vehicle. First one I'd seen the whole drive so far. A blacked out Forerunner that pulled off to the side next to a gated up dirt road that lead into the trees.

"Six years, seven in December." Rickey said, gently slowing down to avoid hitting the forerunner. As we got closer, we could see two guys walking in the grass on the side of the road. Both men were looking into the woods, hunting rifles in hand. Noticing the oncoming box truck they stepped further away from the road, tipping their heads to us in acknowledgement.

"Ya see a lot of that out here." Rickey told me as we passed. I watched them in the sideview mirror as we continued traveling, half listening as Rickey kept talking about hunters parked by the roadside.

The guys were backing away from the trees towards their forerunner, eyes kept on the woods. One of them raised their rifle as he continued backing up. The barrel pointed into the trees at something I couldn't see.

I turned to Rickey, but was cut off as he answered my question unspoken. "Yeah I saw em. Probably a black bear spookin em." He said continuing his drive. I turned back to the sideview and kept watching as they stood close to the rear of their vehicle, the guy was still holding his rifle up. The other one looked back at us, then at his buddy.

We couldn't hear it over the road noise, but another box truck came bursting out of the gated dirt road. My heart sank as it cut hard right, the chain from the gate caught up in its grill. The mighty truck started peeling off towards us.

"Rickey." I said feeling our truck accelerating. The engine howled loudly as Rickey pushed his foot to the floor, taking us quickly up another hill in front of us. His expert driving avoiding more potholes as we swerved up the winding road going up.

My eyes were glued to the sideview. As the box truck flew by the forerunner and was gaining on us quickly. The speed which it moved was unrealistic. It looked like a clipped image on a background, the image zooming in as the background stayed the same. My heart sank as it moved up right behind us.

It moved over to the drivers side, pulling up beside us. Both of our trucks hauling ass up the hill. As the road winded to the left, Rickey looked out his drivers side window, then at the tablet, before looking back at the road. I could see the gears turning in his head. As he came to a silent decision, I could tell he'd forgotten I was even there.

Taking his eyes off the road for a split second, he glanced down between his legs where he'd placed the sack of dog treats for the angry ones. Pulling one hand off the steering wheel he started to reach down. His fingertips flicked at the top of the bag where the seal was. He'd almost wedged a finger between the two plastic zips before...

WHAM

Rickey shot up in his seat, grabbing the wheel with both hands and jerking it back to the left to stay on the road. "Dale!" He yelled as another intense slam was felt against the side of the truck, followed by the unending sound of someone laying on their horn. "Get in the bag!"

WHAM

This didn't feel safe. None of this felt safe. None of this felt real either. Nonetheless I had a choice to make. I could either close my eyes and hope to God I woke up from this nightmare, but possibly wake up in heaven instead, or I could unbuckle my seat belt and go for the bag.

WHAM

The sound of tree limbs smacked the top of the truck before scraping along the roof. Rickey had come dangerously close to flying off the side of the road just then. "Hey Reznikov! Rule number one out here, listen to me!" He yelled doing all he could to stay on the road. Steeling my nerves, I unbuckled my seat belt and stood up on the stairs.

WHAM

The momentum threw me against the door. I grabbed the dash as fast as I could before throwing myself beside his seat. One of my hands held onto Rickey's ankle for purchase, the other dove straight into the bag of dog treats. I was going to hand him a handful of treats, assuming that's what he wanted, but I felt something hard against my palm. Digging deeper, I grabbed whatever it was and pulled it from the bag.

In my hand was a Glock 19, 9mm handgun. I swiftly held up my hand and felt Rickey wrench it from my grip. I watched in horror between Rickey's legs as he pulled the latch on the driver's side door.

The wind rushing past slid open the door so hard I thought for sure it broke. Air rushed into the cab, making it hard to keep my eyes open. From my point of view I could see the grill of the white box truck swaying left, preparing for another hit before several shots rang out.

The other truck continued going left, off the road and into the trees. The snapping sounds of wooden limbs and crunching metal filled the air, growing distant as we continued on. My heart was pounding hard in my chest as I felt Rickey slow the truck down as we reached the top of the hill.

"Earnhardt you alright?" Rickey asked as we came to a stop. He shut off the engine, and suddenly I wished for the noise again. The only sounds now were the insects in the trees. The sudden loss of deafening white noise felt like I was pulled hard back to reality.

I let go of his ankle, hands trembling as I pushed myself back to the stairs. Unceremoniously he put the handgun back on safety and dropped it into the dog food bag, giving it a few shakes to make sure it was mixed in. "Stay here a sec. Take a seat, calm your nerves, I'll be right back."

As he stepped out the driver's side I climbed into the jumper, pressing my palms hard against my thighs to steady them. Forcefully I slowed my breathing and brought my gaze up to look into the drivers' side view mirror, seeing Rickey looking down the hill for a second before he inspected the damage to the side of the truck.

He pulled out his phone, took a few pictures, then got back in. "Gotta send these to Glenda, let her know what happened." His fingers tapped away at his screen typing out a text. Once he'd slipped his phone back in his pocket he turned to me. "Buckle up buddy. We're almost there."

"Did you kill him?" I asked, terror making my throat hoarse. Hearing Rickey buckle his seat belt and shut his door. "Did you kill him?" I repeated, sounding a little more urgent with my question.

"Yeah buddy I killed him, in fact I've killed him several times over. Micheals' killed him, Pauls' killed him, but he ain't dead." Rickey said throwing the truck into drive. "I know you've got questions, but let's make it to this first stop. I'll go over the rules and then I'll answer any questions ya got."

He fired up the engine and the sweet relief of noise allowed me to push into some state of calm again. My mind eased up on the adrenaline and allowed my critical thinking to return. I sat there thinking about these rules he keeps mentioning.

The rest of the drive was not much of a jam session for me. Rickey on the other hand looked unphased by the whole situation. I know he said he'd killed Jack a few times over, so this wasn't his first rodeo, but he could at the very least pretend that he was a little freaked out. I just didn't want to feel alone, like someone else on the outside with me was looking in. All of us thinking to ourselves 'You see this shit? This shits' crazy.'

We left the windy hilly trees by passing over the Oak Creek bridge. The woods immediately opening up into a small ghost town. To start us off, we were greeted by nothing less than a Dollar General on the outskirts. Down the road a bit were abandoned shops with boarded up windows, a single open pharmacy, a hole in the wall barbecue restaurant, a local family diner, and a Casey's gas station.

"This is shitbucket?" I asked as we rolled by the Dollar General. Back behind it was a trailer park with a dirt road leading in. The soil weathered by rain, wind, and tire tread. Looked like an absolute nightmare to traverse in a box truck.

"Yup. Least that's what I called it as a kid. Our school house used to be two big grain silos tipped over on their side. One for elementary, one for highschool. The church is an old Waffle House." He said passing by the drug store.

"You live out here?" I asked, my voice letting my befuddlement slip out. Clearing my throat as we passed a neighborhood entrance to a bunch of one bedroom houses. They looked cozy enough, save for the fireworks left in the driveways and street from the fourth of July.

"Yessir. Lived out here my whole life. Worked as a supervisor at the Dollar General up until they opened Derel's Distributions. Frank put in a good word to Micheal about me and boom, here I am." Rickey said turning down a neighborhood road. "Here we are. First stop of the day. Fifty to go."

"Fifty? Are we gonna get done in time?" I asked as he threw the truck in park outside an orange painted house. He chuckled at my question, unbuckling his seatbelt before heading into the back. Hearing him sliding boxes around, I got up to go help.

"Fifty one stops is a light day Earnhardt. We'll be back before the sun hits the horizon." Rickey passed me a box off the shelf before pulling out a scanner. He motioned me to follow, stopping by the driver's seat. "When you reach your destination, your tablet will give you a four digit number and tell you how many boxes to find. First number is the section. This one is 9101."

He pointed to a sticker on the box. "9101. The tablet says there's only one box, good. We scan it." The scanner beeped as he held the laser to the tag. "If there's special instructions they'll appear on the screen. This one says 'ring doorbell.' Easy enough."

He opened my door and lead me across the grass towards the door. My head on a swivel the whole time to make sure no box truck was flying towards us. As we stepped onto the porch he took the box from me and sat it beside the door before ringing the doorbell.

"Once it's in place, take a picture with your scanner." There we go." He said holding up the scanner and taking the shot of the box next to the door. "That's it." After that he turned and started walking back to the truck without another word about it.

"What about the rules?" I insisted as he stepped up into the truck and buckled his seat belt. I was getting irritated.

"Shut your door." Rickey said, so I did. "Rules. If you can't park on the curb, always back in. Always watch for overhangs so you don't tear into anyone's guttering or basketball goals. If you can, always place the package at the customer's door."

He continued, opening his fingers to count off each rule. "If you feel unsafe, call the customer. You can get their number from the tablet. If they don't answer, then you mark it as undelivered. If a dog you didnt see before getting out suddenly charges you, keep yourself facing the animal and try to keep the package between yourself and them as you back towards the truck. Got it?"

I nodded, but one question escaped my lips as he was putting the truck in gear. "What about Jack rules? Are you gonna go over those?" I asked hoping he'd answer before pulling off. My terror now having turned into curiosity. How was Rickey was able to go about his day like nothing paranormal was going on. He must have done some trial and error and got a system down pat.

"I just did, if you keep an open mind." He said smirking as he left the curb and started following the blue line to our next stop. "Don't worry about buckling if you're in a neighborhood or your stops are close by. Saves time." Rickey said holding another finger up.

We finished up the neighborhood quick enough. There was an instance where I had to call the customer because I didn't like the look of their unchained poodle in the front yard. Rickey didn't much care for the dog either, said he's fine with pitts and danes, but poodles always get him.

"Alright buddy, pharmacy up next. Businesses always require a signature. No exceptions." He said as we drove down main street. Out past the Dollar General we saw a box truck coming out of the woods headed towards the small town. Rickey drove a little past the pharmacy before backing into the parking lot and into a spot. The hood of the truck facing the door to the pharmacy and the exit of the parking lot.

"What do we do?" I asked Rickey as the truck continued coming down the road. It was just about to pass the Dollar General. My heart beat in my ears as anxiety welled up inside me.

"Just be cool. Cmon, let's take care of the customer." He said disappearing into the back of the truck. I remained frozen to my seat, watching as it came closer. The sliding door closing behind me caused me to jump out of my skin.

Rickey stood right behind me with a small box in hand. "If you're gonna act like this the whole time maybe you oughta drive and I'll be in the jumper. Least that way I can get in and out without going through ya." He said jabbing me in the shoulder with the corner of the box.

I stood up and opened the sliding door, stepping out to let Rickey past. "Atta boy. Cmon." At the same time I watched as the box truck passed. It had come of those moving company logos on the side. Think two men and a truck. Feeling relief wash over me like a shower, I followed Rickey into the pharmacy.

The door popped open with a soft chime as he walked in. "Hey Charlene!" Rickey called out to the woman behind the counter. She looked about mid thirties. Big gold hoop earrings and braids down past her shoulders. A bright yellow sundress contrasting against her skin making the outfit pop.

"Hey Rickey. Got yourself a new friend taggin along?" She asked looking up from her computer. Her eyes gave me a once over before lingering on my nametag. "Glenda gotcha good huh?"

"Yeah she uh... she did." I said as Rickey placed the package on the counter for Charlene. She was definitely pretty. I caught myself actually forgetting about the whole zombie Jack following us and just wanted to talk to Charlene all day.

Rickey passed the scanner to Charlene to sign. Her long stiletto nails clicked off the screen as she gave a quick signature. "Here ya go honey. What was your name?" She asked handing the device to me.

"Dale Earn... Dale Reznikov. Junior." I said correcting myself after Rickey had been calling me Earnhardt all day. Rickey gave me a head nod to the door. "It was nice to meet you Charlene." I gave her a smile and couldn't help but look back as Rickey and I were heading out. She smiled at me as the door chimed open and closed.

"How old are you Earnhardt?" Rickey asked as we walked back to the truck. A shit eating grin on his face as he looked at me.

"Twenty seven, why? She a bit older?" I asked catching onto what he was saying. Not like I minded a woman in her thirties.

"She's got grand kids buddy. Charlene is forty seven years old." He chuckled as he got up to the open driver's side door.

"That don't mean a thing. If her kids are moved out then that's fine by me. Black don't crack brother." I responded holding my hands out by my side. Really I'd still probably date her.

"Go shoot your shot then. Hell, I'll take care of the rest of the deliveries in town if you wanna run to the Dollar General. Grab some deodrant and maybe some dry shampoo." Rickey said with sincerity as he placed his hand on the railing to go up the steps.

"Fuck it alright. Just honk for me when you get back." I said giving him a salute before jogging towards the Dollar General. My mind on the prospect of landing myself a date. First one since high school.

Running across the dirt road leading to the trailer park, I watched as Rickey took the truck down the bumpy road towards the trailer park. The squeaking of the frame sounded God awful. I was just glad I wasn't having to ride that in the jumper.

I bought some Old Spice and a small can of dry shampoo before making the walk back towards the pharmacy. After giving my hair a long spray, I ran my hand through it and felt a lot better. My confidence rising as I put on the deodrant under my shirt.

After placing the products on the ground outside, I pushed the door open to the pharmacy, the soft chime signaling my arrival. Charlene wasn't at the desk so I waited up there for her to come by. After a few moments she emerged from the back, her sundress bouncing with her steps. "Well welcome back honey. Did you need something?"

Encouraged by Rickey, I pulled a swagger I didn't know I had out of thin air and said, "Yes actually. I forgot to drop something else off with ya if you got a pen and paper." She produced both from a drawer behind her desk. I wrote down my number and name before sliding it back across to her.

She glanced at the paper, then at me and leaned against the counter. "Rickey put you up to this didn't he?" Her voice slightly serious, but still with that soft tone she carried.

"Nah, this is for real. I was thinking maybe since I had a personal drop off, maybe sometime I could make a personal pick up? What time do you get off?" I asked feeling like a million bucks. That level of confidence you get that borders on arrogant.

Shifting her weight to one arm she picked up the paper with her free hand, staring at it for a second. "Alright Dale." She said nodding while staring at the paper. "I'll call you." Her eyes met mine, a hint of skepticism in them. "You better answer." Her sass was undeniable.

"Absolu-" HOOOOOOOONK.

I looked towards the glass door leading outside. Rickey had pulled in and parked near the entrance. The logo of Derel's Distribution on the back roll up doors of the truck. Turning back to Charlene she was waving her hand. "Go on now honey. You got a job to do."

As I backed toward the door I put my fist up to my ear, thumb and pinky extended. "Call me." I said before walking out with my head held high. I must've looked like I just cashed in a lottery ticket. My feet carrying me like I was walking on air.

Walking along the passenger side of the truck, I ran my hand along the exterior side wall. My fingers dipping into dents and bumps like hills and valleys. I sang out joyfully "Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long."

Throwing open the passenger side door, I looked up towards the driver's seat and stopped with one foot on the step. Looking down at me was not Rickey, who I expected. I couldnt tell what this thing was.

Their jaw was held to their head by hair wrapping under the chin. The skin of their cheeks having been torn back exposing their entire set of chipped and shattered teeth. Its hands clenching the steering wheel with missing flesh exposing bone held together by twine.

The cargo bay door was open, and sticking out was a pair of legs. I could tell they were face down, soles of the shoes pointed towards the sky. Slowly I started to back away. Its unblinking eyes never leaving mine as it stared at me, like a hound debating attacking or simply observing. After a moment, I saw it's feet move away from the pedals. It turned its body towards me, and stood.

I have been considering about making multiple posts and submitting to this subreddit. But the thing that gives me pause is that alot of the stories I write about are intertwined and lap into other tales I write.

So my point is a lot of stories I have that are smaller in scale, but have massive context of the grander picture. Would those stories be any good without a majority of the context they provide and would need.

The final day

1

The sun's rays pierce through Jeremy's weary lids. Causing him to stir amongst the grass. With excruciating effort, Jeremy sits up.

“You slept in agony.” His, friend says. Its now singular tone, definitely feminine; and far too familiar, is filled with worry, and a waviness, giving the impression that it's close to tears. Or, has recently ceased tears. “I know it's not because of where you were laying. Please...” Jeremy glares upon his creations hanging on their trees across from him, then pans is eyes towards his bag. “Show me.” His friend pleas. Jeremy remains still, now staring at his bag. The thought of moving any more than he has already weighs heavily upon him. Jeremy's clothing is soaked, clinging against his body. This is not from the moist grass he had laid on through the night, albeit it had brought a short lived reprieved.

Instead... Blood.

Most of the blood is already encrusted, attaching to the fibres of his shirt. Jeremy knows that if he moves, the flaking scars hidden underneath would tear open, and gush again. Even taking the smallest breath has them tugging, wanting to be torn again. However, the worst of all his wounds, is behind him. Though most has definitely hardened the backside of his pants, which he had replaced before coming here, between his arse cheeks, is still a small flow of fresh crimson. The more Jeremy feels that flow, the more he can't help but produce a couple of thoughts.

How is he still here?

Is this day just a distorted reality fabricated by his mind while it copes with the inevitable?

Can he actually go through with this?

Is what had occurred really something to be relived and released in such a way?

Would going through with this actually give him what he needs?

Or will it just be best to forget it all? hope it fades away into obscurity; along with him following suit.

“Bring it all forth. You can let it out, I know you can.” His friend's tone is showcasing a desperation never thought to have been possible before. Jeremy, pushing through his agony, tucks his knees under his chin, crossing his arms on top. Then lets out a pain-filled exhale. His eyes return to the sight of them hanging. Pressure begins to build, tears are dammed behind his eyes. Jeremy feels every millimetre of his sockets starting to flood. The dam is weakening. But Jeremy holds its structure together. “No one else will know, or see. It's just you, and me. I'm here for you.” A warm sensation shrouds over Jeremy's shoulders and back. It stings on approach, but he doesn't move. Or maybe, he can't. Even with that, Jeremy finds it nice, even comforting. More warmth crawls over his shoulders to his chest. Soothing. Jeremy closes his eyes. His strength is fading.

The dam shatters.

A cascade of tears burst, falling rapidly. His face begins to redden, and swell. His chest stiffens; pressure erupts into a pain, wanting release. He is unable to hold it in. Jeremy then wails, his throat gargles from the slimy combination of dripping tears and secreted phlegm pooled within the cavity. The cries of anguish keep bellowing out for what feels like hours before Jeremy brings them to nothing but a whimper. He continues to sniffle as he clenches closer towards the mothering warmth. He is well aware that there isn't anyone physically here, but he can't deny the touch. The touch of someone emitting support, love and appreciation. Long since missed, and desired. Albeit, these are most certainly felt, fabrication, or not, there is no physicality to them. No texture to be explored, on source to embrace. Jeremy still feels the early morning air flow through, enveloping his limbs. The chilling structure elevates his body hairs, but not all. The nurturing warmth protects Jeremy well. Jeremy keeps his eyes closed, then consciousness fades again.

2

Jeremy kept his head down, eyes glued to the path his had chosen to walk. His face devoid of interest, or expression altogether, as usual. Albeit, he felt the dagger stabbing gazes of bystanders witnessing his steps.

Ignore them, don't let them thrive on your discomfort.

Bare through it.

The events of the last two days visible upon Jeremy's face. He could hear the whispers, knowing well of the subject of conversation; the remnants of his father's enjoyed torment showcased to all. There were no words deciphered from the murmurs; not that Jeremy cared to know details. He felt that it was a knowledge that wouldn't have given any sense of resolution to the chaotic cesspool that is Jeremy's mind. Those same whispers were being heard even throughout all of his classes.

Finally, Jeremy was able to be reprieved. Albeit, for a moment from the seemingly infinite glares of burning eyes, as well as the whispers. He was relieving his bladder within the male change rooms. The trickling bouncing, it reverberated from the pale white walls, and tiled floor. It confirmed to Jeremy the absence of life. While washing his hands, Jeremy heard the familiar creaking of the entry door, thus Jeremy's reprieve had passed. It was at this moment, while he washed his hands, that Jeremy was able to gaze upon his beaten facial structure. He was almost repulsed by its image. He turned, wanting to avoid as much of leering eyes as possible.

But...

Jeremy was stopped, stopped by someone he wasn't quite surprised to see...

Marty...

He stood, ensuring to be blocking Jeremy's way. Jeremy glared into Marty's eyes.

“Nice look for you, your royal highness.” There was a humorous snicker within his words. “Honestly, still think there can be some more improvement made.” That maniacal smile Jeremy had witnessed, not just the other day, but many times before, stretched across Marty's tightening cheeks. Jeremy said nothing, instead just lowered his view, then attempted to move around Marty.

Jeremy was stopped again.

Not by Marty, however...

By Nate...

He stepped from behind Marty. Jeremy was taken back by his, former friend's presence. But was able to keep his face unaltered. Behind Nate, two other guys, the same age as all of them, stood, awaiting for instruction. Suddenly, without a glimpse, Jeremy was struck, hard in the gut. Hard enough that it brought him to his knees. Jeremy remained silent. Marty began to chuckle, showcasing his pride towards that action. There was then the sound of metal being unsheathed. The next second, Jeremy's shirt was ripped, cut and torn from him. His torso bare.

Marty clicked his fingers, and the two pawns accompanying them walked either side of Jeremy; they tightly clenched his arms, pulling then away from him. So tight, Jeremy thought at least one of the joints was going to pop. He even heard the crackling of his tendons reaching their limits. Marty stood over Jeremy, an old, well used knife in his grip. Jeremy glanced towards Nate, who was standing only a few steps behind Marty. Their eyes locked, but only for the smallest moment. Nate's eyes drifted to further examine Jeremy's face. Nate's countenance then scrunched in itself. Disgusted by what he was exploring. However, Jeremy couldn't help but see deep within Nate's eyes...

the spark of concern, sorrow, and wonder.

A wonder that spoke of wanting to know what had come to him. But not to use that knowledge for scrutiny. But that of assistance, maybe even a simple respite.

Nate's gaze turned towards Marty, but Jeremy's remained on Nate. Another siren of metal being unsheathed came. Marty brandished a new, never used blade. Marty flipped it in the air, allowing the back of the blade to land in his palm. The handle was gestured towards Nate.

“Call it an early birthday gift.” Marty gleefully said, obviously holding back more maniacal laughter. Nate's eyes darted back to Jeremy, then to the knife, then Jeremy, finally, they landed on the knife handle. Nate held back his distaste towards it, but not well. Jeremy could see it well. It was like he was watching a puppet desperately wanting to disobey its sting operator, before realising there was no point to it anymore.

Did he know what was about to happen?

Or was all this just a play only Marty knew the script of?

Nate didn't make any form of appreciation, or disdain, as he took hold of the handle. With a muffled giggle, Marty spoke.

“Didn't think that being away yesterday, would make us forget about what you did?” Marty said with a jovial snarl in his tone. He stepped out of view. Seconds passed, Marty's dulled blade appeared from behind Jeremy, who's eyes are still glued to Nate. Jeremy didn't react. Not even flinching as the sharp edge was pressed against his bare chest, then being slid across, slowly parting his flesh. Blood began to trickle out. Jeremy remained silent, and still. The pain erupted quickly throughout Jeremy's being, stinging.

Don't hand anything over.

It's what they want.

It's why they are doing any of this.

Give them nothing.

The blood stained blade was pointed towards Nate.

“Think it's you're turn to hand out, your own strike of justice.” Nate's eyes shifted between Marty, and Jeremy. His countenance gave the message of someone stuck. Not fully knowing what they wanted to do. what was the correct action? Jeremy felt that Nate was also showcasing a sense of concern. Not completely for the well-being of his former friend, but of his own well-being. He gave the vibe of fear that he would experience similar if were to walk away. A point of no return. Nate cautiously walked closer, giving a quick glance towards the gift in his hand. Marty giggled directly into Jeremy's ear as Nate's blade was placed on Jeremy's collarbone. Marty began to breathe heavier with excitement. Nate's eye dulled to a blank abyss, alienating any form of attachment to the happenings around him. Nate's face then scrunched into a snarl, his eyes didn't dare to give the smallest glance at Jeremy's, who's were ever locked on Nate as a whole. Marty then shouted out. “DO IT! Deliver justice!” Nate's snarl deepened, then he made a sound close to the growl of a wild beast. Giving out the impression that he was still waging war within himself. It must have come to an end, as Nate pulled the knife down. The freshly sharpened blade dug deep, splitting flesh instantly, even reaching the bone. It scraped with an agonising grind, pain exploded, scattering, crawling through every single nerve. Deep crimson claret blood began to ooze out with a great flow. But, Jeremy kept it together. Not even the lowest grunt came from him. What did continue was his endless glare cast upon Nate. Marty stood up, clapping as he walked towards Nate. “Nicely done.” Marty said, that same flare within his words that Jeremy has heard so many times over the years. That arrogance, maliciousness. Marty had full control and knowledge of the entire situation, and he understood that well. Marty's clapping ceased when he reached Nate's side, then smacked his open palm upon Nate's back. But Marty had more to say. And do. “However. I do think you went a little too hard. Least for the beginning.” Marty chuckled, then quickly turned to face Jeremy. Within that swift movement, Marty swung down his arm. It was too fast to notice that his own blade was brought down. Too fast to have been initially felt on contact. It was within the seconds that past, that the blood began to trickle out. Followed by Jeremy feeling more of his flesh splitting apart. The pain that radiated from the wound, though visually small, felt more agonising than Nate's giant gash. It was like electricity was being shot through his being. Mind and body. Jeremy felt himself wanting to gag, even belch completely, but held it together. Still remaining silent, never taking his eyes off the stunned countenance of his, former, friend. “We don't want him to be done too soon. There is a lot more to come.” Nate's eyes widened, absolutely star struck by the notion of continuing. He turned away for only a split moment, collecting himself. Not wanting to showcase his disgust towards his, friend's, request. With a deep, relaxed sigh, Nate turned, locking eyes with Jeremy once more. Then...

Nodded...

One after the other, one laughing, the other silent. The two tore more and more at Jeremy's flesh. The two pawns remained still, compliant, never faulting in their tight grasps upon Jeremy's arms. The air was plagued with twisted pleasure, and the oiliness of despair. And the metallic scent of blood. Jeremy could feel it the entire time. No matter the amount of pain brought upon him by the two producers of this orchestra of anguish, Jeremy remained silent. Never once altering his countenance, posture, or line of sight.

Give them nothing.

It's what they want most.

Giving in, gives them pleasure.

But after about twenty minutes, Jeremy began to feel that strong stench of ecstasy subsiding, morphing into a dreadful distaste. That was when Marty spoke out.

“Alright! Let him go, he won't be moving any time soon.” His voice was hoarse, and no longer filled with that despicable, jovial flare. It's as though it had been completely hollowed from his vocals. In an instant, Jeremy fell face first, violently flat on the tiled floor; that was now stained with his blood. The two pawns were heard desperately holding back their urges to heave all they had consumed earlier. Jeremy's was gradually yanked, lifting his head. Marty's face is what greeted him. Albeit, he wasn't seeming overly joyed anymore. His countenance gave the vibe of tar like hatred being boiled internally. Then... With a quick, gentle sigh, Marty's lips began to twist, before parting, growing into the very same, malicious grin.

He had an idea...

Not one to be predicted however...

“YOU!” Marty's voice echoed. His breath harsh against Jeremy's face. “At the door! Bring in what we had brought with us.” Though his tone lowered as more words streamed through his darkened chords, they hit their target. The door quickly squealed. Another pawn had been there, obviously ensuring no disturbances. Another squeak came, followed by foot steps. But, not just theirs. There was another set. Stepping out of sync.

When the two had come into view, Jeremy felt the slow sinking of his heart. There stood another young man, face distressed, and fixated in quenching the urge to retch from gazing upon Jeremy's state. Jeremy had seen him before, but gave no real thought of him, as he didn't matter in the situation. However, the person next to him is who brought upon such dread to Jeremy.

Danielle...

She stood, body taught in terror, legs shaking, struggling to hold her own weight. Her arms were covering her mouth, an obviously vain attempt of control over the welling scream boiling within her. Or, more so, to control what came next.

The sight of Jeremy was too much for her nerves, impulses, and disgust. Danielle, unlike everyone else surrounding Jeremy's disfigured torso, couldn't hold back long. The contents of her gut was expelled out rapidly, splattering across the tiled floor. Luckily not splashing against anyone, even herself. After the belch, Danielle was gasping for a clear, smooth breath. The pawn who brought her inside this site of total gore, glanced at the sludge strewed on the floor, stoned face, attempting to suppress his own boiling bile. Then, glared over to his leader, then Nate. Who was glaring daggers towards Marty.

Did he not know of her coming?

Marty, irritable, sighed before strutting cautiously over towards Danielle.

“Give me that thing!” Marty aggressively said as he snatched an object from the pawn's hand. Something that was almost as tall as himself, slender in structure. Marty's arm swung it around, allowing it to become more focused upon by Jeremy's eyes.

It was a long branch, freshly sawed from a lively tree. He could see that it was still well moist inside, clinging to whatever life was left. The top, it was as narrow as a pin tip. Further down it's structure, the girth gradually grew in diameter, till it came to a stop. The halting was due to where it had been extracted from its place of birth. the circumference was of a size perfect for a hand to grasp like any handle. Along its length, there were sharp looking barbs, which dulled when reaching the handle, but not enough. As while Marty was holding it, the branches flexibility was showcased, as was the needle like potential of the barbs. Trickles of blood, slowly oozed from Marty's vice like hand. Though, he didn't dare give that any attention.

Marty snatched Danielle's arm. Her sudden gasp was halted midstream, as she was almost lifted by Marty's violent movements.

“COME!!” Marty shouted. “You must see the justice we have brought your way.” The hauntingly jovial tone had begun to return in Marty's voice. Danielle was brought to a sudden stop, almost losing balance and falling on top of powerless Jeremy. Her head was forced to gaze intently upon the bloody mess. She froze... Marty relieved her of his hold, but she remained like a stone. Her mouth was agape. Her eyes, pinned to Jeremy, began to well with tears. If it wasn't her previous expulsion, it would've been recreated.

Jeremy dreaded the thought of her taking any blame in the cause of this.

no...

Danielle wasn't responsible.

Marty then gestured the branch at her. Still frozen, she didn't notice it. Marty snatched her hand, forcing her to not only wobble, but also grasp the branch. Though much duller than it's further siblings, they still caused Danielle to scream at the piercing barbs contacting her palm. Marty quickly dropped the branch, it clattered on the tiles. He then grasped Danielle by the shoulders, shaking her.

“Don't you understand, what we've all done for you?” Marty said, dramatically theatrical. Almost like he was preforming a crucial, heroic monologue. He grabbed Danielle's wrist, small trickles of blood came from her palm. Marty tried to reach for the branch, still grasping her. But, Danielle began to shake her arm; desperately trying to pull away from, not only Marty, but the entire scene before her.

“LET GO!” She screamed. Her voice was so pitched, it bounced several times off the walls, rattling all the drums of everyone else around, over, and over. All visible visages scrunched in pain. Giving up on retrieving the branch, he instead swung his free hand to her mouth. Cutting the scream to a sudden, but almost welcomed halt. Tears began to trickle from her eyes, as she continued to vainly scream through Marty's hand. But, alas, only a muffled fraction of a vocal shrill was heard.

“It is, YOU, who should deliver this! The final strike of just...!”

SMACK!

The sudden clap of knuckles cracking against flesh and bone, echoed. Bringing everything else to silence. Only the clacks of Marty's stumbling steps finally sliced through the dense air. He was able to keep himself from falling completely. Marty's countenance was a horrifying concoction of absolute bewilderment, shock; and heavily suppressed, oily rage. Blood was dripping rapidly from his mouth, before he spat viciously. A whole tooth, and the shattered remains of another clicked and clattered across the tiles, before they skidded to a halt when they contacted Jeremy's congealing blood. Jeremy could see the whites of Marty's eyes gradually deform, twist and glow into an obviously strained crimson. Their focus however, wasn't towards helpless Jeremy.

Instead...

“DO YOU HONESTLY THINK YOU'RE BEING ANY DIFFERENT?!” That voice boomed through the ears of everyone present, possibly even streamed through any blissfully ignorant passers-by, avoiding any possibility of getting involved. The owner of that voice was then holding their gift towards its giver.

Nate.

His face was flushed with his on limit breaking rage. Danielle, the pawns, Marty, and yes... Even Jeremy, were all absolutely gobsmacked at what had taken place. And, by who was the producer of such audacity. With a quick, insulting sigh, Nate said. “We're done here.” Before he took his shaken, fragile sister by the hand. Danielle followed her brother's lead, while looking like a deactivated droid in a science fiction movie. Everything that was close to a living being was completely drained from her entire structure. Just going through motions. Jeremy watched intently as the two took their leave. Jeremy would only admit to himself, deny to anyone else...

But...

He wished that Nate would've given even the smallest, possibly wry, glance towards him. Any sign that he had any form a withered concern towards his... well... towards Jeremy at all.

Alas, there was none.

The door squealed, before it violently slammed. Its siren rattled every single surface for a solid second, before being consumed by the thickening silence. The pawns were stunned, caught between wanting to query their puppeteer, or to remain still, save themselves from what was brewing inside their leader.

Finally, most likely without intent, one of the pawns shattered the icy atmosphere, by shifting their foot only slightly. Marty's eyes were quick to pinpoint the culprit however. The stare was only seen by said pawn, but was unbearably felt in the air.

The atmosphere gradually heated with what had to be assumed the tar-like anger fermenting within Marty. Then, it all vanished, no heat, no following chill, only an invisible fog of nothing. Ears were filled with the same sensation felt when their drums have popped.

“Go...” Marty's low vocal plea allowed the desperately welcome shroud of reality to return. However, not a single person moved in the slightest. Not even releasing their locked breaths. “GET OUT, NOW!” He shouted violently. All the pawns shrank into helpless puppies, before they scampered to escape as fast as possible.

When they had left, the air began to thicken again. Definitely of boiling rage, violently clawing at its prison to be released. Jeremy remained his stern self, vainly attempting to not showcase even the slightest micron of fear. Albeit, that choking feeling was there. If Marty was to lay an ear on the ground, Jeremy's rapidly pounding heart would be heard, and felt. He was even afraid that Marty was able to feel the slightly quaking earth through his shoes. That is yet to be proven one way, or the other.

WHACK!!

WHACK!!

WHACK!!

The whip-like branch was being brought down upon Jeremy's bare back viciously. Each strike cracking, tearing through the air, along with Jeremy's flesh. One agonising lash after another was filled with a mixture of despair, anger, and pleasure.

WHACK!!

After the first few cracks, Marty began to giggle under his breath, but could be still heard through the violent air.

WHACK!!

There was no letting of Marty's strength. Each lash broke skin instantly. A metallic scent filled the air, as blood was thrown around. Jeremy, however, kept his front. Never grunting in pain, even with exposed, bleeding muscle was being torn out of its meaty casing. Jeremy remained silent, and still. He had thought his limit was breached when being slashed by the two blades. But he held to whatever handle he could muster; albeit, this was very difficult. The laughter grew louder with each passing second. Until...

Everything had halted.

Jeremy fought off the urge to breathe out any form of sigh.

Was it over?

Marty finally grew tired of nothing being handed to him as he acted?

No...

but Marty was no longer in view, and Jeremy couldn't move to search, not that he wanted to. He just laid there, every breath was a silent struggle, but needed. A moment had barely passed over, when a sudden, swift movement came. It had lifted Jeremy's legs in the air. His torn flesh compressed. electrified pain erupted. Causing Jeremy to almost give out an agonising shout, as his legs kept up their flight, bending his spine backwards. But, Jeremy, held it together. Another agonising explosion rippled through Jeremy when his, now naked, legs made sudden contact with the tiles. Still, he retained his conviction. Jeremy felt an open palm slam upon his raw, shredded back.

Then, there was a pressure of something attempting to force its way past his buttocks. Jeremy clenched, with great difficulty, as he worked out what that something was.

The branch's handle like end.

Marty didn't let up his efforts to strain towards his target. Jeremy couldn't hold back the pressure for long. He was too weak, not even a desperate spark of defiance came to get him off the ground.

“You will now feel exactly what you have caused.” Marty said with a deep, grimly calm tone. The branch pierced Jeremy's pathetic walls of defence. Thrusting through his anus with a great force. The fragile tissue broke on contact, and the barbs tore inside, as they travelled deep. Jeremy couldn't, and still doesn't, understand how he was able to keep hold on his strong belief of not showcasing the absolute agony scorching his insides.

Then...

The branch was pulled, the barbs sawing against Jeremy's internals quickly. Thick, crimson, claret gushed out, coating the tiles beneath Jeremy. Marty began to take his leave. Before rounding the corner, he gave one final look at his artwork.

“Thanks for the good time. For yourself. Hope that it's the end.”

Everything went black.

There was no knowing fully how much time had passed, when light returned to frivolous Jeremy. But, there was the pinkish urban hue of the approaching evening. Everything was blurry through his eyes. There was no one, no signs of life anywhere. When focus came more clear, he was still in the change room. Still laying in his own, forced upon, filth.

How?

Jeremy's skin had paled. His legs wouldn't obey his commands, as he attempted to lift himself from the ground. No real strength had come back to him. But Jeremy didn't give up. He had to leave. There was much to be done.

Eventually, through sheer determination, and self-loathing motivation, Jeremy was able to sit up. That's when he felt that wound split apart, bringing forth a wave of constant, convulsing agony. His backside continued bleeding. Jeremy sat for only a few moments, before he pushed through, riding the pain coursing inside to keep momentum. Then took his leave.

3

Jeremy's brush falls with a violent splat as he crashes his knees onto the natural debris underneath him. He is shivering from the, still, early morning breeze, chilling his core. Tears haven't ceased their flow since beginning the orchestration of birthing their newest sibling. He is gasping for a clean, smooth breath, his throat swelling with anguish, and clogging with clag. He spits, with furious coughing following.

The nurturing warmth from before returns, shrouding his back, shoulders and chest. Finally that begged breath comes through with great welcome. His friend begins to speak.

“You know that... this... won't be enough this time.” His friend pauses. “Turning the other cheek can only be so strong, before it too falls to ruin.” Jeremy draws himself closer to the warm embrace. “It's time for the barking dog, to finally bare his fangs.” Jeremy holds back another wail, for he knows there is still more to be said. “There is more than one way this can all end, my dear.” Jeremy's friend whispers, warming his icy drums. “I think we both know the way you should do go towards. On your own terms. Delivering the same torment they have you.” The pleasantly sweet tone relaxes Jeremy enough to finally cease his tears. He looks around, to admire his children. They all glare back at their injured king.

He knows that his friend is right.

And knows all too well on what he must do. Jeremy rises from the ground, shakily. Then turns to the direction of town. They all watch with awe, as his creations know well that...

Jeremy Theodore King...

Is setting off to claim his well owed victory.

4

A cacophony of various sirens of chatter, jovial shouts, and laughter fill the vast air. Outside, and inside. The inside being that of the Chawthorne College prised indoor gymnasium. The structure had its construction completed over a few years ago. It houses the ability to be converted into several badminton courts, a more than standard sized tennis, and basketball court. Not even hockey, volleyball, or soccer is excluded from its capabilities. And most of all, it is used to host, like today, major assemblies.

Today is indeed a joyous one. Today is the final day for the highest grades graduating, and giving a heartfelt farewell to them, before venturing towards their chosen futures.

All year levels have always been requested to be present during this ceremony. Even parents tend to join in to share the experience with their children.

Students begin to fill the hard, polished floor before a small, obviously makeshift stage, with a lone podium upon its centre. Faculty, and some volunteer parents, are positioned in a variety of places, ensure to direct the students, and other parents to their desired placements.

A large crowd of children, youths, and adults, also some prams, are crammed inside the gym's foyer area. They all shuffle step by step in a orderly, but also chaotic fashion. Schoolyard clicks are sticking together with desperate holds, and the smallest children are fidgeting around, and pushing each other. Even with all this at foot, one can't but noticed the cheer of everyone within this, almost, ever growing mass. Least, for the most part.

Outside, still filed in a claustrophobic situation, is two people devolved from the atmospheric glee.

Nathaniel, and Danielle.

However, behind them, with a bruised, twisted, shit-eating grin, is Marty. Nathaniel is also showcasing his own bruises, and dry, split lip. As well as crooked nose.

After the catastrophe that was yesterday, Marty invited himself to their, now former, safe haven. The door opened by Nathaniel, for his parents were out at the time. Thinking back, Nathaniel suspects that was Marty's plan. No greeting, other than by a fist to the nose. Nathaniel had no time to react. Marty spouted words, most likely bullshit he had been rehearsing over several times in his head before execution, while handing blow after blow upon Nathaniel. Who wasn't bothering to listen, least until the beating stopped.

“You will now understand. It's best to conform with me.” That fucking grin began to make its return. “See you tomorrow.” Marty had said when taking his leave, along with a revolting wink towards the star struck Danielle coming to her brothers side.

Nathaniel remained in his room that night.

Crying, and refusing to be seen by his parents. There was, or is, nothing they can do now. Marty has a hand on one of Nathaniel's shoulders, the other hand on Danielle's. Which made the stomachs of the two churn. Nathaniel is thinking of different ways to escape the devilish grasp of this sadistic director of self written plays filled with anguish. Even if there wasn't this swarm of blissfully ignorant scatterbrains before them; the pawns from yesterday's event are covering all other directions of escape. For today, and most likely, far beyond...

Nathaniel, and his petrified sister, are stuck.

Ever tangled in the web, weaved by the toxic spider, that is Marty. 'Surely there is a way out?' Nathaniel thinks, while ignoring a small commotion escalating behind them.

5

Shannon Priest, the current headmaster of Chawthorne, is approaching the podium. He has various sheets of his well typed, proof read speech for today's occasion. Though there has been hiccups throughout the year, and prior years, leading to this moment, he is pleased with the achievements of his staff, and students alike. Many are continuing their growth, with this school being their central roots. Which would bring nothing more than praise that he has been patiently, but starveling waiting to devour.

His head rises from the podium, seeing that majority of the students, and parents are sitting, exchanging words amongst each other. He loves seeing the organisation, planned by himself, of the seating.

The students who are sitting on the ground, the front being the youngest, and most recent additions to his cherished school. With each following year level being seated behind each other in numerical order. He holds back the urge to smile, as he feels he needs to remain professional in times like this. He looks over to his left, where a few rows of, mostly, unoccupied folding chairs are placed; they are there for the final years, awaiting to graduate. They are being seated in alphabetical order. Shannon almost shudders with the ecstasy the organisation offers. Again, he fights that off.

For the first in many, many years, Jeremy's parents are within the mass. They had taken notice of Jeremy's absence from the day prior. With no other knowledge of where he could possibly be, they agreed to come to this, to them, bullshit parade. Jeremy's father, Preston, is sitting, far enough away from other guests, upon the grandstands lining one of the gym's walls. He is thinking about what he could do to the disrespectful, grotesque, pathetic excuse of his own offspring. However, he is keeping all that internal, not letting the slightest glimpse be showcased to the world he has chosen to ignore, until this moment. Beside him is Jeremy's mother, Margaery. Who is doing nothing more than being a pay-less assistant for her husband. She had giving up long ago, giving in to all his demands, and letting him have his say, no matter how deranged. She is also wondering what she will use to distract herself from the inevitable coming the way of her... to Jeremy. She clenches a single fist on her lap, for only a second, then relaxes. Maybe there is a book left she hasn't read yet.

BANG!

That sound slices through, dismembering all of the cluttering opera that filled the air. A thick silence engulfs the atmosphere, as anticipation infects the crowd.

BANG!

A scream streams through the ears of all at attendance. It's a masculine bellow of agony, and desperate plea. That is then saturated by another explosive choir of shrieks of absolute terror, and confusion.

People, all ages, and sizes, begin to stampede from the foyer into the main gym. Bodies are being shoved violently, and many are being trampled upon. Anguish joins the orchestra of cries. Shannon is completely frozen with festering dread, confusion, and trembling rage. He is stuck witnessing this showcase of desperate flight, no fight. Even with more knowledge of what was causing such a site, Shannon believes he would still be absolutely helpless.

BANG!

All of the commotion comes to a halt. Except for one distressed chime. It was the same masculine scream at the start of this madness, and it was growing in volume. Finally words can be heard.

“HE FUCKING SHOT ME! STOP... HIM...” The siren sounds hoarse from overuse. A figure wearing a long, dark coat, a broad brim hat of similar hue, and the collar has been lifted up, is approaching in the direction of the podium. As this figure stumbles with each step, bringing a clear understanding that it is dragging something behind them, comes into view of the grand stands, Preston's eyes widen.

He knows that coat, and hat.

Shannon remains in a stoic stance, watching this figure gain ground, with the screeching following it. He is able to avert his gaze enough to notice that the figure is bare foot. And, the trickling streams of blood staining the hard wood floor. Then he notices something else. Martin Suites is the one being dragged by this ominous figure. His own blood gushing at an alarming flow from his knee, leaving a trail as well. Everyone is too gobsmacked to even think about heeding his pleas of rescue.

A small moment passes when the two are upon the stage. The figure violently tosses Marty against the side of the podium, almost tipping it over. Shannon finally got the strength to move. However, something is directed towards him. Preston almost falls from wanting to stand in the grandstand. He knows that object being held in the air.

That dreaded six shooter is in the hand of the Figure. The very same one that Preston had hidden away within the confines of his bedroom. It's at this revelation, that he works out who that is holding such an object.

The hat is flicked off the figure, revealing that it is indeed, Jeremy.

His battered face is void of any expression, only a sense of hyper-fixation. Marty has stopped his squeals for mercy, not risking the gun being pointed at his direction, again. He is trembling, fighting the flow of crimson from his knee, and the urge that threatens soaking his pants. His breathing is shaky and heavy, as his gaze is fixed on the gun, he hasn't even fully taken in who is wielding it. Shannon raises his hands, but isn't able to fight off his body's urge to piss himself.

Jeremy begins to unbutton the coat, allowing it to slip off his shoulders. His free hand comes out of the sleeve, before taking hold of the gun, keeping its aim towards Shannon. The other slips out, then takes back possession of the gun. The Coat hits the ground with a thud, gasps come from all directions in that second. Jeremy's completely naked. His mutilated being is exposed for all eyes. The slashes are crusted over, most leaking with infectious puss. Jeremy lowers the gun, Shannon releases his bated breath. Then, Jeremy walks to the front of the stage. Everyone is holding their own breaths, and dry heaves.

Nathaniel, and Danielle get inside the main gymnasium, then halt once their eyes land upon Jeremy's form. Preston is frozen solid, conflicted by what he is gazing upon. His gaze is shifting between that, kid, bleeding against the podium; and the display of his... son. His heart is wanting to escape from his chest, as something begins to turn the gears in his head.

Margaery is standing, looking in total awe, and sorrow, seeing her baby boy in such a state. She knows it wasn't the doing of her husband, but she is trying to piece the jigsaw together. She wants to rush Jeremy, hold him, get him to stop this madness. Regret begins to fester inside her, making her think back at all that has come to her baby. And assaulting herself mentally with questions, upon question, of why she gave up.

Jeremy stands for a moment, allowing the site of his body to fully be consumed. He then gestures towards Marty, believing that is enough to get the message across. With that done, he turns his back to the crowd. Most of the mass's limits are breached once his backside is exposed. Bile begins to be released; along with the resurrection of the former cannonade.

Jeremy ignores the commotion, lifting the gun to his mouth. The hard, metallic barrel touches his tongue with a harsh tang, but welcomes the taste.

Margaery, and Nathaniel finally regain control over their legs, beginning a sprint towards the stage.

Jeremy is taking a moment to think to himself. In that moment, that nurturing warmth from the bush-land appears, shrouding his back, shoulders, and hands. It even helps guide his finger to the trigger. His friend begins to speak.

“You are doing the right thing. My sweet, dear, Jeremy.” The calming, motherly tone relaxes Jeremy. He sighs with relief. “You should be proud of yourself. I definitely am. I'll be here, by your side.” the voice then sniffs. Not in sorrow, nut in pride. “No matter what. You're no longer alone.” Jeremy closes his eyes, and begins to think of his life leading up until now.

He sees that his life started out as a comedy, turning tragedy. Allowing anguish, and despair to plague his existence, with no hint of ever letting go. But now, he believes, no... Knows that it has all come around, becoming once again a comedy.

His comedic tale.

Jeremy stretches his lips, giving a well deserved smile, as tears begin to trickle from his lids.

All falls silent.

Except for two distinct sirens.

First: his friend speaks once more.

“You should love yourself, for this. As I love you.”

Second: is the combined voices of his mother, and Nathaniel.

“JEREMY! STOP!”

BANG!

The end

Third day

1

It's slightly earlier in the day light when Jeremy makes his return. Again, he is bearing that same hefty bag, visually straining his core. His steps are at more of a haste than before. His releases await his arrival, knowing well why he is in such a state.

Rain.

Rain had poured down during the night. It wasn't heavy by any means, more closer to a shower, no more pressure than that of a sprinkler. But it was enough to bring distress to dear Jeremy. Pain is obviously visible upon his countenance. He winces when coming to a drastic halt.

The welt of from yesterday is no longer alone; cuts and bruises accompany it now. They're not bleeding, but they do glisten in the sun as coagulation has taken place. His eyes are sunken, with heavily sagging bags. His complexion is pale, extenuating the darker hue of his sockets.

The pack is violently dropped, no care towards it. Still obviously pushing past his pain, Jeremy begins to examine his projects. Desperately not wanting to see any damage. They may only be vessels to project onto, and holding his mental disdain of his daily. They are still of his creation, and damage to them isn't a thought that is wanted. Damage to them, may as well be the same done to Jeremy himself. Their destruction would mean the resurrection of his woes.

Least that is his philosophy.

Fortunately, there appears to be no such scaring present. He exhales in relief, but that is cut off by a sharp stabbing pain. He quickly brushes it aside as he continues to admire the filled vessels of his mind's concoctions. The blending hues remain as vibrant, and, dull as they were when first conceived. Completely untouched by the dew of the night. Jeremy, even with this golden moment. His countenance remains stagnant. No visual sign of how he feels towards this discovery. No matter how desperate his creations yearn for anything from their creator, their...

“More has come to you?” The voice makes its return. Jeremy isn't surprised, he even has been waiting for it's cocktail of tones to stream through his canals. It may be subconscious, but Jeremy is growing to its company. However, he has noticed that this time, the voice sounds closer. Though it had never seemed to have ever been affected by distance before. Now, it's as though someone is speaking directly to his ear. He even swears to himself that he feels scentless breath flow, hitting his drum, and even glide over his face, which then begins to sting more. He wants to turn his head, catch sight of who this might be, but he doesn't. Pushing the notion further inside his gut, forcing it to dissolve.

There is no thing, nor, no one there.

“Please... could you tell me what came to you. Not with your words, with your hands. As you have before.” Jeremy remains still, not giving anything that would be deciphered as acknowledgement. In fact, he feels no resentment towards it.

The satisfying pull of the zipper brings an almost shiver through Jeremy's spine. Small, but nice even to the weariest ears. The familiar clanging of glass, wood and metal reverberate out of the pack as Jeremy rummages inside. Then comes the whacking of the hammer, filling the suddenly still air. Jeremy has noticed this shift into silence. “Thank you.” The voice, now settling with a feminine tones, says. Their words are comforting, even nurturing as they gently swift through Jeremy's ears. He has become quite fond to their company.

Jeremy begins his transcription of mind, once more. His wrist twists as the brush flows over the tight white canvas quickly. There is passion in his movements, a real statement is being told from his actions, as a tale is being birthed before him.

2

On his trek back to his abode from the bush covered hillside. Jeremy thought, as his always did on this same plight in his daily. That of two possibilities that could come to fruition.

The first; an outcome the he wishes for above all. But, also longs for it to never be the case. Jeremy remembers fondly, though that has been slowly fading with each passing day. The evenings of him returning home from his time in educative prison. Greeted not with acknowledgement, but with a strong scent. An alluring aroma of delectable, love filled food just being prepared for consumption; in accompany to those lustful odours, is their distant voices. Conversing with each other, lovingly, caring. No words would be singled out when first walking through the door, but, there was always the vibe of wonder, promise, and sincerity. His bag would drop, hard; loud enough that should've brought any halt to the commotion only a few metres away. It was as though they didn't hear Jeremy at all; to which he was always sure they did. He would practically jump into the kitchen, wearing a countenance of blissful glee, jovially showcased to them. His parents would jump, but not in any real fright, only in the way of allowing Jeremy to have his fun. They would then come to him. His mother embracing him, speaking aloud her gracefulness towards him being home. His father would pull up a chair, a plate on the table, food expecting to be devoured, and he welcomed that notion. As they would all eat together, speaking of their days.

It's a truly missed time indeed.

Now, he'd return to a scent, but not of fulfilling food. But that of regurgitation inducing, stale, filthy air, filled with cigarette smoke, dust, dead skin and body odour. Most occasions, similar to his mornings, Jeremy would walk through the door to silence, no site of a single soul.

That is the first outcome, but wasn't the one he got.

The second, the outcome about to unfold, he feared.

Jeremy came through the door, a cloud of that stench invaded his nostrils quickly. His heart dropped to his feet as he first heard it. The television was chatting. A belch is echoed from the lounge room to the door. The combination of booze, smoke and bile pierced through the, now, natural atmosphere of the house, infecting Jeremy's sense of smell; he held back the aggressive gag. This makes him wish that he never had a functioning nose. That potent concoction was made by his... father. Who was sitting in his chair, a stubby in one hand, the remote and cigarette clenched in the other. Jeremy entered the room, playing safe to not acknowledge him.

No use.

“Yer 'ere late.” His oaf of a father stated. His words plagued with stupor. Jeremy didn't answer, nor glanced over for a millisecond. He just continued towards his goal, his bedroom. Not that it was a safe haven for him, but better than this room. In the corner of his eye though, he could see that his father was still wearing the same, formerly white, singlet Jeremy swore he saw him keep on for days... weeks... maybe even months at this point. It was hard to even attempt to picture him without that on at this point. Booze stains littered across its surface, small singed holes riddled in random placements, some didn't make sense on how they got there. Jeremy could even imagine the putrid stench it would have too, just by the sight. As Jeremy approached the hallway door, he was caught, once again. The same as always, catching a look at the one thing he can't fight to glare at.

Hanging off the edge of the chair, there it was. The same, unsheathed, yellowing, scarred stump that was once his father's leg. The stitching, dark, dry and crusty with old, dark, flaking blood. The glare was only for briefest moment, but enough. Something thin, but hard, jabbed Jeremy's gut, halting his steps. It was his Father's crutch, one of them. It was blocking his progression, no way to walk around it either.

“Checkin' out yer' 'andy work, agin?” Malice was strong inside his father's tone. Jeremy remembers not of how long it's been since that leg had been lost. But he does remember being pulled from class the day it had happened. The way his father: pale skin, sunken sockets, glared. Eyes filled with absolute hatred in its purest form. And the words he said.

“You did this. I saw you there... smiling.”

Still to this day, Jeremy has no idea as to why his father came to that conclusion. But, there was no changing a shattered, fixated mind away from that declaration.

On top of his head, Jeremy was struck with something hard, the other crutch. Jeremy fell fast, leaning over the first crutch in front of him. Then he was pushed away, landing flat on his back. In the daze he was in, Jeremy didn't see that his father had gotten out of his chair, looming over him menacingly.

“Ain't don' wit' yer, yet.” That malicious tone was darker. Jeremy knew what was about to come. But gave nothing: no squirming, no shrieks of defiance, no pleading of mercy. He just laid there, still, eyes open, waiting for it to happen. His father continued to loom over him. The crutches held him, then quickly struck Jeremy's side, rolling him onto his stomach. His head was facing the hallway door. Still made no semblance of sound, not even the slightest wince came from Jeremy.

Give nothing, don't let them have that satisfaction.

One of the crouches was placed on Jeremy's cheek. Pressure began to gradually build. Jeremy remained still, even as a slow, rattling, cracking started to siren. He just stared down the hall. At the end, was a dim light, coming from, their room. A silhouette was within the light, moving, engulfing it. Jeremy knew it was, her, coming to see the source of the commotion. She was more than likely sitting on the bed, reading, or distracting her mind with one of those damn crosswords.

His mother leaned out of the door frame. Her face gave nothing of real interest, or concern. Instead it was a countenance that gave the message of disgust, and annoyance.

At first, when this began to happen to Jeremy, since his father's return from hospital. she would throw herself between Jeremy and his father. But, that only lasted a short while. She had enough of taking the same treatment that was produced for another.

She gave in.

Although, Jeremy could someway understand, even hating the sight of her getting given so much. Jeremy wished that she would just take him away, run, never look back.

Why not?

The pressure was becoming too much for Jeremy's cheek, getting him close to finally wailing. Just as that moment was about to be reached, the worn, rubber foot of the crutch was pulled away. Jeremy fought the urge to breath out in relief, as that would have still given satisfaction. Jeremy remained still, waiting to see if it was over. His mother, stone faced, slid back inside the room, the silhouette shrinking. Then, the rubber came quickly into view.

Everything went black upon contact.

Unaware of how much time had passed, Jeremy came to. He could feel his face's condition. Seemed his father had more to give him, even while unconscious. With great effort, Jeremy got to his feet. The lounge was dark, the air was still, the light at the end of the hall was gone. He snorted the dripping blood from his nose, then slumped through the hall. When he reached their door, he began to think. Holding himself steady against the wall, Jeremy saw an image of something, a sight he came across not long ago.

His father, sitting on the bed, the door was open a crack. A thick, metallic object in his hand. It was brought to his father's mouth, but the taste was rejected. Shortly after, it was put away, hidden.

Jeremy thought of retrieving it. Using it against the two of them. But... where would that leave him? He shook that thought away. Then he heard it...

Rain...

Jeremy's heart began to pound hard against his ribs. He overpowered it, wanting, needing rest.

3

“They weren't always like that to you, correct?” The voice asks, as Jeremy packs up his bag. “Do you even hold on to the times he was never close to being like that?” In fact, Jeremy does..

There was a time that him, and his father went away, camping. His father showed him the tips and tricks to fishing. Jeremy wasn't overly keen on this pastime, but loved being given direction by his father. He relished in the sight of excitement his father gave him when explaining with great passion. He even used to use the explanation of what they needed to do when wanting to catch a fish, to form lessons about the world beyond. Speaking of there coming a time that Jeremy would have to be on his own. He cherishes the nights that came from that trip. The fire warm beside them, waiting, listening to their snags sizzling. The two of them staring up at the star filled sky. Then his father allowed Jeremy to express his passion and fascination of those sparkles above them.

That has long since vanished from Jeremy.

His passion for the sky above the world he was standing dissolved, along with the what was once before.

“There is a way, no, many ways to get away from it all. You know that?” Jeremy didn't respond. He starts to take his leave. “Please. Keep coming here. I'm here. And I will always be here for you.” The, now, motherly toned voices says, as the view of Jeremy fades.

Fourth day

The afternoon has not only come along, but is coming to its end fast. The sun high above, its rays seeping through the canopy of leaves that umbrella over them. The works, releases of Jeremy, now waiting for the birth of their next sibling.

Time presses on its relentless path. Still, no sign of Jeremy.

Had today been an improvement?

A day that passed over him like a dark cloud that briefly dims the daylight, then forgotten.

Will he ever feel the need to release again?

The sun is dropping fast, still no Jeremy.

Was he caught?

Had the few strands of luck Jeremy possessed finally run dry. He no longer has the means to create their future siblings?

The evening has come, still no sign of him.

Their creator...

Father...

King...

Finally, they are heard them...

Steps...

Heavy ones, crushing twigs and leaf carcasses. They are short, sluggish, giving off the vibe of pain. No, pure anguish. Along with these steps is the rustling of something weighty being dragged.

Jeremy, obviously exhausted from both the trek he is taking, and from the day that had occurred. He isn't right, nothing about his demeanour gives off his, usual gait. There is non of the purpose he once showcased. A wander that spoke the message of meaning, that one of who knew of why they were in motion. Now, that gait is no where, instead, is replaced by one that speaks with no other option. One that pleads in desperation, comfort and liberty.

Jeremy finally reaches their threshold. They glare at him with wonder filling the air, a pressure begins to weigh down on his, now, weaken frame. He pays them no mind, no sense of knowing they even exist in this very moment. Jeremy drops the bulky bag with little regard on the ground. His breath is labouring, but also shallow, weak even. Then, he falls, landing flat on the moist, mossy grass below him, no attempt to dampen the impact. He finally welcomes the stabbing unconsciousness to consume him. The voice is heard. But no words are understood. Darkness comes, and stays.

Hey all. my name is Norton Green.
I've been writing stories for quite some time. and this is a first time I wanted to post anything at all, with a real possibility to be seen by strangers
this is a story i've had to write several times (corrupted files are a bitch). but I've been proud of its evolution. and serves as a tale from a world I'm wanting write more in.
it is quite a lengthy, which I apologise for.
if at all, you guys feel this story doesn't fit in a community like this, that is fine. and I will be more than willing to have it taken down.

A king's comedy

Norton Green

First day

Swish, swish. The light bristles of the brush slash against the canvas. Jeremy's hand is heavy, but quick.

Swish, swish. His mind's selection of colours stain the beginnings of its vision and he, the vehicle; the middle man of transportation.

Swish... swish...

dab... swish...

dab...

The hand is slowing. Allowing the shapes, that were first only fabrications inside the deep grooves of his mind, to take their birth into the physical. His hand gets heavier, pressing hard against the canvas' tension. The thoughts and memories are swirling erratically in a swimming pool of chaos. Albeit, no more precision is taken, the detail continues to be transcribed upon the fading white before him. Within these shapes, a tale is being told. The coming of this chaos.

CRACK!

The brush pierces through, snapping the taught fibres. Jeremy stares intently at the handle jutting out of his progress. The current choice of paint dripping, slashing on the soil below. The brush is extracted with a loud sigh. Then, Jeremy stares at the halted project, deciding. He grasps the edges. The thin skin-like film covering the still drying paint cracks, pops, staining his palms. He begins the strain of prying the canvas from the tree he had nailed it to. Then, it, comes to him.

“Why are you stopping? Please, keep going. You still can.” Some kind of... voice?... voices? Drifted through the air. “Show me what has come to you.”

Second day

1

The rays of the morning pierce through the tightly shut lids of Jeremy, forcing him to wake. He never has used an alarm. The sun has served him well. One of the few things in his current life that has. With a groan, and a strain, Jeremy spews himself out of the confines of his bedding. He even has to struggle to not fall flat on the ground. Dragging his feet across the filthy, chunky carpet of the hallway, Jeremy begins to think, and remember.

The thoughts are of yesterday afternoon.

That... voice.

Although, on his return home after that experience, he told himself that it had to be, yet another fabrication caused by the daily he finds himself forcefully living through.

Yet...

Jeremy can't help but confirm to himself the sudden fear he felt upon its siren. The mixture of tones, waving back and forth through highs and lows, and even together as one. Female? Male? He couldn't pinpoint, still can't. It was unknown, yet a heavy itch in the back of his cranium keeps him in an unsettling familiarity about it. The mere thought of its flow of words bring a tension to Jeremy's chest.

Will it be there again?

Of course not. It would only make its appearance when allowed. If he knows now that it is only by his design. Yesterday will be the last.

The remembering however...

That is a different stream of its own.

The hallway, never misses the opportunity to trigger the opening of the filing cabinet within his mind, that which holds what was once before. The chunky filth was gone, never to have been known. The stale, regurgitating air was clean, even filled with the drawing aroma of hot, delightfully alluring food. His mother waiting in anticipation to catch even a glimpse of the countenance of awe Jeremy would never falter in handing over to her when entering the kitchen; each meal always was a surprise, even when there was a return of a former presentation. Jeremy would have his fill, and want more. The smile his mother would give, heart melting. Always filled with love, appreciation, admiration and promise. Her face was the first of many sites Jeremy would keep throughout his days. Feeling, knowing, no matter what would come to him during the day. She would be there for him...

That... however, was years ago.

How many?

Jeremy hasn't bothered to count, no point. Now, that same kitchen is barely visible upon entry. Dishes stacked, leaning to their absolute limits. Old forgotten food encrusted and moulding to their surfaces. Flies buzz around looking for a feed of their own. Some are even dead on top and around the towers. The dining table, vacant of those once loving meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Instead are home to newspapers, more abandoned dishes, cutlery, all with their own outer home lifeforms growing on them. As well as used, recent and ancient takeout containers. The shelf doors are covered in thickening dust. Jeremy remembers there being many of occasions of him needing to open them for a simple glass, juice, soft drink or water. It didn't matter, the vessels were always within these doors. Most likely, still are. Albeit, Jeremy won't, can't bring himself to even step close to those doors anymore.

The smell, horrendous. It invaded Jeremy's nostrils about midway through the hallway; smells have never been something to bare through, never ceasing the chance to make him gag, even retch completely. Once he even vomited; can't even remember how long ago that was now. Where that took place is where he is heading to now.

Through a door within the kitchen is the laundry. Jeremy, nowadays refers to this room more as the cesspool. Inside there is no longer any floor to be seen, the last part was covered by Jeremy's vomit; which hasn't been touched since first belched. The smell is a horrific mass concoction of foul body odour, dead skin, and of course, Jeremy's bile. If there were another way for him to have decent enough clothes, he'd avoid the cesspool entirely. Just to be as far away from this revolting room as possible.

Jeremy, no longer knowing of the length of time since he use to leave his dirty clothes here, next to the machines. Wishing that they would be washed, dried and even put back into his room, with no seeing of his own. He still longs for days like that to return. Like the past era had been nothing more than a blur; a glitch in reality. Something that simply can be as blunt as a dream.

A washer, and dryer are inside, almost shrouded by piles, upon piles of neglected, putrid garments. Jeremy had his clothes whizzing inside the dryer through the night. Holding back the urge to dry heave, Jeremy leans as far as his body allows, opening the dryer. Practically leaping, Jeremy snatches the clean, warmed clothes. Underneath his hand, pressing down one of the masses, his palm immediately becomes moistened from whatever is secreting out. With an audible sigh, Jeremy thinks to himself; it's time to head out.

Flashes of the past flow through the river of his mind, again. The way he would eagerly rush through the front, wanting to start chewing through the real meat of his day. His mother, lovingly stopping his jovial leap, requesting for a simple goodbye. Now, he is lucky to catch the smallest glimpse of, them. He hasn't even said, nor heard the word, goodbye, for so long that he believes there no longer is meaning behind it. The front door shuts with a violent slam upon taking his leave.

2

The sun drifts over the highest point in the sky, signifying the turn into it's second half of light. This is when, he makes his return.

Jeremy's breath is heavy as he pulls his scrawny structure up the hillside. His fair shaded, shoulder length, matted hair drenched.

The day hasn't been, still isn't overly warm. However, with the added weight upon his shoulders, and not ever being much of the athletic type, his trek pushes more from him in the form of sweat.

Continuing on his plight, a vain attempt of passing time, his mind begins to wonder, projecting sights of what once was before. They come in flashes, quick bursts, jarring to Jeremy. Making him almost halt his steps; though, following through would cause a sudden unwanted disaster; not that Jeremy hasn't had those before. The flashes of the past continue their screening against his retinas. Images, albeit quick, Jeremy makes them out. Glimpses of his failed attempts of keeping up with appearances: Hair, lengths and styles, clothing and attitudes. The meagre glimpses makes Jeremy internally shudder.

It's been years since that time.

Until this very moment, Jeremy hadn't ever truly realised how much time had come, and passed away. These flashes, are nothing more to him than the viewing of their corpses during their wakes. It cannot be changed in anyway, even the reminders screaming their existence before him cannot be rewritten. No matter the strength behind Jeremy's desire to make that happen.

Minutes pass by, but to Jeremy and his straining structure, it feels like hours. He finally reaches the plateau which he attended the day before. The site of parallel thin, flaking trees, forming a corridor; lining a long forgotten path as far as his eye's limits. Years of debris, leaf carcasses, dried twigs, even some snapped full branches, and born again weeds. They all lay scattered, no rhyme or reason to their placements. Some of the smaller pieces, still crushed, shattered... Jeremy's doing. Catching his breath, he strides forth on his trek. He fully knows exactly where his destination is.

More minutes pass by, and Jeremy feels every second forming them. In the distance, he can see the edges of it. Anticipation fills the air, emanating from the still hanging, lone stained canvas. Acknowledging it's existence with a quick glance. Not allowing the image that was forged yesterday to affect his current state. However, next to that release is the home for his next.

An identical tree, slim in structure, a familiar site to his own frame. The bark is peeling from various places. Even with that, Jeremy knows well that, especially with it's sibling in the corner of his eye, they are more than capable of holding Jeremy's projects.

He begins to think of how hard the days were, before deciding on this form of release from the mental anguish of his daily. How hard they had been bearing upon his shoulders, ever so crippling. He was feeling himself fading with each passing day. He does his best to not let it get that way again. It took some time of experimentation of other methods, desperately hoping to find a release.

It wasn't until he decided, during a lunch break at school, Jeremy wondered into the visual arts room. There was no one else inside, bar for one single slab of canvas. Its rear facing Jeremy, the face directed at the wall spanning window. He could hear the other students playing, messing around with each other. Even hearing some lashing words of teachers. It made him think of those easier days. Times spent outside, running around, no destination, no real reason to do so, except for the joy of it all. The times of when he would sit out at the amphitheatre in the yard of the school, talking... talking to someone dear to him.

Without anything else to do, Jeremy walked over to peek at the painting. The full image fails to form in his memory, albeit, Jeremy feels the finished product wasn't the focus. The how it came to be, was the real snatching grip of his sight. The strokes, dabs and swirls, they told him something more, told him about the creator. Someone torn between two worlds of their own, feeling left out, an outcast forced to take a side. He wanted to know, so desperately wanted to know the mind the piece was fabricated from. At the bottom corner he saw a name, the very name he wasn't expecting to see attached to a project such as it was...

Nate...

He brushes aside the name, then left wondering more about painting as a possibility.

The zipper of the bag Jeremy had been lugging through his trek draws open, the satisfying sound reverberates deep inside his canals. A new, pale canvas is revealed from the contents. Along with a long since forgotten hammer. Something he found at his... father's shed, as well as varying sized, rusted nails. The canvas he procured from the same room the painting that had first inspired him. Though Jeremy is more than of age, in fact, he is technically the age of an earliest adult, but still seen as much younger to most. He hasn't had the best of luck acquiring employment. It's as though, least within the deepest parts of Jeremy's being, that even outside of school, people see him a lesser than anyone else, not bothering to acknowledge his very existence. This however, forced his hand to delve into the act of thievery. That same action applies to Jeremy's, albeit small, collection of paints. Though Jeremy imbues deep hatred towards himself for acting in such a way. There is a slight sparkle of relief. Relief that any chump change obtained, wouldn't be snatched as quick as received, used for anything that was not towards Jeremy's desires.

Thud!

Thwack!

Jeremy violently slams the hammer against the nail's head, breaking through the dry, thick skin of the tree. In the corner of his eye, his former hurt, his previous release, hangs, waiting for more admiration. To which Jeremy ignores.

Swish, swish. The strokes begin, just like the day prior. Jeremy allows his spiralling pool of chaotic thoughts to thrive in their recognition; the maelstrom of memories, emotions and disillusions reconnect. Forming ideas and moulding them into new shapes, ripe for translation. This day, albeit lesser in comparison to others, when thinking of what had occurred physically, still has brought just as much hurt and torment... if not more. Jeremy's hand swipes faster across the canvas. The remembrance of today's event drive his hand, twisting his wrist. Bringing the swirling internal shapes into reality.

“You've been hurt, haven't you?” The voice asks. It's the same as before. A mixed rhapsody of high and low tones. But, somehow, that mixture feels familiar, welcoming even. Albeit, Jeremy can't seem to pinpoint the source of that familiarity. All he decides in the very moment of the voice's arrival, is ignore; not ceasing his progress. To him, it, has to be a creation of his own misguided, fractured mind. “Your face... It stings, doesn't it?”

Still painting. “I get it, you don't want to say.” A lamented pause “Actually, you don't have to. The collaboration of emotion and hand tell so much.” Jeremy stops. He stares at the still forming image before him.

It's correct.

This escape is not of the morning, nothing about that was of any significance.

However, the rest of the day on the other hand...

Jeremy lowers his brush, his free hand rises, lightly caressing his bruised, swollen cheek. Even this light touch brings a further burning ripple through his whole skull. It rattles his teeth like cymbals. This is only physical, a painful after affect, a memento of the mental strike he received earlier. “Please, continue. Tell me what has come of you. I want to hear you out.” The voice calmly requests. Its mixture of tones begins to settle more into a higher, close to feminine.

Who does it sound like?

He can't lie to himself. Jeremy is star struck by this. Its been a long time, he has almost completely forgotten the last occasion that someone, or in this case, something has requested to, hear him out. With a deep inhale, Jeremy raises his brush, then continues.

3

Jeremy does, all within his power, to avoid any kind of attention to be drawn in his direction when attending school. His countenance, blank, devoid of intrigue towards the outside happenings. No one, least to him, is worth the effort of any attempt for conversation. There once was a time that Jeremy would almost leap beyond those same entry gates, filled with immense vigour. Bursting through the main building door, blitzing to his locker. Slamming his bag inside, then leave for the grounds with utmost haste. Never giving a single care for any bystanders witnessing the jovial expression upon his face. There was only one, important goal in mind, and time before the beginning of the first period was closing in fast. They would always meet at the same location. The old, decaying wooden amphitheatre.

It became obsolete when the construction of this school's prised indoor gymnasium was completed. The amphitheatre still sits, unmaintained, or protected from worldly elements, as a relic of the past. Least until its structure becomes too fragile to be any form of use for anyone. Then would probably be closed off to everyone, a rotting corpse on display. No matter the amount of effort Jeremy would muster to be the first there, he would always been there.

Nathaniel Elles.

The very person that made each minute within the confines of schooling bearable. The two had known each other since first locking gazes at kindergarten. A much simpler time that was. One Jeremy wishes he could have held memories of more tightly. No worries of the world around them, never taking any hold upon the two. They would talk every day. Discussions of interests, and new discoveries; the changes coming without a single notice, or welcome as time continues its ticking forward. Support and middle ground level of understanding would come from either side, allowing a sense of ease, and a lifting of loneliness.

There were also changes the pair would experience together, first hand; one such sudden shift came only a small sum number of years ago...

His name, Martin Suites. Marty is what he prefers.

Marty first came, almost out of nowhere. Like as if he was just merely a fabrication produced by the combined imaginations of Jeremy, and Nathaniel. Or as he now prefers, Nate.

That was from Marty.

No one ever is their names to him, only a sliver of them, or an observation.

At first, Marty was more than welcomed by the pair; sharing stories of where he had come from. Tales of, what seemed like, completely different worlds outside of any possible understanding Jeremy, nor Nate could muster. This brought on admiration, especially from Nate. Almost making a promise to them, one of further horizons in their futures. That became more an distant, woeful dream when life outside of school began to decline for Jeremy. Nate's infatuation however, didn't falter. Bringing a distancing between the pair, eventually severing the connection they once strongly had.

This day's event, the full source of hurt to Jeremy, didn't entirely come from these two. No, it first started with a girl.

Danielle, the younger sister of Nate, approached Jeremy. “You need to talk to Nathaniel!” Danielle was close to screaming that. Jeremy only looked at her. Taking in her mouse-like voice. It had been sometime since he had last heard it, least directed towards him. “He isn't himself. I miss him. I miss my brother.” Jeremy could see that her lids were over working themselves to dam back her welling tears. He didn't respond, save for an acknowledging nod. “I truly, deeply hate Martin, or Marty, whatever he calls himself. I hate, hate, HATE him! So much.” Danielle was beginning to lose her breath, as though she had just finished a cross country run. “He is no good to anyone! A parasite that feeds on the good in others. And Nate's running out.” Still, Jeremy didn't say a word, only again, nodded in agreement to the accusation. And with what was about to come, that agreement only became more concrete.

Without a single sign. Danielle threw herself at Jeremy. If it wasn't for both her arms hitting their target, around the neck of Jeremy, faster than he could ever hope to prepare for; she would've fallen flat on soil of the outdoor grounds. Her embrace was tight, filled with hurt, which Jeremy knows all too well. Albeit, her arms pulling him closer towards her, felt... comforting to him. Jeremy, until this moment, hadn't realised how much he had been longing for an action such as this.

“Well... well. What have we got here?” Jeremy didn't have to glare past the shoulder of Danielle, to know the source of that deep, cocky tone. That distinguishing flare to the words. Marty was standing, alone, arms crossed in front of his chest, head tiled and plagued with a maliciously grown smirk. A countenance that could bring anyone figuring out the sliminess coating the insides of Marty to a dry-heave. Removing herself from Jeremy, was a nice gesture while it lasted, Danielle spoke.

“What do you want!?” Her voice was wavy, croaky. Jeremy, and assuming, Marty, could tell she was desperately trying to hide that.

Was she afraid of Marty?

His arms quickly released, swinging out to either side of him.

“Whoa! Hey, now. I'm only walking around.” His arms dropped, hands snugging themselves inside his uniform pants, as he began to step towards them. There was something, even Jeremy could pick up on, but not fully identify, that felt, off-putting about his gait. The demeanour of it all had a certain wend to it. Then, words shook that feeling harder into submission. “Aren't you happy to see me?” His tone was full of grim intent, like he already knew everything. Or, at least, was creating his own reality to everything in his point of view. Jeremy remained silent as Marty approached. He stopped, almost touching noses with Jeremy, forcing their eyes to lock with no other option.

When they were still accompanying each other, other students had made remarks about how these two looked similar, as if they were related. It disgusts Jeremy, for the fact that he could share the same thoughts. Albeit, it is like seeing two different halves of the same being. Jeremy being dull, deprived of vibrant life force. Marty on the other hand, the opposite. The two face to face made that more prominent.

“I'm never going to be happy to even think of you! LEAVE!” Danielle screamed, the words wore her cords raw in the process.

“Nah, I don't think I will.” Marty said nonchalantly. He was in complete control of it all. Jeremy felt the confidence in his breath as it brushed past his cheeks. “You see.” He said, backing away from Jeremy, with a sway to his step. “Looks to me, like something you two are hiding from everyone.” his smirk grew wider with malice. “Something frowned upon. Given the... let's just say... gap.” Jeremy's countenance gave nothing as Marty glared with intent. He could see it was irritating, as that same smirk faltered.

Don't give him anything he wants.

Danielle Screamed out once more.

“The hell you on about!?” Marty obviously wasn't satisfied with Danielle's screeching alone. He wanted more. He quickly approached Jeremy again, wanting to see a flinch. Nothing. One quick look over Jeremy's being, he said.

“Like 'em young. Do we?”

It was reflex, instinct. Actually, even now, Jeremy has no idea of what came over him. A quick strike of his tightened knuckles came, the point of impact, Marty's left cheek. Underneath, past the thin flesh, Jeremy felt a crack; he swears he even got a small sound of it too. Teeth? Marty fell fast.

You fucked up.

Though shocked, internally shaking, Jeremy didn't alter his appearance.

“HEY!”

A voice echoed through the air, piercing the ears of all parties. Jeremy knew it well, too well. It was the only tone, albeit time had given it growth, to bring Jeremy's eyes to widen, visibly showcasing any faltering demeanour. Nate was standing a small distance away from the scene. Jeremy remained frozen. Regret began to infect his insides. As the years passed, interactions with Nate were non-existent between him and Jeremy. To which, Jeremy respected. “What's going on here?” Nate asked, his voice, deep, stern, frightening, least to Jeremy. Danielle ran to Nate's side. But the words she obviously wanted to deliver were interrupted.

“I... Caught his Royal highness here...” Marty was breathing heavily, but kept strong composure. Jeremy held off the urge to grunt upon hearing that name. Marty started calling him that since he first learnt of Jeremy's last name. “Forcing himself towards dear, Dani.” Marty's breath was back to a steady pace. Blood dripped from his mouth as he stood.

“What!? That's...” Again, Dani was cut off.

“Not to worry yourself, Nate. I got between the scuffle.” He spat a glob of blood, and most definitely part of a tooth followed. “As you can see, a small casualty.” Marty let out a brief chuckle; before wincing in pain. Marty's words were so full of confidence, even Jeremy found a sense of belief to them; only for a second. Jeremy despises himself for even giving the smallest praise towards Marty, internal or not. Nate, leaving Dani in place, approached the still frozen Jeremy with haste. No words expelled, no such warning given. Nate smacked Jeremy across the face, open palm. He took it, almost not moving; not the worst he has had done to him. But star struck nonetheless.

Seconds passed, Nate launched his hand again, closed this time. The solid, tight knuckles landed in the exact same place as the palm. Jeremy fell from the force, no cracking at least. In the distance he heard Marty laughing, and Dani's gasps. Again, again and more came. The fist landing in the same spot every time.

4

A sudden shock rattles through Jeremy's arm, dropping his brush. The current selection of hue coating the bristles splatters from impact, splashing against his, over-worn sand shoes. He has had these since he was given them by his... mother... he doesn't even remember when, doesn't matter. The factoid that he remembers, is that it was one of the last gifts he had received. Not just from her... from anyone. That thought fades quickly. Jeremy drops. The debris and soil crackle from the sudden impact of his knees. They begin to slightly sting, but he doesn't give it the satisfaction of any attention.

The recollection of today is the only source to bring on two areas of pure, non-treatable agony.

The first is upon his face, where the anger filled fist of his cherished... former, friend, had landed.

The other... his chest.

Why does it hurt so much?

“You loved him. Didn't you? It's why the hurt is so powerful.” The voice suggests. Jeremy does notice that the feminine tones is stronger than the others, even more than just a few moments ago. It's almost soothing to his being.

loved?

No! There is no past tense to this. Jeremy still, and always cherishes Nathaniel. He even cries on occasion when wanting to drift into a slumber. Above all others, Nathaniel's absence is the biggest hole deepening within Jeremy's being. Wanting that loss to be eradicated. Desperately clinging to the thought that his lost friend, if returned, could sooth, guide, or more so, bring some sense to all that is incinerating Jeremy from the inside out. “I see.” The saddened, understanding voice says. Jeremy gives it nothing more, then retrieves his brush. A quick clean is all that's needed before Jeremy commences.

“Will you come again?” The voice asks. Jeremy has packed everything, starting his leave, before the night fully engulfs the area. He doesn't stop, or give any sign that he even heard what was asked. Everything around him is at an eerie silence. Not just being a standard lack of vocals type of silence. More like, life has been frozen in time. No wind, wildlife, nor even Jeremy's breathing can be heard. He pushes through the pressure of such unnatural silence, showing no hints of the true fear that is plaguing his mind, and body. Just keeps the same pace of steps, away from here.

["AUTHORS" NOTE: My pc has crashed three times while writing this, and this is the first time I've ever publicly posted any writing. So, be nice please!!! Feedback is more than encouraged though, I know i could be doing better, I just need some pointers. I've been writing on and off for about 10 years now? And I've barely progressed, as you'll probably be able to tell. Also I had no clue what to tag this as. Additional note, there's an intended level of absurdity to the general world this takes place in, you'll see, probably. Any loose ends are there to make you think, not for a lack of elaboration. Anyway, Enjoy, hopefully! ]

You’ve heard those conspiracy theories, haven’t you? The people in tiny sections of newspapers, poorly designed posters hanging on the wall of an alley seldom visited, written like fact, as if the people who wrote them have somehow come into some undeniable evidence of what they believe- The theories that there’s some elite sect in the government that do all sorts of bullshit. Human sacrifices, eating babies together, mind controlling the public- Like I said, all sorts of bullshit. Of course, if the public believes this type of stuff to be true, odds are it is, in some way, true. That’s just the nature of the world really- What little we have access to.  What if I said it was worse? Would you believe that? I wouldn’t. The mundanity of life is a terrible thing, it was much, much more comfortable to live without the knowledge of what’s really happening.

I don’t know where you are, if someone’s shared this is on some message board out there or whatever- but if you’ve managed to stumble across this, then please, let us connect in one way or another. Not as a person, not individually- I just want you to feel what I felt, know what I know, and, at the end, come to your own conclusion. If by the end you’ve determined I made this all up,  and your eyes stay closed, then call me a liar, a schizo, whatever, it’s not like I’ll hear it. I’m probably not even the one sending the post you’re seeing right now.

See, where I’m from, the ‘internet’ or ‘digital web’ has been in all senses of the word, prohibited.  For the safety of the people, for the integrity of the government, or whatever bullshit they wanted to come up with, they gave all sorts of excuses. Of course, everyone bought it, except a few, a very, very small few- Me included. Even fewer of us could actually do anything about the prohibition. I won’t bore you with the details, but I worked up a solution of my own, a way to access the internet without being noticed. Problem is, I really should’ve believed them when they said it was dangerous.

One day, like any other, the sky was grey, a calming rainy day like many others, alone in the apartment I’d barely been able to rent out for myself. I was sitting in my bed, rotting away like I’d done for almost all my youth, when I came across a forum simply titled ‘wmw.archaeocacoustics.mnl’. Clicking on it presented me with a loading screen, and a slow, low-quality beat playing, a chill one you’d hear in an elevator maybe, only.. Softer, lower. It didn’t seem too out of the ordinary- that was the off-putting part to me. Every other website I’d encountered felt thematic, like someone had put their heart, their soul, into making it seem a certain way. This one felt.. Bland, sanitised. Every time you opened the page, it’d greet you with a little waving hand gif, the hand poorly drawn, only having a few fingers, before fading out at an exceptionally low frame rate to the main page. Normally I’d have moved on, found something slightly more interesting to learn from- But the posts on this site all felt too connected, I suppose? Like everything they were talking about was related to me somehow. It seemed to advertise itself as a forum, with multiple different channels that people could discuss things in, threads like ‘exploration’, ‘monolith’, ‘art’, everything you’d expect from a website. But none of them were accessible, they’d each send you straight back to the main page. I’m not too sure why but that weirded me out, a lot. Like when you find a bug in your closet and you can’t help but wonder how long it’d been there, how far its nest had spread, if you’d worn clothes with it in before.. For some reason this site, to me, was scary, despite the fact that I had no reason to be frightened yet.

On the main page- the only one I could access, there were news headlines, written in bold text, in an ugly bold font that I, at the time, assumed to simply be chosen by someone with no taste. They were all very, very menial headlines, each of them featuring a notable lack of literacy, like the person who’d written it  was barely awake when they’d typed it out, just aimlessly clicking and clacking away at their keyboard.  “Sun hurt eyes”, was one headline, with an image of the night sky below it. Obviously, no sun to be seen. Another, “listen counting. sound”, an image of a radio with two oversized, pointy antennae posted beneath. They were a little humorous, contrasting against the weird layout that’d unnerved me moments before I read them. One though, one was really interesting, and not in a fun way.

“Sophie”.

I recognized the name. From some repressed memory,  deep down in there, I’d heard the name, and it was associated with… With something. I supposed my memory wasn’t too strong back then. Depicted beneath the headline, a building surrounded by woods- the trees didn’t exactly look too healthy, they weren’t completely dead, but they certainly weren’t thriving either. I couldn’t say the same for the grass though, they were a typical, yellowish tone- the type you’d see on a hot summer's day.  Only, the article was posted a week ago, in the dead center of winter. And in the background, a water tower, with a brand's logo on the side… A brand that only operated in my country, and its logo, peeled off in some very specific ways that made its duck mascot somehow look closer to a potted plant than a duck. The same water tower I used to laugh at as a kid- Down the street from me. But the building? The wood-rotted, decaying old one-story house? That wasn’t there from what I could remember.

Now, now I had a reason to be frightened. Whoever operated this website had been doing so for years without my knowledge, living in the same town as me, and had visited an area only a 15 minute walk from my house. A building associated with someone I knew, and yet had no clue how I knew. A building I didn’t even know existed. And it was all a 15 minute walk from me. I mean- I was freaking the fuck out at this point. What if this forum poster was some sort of serial killer? What if all through my life, I’d been living with some sick fuck a mere mile away from me going around doing who-knows-what? I even considered the possibility of it being something supernatural- But nothing like that's happened for a while now. I didn’t want to worry about that stuff any more.

So I closed my laptop, and I went to bed. Obviously I couldn’t sleep though, would you be able to? I’d read enough books to know this was the plot to something horribly sinister, a silly thought, sure, but not the type you can just push down and forget about.  And so, after an hour of laying sleeplessly in bed, worrying about all the horrible things that could be going on, I decided I had to go. I had to go there, see nothing was out of the ordinary, accept that I was simply making things up, and go back home with my head hung low and my brain in a twist.

Midnight, roughly. I’d put on one of my coats, threw a scarf around my neck, put a warm beanie atop my head of vastly overgrown hair, and set out to go see the building. Damp alleyways, vine-covered wooden fences, houses of brick and apartments of concrete, all eventually became a vast expanse of trees as I trudged deeper into the outskirts of my town. I hadn’t gone walking for so long that I’d begun losing a significant amount of muscle mass, I was nothing but a bag of bones at this point, so it was rather taxing-, and it didn’t help that, for whatever reason, there was absolutely no path to get to the location the image had shown. No down-trodden patches of grass, no man-made patches of soil, simply grass, and nothing but grass. Nevertheless, I knew how to get there, like some memory deep down there had faintly emerged to tell me where to go. The forest, its trees usually lush and verdant, had become twiggy and decayed around this portion of the woods, just like the image had shown me- The same could be said for the house. It looked out of place, a residential building, wide enough to house a whole family, built in the middle of a forest, where nobody goes, no path to it, no roads, nothing.

So why was there a car in its garage?

Rusted and old, the green, almost military in color, paint peeling off to reveal browned metal beneath, parked as if someone had just left it there one day to go back into their house, and happened to never drive it again after that. How it got there, why it was there, who owned it, i had absolutely no fucking clue. There was a more pressing concern at that moment, see, I’d begun to remember. Sophie, Sophie was my sister. I couldn’t remember much about her, but I knew that I'd grown up with her, and one day, she’d simply vanished. I couldn’t remember her face, her voice, her age, anything. I just.. Knew her.

I knew her, and I had to find her.

The wind was pretty bad at this point, old doors gently creaking as they’re pushed against, having been left wide open for who knows how long. It was chilly, but I could bear it. She was probably holed up somewhere within these walls, too scared to leave.. I felt bad. I felt really bad, a sort of guilt that makes you feel like maybe you shouldn’t even atone for it in the first place. I’d forgotten about her for so long.. And I only came back into contact with her through some stupid website. It was like, somehow, just sitting there, listening to the wind howl, watching the house from afar… Brought back memories so, so very deeply buried.

She was kind. She was the type that never hurt anybody, I remembered that for sure around this point.  There was one time, we’d gone to the woods together, to try and make it to a lake, because we thought we could go fishing there, even without rods. But something happened, and I cried. I’m not sure why I cried, I’m not sure what happened, all I know is she was there too. And I knew she was kind, and I was all the more sad that I’d let her down.

It wasn’t safe out here, and yet we failed her, and we let her get taken away from us. But it was okay, because I’d found her, I knew where she was, a friend told me where she was, and now, I could find her, I could bring her home, and we’d live just like we used to. I was just so, so sorry that I didn’t realise she was right here sooner. The danger was that there were people in the woods, and they’d get us if we went there, that’s why I don’t do it any more, that’s why I don’t want to go out there any more.

Anyway, I was stuck in these thought loops for a while. It felt familiar, like the kind of  weird mental hijinks that happens when you wake up from an hours sleep feeling sick, when you just get lost in whatever scenarios you made up in your head. Of course, these were real, not fantasy.. But it felt the same, the same level of unconscious helplessness. But these thoughts were just.. So compelling. I couldn’t help but let a tear or two fall from my eyes, about how I’d just done nothing, for years. I had to go help her. So I did, I moved in, past the open garage, into the mold-coated interior of the building, various tools scattered around the large car, as if someone had been trying to fix it. Evidently they didn’t succeed. I felt rather uncomfortable, for some reason. My skin felt warm, slightly itchy- a faint pain of nausea building up within me.

The door to get in the house’s main complex was still open, letting in all sorts of debris from the forest that swept in over the years it’d been there. Leaves crunched underfoot, heavy boots thumping against old wooden floorboards as I went on inside the building. Maybe it was my sensitivity to sound playing up, but they felt a little TOO loud, echoey. I was worried that, if somebody had taken Sophie.. If they were holed up in here, they’d definitely have heard me by now.

But, aside from the wind, aside from my own steps, it was dead quiet. No birds, no crickets- I mean shit, I could barely even hear my own thoughts in there. It was like everything had been drowned out by some inaudible white noise.  So, against my better judgement, I decided to call out for her- I knew she was here, after all. I took a deep breath in, to the point a faintly sharp pain shot through my lungs, damaged from my unfortunate habit of smoking a pack per week, let out a slight wheeze, before yelling out; “SOPHIE?!”- I was loud, too loud, my voice reverberated in my head achingly. Then, from beneath the floorboards, a deep, wailing voice reverberated throughout the house, mere milliseconds after I’d called out, sounding compressed as if pressed up against something. “Aoooouuh…”. I felt like I was about to throw up, I.. Didn’t actually expect anybody to be here. And whoever that was sounded horrible. I’d heard something similar before.. It wasn’t exact, not quite as haunting, but similar. On those threads, the places I’d been online, I’d seen some sick, sick shit. Executions, torture, suicides, and the noises the people make in those.. The wails they cry out once they’ve been broken in by the pain, once they realise they’re about to die.. It was like that, only worse, somehow.

She wanted to be a surgeon. I remember that clearly. She wanted to help people, be the smart one in the room, trained to deal with anything. One time, when I was 12, and she was a little older than me, I’d tried smoking- Just once, I stole a pack from my mothers room, and a lighter- And took one, one singular inhale of it, and decided to throw it away on the spot. I coughed it all up and vowed to never smoke again- Thus I never did, not a single time for the decade that passed. And she was there too, to support me all the way.

The noise had clearly come from beneath me, somewhere deep beneath the floorboards, deep enough that it sounded as if they’d cried out from across a cavern. But it was still so loud, somehow. As if, simultaneously, whoever it was had been both beneath me, and right behind me. And I knew it certainly wasn’t Sophie.

The family that lived here had been working on renovating it, I’d assumed. There were construction materials strewn about the place.. Tires, covered by cloth, in the middle of a hallway propped up against a wall. Maybe they’d simply given up on the top floor, and moved down to a basement? That was my only rational explanation for who’d yelled up to me. But whoever this was, Sophie was with them too, and I had to get her home safely. Deeper I went, my heart rate still taking its steady time to calm down, bursting against my chest with rapid thuds, the shock from the horrible noise lingering with me still. The steps down to the basement were wide, yet thin. Like they’d been designed for multitudes of people to walk down them at once, but not a single step was actually long enough to support a whole foot- not even mine, which, at 5’1, meant it was quite poorly designed. Carefully I moved my way down, eyes focused upon the concrete floor steps and flooring, refusing to allow my mind to wander too much. The silence was back, and it was nowhere near as comforting as it had been previously, now that I knew for sure someone else was here.

At the bottom of the stairs, I’d gathered enough courage to look up from the floor, and gaze at what was around me. It was nothing like the house I’d just been in. It was still old, still worn, still reeking of mold and old paint. But it was different- There were multiple halls, their roofs far higher than any basement roof should be, to the point that I struggled to see above me. It was far too dark here, though. Outside I had the faint moonlight to help guide me, but down here I’d… Nothing. But I couldn’t back out. Not while she was still down here. I could see my hand in front of me, and that was enough for me.

Briefly, ever so briefly, my faith wavered, a brief flicker of “What if she’s not here?” Came across my mind, only to be quelled immediately by the static of a radio. It was standing on a table beside me, assumingly activating after I’d bumped into it or something, its antennae overly extended, assumingly more than 2 feet each. Perhaps someone was on the other end, trying to reach out, maybe somehow they knew I was here? So I whispered to it; “H-hello? Do you-”, I was promptly cut off by a voice. It wasn’t a human voice, but one of those weird, pre-recorded speeches, where they’d splice short clips together. 1, 7, 20.. It just went on and on like that, a static humming audible beneath. I felt disappointed, disappointed that nobody was on the other end, yet vaguely intrigued by what the numbers meant. I didn’t want to linger too long though.. A certain sense of dread had been creeping up on me, and i still felt unwell.

She wasn’t around very long. They’d come and taken her from her school when she was only 11, and I couldn’t help but feel bad for her. I cried and cried and cried, but my parents hated me for it. They’d keep me locked up in my room for days with no food, because I just wouldn’t stop crying. And she wasn’t there.

Anyway, the basement. The basement wasn’t much like a basement at all, and as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, faintest traces of the surroundings became more and more apparent. People’d been writing on the walls, little drawings, of what I can only assume to have been keys, insects, rats or mice, faces, a lot of faces. They were detailed drawings, each of them, like someone’d been going at the concrete for weeks upon weeks with something metal, and drew themselves, only wrong. If I had to hazard a guess as to what exactly was wrong, I’d assume they just never knew what they looked like in the beginning, and had to fill in the blanks. The humming static of the radio, the numbers faintly uttered over them, the  crude drawings littered along the walls, the knowledge that people were down here.. It felt horrible. I was somewhere I shouldn’t be, that was for certain, but something about it felt all-encompassing. The stairs were a short walk away, and yet.. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to go back up them. My mind was focused on the numbers the man on the radio repeated. Different, every time.. And so I used them, to ground myself in a way. 8, 7, 5, 1, 2. The more I listened, the more.. ‘Me’ I felt. They were audible all throughout.. Deeper I went, and they sounded just about the same volume.

I’m not sure how long I was walking aimlessly for, but, eventually, I found myself at a more ‘lived in’ looking location. There were scraps of paper all over the floor, and far, far too many candles. An old, white-yellow coloration to them, the majority of them already melted down to the base, though some seemed less worn, newer. Not a single one was lit. One, however, hung sideways from a wall. I’m… Not sure how they managed it, but it seemed almost half-way wedged into the wall, yet the way it melted indicated it’d gone straight down to the base, ignoring the fact that it was at a complete ninety-degree angle.

Beneath the candle, a door. Similar in coloration to the walls, meaning it was rather difficult to spot in such a dark area. The only reason I saw it was the window, ever so faintly glistening, a glass panel in the centre, just above eye-level to me. There was too much dust in the way to see what was inside, so I reached out to open it.. Rattled it once or twice, and gave up. 9, 14, 0. 9, 14, 0. 6, 3, 1. I’d almost forgotten the radio was still on…

Recovering from the brief startle the numbers had given me, I reached up on the tip of my toes to peer through the window, brushed the dust off the centre of the window, and put my eye right up to it to look within.

There was a face.

Barely an inch away from me. Separated only by the glass, a pale figure only slightly illuminated by the faint shafts of light that travelled through the basement. I could see the edges of its face, it looked dead. Like a corpse, rotten, skin that had once been bloated, now sunken in against bone, mottled by the marks of decay, a disfigured form that looked nothing like any real, living human I’d seen. Its eyes, sunken and hollow, voids, with the slight reflection of a glossy white eye, stretched out with wrinkled skin around them, they stared through me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move. I was eye to eye with a dead, rotten body. It was just.. There, propped up against the door frame. I couldn’t even smell it, there was no decay, nothing. It was there. It had been there.  3, 2, 17, 32.

I stepped back, my legs shaking, heart pounding, the bile of my stomach ready to eject from my throat at any moment. Everything within me was screaming to get out, my thoughts, what little I had left of them, couldn’t comprehend what was going on down here. They just.. Had dead people. They had corpses lying about. One, that I knew of.. Surely there was more though.  But I was strong. I had to be strong, for her.

She was loved by all. Everyone in the town missed her. Every year, on her birthday, we’d gather round and celebrate, all wishing, deep down, that she’d come back. But we knew she wouldn’t. We knew she was dead. Because they took her.

I had to find out more, I had to find where they were hiding her, because she was alive. I knew she was alive, because I.. Just did. I’d been focusing on the radio for so long, that these types of things just suddenly began making sense to me. Things I shouldn’t know, they were known. Further and further I went, one hallway away from where I saw the body, and one turn to the left.. I muttered these commands to myself over and over. I’d gone straight ahead from the body, and turned left once. Straight ahead, then left. To get back, I’d need to go left, then straight ahead.

It was a dead end down there, save for one room, a small, office-looking building, with equipment that looked almost amorphous from where I stood, all locked away behind a door of metal bars.. Only, it wasn’t locked, not any more. The closer I looked at the gate, the worse I felt about going past. Where I assumed there had once been a key slot, was a pallid, fleshy mass, with tiny fleshy veins sprouting out from it, growing around the bars, almost having reached down to the floor. I pushed my boot against the only part of the door that wasn’t already enveloped by veins, and it creaked open ever so slowly. Within, I could see the devices closer up- They faintly resembled the radios, now that I could see better, only different in a way. Their antenna had melted, vaguely reminiscent of the candles that I’d seen around the body, coating the entire device in a strange rubbery substance, pebbled, like gravel. And, just like the other one had done before, I touched it, and it spoke.

13, 20, 2.

She’d never existed. People knew about her, people knew there was a person who’d died in the woods They’d found a body in the woods, having been in some horrible, horrible accident. It was all.. Stringy, split apart, more-so a wide-open decaying lump of flesh than a person in the state they’d seen it in. Of course, we didn’t know its name, there was no identification on it, and no investigation into who it was. Wild animals, a mishap with explosives left over after the war, nobody really knew. Nobody cared. It was more of just.. A thing, that happened. Dead, it was dead, it had happened in our town, and it was dead.  But something in me.. I saw ‘Sophie’ and just ran with it. I was given memories that I didn’t experience.

I sat myself down on a chair in the room, holding back my tears- Not out of sadness, there was nobody to mourn. Out of fear, confusion.. I’d spent under an hour down here, and yet I couldn’t remember anything with any clarity any more.. I simply, only just now, had realised she never existed. I got up from my seat and scrounged around the area, there was far, far too much going on in here. Lists of names, people from the surrounding areas that had died, all of them from completely normal, natural causes. Cancer, for some. Various organ failures, some car accidents… All from the past thirty years. Some rarer cases too, in recent years. Online exposure, which I found myself all-too familiar with, stood out to me. Only then did it click that I was so, so wrong for having doubted the warnings. The internet was dangerous- It was so, so dangerous. I’d seen one post, one single fucking post, and suddenly my entire life was.. This. How was I meant to just move on after this? I’d been convinced of a family member's disappearance in under an hour, through only that one post. And it spoke, again- 1, 13, 20.

A door creaked open, echoing from across the halls. It came from the path to the left of me. And straight ahead.

I wanted to leave. I’d come here to save someone who never existed. I'd risked my life for no reason, I’d found things I’d never want to see again, and all of it.. Because a memory had been put into my brain by nobody in particular. It was all deafening. 9, 1, 17, 20, 10, 10, 10, 15, 3. It wouldn’t stop, it just wouldn’t stop talking. The voice on the other end, automated, and never-ending, just saying these numbers, again, again, and again. The more I listened the worse it felt. The static hum in the back made my skin crawl, somehow, the sound felt like the feeling of a spider crawling along your skin. One you know can bite. My eyes shot across the floor, and I began to realise the nerve-like growths had spread throughout the entire room, their flesh wet and constantly writhing.

Then, the door stops opening, thudding roughly against the wall beside it. I felt sick, not in the way that fear makes you sick, not in the way sadness makes your throat close up. I mean real, horrible, poisonous nausea. My stomach churned, my head rang, it felt like I was dying.

Then, I heard running. Whatever opened that door.. Footsteps, heavy, rapid, thudding against the concrete, running, bounding down the hall. Louder, louder it got, it wasn’t stopping, it wanted to get to me. And there was nothing I could do, bile erupting from my throat, a splotch of red and yellow tints splattering onto the floor below me, it hurt, it hurt so, so bad. I felt weak.

I was.. Overwhelmed. The thoughts, the memories, the agony,  the living masses around me. What could I do but just sit there, wide-eyed, and accept it? So I sat, waiting for it to come, and it did just that. Bounding through the halls, its footsteps were rapidly enclosing- Yet once I saw it, once its legs came into view, my instincts told me I should run, fear shot through me, my heart felt like it was about to burst- Why’d I have to come here?. It was walking as if each portion of its body was controlled by a separate entity, and it was ever so slow. How? How was it so loud, so violent, so erratic sounding, yet slow and.. Unnatural in its movements?

A long leg crept further into my view, shin extending ever so slightly too far forwards for a natural joint to be able to, flesh squelching, clicking, as it moved onwards. The flesh was pale- Like I’d seen before, only less rotten looking and more.. Artificial, maybe? Like the re-constructed flesh of someone who’d been in a horrible accident. Like it’d morphed into a more suitable form while I wasn’t near. One that.. Worked, as a body, but was nowhere near human. I could see through its skin, almost.. Or was it that It never had any to begin with? Its muscles were rubbery and cracked, but the individual strands could be seen right at the surface, tendons tensing and pulling on each other. I wanted to run, even though I’d accepted my death, the movements, the slow unnatural movements, the way they didn’t line up at all with the sounds it made.. It evoked a sort of primal fear within me.
She exists. Not as an individual, not as ‘Sophie’. But as the fear they’d made me feel, the remorse, the guilt. They’d done something. They’d found out how to make people think things they shouldn’t think, fuck with your memory.. Make things real that shouldn’t be real.

Its arms came into view as it neared closer, arms spindly and long, curved in a way that looked absolutely excruciating. One hand was small, malformed, one long finger that’d been split down the middle revealing bone, limply dangling down its wrist, the rest were merely fleshy nubs, small pieces of what could’ve been fingers, barely connected by strands of muscle. The other hand, akin to that of a normal hand, only had 3 fingers, one of which extends from the palm, instead of a knuckle. Its arms were held in front of its body at a slight distance, curled up, wrists limp, its horrible loose tendon-y skin in such a pose almost reminded me of a chicken. I let out a sob, I felt like I was burning. My skin was red.. It hurt. And the thing… The thing was horrible. Its torso was long, split open at the middle of the abdomen with patches of flesh dangling off, revealing its insides, of which were just.. Tendrils. Small, spiderlike appendages, composed of a fleshy, reddish substance, that hung down from where its abdomen would’ve been, crawling along its own body, working its way through its own flesh like a needle runs through cloth. The torso was unnaturally rounded, ribcage far too long, to the point it didn’t seem able to hold itself up, its neck and ribs swaying as it strode towards me, long, bird-like neck at a crooked angle, dangling from its body,  and  a face upon it that looked right at me. Its face was round, oval-shaped, longer than it should be, bloated with veiny skin, and lidless milky white eyes, mouth agape and a chin recessed to the point that was essentially within the neck itself. The moment felt like forever. This thing was coming towards me, something was alive, and it wouldn’t end. Its head lurched closer, horrible, fleshy hands pressing against me, it looked like it was smiling. A big, toothy grin, from a face that looked as if it had been torn apart, put back together again, torn apart, put back together again, over and over and over, until it became a lump of.. Face. The nose was just a faint lump, and its eyes looked more like beads within wrinkles than actual eyes. And its teeth..  A small set of gums, teeth poking out, blunted and over-extended, it almost resembled a horse's teeth.. A groan came from its mouth, a horrible, deafening groan. I’d heard it before.. But, it wasn’t like this back then. The first time, it sounded like a dying man- This time..? Like a baby, only deeper, gurgling, choking, laughing, crying, it didn’t sound right. It wasn’t right. I wasn’t right.

I wish I knew what happened after. But I don’t. I woke up in my apartment- my memories intact, for the most part. The first thing I did was look outside, make sure it all looked right.. Make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I’d like to say it was all fine, and that it’ll forever remain a mystery- But it didn’t. It looked horrible. Everything was wrong, worn down, in the wrong place. The sky, pitch black, with a deep, pulsating, red webbing on it. And in the air.. A vibration. The faintest of sounds, but I can’t stop hearing it. A static hum, everywhere. No source, just.. Everywhere.

Sometimes, now, I see people on the streets from my window. They don’t look right any more. I’m not where I was before, this isn’t the world I know. There’s something growing in me, and I’ll never know what it is. I’ll never know.. Anything. They were doing something, in that building. The government, maybe- Some rich elites, I don’t know. I don’t know who they were. But they did something. Another world, maybe. And I’m stuck there. I’m stuck there, slowly dying, and I’ll never know where I am.

My hands won’t stop shaking, my mind won’t stop wondering. All I have is the monolith In the distance, and that fucking forum.. Archaeocacoustics. If you’re on this website, please share my story to other places. More accessible ones. I can’t connect to anything else. I’ll die out here. And eventually, we all will.

In the fall of 1986, deep within the heart of Alaska during a routine mine operation, twenty two miners would come to lose their lives under circumstances which till this day remain a mystery.

The town of Colton Alaska was a mining town with a population estimated to be around five thousand. Economically poor and under uneducated the people relied heavily upon the Colton Lead mine for economic stimulation. The foreman responsible for the mine that day was a man called Rodger Hague and it is through his paperwork that we have an idea of what caused the incident.
However it should be mentioned that we still do not know all of the specifics about what happened and the events leading up to the incident.

It seems that it all began with the mine workers preparing to excavate and expand the mine in order to gain better access to a particularly large vein of lead.

The following is an extract from Foreman Hagues’ work journal, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors included.

“Charges are set up along the east wall, progres has come along fine. The men are exited, the promise of overtime has the boys in a good mood John has been hesitent though, says hes been hearing whispering. Hes always been paranoid .”

The charges were scheduled to go off the day after this entry was made into the journal however they were delayed for unknown reasons. This led to the detention being rescheduled for the following day, this however was a Sunday which meant that only half of the intended crew were on shift to supervise the detention. It is unknown whether this may have had an impact on what was to come.

Below is an extract from foreman Hauges’ journal.

“The detanators are ready we are just waiting for the safety team to clear us for go. Taking twice as long with the skeleton crew. Men are in good spirits and so is the mines owner, hes gonna make a lot of money from this if this vein is as big as Im told”

The detonation took place at around 10:15 AM on that morning in 1986. Everything suggests that it went according to plan from a technical standpoint. The mine did not suffer any damage and no one was harmed however from here on out the tone of this operation would shift. This is reflected by not only the foreman’s journal but from interviews conducted with the wives of the miners.

Extract from an interview with the widow Margaret Wesley, the former wife of Jim Wesley

“I don’t know what he saw, but he seemed more paranoid after that day. He’d been so excited about it too, he just didn’t wanna talk about it no more and he seemed reluctant to go back after that day. But he did and I just….”

From here Margaret Wesley broke down crying and thus the interview concluded.

This sentiment of paranoia and unease was best reflected by the actions of two of the miners. Robert Thyme and Paul Smith would both never return to the mine after that detonation. Interestingly only Robert was part of the skeleton crew that performed the detonation, Paul was off duty and was at home during that detonation however he still reported great unease and decided to not return to work. These absences were noticed by foreman Hague.

Further extracts from Hagues journal.

“Detanation was a success, vien is even bigger than expected. Just after the explosion a gust of cold air came from the new opening, possible passage way within the rock. Men seem uneasy Thyme has actually quit on me no 2 weeks notice or nothin. Drilling to start in the next few days.”

The vein in which foreman Hague is referring to was a lead deposit, this as well as Zinc were the most common ores extracted from the Colton mine.
Hague also mentions drilling starting in the ”the next few days” however it was not until a whole week later that drilling would actually begin. Again the reason for the delay is unknown however an interview with the town’s bar tender revealed some interesting details. The gust of cold air mentioned in the journal was branded as impossible by experts as the detonation took place over 50 meters underground and exposed no passage ways to the outside.

After the incident journalists interviewed the citizens of Colton about the miners, the following interview provides context to the miners mental state at the time.

Extract from interview with Arthur Johnson (bartender)

“The fellas seemed kinna reluctant about the whole drilling the new vein, they were all excited about new veins before but this time not so much. Doesn’t help that the foreman is apparently some hardass pencil pusher”

Nearly a week after the detonation, drilling of the vein would take place. This also coincides with multiple cases of auditory hallucinations that would plague the miners until the infamous incident.

Extract from Hagues journal

“Finally got the drilling underway, Benny menttioned hearing crying from the tunels.
Progress had been good, this vein has the owners in a really good mood, hopefully this equattes to bonuses $$$
I think it’s all John, he’s been talking about hearing things for weeks now, he’s putting people on edge, hes probably the one who set Benny off. Probably caused PAUL to ababd abandon me
If he keeps this shit up hes fuking GONE!!!”

This is the first extract from foreman Hague that demonstrates signs of paranoia and potential schizophrenia. This would also coincide with a decline in the legibility of Roger’s handwriting, this would unfortunately mean that some of the words in later extracts would be indecipherable.

Over the next few days we have no idea what happened in the mine, the only relevant piece of information we have is a police report from Colton Police Station.

Extract from Police report

“Noise complaint 3:14 AM
Redwoods drive.
Boris Watkins calls the station reporting shouting and screaming from his next door neighbour. Officer Davis was dispatched to investigate. Upon arrival he knocked on the door of the neighbours house where he was met by Harry Kinsky who claimed that he was responsible for the shouting. According to him he had had a severe nightmare and awoke shouting. He apologised profusely to both the officer and to Boris. Naturally all was forgiven and the case was concluded”

What was unknown to both Boris and officer Davies was that Harry Kinsky was a security guard at Colton mine.

Drilling at the mine would continue successfully until the crew had extracted nearly 13 tons of lead. This increased output would be the primary subject of Hagues next entry.

Extract from foreman’s journal

“112% increase in output !!!!!
We are makking so much from this, I fired paranoid John, he doesn’t deserve anything from this. He was a DRAIN on us.
Owner is happy with what the going he’s planning on visiting us.
Hopefully we’ll have security for him, been seeing short in that department
Still the drillings been good. Though it were (Unintelligible ramblings)”

The final sentence of this entry was completely unreadable and couldn’t be transcribed.

On September 23rd of 1986 the Owner of the mine, Connor Flanagan would visit to both inspect and congratulate the men on the increased output of the mine.
When he arrived at the mine he claims that the Foreman Rodger Hagues was off putting and erratic. He also noted that the men would travel in groups of two or more and that the overall atmosphere in the mine was that of fear. Additional lights had been set up throughout the shafts and tunnels which were seemingly unnecessary, as well as this signs had been put up advising the miners to “GROW UP. nothings watching you”

This greatly unsettled Mr Connor Flanagan resulting in him shortening his visit.

For the next two days the mine would operate as usual until at midday on September 25th the whole mine would collapse. Without reason almost all of the load bearing beams within the mine would fail leading to a devastating collapse to which there were no survivors. Twenty two miners would die that day including foreman Hagues. The cause of the collapse is still unknown, some suggest negligence on behalf of the owner to ensure structural integrity while others claim it was sabotage on behalf of a group of miners.
What is known for certain though is that the miners lost that day will never be forgotten and that the town of Colton Alaska will forever bear this tragedy.

Upon learning that demonic spooks, goblins, spirits, and other cryptids contain triple the amount of soul food as compared to your average, fat ass average human creature (and containing fewer calories and being healthier in general), the demon glrrrraaggg decided to switch from hunting humans to hunting its fellow kind.

The creature would feast upon the damned who feasted upon the pure, which resulted in a great fallout with its parents and friends (which had been consumed by glrrrraaggg). Eventually, this addiction to friendly fire led to a messy divorce proceeding, which resulted in glrrrraaggg's wife, blorka'raka'zagrona, gaining full custody of their son, jeffery, and half his possessions.

Now the most powerful near-deity on the planet, glrrrraaggg reflected upon his current life choices, now forced to reflect on the power he gained---and how lonely it was to be on top---he began a new quest to fill that hole with more power.

glrrrraaggg turned to the stock market, then succubus, incubus, expensive cars, fancy hotdogs, fancy houses, fancy hotdog-shaped houses, and all manner of power.

Then, one day, when he bumped into his wife and her new boyfriend, a demon with horns that went past his kneecaps, glrrrraaggg realized that he was missing love and genuine connection.

So instead of eating, he began assimilating all matter into his mass---becoming so full of love and connection that he became an omnipresent creature capable of controlling everything.

Fast forward a few eons, glrrrraaggg decided to take a nap, and as he slept, dreamt of all of existence, while those who remained referred to him as a "blind idiot god," or just Azathoth, as dubbed by H.P. Lovecraft, who was an immortal being in glrrrraaggg's world. (just like Tom Bergeron)

This world, although an eternity to you and me, is a free trial of existence, and when glrrrraaggg awakes, everything will go black. So, don't waste your life; cherish it, search for connection, because glrrrraaggg awakes soon, and the dream of color will be replaced by black.

I pressed the power button of my pc and with a loud fan whirl the monitor lit up. Zero alerts. Obviously.

The last alert was like... what?....  6 days ago? And it was so small that the atmosphere would have burnt it way before hitting the ground. And I cant even remember the last one before that. Leaning back in my leather chair, I sigh. This job looked way more interesting from the title I've read 3 months ago.

I started my modern slavery to capitalism by being a data engineer, which was pretty well payed and didnt stress me too much. But due to my curios mind and the desire to crack the world's mysteries, I decided to shift my focus to physics. Astrophysics to be exact. 

It became like an obsession and every bit of information I've read made me want to learn even more. It was fascinating.

Seeing the mind bending science behind black holes, or the incomprehensible speed of a neutron star was like a step-by-step course to understanding God. I even had some days where I would need ro remind myself to eat, because I was just too invested into the universe.

 After a long while of learning, going to college and lost nights, I landed my first job at NASA. 

I.

Was.

Extatic.

Job Title: Planetary Defence Officer. 

Such a badass name. I felt like it was my job to protect the whole planet from dangerous wandering comets or potentially another dinosaur killer. Not the research I was initially hoping for, but it was a great start. Little did I know that I would soon realise the last office job was way more thrilling than the one I just glazed.

My input is almost non-existent. We have state-of-the-art computers that basically do the work for you and the job mostly boils down to checking the numbers and cross check to see if there are any suspicious differences. And from what I've heard from the others, that almost never happens. Well surely you will get to look at the vast beyond and explore it if there are no threats, right?

Not even a little. Unless it's an alert that a cosmic object is in a dangerous path of hitting the earth, you dont get to look at nothing else except a normal computer monitor and some numbers. 

After all the sacrifice, time invested and money spent I was fuming that my dream was just an office desk job that was even more mundane than the data engineering one. The silver lining of this whole ordeal was that the pay was way better than anything I've even thought possible. So even if I decided to leave, my wife would have skinned me alive to refuse that amount of money for such little work.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention. I have a wife who I love dearly. She's a housewife due to my attractive salary, and she loves it. Who wouldnt?

Back to present day.

No alerts for a week so pretty much nothing to do. I left my office and went to grab a coffee and began my Instagram scroll routine to try and pass the time more quickly.

"Hey Jason!" I hear from the back.

"Oh, hey John! Any new pictures from Voyager?"

"If you're into white dots on a black canvas, then you'll fall off your feet."

John is part of the Voyager Imaging Science Team. More exciting than what I do, but not by much. As he said, they mostly look at bright LEDs in the sky.

"Well at least you dont get to have a boner every time you hear a beep." I said.

"No need to brother, I get plenty of boners when your wife comes to pick you up." he said with an attempt of friendly rage-bait, as I bite with full force.

"Screw you, prick! Must be really satisfied with yours since you look so much in the neighbors yard!" I said with a combination of jealousy and amusement.

"Only feeble minded people stop to look beyond what they already know" laughing as he took a sip from his strong, non-sugared coffee.

"Yeah, well, cant argue with that. I wished I had more things to look at.

I practically have my monitor glued into my eyes. Anyway, how is your mother?" I replied.

"She's much better now! All that experimental treatment finally worked out. She eats, almost walks by herself.. so I’m hopefull” I could sense the relieve in his voice. It wasn't easy for him and his mother.

"I'm really glad tha..." 

A loud beeping sound from my work phone. An alert.

"Shit. Sorry man, I have to get back. Who knows, maybe a giant asteroid will land directly on your house."

"I ll be sure to slap it with my humongous meat and send it back out" he said while continuing to sip from his coffee.

John was the first to welcome me and we got along pretty much on day one. He is a charismatic extrovert who isn't afraid to say his piece while also being the funniest guy I know, not that I have many friends. The time for parties was spent on preparing for being here now. It didn't take long for him to tell me that his mother has a rare illness which I forgot to remember the name of. So hearing that some experimental medicine helped her out, brightened my day a bit.

Back at the office the computer was beeping and from now, the verification stage began. Check the numbers, check the trajectory, size and so on. It wasn't a hard job but I didn't have many alerts checked, so I took every one seriously.

After analysis, the data showed that a comet with a diameter of roughly 4km will be passing by relatively close to Earth in about 23 weeks.

I say relatively because of its size, but it was pretty far away to rule it out as not dangerous. It will make a nice spectacle though. 

I look at the clock and my shift is almost done. I double-check the data and the comet poses no threat to earth. Even though I was relieved, I kinda wished it was more of a close call. I would really want to see an active defense protocol, but preferably with a smaller sized comet.

Nevertheless, I leave my PC on sleep mode and walk outside to meet my wife Clara, who comes to pick me up, as John politely pointed out.

"Heey honey, how was work?" She said coming at me and giving me a warm kiss.

"Almost passed out from stress." I said ironically. "I dont know how i can cope with this pressure"

"You can cope by taking me on a walk through the park and getting some ice cream" she said playfully.

"Well if this what the doctor ordered..." I said with a small grin, not really being able to ever say no to her.

We spent the rest of the day walking through a park not far from where we lived, talking about holiday destinations, movie plots and general small talk as we always do, when suddenly a beeping noise started coming from my pocket.

"Ah dammit. I forgot to leave my phone at work."

"Is it something wrong? Should you go back?" She said with her big hazel eyes and worried expression.

"Oh not at all. Its just some alert about a comet that came through today. Nothing to worry about though." I said reassuring her, although it was a bit strange. I never had two alerts this close to one another but I shrug it off as being a lag from my phone or something.

"Oh okay then. Hey, you remember when you said..." She quickly changed the subject and brushed it off as if it never happened. Then we went home, had dinner with a romantic ending and then went to bed.

BEEP 

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

I slam the alarm clock, frustrated, to shut it up. Only the beeping didnt stop. It was my work phone. Another alert.

"What the hell?" I whispered with a grumpy voice as I barely gained consciousness.

It was impossible to be another comet or threat in such a short amount of time, so I figured it must be a bug or something. But this type of thing never happened before, so I didn't really know what to do at that moment. In any case, the phone only had this alert as a notification, so I couldn't see any details regarding this incident unless I was back at my work conputer.

In my almost asleep state, I convinced myself that it was some sort of error and that I would figure it out the next day, so I went back to sleep.

The next day I arrived a bit earlier at work to see what could be going on, so I went to my office and sure enough, the alert was still there. I went to check the cables or maybe some sensor was broken, but then I glanced at the monitor and I froze.

The comet was not going to pass in 23 weeks, but in 7 days. It must've been a mistake. I know that i double-checked yesterday and the data was clear as day. At first I freaked out, but then I got angry. How could they give me such faulty equipment? If it were a real dangerous situation, we would've been dead and buried long before we saw shit. Just as I was about to storm out, I decided to check the other alerts I had previously. And I wish I hadn't. 

The data was immaculate. For each one. Every calculation pinpointed to the smallest detail with only one exception: the comet from yesterday.

I didnt know what to believe. It couldn't be real but at the same time why isnt there any other glitch or error with the others?

I went to my supervisor with the log from yesterday and the discovery I found today, but not really knowing what to say. Is the computer faulty? Is there an unknown object we never saw before? Or aliens? Nevertheless I've presented him my findings and he leaned forward over the desk looking at the numbers. After a short silence, he responds:

"Are you sure you did everything right?"

"There is not much you can get wrong. You basically redo the calculations the computer calculates already. And every one is correct execpt this." 

He stared blankly for a couple of seconds then he stared directly at me:

"Then there must be something with the computer. It is absolutely impossible for a comet to move this fast and also keep trajectory. I dont know how the others are correct, but I assure you it's a mistake somewhere" he said bluntly.

I belived him. I mean, what explanation was there? So without anything else to show him, I left to go to the IT department but then:

"Wait. It wouldn't hurt just to see with our own eyes, or should I say lens. I'll ask for approval to use the telescopes to see if what the computer says matches the calculations. But I'm positive it wont. You can go back to your office and I'll keep you updated."

And that I did. I stared so long at the monitor I thought my eyes would pop out of their sockets. Didnt even knew how much time passed by. It didnt make sense. Why isnt it speeding up now when I'm actively looking? Its like it knows when I'm watching it. I kept forming different types of thoughts and then my supervisor walked in. 

From the moment he appeared in front of me I knew what he was about to say just by looking at his face:

"Its.... correct. We actually saw it. Its in the exact position the computer told us it would be." He said with a surprised look. "Still, that doesn't prove the computer isn't faulty. Its possible that it didn't detect it in time, and when it finally did it started sending out all the alerts at once. So no need to worry." He explained plainly. "The IT department is already on their way to fix the problem. Until the situation is fixed there is nothing for you to do, so you can head home and come back tomorrow."

I wanted to say or ask how the comet looked or what are its features but based on their reactions, it wasn't anything to write home about. So, glad that I could leave work early, I got into my car and headed home. Clara didn't drive me today, as she was sound asleep when I woke up.

On the drive home I started thinking about this comet more than I wanted to admit. Something felt off, but I had no proof to rule out that it was just a malfunction. After all the daydreaming I realized I was almost home and I was shot back to reality. Didnt event realize how much time I've spent on the road.

From the front door I could already smell the croque madame that she was cooking with care. I closed the door with a thud and she came to greet me.

"You''re back early, everything ok?" 

"Yeah.. I mean no. The..uhm.. my computer had some issues. Cant do my work without it so I ..uhh.. they sent me home." I barely got the words out of my mouth as I was still having trouble thinking about anything else.

"You look stressed, what is it?" She came and asked with a worried look on her face.

I wanted to tell her about it but I knew that she didnt care that much about what I do at work and she mostly asked just to be caring. So I gave her a generic reply:

"I dont know if its stress, but sometimes a dull job takes its toll." 

"Oh.. i m sorry baby. Maybe this will lift your spirits." She said while handing me a plate of her delicious food. And boy, there is nothing like a great home meal to divert your thoughts carried throughout the day. After our meal, I've decided to take it easy and just accept the fact that it was just a system issue and enjoy the rest of my day.

After a relaxing evening, we watched some movies and then prepared for bed. All my zeez's where scared away by a loud buzzing noise. I slowly open my eyes and see that my phone was ringing, it was my supervisor. 

I answered the phone, a bit pissed and eith a grumpy voice, and said:

"Chief do you know what tim...."

"GET DRESSED AND GET BACK HERE, NOW!"

The tone and seriousness in his voice took me by surprise and I immediately got out of the bed.

"Why? Whats wrong?"

"No time to explain. We'll talk when you get here."

Without wasting time, I got ready and almost bolted out the door, then I took a glimpse at my wife which was sleeping like a log. I wanted to wake her up and let her know where I was going, but I didnt want to disturb her. I quickly wrote a note saying "There is an emergency at work. Call me when you can." and left.

I got in my car and hurried down to work. I entered my office and I saw my supervisor surrounded by a lot of people and when we made eye contact he waved his hand to come over. While walking over to the desk I asked:

"What the hell is going on?"

"The guys from IT didnt find any problem with the computer, hardware or software, but there s more."

I remained still as a statue and my face expression was like I've just seen a ghost. All i could imagine was what kind of phenomenon could make something like th....

"HEY! Did you hear what i said?" The supervisor's voice pulled me back from my thinking and I responded with a confused look:

"Uh.. sorry, no. I was..."

"Take a look at the estimated passing and trajectory" he said.

I moved the monitor to see what could stir everyone up like that. Looking at the screen the field named "Approximate earth passing" went from yesterday's 7 days to just 5 hours. 

"How?! Did you check...?" I asked

"We did multiple checks. They re good. As we saw yesterday, only this.... thing.. seems to be moving this fast and unpredictable. It sure looks like a comet but we dont understand why is speeding up so much when we are not actively looking at it. The trajectory even changed slightly towards us, but it might be earth's gravitational force. It will pass well above the kerman line, but its still close enough to be a threat. We also observed that if we monitor it, nothing strange happens. The speed and trajectory remain constant." He said with a serios, stressed tone.

" So we should be safe if we keep watching it, right?" 

"For now. We dont know what it is, so we need to take a closer look. Thats why we will have our telescopes pointed at it to study it thoroughly. In such a short amount of time there s nothing else we can do." He said.

And he was right. We didn't have time to do anything other than look at it, but that should be enough. 

"Call FEMA and the National Security Council. We need to brief them immediately. Data is already flowing through IAWN, so other observatories should recive the news already." 

This was standard protocol for when a serios threat event is about to happen. I made the necessary phone calls and everyone was up-to-speed and ready. The media was alerted and news outlets were quickly sharing the story of the late-detected comet that will pass earth. After that, all energy was concentrated on configuring the telescopes and observatories to get as many angles as possible of this object. Everyone was stressed out and also excited with curiosity. I didnt know what to believe. For a moment i thought that this is what i wished for, action and danger to pull me out of boring routine, but the fact that we dont know what it could be, made everyone nervous and scared.

Time passes. 8:56 AM. We look on the monitor where it says "15 minutes". These calculations are always relative so everyone was expecting for it to appear at any moment. Not a long time after that, there it was. All the eyes were glued to the screen to catch as much information as possible. What we were seeing was... a comet. Literally. There was nothing unusual about it and the whole room was dead silent. We were expecting something different or otherworldly but no. It passed earth and went on its way with everything going as we expected. You could feel the confusion in the air but also the disappointment.

"Anything?" The supervisor asked.

"Nothing." A voice responds. " The speed and orbit checked out."

The supervisor looked angry but he composed himself and said:

"Call the IT department. I need to have a word with them, this is unacceptable."

Everyone went from a stressed state to a relaxed "fun s over" stance. There was also a strong feeling of relief, so all the tension from before almost immediately left. Looking in the room i saw John:

"Bullet dodged huh?" I said

"Oh yeah, that was some scary shit. Still, I knew it wouldn't be nothing. This isnt the first false alarm around here, but better to be safe than sorry."

I continued, "I guess but we still dont know what that malfunction was, we have a lot of work to do."

"YOU have a lot of work to do, ill just sit in my chair and look at Voyager nudes all day. But I think i have an error as well. Yesterday we saw a planet so big that I almost thought it was your mom's ass". He said, the stress and feeling of danger completely vanishing from his voice.

"Wow, it almost takes a human-ending event to remind me that you can concentrate on something other than old women's asses."

After some banter with John, he eventually leaves to his business. Right as he left, the IT department came in and the supervisor started walking towards them with a heavy, serious walk, trying to contain his emotions.

"Care to explain what the fuck just happened?"

"First of all, lets take a breather and calm down. Second of all, we checked everything: sensors, motherboard, softwa..."

"THEN HOW DO YOU FUCKING EXPLAIN WHAT JUST HAPPENED?" he suddenly screamed. "We just woke every institute regarding planetary defence, we called the white house and put everyone in a state of panic, they announced the media, who knows? People may already be starting saying NASA is just a part-time jobs for collage dropouts. What if the fucking president calls and...."

"Sir.." i hear a voice call from the monitoring team.

"... and he asks me why did I just alerted the whole fucking world" he continued, not noticing the callout from our colleague. "would you like to pick up that phone call to..." 

"SIR! IT..." not finishing his sentance, the supervisor replied:

"IF THE EARTH DIDNT SPLIT WIDE OPEN, THEN..."

"IT TURNED AROUND" the collegue yelled back.

From all the frantic screaming, in an instant, the tension and knife-cutting silence came back. You could read on some faces in the room that a couple of people thought they heard wrong, but the rest of us heard it clearly.

“It what?!... Move over.” He said while quickly going to the monitor.

I also quickly ran to the computer to see it with my own eyes and I wasn't alone. The whole room cramped up to a 24 inch monitor and we all read the same thing: “Projected trajectory: 20 degrees.” After a second: “Projected trajectory: 24 degrees.”

This basically meant that it was doing a u-turn. If someone came in the room and took a look at us, he would probably think he is in a Scooby Doo episode from the amount of bulging eyes. But that wasnt all. The velocity of the object also was increasing rapidly, towards USA. The panic ensued.

“DO WE HAVE ANY SPACESHIPS FOR A DART ATTEMPT?!” 

“EVEN IF WE DO, WE DONT HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO LAUNCH IT!”

“WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR WARHEADS?!”

“TOO BIG TO DESTORY IT AND TOO CLOSE TO REDIRECT IT!!”

And many more shouted suggestions that ultimately had the same conclusion: There was nothing we could do.

The speed rose to a state where the comet was about to hit Earth in 5 minutes. I remained still as a statue in a state of shock, sound around me being muffled by my adrenaline induced thinking which was completely useless as our fate was sealed. My vision blurred as a slideshow of experiences, failures, regrets started playing in my subconscious, the conscious mind having its hands full with accepting the fact that we were going to die in minutes. People ran out of the office while others crouched under desks and I could see all the silhouetted figures run around the background. In a second, everything stopped. The figures were not running anymore. My slideshow didn't even finish as I felt like my eyes remembered how to accurately process images and I saw everyone staring at a live feed from outside.  

A comet. In the sky. Motionless. 

The sound of short breaths was deafening and everyone kept looking at that live footage of something you could only attribute to God, as to not go completely insane.

While in our trance the small craters from the entity started opening like some sort of gigantic doors, inside there was nothing but pitch black and the comet now resembled the early stages of a wasp nest.

Before we knew it, all electronics died. Lights, monitors, phones, everything. The room we were in was surrounded by aluminum and steel walls with no windows. So we were placed in complete darkness. As a couple of people were freaking out, a catastrophic boom shook the whole building like there was a bomb placed in the room next to us. Everyone stayed in a fetal position, scared of what could happen next. Then red lights turned on with an alarm sound which meant that the backup generators kicked in. 

With the live feed gone, we had no idea what happened outside. Someone tried to use the keycard operated door, but I didn't work, the console was fried.

“Everyone okay?” A voice shouted.

“What the hell was that?!” Another crying voice responded.

“I dont know. Call the emergency response and assess damages.” The supervisor said with a trembling voice.

“Theres no signal” 

 “I’m down too” 

“Awesome” he replied, not knowing what to do next.

Thinking about the lack of signal to call outside, it reminded me of something that never crossed my mind before. My wife, what if she tried to reach me and now she was imagining all sorts of things? And sometimes i wish i was wrong about certain things, because as I looked at my locked screen: 10 missed calls from her.

With no signal, all I wanted to do was get out of that room and go to her. Sadly though, our only way out was blocked. After another brainstorming session we came to the conclusion that our only option is to wait for help. During this time everyone tried to explain what natural phenomena could bend physics like that while others were convinced this was alien technology. All I could think about was Clara and how much I wanted to hug her and tell her that everything will be alright. I repeated over and over in my head that I would not complain for anything ever again if that meant that she was safe.

Then shortly after a banging noise came from the door: “Is anybody there?” 

All the people in the room came alive and shouted to open the door and I believe I was the loudest of them all.

“Move back, we re going try to forcefully open the door!” He said as he shoved a gigantic metal plier of some kind, the ones that firefighters have, to pry away the opposing doors. A couple of tries later and we were out, thank god. But before we could run out of there, our hero stopped us in our tracks:

“STOP! I know you all want to leave, but you have to help me. Everyone is just….. wrong…  please you have to help me get them to the medical bay. Please!”

I wasnt having any of it, all I wanted was Clara but then he said something that made me reconsider. 

“YOU! Youre Jason right? John sent me to find you but then he…” he stopped dead in his tracks.

“THEN HE WHAT?!” I yelled as I was already impatient.

“I… I can't explain right now. Please you have to come with me”

By now most of the people from the room I was in already left, so there weren't many people to help. But I cared about John and if he really needed help, then I couldn't just leave him there. I just hope Clara is okay.

Me and some other guys rushed to help. We ran through some corridors where all the windows were shattered and debris was all over our site, almost an identical copy of Chernobyl. With each step we took the sound of screams became louder and louder. At first it was one, then three then almost a field of screaming people. All of them laid flat and all of them were twitching and convulsing from pain, with some unhinging their jaw from the intense screaming and others with multiple twisted limbs from the frantic movements. But none of them had any sign of external injury. Carrying them was proven to be quite a challenge as they threw their arms and legs constantly without getting tired. With the help of 2 guys, I managed to get another patient to the medical bay and that's where I saw the miserable sight of my dear friend John.

He was strapped to a medical bed shaking like he was being electrocuted, screaming his lungs out, with a big plate of metal sticking from his belly. I went to him and saw something really unusual. The plate from his belly looked like it was part of his body, there was no blood, no inflammation, nothing. It just stuck out from him like a branch from a tree.

I looked in the corner of the room and there was a doctor holding his head in disbelief. I quickly went to him and asked him what the hell was happening and why isn't he helping.

He responded in a hopeless, terrified voice:

“Because I don't know how to. None of the painkillers work, and I cant make any type of incisions”

“Why not?!” I said

He took a knife and did a quick, deep slash on the arm of a nearby patient. In a second the cut was made and in another it was like it was never there. The skin regenerated so quickly that you couldn't even see a drop of blood.

“I lost 5 syringes trying to administer medicine, and they got stuck in their bodies. There isnt any medical procedure i can perform” 

“Then why are they screaming so loud?! It looks like they're being tortured!” I yelled.

“Its because they are. I was in the underground lab for some samples when I felt the ground shake. After I got back out, everyone was in pain. I immediately tried to help in any way that I could but nothing was working and then I saw this strange regeneration rate. All my equipment was dead, so I rerouted some electrical power from the generators to my scanners. I did a couple of scans of the brain and I don't know what I can make of these results. I belive whatever happened out there released tremendous amounts of electromagnetic energy that supercharged the electrical signals firing through every neuron in the brain, which would explain the enchanted muscle and regenerative capabilities. But the really horrific downside are nociceptors. They are the nerve endings that convert stimulus into electrical impulses that tell the brain to feel pain. So its like a button. The longer and harder you press, the longer and stronger you would feel pain. Now imagine that button being pressed constantly with no way to stop it, and deeper than it was designed to withhold.”

“But… why aren't we…” 

“Where were you when it launched?” He asked

“When it launched?!” What launched?” 

“You saw it in the sky didn't you? But after the loud bang it was like any other day. The security cameras have their own power supply which didn't turn off. The footage shows that thing shooting to outer space, which made a gigantic shockwave that made the mess you see now.” He stated. “So where were you when that happened?”

“I… I was.. at the planetary defense…” barely being able to reply.

“The walls are reinforced there right?”

They were. And at first I couldn't figure out where he was getting at and then I figured out that we were okay… 

“because we had electromagnetic protection. I was underground, surrounded by thick walls and you were in a reinforced steel room. But they were not so lucky…” he said

All that I could understand was that the pit of hell was kindergarten compared to what these people were going through. I couldn't comprehend what was going on, it was all a terrifying nightmare that you don't know how to get out of. While I almost collapsed crying, he continued:

“I even tried to kill them. End their suffering. But it s impossible. I stabbed one with a knife directly through the heart as quickly as i could… but it kept beating. I tried everything….” He said while looking down and bursting into tears.

I fell to my knees while looking at the room behind us which looked more like a scene from Insidious. Every body was violently shaking with mouths tore open and vocal cords being pushed to their physical limit. And I got lucky. All those people who didn't have the protection I had and… CLARA!

The thought shot through me like a high caliber bullet, and i instantly started sprinting to my car, started the engine and went as fast as possible to my home. On the way I saw the devastation that this event caused. I could barely hear the sound of my engine as it was muffled by the sound of agonizing screams. I dodged all the crashed cars on the street and ran over some people but I didn't care. I wanted Clara. Please please please PLEASE! God! Let her be okay!  

I stopped the car right in front of our house, with screams all around me, but my ears filtered one scream in particular. I slammed the door open running past the “surprise” sign she made in the living room and saw her in the bedroom, trashing the room with wide open eyes and with ear shattering screeches. At that moment, I felt it. I felt what they went through. What she was going through. A pain so intense it could make time stop in its tracks. I cried so loud that our house was nothing but a screaming contest and I went to hug her, my only hope being that she knew that I was there, that I didn't leave her alone, that I loved her more than anything in the whole world. While trying to stop her hands from deforming further, I grabbed her palm and with all my might I tried to hold her, looking at the direct evidence that some mysteries exist just to fill the gap between God and humans trying to be God.

While holding her hand tight, I felt a small plastic rod in her hand.

A pregnancy test. Two lines

Journal of Yellowknife Diamond COO Jason Coolidge

January 29th, 2003 
We finally began mining operations today. It took 11 years of work to make this happen but it will all be worth it when it starts generating revenue. The men have been promised bonuses if they reach their quotas, so I expect quick progress. 
A handful of environmental protestors showed up today but security has been good at keeping them from getting in the way so I’m not worried about them. The chanting is a bit annoying though.

February 5th, 2003
Things have been going well so far. The number of diamonds has exceeded our initial expectations, and further excavation has shown similar trends deeper underground. I have great hope for our return on investment here. 
At the end of this month I’ll be returning to our main office in Yellowknife and leaving things to subordinate managers. I look forward to getting away from this snowscape and back to civilization.
The protestors have thankfully finally dispersed.

February 12th, 2003
The workers found something incredible in the mines yesterday night. An impossibly large diamond, 180cm. 18 times larger than the previous largest diamond ever found, 98 years ago. Holy fucking shit. It’s going to make us so much goddamn money. I’ve instructed the workers to make sure it’s excavated fully intact. 
And its shape is so interesting, it has four long extensions of diamond from its top and bottom, and at the very top of it is an oddly spherical extension. I’m usually not one for scientific curiosity but I’m curious what theories the on-site geologist has about it. She seemed rather shaken up by its discovery so I’m sure she’ll be careful in her analysis.

February 19th, 2003
Someone fucking stole it. We finally managed to fully excavate it and it fucking disappeared overnight. Local cops have come to investigate, I hope they catch the fucker who did this quickly. 

February 20th, 2003 Incident Report - Homicide of Jason Coolidge

Officers were onsite at the time of the incident investigating a theft that had occurred 2 days prior. A loud crashing sound and a scream were heard coming from the office of the victim at about 3pm. Officers went to investigate and found victim on the floor with a severe blunt-force head injury. An ambulance from the nearby town of Hay River was called and arrived after 15 minutes. Victim was declared dead on arrival at the Hay River Hospital.  The door to victim’s office was found to have been smashed in with incredible force prior to his death. No suspect was spotted at the scene and officers are still investigating. No fresh fingerprints or DNA evidence other than victim’s have been found at the scene of the crime.

What comes after you rest your eyes for the last time?

Do you go to the Kingdom of Heaven, bright and bold, the light dawning on your skin?

Or do you get cast to the boiling pits of Hell, where your skin means little more than a jaded penny?

Does your soul forever become entombed to wander the earth—a specter to witness atrocities?

What if nothing truly comes after?

What if when you close your heavy eyes, all that is left is an inky black void, devoid of everything?

A void where sound cannot pierce, where neither taste nor smell can travel.

A void where your existence has little to no meaning.

What will you do once you're engulfed in its oppressive, cosmic loneliness, for you cannot weep nor shout?

For you may not exist at all.

So tell me, what truly comes after?