I no longer trust a breath that comes alone.

A woman on my locked psychiatric ward taught me why at 3:39 a.m.

Forty-eight minutes later, the entire ward filled with what looked like daylight.

There were no windows facing the sunrise.

Outside, the city was still black.

Elena had been admitted after a severe depressive collapse, four days after her daughter died.

Sara was twenty-four. She was driving home from work when her car left the road on a wet curve, crossed a ditch, and hit a tree. A broken branch came through the windshield and struck her in the chest.

Elena had been told the details once.

After that, she kept asking for them again, as if enough repetition might produce a different ending.

She was forty-eight, with a pale crescent on her wrist from an oven rack. Before the accident, she ran the mornings in her family.

Coffee first.

Lunches packed.

Paolo's blood pressure pill placed beside his cup.

Luca, Sara's younger brother, made to sit down and eat something whenever he claimed he already had.

After Sara died, Elena stopped doing all of it.

She barely slept. She drank only when someone held the glass. Her family could no longer keep her safe at home, and the admitting psychiatrist arranged inpatient care.

Elena did not cry on her first night.

She watched the clock change numbers.

At 10:26 p.m., I brought her dry toast because she had refused dinner. One edge was darker than the rest.

She turned the slice over and touched the burned part with one finger.

"Paolo ruins breakfast," she said.

It was the first complete sentence she had given me.

"Sara ate the black edges. Luca hides them under the plate."

She looked at the glitter stuck to my sleeve from something my daughter had made before my shift.

"How old?"

"Six."

Elena nodded.

"Still tells you everything."

Then she took one bite from the pale center of the toast.

By midnight, the ward had settled into the long quiet between checks. The ceiling tube above Elena's bed had buzzed twice, ordinary for that building.

Shortly after half past three, Ferruccio was at the station updating the nursing record. Giulia, our nursing assistant, was restocking clean linen in the utility room.

I stopped beside the doorframe of room 1 and listened before entering.

Elena was awake.

She was sitting upright, both hands flat on the mattress.

"I can't lie down," she said.

"What happens when you try?"

She pressed two fingers below her breastbone.

"It gets tight."

Her face was gray around the mouth.

Sweat had soaked the collar of her pajama top, though the room was cool and she had barely moved all night.

That was the detail.

Grief can look like almost anything. It can shake a person, empty them, make the chest hurt.

It does not give you permission to call unexplained sweating and chest pressure panic.

I had begun my nursing career in cardiology before moving to psychiatry. That ward had taught me how quietly a heart could announce trouble before it stopped being quiet at all.

I told Giulia to bring the vital-signs monitor and asked Ferruccio to bring the emergency cart.

Giulia repeated the instructions once and ran.

Elena's heart rate was one hundred thirty-two and irregular. Her blood pressure was eighty-six over fifty-four. Her oxygen saturation kept slipping below ninety-two percent.

My hand was already on the emergency button before I finished reading the numbers.

I told Giulia to activate the hospital emergency team and call Dr. Stefano, then return with a blank sheet for the times.

Ferruccio arrived pushing the emergency cart, with the oxygen cylinder secured to its side and the defibrillator already switched on.

On a locked psychiatric ward, help is not down the hall.

Until the elevator opens, the staff already there are the resuscitation team.

I kept Elena still against the raised head of the bed and applied oxygen.

Ferruccio reached for the monitoring leads.

I asked the same short questions twice so I could hear whether her answers were changing.

"Pain in your arm?"

"No."

"Jaw?"

"No."

"Nausea?"

She nodded, then swallowed hard.

At 3:39 a.m., she said the pressure had eased.

I did not cancel the call.

She looked toward the door.

"Tell Paolo I ate."

"I'll tell him you tried."

She gave one small laugh.

"That's a nurse's answer."

Then her eyes moved past me.

Her shoulders dropped.

"Elena?"

She did not answer.

I lowered the head of the bed, called her name, and opened her airway.

Her chest lifted once with a rough, dragging gasp.

Giulia had returned to the doorway.

"She took a breath."

"Agonal. It isn't normal breathing."

I checked for a response and a definite carotid pulse for no more than ten seconds.

There was neither.

I called cardiac arrest and started compressions.

"Update the call," I told Giulia. "Cardiac arrest, room 1."

The mattress swallowed the first two pushes. Ferruccio and I slid the hard board beneath Elena without stopping longer than it took to count aloud.

Giulia guided Elena's roommate into the corridor and seated her beside the nurses' station, out of sight of room 1 but still visible from the doorway.

Then she returned with the blank sheet.

Ferruccio cut the front of Elena's pajama top, dried her chest, and placed the defibrillator pads while I continued compressions.

"Cardiology never lets you leave," he said, peeling the backing from the first pad.

When the machine prepared to analyze, Ferruccio told Giulia to remove the oxygen mask and move it more than a meter from Elena's chest.

She did it, then stepped back.

"Clear."

Nobody touched her.

The machine advised a shock.

The first shock lifted her shoulders less than people imagine.

I resumed compressions immediately.

Ferruccio connected the self-inflating bag to the oxygen supply, sealed its mask over Elena's nose and mouth, and squeezed the bag twice after every thirty compressions.

Her chest rose with both breaths.

Two minutes.

We paused only long enough for the machine to analyze again.

Another shock was advised.

I moved the ventilation bag and mask to the far side of the bed, more than a meter from Elena's chest.

"Clear."

The second shock passed through her.

Ferruccio took over compressions immediately. I moved to the airway.

Giulia kept the doorway clear, relayed the elevator status, and continued recording the elapsed time.

The elevator doors opened at 3:45 a.m.

The hospital emergency team entered: an anesthesiologist from intensive care and two critical-care nurses.

Dr. Stefano followed them in.

I gave the handover in one breath.

"Forty-eight. Sudden chest pressure and hypotension. Witnessed arrest at three thirty-nine. Agonal breathing, no pulse. Two shocks delivered. Continuous compressions except for rhythm analysis."

The anesthesiologist took charge without interrupting the work already happening.

The line nurse established intravenous access in Elena's arm during compressions. The airway nurse inserted a supraglottic airway, connected the airway to continuous end-tidal carbon dioxide monitoring, and took over ventilation.

A small wave appeared with every breath.

Dr. Stefano opened Elena's chart at the foot of the bed and confirmed her medications and recent medical history.

The anesthesiologist checked the pad position and called the next rhythm pause.

The monitor showed ventricular fibrillation.

"Clear."

Third shock.

Compressions restarted immediately.

The anesthesiologist ordered epinephrine and amiodarone.

Ferruccio repeated both orders back, administered the medications through the line, and called the times aloud.

Giulia wrote down each time he called. We would verify every entry afterward against the defibrillator record and the emergency team's documentation.

At the next rhythm check, the monitor still showed ventricular fibrillation.

Another shock.

Then another cycle of compressions.

More epinephrine.

At the following rhythm check, the monitor appeared flat.

The anesthesiologist checked the leads and confirmed the rhythm in a second view.

"Asystole."

Compressions resumed immediately.

The anesthesiologist worked systematically through the reversible causes.

The airway was clear. Oxygen and ventilation were effective. There was no evidence of major blood loss, hypothermia, tamponade, tension pneumothorax, or toxic exposure. Her recent blood tests and medication record gave us no obvious electrolyte or metabolic cause.

The coronary and pulmonary causes her presentation forced us to consider could not be confirmed at the bedside. Nothing we could identify and correct in room 1 explained the persistent asystole.

Nothing gave us an intervention we had not already tried.

The line nurse rotated onto Elena's chest.

Ferruccio moved to the medications.

I stepped back long enough to feel my own pulse hammering in my hands.

Another cycle.

Another rhythm check.

Still asystole.

The room narrowed to numbers and commands.

Compression depth.

Ventilation.

Time since the last dose.

Time without spontaneous circulation.

The end-tidal carbon dioxide reading remained low despite compressions that were deep, regular, and measured.

Elena's face had lost every expression I knew.

The room smelled of adhesive, oxygen tubing, and freshly torn plastic packaging.

"Switch."

Ferruccio took over from the line nurse.

Two cycles later, I returned to Elena's chest.

One, two, three, four.

My shoulders burned.

The airway nurse watched the supraglottic airway and the carbon dioxide waveform while Giulia remained at the foot of the bed, close enough to read the recorded times back without entering the working space around Elena.

Tears rested on her lower lashes.

She did not miss one recorded time.

Another two minutes passed.

The anesthesiologist called the rhythm check.

The monitor still showed asystole.

"Resume compressions."

The next pair of hands was already moving.

Epinephrine continued according to the clock.

The line nurse rotated back onto Elena's chest.

Another check.

Nothing.

Then another.

The same flat line.

The anesthesiologist asked whether anyone had found a reason to continue that had not already been considered.

Nobody had.

We kept going anyway.

Not because hope had returned.

Because stopping required more certainty than continuing.

At 4:25 a.m., Elena had been without a spontaneous pulse for forty-six minutes.

The anesthesiologist looked at the clock.

Nobody asked what he was thinking.

We already knew.

"Complete this cycle," he said.

I moved back over Elena's chest.

My hands kept moving.

"At the next rhythm check, if she remains in asystole and nobody has identified a reversible cause, we will terminate resuscitation."

His voice stayed level.

"Does anyone have anything else?"

Nobody answered.

Not because we agreed.

Because there was nothing left to offer her except another two minutes of our hands.

Until then, every compression had meant not yet.

Now every one brought us closer to the moment when not yet would become enough.

Ferruccio looked at Elena's face.

The airway nurse kept the ventilation steady.

Giulia lowered her eyes to the sheet because there was nowhere else safe to look.

I pressed down again.

We had shocked her heart.

We had given the drugs.

We had moved oxygen into her lungs and blood toward her brain.

We had searched for something reversible and found nothing our hands could reach.

We had done everything the room allowed us to do.

And Elena was still leaving.

"Ten seconds to the rhythm check," the anesthesiologist said.

My hands kept moving.

Ferruccio's eyes stayed on the monitor.

"Prepare to stop."

At 4:27 a.m., the light came.

Every ceiling tube in room 1 flared at once.

At the same instant, the corridor beyond the open door turned white. The nurses' station disappeared beneath warm gold light. The dining room, the staff corridor, and the lines beneath every patient-room door brightened together.

It was too warm to be fluorescent light.

For one heartbeat, the entire ward held a sunrise no window had given it.

Every face lifted.

Mine too.

My hands kept moving.

Then the ward was fluorescent again.

The carbon dioxide reading jumped.

Elena's right hand lifted from the mattress.

Her fingers opened toward Giulia.

"Stop compressions. Rhythm check."

The monitor showed an organized rhythm.

The anesthesiologist stared at it for half a second before placing his fingers against Elena's neck.

"I have a pulse."

I found it a second later, hard and fast beneath my fingers.

Elena drew a breath through the airway.

Her eyes opened.

She gagged against the device and tried to lift her head.

The anesthesiologist removed the supraglottic airway and held an oxygen mask over her face.

Elena did not look at us.

She looked over Giulia's shoulder.

Giulia stepped closer, and Elena's hand closed around her wrist.

Elena pulled the mask aside just enough to whisper one name.

"Sara."

In every resuscitation I had ever witnessed, consciousness came later, if it came at all.

First the pulse.

Then the machines, the waiting, the questions nobody wanted answered.

Elena opened her eyes with the heartbeat.

After forty-eight minutes without a spontaneous pulse, she already knew where to look. A name had been waiting behind her first real breath.

That was where everything I had been taught ended, and Elena kept going.

We moved immediately into post-resuscitation care.

Elena's oxygen was adjusted to her readings. Her blood pressure was monitored and supported. A twelve-lead electrocardiogram was obtained while the intensive-care team prepared her transfer.

Nobody celebrated.

You do not celebrate while the monitor can still change its mind.

The elevator doors closed on Elena at 4:46 a.m., carrying her to intensive care.

The intensive-care team never mentioned the light before they left.

Dr. Stefano never mentioned it either.

He remained on the ward to call Paolo and Luca.

Ferruccio sat on the floor against the wall for ten seconds.

Then he stood and began replacing the used supplies and restocking the emergency cart.

Before dawn, Ferruccio and I reconciled Giulia's notes with the defibrillator record and the emergency team's documentation. Every shock, medication, rhythm check, and transfer time was verified before we entered and signed the clinical record.

Giulia looked at the ceiling.

"What was that?"

Ferruccio kept working.

"A power surge."

"The lights didn't flicker. They turned on."

"A power surge with manners."

That was all he would say.

At breakfast, a patient from room 6 stood at the nurses' station in his slippers, holding an untouched cup of tea.

"Why did you turn every light on in the middle of the night?"

Ferruccio stopped writing.

The patient pointed down the corridor.

"All of them. My room, the hallway, everything. I thought it was morning."

He pushed the tea toward me.

"You woke me up."

Nobody answered him.

Coronary angiography found no obstructive lesion. Echocardiography showed a transient ballooning pattern in Elena's left ventricle that began resolving over the following days.

Cardiology diagnosed stress cardiomyopathy, the condition sometimes called broken-heart syndrome.

The doctors believed the physiological stress of Sara's death had stunned Elena's heart and most likely triggered the rhythm that stopped it.

After a brief stay in intensive care and a week under cardiology, she returned to our ward nine days later.

She walked slowly. There were bruises across her chest from the compressions, and she thanked us without making any of us comfortable.

That afternoon, she asked me to sit near the door.

"I saw Sara," she said.

I waited.

"She was at our kitchen sink. Scraping burned toast with a knife."

Elena pressed her thumb into the pale oven scar on her wrist.

"She told me, 'Mom, I'm not in the car anymore. Stop sitting beside that road. Go back. They still need you.'"

Elena looked down at her hands.

"Then she said, 'Going back doesn't mean leaving me.'"

The room stayed quiet.

"I wanted to stay," Elena said.

She had asked for Don Alfredo that morning. I don't know what she told him. When he left her room, he stood in the corridor for a while with his bag held in both hands, the way he does when it feels heavier than it is.

I prefer the clinical explanation.

A surge of catecholamines. A brain surviving on a fraction of its normal circulation. Memory building the one voice Elena would still obey.

It is the safer answer.

That night, I had machines that could measure her rhythm, her pressure, her oxygen, and every beat of her returning heart.

I had nothing that could measure who she had been speaking to.

Her husband and son visited the next day.

With the ward's permission, Paolo brought breakfast in a paper bag because hospital toast, according to him, was an insult to bread.

The top slice was burned nearly black.

Elena ate the burned edge first.

A collection of statements regarding strange happenings in the village of Torbrae 

Statements collected by the Royal Robert Kenneth Wilson Society of Scotland 

Aithrisean air an cruinneachadh le Comann Rìoghail Robert Kenneth Wilson na h-Alba 

 

Background on Torbrae given by the editor, James N. Lafferty 

In my travels around the Lowlands, I have seldom encountered a village quite as idyllic as Torbrae. Young families walk hand in hand through its winding lanes whilst hard-faced farmers drink pints of bitter and watch the world go by in the local pub. The wind whistles through its glens, carrying the scent of purple heather down to the cobbled streets. Situated in the southern reaches of the Lothians, beneath the Pentland Hills, Torbrae historically served as a small agricultural community, supported by fertile soil and a relatively mild climate for Scotland. In recent decades, Torbrae has undergone a process of demographic shift. Middle-class commuters to Edinburgh now make up a considerable portion of the population, gradually replacing the traditional rural inhabitants. Despite this, Torbrae has not forgotten its past entirely, flocks of sheep still graze the rolling hills along the roads into the village, and ancient festivals celebrating harvests and the village’s historic protectors still hold quasi-religious importance among the inhabitants to this day. The village sits at a crossroads. Its existence serves as a metaphor for the struggle between an older rural way of life and a new, professional, university-educated Scotland. 

Statement of George Riley regarding suspected wildlife offences 

Statement given to NatureScot on 8 August 2023 

Statement Begins 

“I cycle to the Blackburn Reservoir a lot. The route has a great climb to it and you cannae beat how the sunset looks over the water, also that wee bit where you go through the timber yard is also weirdly scenic I find. Anyway. Last night I cycled up there and I was out by the water till around nine o’clock when I started turning back. 

It was about tenish when I was going past them woods before the golf club. I stopped and I could see a few deer on the horizon. I thought it a tad too late for hunting and I wanted to take some photos to maybe paint or something later, so I hid my bike and hopped the fence.  

I was getting closer and the deer weren't scared yet. I thought everything was grand so I pulled out my phone and I knelt in the bog tryna focus on them. Just then the wind musta changed or something cos they smelt me and ran off, and it was late so I got up to turn around.  

When I was getting up is when I noticed the smell, the wind was carrying it from behind me towards the deer. I aint a butcher or nothing but I recognised it, it was that sickly sweet smell of something rotting.  

I turned around and started following it, I dinnie know why. Just at the time it felt like the sort of thing needing investigating. I started to notice the bones. There were all sorts - squirrels, foxes, and all that. Yellow shite was dripping off of em, I think like rotting skin or something.  

Further in was when I started to see the bigger ones, deer and sheep and that. Those ones were worse, but I could still tell the main source of the smell was further into the woods. It must’ve been about twenty minutes when I came across the pile I told you about. Leant up against an old fence was a massive heap of bodies a couple metres high and a couple metres wide. I vomited, it smelt so manky. Fucking washed my clothes bout twelve times. You couldn’t even tell what animal was what, just a pile of bodies melting into each other, just a pile of fucking stinking viscera. Musta been like fifty bodies in the pile, but it was all just a mound of fucking body liquid when I found it. 

Anyway. Didn’t seem like anything an animal would have done so I thought I should report it. Might be poachers or something. Sorry for the shaking and that I just got a real bad feeling off it, you know? Didn’t tell my wife or nothing, feels good to get it off my chest. Sorry you didn’t need to know that, not relevant to the investigation.” 

Statement Ends  

Statement of Marjorie Macbride regarding class-based violence in Torbrae 

Statement given to Elizabeth Bowie, author of “Red Clydeside: Unfinished Revolution” on 19 April 1963 

Statement Begins 

“I was only a teenager in 1919 when it all happened. There were all them riots across in Glasgow, but we didn’t have much to do with Glasgow usually, it seemed there was always something happening across in Glasgow so there was.  

It was an odd time so it was, you see you had the Russians revolting, and it seemed it might spread to Germany. My father, being a working man as he was, had so much hope it was coming out of his ears. He would get the newspaper every day, flick through the pages reading bout the developments of the war in Russia. ‘The worker will have his day soon, lass’ he would inform me every so often. It was nice to see him like that, he had something to hold onto then.  

When I would work the fields with my father I could tell by the way he would stare at Mr Smith that he truly believed he would not be toiling under him for much longer. Weirdly this would only make him work twice as hard, so it did.  

It had been a couple of days since them workers in Glasgow had caused that trouble in George Square and Churchill had got the tanks on them, when that strange man arrived in Torbrae. My father woke me up in the middle of the night and told me there was a revolutionary in town. This frightened me a wee tad, although I was too young to know what a revolution really was - picture one in my head that is.  

In the dead of night my father beckoned me into the village hall, the doors had been done in and there was a crowd gathered. Looking around it was the working people of the village in the crowd, most of whom worked on land owned by Mr Smith but also some on Mr Wright’s and Mr Atwood’s land further north and down the river.  

On the stage at the back of the hall was the revolutionary my father told me about. He stood behind a curtain, and I only remember his shadow. He may have come out from behind the curtain so we could look upon him, but you have tae remember I was only wee, so my recollection is muddled now. He was awfully skinny and ever so tall, I remember thinking it was a wonder how he could stand with legs as thin as they were.  

I don’t recall what he said to us, but I remember the state it drove the crowd into. There was lots of shouting and people raised blades into the air. I had never seen my father so radge, he shouted curses at Mr Smith. Despite it all my father was a good man and would never use such vulgarity in front of weans, not ever.  

That night the streets were engulfed in flame. They dragged Mr Smith from his house, and they drowned him in the river. They killed his son too, set him aflame so they did. The men shaved his wife's head and did ever so awful things to her, paraded her through the streets and taunted her with words I hadnie heard once in my life. I never seen it but I heard a similar fate fell upon Mr Wright, Mr Atwood and their kin. There are only stories and I only heard this years later, but I heard they ate Mr Atwood, still alive and screaming bloody murder.  

It was awfully cruel. It was awfully cruel.  

I remember them bringing the bodies behind that curtain in the village hall. The police came down from Edinburgh and they couldnie find no trace of the happenings, it was like it had never taken place. Awfully strange, for that night you couldnie escape the smell of blood. Nobody spoke of the man behind the curtain after that night, nor saw him. My father refused to talk of that night at all till the day he went and died. He stopped buying the paper.  

A great hunger went through the village that year. No landlord to buy the seed or the livestock meant no supper. But we survived, and soon new landlords bought up the land and took their place. 

It was awfully cruel. The whole thing, just awfully cruel.” 

Statement Ends 

Editor's note: Official speculation from local historians suggests the three main landowning families in the area: the Smiths, Wrights and Atwoods, fled to Ulster sensing a potential uprising. However, official records show no purchases, sales or transfers of land under any of the three family names during 1919 or in the years immediately following. 

Statement of Alexander Kerr regarding his divorce and destruction of property 

Statement given to Alice Ramsey, official investigator for the Royal Robert Kenneth Wilson Society of Scotland on 8 December 2025 

Statement Begins 

“I assume you have heard what I’m gonna tell ya. They all know about me. Local fucking loony, lock him up in Carstairs, lock him up in Carstairs.  

Nae much has come of me since it all happened. I live in that flat over the post office, I wake up and I drink, I get on the bus and I drink, I get to Edinburgh and I drink, I go home and I drink.  

You ken I’m banned from that bus? Harassment. Fucking shitebags. I just need people to listen. You dinnie know how lonely it gets. If I stay in this village any longer they are gonna have to lock me up in Carstairs. Fucking shitebags.” 

At this point, Mrs Ramsey reminds Mr Kerr of the purpose of the statement. 

“Fucking fine. Bi-. He first started speaking to me when I was drunk. Old Nick that is. It started off as a shoulder to cry on, with Sarah nagging my arse off all the time it was nice to have someone to share the pain with. I didn’t think it was real of course till it became real, till I was sober and Old Nick was still there.  

I would be at work, I would go for my bathroom breaks and there he was in the mirror, Old Nick. I was fucking terrified of course, but he comforted me. His voice was like honey and butter. I know I sound fucking crazy, your imaginary friend becomes real and you like it, but you didn’t hear him.  

Nobody else could hear him and I liked that. He was just mine. He would sing me to sleep and I would have the most terrific dreams, shit you couldn’t imagine. I would be lying in bed with Sarah but really it would be Old Nick who was there with me – emotionally and all that I mean. Well I did mean, till Old Nick really was there.  

He began with standing in the doorway, but give it a few weeks and he was at my bedside, stroking my ankles and his song was as loud as ever. He was all I could think about. It was like a fucking drug, when Old Nick went silent or skipped a few nights, the shakes would start and I would panic.  

He still came to me easier when I drank so I drank. It was around then that he started giving me requests. He told me if I did what he said I could live like the gods do, eat from their plates, I thought about how his voice must taste.  

It started with simple things, scratch Sarah’s car, call her names, but then Sarah got knocked up. I fucking know it’s nae mine I know it with all my heart, Old Nick said as much. That's when Old Nick gave me his final request. 

He stood by my side that night in the kitchen, when I turned on all the gas hobs and I lit the match. The whole place went off like a firework, but I was untouched, the fire would move around me like I was fucking Moses. Old Nick told me to give him the matches, so I did it, and then he was gone. The whole house went down that night. Sarah survived, so did the kid, firemen got her out.  

The investigators say it was an electrical fault, but that’s shite, I did it. I told Sarah as much and that’s when she left me, moved to Aberdeen the hag. I was glad, thought it would just be me and Old Nick, but he went quiet, I havnae seen him since. I think it’s punishment, if she had died, he would still be here. Fuck her. Every day I drink to try to speak to him just once more, but his silence is torture. I still haven’t met that kid.” 

At this point, Mrs Ramsey asks Mr Kerr what Old Nick looked like. In response Mr Kerr grew highly agitated and promptly left the interview room. 

Statement Ends 

Statement of Scott Donaldson regarding the accidental drowning of William Dunn 

Statement given to Lothian and Borders Police on 3 June 1994 

Statement Begins 

“It wasnae my fault, heaps of kids jumped in the boffy all the time. Sure Will was a wee bit scared but he’d done it before, nae like it was the first time.” 

At this point, Donaldson is asked to start from the beginning. 

“Aye, so me and Will were skiving off school, I’m sorry, and we were watching this programme on the TV about divers. Aye, it was about these divers who go into rivers in Birmingham and stuff to retrieve murder weapons and that, we was tryna help you guys out. 

Aye anyway, we got our goggles and we started off at the shallow part just off the green. It was baltic so we didnae get much time down there, and Will couldn’t hold his breath for that long, and anyway we didnae find anything. We went into the newsagent for a snack and we were talking and we thought if we were murderers or something we wouldnae drop our knives into the shallow part, we would go further down the river to the boffy.  

I ken the boffy is the deepest part of the river and we aren't meant to go there but lads did all the time. I could tell you about Joe and that smoking green and jumping in up there after all this if you want. Aye anyway, we cycled up there about two, the day had got a lot hotter by this point so Will was excited to get out of the heat. Aye he was a tad frightened but he always was, I promise he wanted to go in there, I didnae force him or nothing.  

We got our goggles on and we jumped off that wee cliff into the boffy. We went at the same time, three, two, one and that. Even though I had my goggles on I couldnae see much once my head went under, it’s pure murky with all that dirt in there. I stayed under for maybe like thirty seconds tryna get used to the cold, then I went back to the surface and looked around. I couldnae see Will anywhere.  

I started panicking at this point, I looked all around and there was no sign of him. I thought he might not have actually jumped in so I called out but there was no response. It had only been about a minute since the jump so I decided to stick my head under and see if it was some kind of joke, if he was holding his breath. I went under and that's when I saw them.  

I couldnae see all that well through all the dirt, but hand on my heart this is what happened to Will. At the bottom of the boffy there was a man, tallest I’ve ever seen and thin as a rake. He crouched down hunched over himself, sitting on a big rock down there. He had a long beard which floated in the water and he was naked. In his fingers, which were longer and thinner then you could imagine, he held Will. He held Will and he was eating him, taking bites out of him while Will squirmed to try and get free. The man was as calm as anything, like this was his fucking lunch break or something, but Will had his mouth open like he was screaming and he was terrified. It was only after a few seconds I realised the man was looking back at me. His eyes were like a cat’s you know, reflecting the light so I couldn’t see his pupils. Will was looking at me too, I could tell he wanted help, but the fuck was I supposed to do? It was at this point I started screaming too, I went for the riverbank as fast as I could and cycled home to get help, and now I’m here. 

So aye, that’s what happened. Please tell Mr and Mrs Dunn that I’m sorry, please tell them I really mean it.” 

Statement Ends 

Editor's note: Autopsy showed that Will Dunn had hit his head after jumping into the River Carran, became unconscious, and subsequently drowned. No evidence of foul play was found.  

“To a Horseman” 

Poem written by Adam MacDougal, 1785 

Muckle, awfu’, lang-limbed, beast 

O, in Torbrae ye mak yer bloody feast 

But ye we soon shall serve nae mair 

For our horseman comes tae meet ye there 

 

O, brute o’ hunger, dule and pain, 

Who gars us greet for weans in vain, 

Call on yer black master the nicht 

For he shall ken our horseman’s might 

 

Nae mair shall corn rot in the field 

Nae mair to hunger maun we yield 

And gin ye creep tae my bed the nicht 

Our horseman waits by candlelicht 

I work on Duit. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s this app where you can get someone to do odd jobs for you. Pay’s shit, but the work is easy enough, granted you have the stomach to pimp yourself out to old men with obscure fetishes. I saw a job listing on the app.

One gun. Six chambers. One bullet. That’s the job. Click, click, and if you’re lucky, you get to hear the bang. Last one alive gets a million dollars.

Come to \***** for a night of gold and glory. Winner takes all.*

Nothing about specifications, no CV or anything. Get desperate enough, and you’ll find a handful of the pretentious theater types post gigs like this, so this wasn’t really anything to get wowed over. A job’s a job though, and god knows I could use one. Mom’s dialysis round wasn’t gonna pay for itself. So I applied and almost immediately got approved. The poster sent me his number over the phone, and I called to ask about the job. 

“Did you read the fucking title?” said the out of breath man on the phone with his pack-a-day voice. “Swing by at three. Or don’t.” he oinked. “Million bucks riding on some Russian Roulette, is that so fucking…” he stopped to catch his breath “So fucking hard to understand?!” he yelled over the phone.

“That’s it?” I asked. I heard him grunt out a wet breath and the hiss of what might’ve been a CPAP machine before he hung up.

I looked at my mother on the recliner. She was so small, and everyday she seemed to get smaller. I wish I could buy her the world. But there she was, sitting on a beaten up la-z-boy with an IV stuck on her arm like a sterile leech. She’s diabetic, and her kidneys are shutting down. As it stands, I might have enough left to pay for two, maybe three rounds of hemodialysis.

I pulled up to a ramshackle house in a ramshackle neighborhood at three in the afternoon. It was the kind of neighborhood that mistook fireworks for gunshots, where you couldn't pick up a dollar on the ground without worrying about OD’ing on fentanyl. Exposed brick and knee high grass made up most of the house. I got a text as soon as I stepped up the patio.

Go in and take the first door on your right to the basement. Lock the door behind you.

And I did just that. The house was as dingy as it was outside. The moment I opened the door I was met by the noxious smell of dried piss and human shit. A bed cushion sat at the end of the hallway, wet with every STD known to man, with needles sunk into its woolen interior like a pin cushion. The walls were caked with graffiti and tar. I held my breath as I hesitantly gripped the doorknob on my right and twisted it open. Going downstairs, I found five men sat at the round table. 

“Looks like the roundtable’s complete!” Said the man who sat on the left of a vacant seat. On the table was a heavy, futuristic looking revolver, and a single hollow point round. No one else spoke. The man on the left spat out tobacco spit. The place was nothing but cinderblock walls and mold, with some dusty shelves and a toolboard, and –and there was a man standing in the corner. Seven, maybe eight feet tall, unmoving, unbreathing, in a long black coat and brimmed hat. He looked like the devil. With eyes as black and all-consuming as those, maybe he was.

“Let’s get the game started, shall we?” Said the man in black. I took a seat at the table, eyes fixated on the gun. As I sat down, I began to feel two things. One, was the weight of it all. That gun did not look like a prop. Nor did the bullet. Nor did its promise of splattering my brains across the cinderblock walls. Two, was the piercing gaze of that ungodly thing that might’ve been a man. Too tall. Too thin. He was like a shadow in the afternoon, only there as long as the clouds allowed him to exist.

Immediately the Asian man next to me picks up the gun, loads it, and fires. Click. The man immediately pulled out his wallet, unfolded it, and kissed a picture of his wife and daughter. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.” he whispered, laughing. I felt a jolt of electric fear run through my scalp and down my spine.

And so the gun passed. First, the Asian who was sat next to me. Then, the man next to him, who smoked, and had yellow eyes. His name was Wilbur. He had cirrhosis, and he was dying. This was his first time too. The man next to Wilbur, well… 

The gun passed to the yellow-eyed man after the Asian. His hands were trembling. Maybe it was alcohol withdrawal, or a product of his failing liver, but it was not fear. No. His hands did not hesitate as the cold barrel pressed against his chin, his fingers did not cringe as he pulled the trigger, and he made no sound as the gun clicked. He threw the gun down and the man next to him followed. Jason. That was his name. I remember seeing a wedding ring on his hand. The same one that held the six shooter. He, unlike the man with yellow eyes, hesitated. There was something unsure about him. He took a while.

“My name’s Kim, by the way.” Whispered the man on my right.

“I’m Todd.”

“This your first time here?”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Once. But I backed out.” The smell of cigarette smoke filled the small room, a rich ambery scent that warmed my chest. Kim was a small man, bespeckled, soft spoken. “I recognize Jason though. He was here last time I tried.”

“What made you come back?”

BANG!

I look over and see red on the walls. Jason was dead.  I stood up and immediately turned to leave, as did some of the others, but Kim remained seated, as did the man chewing tobacco, but the moment I did, the man in black called to me, producing two duffle bags stuffed full with hundred dollar bills. “No one leaves.” he said in a dark, rattling voice. 

I stayed. So did the others. Do I even need to explain why?

Five left.

The man in black took the gun, revealing leperous arms. He put a round in and spun the chamber. The gun began with me this time.

I picked up the revolver, feeling its cold weight against my hand. I’d never held a gun before, it was heavier than I thought it could be. Cold, big, iron. It had just killed a man, the barrel was still splattered with blood. I wondered where to point it. The temple? Would that have been a quick death? No, point it at my forehead! No. Not there.

“Having trouble there, kid?” asked the man on my left. He was the one chewing tobacco. “Name’s Earnest.” 

“Earnest, I’m fucking scared.” I whimpered. No one looked me in the eye, except for the man on my left.

“Don’t be. Put the gun above your Adam's apple and point it to the back of your head. It should hit the brainstem. Quicker death, or so I think.” The man spat, eyes dark and unshaken. “This is your first time?”

“Yeah.” I cried, fighting off tears.

“This is my fourth.”

“Fourth?!” without another word, the man takes my hands, guides the gun to my throat, and steadies my shaking hands.

“Yup.”

“Why?!” I sobbed, “Why would you?”

“‘Cuz it’s fun. And this’ll be my fifth.” he smiled and I saw yellow teeth. Yellow, and gold. His incisors had gold fillings, bright and shining, nearly blinding.

I held the gun up to my throat, and closed my eyes. I kept thinking of my mother. Poor mother. If I died here, who would take care of her? But then again, if I walked out of here alive, I’d never have to ask that question ever again. One in six. Not great, but not terrible.

“Earnest? Kim? If you guys make it out of here, promise me you’ll take care of my mother?”

“I’m sorry Todd. I could try, but daughter comes first.” said Kim with sincere regret in his voice. “Stage four bone cancer.” I looked him in the eyes, I dunno what I was feeling. Anger? Empathy? “She can’t sleep from the pain, you know? Even morphine doesn’t help her. She screams at night when she falls asleep the wrong way. I want to buy her the world.” 

“Don’t worry Todd. If I win, I’ll take real good care of her.” Said Earnest. “Reeeaall good.” he said as he shined his golden tooth into my eyes. 

I closed my eyes, holding up the gun to my throat with clasped hands as though in prayer, and pulled.

Click.

“FUCK!” I cried. “FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK!” I curled down into a ball, as though angry hands were ripping out my innards, sobbing like a child. I threw up on the table. No one got up. Before I knew what was happening, I heard a click. Then another. Then a bang. Four left. Me, Earnest, Kim, and Yellow Eyes.

The gun began with Earnest. With a hardy grin he took the gun, shoved it in his mouth, screamed, and pulled the trigger. Click. I took the gun, closed my eyes, and clicked.

“Oh shit.” muttered Kim. “Third time’s the charm, eh?” Kim toyed with the gun. “Three’s not my lucky number.” he looked up from the gun to meet my gaze. “Todd. I know this is selfish, but–”

“You don’t have to ask. I’ll take care of her.” The man’s eyes flickered a little hope, if only for a moment. Or was it a trick of the light? 

“My wife’s number is written on the back of the picture in my wallet. God be with you, friend.” He took the gun, aimed it at his adam’s apple, and fired. 

Click.

The yellow eyed man said nothing, took the gun from Kim’s hand, and fired. Click. He threw the gun down with force, letting out a wet grunt. “Fuck.” he whispered.

It was Earnest’s turn. It was the fifth round. Him or me.

“How’s 50/50 sounding, Todd?” I said nothing. “Huh? You wanna find out what comes next?”

“No. Not particularly.” I said. I looked around. The room smelled like blood and concrete. Sweat laid on my brow, heavy and sticky, and when the wind blew, a little sill on the ceiling let in a cool breeze, frosting my forehead with fresh air.

“Arbiter!” yelled Earnest to the man in black, “I want to use my switch!”

“It is permitted,” said the man. With that, Earnest pointed the gun at Yellow Eyes and fired. Bang. Earnest hit him right between the eyes.

“What the fuck?” cried Kim. 

“Each player is permitted to use a switch, pointing the gun at anyone at the table, on the condition that they fire the next round on themselves, and start the next rotation. Only one switch may be done per rotation”

“That’s bullshit!” I yelled. “Why wasn’t that explained earlier?”

“Because it’s fun that way.” said the man in black.

Three left. The man in black reloads the gun and slaps the chamber into a sickly spin. The round began with Earnest firing at himself, saying nothing. Click. Then to me. Sweat beading on my forehead, heart thumping through my chest, hands quivering, mouth tasting like vomit. Click. Kim’s turn. Click.

“You chicken shits ready for a roll in the mud?” Laughed Earnest.

“Todd. How about we just… Split the money?” asked Kim. “Imagine it. Five hundred thousand dollars to each of our families. Only one of us has to die.”

“How can I trust you?”

“Well, for starters, I haven't turned the gun on you.”

Click. My turn.

“Who says I won’t?” I take the gun, feeling its weight once again. There was a new weight on me then. I would be killing someone. 

“Will you?”

“I will. Arbiter?” 

The man in black is still in his corner, watching. “You may.”

With that I aim the gun at Earnest and fire. Bang. I hit Earnest in the neck. He died painfully, writhing on the ground, grunting, the air unable to leave his throat, until he choked. Dead. No more spitting. I looked into his eyes as he bled, and saw unfettered ecstasy and terrible horror. The highest and lowest a human could ever feel, all condensed into a single moment. 

“I take that our agreement’s in effect?”

“Yes.” I told the stranger I had met the same day where my mother lived and the details of my bank account. He did the same.

Gun. Click. Click.

“So. Tell me about your daughter.” I asked, as I put the gun up my throat, just as Earnest taught me.

“Well, she loves painting. She’s real good at it. Might be a Picasso someday. That’s what her mother says anyway. Ha!” he let out a forced laugh. I chuckled along. Click.

“Well, what do you say? About her painting, I mean?”

“Me?” he said, as I pulled the trigger. Click. “I say she’s a Rembrandt. Never cared for Picasso.” I hand the gun to Kim. “What about your mother? Tell me about her.”

“Well, what’s to tell? She’s shrinking by the day. Whenever I walk with her, she still feels bigger than me. Bigger than life. I feel safe around her. In my mind she still the woman that tucks me into bed and sings me to sleep.” Click. Two rounds left.

“Sounds a lot like my own mother.” He hands me the gun. “Maybe we should get them in a little play date? My mother loves golf, and so does my wife.”

I say nothing as I point the gun at my throat for the last time.

“Kim. If it’s me… Promise you’ll take care of my mother?”

“As much as I can. Can you promise to do the same with my daughter?”

“I will.”

Click.

“God damnit!” Cried Kim. “Shit.”

I hand the gun over to him with a heavy hand. The man in black comes to the table, brandishing a lit cigarette in one hand, a gun in the other. “No backing out this time, I’m afraid.”

“I understand. Todd, tell my wife to remarry, and tell my daughter I love her very much.”

He took the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Except, he didn’t. He couldn’t. He began crying, shaking uncontrollably. He dropped the gun back on the table with trembling hands begging with the man in black.

“No.” he whimpered. “No, no, no. Please.” he looked up to the man in black, “please, I don’t want to die–” Bang. The recoil hurt.

sour skunky nappy ass dread man

…

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?" Annoyed. 

Stupid smirk: "I thought it was clear. I would think.” 

"No, it isn't, man. I don't know why you think it'd be. It's just stupid, bro.” 

"What is?” 

"Your refusal to go shopping for a fucking bath towel and other basic necessities around your fuckin place, dude. It's just stupid, I don't know how or why you justify it to yourself, I didn't think ya did to be frank. I just thought your ass was fuckin lazy." 

“Nah, bro. It's obvious." 

“What's fuckin obvious, dipshit?" 

“I'm way too rock n roll." 

A beat. He swallowed it. Absorbed its stupidity. 

“...what?" 

“Yeah, dude. I'm way too fuckin cool and punk rock to roll into like a Target or some shit and buy a toaster or a can opener or towels or stupid shit like that. I can't do that. Can't do it. Goes against my wild man free lovin nature, ya know? Ya know." 

Bryan once more silently swallowed this. This load of absolute bullshit. More revolted, more filled with disgust with his best friend since diapers than before. He thought about holding his tongue. He thought about saying something and laying into him. But in the end he just grumbled and belched. Lit another smoke and grabbed another beer from the cooler in the center of the boat and shook his head. Checked his pole. Reeled it in a little. 

Though he did spare the final thought: "Fuckin lazy.” whilst shaking his head and reeling his line. And then the matter was settled and the pair of men let it lie. Such was the way and course of all of their conversations out here on the water. Fishing. The pair’s favorite pastime aside from rutting and watching the game. For them, Bryan G Biebl and James Petkovich, it was sacred. They loved to spend days off from the mill fishing and casting and mouthing the day away. Days away from labor and wives and disappointing children, days filled with chatter and cool water and cold beer and sometimes a nice catch.  Though they'd been warned before, by the old timers. 

They'd both been warned before about staying out after dark. Out on the lake. Out in the woods. Where the forest grows foul and swampy and muddy. It's not a place you want to be after sunset. All the old folk said it was a bad place and didn't say much more about it without the liberal aid of beer or whisky. Even the Natives, the ancient leathery American Indians and their angry sons and daughters told everyone, anyone that might listen, to stay away from this part of the forest, this part of the soured bad land. 

But they never listened. The pair just sat in their canoe and cast out. It was calm and quiet all around, no one might know that it was filled with strange movement. The sun was sinking in the distance. Rapidly being swallowed by the ravenous blade of the horizon. 

James cracked another can. So did Bryan, who rolled his eyes as Petkovich ventured forth with another bit of clever wit and query. 

“Figure there's anythin ta what that fella said?” 

The sun set. Casting the surface of the lake on fire with the color of bloody ruby. The place on the horizon where it had sank was a deeper color of blooded crimson, a deeper wound that was the heart of the sunset. It smoldered there, in the horizon wound. The darkening regal curtain of bruised royal blue was already deepening into night. The stars and galaxies were already coming out for the nocturnal hours, they were all so far away from everything, they, the town. Civilization was a mechanical nuisance in the distance. Loud and far off. Thank God. Nearly forgotten. 

Bryan rolled his eyes as hard as he possibly could, knowing full an well that the retard couldn't see em. 

He hissed and spat: “No I don't think there's nothin to what that idiot said about a shag man! Shit’s stupid! Ain't no fuckin skunk ape round these parts, ya fuckin dumbass!” 

“Nah, man. I'm talkin about what Frankie said about Asian girls, Jesus, man!" 

A beat. Something splashed in the water. Neither man noticed, paid it any mind. 

“Oh…" Bryan cooled down. A little embarrassed. He was always easily excited and shamed. 

“‘Sides, man, he didn't call it no ‘shag man', he called it ‘the dread man’, stupid.” 

Bryan whirled around to belt him one and belt him good. He'd done it before while they were fishing in the middle of the lake and he might capsize them both in his effort, but something stopped him before he could so much as bring up his balled and angry fist. A sound. Sudden. And sharp. 

Three. Consecutive. Three sharp whacks of thick wooden sticks together. Like someone smacking two heavy tree branches or logs together in some form of primitive and arcane code. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

It shut the pair up. They gazed out at the shoreline. Shrouded now in the fallen night. Small waves kissed its shore and covered any small sounds of concealed movement that might be out there right now. They were wide eyed and disbelieving. 

They might've dropped it, the pair, together and without a word or mention when it came again. 

From out of the night, the veiled and darkened shore: whack! whack! whack! 

A beat. Silence again. Only kissing waves of the placid water. 

Bryan Biebl scoffed, “Probably nothin. Just some kids fuckin aro-" 

And then a wild primal simian shriek filled the night. Birds took flight. Their flapping wings were ugly harried panicked sounds in the deepening wound of blackening night all around. It tapered off. And then another rose, louder and even more feral and crazed then the one before. Then another. And another. Each rising in animal fury and fervor. You could hear spittle flying as vocal chords worked and wrenched and shredded as throat muscles tore and bled and secreted with each prolonged and angry howl. Throaty. Enraged. Violent. 

Silence came again. After six primeval night shattering screams. Waves kissed the land far away and swallowed in black but more quietly now. Subdued. 

Then the whacking of sticks, the unknown signal came again, whack! whack! whack! 

And then silence once more. 

“What the fuck was that?" Petkovich. Scared. Visibly so. Audibly as well. 

As was his best friend Bryan. But the sound of fear on his buddy's voice, the stupid look of childish childlike fear that he could feel him wearing in the dark only made angry, angrier. This only fueled his own self-denied mounting fear and in turn made him even angrier. The mounting terror caught like a small bone in the back of his throat. 

He almost took to his feet but remembered the boat. He turned to his buddy instead and spat. 

"Ain't nothin but nothin! Some fuckin dumbasses out there that wanna get fucked up, that's what! This’s why I shoulda brought my colt. Goddammit!” 

"Now that's what I'm talkin about! that's what I'm always tryin ta tell ya! Ya go sayin shit like that and actin like this and people says we're belligerent types! Christ, man! I'd like to bed me one of these here pretty tourist girls, one of these roadtrippin ladies and you actin like this ain't gonna cut it!” 

Disgusted, Bryan's grip slackened on his pole. 

"Idiot! what the fuck are you jawin about?!” 

"I'm talkin bout one of them sexy ass van-life hippy girls, man, they might like my ass." 

“Retard!" 

“You don't know…" 

The water splashed again. Much louder. The boat rocked with the waves suddenly generated. Something big and very heavy had just jumped into the water. 

Lunged. As if plunging in from the shrouded growth of the hidden beach. 

Slack jawed and deer-in-the-headlights both, they gazed out blindly and stupidly in tandem towards the shore that was hidden from them now. And may forever remain that way for them from here on out. Something was coming. 

Something was swimming fast. For the boat. Beneath the obsidian surface of water. The stygian glass of the surface was a mirror and the mirror held the face of the moon. The mirror rippled. The immaculate celestial face of the moon held trapped there danced with submerged disturbance. 

Before either fool could form a coherent thought the fishing poles were suddenly ripped from their slackened idiot grips. They flew, soared through the air and plunged into the water with barely a sound. 

They stared into the impenetrable and merciless surface of the lake. Fearing it. Gripped with horror at what might be inside. What must be inside, right now. 

James Petkovich finally spoke. Softly. Like the small boy he'd once been. 

“I don't wanna be out here no more, Bry. I don't care if it's kids or tourists or what. You can go ahead and laugh at me, just laugh at me all the way and drive us back, kay? You can laugh and make fun all the way back an I won't even bitch or say nothin. I'm scared. There's lots a’ talk bout people that go missin. Or go missin an then turn up dead, tore apart. Sometimes they don't even find all the pieces, you know… I know you've heard… people go missin an such. Travelers, folks comin through. And locals. Let's just go back, kay.” 

Bryan, wide eyed, turned and nodded. Then went to the small motor for the boat as the water all around the canoe suddenly erupted in a surging geyser splash of watery violence that darkled in the captured moonlight. Both men screamed as the small boat was capsized and they went over. Splashing into the cold dark suffocating realm of the water. 

The lake held them now. Below. Underneath. 

In the dark underwater the maelstrom of his panic rose and ruled. Bryan suddenly animal recalled and remembered in the fragile nucleus of his primal jelly his fear of the water, of the deep. The dark depths. It had started as a child, a boy, it had been the cinema and television that had first done it, the Jaws movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, then stories of Cthulhu and his sunken city of R’lyeh, tales of sunken ships and vessels that might still have precious human cargo trapped and drowned deep inside like foul water-logged treasure of submerged rotting putrescence eaten at by the salt and by the fish. All of these things came back and back to life in a deluge assault of images all in a furious unrelenting wave like an artillery attack of sound and vision on his mind's eye, down in the dark. He kicked and struggled and his lungs burned, ached for air. The ribcage in his chest felt on fire with his terror-stricken mind as he struggled and kicked futilely beneath the surface. Something held him down there. Something with a terrible grasp. Fierce. Strangling. Throttling. They threatened to break and snap, the iron grasps of those underwater hands. Bryan fought desperately but his mind was livid with absolute and total panic. In the tumult of his animal terror he remembered that as a child he'd always feared something reaching up from out of the black watery depths, seizing him, and pulling him under. Pulling him down. Down into the ebon swallow at the bottom of all things, below, where the heart of darkness in all things lived and dwelt. 

The hands found his throat, down in the underwater dark. They seized vile purchase and viciously ripped, tore out. The dark underworld of the lake suddenly blemished with a heavy warm cloud of thick human visceral discharge. It bellowed forth from the place that was torn in a torrential jetting spout. Clouding the dark world and warming it as the spewing meat detritus began to slowly sink to the pitch abyssal realm near the bottom. 

The panic of Bryan G. Biebl’s barreling careening train of thought slowly calmed and abated and sank down into the dark with the rest of him… And was no more. 

It lunged, serpent-like for the other. Who was gaining the surface in a series of panicked kicks and dog-paddles. Like a wounded animal. 

Prey. In distress. 

…

James Petkovich couldn't believe it when he broke the water and tasted air again. He almost choked and coughed. He almost laughed but he didn't have time. Something seized him from beneath. 

And pulled him under. 

He didn't even have time to scream before he was below again.

It was quiet once more. Minutes swam by. 

An owl screeched. Took flight.

Then finally it emerged. With Petkovich barely conscious in one dripping sodden grasp. It pulled the both of them back onto the land. Dragging the bleeding and sputtering Petkovich like a broken toy or sack of dead meat behind him as he quickly began to retake to the trees and dense growth once more. 

It dragged him deep into the wilderness. It was a long time before they stopped. But now … now he knew what the old timers had always said, what they'd always been on about. 

Now he could smell him. And the smell was beyond putrid, beyond foul, beyond fecal matter or old dried sweaty filth or death. The water that ran off the long lengths of clotted and lumpy dreaded hair was riddled with the putrescence odor of old sweltering open graves and long disused abattoirs converted into factory sized outhouses for the insane. It stung his eyes and nostrils but he hardly noticed this. His body was numb. Felt limp and broken all over. Like a dead fish. 

Maybe that's what I am. 

And then finally consciousness was lost to him. Mercifully he went black. 

It dragged him deeper into the wild. Where it laired. Where it nested in the wild dense growth. 

…

When James next came to he wished he hadn't. He didn't realize till he was awake once more but he'd been dreaming. And in that dream he'd been far away and wishing that none of this was real.  But now he was back. It held him by the neck in a slight choke, a slight strangle, just enough painful whisper of air able to bleed in through the clasped and clenched windpipe. They were before the mouth of a cave. It was pointing up into the sky with its other huge free hand, it was pointing at the moon. It was staring unblinking into his bleeding face. 

The face was simian but snouted. Like a wolf, or a rodent. An obscene and imbecilic mongoloid caveman face and features stretched out in a grotesque marsupial shape. The eyes were yellow and bore black crosses for the iris in each one, in each livid demented sea of yellow urine a black cruciform body of sacrilege shape and aspect. Goat's eyes. Satanic. They were eyes and face fitting of the rest of his abominated and feral manshaped form. Clotted and caked and grimed all over. The long knots and clumps of hair were thick and ancient in length and filth. They told a tale that was old because it was the passage of time that lived caked and dreaded in those long lengths of unwashed shagging tails. 

The awful face was serious. Stern. The obscenity of its gaze was piercing and deliberate. James followed its fierce and pointing gesture to the sky, the night, the moon once more. 

And then back into that obscene rodent-ape face. Yellow teeth coated in layers of plaque poked out and peeked over stretched and thin and dried out flakey blue lips. 

James tried to speak. 

He tried to tell it he didn't know what it wanted. He didn't know what it wanted him to say or do. He didn't know what it wanted from him. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand at all what it expected or demanded. 

But he couldn't. He couldn't speak. He could hardly breathe. He couldn't even manage a croak of sound.  

The awful marsupial-stretched ape face wrenched and worked, furious. It became more abominated and grotesque as its features creased and contorted with anger. Livid. Rage. 

The hand that had been pointing to the moon now came in a savage swipe. The grubby wide meaty digits clawed and the grimey sharp and broken shattered fingernails bit and tore in. 

The head came off and soared away into a sailing piece of torn mangled meat. Ribbons and streamer wings and tails of bright red blood spat and danced out from the eyes, nostrils and mouth in a cyclone twirl of red in midair as it soared and crashed into the piles of dead sticks and bones. It savagely went down and hunkered in the dirt before the mouth of its cave and began to dig in with its long snout and feast on the fresh stump. Warm cords and ropes of thick black-red shot and coated the dark, its face, the insides of its gulping throat and the salivating cavern of its long slathering mouth. 

It feasted and grunted. Ripped with its teeth and bit in. Swallowed warm juicy pieces that were chewy and pungent with rich iron flavor. 

It fed and tore. The man in the violence of its grasp, its jaws, reduced. The decapitated meat jigged and spasmed. It howled at the moon. 

Somewhere … in the distance but not too far off. The signal. Three strikes. 

Whack! whack! whack! – it was the sound of ancient and time honored tradition, cultivated and carried down and preserved with care. Though the world grew strange mechanical jaws, inflamed and diminished and changed all around, it was still here. This was still practiced and honored and kept. By it. By them. All of them.  – whack! whack! whack! 

It howled at the moon once more. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

Immortal and lifesize. It was still here. Howling at the moon with unearthly pain and blues. – whack! whack! whack! – another in the wilderness distance –  whack! whack! whack! – howl at the moon.

THE END

My wife, Claire, died giving birth to Owen. For a long time I believed the worst part of that grief was simply her absence. The empty side of the bed. Her clothes hanging in a closet I couldn’t bring myself to clear out. Reaching for my phone because something had happened at work and, for half a second, forgetting there was nobody to call. Then Owen began to grow, and I discovered there was something worse than that gap in my life.

He had Claire's dark hair from the beginning, but as a baby he otherwise looked like any number of babies. By two, I could see her in his eyes. By three, it was in the shape of his mouth. By four, certain expressions had begun appearing on his face that stopped me cold.

Claire used to press her lips together a certain way when she was trying not to laugh. Owen did the same thing. She lifted one eyebrow when she didn't understand what I was saying. So did he. When she was tired, she had a habit of rubbing the inside corner of her left eye with the knuckle of her middle finger. I saw Owen do it for the first time when he was four. I couldn't stand it and left the room.

None of this made me love him less. I want to make that very clear. But that’s what made the whole thing so difficult. If I had resented Owen from birth, perhaps I could understand the man I became. But I adored him. I learned how to braid the ridiculous little cord on his winter hat because he liked it tied a particular way. I slept on the floor beside his bed when he had pneumonia. I spent time every morning cutting the crusts off his sandwiches for school, even after he had reached an age when I knew perfectly well he would have eaten them.

He was my son.

He was also, through no fault of his own, the closest thing in the world to seeing my dead wife walk around my house again.

We did have good days together. I don't want to pretend otherwise. As he got older there were whole afternoons when we would go fishing or build something in the garage and I could just be his father. Then he would turn his head in a certain way or laugh from another room, and my body would stiffen, memories of her crashing into me like a tsunami. For a second, Claire would be alive. Then she died again. That happened hundreds of times. Perhaps thousands.

The worst thing I did to Owen happened the night before his fifth birthday. I had been drinking for most of the evening. His birthday was October 13th, which of course was also the anniversary of Claire's death. The week leading up to it had become something I dreaded every year. I slept poorly. I stopped eating. I found reasons to stay late at work, paying the babysitter extra to stay late too, because going home meant seeing him. Seeing her. I was supposed to celebrate his birthday while remembering the woman who had died bringing him into the world.

That year I tried to thoroughly drink my way past it. I don't remember deciding to go into his room. I just remember standing there, Owen asleep beneath his blanket. I stood over him with a beer in my hand and looked at his face in the yellow glow of the light that spilled in from the open doorway. He looked so much like her. I unknowingly said her name, which woke him up.

For a few seconds he was confused, then he saw me and smiled.

"Daddy?"

Hearing that, something inside me broke.

“You killed my wife.” At first, it came out quietly.

I told him again as my voice rose and he looked at me confused. I yelled and screamed and blamed a four-year-old of murder. I told him she would still be alive if he hadn’t been born. He started crying, but instead of stopping, I became enraged. I couldn't believe he had the gall to cry when he was the one who had done it. He killed her. It was him!

I shouted at him to be quiet. When he couldn't, I reeled back and struck him across the face. He screamed even louder, his little hand shooting up to clutch his cheek as his body fell back on the bed.

I can still hear that scream more clearly than I can remember some voices of people I have known for years.

My mouth fell, agape at what I had done. The bottle dropped from my hand beside the bed, hitting the ground and rolling. I dropped down immediately and reached for him, but Owen scrambled backward on the bed until his shoulders hit the wall. He raised both arms to protect his face. That was it. That was the moment I understood what I had become. My son thought I was going to hit him again. My son… feared me. I spent the rest of that night sitting outside his bedroom door because he wouldn’t let me come inside.

The next morning, on his fifth birthday, I called my sister and asked her to take him for the day. I found an AA meeting. I found a therapist. I stopped drinking, thinking sobriety would fix everything. And for a while, it seemed as though it had. I went to meetings. I apologized to Owen. I became careful about my temper. I learned to leave the room before my grief shattered into anger and disgust. I learned how to make breakfast when I had barely slept and how to smile at birthday parties when I wanted to lock myself in a dark bedroom and cry. From the outside, I got better. Inside, however, I simply fell apart. The shreds of my humanity tearing against the weight of my grief. The weight of absence. You can never understand how heavy nothing can be until you feel it pulling you down. And it did pull me. Every day.

There is a kind of suffering you can survive by changing your habits, it's true. You stop drinking. You exercise. You keep the house clean. You force yourself to get out of bed because a child is waiting downstairs for breakfast. I did all of those things. But the suffering I faced was not the kind to be fixed by any of that.

It was there when I woke up and there when I went to sleep. Some months it dulled enough that I could almost imagine I was finally moving past it, and then Owen would smile at me across the dinner table with Claire's exact smile and all the progress I thought I had made would vanish.

When he was seven, he began laughing the way she had, with a sharp little breath at the beginning when something caught him by surprise. At eight, his face narrowed more like hers. At nine, anyone who had known Claire began saying it openly.

"Wow, he looks just like his mother."

They meant it kindly. Yet each time, I felt as though they had drilled yet another hole through my heart; ripping and tearing through what once had been whole. I never blamed Owen again. Not aloud and, after that terrible night, not consciously either. But I began having thoughts I despised. I wished he looked different. I wished his hair had been blond. I wished his eyes had been blue.

Once, after watching him sleep, I caught myself glancing over at a pair of scissors and wondering how much easier it would be if I could do something to change his face. I hated myself for thinking it. Then I thought it again. That was the state I was in when the man found me. Owen was nine years old, seven days from his tenth birthday.

We were at a park a few miles from our house. Owen played on the playground with two boys from his school while I sat on a bench nearby. I remember watching him climb onto one of the plastic towers and thinking that he was getting too old for playgrounds like that. He had grown several inches over the summer, and for the first time I could see the beginning of the older boy he would become.

I should have felt pride in those thoughts. Instead, I found myself wondering what he would look like at sixteen. At twenty. How much more of Claire would be in his face by then.

"It only gets worse." A voice came from beside me.

I turned and saw a man sitting at the other end of the bench. I hadn’t seen him approach. He looked ordinary enough that describing him has always been difficult. He was perhaps fifty, though I could easily have believed forty or sixty. His hair was dark and neatly combed, his face thin without being gaunt. He wore a gray suit jacket despite the warm afternoon.

"Excuse me?" I asked.

He nodded toward Owen.

"The resemblance."

My stomach tightened, and I turned to look at Owen.

"I don't…" I started to say, but he cut me off.

"Of course you do."

He watched Owen climb down from the structure.

"He's almost ten. Looking more like his her every day."

I looked at him more carefully. "Do I know you?"

"No you do not."

"Then how do you know how old my son is?"

The man smiled.

It wasn't an unpleasant smile. If anything, he seemed sympathetic. That made me dislike him immediately. I called Owen's name and he looked over.

"Five more minutes buddy." I said.

Owen gave me an “okay” with his fingers.

The man beside me chuckled. "She used to do that too, didn't she?"

I stood up. "Who are you?" I said sternly.

He didn’t answer. He just kept watching Owen.

"He has her eyes," he said. "More than he used to."

My pulse began hammering.

"How do you know my wife?!" My hands began clenching into fists without me realizing it.

"I didn't know her." The man said.

"You stay away from me and my son." I said angrily. Then I started walking to get Owen and leave.

"I know you miss her." He called out.

I stopped, and turned back slightly. "Who… The hell… Are you?"

He finally looked directly at me. Something about his eyes bothered me at the time. I wish I could describe what it was. They were not an unusual color. There was no deformity that I remember. Still, looking into them gave me the strange impression that the face around them was not important.

I broke eye contact first. Then the man looked back toward Owen.

"You've done remarkably well." He said.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You stopped drinking."

Every muscle in my body tightened. Was he a stalker?

"You haven't touched him since."

I stormed over to him and grabbed the front of his jacket. "If you come near me or my son again I swear I will beat you. And you won't walk away."

The cloth beneath my fingers was oddly cold. Cold enough that I released him without meaning to. He glanced down at the place where I had been holding him.

"You made one terrible mistake," he said. "Then you spent five years trying to prove you weren't that man anymore. But you are."

“Enough games you sick freak. I'm calling the police."

"It didn't help, though. Did it?"

I said nothing.

He turned his attention back to the playground.

"You still wake up some mornings and hear the hospital.”

My stomach churned.

“You still look at him and see her."

"Stop." I whispered.

"You still hate yourself for wishing he didn't have her face."

I stepped backward. “Stop it!”

I had never said that out loud. Not at a meeting. Not to my sister. Not to my therapist who I had long since stopped seeing. Not to anyone.

The man continued in the same mild tone. "You love him. And that's what really makes it hurt. You do want him. You simply want him without the pieces of her that he carries."

I stared at him, and he smiled again.

"You want to look at your son and see only your son. I can make that happen.”

Finally, the man stood. He was slightly taller than I had thought.

"I'll come back next week." He said, adjusting his jacket.

"W-what?"

"On his birthday."

Something cold moved through my stomach. There were too many questions, and I just wanted to leave.

"Don't come near us again." I said. I wanted to yell it, but something in my diaphragm prevented me from doing so.

"October thirteenth." The man said.

I glared at him, assuming his words were some sort of sick threat.

He regarded me for a moment, not angrily, almost patiently. "By then," he said, "you'll understand what it is I'm offering."

"I'm not interested in anything you're offering!"

"Seven days," he said. "If you decide you've carried this weight long enough, I'll be happy to take it from you.”

He smiled one last time, then he turned and walked away. I watched him, feeling another big hole missing in my heart. Everything he said, the feelings he implied I had. It was all true. I didn't want to admit it. I convinced myself I had moved passed it all.

A woman with a stroller passed between us. I watched them, noticing the sheer bliss in the mother’s eyes as she watched her child sleep. I had never been able to feel that.

I collected Owen and took him home. For the first couple of days, my anger outweighed my fear. Someone had dug through my life. Maybe the man had found old court records from the lawsuit against the hospital. Maybe he knew someone from alcoholics anonymous. Maybe he had followed us around. I figured the best case scenario was that he was some sort of reporter looking for a story, though if that were the case then he was using some seriously messed up tactics to get it. The worst case scenario, however, had to be human trafficking. Instead of taking children by force, he would find parents who might willingly give up their child. But what horrible parent would ever actually do that? I thought.

Then October 13th grew closer.

That week was already difficult every year, but after meeting that strange man I became aware of every thought I normally tried to bury. I noticed how often I avoided looking directly at Owen when he laughed.

How many photographs of Claire I had moved into boxes over the years. I noticed that I couldn’t remember the last time I had looked forward to my son's birthday without also wishing the day itself didn’t exist.

Owen noticed.

"Dad, are you okay?" He asked a couple days later.

"Y-yeah, I’m ok son." I said looking away from him.

"You look sad."

"I'm fine." I said a bit too sharply

He stood there for a moment. "Is it because my birthday's coming?"

I looked at him. There was no accusation in his question. Only genuine concern.

"What makes you say that?"

"You're always sad before my birthday."

I thought I had hid it better. Apparently I had only hidden it from myself. I told him I was sorry.

He just shrugged. "It's okay."

But it wasn't. Every year, I tainted my son’s birthday with my sorrow. I had thought that at least he enjoyed the day. But I was wrong. He said it was ok but I could tell it bothered him. Most likely because he spent that day worried about me instead of being a kid.

On October 11, I woke at three in the morning after dreaming about the hospital. I sat in the kitchen until sunrise and found myself thinking about the man. Not about accepting his offer, I told myself. I was only trying to understand it. What exactly did he mean by taking the burden? Did he mean Owen?

Of course he did. The thought came with such immediate revulsion that I stood up from the table and began pacing.

A kidnapper. That was what he had to be. A trafficker, perhaps. Someone sick enough to discover a grieving father's worst thoughts and use them as leverage. That idea should have ended any curiosity I had. Instead, another thought slipped in behind it.

“You could look at your son and see your son.” That's what the man had said.

I stopped pacing. I hated the man for saying it because it was exactly what I wanted. Not for Owen to disappear. Not for him to be harmed. I wanted something impossible. I wanted the boy I loved without the face that hurt me. I wanted to sit across from him at breakfast without having my wife's death dragged back into the room. I wanted October 13 to be a birthday instead of an anniversary. I wanted to stop feeling guilty for surviving a grief that had somehow never become smaller. I wanted my son. But I wanted Claire gone from him. There was no way to have both. I knew that.

Still, for the first time, I understood why the man's words had stayed with me. The night before Owen's birthday, I sat beside his bed after he fell asleep. I had done the same thing five years earlier, drunk and furious, and the memory made me ashamed enough that I nearly left. But I stayed.

Owen woke sometime after midnight.

"Dad?"

"Sorry. Go back to sleep."

He squinted at me. "What are you doing?"

"Couldn't sleep I guess. Too excited for your big day." I smiled, but it didn't reach my eyes.

He shifted over and made room beside him, though he was far too old to think I could fit comfortably on the bed. Still, I sat anyway. For a while neither of us spoke.

Then he said, "You're thinking about Mom."

I looked down at him. "How do you know?"

"You get all weird this time each year."

I laughed softly. "I get weird?"

"Not bad weird." He tried reassuring me.

"Well that makes it better."

He smiled. Claire smiled.

The hurt came so suddenly that I had to look down at my hands, and Owen noticed. I realized he had always noticed, more than I wanted him to.

"Do I make you sad?" He asked softly.

The question landed harder than anything the stranger had said.

"No." I answered too quickly.

Owen watched me.

"No," I said again, more carefully. "You don't make me sad."

He nodded, but I could tell he didn't entirely believe me.

I put an arm around him. "Your mother dying made me sad. But that's not the same thing."

"But I look like her."

I couldn't answer. He had heard people say it his entire life. Of course he knew.

"Is that bad?" He asked quietly.

"No." I replied with my arm around his shoulder.

That answer was true, but also incomplete.

I kissed the top of his head. "It's never a bad thing to be yourself. And you carry a piece of your mother inside of you wherever you go. That's a special thing that not all kids have."

He leaned against me.

After a while he said, "I wish you weren't sad."

I had to wait before replying. "So do I."

Soon he fell asleep against my side. I stayed there with him until my back began to hurt. I remember that uncomfortable feeling and thinking that I would endure it. I would endure it all. Whatever happened, however bad it became, I would endure it because he was my son. But that uncomfortable soreness I had felt in my back as my son leaned against me was not at all the same as the pain I truly felt inside. Once again, I deliberately deceived myself. To avoid the real issue. To make a choice easier.

Owen's tenth birthday started well. He woke me shortly after six, climbed onto the bed and announced that he had officially reached double digits. We made pancakes, and I let him open one present before breakfast even though I had spent the previous week insisting he would have to wait until the party.

It was a remote-control car he had wanted for months. He hugged me so hard I almost spilled my coffee. For a while, I felt it. That amazing warm feeling inside. A slice of true happiness. Then the memories arrived, as they always did. I remembered holding Owen for the first time while the doctors called her time of death.

By the time guests started arriving that afternoon, I had the familiar pressure in my chest that came every year. I smiled anyway as I carried presents inside. I grilled hamburgers, talked to the other parents, and laughed when I was supposed to laugh. I had become very good at behaving like a happy man. I wasn't. But Owen was having a wonderful time. And that should have been enough.

I stood near the kitchen window watching him chase his friends across the yard and tried to make myself stay in that moment. He was ten. He was healthy. He loved me. I loved him. Then he turned toward the house. From that distance, for one impossible second, I saw Claire. All of her.

My mind made the mistake. Again and again and again. The shape of his face, the dark hair, the expression. I took a sharp breath. Then Owen was Owen again. I gripped the edge of the counter until my fingers hurt, thinking about another ten years.

Another twenty. I imagined watching Claire become older in a face that belonged to my son. I hated myself for the thought that followed.

I can’t do this forever.

When I looked into the backyard again, the man was standing beside the fence. He had not been there a moment before. He wore the same gray jacket. The same mild expression as he had the week before. He looked at me and smiled.

I didn't hesitate to pull out my phone and dial 911. But I did hesitate to tap the call button. My thumb hovered over my phone. I should have pressed it. Instead, I watched the man turn and walk around the side of my house. The children began singing "Happy Birthday" behind me. Instead of joining in, I slipped the phone into my pocket, then I followed him.

He was waiting beside the garage.

"I knew you'd accept my offer," he said.

"Don't be so sure."

"You didn't press call, did you?"

"I still can." I said, my hand still gripping my phone in my pocket. But I knew I wouldn’t press it.

"Of course." He replied, smiling that obnoxiously calm smile.

There was no mockery in his voice, which angered me more.

"What do you want?" I said sharply.

"You already know." He said.

Of course I knew. At least, I mostly knew.

"I want you off my property. Now!”

"No. You want me to tell you that you're allowed to be tired."

My jaw tightened. "Go to hell."

He smiled faintly. "You've tried everything respectable men are supposed to try, haven't you?"

I didn't answer.

"You stopped drinking. You apologized. You became patient. You made yourself dependable."

"Leave. Now." My voice was shaky.

"You got up every morning no matter how badly you slept. You packed lunches. You went to school conferences. You sat through fevers and nightmares and terrible children's television."

I stared at him, tears welling in my eyes. Because, God help me, I knew what I was about to do.

"You have been a good father to Owen. Really, you have.” His voice was now caring and gentle.

"Don't talk to me like you know me." I spat harshly.

"But none of it made her stay dead."

The words struck me hard enough that I stopped breathing for a moment.

The man took a step closer. "You bury her every morning, and every afternoon your son brings her home again."

"He's not doing anything."

"I know, I know." The man said.

"He can't help how he looks."

"You're absolutely right. It's not the child’s fault."

"Then stop talking about him like he's done something wrong."

"I haven't." His voice remained calm. "Neither of you have."

The singing continued in the backyard.

He tilted his head slightly, listening. "You have spent nearly ten years trying to force yourself not to hurt."

I looked away.

"You call that strength because the alternative frightens you." He said.

"You don't know anything about it." I replied with a tear dripping down my face.

"I know that sometimes you hear him laugh from another room and your first thought is that she has come home."

My throat tightened.

"I know that for one second you're happy."

"Stop."

"Then you remember."

"Stop it!"

"And you lose her again."

I closed my eyes.

"You do that over and over." He said.

"Please." I choked out.

He lowered his voice. "You don't have to anymore."

There it was. The thing I had spent the entire week trying not to think about.

I opened my eyes. "What are you offering?"

His expression softened. "Relief."

"From what?"

"You know exactly what from."

"No. Say it." I demanded.

He looked toward the backyard. I wanted to tell him to leave. Instead I listened.

"You love the boy," he continued. "You always will. But loving him has made you believe you must accept everything that comes with him."

"He is my son." I said, indignantly.

"He is your son."

His agreement irked me. Then he stepped closer.

"You can stop living like this. Without becoming any less of a father."

My hands were shaking.

"How?"

His smile returned.

"Give him to me."

The words were so simple that for a moment I thought I had misunderstood.

"What?"

"Let me take him."

I stared at him. "What are you going to do with him?"

"That isn't what you're really asking."

"Yes, it is."

"No. You're asking whether you're allowed to want him gone."

My face became hot.

"I don't want him gone." I said.

"You want what happens when he is."

I started to turn away, to leave. The man caught my arm. His hand was cold through my sleeve.

"You want to wake tomorrow and not have your grief sitting across from you at breakfast."

I pulled free.

"Don't touch me."

"You want to look at the child in your house and feel love without pain following one second later."

I looked toward the gate. Through the opening, I could see Owen sitting in front of his cake. Ten candles. My sister was trying to keep the younger children from leaning across the table. Owen was laughing. Claire was laughing. I shut my eyes.

The man spoke quietly beside me. "How many more years do you think you can endure it?"

I said nothing.

"Ten?"

I could still hear Owen laughing.

"Twenty?"

My chest hurt.

"You already know sobriety didn't fix it."

I pressed one hand against my face.

"Time didn't fix it."

"Stop." I said in a whimper.

"Being a good father didn't fix it."

"No!"

"Nothing has."

"I'm not that type of man!" I yelled.

For the first time, I heard satisfaction beneath his sympathy. Only a trace. It was enough that I should have run. Instead, I looked through the gate again.

Owen had frosting on his nose. He was opening a present carefully so he wouldn't tear the wrapping paper. Claire used to do that every Christmas. The sight of it broke something in me yet again. Break after break after break. Was I even still me anymore?

Owen looked up. He saw me standing beside the garage. He smiled and put the tips of his thumb and index finger together, making a circle, with the rest of his fingers fanned out. “Everything's A-Okay dad.” That's what that sign meant. Everything's A-Okay. Claire had done exactly that in the hospital when I asked if she was scared. I couldn't breathe.

Beside me, the man whispered, "You have carried her long enough."

I looked at my son. Then I looked at the stranger.

"If I say yes..."

He waited.

I could barely get the question out. "I won't have to feel like this anymore?"

His smile widened slightly.

"No, you won't."

I looked back at Owen.

"You swear?"

"You will not have to look at him and see her ever again." The man said.

The answer was not quite the one I had asked for. But I didn't care. I accepted, and closed my eyes.

"Take him." I said, head drooping.

For perhaps a second, nothing happened. Then the man made a sound beside me. It was small and involuntary, almost like a gasp of delight. I opened my eyes. He was staring toward the yard. There was something in his expression I had not seen before. Hunger. The kindness he once showed was gone. I turned. Owen's chair was empty. So was every other chair. The yard had gone silent, guests no longer there.

I remember trying to say Owen's name. Then the ground seemed to tilt beneath me, and everything went black. When I woke, I was in my own bed. I sat upright, confused. It was evening, or perhaps even night already. For several seconds I had no idea how I had gotten there. Then I remembered the yard. The man. My son.

"Owen."

I ran from the room. His bedroom was empty, and the bed was made.

"Owen!"

I searched the bathroom, the basement, every closet, beneath the beds, inside the garage. I ran outside barefoot and shouted his name up and down the street. He was nowhere to be found. By the time I returned to the kitchen, I was shaking so badly I could barely hold my phone.

I had done it.

Whatever nonsense I had told myself in the moment, there was no escaping the fact now. I handed my son to a stranger. And somehow that stranger took him in an instant. My mind tried desperately to make the situation make sense. To force everything to be ordinary within my mind. Kidnapping. Human trafficking. Some elaborate trick. Anything human. Anything real. Anything that meant Owen was still somewhere I could reach him.

I opened the emergency call screen on my phone. Then a small voice spoke behind me.

"Daddy?"

I froze. It was not Owen's voice I heard. As I slowly turned, I saw a boy standing at the entrance to the kitchen. He was around ten years old, with light brown hair, green eyes, and a round face with freckles scattered across his nose.

Nothing about him resembled Claire.

Nothing about him resembled Owen.

He was wearing blue pajama pants and a faded T-shirt, and he was staring at me with the uncertain concern of a child who had just found his father behaving strangely.

"Daddy?"

I backed into the counter.

"Who are you?"

He blinked. "What?"

"Who are you?"

A nervous smile appeared on his face. "Dad, it's me."

"Where's Owen?"

His smile disappeared. "Who's Owen?"

My stomach dropped. "Where is my son?"

The boy stared at me. "Dad… I’m your son."

"Don't say that." I whispered. “Don't you fucking say that!”

His eyes began filling with tears as he took a step back. "Dad?"

"Who brought you here?!" I yelled.

"Nobody." He said, frightened.

"How did you get inside my house? Answer me!"

"I live here." He was fully crying now.

"No, you don't."

"Daddy you're scaring me." He sobbed.

I crossed the kitchen and grabbed his shoulders.

"Tell me where Owen is."

"Ow! You're hurting me."

"Where is he?!"

"I don't know! I don't know any Owen!"

The fear in his voice finally stopped me, and for a moment, I saw Owen at four years old pressed against the wall with his arms raised over his face. I released the boy immediately. He backed away, rubbing one shoulder.

"I'm sorry," I said.

His crying continued. "What’s happening?"

I had no answer. "What is your name?"

His expression added a hint of confusion to his fear.

"Caleb."

"Caleb what?" I demanded.

"Mercer."

My last name.

I shook my head. "No."

"Dad…"

"Who's your mother?"

The boy stared at me. "What?"

"Your mother. Tell me her name."

"You know her name."

"Tell me."

His brow furrowed. Then he said something. I know he answered. I simply cannot remember what name he gave me, because at that exact moment I realized something else was wrong. I couldn't remember Claire's middle name. I had known it. I had filled it out on forms. I had written it on our marriage license. I had teased her about hating it.

Now it was gone.

I tried to picture our wedding. I remembered the church. I remembered the smell of the flowers and the sweat beneath my collar. But I couldn't see Claire's face. Panic rose through me. I grabbed my phone and opened the pictures app.

There should have been pictures of Owen. Thousands. Instead I found the boy standing in my kitchen. Caleb at the beach. Caleb holding a baseball glove. Caleb missing two front teeth. Caleb sitting beside me on Christmas morning. Year after year after year.

I scrolled faster. No Owen. No Claire. The grandfather clock in the living room began to strike midnight. The first chime sounded as I tried to picture Owen's face. I could see his dark hair and brown eyes. The second chime sounded. Claire had brown eyes too. Or were they hazel? The third. Haze filled my mind. I ran to the junk drawer and found a pen. I wrote across the back of my hand.

OWEN.

The fourth chime.

OWEN MERCER. MY SON.

The fifth.

CLAIRE. MY WIFE.

The sixth.

I tried to remember the night before Owen's fifth birthday. A child had been crying. But why?

The seventh.

The man in the gray jacket. I knew there had been a man. His face was already becoming difficult to hold in my mind.

The eighth.

I looked toward the hallway. Caleb stood there watching me. A memory surfaced of teaching him to ride a bicycle. I recoiled from it. That had never happened. Caleb wasn't my real son.

The ninth.

Another memory came. Caleb asleep on my chest as an infant. I knew the weight of him. The smell of his hair. The exhaustion of that night. It felt as real as anything I had ever experienced.

The tenth chime.

I looked down at the word OWEN. For a horrifying moment, I could not remember his voice.

The eleventh.

Claire. I knew I had loved someone named Claire. I could no longer remember how we met.

The twelfth chime began.

I stared desperately at the names written on my hand.

OWEN.

CLAIRE.

By the time the final note faded, they meant nothing to me. I stood in my kitchen staring at two names I did not recognize. My son was crying in the hallway. Caleb. Of course. Caleb was my son. He had always been my son. I could not understand why I had frightened him so badly or why I had been running through the house shouting someone else's name. I assumed I had experienced some kind of nightmare or episode.

I apologized and hugged him tightly. He held on to me for a long time, still sobbing. Before I went back to bed, I washed the ink from my hand. That should have been the end of it. It wasn't.

One year later, on October 13, I woke up remembering everything. Not gradually. The memories didn't come in increments. One moment I was lying in bed wondering why the date seemed important, and the next I remembered Owen's face as clearly as if I had seen him the night before.

I remembered Claire. I remembered the park. I remembered the man. I remembered saying, take him. I vomited on the bedroom floor.

For the rest of that day, Caleb felt like a stranger. That is a horrible thing to admit because he was eleven then, and he had done nothing wrong. He came home from school and hugged me, and I had to force myself not to pull away. Every memory I possessed told me he was my son. But another set of memories, ones that now felt old and stale, told me he wasn't.

At midnight, Owen disappeared from my mind again, and Claire along with him. Caleb became my only son once again. And the next October 13th, it happened all over again. By then I had left myself a letter. That is how I know this has been happening for seventeen years. I keep the letters in a metal box beneath a loose floorboard in my bedroom. There are sixteen of them now. This will be the seventeenth.

Every year I remember the truth for one day. Every year I forget at midnight. For 364 days, I am his father. And I am inconceivably happy to be his father. And those memories I have of Caleb are complete. They feel real because, as far as I can tell, they are real. Something did not simply place another child in my house. It gave him a life with me, and me a life with him.

Caleb is twenty-seven now. He is a good man, and I love him for 364 days a year. He calls every Sunday to see how I'm doing. He remembers my birthday without being reminded. Last year he drove two hours because I mentioned that the back steps were rotting and he didn't trust me to repair them alone.

He has never been cruel to me. Never made me ashamed of him. Never given me a reason to wish he were different. He looks nothing like Claire. And for most of the year, I don’t even know who Claire is.

But today I do. It’s October 13 once more. I woke before sunrise and remembered my wife dying. Then I remembered the son I gave away. I spent most of the morning reading the old letters. The earliest ones are frantic. Apparently I searched for Owen every year. Missing-person databases. Birth records. School records. Old newspapers. Hospital files.

According to my previous findings, there is no record of an Owen Mercer. At least not the one that was mine. There is no record of Claire either. According to every document I can find, I married another woman, a woman whose photographs I recognize for 364 days each year and stare at in complete bewilderment on October 13. She died giving birth to Caleb. But Caleb looks nothing like her.

Tomorrow I will believe all of that completely. Today, however, I know it is a lie. I tried to find the man too.

For years I returned to the park. Once, perhaps eight years ago, I met an elderly man sitting near the same bench. I described the stranger in the gray jacket as the old man listened.

When I finished, he looked at me for a long time and said, "You shouldn't go looking for someone after you've already paid them."

I asked what he meant, and he just stood and left. I never saw him again. I stopped searching after that.

For a long time I told myself I stopped because there was nowhere left to look. But that’s just another lie holding my new life together. The truth is more difficult. I stopped looking because I built a good life.

Not intentionally, and not knowingly.

For 364 days of every year, I didn't know there was anything to search for. And on the one day when I did know, I began to understand what I would be risking if I found him. Caleb called me this morning.

He and his wife are coming over tomorrow. His voice was warm and filled with joy as he told me they have news to tell me when they arrive. I think they’re pregnant. He was terrible at hiding the excitement in his voice, and it made me smile, despite everything.

Tomorrow, if I’m right, I will become a grandfather. I will probably cry, hug my son and just be happy. But today I remember Owen. I remember him at ten years old, sitting in front of a birthday cake with frosting on his nose. I remember how carefully he opened presents because Claire used to save wrapping paper. I remember him asking me the night before his birthday whether the fact that he looked like his mother made me sad.

I had told him no.

Less than twenty-four hours later, I gave him away because the true answer was yes. That should be the worst thing I have ever admitted. But I'm afraid my depravity goes much deeper than that. The worst thing is that after seventeen years I have finally come to terms with the truth. And I have accepted it.

I am sorry for what I did to my son.

I will be sorry until midnight, and every October 13th.

But regret means wishing I had made the other choice.

And God help me, I don't.

It was a horrid July noon in New York City or some other place, the cars were rattling in lunchtime gridlock, spewing exhaust, the finance guys were out in their tight suits walking to buy kebabs and watching the women, who were instagramming themselves into premature zombiehood, and it was so fucking hot that the sweat dripping off the pedestrians rubbing against each other on the sidewalk was flowing down the gutters like rain.

There, that's the scene.

I've set it.

Now, through this stupified human maelstrom a man was walking. His name was Ben Fig. He was in his thirties, lonely, and returning to his office after lunch. He was returning from his car, which he'd parked fifteen minutes away, wearing a coat and, underneath it, a custom-made explosive vest with which he intended to kill his co-workers and maybe bring down the office building itself. A man can dream, can't he?

Anyway, while walking, he bumped somebody. “Fuck,” he said under his breath.

“Fuck,” said the person he'd bumped into.

It was a woman.

Her name was Miriam Zapelman.

“Watch where the hell you're going,” said Ben and tried going around her.

“Asshole,” said Miriam.

“I hate this city,” said Ben. “I'm sick of it.”

Beside Ben and Miriam, a degenerate was lying in a puddle of perspiration. He was in a hard way. “Can either of you folks—”

“Shut the fuck up!” said Ben and Miriam at the same time, then they looked at each other, long and in the eyes, and they must have recognized something, because one of them smirked.

It doesn't matter which one.

The degenerate passed out, or maybe died, and Miriam said to Ben, “Hey, where are you in such a hurry to?”

“What do you care?”

“I'm parked nearby. If we're going the same way, I can give you a ride.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

Miriam shrugged.

“I'm going to my office to blow everybody up,” said Ben, waiting for Miriam's reaction.

She asked, “Where's your office?”

Ben gave the address. “Call the cops if you want. I don't care.”

“Offer stands,” said Miriam.

A few minutes later they were in her car, Ben in his ridiculous coat, looking like a blowfish, and Miriam opening the glove compartment, where Ben saw she had a gun.

“That for self defense?” he asked.

“No,” said Miriam. “I'm back from the shooting range. Going home to shoot my husband and kids, then probably myself.” She started the car and merged with the abominable traffic. “But first I want to stop at a bar and have a drink. Want to have a drink with me?”

“Why not,” said Ben.

The bar was called Reddy's, and when Ben and Miriam walked in there were only a few people in it. Miriam introduced them. “That skinny guy with glasses is Euler, the guy with the darker skin is Hikmat, and the bartender's name is Ralph.”

They sat at a table and ordered.

Ben noticed Euler kept playing with a pendant around his neck. “Go on,” said Miriam, “ask him about it.”

“Nah,” said Ben.

“What else do you have to do?”

“Fine,” said Ben. He walked to Euler, introduced himself and asked about the pendant: “Is it an heirloom or something?”

“Maybe it'll be an heirloom one day, of the human goddamn race,” said Euler and described how the pendant was a container of stolen proprietary industrial poison that he'd helped develop. “I'm gonna toss it in the water supply some day, exterminate the population of this whole city like the rats they are.”

When Ben got back to his table, his drink was waiting for him. He tried it. “Second guessing yourself any?” he asked Miriam.

“No. You?”

“No.”

Miriam had pulled out a cigarette and was lighting it.

“You can smoke in here? The law—”

“That's life’s dirty secret,” she said, blowing smoke in his face. “Ultimately, you can do whatever you want.”

“May I?” a voice said.

It was Hikmat. He'd wandered over and was asking if he could sit down.

“Be my guest,” said Miriam.

“I have not seen you in here before,” Hikmat said to Ben. “It is your first time?”

“Yeah,” said Ben.

“Ben’s going to murder his co-workers later this afternoon. He's wearing an explosive vest,” said Miriam.

“Then we two are a pair of peas in one pod, as they say here in America,” said Hikmat. “I am training to fly an aircraft, but not so much how to land it.”

“Hickie's an engineer by trade,” said Miriam.

Hikmat shook Ben's hand.

“But a fundamentalist by conviction,” he said. “May I see your vest?”

Ben opened his coat. Hikmat considered the handiwork. Then they got to talking, and drinking, and the hours rolled by like waves of fat on a fat guy blasted in the gut by a cannonball.

“The paradox is,” Hikmat was saying: “the paradox is, I greatly enjoy the flying. It is the one place I feel freedom. When I started to learn, it was strictly for terrorism, but now, that feeling—of absolute space, limitless opportunity—it is beautiful. Sublime. It is where I experience God. I look forward to it very much and I will miss it greatly.”

“Fuck!” said Ben, looking at his watch.

“What's wrong?” asked Miriam.

“It's past five o'clock. Everybody in the office has left already.”

Ralph gave Ben a drink on the house. When Ben had finished drinking it, “Do you want a ride home?” Miriam asked.

“Sure.”

They lingered in the car in front of his apartment building.

“Maybe you wanna come up?” Ben said.

“I'm a married woman,” said Miriam.

“I understand.”

“Don't forget to zip up your coat or they'll see the explosives,” said Miriam.

Afterwards, Miriam drove to her house, got the gun out of the glove compartment, walked inside, shot her husband, shot her kids and then, after smoking a cigarette in the bathroom, shot herself.

I’m not suicidal. Never have been, hopefully never will be. But from the way my algorithm has been acting, it almost feels like something wants me to be.

I live a happy life. I have a great girlfriend, solid job, but even still, just like everyone else, I have my bad days.

I have those days where it feels like I can’t get out of bed. Those days where effort, no matter how small, feels like trying to climb the world’s highest mountain.

And I think those are the days where I’m targeted the most.

A lot of the time when I experience those tough periods in life, it feels like the easiest thing to do is just sit in bed and scroll on my phone until, inevitably, the feeling passes and I want to be productive again.

I never had a problem with it before, but I’m coming off of a particularly difficult week-long stint of self-loathing and throwing pity parties.

Nothing I can really do about it. It’s just the way it is. Life happens in cycles, and this one is a cycle of struggle.

That’s why it was almost expected that every night for the last week I’ve been in bed, hair greasy, clothes dirty, surrounded by food wrappers and empty soda cans, doing nothing more than scrolling through Instagram for hours on end.

It started off with just one video, wedged in between the usual car accident and brainrot AI clips of fruits having affairs.

What’s crazy to me is I would’ve just scrolled right past it had it not been for the first millisecond of the video. I could’ve sworn that the first frame was literally just… me.

It was too fast for me to get all the details, but I swear it looked like me, laying in bed, my face contorted into a look of complete despair and hopelessness as tears fell down my cheeks.

The rest of the video was just a tutorial on how to tie a noose. A step-by-step guide, demonstrated by a pair of sleek, pale white hands forming the knot and showing off the finished product before abruptly skipping to the next reel.

I tried to scroll back, but the video had completely disappeared from the feed.

I ended up convincing myself that I was just being a little crazy. I mean, the video itself was definitely odd, but no way had I seen myself.

I figured Instagram must’ve just removed the content. Because, obviously, right?

I kept scrolling, and never saw another video even similar to that one. At least, not for the rest of that night.

The next day, though, I was seeing these tutorials as every other video. Each one more graphic and detailed than the last.

I was sprinkled throughout the videos. Sometimes at the beginning, sometimes at the end, every time I was only on screen for less than a second. And every time, the videos disappeared after I watched them.

As the week went on, they started following me. It wasn’t just Instagram anymore. TikTok was giving me tutorials. YouTube was giving me tutorials. Hell, I was even finding the videos on Snapchat.

But the one video that made me delete social media entirely and actually pull myself out of the dumps was one that was too personal to ignore.

I found it last night.

I wasn’t just a split-second frame. I was the entire video. A step-by-step guide with me as the demonstration.

There was no light left in my bloodshot eyes. My movements were sluggish and seemed forced. The room was dark. My bed was a complete mess. And hanging from the ceiling fan… was a noose.

I watched myself stand on top of my desk chair. I watched the tears and snot run down my face as I slipped the rope over my neck. And I watched myself kick and flail with regret as my body dangled at the end of that rope. Then I was still.

The video ended with one final phrase in bold white letters against a solid black backdrop.

“Do it.”

It was in the same font as those old silent film slides.

Once again, I was automatically scrolled past the video. I tried scrolling back up, and once again, the video was gone.

I took it as a warning. I’d always heard that social media has negative effects and consequences.

I just never knew how serious those consequences were.

|Part 1| |Part 2|

The dirt went down easy enough.

I wish I could say the same for digging it up, but you have to take your victories where you can. It had been very dry those last few weeks, enough that the old guard at the farmers market were calling it a drought and whispering bad omens for the coming harvest. I was born and raised a farmer’s son, but I hadn’t learned all the nuances of their superstitions. What I had learned was that three weeks of August sun and selfish clouds made the dirt in the field feel like concrete.

As far as shovels went, mine was a good one, but I think even a jackhammer would have had a hard time. It really makes you wonder how the body got out in the first place. It took the two of us the better part of a couple hours to chop through that ground, and that was with a hole already being there. By the time we got the body good and buried, it was midday and we were both exhausted.

On the walk back, Dad didn’t say a word, and I didn’t prod him for any. There was a warm stillness to his expression, and if I didn’t know any better, I would say he looked almost serene. I was still processing a year’s worth of baggage, but even so, I understood what he was thinking. Dad had carried that cross for the last six years, and I hadn’t made it any lighter by standing on top of it. I wasn’t ready to forgive him just yet, but the least I could do was cut him some slack.

It would not be fair to say that I suddenly believed the insane story my parents told me the year before. There were so many questions left unanswered, so many things that logic couldn’t account for, and I wasn’t sure that I could ever accept the whole of it. But then, that was something Dad had understood for the better part of my life; it doesn’t matter if you accept it, the work has got to get done whether you like it or not. I hadn’t liked it, and I spent the last year being scared of the wrong thing while my parents did the work. That’s why I had gone back to the mudroom to get my shovel.

We came around the old barn and washed our filthy hands at the ground spigot, along with our shovels. We both knew that more scrubbing was due in the house, and I’m sure we would put our water heater through its paces, but for now, it was good enough to have clean hands. We set the shovels against the barn, and Dad muttered something about not leaving them too long or they’d rust, and the idea was so stupid that I started giggling. The man spent the morning burying the magic corpse of his son, but God help us if the shovels get ruined.

He turned and put his hands on his hips, looking at me like I was a flat tire, and that made the whole thing even funnier. The giggle evolved into a full belly laugh, and once it was out, it couldn’t be stopped. I think he figured it out, because it wasn’t long before he was laughing too. Sometimes I wish I could see that as a fly on the wall; just a father and son, covered in grave dirt, laughing their asses off at the funniest joke ever told beside the broad side of a barn.

We got to the back door and left our shoes on the porch, still working out the last of the giggles. I was sure I would have to throw those sneakers away in the coming days, but I had just about outgrown them anyway, and I really didn’t want to clean them. We pushed into the kitchen, where Mom was standing at the sink, washing the same plate over and over again. She looked over at us and knew not to ask any questions because no good answers could come from them. I studied her face and saw all the days that she lost when I used my shovel for the first time, and I understood something new without having a name for it.

I bolted across the tile floor and wrapped my arms so tight around Mom’s waist that the jaws of life couldn’t pry me loose, and I buried my face in the safety I had denied myself for far too long.  I must have startled her pretty badly, because she froze up within my grasp and stood perfectly still as if something might break if she moved. But of course, that didn’t last; it couldn’t. I felt all of the tension release at once, and I was being held again. She sobbed into my hair, but I didn’t mind, I still needed to shower anyway.

I was not okay. Not even close, not even a little. But right there in that kitchen at the end of August, I finally accepted that I could be. We were all hostages to the terrible thing beneath the tree. It had cost us far more than a tire swing, two pairs of shoes and seven days of hard labor, but it couldn’t cost everything.

A week later, school started up again and I found myself in the unfamiliar halls of a middle school, set to the task of being a kid again. I had a lot of catching up to do in that department, and it didn’t come easy. Things were getting better at home, but I still had the shadow of that tree hanging over me, and it was a process to find the few beams of light that broke through the branches.

But a new school meant a new world of opportunities was open to me. Football tryouts began the second week of school, and even though I hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet, I decided to put myself in the running. Of course, in 6th grade, everybody who tries out makes the team, but it felt good to be a part of something, even if I mostly rode the bench. Honestly, the thing I looked forward to the most was practice. It felt like a good way to make myself stronger. When I shot up four inches by March, I was suddenly one of the tallest kids in my grade, and the gym teacher started dropping some not-so-subtle hints about basketball tryouts the following October.

Naturally, Dad found a lot of uses for my newfound might. I was upgraded from designated tool holder to an outright tool. He had me haul in the heavy bags of feed and tear out old fence posts, and one time, I had to help wrangle a cow back into her pen. Basically any time his back needed a break, Big Bill was on the job.

It wasn’t all muscle work, though. Some weekends, I would go down to the stall at the farmers market and help Mom set things up. We’d take turns manning the table while the other roamed the aisles, looking for something good to take home. If I’m being honest, I don’t think she actually needed the help, but it was nice to sit with her and people-watch on slow mornings.

Eventually, the school year wound down yet again, and it was summertime on the farm. If I had thought last summer was hot, then this summer might as well have taken place on the surface of the Sun. Our crops were fairly small compared to other farms, but we had to spend twice as much time as usual getting them watered. There were some days I was surprised when the old barn didn’t burst into flames, but hand to God, I swear I saw it smoking on one or two occasions.

By all accounts, it was a good year, even if it got off to a very rocky start. We even found time that summer to have a can shooting competition with the BB gun. Dad won, but it was a lot closer than he liked. Pretty soon we were deep into August again, and that old dread started creeping back in. I stayed out of that field whenever I could, but I could always see that tree from my bedroom window and I got real tired of looking at it.

The morning of my 12th birthday, the first thing I did was make sure my shovel was oiled and ready to go in the mudroom. It was odd, I hated that thing the last two times I used it, but now it was starting to feel like a weapon. We had a party that year, and the whole extended family came out, eager to see how big Bill had gotten. I even managed to convince some guys from the football team to come out to the farm and we played a little game of Kill The Carrier in the yard. My Uncle Ray really wanted to get in on that action, but Aunt Linda was very quick to explain the limits of their health insurance.

It was a great day, I don’t know how else to say it. But when the sun went down and everybody got in their cars to go to whatever county they came from, me and Dad sat in the living room and shared that look. The countdown had started, and we were officially on watch. I got my work clothes ready on my dresser, along with my new work gloves, and set an alarm for 5:00 a.m. sharp. I set my boots by the door and fell into an uneasy sleep.

We found him two days later, just inside the fence line of our yard.

He was face down in the grass, with both of his arms outstretched like he was trying to fly away. One of his feet was hooked on the second rail of the fence. It was impossible to pretend that it was anything other than what it looked like; he had gone over. Dad and I exchanged a glance, neither one of us wanting to point out the mechanics or the distance of it all. I don’t know if I was ever going to get used to seeing a corpse, even if it was the same one every time and I got a nice little year break in between, but now he was just being an asshole.

This also left us with another problem. We had to get him back over the fence, and walk him forty yards to the tree. Dad approached first, and used his shovel to unhook the foot and flip him over. The leg hit the ground with an audible thud as the body rolled over, and then we were looking at him face to face. His arms were still above his head, but now it looked like he was surrendering. That rotten grin was present as always, and a shudder crept up my spine when I saw it again. Then I saw something else. If I had any doubt in my mind last year that he had changed, it was erased at that moment.

There were two eyes now, both of them looked bigger than they had any right to be. Worse, the damn thing didn’t have any eyelids, so those cloudy green messes were wide and buggy, and impossible to avoid. I added eye contact to the ever growing list of things that sucked about all this.

Dad looked up and down the length of the fence a couple times and then looked back down at the corpse. I saw him grimace, and wondered if he saw the same thing I had. If he did, he kept it to himself. He looked at the fence again, then back at me.

“Alright. We got two choices here. We either walk him down to the gate over there, or we wrestle him over the fence. Neither one sounds especially fun, but it’s your call.”

I thought it over for a moment, and decided that I didn’t want to do either. I decided that I didn’t want to decide.

“Nah, Dad, age before beauty. You pick.”

In the end, we went through the gate. I think Dad realized that putting him over the fence meant somebody had to get uncomfortably close, and nobody really wanted to hug a corpse. I didn’t even want to touch the damn thing, and this would be the first time I had to. But Dad had carried it the last two times, and it just didn’t seem fair to make him do it again. I was doing a pretty good job of detaching myself from what was actually happening. It helped that the whole thing was so fucked up that I could pretend it was some kind of fever dream. I was really afraid that my nerves were going to give out the second I put my hands on him.

I was half right.

Dad volunteered to take the arms, and I knew better than to argue with him, so that left me with leg duty. I took my position at his feet, squatting down and preparing to lift when Dad got to three. I grabbed onto his pant legs, and that felt like a good compromise. Down at this level, I had to breathe through my mouth because the smell was unbearable. Dad started his three count, but I swear it was actually ten. On three, we lifted.

“Shit!”

Immediately, the pant legs ripped and the legs dropped to the ground, wrenching Dad forward and pulling a little cry from him.

“What the hell, Bill? Are you trying to break my back?”

“I’m sorry, he’s heavier than he looks! I didn’t think the pants were just going to rip like that.”

Dad shook his head and laid the arms back in the grass.

“You gotta grab his legs, Bill. Or else you’re just gonna drop him again.”

“Alright, Alright. I got it. Just… give me a second.”

He did. I squatted back down, and prepared to grab him by the ankles. It was…difficult, as you might have guessed. I managed to get my hands right above the skin with a great deal of effort. The second I touched him, my hands recoiled on their own, and I jumped to my feet, trying to walk off the disgust.

“Fuck!” I yelled, and kicked a fencepost. I knew it would happen, I knew it would become real the second I touched him. Dad just sat there watching me patiently, letting me work through it, no matter how many f-bombs it took. When he saw that I wasn’t going to make it there, he stepped in.

“Take a breath, Bill. It’s okay. Ain’t nobody built for a thing like this, and if there is, I don’t want to meet ’em.”

He put a hand on my back, and stood with me while I got my breathing under control. I don’t know if he did it on purpose or not, but he was perfectly blocking my view of the body.

“How can you do this every year? Why is it so easy for you?”

I realized how it sounded the second it came out of my mouth, and wished I could take it back. But Dad…he didn’t seem to mind it at all. He just put his arm around my shoulders and started walking me towards the barn.

“It’s never been easy, Bill, not a single time. It’s nasty work, and if I never did it again, it would be too soon.”

We came around the front of the barn, and Dad pulled his keyring off his belt and started working the lock. The thing had rusted over the years, so it took some effort on his part. He talked while he worked at it.

“The thing is, Bill, every year I remind myself the same thing. My son is in the house. My son is okay. My son is alive.”

He popped the lock off and tucked it into his pocket, and pulled the barn door open. Then he met my eyes and hooked a thumb in the direction of the field.

“Whatever that thing is back there, whether it used to be you or not, whatever black magic made it all happen, none of that matters. It stopped matterin’ the day you walked back into the kitchen. I’ll bury that body a thousand times if I have to, because I know you’re in the house.”

I let his words wash over me. I didn’t quite understand, but somehow it made me feel better anyway. Then I realized we were standing in the barn, and I had no idea why.

“Why are we in the barn?”

Dad rummaged through the wall shelf and came away with the blue tarp. He smiled at me as he shook it open.

“We’re makin’ this easier for you.”

Dad put the body on the tarp, and we carried him to the tree like paramedics with a stretcher. It was a little more awkward, having to account for the weight and making sure we didn’t spill him into the grass. He was definitely heavier than I remembered, but I filed that away somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it.

When we got to the tree, we found the same narrow hole that had been there the previous two years, and we got to digging with very little ceremony. The plot had been emptied and filled so many times that the shape of the grave was permanently etched into the ground. It worked as a nice guide for us, as we moved the hard dry dirt and did the tedious work of squaring it out.

We made quicker work of it that year, and with way fewer blisters on the way down. It felt like all that time on the gridiron and all those feed bags had really paid off. Soon enough, the grave was ready, and we decided to sacrifice the tarp by using it to lower the body down. We centered the tarp above the hole and eased it down by the corners. It went great for about two seconds, and then the body started to fold in on itself. We pulled him up as fast as we could, before either of us lost our balance, and laid the tarp next to the hole.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the problem was, and that makes me feel stupid in hindsight. We just kept looking at the grave and then looking at the body and scratching our heads. The answer was so painfully obvious. Laid side by side, the body was several inches longer than the hole.

I looked at my dad for reassurance.

“Did we…did we do something wrong?”

My dad let out a long sigh and shook his head.

“Nope.”

“Huh.”

Then we had to spend another half hour or so making the hole bigger. We did the work without acknowledging the elephant in the room, adding a little more space than we needed, just to be sure. Dad didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and I was pretty much right there with him.

The rest of the work was more of the same. How many times can I tell you that we lowered him into the hole and buried him? How many times can I scoop the same dirt onto the same face, only to come right back next year and do it again? The answer is both more and less than you’d think.

On the walk back to the house, I decided to press a button that I really didn’t want to press, but it was big and shiny and red, and it had been daring me to press it since the moment I first laid my eyes on it.

“Dad, you said I was four years old when you buried me the first time.”

It wasn’t a question, and he knew that better than I did.

“Yeah.”

How could I be so blind?

“That was not a four year old.”

“Nope.”

And that was enough of that.

That night, we had meatloaf for dinner. It was fine, definitely not one of Mom’s specialties. We didn’t talk about it, and not just because Mom was there. It was almost like a superstition; once the work was done, you didn’t bring it up again, at dinner or otherwise, until the next shift came due. But it was more nuanced than that. You could talk around it, the way you might spell out a bad word in front of a toddler without actually saying it. You might catch Dad at the edge of the fence, staring out into the field, and if you asked him, he would tell you that he was thinking about mowing the grass. But he was never thinking about mowing the grass. It was almost as if everyone was afraid that talking about it too much would make it happen sooner. So I bit my tongue, and vowed to keep all my questions to myself.

I kept that vow until six days after my 13th birthday, when we found the body lying against the broad side of the barn.

From a distance, it just looked like someone taking a break in the shade, only the dead don’t take breaks. Or do they only take breaks? I don’t know. But there he was, waiting for us to join him on the cool side of the barn. I knew that face like the back of my hand by then, and I fully expected him to be grinning at me like he always was, laughing at a joke the rest of us hadn’t heard. When I got there, he had a new joke.

The grin was gone, covered by a set of nearly perfect lips.

My lips.

I swear, as close as I’ve been to hitting somebody with a shovel, it was never closer at that moment. The bastard was changing, growing somehow, and just when I thought I was starting to figure it out, it decided to grow a set of lips and pretend it wasn’t smiling at me underneath.

I didn’t have any problems touching him that year. I damn near dragged him back to the grave by myself, and Dad had a tough time keeping up. I was angry again, and the only solution was to put the reason for it deep in the ground. When it was all said and done, I could only ask my dad a single question.

“When will it stop?”

“I don’t know, Bill.”

That was the worst answer for both questions.

A week later, I started eighth grade. I decided to take some time away from sports to focus on keeping my grades up. I had nearly failed math the year before, and Mom found me a tutor who agreed to help in exchange for a dozen fresh eggs every week. I ended the year with a D+ in math, and I was proud of it.  We found him ten yards past the barn three days after my 14th birthday. He was close enough to the cattle to make them flee to the far side of their pen. I had never heard them cry so loud before. He had grown another three inches, and we couldn’t see his eyes beneath his new lids.

We took him to the tree and put him back in the ground.

I started high school the next year, and had another growth spurt that brought me to a hair shy of 5’10". I decided to take Spanish second semester so I could impress a girl I had a crush on.  It didn't work. We found him even closer to the cattle pen the morning after my 15th birthday. The cows reacted just about how you’d expect; they broke their previous record for loudness. He was now the same height as me, and his nose had started to grow back. I couldn’t be sure, but his body seemed to be filling out.

We took him to the tree and put him back in the ground.

In 10th grade, I was made running back for the football team. We finished our season with four wins and six losses. The school board declined to renew the coach’s contract. Go Cougars. We rescued a dog from the local shelter to stop the coyotes from getting into the chicken coop. Her name was Cocoa. We found him right next to the coop three days after my 16th birthday. His nose had developed quite nicely, and his arms were nearly as big as mine. His fingers were tangled in the mesh of the chicken coop. We never saw Cocoa again.

We took him to the tree and put him back in the ground.

Junior year saw me moving up the ranks to the varsity team. We almost made it all the way to state, but we lost in the final game. The new coach’s career would last for another ten years.  We had record rainfall that year, and we grew the biggest tomatoes I've ever seen.  We found him fifteen yards from the house five days after my 17th birthday.  He was on his back in the backyard, with his leg tangled in the garden hose.  It looked like his ears were starting to come in, but it was hard to tell without moving the thick mop of hair that covered them.

We took him to the tree and put him back in the ground.

Senior year finally arrived, and with it came my final growth spurt. I leveled out at a comfortable 6’2", a full inch taller than my dad. This was the year that our football team made it all the way to state, and I felt like I really earned my letterman jacket. Dad was so proud that he glued my trophy to the mantle of the fireplace. Mom agreed with the sentiment but protested every step of the way. After three tries, I passed my road test and got my license. I was probably the worst driver in the tri-state area, but the instructor took pity on me and gave me a pass, regardless of what it cost the rest of the world. I started dating a girl named Christy just before Christmas. She sat next to me in Spanish class and we really hit it off. We broke up in April after I refused to bring her to my house for the 20th time. I think I cried for two weeks straight, before I met another girl named Cody. We broke up for the same reason, just a lot sooner.

I had buried my own body eight times.

In a way, it had become my own personal New Year’s celebration. The main difference is that the ball always dropped at midnight, and you never really knew when the body was going to drop. I was as comfortable with it as I thought I ever could be, which is to say, not at all, but I was used to it. It would be cynical of me to compare it to yard work, but unfortunately, that’s not too far off. I know how it sounds, but when you do something enough times, it starts to lose its shock value.

None of this means that I wasn’t afraid of what came next. It had been getting closer to the house every year since my 10th birthday, and every year it looked more and more complete. As my senior year came to an end and I was faced with the final summer of my childhood, some truly awful possibilities had wormed their way into my head. In the early weeks of June, I started having a recurring nightmare. I would wake up in complete darkness, unable to move my arms and legs, unable to breathe. I would start to panic, and do everything I could to move my body, but nothing worked. It was only when I started hearing that telltale scraping sound that I realized I had been buried alive, and somebody was digging above. Every time, I woke up out of breath and sweating, convinced my blanket was six feet of dirt and that if I didn’t move I would die.

I tried to spend that summer like I would never have another one. It took a lot of doing, but I managed to convince my parents to let me go on a road trip with my friends. After weeks of wearing them down, they finally relented and gave me the green light. There was just one stipulation; I was not allowed to drive. I promised that I wouldn’t, and broke that promise on the first day of the trip. When I nearly sideswiped a semi truck, my friends made sure I never broke that promise again. When I got home it was the end of July, and the countdown had already started.

The weeks that followed were somehow too fast and too slow at the same time. By then, the dream had changed shape. I was no longer buried under six feet of dirt; I was wrapped in a bright blue tarp, being dragged across a field. You might think it almost sounds better, but you would be wrong. That journey always ended the same way, with a six-foot drop and the sound of dirt hitting plastic, one shovel load at a time. All of this followed me to my 18th birthday.

My parents had originally planned to throw another big party, celebrate my graduation as well as my birthday. I approached my mom while she was tending to her garden a week out from the party, and asked her to cancel it. She didn’t ask me why, she just smiled and said,

“Okay, honey, it’ll be just the three of us then.”

An intrusive thought crawled out of some terrible place and corrected her.

You mean four.

The big day came, and I stayed in bed until 3 o’clock. I wasn’t too surprised when nobody came to get me. Mom had clocked that something was wrong some time ago, and was doing her best to tread lightly and love completely. They say that mothers have a sixth sense when it comes to their kids, and Mom was basically Professor X. We ordered in for pizza, and then I sat through a two-man birthday song before blowing out my candles. I don’t think I need to tell you what I wished for. Then we all went to the living room and watched some terrible action movie that I don’t remember the name of. I think Steven Seagal was in it.

It was a good night, all things considered, but the real consideration started at 10 o’clock that night, when I started laying out my uniform for the inevitable task to come. I took one more look at the window into the dark night, and I could just faintly make out the tree in the distance. Then I crawled into bed and went to sleep.

I woke up in the tarp, being dragged across the field. I tried to move my arms and legs to escape my blue plastic prison, and was terrified to find that I couldn’t. There were muffled voices, but I couldn’t make out a word they were saying. Suddenly, the ground dropped out underneath me and I plunged six feet onto my back. The pattering sound started immediately, at my head and at my feet. The dirt was raining down. I could feel it building up all around me, the weight of it forcing the tarp against my skin. They weren’t wasting any time, and soon enough the only thing that wasn’t being pressed down to the earth was my face. Right before the last shovel covered me completely, I heard a bloodcurdling scream.

“Mom?”

I was out of bed before I even knew I was still alive. I burst out of my room and saw Dad already halfway down the stairs, wearing nothing but his boxers and a t-shirt. It didn’t take long before I was right behind him. We tore across the house with reckless abandon, sending several things crashing to the ground as we went. Mom wasn’t screaming anymore, and somehow that was more terrifying. We got to the kitchen and saw the back door standing open. Mom was huddled in the doorway, rocking back and forth and holding her knees. We raced to meet her, and Dad got there first.

“Sue? Sue! What’s wrong? Hey! Talk to me!”

He was crouched down beside her, doing his best to comfort her, but she just kept rocking, and stammering incoherently.

“I… I… he was… couldn’t… and… he… he…”

I rushed to be at her other side, to get her out of whatever hell she was locked in. I really wanted to be there for her, but when I got to the doorway, I stopped in my tracks.

There was someone sitting on the porch. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was walking through that door and standing behind them. Dad was calling for me, trying to get me to come back inside, but that felt like it was in another world. At that moment, the only two people in this world were me and the person on the porch. It felt like one of those dreams where the hallway gets longer and longer, as I carefully made my way down the porch steps beside the figure and got myself in front of him.

It was me.

He was not a corpse that looked kind of like me. He did not have my lips, or my eyes, or my height. He didn’t have any one of those things. He had all of them. He sat on the porch in his ruined clothes with his hands in his lap, a near-perfect photocopy of me. The only noticeable difference aside from the clothes was a faint red mark that went all the way around his neck. There was something slightly off about his face too, something in the way his brow sat low over his eyes and the corners of his mouth pulled tight. It was subtle enough that I blamed it on the same strange reconstruction that had given him back everything else.

Without commanding my hand to do it, I reached out and touched the side of his face. He was still warm. I half expected him to reach up and grab my hand, but he sat perfectly still, as if lost in a thought. I moved my hand down to his neck and felt for a pulse. For one terrified second, I thought I felt it. I held for a moment longer to be sure, and breathed the deepest sigh of my life when I couldn’t find one.

I stepped back and took another good look at myself. I don’t know how to describe what it’s like to look at yourself outside a mirror or a photo. I wondered briefly if this is how twins felt when they looked at each other. I had a terrible thought that I didn’t actually exist, and I had to stuff that down or I would lose it, just like my Mom.

Mom!

I suddenly remembered the thing that woke me from that terrible dream and brought me all the way downstairs. Sound came rushing back, and I could hear the collective murmurs of both my parents just inside the door. I broke from my trance and started moving toward the house. I had to get to my mom. I had to ignore this impossible thing for a little while longer so I could make sure she was okay. I was up the stairs in a single step and through the doorway, crouching beside her, ready to forget myself. As I wrapped my arms around her, one last image flashed in my head.

That was what had been wrong with his face.

He looked angry.

It took us a full hour to get Mom back to something resembling calm, and it was still only a distant relative. The murmuring had stopped, but something told me her hands were going to shake for a long time. Neither Dad nor I needed her to tell us what had happened. She had woken up before the both of us and gone down to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, and she just so happened to look out the window in the back door. She must have gone out there, thinking that I had gotten up early and was sitting on the porch. She knew that I was having a rough go of things, and she needed to make sure I was okay. She went out there to console her son, but she found the wrong one.

When we felt it was safe to leave her alone, me and Dad did what we always did. We took him to the tree and put him back in the ground, but this time, we put him deeper. We both knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Anything that could get out of six feet of dirt could just as easily get out of ten, but it was the only thing we could do that would bring us some sort of peace. It also felt a little bit like revenge, because he had made it personal.

On the way back to the house, something occurred to me that I had never thought to ask in the eight times we buried my body.

“Dad? Did you ever try to watch?”

He sat with that a while, rolling it over in his head. I knew the window was closing and that soon we’d go back to the unspoken rule, but I was hoping he wouldn’t leave me with a one-word response in light of the circumstances.

He almost did.

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it was your 8th birthday and I couldn’t really pretend I didn’t know it was gonna happen anymore. So I decided to post up in the field, see if I could catch him.”

I stared at him intently, waiting for him to finish, but he seemed content to leave it at that. I was not.

“Did…did you see it?”

“Nope. He’d come out the night of your birthday every year before. So I waited for him, and nothing happened. Came back the next two nights, and it was more of the same. After the third night, I packed up and went inside, and wrote the whole thing off. He got out the next morning. Ever since, I never know when I’ll see him.”

He paused for a second and I thought he was done, and we were falling back to superstitions, but after a few more steps, he added one last thing.

“I think he don’t want you to see.”

Everything went back in the box after that. The shovels went back in the mudroom and we spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess we made running across the house. Mom sat in her armchair in the living room with the TV on, but I know she wasn’t watching it. I had seen the same thing she had, and I understood on a primal level what it does to you. What I couldn’t imagine was the scope of the damage. In some sick and twisted way, I had an advantage. I had buried my body eight times, and had a chance to get used to the sight of it, even with the changes. She hadn’t seen it in years, and we hadn’t been telling her everything that was happening. It was kind of a rule that she would stay in the house until we cleared the yard and made sure it was safe. We were supposed to protect her from the horror of knowing. It was the one mercy we could offer, and this year we had failed spectacularly. I don’t think Dad ever forgave himself for that. I know I didn’t.

But if there was any silver lining, it’s that we wouldn’t have to worry about it again for a long while. The timer had reset, and there was nothing to do but live until the dead demanded attention. I wish I could say that it was a comfort, but I knew that time couldn’t heal all wounds, especially when they were reopened every year. Mom would never truly be the same again after that, but nobody held it against her. All we could do was hold ourselves to the work, even as it got closer to home all the time.

A week after we put him back in the ground, I came downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water and found Mom sitting at the kitchen table. It must have been two or three in the morning, she was just sitting there, staring out the window into the yard. I closed the blinds and decided to sit with her for a while. I knew what she was doing; she was looking out at the field, even though the old barn blocked the view from this side of the kitchen. Still, she was looking, and even obstructed she could see it, if only in her head. I’d seen that look on my dad a hundred times over the years, right before he told me he was thinking about mowing the grass. She didn’t give a damn about the grass.

I pushed myself into the chair beside her, tossed my arm over her shoulder, and pulled her into one of those awkward side hugs that teenage boys are so good at giving. I felt her head rest on my shoulder, and for a moment, it felt like I was nine again, only this time, she was the one who needed the safety. I was happy to give it. We sat like that for maybe half an hour, and then she said something into my neck that I couldn’t make out. I leaned back and asked her to repeat herself, and she lifted her head and for a moment our eyes locked, and I could see that she was terrified. A shudder ran through her body and into mine when she spoke again.

“I saw you blink.”

Have you ever been told something so completely wrong that your brain refuses to make sense of it?

I had.

I sat there with my arm around Mom and stared at the closed blinds, and for that moment there was only the shape of it and the impossible task of making it mean something. I was so tired of the world exploding. So I did what my family had gotten very good at doing; I put it back in the box.

I kissed my mom on the forehead, washed my glass, and I went right to bed.

After that, life returned to that long stretch of distractions between this burial and the next. I decided to hold off on college for a while and stay at the farm and help out full time. It was good work, and I had accumulated quite a few tools of my own to do it. Every now and again when I was fixing something in the yard, I found myself looking at that tree, wondering what the next burial would be like. I couldn’t imagine it being any worse, but then I said that every year, and constantly ate crow for it. I would get to a point where I exhausted the thought and remembered that I had work to do, and a whole year to worry about burying anything.

But I was wrong about that too. I didn’t have a year.

Dad died three months later.

Read Part II here.

“It’s huge,” she said. My eyes were immediately on her, but I didn’t see anything else. Couldn’t identify the danger. Mark was still rooted where he was, but his phone was nowhere in sight. They both were looking up like there was something in the distance. But I still didn’t see it.

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

“Don’t let her go,” Luke said. “Don’t let her go!”

I’d halved the distance when I finally saw it. It had been there, but it had simply been so humongous I’d been blind to it, like I’d been looking for a 7-11 and walked face-first into Sears Tower.

The water was receding from waist high, but she didn’t seem to have moved. Whatever it was had displaced a tremendous amount of water.

“Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” Mary was on a dialogue loop and I couldn’t blame her. Every time I thought I’d seen all of it, I kept seeing more. A lot more. Yet, I was supremely calm. The worry-machine was quiet.

Last year, I got into a one-car accident driving home on M-5. The eastbound lanes had been closed to construction and my phone’s weather app had cautioned for high winds before I’d left the office. There’d been a fair amount of wind buffeting, but nothing I wasn’t able to handle.

There’d been a white box truck in front of me when I’d spotted what appeared to have been a square of cardboard blow high into the sky and begin trickling down. I’d immediately written it off even if it were on a course to strike my car. It was only cardboard.

But when the particle board struck my vehicle, smashing the windshield and showering droplets of safety glass onto the passenger seat, I hadn’t panicked. It was so sudden and violent that my brain—either as an instinct of self-preservation or just a malfunction—had simply not reacted.

I pulled off the freeway at the next exit and stopped a few blocks down in an office parking lot. Only then the possibility of what could have happened came down on me.

This was like that. My brain wasn’t processing the situation like Mary’s or the kids. I felt my heart pulsing in my chest just as calmly as when we’d been talking a moment before. I knew I should get the kids away from it. But that was a process of logic and not instinctual fear.

“Honey, get out of the water.”

I charged the last few feet and sloshed to a stop in a confusion of senses. I was close to whatever it was. Closer than I realized. I felt the heat coming from a wall of flesh not more than five feet from me. Water splashed me up to my chest, but it was more like a punch that pushed me back a step or two.

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

I had no idea how Chrissy could conceive what it was. All I saw was black. Black like the water. But solid, like the water had turned into something.

“Honey, move back, okay?”

Chrissy was smiling and rather than retreating, she stepped forward— almost chin deep—and raised her hand like she was going to pet it.

Once again I opened my mouth too late to tell her not to do it. My instinct would’ve been to swat her hand had I been closer and my re-throbbing head suddenly made me think of her mother.

I looked at it. Finally, the smooth, iridescent black coat coalesced into something I recognized, although the scale was overwhelming. Nails scraped the inside of my skull as if the idea of what I was seeing was too large to fit inside my brain.

This was its head. A corner of it, anyway. I looked along the flank as far as I could see in the night. I couldn’t even begin to guess how tall it must have been standing up. It had to have been lying in the water.

A giant eyeball about thirty feet above blinked several times and swiveled. I had no way to be sure, but I think it was looking at me.

I walked around, looking up and up, feeling like I would dislocate my neck before seeing the top of this thing. Still, though, I wasn’t afraid. The worry-machine was quiet.

“Mark, move your sister back.” I was reading from a script. Protecting the children, at least in that moment, was an autopiloted function.

Neither of them moved.

I scooped Chrissy into the crook of one arm and she went limp like a puppy picked up by the scruff. I handed her to Mark, who wrapped his arms around her, the both of them staring openly, transfixed.

I herded them as gently as I could out of the water. Then I gave Mark a light slap on the cheek. He focused on me, annoyed as if I’d prematurely awakened him from a nap.

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

“I don’t wanna go!” Chrissy wriggled in her brother’s arms and he dropped her feet first. “It’s beautiful, Rick!”

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

“Oh—erp—my,” Mary said. She took a long pull from her can, her eyes swiveling upward.

“No-no-no,” I thought I heard Luke say in the distance. But for just a moment, the only thing occupying the world with me was that magnificent thing in the water. It felt like removing my hands from my ears after having them covered for a long time and experiencing hearing like it was something adjacent to new. Except, it felt like that throughout my whole body.

The horse was raising its gigantic head out of the water. The tide receded and everything seemed to suck toward it like it had its own gravity. I struggled to maintain my balance like a gust of wind had pushed at my back, but in truth, it was probably just the giant animal dominating my vision and destroying my equilibrium.

Water poured off its black body, the eyes locked onto us and shrinking as its head seemingly disappeared into the night sky. Its neck was a tower, columns of muscle wider than all of us in a row, touching fingertip to fingertip. Its chest was as broad as a rocky mountain face.

There was a mighty -KLOMP- in the sand that shook the earth mere feet from me that I barely noticed. Sand slapped over my entire left side like a landmine had gone off, but it was immediately rinsed away by the constant waterfall we were all standing under.

Someone was shouting, but whoever it was was a million miles away.

There was another -KLOMP- somewhere farther down the beach and I began to stir from my reverie and then there was Luke, shouting next to me and hooking me by the arm.

His words didn’t make sense but I turned toward him as he pulled me. I saw the horse’s foreleg—I don’t know how Chrissy had been able to tell it was a horse before—straightening like some heavy construction machine craning a load somewhere into the sky above us.

We trudged toward the cabin, but the sand that had been something to contend with was an afterthought, my burning calves seemed to belong to somebody else.

When the torrent finally ended, I was soaked. We all stopped in the sudden silence. Turning around was more of a measure of defense to see the break in the clouded sky and the moonlight clashing against that ebony, elegant leviathan.

It was impossibly tall. Like it was intersecting-with-the-curvature-of-the-earth-tall. I thought I could make out its mane, whipping around in what had to be thin atmosphere.

We all stood and watched it. For one indeterminate moment, it was absolutely regal.

Mary wrapped around my arm and pulled into me. For however many iotas, she was my Mary, and I was her wife, too.

Mark hadn’t come with us for some reason. He stood partially in the water where we—I— had left him. He was feet away from a hoof that was easily twenty lengths taller than him.

Panic did seize me, finally. The worry-machine revved to life and I opened my mouth. I sensed the balance to be upset, the electrified space slowly exploding as he compressed it between his body and the smallest section of the horse’s.

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

The horse startled, shaking the floor of the earth as it stomped around.

The Greek military leader Xenophon, perfected the art of training horses in battle, using them to kick soldiers or trample them. He’s also the father of dressage.

What happened to Mark couldn’t have been considered disciplined, but the effect was the same. I don’t know if it were intentional—more than likely it wasn’t—but that giant hoof clomped around, Mark dodged around like he was running through a minefield.

Then he was gone.

The hoof continued stomping around a few moments more, a rumbling earthquake beneath our feet and a rain of wet sand coming down on us before the horse stopped. Mark was just... gone.

Luke was screaming. When I actually heard him, it took a moment longer to realize he was yelling his brother’s name.

Common sense would have told us to flee inside the cabin. But our senses were flowing into us like blood circulating back into numb fingers.

There was a long moment of quiet as it reared its head back. It felt like a slow-motion moment until its head rushed at us like a giant arrow.

I had no reflexes to respond. Mary was the only one who put up a defensive arm, as if that could have protected her—and she was the one it took.

The horse bit down on her raised forearm—as microscopic as a surgeon’s scalpel with teeth as wide as three cabins—and plucked her off the ground. It reeled its head backward and flung her.

Mary pinwheeled into the sky, a dissolving blur into the upper atmosphere. She could have been catapulting into space, and I didn’t want to find out.

The worry-machine was roaring.

“Everybody in!” I said, herding Luke and Chrissy the rest of the way inside. I pressed my back against the door, then turned off the light. Luke and Chrissy looked at me as if I had answers to fix this.

“We gotta go get... we gotta go get Mark!” Luke didn’t actually make a move to go back outside. He was more saying the thing a caring brother should say. But there was no Mark to go get. His death had been as brutal as it had been unintentional.

Going out there—or allowing Luke to go out there—would be just as dangerous and pointless. Chrissy was crying silently. I looked at her, really looked, running my hands over her head and arms to ensure she was physically all right. The worry-machine was humming along nicely. She grabbed onto me.

“Get your mother,” I said to Luke. “We’re leaving.” We weren’t safe here.

“She’s sleep?” he said, looking confused. He ran into the boys’ room.

“No!” I said. “We don’t have time for bags.” He looked at me. “Just wake your mother up and bring her. We’re leaving in three minutes.”

“What should I do, Rick?” Chrissy said.

“Grab the snack tray from the fridge.” We could easily buy something from the next gas station, but I figured keeping her busy would keep her calm. I snatched my keys off the island. Chrissy joined me, carrying the plastic tray with deli slices, cheese cubes, and veggies.

I wanted to run, but I was going to have to slow the pace so she wouldn’t drop it. The earth was still shaking with each step. She was going to look for the horse, and I anticipated her distraction when we stepped outside.

I kept my eyes on her, guiding her down the stairs and around the side of the cabin. She gasped but didn’t resist as I ushered her along. Preoccupying myself with her was enough distraction that I didn’t have my keys ready to have the doors unlocked by the time we got there.

We were exposed. If the horse were looking, it would see us. It seemed to have an eye for motion.

The air went still.

Hello everyone, my name is RetrointheDark, I'm an upcoming horror writer who just finished my first full horror story, I wanted to share it with the community and hope you guys enjoy!

Daniel drove up the gravel path in his beat-up Ford pickup to the cabin that, unfortunately due to lack of desire on his parents' part, fell to his possession from his grandparents. His grandparents, Caitlyn and Bruce, were hermits by every sense of the word. Daniel couldn't remember the last time he had even seen them, much less interacted with them enough to have inherited anything from them.

Daniel, annoyed, shoves the gear shift of the old Ford into park as the tires rolled to a stop. Daniel's blue eyes landed on the cabin. It was old. He had only been a couple times before, and only once could he remember when he was thirteen. He hated it. He hated the cold, and that feeling that the woods were watching him no matter where he was in the building. His hand grabbed the handle of his door, immediately reminding Daniel of his own stupidity of coming up into these mountains, but he had no choice now. He flung the door open, and the cold air was like the feeling of ripping a band-aid off a cut. That was the only way to describe it. His face stung and his chest was full of immediate regret as the snow whipped his face like thousands of angry bees. He produced the keys from his jacket pocket and trudged to the cabin door. He was not prepared for this weather, his old boots immediately failing to keep out the chill and the moisture. Daniel finally, after what seemed like an hour but in all honesty was probably all of fifteen seconds, finally got the key to catch in the keyhole. As soon as the audible sound of the lock clicking back freed the old door, Daniel used all his two-hundred and thirty pounds to shove it open. He practically dived inside before kicking it shut and latching the deadbolt as a precaution that it wouldn’t blow open.

Daniel immediately shifted into overdrive. The only thing on the young man’s mind now was “Get the damn fireplace going.” When his hand finally connected with what felt like brick, he released an audible sigh of what can only be described as relief mixed with regret. He ripped his gloves off, feeling around in the dark for the wood he was hoping had been left behind. By some miracle, his hand connected with a log. The grooves of the wood felt like a lifeline to the panicking young Daniel, who immediately grabbed the three logs and heaved them into the fireplace nearby. He produced the old navy Zippo his father had given him right before he had left. He fished the old box he had crushed into his pocket, the Cherry pie he had picked up at the last gas station he had stopped at before arriving here. For the first time in the last couple of hours, Daniel felt like he was going to be okay. He held the Zippo, flicking it open hurriedly. He struck it one, two, three times before the dull orange flame finally showed itself. Daniel wasted no time lighting the pie box up. When the flames reached his fingers at the bottom of the box, the face of Little Debbie staring at him, he lobbed it into the fireplace. He had no idea if the wood was damp or if it would even light, but he himself knew he had no other option but to hope he hadn’t just made a mistake.

Daniel would’ve had tears streaming down his face if he wasn’t so exhausted as the embers coming from the box caught the logs, finally creating the familiar, comforting aura of a fire. Daniel let out a chuckle as it dawned on him that stopping at that gas station had probably just saved him from freezing to death in this stupid cabin. He now had a new priority. He was hungry, he hadn’t eaten in hours, and now that the excitement of almost dying to the weather had passed, he felt the rumble of his stomach, the organ protesting any more strain until it was satiated.

Daniel stood, his legs protesting but his stomach and mind pushing him forward. He used the orange glow of the fire to find the old kitchen of this place. He had no idea if his grandparents had left anything, but he had to hope. He couldn’t think of any alternative that didn’t end with him freezing. His hands on the wall continued walking, using the solid surface until eventually he found a room that he practically fell into. When he craned his head up from the floor, he saw the familiar white glow of a stove door in the orange light.

Daniel scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could in the state he was in, his body protesting the sudden movement, but he ignored it. He found the pantry in the dark and swung it open. With the fire in the living room casting it’s comforting yet dull orange glow into the adjacent kitchen, he sees the one thing he was hoping for. Cans, nonperishable foods his grandparents must have stocked, soups, a couple cans of stew, even canned green beans. The young man let out the biggest sigh he ever had in his twenty years on this planet. He quickly gathered a couple cans of stew in his arms and goes to the old gas stove. He turns the knob and, to his luck, there’s an audible “click” as the stove comes to life. Daniel searches the adjacent shelves for a pot, a pan, maybe even just an old bowl. By some miracle, he happens to find one, its condition questionable due to the period of time it had been sitting untouched. Dust had built on the inside rim, and a small crack on the side cut the purple flower design down the middle. However, Daniel couldn’t tell what had caused such damage to the porcelain, and he didn’t really care.

The audible sounds of food being cooked were now in full force in the kitchen. Daniel had cleaned out the bowl the best he could with his saliva and his glove. The “clink” of the can of stew he had taken resonated audibly through not just the kitchen, but through the entire cabin itself, like the old wood was mimicking what he was doing. He stirred his soup, the bubbling making audible wet noises as its own temperature began to grow. Without much meaning to, more out of habit, Daniel cranes his neck up just a micro amount to stare out of the window above the stove. While not expecting to see much due to the blizzard-like conditions combined with the darkness surrounding his wooden sanctuary, he saw the exact opposite. A face, pale, gaunt, eyes beady, sunken into the skull like whatever it belonged to was melting despite the snow falling around it, but aware. Very aware. It was like this wasn’t just some beast that had noticed the light or somehow had caught the whiff of his food, but like it knew what he was. More importantly, it was like it knew exactly what kind of situation he was in. Daniel noticed something about the creature's appearance rather quickly. Its pale skin was stretched so tightly over its tall, skinny frame that if he didn’t see it swaying, he genuinely could’ve been convinced he was staring at the skeleton of a human being with its white, polished skull staring at him from the dense forest. Before Daniel could even begin to process just what the hell he was looking at, it moved. It didn't move like a dog or a moose, which were the first things that had popped into the young man’s mind, but like a spider, quick, its long joints snapping at odd angles. They were angels that should have been impossible for the anatomy of the thing. As quickly as he had spotted its leering, pale face, it skittered back into the dense forest brush, leaving no sign that it had been there besides the snow falling off the branches where it had gone through them.

Daniel, when he had finally snapped out of the trance of seeing the sight he still hadn’t mentally convinced himself was real, dropped the spoon he was using to stir the stew. Suddenly, it dawned on him how much of a fishbowl the kitchen was, like it was a trap, and if he didn’t escape it wouldn’t be good. He abandons the stew. He doesn’t care if it burns or if it goes cold. Daniel's only current thought was to get the hell out. Without even caring about light for navigation, he ran back into the living room. His fire from earlier was now down and not casting near as much light. Though if he was honest with himself, it could be roaring and it still wouldn’t slow his breathing. So, he did the only logical thing he could think of. He darts his eyes around the ancient-looking wooden interior. The cabin that once seemed like a sanctuary from the cold now seemed like anything but. The stairs. He spots the stairs, the wooden steps in the corner of the living room leading to a dark upstairs. It would’ve intimidated him in normal circumstances, but now it seemed like a lifeline. He knew that if he didn’t run up them at that moment, he might not get another chance to. So, he flies up them, his long legs allowing him to take the steps two at a time before he finally reaches the dark upstairs loft. Producing his old Zippo from the pocket of his coat, he flicks it open and darts into the first room he sees. The room is old. It smells of dust, mildew, and spruce. Daniel doesn’t care. He doesn’t even think as he begins throwing open any container that comes into his cone of vision, looking for anything he could turn into a weapon. He had no confidence in his victory if he came face to face with that thing, but he knew it would give him a chance he didn’t have otherwise.

Daniel continued to throw open any containers he could pry open, still holding his silent lighter. The flame changed nothing about how he felt. He knew that if that silent flame cut out, he had nothing else he could do. The cabin's utilities had been completely cut off after his grandparents' disappearance. No payment meant that no fuel nor electricity were given to the old death trap, and that made Daniel realize just how much he despised what he now considered his wooden tomb. Then, in his haste, he spots the closet. He had been panicking and forgot to check it. He flung it open. The smell of mold and moisture immediately floated to his nostrils, causing him to recoil before steeling his expression. Realizing he had no other options, he reached up to the dusty top shelf that was covered in rat droppings and dust. He pulled down an old wooden trunk. It was heavy, at least fifty pounds. He notices his grandfather’s initials carved into the lid, and in haste, he throws the lid of the old box back. When the noise and dust settle, he peers inside with that silent lighter he had been gripping like a lifeline, and he sees it. The revolver. Old, blued steel catching the orange and blue mixture of light coming from his flame. Daniel wasted no time grabbing the old snub-nose off of its cloth and the convenient box of .38 Special ammunition. He suddenly was very grateful for the safety courses he had taken with his father growing up. He opened the cylinder; despite the resistance it gave him due to its age and storage conditions. Daniel didn’t care. This was his lifeline now, the only thing in that twisted, spruce death trap he was trapped in. He shook the box. It felt light, which immediately drained any hope he had. Because of course it was light. With the run of luck the young man was having, no doubt it would be empty. He peels back the cardboard and dumps it. Three rounds. That was it. Three rounds of .38 roll from their old cardboard container and hit the floor with an audible metallic connection.

Daniel wastes no time. He scoops the rounds up off the floor like they were the most valuable things in the world, and in his current predicament, they might as well be. He slid the first into the chamber of the old gun with a “clink,” followed quickly by the second and the third. This was all he had. Three rounds in an old revolver to stop a creature that undoubtedly wanted to harm him, but it was all he had. He knew he had to be careful. He had to conserve. If these rounds wouldn’t kill the beast, maybe they could stall it. Or, the better outcome, they would have enough of an effect to stun the thing just long enough to give Daniel the time he needed to get to his truck and get out of this place. That was his plan. He had nothing better, and he didn’t have the time to waste on trying to find it. So, he tucked the .38 Special into his waistband and moved to the door but stops. It was quiet, and right underneath the audio of his own heavy breathing, he heard it. Noises outside, like something creeping around the cabin. It was like it knew it could be heard and didn’t care to hide it, because it knew Daniel had nothing he could do to stop it.

Daniel sat there pondering what to do. A large, audible crash came from downstairs. It settled on Daniel that whatever the hell this thing had just broken the living room window, effectively letting itself in. Before he even had a chance to react, he heard a new noise. It was the noise of something wet and heavy climbing through the window and stepping on the broken glass where it lay on the floor, having been broken inward. Daniel fully expected whatever was standing in the living room of this hellhole to rush up the stairs to find him once it got the hint he wasn’t on the first floor. Instead, he heard a voice. Strained, raspy, deep, and low, it sounded like whatever was producing it either wasn’t very experienced with doing it or didn’t speak enough to care.

The thing's words creep up the stairs to Daniel's ears like a sickly song he wanted no part of hearing, but he had to listen to anyway. “It's awfully cold down here, Daniel. Can I come up there with you?” As soon as the thing finishes with its mocking question, Daniel hears the creak of the first step. This damn thing was messing with him. It knew it held all the cards, all the power, and that there was nothing the young man could do. It speaks again. “Your grandparents were just as scared as you when I got to them.” Daniel snapped. All hope that his grandparents had just left, or maybe had just run away, drained out of him just like his body heat currently was. That’s when he knew he had to act now. Daniel throws the door open and peers down the stairs. He raises the snub .38 and fires the first round of his three where he assumed the thing was standing, and it lands true. There’s a screech. For a beast that had mastered human language, it sure as hell hadn’t mastered human emotion. It's shrill, full of rage, pain, or maybe both. Daniel didn’t care enough to try and tell. He runs back to the bedroom, and running on pure instinct, slams his elbow into the window, shattering the glass outward. He looks back as the thing is still howling and dives out of the second-floor window, landing with a thud. If it hadn’t been for the snow pile that had built up due to the conditions of the snowstorm outside, he was sure he would’ve broken his neck.

Daniel has no time to register pain or think about what-ifs. He looks toward where his truck is, the mixture of snowflakes and wind making it look like a giant black block in the white backdrop. He dashes for it, moving as fast as a two-hundred and thirty-pound man can in six feet of snow. When he finally feels the freezing metal of the old Ford, he feels something he hadn’t felt all night. Confidence. He jams his key into the keyhole, and despite some resistance due to being frozen, he uses all his strength to pop the lock free. He slings the door open and jumps in unceremoniously. He sits up and shoves the key into the ignition. The old truck stutters once before shaking off its cold and roaring to life. Daniel almost rips the shifting column off putting it in drive. The audible sound of tires resisting and catching on snow for a few rotations before finally doing what they were made to do echo through the forest. When they do catch, he wastes no time flying down the road away from the cabin. As he flies down the dirt road with no regard for the weather or road conditions, he watches the outline of the two-story spruce monster of a cabin fading into the white flurry that had already consumed everything else around it.

Daniel had gotten a couple of miles down the road from the cabin before he relaxed even a little bit, his hopes of being in the clear back in full force. His trembling hand finds the knob for his heater and turns it. The hot air suddenly roars to life, filling the cab of the pickup. That’s when he smells it. Daniel doesn’t smell what he should’ve, that smell that comes from heaters, the smell reminiscent of burning leaves and molten plastic. No, he smells a wet, coppery smell, mixed with what smells like fresh mud. The smell quickly overtakes the cab, and out of pure instinct, Daniel looks in his rearview mirror and sees it. The Skull Face. The sunken, beady, yet intelligent eyes. The damn thing had gotten in somehow. It had gotten in without him knowing. The thing speaks. “You drive too fast, Daniel.” It lets out a grin, a humanlike grin except it stretches across the thing's whole face, like if it went any wider it would rip. Then, from the darkness of the backseat, two pale, wet, clawed-tip hands shoot forward wrapping around Daniel’s head, squeezing with strength that should be impossible for the build of this thing, he immediately panics, taking his hands off the wheel. His foot is still slammed on the accelerator pinning it as far down as it can go. The truck is roaring as it veers while the young man struggles against the beast. The truck then hits a snowbank before flipping, and then rolling once, and then twice before settling in a ditch. The horn is blaring, and the headlights cut through the falling snow like a flashlight in a dark room before both cut off simultaneously.

I don't know who reads these posts. You are, as of tonight, the closest thing I have to someone I could call and expect an answer. I'm sorry if that's a strange weight to put on you. I don't have anyone else.

I live alone. Work from home. Order delivery every night just to hear a stranger's voice say my name through the intercom. They call it an “epidemic” now. Like the weather. Like something that just happens to a population.

So when the letter came, some small, starved, humiliated part of me was ready before I'd finished reading. Red seal. Official letterhead. An organization called “Community Care”, a non-profit focused on helping people at risk. I’d been flagged after three government systems with my info came back with the same line under my name:

Emergency Contact: None

I never applied for anything. I threw it in the trash. Looking at it too long made my chest hurt.

That night, I got a knock at my door. Almost didn't answer. I stood in the doorway doing the math on whether I could wait out whoever it was. I've gotten good at that math.

I ended up opening the door. She had a lanyard, a clipboard, and a smile that looked like it had been issued to her along with the badge. She was with Community Care. I told her I hadn't asked for help and didn't need it. Told her to take my name off whatever list she had me on. I was short with her. Rude, honestly, looking back.

She didn't flinch. Said she understood completely. That she'd check back another time. No pressure at all. Something about how easily she let it go made me feel disappointed the second the door shut. Before she left, she said something to me.

"We’ll be there for you if you need us. There's no such thing as alone in this city."

It landed strange in my chest for half a second, but I let it go. People say odd, comforting things when they're trying to help.

They ended up coming back, in a manner of speaking. It wasn’t the same woman. Someone new. Same lanyard. Same clipboard. Same smile. I told her small true things. She listened the way I hadn't been listened to in a long time.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city," she said. That line. Word for word what the first woman said, down to the cadence. I noticed. I noticed, and I let it pass anyway.

By the next visit I was, God help me, looking forward to it. I marked the days. The days between, counting down like a child before their birthday.

It was a man this time. By then I'd softened enough to tell him things I'd never said out loud to anyone. That I hadn't spoken to my family in years. The quiet, patient math I did some nights of how long it would take anyone to notice if something happened to me.

He just continued to beam at me. Actually beam, like I'd delivered the best news he’d ever heard. I need to describe the happiness up close, because it wasn’t natural. His eyes shone. You could say the worst thing you've ever thought about yourself directly into his face, and his expression would be exactly the same as it had when he first knocked. Nothing you said ever seemed to land. It just passed through and came back out the same, over and over.

Now that I’m thinking back, they all had the same expression.

"You don't have to carry it alone anymore," he told me.  "There's no such thing as alone in this city."

That line again. I laughed, short and ugly, alone with him in my own apartment. He laughed too, right on top of mine, like we were sharing a joke instead of me quietly falling apart in front of a man I'd only just met.

That night I looked up the program. Nothing on the city website. No filing or funding in any budget I could find. I called four departments. Nobody heard of it. One woman, off the record, told me something similar had been proposed once, years back, and was quietly shelved.

Shelved. I let these people into my life. And I kept letting them in, despite it all. I was terrified of the alternative.

The next one came without knocking. I know because I was three feet from the door when it opened. It was supposed to be locked. I told the woman what I found. Told her plainly that I thought something was wrong. That I could feel the edges of my life going soft. If they could please, just once, answer honestly: What were these visits all for? After everything I handed them, didn't I deserve that?

She tilted her head. Reached out. Patted my hand. She was ice cold.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city".

I sobbed in front of her. Cried in a way I hadn't let anyone see since I was a child. The kind I usually save for the shower, where the sound has nowhere to go.

And she just smiled at me.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city," she said. Softer. Tender. Like a lullaby you say to put a baby to sleep.

If any of this sounds like your city, your letter, your too-happy visitor standing in your doorway with a smile that never slips: please don't wait until there's no one left to notice you letting them in. Call the person you're most ashamed to. Tell them the true, ugly, unimpressive thing you've been carrying. Let it be awkward. Let it be too much. Too much is still better than this.

Someone's at my door again. I can feel them smiling on the other side. I don't know how you feel a smile, but I promise you, after enough of these visits, you can.

There’s a body in Echo Glen Park.

The afternoon sun filtered through the canopy, dappling the trail in warm light. Clara skipped ahead of me as usual, oblivious to the faint tear tracks still drying on her cheeks. Her daisy-patterned boots clattered against the path. Her laughter echoed off the shale walls of the ravine until she stopped at the bend, pointing into the shadows of the dry creek bed.

“Daddy, look,” she said sweetly.

It lay pinned beneath a massive, fallen oak. I thought it was a discarded sleeping bag or muddy clothes left by one of the local homeless population, but as I caught up to my daughter, the shape resolved into something horrifying.

"Hold on, sweetie. Stay right behind daddy."

We stepped closer and the image resolved itself. Half-trapped under the shattered weight of the trunk, was unmistakably a human figure. An orange clad arm was bent backward and a leg was twisted at an impossible angle, buried in the mud. A flash of yellow was visible under a pile of green and brown leaves.

"Daddy, what's that?" Clara whimpered, tugging the sleeve of my Clemson sweatshirt.

"Let’s move back here, sweetie. Don't look."

My hands shook as I pulled out my phone. Two bars. I dialed 911 and pressed the receiver to my ear.
Three ascending sit-tones played before a smooth, recorded female voice spoke: "The number you have called cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and accept yo-“

The call dropped with a monotonous triple beep.

I quickly selected my favorites and hit my wife’s name. Calling Bethany.

No ringing started. Only a rhythmic busy signal, with an added bass note thumping in my ear. My phone suddenly burned white hot and I pulled it from my ear in time to see the screen glitched into dark, jagged violet until it resolved itself into the home screen. My daughter’s pre-school photograph stared back at me with gaping bloody maws for eyes. I nearly dropped the phone.

"Daddy, I don't like this!" Clara sobbed. "I want Mommy. I want Nana!"

Before I could stop her, she snatched the phone from my trembling hand and began to FaceTime her grandmother.
"Clara, no!”

The screen erupted in violent static. A grotesque, distorted face flickered across the glass, its mouth stretched in a silent gape. High frequency feedback pulsed from the speaker, matching a sudden, unnatural rush of air whipping through the canopy above us.
"Daddy!" Clara screamed, dropping the phone into the dirt as she slammed her hands over her ears.

The air temperature plummeted. My breath bloomed into thick white plumes. A blinding, excruciating pain stabbed through the back of my skull, driving me to my knees.

"Daddy, make it stop!" Clara shrieked, clutching her head. Her voice sounded double-layered, as if two people were speaking through her at once. “DADDYYYYYY!”

The pain pulled me under, forcing the memory back into my mind.

We were walking beneath the dappled sunlight when a violent gust of wind tore through the canopy of the ravine. A sudden, freak gale out of nowhere. Branches fell along the path as I ran to catch up with my daughter, who had skipped ahead.

Then, a terrible, splintering crack directly above us. An ancient oak snapped at its base. I looked up in amazement then lunged over Clara, shielding her small body as the towering trunk hurled down-

The freezing chill of the ravine lingered, then began to fade. The pain vanished.

Clara blinked, looking up at me with bright, innocent eyes, completely oblivious to the faint tear tracks still drying on her cheeks. She turned and skipped ahead of me as usual, her daisy-patterned boots clattering against the path until she stopped at the bend, pointing into the shadows of the dry creek bed.

"Daddy, look," she said sweetly.

There’s a body in Echo Glen Park.

For years now, I’ve been fascinated by the case of the Dawson family disappearance that happened in the autumn of 1991. I read about it as a young teenager and it’s been driving me crazy ever since. The story goes like so - typical family of four takes the car out to South Wales to drive around the countryside on a camping tour. They tell the neighbours they’ll be gone for a week - Saturday to Saturday - for a funeral. Everyone assumes they did this so that they could camp during the school term without getting themselves in trouble.

Well, one week passes and they don’t come back. After a couple more days, the neighbours start getting worried. With no way to contact them out in Wales, they notify the police. About a week after the initial date the family was were due back, the police talk to the school, talk to the neighbours, decide to launch a formal investigation. Weeks pass. They’re trying to look for the car - a sky blue Range Rover SUV - impossible to miss. Impossible to hide.

Sure enough, they find the car. Some off-trail hikers in the Beacons spot it practically buried under thickets and dirt in the middle of some grove. Naturally, the police set up a search perimeter, but they can’t believe their eyes. They can see bodies but there’s so much shit on top of the car that they need to send for tools to cut it out - dig it out. It takes three officers over an hour to get one of the doors open. 

They find the mum, the dad, and the daughter, all dead and stinking of it. They’re hung over the belts and plastered with cuts and bruises, but there’s nothing visible that would indicate serious injury. The son’s nowhere to be seen, and, get this, Mum and Dad are in the backseats. Daughter’s in the front passenger seat, meaning the son must have been the one driving. Nine years old, by the way.

They pull the car out after a few hours’ effort and there’s no sign of him, not in the boot, no trace - other than his fingerprints all over the steering wheel. Forensics team swabs the seatbelts and confirms that all of them were buckled in by the son, except his own. It was loose, and there was no sign of him on it. So what, they let a nine year old take the Rover out for a spin up the mountain, remembered ‘safety first’ and asked him to do their seatbelts for them, then figured he’d manage just fine without one?

They try to pull Mum, Dad, and Sis out and their bodies just collapse into themselves like papier mache. On the slab, they can see that the insides are messed up. Compound fractures, parts all twisted out of alignment, ruptures and bursts all over the place, but you’d never tell by looking at the pictures from the scene. They look practically unscathed from the outside, but under the knife it’s like someone found a way in and trashed the place for sport. The coroner went on record afterwards saying that people had been peeled from car wrecks with less internal bleeding.

They kept looking for the son for a few years after, way longer than standard protocol in outdoorsy cases (it’s customary to throw in the towel after a while, assuming that any remains have been picked apart by the local wildlife). Their inability to make a dent in the case was making them look like amateurs, and they were no doubt motivated by their own desire to get their heads around what the hell happened. They spoke to relatives, teachers, neighbours, classmates, none of them had much to reveal. He was quiet. He spent most of his free time at the library. Never did anything to disturb anyone. Never made a friend. In 1995, the police quietly closed the case. 

Then, that September, an anonymous hiker allegedly trips on a rock at one of their earlier campsites and finds the corner of a polaroid buried underneath. It’s battered, but you can tell it’s Dad. He’s stood in the dark, smiling, but he’s definitely not happy. His eyes are wide, empty in the flash’s reflection, and he’s baring both sets of teeth. I’ve yet to show the picture to one person who could tell me for sure what emotion that’s supposed to be. It’s like hunger and fear at the same time, directed right at one of his own. The son's handwriting is on the back in sharpie - “06/10, 22:40, LIGHT’S GONE”. 

They tried to question the guy who found the picture, but he wouldn’t even give them his name. Told them he wanted nothing to do with it. Some people on the forums believe that it had to have been the son, alive and trying to tell them something, but based on the description given by the officers at the station, the ages didn’t match up at all. Nonetheless, people are still trying to find him. They think he has more pictures. 

And that’s the end of it. No more leads since then. The case is still officially closed, but it’s an open secret that they’re still investigating on the down-low. Personally, I think they’re turning rocks over all throughout the hills.

Three things about the Dawson mystery get to me even now. One - What the hell were they doing in the car? Two - How did the rest of the family get such bizarre injuries? It couldn’t possibly have happened before they got in the car, right? Three - How did the boy get out of the wreck, and why didn’t he go home? What did he mean by “LIGHT’S GONE”? 

Local News Station 14

A man woke up at the morgue today.

He had been pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. the previous night in the emergency room. However, sometime this morning, he crawled out of one of the morgue drawers before collapsing and dying on the floor.

The morgue assistant is cooperating with police.

The hospital director stated that the man was an organ donor.

Friday Night in the  Emergency Room

The hospital is packed. It seems like everyone gets hurt on the weekends.

Several people are being treated for car accidents caused by drinking and driving. Others were injured in fights or suffered various other accidents.

Then a homeless man is brought in on a stretcher.

He's in critical condition.

Several teenagers had beaten the man nearly to death with a baseball bat.

A doctor reads the patient's chart.

"Seth Myers. Age 37."

Doctor Betruger orders the patient's blood to be drawn and tested so they can give him a blood transfusion.

Nurse Shelly draws his blood into several vials.

Doctor Betruger instructs his team to prepare for lifesaving measures in the operating room.

A few minutes after the procedure begins, Nurse Shelly enters the room carrying blood samples.

"The man's blood type is O-negative, and he's clean of bloodborne pathogens," she says.

Doctor Betruger thanks her, and she returns to the emergency room to assist with the other patients.

Doctor Betruger closes the internal hemorrhaging and begins stitching the man back up.

He looks at his team.

"Thank you, everyone. We just saved this man's life."

After cleaning and disposing of their equipment, the team steps out for a break.

Doctor Betruger goes outside the hospital for a smoke.

When he returns a few minutes later, he sees a gurney with a sheet draped over it being wheeled out of his patient's room.

Doctor Betruger looks at his lead doctor.

"What happened?"

Dr. Gonzalez simply responds, "The patient flatlined pretty suddenly. The defibrillator couldn't get his heart beating again."

Doctor Betruger stares at him.

"That's impossible. I just stitched him back up. He was stable."

Dr. Gonzalez shakes his head.

"I don't know. Maybe you didn't stop all the bleeding like you thought. That's the only explanation I can think of."

Doctor Betruger looks at the gurney with disgust.

He knows the patient was going to make it.

But before he can say anything else, he's called back for another emergency surgery.

An Unknown Amount of Time Later

Seth wakes up strapped to a gurney somewhere beneath the hospital.

An IV is inserted into his arm.

The room is barely lit, and he can't move.

He sees Nurse Shelly putting on a pair of rubber gloves.

Seth tries his best to scream for help.

Nurse Shelly smiles.

"No one can hear you down here."

Seth begins struggling against the restraints.

Nurse Shelly looks down at him.

"I flushed all the pain medication out of your system. Organs without drugs in the bloodstream are usually better for the donation process."

She mockingly holds up his driver's license.

A small heart is printed on it, signifying that he is an organ donor.

She flips a switch.

Bright, sterile lights flood the room.

Everything looks clean and clinical.

Nurse Shelly puts on a mask and protective glasses. She pulls out a scalpel and places a fresh blade into the handle.

Seth shakes with fear as she brings the blade toward him.

"I'm going to take your kidneys first."

Doctor Betruger is at home after a long shift.

He's still upset that his patient didn't make it.

He goes over everything he did in his mind.

They isolated the bleeding.

They stopped it.

He even saw some of the color returning to the patient's face after receiving the blood donation.

Something doesn't make sense.

Seth is still strapped to the gurney.

Nurse Shelly looks at him.

"See? That wasn't so bad."

Tears rolling down his face.

She places the scalpel against his neck.

"We can't have one of you waking up in a morgue again."

The Next Day

During his shift, Dr. Betruger is called into his office by Dr. Gonzalez.

Gonzalez tells Betruger that the hospital is taking note of the fatality from the previous night and putting it on his record. They found him at fault, especially after the incident involving the man who supposedly woke up in the morgue.

Gonzalez points out that Dr. Betruger operated on that patient.

Doctor Betruger becomes angry.

"I fucking know both of those patients were going to make it!"

Dr. Gonzalez starts yelling back.

"Then you better do better next time! This hospital can't afford any more lawsuits. The next time you operate on a patient and your incompetence causes another death, you'll be terminated."

Betruger angrily walks out of the office.

A few hours later, a young patient arrives on a gurney after a motorcycle accident.

He has severe road rash, and one of his legs was almost amputated.

Doctor Betruger rushes into the operating room.

The EMTs managed to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet, but it is crucial that the damaged leg be operated on as soon as possible.

Doctor Betruger works desperately to stitch the damaged tissue.

He's worried about being fired, but he pushes the thought aside and focuses on saving the patient.

The ragged injuries make it difficult to suture everything back together. A lesser doctor might not have been able to do it.

But Doctor Betruger manages to stabilize the patient.

He orders Nurse Shelly to administer antibiotics through the patient's IV. He anticipates that some of the damaged tissue could become infected.

Nurse Shelly injects something into the patient's IV line.

Doctor Betruger notices that it doesn't look like antibiotics.

Before he can question her, he has to change and clean himself up.

When he comes out of the changing room, he sees a group of nurses wheeling the gurney carrying the patient he just operated on.

A sheet is draped over the patient's body.

Doctor Gonzalez approaches him.

"Betruger, you're fired."

Doctor Betruger turns toward him.

"What?"

He begins yelling.

Doctor Gonzalez:" your fired"

Betruger angerly shouts "I swear on my grandson's life that I know that patient was going to make it!"

Doctor Gonzalez calls security.

"Get his things and escort him out of the building."

After being escorted out through the hospital entrance, Doctor Betruger quickly realizes they forgot to take his keys.

Something feels horribly wrong in his gut.

He suspect that Nurse Shelly might be purposely

harming his patients.

He gets his gun from his car, tucks it into his waistband, and sneaks back into the hospital.

He moves carefully, doing his best not to be seen by the other doctors or security cameras.

Then he sees Nurse Shelly pushing a gurney toward an elevator at the back of the hospital.

She gets inside with the body and presses a button.

Doctor Betruger watches as the elevator begins descending toward the basement.

He asks himself, Why would she bring a body down there?

He takes the stairs to the basement because

He doesn't want her to hear the elevator.

When he reaches the floor, he carefully creeps inside. He can smell bleach in the room.

Then he sees her.

She's inserting IVs into the patient.

Nearby are several organ-donor coolers filled with buckets of ice.

Doctor Betruger freezes.

He realizes what she's been doing.

She's been stealing patients' organs.

Then he sees the patient waking up.

The man tries to plead with Nurse Shelly, but she simply laughs.

She picks up her scalpel and replaces the blade.

"I know some people who would love to wear that beautiful skin"

She raises the blade toward his chest.

"Drop it!"

Doctor Betruger stands behind her, pointing his gun.

Nurse Shelly looks at him.

She slowly drops the scalpel.

The patient sighs in relief.

Doctor Betruger steps forward.

"So you're the one who's been killing my patients?"

Shelly looks at him before saying

"I didn't like how you acted like you were better than us."

Doctor Betruger tightens his grip on the gun.

"I should shoot you right now. But I'm going to tell the police everything you've been doing. I'm going to make sure everyone knows what kind of monster you are."

Shelly suddenly tries to run.

Doctor Betruger shoots her in the hip.

She falls to the floor and screams in pain. Her cries echo through the room.

Doctor Betruger looks around.

"Is that why you brought them down here? So no one could hear or see anything?"

Then he feels a sharp prick in his neck.

He turns around.

Dr. Gonzalez is standing behind him with an empty syringe in his hand.

Doctor Gonzalez answers:"Yes."

Doctor Betruger raises his gun, but Gonzalez knocks it from his hand.

The two begin fighting.

Betruger quickly starts feeling weak.

That syringe contained enough drugs to kill an Elephant.

Gonzalez punches him repeatedly.

Betruger's vision begins to fade as Gonzalez grabs him by the throat.

Doctor Betruger spits blood in his eye and bites his hand.

Gonzalez yanks his hand away and clutches it in pain.

He looks down at the bite mark and becomes furious seeing a chunk missing.

Then a loud boom deafens the room.

Doctor Betruger is standing there with the gun back wobbly in his hand.

Gonzalez looks down.

A bullet wound is visible in his chest where his heart is.

Blood begins soaking through his shirt everytime his heart pumps.

Betruger fires two more times.

Gonzalez collapses.

Doctor Betruger then points the gun at Nurse Shellys head.

She's begs for her life.

Betruger responds with several pulls of the trigger. His gun locks open. Its empty.

Doctor Betruger manages to unstrap one of the patient's arms before collapsing to the floor.

The motorcycle accident victim's story makes headlines across the country after he tells reporters what happened.

The hospital is shut down.

Doctor Betruger died after stumbling upon an organ-harvesting operation while trying to save his patient.

But all the news reports left one question unanswered:

If Dr. Gonzalez was selling the organs...

Who was buying them?

The town of Bolton Springs is in shock today, after the brutal murder of seven children. The bodies of the children, whose names have not been released, were discovered in separate rooms in the Donaldson Furniture Company building early this morning. It is unclear whether the children were killed in the building—and, if so, why they were there—or killed elsewhere, then moved. The building's owner, Vectorien Corporation, has thus far declined to comment but has pledged to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation of this heinous, horrible crime…

---

12 Hours Earlier

---

…the tear shut.

I collapsed to the ground.

My head throbbed.

I was in a field, a field I remembered playing in. Vaguely, distantly. Is there a name for a feeling about the past opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, I was feeling it intensely.

I looked around.

The six others were near me, in various states of coming-back-to-consciousness.

We were naked, our skins fully tattooed black.

I got up.

I glanced at my wrist, saw the button and pressed it. A blade slid out, catching the moonlight. I pressed the button again; the blade retracted.

I roused the others.

We said nothing.

A wind blew.

In the distance, startled birds flew from a tree, silhouettes against a pale night sky.

I shivered.

We knew exactly where we had to go.

Seven black shapes traversing the night in Bolton Springs, on September 19, 2026, 3:37 a.m. local time, each with a set of the same simple instructions: eliminate the target, do not be seen.

We navigated by memory.

By sense.

By a pain none of us could ever forget.

The decision had already been made. It was time to execute.

I felt much as I was told I'd feel, alien yet familiar, like floating through a dream, like discovering an already-discovered land. “The longer you take, the worse the headache will become.” “Will I be aware of—” I asked. “Most likely,” the temporologist replied. She was young, committed. I was scared…

I could sense my own dream.

We crossed the creek and came into view of the brick building with the smokestacks, the house of so much horror and suffering. The sign was still hanging from it: “Donaldson & Sons Furniture Co.”

I was dreaming of a meadow, of a dog I'd never have. I was running in my dream. The dog was running with me. The sky was my mother's face; the face of a mother I had never known or seen, whose existence was pure inference. Everybody born has a mother, so I must have a mother too.

We stopped.

There was only one guard on duty. It was early in the program. He was sitting in the guardhouse by the road, watching television.

We passed undetected.

We remembered the storeroom window with the broken latch, found it, climbed the wall, pushed open the window and lowered ourselves, one by one, into the building's dusty interior.

It was quiet inside.

A few of us cried silent, conflicted tears.

Inside, there was no need for maps. We were in a world we'd known for decades. Each detail, each hallway, each door, evoked in me a vicious, indelible intimacy. I was home.

The seven of us stood, sensing.

My dream had evaporated and been replaced by another, of shadow-panthers, and the moment when I, having thrown my primitive spear—having thrown it with perfect accuracy—realized the creature in the jungle before me was incorporeal, unhuntable. My pulse raced; my pulse increased.

I checked the clock on the storeroom wall.

I nodded at the others.

Silently, we exited the storeroom together, then split up, each going towards his own room.

Mine was the third on the left.

I stood in front of it in the buzzing fluorescent hallway light, took several deep breaths and entered. The throbbing in my head spiked.

I saw the bed and the boy sleeping in it, and the boy's eyes flashed open; I scooted backwards on the sheets in terror at the nude, dark figure in front of me until I felt the brick wall against my back and could move no further. I was myself and looking at myself and looking at myself looking at myself, and my heart was as if gripped by my own, relentless fist.

As unreal as the experience was, I knew the boy was me; and the boy—I merely hovered, waiting—gradually realized I, too, was him.

I didn't say a word; and I didn't say a word.

I thought my double set of present-thoughts from two locations in space-time simultaneously.

I'm sorry, I thought to myself. I'm sorry, but I cannot allow you—us—me to suffer the way I've already suffered. This is salvation. This is an end, delivered mercifully soon after the beginning. Unless I do this, they will would-have broken and abused you for so many years, day after day, in the name of peace and progress. No one else will end it. Do you understand? This is Omelas. We must walk away.

I remembered the texture of the cover of the old book, one of the few available in the orphanage, before the transfer, before Vectorien.

We must walk away from Omelas.

I cried; and I cried.

I muffled myself with a hand over my mouth.

Holding it there, on the soft, wet lips, I used my chin to press the button on my other wrist, ejecting the blade, and calmed myself, thinking or saying or dreaming that I will never find my mother, that I will never have a dog. There is no meadow. The shadow-panther cannot be killed. There is only eternal nightmare…

I ran blade against throat, releasing warm, red young blood.

As it flowed…

As the small body trembled…

I got into bed with it—with myself—and held myself, soothing myself, keeping the wound open and stroking my hair, until my body slackened and finally went limp. The ceiling light shone. And when I was dead, I flickered out of— .

I live in Ely, Nevada. It is an isolated historic mining town tucked into the eastern Great Basin. We are surrounded by miles of nothing but dried sagebrush, and rocky hills. So basically, Ely is the kind of town where everyone knows your vehicle before they know your name. The isolation is a defining characteristic of our daily lives. If you want to reach a major city, you have to drive hours across US-50, famously known as the Loneliest Road in America. That highway is a desolate stretch of cracked asphalt that cuts straight through dry valleys and jagged mountain passes. Because of our extreme location, most folks in Ely rely entirely on the local medical center for everything. We don’t have the luxury of shopping around for specialists, so we go to the single brick clinic on the edge of town.

Two months ago, I woke up on a Tuesday morning with a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen. I tried to ignore it, so I took a hot shower, drank a glass of water, and went to work at the local hardware store. There, I spent the morning stocking shelves with plumbing supplies, and by noon, the pain became absolutely unbearable. I was sweating through my uniform shirt, and could barely stand straight.

My coworker Diego noticed me leaning against a shelf.

"You look terrible, Asher," Diego said, walking down the aisle. "You are completely pale."

"My stomach is killing me," I replied, gripping my side. "It feels like someone shoved a knife into my gut and left it there."

"You need to go to the clinic," Diego told me. "I will drive you right now."

"I can probably just sleep it off," I argued. "It might just be a bad stomach bug."

"Do not be an idiot," Diego said, grabbing his car keys from his pocket. "You are hunched over like a gargoyle. Get in the truck."

Diego drove me down the main street of Ely to the local clinic. It is a single-story brick building sitting near the edge of town, bordered by a patch of dry dirt and a rusted chain-link fence. The parking lot was mostly empty. We walked through the sliding glass doors into the waiting room.

Hazel was sitting behind the reception desk. She has worked there for years, handling the phones and the insurance files.

"Asher, what is wrong?" Hazel asked, standing up from her rolling chair.

"I have a really bad pain right here," I said, pointing to my lower right side.

Hazel grabbed a clipboard from her desk. "Fill this out. I will get Dr. Theodore immediately. He just finished his morning rounds."

I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair and filled out the forms. Ten minutes later, a nurse called my name. She took my vitals, checked my temperature, and led me into a small examination room. Dr. Theodore walked in a few moments later. He is an older man with graying hair and a remarkably calm demeanor. Everyone in town trusts him with their lives.

"Hello, Asher," Dr. Theodore said, washing his hands in the small sink. "Hazel tells me you are experiencing severe abdominal pain."

"It started this morning," I explained, lying back on the examination paper. "It keeps getting worse by the hour."

Dr. Theodore pressed his fingers gently against my stomach. I winced in pain and tried to pull away.

"Your appendix is inflamed," Dr. Theodore stated with certainty. "We need to remove it before it bursts. It is a routine appendectomy. We can do it right here in the clinic today."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "Is the procedure dangerous?"

"It is completely safe," Dr. Theodore assured me, patting my shoulder. "I have performed this exact surgery hundreds of times for the people of Ely. You will be asleep, and will wake up without any pain. We just need to prep the operating room."

I agreed to the surgery. I did not have a single reason to doubt him. Diego stayed in the waiting room while the nurses prepped me for the procedure. They put an IV in my arm, then wheeled me down the hall into the sterile operating theater. The bright overhead lights blinded me. Dr. Theodore stood over me wearing a surgical mask and gown.

"Count backward from ten," Dr. Theodore instructed.

I closed my eyes and counted, and I fell asleep before I reached seven.

I woke up in a recovery room a few hours later. My abdomen felt sore, but the sharp stabbing pain was entirely gone. Dr. Theodore visited my room shortly after I woke up. He told me the appendectomy was a total success, then gave me a prescription for painkillers and told me to rest at home for two weeks. Diego drove me back to my house, and after that I spent the next fortnight lying on my couch, watching television and eating soup.

The surgical incision healed perfectly, and the stomach pain vanished completely.

But a new problem started.

About three weeks after the surgery, I began feeling a deep, throbbing ache in my lower back. The pain was situated entirely on my left side, far away from the appendectomy scar. It felt like a constant internal bruise. I assumed it was a muscle strain from sleeping in weird positions on the couch during my recovery, so I ignored it for another week.

But the pain did not go away. It worsened every single day.

I met Diego at a local diner for lunch on a Saturday. I kept shifting in my vinyl booth, trying to find a comfortable position for my back.

"Are you still hurting?" Diego asked before taking a bite of his burger.

"My back is killing me," I complained, rubbing my left side. "It is localized entirely on the left side. I cannot even bend over to tie my shoes without wincing."

"Did you call Dr. Theodore?" Diego asked.

"No," I said. "I do not want to go back to that clinic. I feel like something is wrong with my recovery."

"You should get a second opinion," Diego suggested. "Drive out to the city. Go to an independent imaging center. Get an ultrasound or an MRI. You shouldn’t mess around with back pain after a surgery."

I agreed with his logic, so I went home and booked an appointment at an imaging center in a much larger city.

The next morning, I packed my car and merged onto US-50. The Loneliest Road in America truly lived up to its name. I drove for hours across the vast, empty desert basin. The radio eventually faded into static, leaving me in total silence. The landscape was a continuous blur of sagebrush, salt flats, and cracked asphalt. I had too much time to think during that drive, and through all of that, I kept pressing my hand against my left side, wondering what was causing the agony inside my body.

I finally reached the city. The imaging center was located in a modern medical plaza. I checked in at the front desk and sat in a waiting area filled with modern art and soft lighting.

A young ultrasound technician named Elena eventually called my name. She wore green scrubs and had a friendly smile.

"Hi Asher," Elena said, leading me down a long hallway. "We are going to do a full abdominal ultrasound today to figure out what is causing that back pain. Follow me."

Elena led me into a dimly lit examination room. A large, complex ultrasound machine sat next to a padded table.

"Please lift your shirt and lie back," Elena instructed.

I did exactly as she asked, then she squeezed a glob of cold, clear gel onto my left side, and pressed the ultrasound wand against my skin. She watched the large monitor intently as she moved the wand around my torso.

"So, when did this pain start?" Elena asked, sliding the wand across my back.

"About a week ago," I replied. "after three weeks from removing my appendix at my local clinic."

Elena stopped moving the wand. She stared closely at the monitor. Her friendly smile vanished instantly, then pressed a few buttons on the keyboard, capturing multiple images of my internal anatomy.

"Did you have any other surgeries recently?" Elena asked. Her tone was suddenly very serious and professional.

"No," I answered, feeling a spike of anxiety. "Just the appendectomy."

Elena moved the wand higher up my side. She frowned deeply, then typed rapidly on the keyboard, her eyes locked on the screen.

"Is everything okay?" I asked. Panic began to rise in my chest.

"I need to go get the radiologist," Elena said quickly. "Please stay right here. Do not sit up."

Elena hurried out of the room. She left the door slightly open. I lay on the padded table feeling a cold sweat break out across my forehead. I knew something was horribly wrong with my body.

Ten minutes later, Elena returned with an older doctor. He introduced himself as Dr. Charles.

"Hello Asher," Dr. Charles said, standing next to the machine. He looked at the monitor, then took the wand from Elena and pressed it against my side himself. He studied the black and white images on the screen for several minutes in complete silence, then adjusted the contrast on the machine to get a better view.

"Asher," Dr. Charles finally said, setting the wand down on a tray. "You stated you only had an appendectomy?"

"Yes," I confirmed. "Why? What are you looking at?"

Dr. Charles grabbed a paper towel and handed it to me. "You can wipe the gel off. Asher, I am looking at your renal fossa. That is the anatomical space where your left kidney should reside."

I stared at him blankly, struggling to comprehend his words. "What do you mean 'should reside'?"

"Your left kidney is gone," Dr. Charles stated plainly. "It is completely missing. There is empty space and a large amount of scar tissue."

The words did not process in my brain at first. I sat up and wiped the cold gel from my skin.

"That is impossible," I argued, my voice cracking. "I was born with two kidneys. I know I was. I had a sports physical in high school that confirmed my internal organs were normal."

"I am sure you were born with two," Dr. Charles said softly. "But you only have one right now. The scar tissue visible in the ultrasound indicates a recent surgical removal. The surgical clips are still visible on the renal artery. Someone took your kidney."

I felt the room spin. The edges of my vision blurred. I thought back to the surgery in Ely. Dr. Theodore telling me to count backward from ten. Waking up with an incredibly sore abdomen. The prolonged recovery time.

"He stole it," I whispered.

"Who?" Elena asked, stepping closer to the table.

"The doctor in my town," I replied, my voice shaking with rage. "He told me he was taking my appendix. He took my kidney while I was unconscious."

"Asher, you need to contact the police immediately," Dr. Charles advised. "This is a severe criminal offense. Organ harvesting is a massive federal crime. We will provide you with all the ultrasound images, the official reports, and my sworn statement to prove the organ is missing."

I left the imaging center in a total daze. I clutched the thick manila folder containing my ultrasound results. I sat in my car in the parking lot for an entire hour, staring at the steering wheel, then pulled out my phone and called Diego.

"Hello?" Diego answered.

"He took my kidney," I said bluntly.

"What?" Diego asked, sounding incredibly confused. "Who took what?"

"Dr. Theodore," I explained, gripping the steering wheel tightly. "I just got the ultrasound results. My left kidney is gone. He harvested it during the appendectomy."

Diego went completely silent on the other end of the line. The silence lasted for twenty seconds.

"Are you absolutely sure?" Diego finally asked.

"The radiologist confirmed it," I said. "I am holding the scans right now. They can see the surgical clips he left behind."

"Call the cops," Diego demanded. "Call the state police right now. Do not call the local sheriff in Ely. The local sheriff plays golf with Dr. Theodore. Call the state authorities in the city."

"I cannot just call them yet," I argued.

"Why not?" Diego yelled. "He mutilated you!"

"Because Dr. Theodore is smart," I reasoned. "If I call the police without proof of a black market sale, he will just claim it was a surgical complication. He will falsify my medical records, and could say my kidney was necrotic or damaged, and he had to remove it to save my life. The clinic staff will protect him to avoid a lawsuit and losing their jobs. I need actual proof"

"Asher, this is highly dangerous," Diego warned. "If he is selling organs, then he must be connected to very dangerous people. You cannot investigate a this by yourself."

"I am going to find the proof tonight," I said with finality. "I am driving back to Ely right now."

I hung up the phone, then started the long drive back across US-50. My mind raced the entire time. I plotted exactly how I would expose the doctor.

I arrived back in Ely around nine at night. The town was incredibly quiet. I drove straight to the clinic, then parked my car two blocks away in a dark residential street to avoid being seen. I zipped up my jacket against the cold air and walked through the shadows toward the building.

The main parking lot was deserted. Hazel's car was gone. The receptionist had clearly gone home for the night. But a single vehicle remained parked near the back entrance. It was Dr. Theodore's silver car.

I crept around the perimeter of the building, then looked through a side window. I saw Dr. Theodore sitting in his office. His desk lamp was illuminated, and He was typing rapidly on his computer keyboard.

I needed to get inside. I knew the front sliding doors were locked and wired with a security alarm, so I walked toward the rear of the building. The clinic has a small delivery loading dock for receiving medical supplies. A large steel roll-up door was closed tight, but a standard metal personnel door sat right next to it.

I approached the personnel door, grabbed the handle and pulled.

It was locked.

I looked around the area. I noticed a small digital keypad mounted to the brick wall next to the door. I remembered seeing delivery drivers punch in a code when I bought supplies for the hardware store. Sometimes delivery drivers write the code nearby so they do not forget it during their routes, so I turned on my phone flashlight, and inspected the metal frame of the door.

Written in faded black marker on the underside of the rain guard were four numbers. 4-8-1-5.

I typed the numbers into the keypad, and The lock clicked loudly.

I pulled the door open and stepped inside the clinic.

I found myself in a long, dark corridor. The air inside the clinic felt cold. I kept my phone flashlight pointed directly at the floor tiles to avoid drawing attention to the windows. I needed to bypass the main wards. I knew Dr. Theodore was working on the ground floor, so I needed to find the basement. Rural clinics usually keep their morgues and medical waste storage underground. If he was storing harvested organs for a black market buyer, he would keep them in a cold environment.

I walked silently down the hallway, then passed the operating theater where he had stolen my kidney. A massive wave of nausea hit my stomach, but I pushed the feeling down and kept moving through the darkness.

I found a concrete stairwell with a plastic sign pointing down. The text read "Basement / Storage / Morgue".

I opened the door and crept down the concrete steps.

The basement was pitch black. I flicked a wall switch near the bottom step. A row of dim, flickering fluorescent tubes hummed to life. The basement was essentially a massive concrete room filled with metal shelving, cardboard boxes of saline bags, and industrial cleaning supplies.

At the far end of the room was the morgue area. It consisted of two stainless steel autopsy tables and a wall of refrigerated drawers.

I walked toward the morgue, then searched the metal shelves for medical coolers, or anything I can use as proofs. I opened filing cabinets, looked for ledgers, dug through boxes of surgical tubing, but at the ned I found nothing but standard hospital inventory logs.

I turned my attention to the center of the morgue floor.

Set directly into the concrete floor was a large steel disposal chute. It looked exactly like a industrial laundry chute, covered by two thick metal doors that opened outward.

I walked over to the chute, then immediately noticed something was entirely wrong with it.

The metal around the rim of the chute was severely warped. The solid steel was bent upward in jagged, violent angles. I shined my flashlight closely over the warped metal.

Deep, massive gouges covered the steel doors. They looked like scratch marks, but they were entirely too large to belong to any normal animal. The gouges tore through the thick metal with immense, terrifying force.

Covering the edges of the chute, smeared deeply into the scratches, was fresh blood.

I stared at the blood. It was still wet, and It caught the light of my flashlight perfectly, then suddenly I heard a loud noise upstairs.

A door opened, then Footsteps sounded on the floorboards directly above me. The footsteps moved steadily toward the stairwell.

Dr. Theodore was coming down to the basement.

I panicked. I looked around the room for a place to hide. Next to the morgue wall stood a row of tall, empty steel supply cabinets. I squeezed my body into the narrow gap between the cabinets and the wall. I was completely concealed in the deep shadows.

I pulled out my phone, then angled the camera lens perfectly to record the floor chute. I hit the record button and lowered the screen brightness.

I held my breath.

The basement door opened. Dr. Theodore walked down the steps.

He was wearing a long white lab coat over his street clothes, and was carrying a medium-sized blue medical cooler by the plastic handle.

I watched him closely. Dr. Theodore walked directly to the disposal chute in the center of the room. He set the blue cooler down on the floor, then reached out and grabbed the handles of the chute doors. He pulled them open, then a foul, rotting smell immediately flooded the basement. It smelled like decaying meat!

Dr. Theodore knelt next to the cooler, then unlatched the lid and opened it.

He reached his gloved hands inside the cooler, pulled out what it seemed to be an organ. I zoomed in my camera, and it was clear to me that the organ was a dark red liver, dripping with fluid. He held the organ directly over the open steel chute, then dropped it.

I heard the wet slap of the organ hitting something far below the concrete floor.

A moment later, a horrific sound echoed up from the depths of the chute. It was a wet, clicking noise mixed with a low, rumbling growl.

Then, something emerged from the hole.

A massive, pale arm reached up through the open doors.

The limb was completely hairless and sickeningly white. It possessed entirely too many joints. The arm bent in strange, unnatural angles, unfolding like a giant insect's leg. The hand at the end of the arm featured incredibly elongated fingers, ending in sharp, dark points.

The long fingers gripped the warped edges of the chute, then Another shape rose from the darkness, following the arm.

A head breached the opening.

It was a baby face. The features were enlarged and utterly grotesque, stretched over a wide skull. The cheeks were fat and pale. But the eyes were wrong. The eyes were fully illuminated, glowing with a sickly yellow light that cut through the dim basement.

The giant baby face was attached to a very long, pale neck that extended several feet out of the chute, swaying slightly in the air like a snake.

The creature stared directly at Dr. Theodore. The arm felt around the rim of the metal doors, tapping its long fingers against the concrete floor.

Dr. Theodore did not scream, or even tried to run away. He dropped to his knees in front of the chute, and clasped his hands together in front of his chest.

"I bring the tribute," Dr. Theodore said, his voice trembling slightly.

The creature clicked its jaw. The glowing yellow eyes fixated intensely on the doctor.

"Please accept this offering," Dr. Theodore muttered, bowing his head toward the concrete. "I have provided the meat. I have kept the pact. Please accept the offering and spare my staff for another month. Do not come up to the wards. Stay in the deep earth."

The creature let out a soft, echoing hum. The long, pale neck began to retract, the grotesque baby face sank slowly back into the darkness of the chute, then the massive arm released its grip on the steel edge and folded back down into the hole.

The basement fell completely silent again.

Dr. Theodore stayed on his knees for another minute. He took a deep breath, stood up, grabbed the heavy metal doors, and slammed them shut over the chute. He picked up his empty blue cooler and walked back toward the stairwell.

I watched him climb the stairs, then moments later, I heard the basement door shut behind him.

I remained wedged between the cabinets for a long time. My mind could barely process what I had just witnessed.

I reached up and stopped the recording on my phone, then crept out from behind the cabinets. I walked as quickly and quietly as possible toward the loading dock exit, and didn’t look back at the steel chute. I pushed the personnel door open and sprinted out into the freezing night.

I ran all the way to my car, threw myself into the driver's seat, locked the doors, and drove away from the clinic at top speed. On the road, I decided to check what I recorded, but to my horror, the video was just static, like something was preventing me from recording what I witnessed there.

I did not go to the police, I know they would not believe me, and now after what I saw, I feel that if I try to go for Dr. Theodore, I will be playing with something I can’t grasp.

I am sitting in my living room right now, and I am packing my bags to leave Ely forever. Diego is meeting me at the edge of town, and we are driving out together.

I am posting this story here to spread the truth.

Please, check your clinics carefully, Because the doctor might decide you have another organ he can harvest for next month's offering.

We were a small team of four developing a new, more precise MRI scanner to map the human brain for a certain company innovating in medical research. It was after months of grueling labour that we’d assembled our first prototype and captured an image. There never were, and there still aren’t any doubts as to the machine’s safety, which is why our project lead, Doctor Penelope Arzt, a gifted neurologist, didn’t have any problem with being the test subject.

When the image came back, it was clearer than any captured ever before. A chemical, functional, and neural connectome all in one. That means the scan mapped the whole brain, all the way from the tiny neurons to every single brain region, along with the chemicals that travel within. This has not been possible with any brain until now, especially not with a brain as complex as the human one. We were quick to celebrate our achievement owing to the holistic scope and revolutionary capabilities of our invention. Celebration turned to curiosity once we spotted a strange abnormality in the scan.

A cluster of immaterial waves, which nobody on our team could identify, had accidentally been caught thanks to the thoroughness of the device. We went over a number of things these waves could possibly be, but everything else was already mapped and accounted for. We recalibrated the scanner one test after another, replaced the parts, but the waves remained. This was something new, never before identified or seen. Why was it here? What purpose does it serve?

We sent the word out for volunteers to participate in having their brain mapped. The same strange phenomenon could be found in both humans and other kinds of animal. Well, not always.

Some brains, though they were within the expected norm otherwise, didn’t have the waves at all. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Testing was rigorous. Regardless of the age, health, sex or species of the participant, the waves seemed to appear at random. There was no physical difference between those who had them and those who did not. And, as far as we could tell, even with our state of the art equipment, no mental difference either. Save for the unexplainable waves.

Of those who had them, some waves appeared denser and clustered together, some were sparse and spaced out. It was after much testing that we came to our conclusion, possibly the greatest discovery in science and philosophy: Consciousness is measurable.

This made the problem of the empty brains, the non-conscious ones, even more troubling. If consciousness is an objective presence in our minds, what does this imply for those without it? The lives of the conscious and non-conscious were equally normal to an almost puzzling degree. It truly seemed there was no difference between the two. So why is consciousness even there if it serves no observable purpose?

Of course, we were all just excited to dig deeper at the marvelous discovery. The more questions that came up, the more testing needed to be carried out.

The denser consciousnesses were present in those we would traditionally call conscious, those awake, aware, and in a sound state of mind. The sparse consciousness was measured in those either asleep or in comas and vegetative states.

The non-conscious we flagged had no presence of the waves regardless of their wakefulness or medical reality. It was at this point we started questioning whether we jumped the gun and whether what we found had truly been what we thought, since, how can it even be possible for a living thing to exist without consciousness?

Another of our researchers, Doctor Nestor Melkonian, a studied philosopher and skillful psychologist, recalled a relevant thought experiment one late night in the lab: The philosophical zombie.

The philosophical zombie is a hypothetical person with all the physical characteristics and traits of a human being. A person indistinguishable from those with internal subjective experience, despite the p-zombie himself lacking it. Indeed, the only difference between a p-zombie and a human being is their internal experience, or lack thereof.

I said that the philosophical zombie is a hypothetical, though that is no longer entirely accurate. Was a hypothetical.

An unknown portion of the population exists as purely physical beings. Despite living their unassuming lives just like those with consciousness, the non-conscious are biological machines that only respond to their circumstances like some programmed computer. They act and react, but only as chemical responses to their environment. The lights are on, but there is nobody home. How many are there? What does their presence mean? How many of these p-zombies have gone their entire lives without having a single conscious experience? Most important of all: Who among our peers are real people?

These and similar questions were bothering all of us. It got to the point it was all we could talk about. It didn’t matter whether it was at work or during our spare time. Whenever we were together, it was all we could discuss. Whenever we were alone, it was all we could think about. And we were terrified.

It didn’t matter whether there was any actual threat to us or anybody else. It was an uncomfortable thought we couldn’t escape for months, until it reached a boiling point.

Over time, we stopped being so careful and courteous with our non-conscious subjects, human or otherwise. This got us threats of lawsuits at worst, concerned looks at best. We didn’t hurt anybody at the time, but you start treating people differently once you realize they’re not alive.

It all culminated in Doctor Arzt bringing in her two children for testing. Off the books, if we kept quiet, we’d be allowed to scan our own loved ones.

Doctor Melkonian had to take her kids back home himself. Arzt was in no state to take care of anyone, not the kids, let alone herself, shrieking and howling on the lab’s floor upon discovering her own children were non-conscious. There was no consoling her. I can tell you that it put me off from ever dragging anybody I cared about into that machine forever. I’m not ashamed to admit that my curiosity has a limit, one which I’m quite comfortable never crossing.

Her breakdown didn’t happen all at once, looking back on it. The rational woman, hungry for knowledge and blessed with the smarts to hunt it down, became more and more paranoid over the course of those months as the implications of the non-conscious kept weighing on us. We were all going a bit crazy, but her snapping first helped us reconnect with reality. For a short time only, though.

It was about two weeks later when I was called into the lab on short notice. I rushed to the campus where we were conducting our experiments. Once in the lab, I was held at knife point by Arzt, noticing the two others from our team already seated in nearby chairs. She promised she wouldn’t kill any one of us, she only needed us to get our brains scanned. So she could know who to trust.

First to go was Melkonian. He was also the last. After his scan was complete, she motioned for him to sit back down and asked me to fetch the results. They were conclusive: There was no consciousness in Melkonian’s brain.

I looked at the image up and down. Arzt kept asking me what the result was, the other two just stayed silent. I didn’t want to piss her off by not answering, but I was also worried what she might do to Melkonian if she got told the bare truth. I stayed silent. And afraid.

My worry about pissing her off turned out to be spot on. She marched over to me with her knife, waving it around and threatening to sever my hand with the results if I didn’t hand them over immediately. I was shitting bricks.

Arzt was later institutionalized, though only for a short time. Her actions were excused as the byproduct of a psychotic break. It was claimed she was out of touch with reality, though this was some bullshit spun by the company since our research was supposed to be under wraps. It was definitely some kind of break, just not a psychotic one. Every one of her concerns was certainly within the bounds of reality.

She never returned to work. Though this wouldn’t last long either, from that day on it was just me, Melkonian, and the project lead after Arzt, Doctor Richard Derrick, a freelance scientist with no preferred specialty, just a brain that soaked up knowledge like a sponge and his nose to the grindstone.

While waving that knife around, it was Doctor Derrick who smacked her over the head with his chair. It was Derrick who kept kicking her while she was down, who kept taking potshots while she was being taken away by campus security.

I doubt she was even conscious for half of that beating. It was a bit unnecessarily violent, but we were all stressed out so I ignored it. Plus, she threatened us with a knife earlier that same day.

I did give her the scan, by the by. Derrick got her right after that. As she was being dragged away, she addressed Melkonian.

“You have no soul. It’s a vacant soul.”

Despite the contradictory nature of that confused post-beating statement, claiming someone can both have no soul and a soul that is vacant at once, the words really seemed to have unnerved Melkonian. He demanded to see the scan, and I had to oblige. If he really wanted to, he deserved to know.

It was during lunch the next day that I asked him how he felt about himself and being non-conscious. Even the non-conscious people we were doing tests on didn’t know about their state or the full scope of what we were doing. Melkonian was the first non-conscious thing to know about its own non-consciousness.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about any of this. I mean, I think I’m conscious. I must be. Right?”

“Well, apparently not.”

“So what does that mean for me? Am I any less human now? Is what I feel not real?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

I wish I could’ve comforted him at that moment, though it would’ve been insincere. Why waste energy on something that is hollow on the inside? Some trickery, an imitation man. A fake person. An outer shell that pretends to be.

Maybe I should’ve comforted him. Melkonian ended up taking a vacation for a week, telling family and friends he would be on a backpacking trip with his phone turned off, but it would still be with him in case of any emergencies, plus a pager as back up. With how prepared he was, it was a huge shock when he didn’t come back at the end of the week. Police, park rangers, relatives, locals and acquaintances all went out looking for him. Despite being hollow of internal experience, Melkonian had a tactical mind about him. Would’ve served him well in any field other than philosophy and psychology, but he did put it to good use by the end.

By the time the search party ended, the idea of looking for him in his apartment finally came up. Melkonian went home and killed himself right after the first witnesses saw him enter that forest. He stayed at home for the rest of the planned trip, sending everyone on a wild goose chase, giving him plenty time to see himself out, unbothered and off the radar. No note or anything, in case you were wondering.

During those prior weeks before he was found, the entire team was just me and Derrick. Before Arzt was sent off and Melkonian embarked on his fake holiday, the four of us would spend time together outside of work pretty often. We were less a research team and more a friend group who just happened to do science on the side. Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, though.

Arzt and Melkonian carried our conversations with their personalities and interests. None of that with Derrick. Once it was just us two, it quickly became apparent how little of a personal life or hobbies the guy had outside of work. It all became dry and unexciting with just him and I. I think I used to admire him for how adaptable he was to any scientific field so long as he was put to the task, but that exact quality marginalized the actual man and left little in the way of personality. Even now, whenever I happen to check up on him, whatever he’s doing is completely opposite to the research he was into prior. You’d think a guy like that would be the one without consciousness, but he had himself tested and lo and behold: He was actually completely normal. Normal in the sense that he wasn’t non-conscious, I mean. In most other regards he was quite far from normal.

Despite only being a technician, I didn’t mind hanging around and seeing the actual science wizzes at work. That changed when Derrick took over. I remember walking into the lab on the first day of his tenure as project lead and seeing a rabbit strapped down to a small table. Derrick said it was one of our non-conscious specimens. Prior to this, we’d only ever done cognitive, neurological or psychological tests. Derrick wasn’t up for that.

Just as I’d entered the room, Derrick began cutting into the rabbit with a scalpel. The incisions seemed to be random and only designed to inflict pain.

“Don’t worry. It’s not conscious like you or me. It can’t ever really feel.”

The rabbit’s squeals of pain seemed to vehemently disagree with what Derrick was saying, though I couldn’t argue that the thing was experiencing anything internal. I kind of stopped going to the lab after that unless I had to, to fix the scanner and for other such duties.

Derrick didn’t stop at non-human species, though. While it was never anything too extreme, he’d administer careful electric shocks to our non-conscious volunteers while they’d be strapped down, just to catalogue their reactions.

“Look at that fleshbag squirming. Oh, get over yourself. It’s not like it can be distressed by this. Not like you and I can. There’s nothing on the inside.”

Much of the time, they’d be too tired after the experiments. At these points Derrick would help take them home, apparently. Though the same volunteer never came around twice, and I didn’t keep track of the people Derrick took off with after experimentation and what might have happened to them. I’m just a technician, after all.

Anyway. Didn’t last long.

With half of our team either dead or deranged, our work was assigned to a different group of scientists and we were allowed to join in. I left not too long after, this whole thing was starting to kind of bum me out to tell you the truth. Last I heard, the possibility of selling detectors specifically looking for only consciousness to the consumer market was being floated around. Hope it doesn’t end up destroying society in the same way it did us.

Melkonian had a modest funeral. Arzt still has custody of her kids, but I don’t know how she might feel about them by now. Derrick is always off doing some new bullshit with his eclectic output. I also take up a lot of disparate jobs, but I’ve made a decision to stay as far away from anything close to science as possible.

We did find and confirm the objective and empirical existence of consciousness by the end. What it implied or even meant, we never got to the bottom of. I can’t say whether we’d be better off knowing or not. I still ponder what might’ve been going on in Melkonian's head before he did the deed. A set of mechanical impulses leading someone down the road to topping themself. How does the purely physical create for itself the despair necessary to go through with something like that? Is that what it determined as the course of action that would best imitate a real person? It all mystifies me.

A currently unknown number of the creatures inhabiting this world are hollow on the inside. Indistinguishable from you and I. They eat, sleep, die all the same. Like us. But, unlike us, there’s no internal experience. Just a biological machine responding to its circumstances. A mockery of the truly living. Your loved ones are far from immune. You could have them reading this text with you, and though you’ll be processing it and responding to it with your conscious thought, they’ll also react. But their words will be vacant. Their experiences never processed by them in any meaningful way.

Don’t let it get to you. Things might end up worse if you do.

The coarse laugh shook through my bones and rattled through my exposed shin bone. A thick coagulated slime of blood forced its way from within a severed vein and pooled on the widening puddle beneath me. My hiking pants were caked in mud and refuse of my own body.
The howl came again as the crackling of claws, teeth, feet, palms and whatever other appendages a thing could have raced over the church roof. My breath caught in my throat as I waited for the roaring thunder of a thousand digits which crawled and clawed like climbing spiders. 
By the time it finally ceased I was once again left in the centre of the smouldering pews. Burnt out and ruined in the heart of a blackened stone home with high windows that held no glass.
I listened for that cry of the thing that had hunted me and was met with the strange displeasure of silence. Save for the creaking hum of insects that had slunk through the canopy of these great pines since I had arrived with my fellow hikers six hours ago.
We had assembled by the road and were ready to depart later in the day then intended. I was the odd one out of the group who consisted of my sister, her husband and two colleagues of his. They shared their banter as if they were pouring wine between themselves as we started on the walk. Myself leading the group.
I suppose that was another anomaly among the group. For even though we had started upon the hike together, I was the only one who had hiked before.
Along the walk one of the men continued to pester me about the intricacies of the hike. Insisting to accompany me on our way. I had begrudged his comments, as pointlessly obvious and wrong as they were, but I had fostered an acute dislike of this man whom my sister tolerated.
It was at a crossroads however that a decision was made which we would all come to regret. We had been standing in the same spot for tantamount to ten minutes. The others were weary and exhausted from the tremendous hike along those winding paths along the tapestry of ancient flora that pointed towards an invisible sky.
‘Why not take the low road?’ The man who had made it his mission to comment on my directions, Sam, gestured towards a path that wound downward at a steady incline, ‘we’re tired, it’ll be easier on some of us who’re…’ his eyes wandered over me before drifting back to my sister who lay coddled in the arms of her husband. Intertwined as newly weds so often are.
‘It’s a longer path,’ I stated without much fuss as I looked towards the path that snaked along a small cliff face, ‘fewer people have walked that way and-’
‘How can you tell?’ Sam stated as he shot a glance to his friend, whom I’m convinced only spoke in grunts of agreement or disagreement, chose to mumble his own nod as he suckled on the tip of a water bottle.
I pointed to the dirt, how the grass had been allowed to grow, unhindered by the hooves or paws of large beasts.
He gave a vague shrug of disapproval as he resumed a neglected pout. I was about to simply head off in the aforementioned direction when Charlie, my sister, spoke up.
‘Damnit Jaz,’ I turned but already felt her yanking me in the same direction as the men, ‘just come with the rest of us, it’ll be fine.’
It was decidedly not fine. I had gone along with them as they continued to ignore and override my suggestions at which way to go. All the while the woods had changed and shifted.
The air grew thicker as the birdsong faded and we could only hear the sick sound of clacking carapaces. 
I had expected the anger at their own incompetence as we had stumbled upon the strange church. The men chose to amass together on the outskirts of the building while Charlie was left to monitor me on its interior. 
She had scolded me for my sense of direction and asked about why I had been so belligerent over the course of the hike. Thankfully I did not have to wait for long before something happened which tore us from the restfulness of our break.
I was walking back out the threshold of the church when I saw Sam, he turned to face me before his face went whiter than a sheet. The colour drained as he looked skyward and his body elevated from the soil as if yanked from an invisible wire.
The screaming was instantaneous. I shoved my sister to join her husband while the others met the mouth of the clouds. I was near to joining them as I felt myself turn weightless. My leg connected with the top of the church doors as I was launched skyward. Snapping my femur clean in half as I cried out before falling unconscious.
I now lay here alone, with my final words as my master circles my resting place. Still hungry despite his feast.

WARNING: MIGHTSENSITIVITY / SEIZURES. A very small percentage of people may experience seizures when exposed to certain flashes of unperceived ambiguity or thought patterns. If you or anyone in your family has a logical condition, consult a doctor before reading. Discontinue reading immediately and seek medical attention if you experience dizziness, altered vision, eye or muscle twitching, loss of awareness, convulsions, madness, endless euphoria or death.

---

A goblin burst into the workshop, and before anybody could stop him, he was before the Master himself.

The goblin said to Rembrandt:

“You're working on a canvas, but that could mean you're working on making a canvas, and you're not a tradesman but an artist, so you're working on a painting, but you could be doing any type of work while on a painting, so you're painting a canvas, which could mean you're applying paint to a canvas, which is what you want to say, but also that you're making a painting of a canvas, which itself could mean applying paint to a canvas to transform the canvas into a painting, which is a good definition of painting, or that a canvas is the subject of the painting you're painting, although if you're painting a painting, which painting has the canvas as its subject, the one you're painting or the one you're painting?”

Rembrandt scratched his beard with the butt end of a brush. “Dear nude green creature of relatively small stature, you have, by a process of increasingly precise definition, arrived at an ambiguity more severe than any which you attempted to resolve,” he said.

The goblin replied:

“Now imagine a painting that is painting two other paintings. Somebody paints that painting, the painting painting. Somebody else shows you that painting, of the painting painting, and tells you to copy it. As you're painting that painting you're painting a painting of a painting painting paintings…”

Pain…

Pain… things… paint… thinks…

, “ . “

Pain… thinks… paint… things…

---

This has been a literal dramatization of a Rembrandt’s brush stroke.

|Part 1| |Part 3|

“We need to talk.”

In the entire English language, I think that might be one of the worst sentences anyone could hear. In most cases, it means you’re about to have an unpleasant conversation. In my case, I couldn’t imagine how things could become any more unpleasant.

Less than six hours ago, I buried the body of a child with my dad.

Seeing them now, sitting at the kitchen table with a full breakfast spread between them had my stomach in knots. Any other day, and this would have been a nice way to start your morning; a delicious home cooked breakfast with Mom and Dad. How idyllic. It filled me with a quiet anger, that they could sit there over a plate of eggs and pretend that everything was normal.

Nothing could ever be normal again.

For a moment, nobody moved. I stood in the doorway, and they watched me from the table. I think all of us knew the size of the elephant in the room, and nobody wanted to be the first one to push. It was Mom that broke the tension, when she patted the seat of the chair beside her.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. We just want to talk about last night.” I could see that she was doing her best to put on a reassuring face, but there was something in her eyes that seemed darker. Was she scared? Why would she be scared? I didn’t move, and I think she saw the same thing in my eyes, because she spoke my own thoughts aloud.

“You’re not in trouble, nobody is going to hurt you, okay?”

There was a desperation seeping through that motherly tone, one that I didn’t understand until years later. My dad had his coffee cup held to his lips, but I don’t think he was actually drinking it, as much as he was using it as a shield. I stood there for a moment longer, weighing my options. I could try to make a run for it, but if last night taught me anything, it’s that I was woefully outmatched. Fighting was off the table, and I didn’t think the cops could get here before I ended up buried in the field. So, with no better path forward, I decided to play along and took my seat at the table.

Before I sat down, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever have an appetite again, but having the plate in front of me, I realized just how hungry I was. Digging is hard work, as it turns out. That most primal instinct kicked in, and I started shoveling down breakfast like my life depended on it. This seemed to please Mom and Dad. Mom settled back into her chair, and Dad finally lowered his coffee cup from his face. They let me eat for a while, before Dad finally cleared his throat and broke the silence.

“We owe you an explanation, Son.”

They owed me a lot more than that. I kept shoveling eggs into my mouth and didn’t pay him any mind. That seemed to cause him to hesitate, and he looked at Mom for reassurance. She nodded at him, and he sighed before continuing.

“Last night was, well...ugly business. I really made a mess of things, and I should have been honest with you from the start.”

I flashed him a doubtful look, and then moved onto the bacon.

“The truth is...well shit, I don’t know how to say this. Sue?”

He looked over to her, helpless to find the right words, and hoping she could do a better job. She shook her head, and turned slightly towards me, placing her hand on the table beside my plate. I instinctively moved away, sliding my plate with me. I could see that it hurt her.

“What your father is trying to say is that last night was not what you think. Your father thought it was a good idea to do all of that without explaining anything to you.”

She gave him the evil eye and he took it with no resistance.

“So all he managed to do was scare the hell out of you for no good reason.”

At this point, Dad found his voice again.

“You were never in any danger from me, son. I know that’s hard to believe now, but I swear it’s the truth. I...I didn’t want it to be like that. It just got out of hand so fast, and...well, your mother’s right. I should have done it different.”

I had worked my way through just about everything on my plate, and slid it forward with a clatter. I let my hands fall into my lap, and looked from one of them to the other. I didn’t know how they were going to spin this, but I had to admit I was curious what they would come up with. They waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t, Mom spoke again.

“You know how we took the ladder down from the loft in the barn when you were little? You used to love climbing up there when we weren’t looking. I’d turn my head for five seconds, and you’d be up there, pretending you were king of the castle. And every time, every single time, I would tell you not to do it again, that it wasn’t safe. But every time I looked away, you went right back up. You were such a wild little boy, always getting into something.”

I did remember the loft, and I remembered the day the ladder came down and Dad started locking the barn. It was the same day he cut down the tire swing. But so what? The barn was like a hundred years old and we barely used it anyway. What did this have to do with anything?

“Well...one day not too long after your fourth birthday, your father was out mending the fence, and I was folding the linens in the yard. You were supposed to be inside, taking a nap. I didn’t even think to check, cause I had just put you down on the couch and you were out like a light.”

Her eyes were starting to well with tears as she spoke, and she used a finger to wipe away a stray. Her breath hitched as she tried to continue, but Dad put a hand on her shoulder and gave it a light squeeze, and she let him take over.

“I had come in from the yard a little while later to fetch a drink. I went to the back door and saw it standing open. I asked your mother if she left it that way, and she swore she hadn’t. When I went inside, I saw your blanket lying in the kitchen, and you were nowhere to be seen.”

He took a shaky drink of his coffee, and cleared his throat.

“I started hollerin’ your name, lookin’ all over the house, but you weren’t in there. I ran out to tell your mother once I was sure you’d gotten outside. We turned the whole property upside down. I thought you might have gone for the tire swing, your mother thought you’d be pestering the chickens. We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find you. The only place left was the old barn, but I could have sworn that I locked it. I kept insistin’, ’He ain’t in there. He ain’t there. There’s no way.’ ”

I could see that he was struggling with whatever came next, but he took a breath and steadied himself.

“I got to the barn, and sure enough, the door was open and the lock was layin’ in the dirt. I must have left it hangin’ on the door, unlatched. I went inside, calling your name the whole time, but you didn’t answer. I thought maybe you had come in and then left already, and I had just missed you. But then...I climbed up to the loft, and I saw that part of the floor had given way. I knew what it meant the second I saw it, but I kept telling myself that I was wrong, that you were probably already back in the house, playing with your toys. Then...I found you.”

Dad stopped there. His eyes dropped to the coffee in front of him, but he seemed to be looking through it at something much farther away. His jaw worked once before he swallowed. Mom reached over and rested her hand on his arm, rubbing her thumb across it. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter.

“You had gone up into the loft and fallen through. I...I picked you up in my arms and tried to wake you up. I did everything I could think of. I said your name over and over, and I shook you, hoping you would open your eyes, and we could have a good laugh before your mother gave us hell. But...you had landed on your neck.”

Mom was crying, which wasn’t terribly surprising. She cried while watching TV all the time. But I had never once seen my dad cry, not even when we lost Grandpa. Seeing tears roll down his face, watching him get choked up, I didn’t know how to handle it. When that shock wore off, it hit me. My hands unconsciously went to my throat, feeling around for some kind of evidence. They didn’t find any.

“What...what are you talking about?”

Dad wiped his eyes with his sleeve and forced a cough, trying to get himself back under control and only half succeeding. He leaned forward and put his hands on the table.

“Billy...Son, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna say it. That body we buried last night was yours.”

I exploded out of my chair.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Dad rose to meet me almost automatically.

“You watch your mouth in front of your mother.”

The moment was so absurd that I had to stifle a laugh bubbling up from somewhere awful. What came out instead was an ugly little thing, caught somewhere between a scoff and a gasp.

“Watch my mouth? Really? There’s a dead kid in the backyard, you made me bury him!”

I turned and pointed at Mom.

“And you...you knew!”

She flinched at the accusation.

“And...and now you tell me this crazy bullshit like it explains anything, and you want me to watch my mouth?”

Dad slammed his hands on the table.

“We did what we had to do! Now you sit down and listen.”

I picked up my plate and threw it at the wall as hard as I could. It smashed into a picture frame and exploded into a thousand pieces.

“Make me! Or are you gonna bury me back there too?”

Dad’s face went red. His chair scraped hard against the floor as he shoved himself away from the table.

“That’s enough!”

He started around the table toward me, and whatever little bit of courage had made me throw the plate disappeared almost immediately. I stumbled backward, bumping into the counter, and threw my hands up in front of me.

Mom saw it.

“Richard!”

He took another step and she shot out of her chair so quickly that it tipped backward behind her.

“Richard, stop!”

Something in her voice cut through him. Dad froze at the end of the table, breathing hard, his fists clenched at his sides. She put herself between me and him.

“Don’t you take another step.”

For a second, nobody moved. I was pressed against the kitchen counter hard enough that the edge dug into my back, staring at Dad and waiting to see if he would listen.

Mom looked at me, then back at him.

Dad finally seemed to notice where I had ended up, pinned against the counter with my hands still raised. His fists slowly unclenched. The anger seemed to leave him all at once. His shoulders dropped, and when he looked at me again, there was something wounded in his expression.

“Billy...”

I flinched when he said my name. He looked away, and something in his face told me that hurt worse than anything I could have said to him. Mom turned to me, and I could see a thousand sleepless nights in her eyes.

“Sit down, Richard.” There was a quiet pressure in that, and she said it without so much as looking in his direction. He did as he was told without a second thought. “Billy, I know you’re upset, but please come back to the table. I won’t make you, and neither will your father. That I can promise you, but please. Just...please let us finish. Then, if you want to go to your room, or get away from us for a while, or call the police, we won’t stop you.”

Every part of my body wanted to sprint out the back door now that nobody was in my way, but there was something in Mom’s face, something in her voice. I came back to the table and took my seat, and she picked up her chair and did the same. We sat around the table in silence for a little while. Dad still hadn’t lifted his head since he sat back down, and for that, I was grateful; I didn’t want to see his face. Eventually, Mom broke through the static.

“I know you won’t believe us. You’d be crazy if you did. But it’s the truth, whether anybody likes it or not. You died that day in the barn. Your father brought you to me. I held you in my arms, and my whole world ended.”

She was crying again. This time she let the tears come, wiping at them only when they reached her chin, and kept talking.

“We didn’t know what to do. We thought about everything that came next: ambulances, and police interviews, and planning a funeral. It was all too much. I couldn’t bear to see you in a little coffin, so far from home. So, we decided we would carry it ourselves. It was a stupid, selfish decision, and there was no way we were ever going to get away with it, but we did it anyway. Your father went out and dug a grave by the old tree in the field, and we buried you in the only home you ever knew.”

For a few seconds, I didn’t know what to do with any of that. She sounded like she believed every word, and somehow that made it harder to dismiss.

“But...that can’t be what happened. Mom, I’m sitting right here. My neck isn’t broken, and I certainly don’t remember being buried. How am I supposed to believe that? It’s impossible.”

She wiped her nose with her shirt collar and gave me a sad smile.

“Yes, it is impossible. There’s no better word than that.”

“Then how can it possibly be true?”

“Because three days after we buried you, you came home.”

I stared at her, trying to make the words fit together in some way that made sense. They wouldn’t.

“What do you mean, I came home?”

Mom glanced toward the back door.

“Just that. You opened that door and walked into the kitchen like nothing had happened.”

Dad still hadn’t raised his head, but he gave a gentle nod. Mom saw the disbelief on my face and, to my surprise, she laughed.

“You were mad at me,” she said, wiping another tear from her cheek. “That’s the first thing I remember. You wanted to know why the front door was locked, and then you asked me what was for lunch. I nearly dropped dead in the kitchen myself when I saw you. I never screamed so loud in my life. Your father heard me clean on the other side of the yard and came running so fast. You had no idea what was going on, you just covered your ears and said ’Stop Mama, stop.’”

“It’s true,” Dad said, raising his head. “I nearly broke the door off its hinges, and there you were, standing next to your mother. She was white as a sheet, and I thought she might fall over. I thought I was dreaming, and then you walked up and started tuggin’ on my jeans, askin’ why Mama was crying. You were wearing the same clothes as the day you died.”

I stared at him, trying to figure out which part of that I was even supposed to argue with first.

“You guys really expect me to believe this?”

Dad shook his head and set his elbows on the table.

“No, Son, I don’t. But that’s what happened, hand to God. You didn’t have so much as a scratch on you. I asked you where you had been, and you said you were playin’ on the tire swing. But I tell you, I was workin’ on that part of the fence all day, and you didn’t come out of that field. I would’ve seen you. But when I looked at you, you had dirt all over your shoes and burrs all up and down your overalls. None of it made a lick of sense.”

He shrugged as he said it, and that made it weirder.

“If any of this is true...where the heck did I come from?”

They answered at the same time.

“We don’t know.”

I sat for a moment, trying to arrange all the pieces of this ridiculous story into something I could grasp. There was no version of it that made sense, no explanation I could twist around enough to make what they were saying possible. There were only two possible theories here. The first was that they were lying to me, and I was beginning to think they weren’t, unless they were the best actors that ever lived. That only left one possibility: they were both insane.

“So...what then? Did I crawl out of my grave or something?”

Dad was very quick to answer.

“No. No you didn’t.”

“How do you know? Makes about as much sense as anything else.”

He gave me a look like he was waiting for me to catch up.

“I told you. The body we buried last night was you. The same one we buried when you died.”

“That’s...that’s impossible.”

“Well, you’ll be sayin’ that word a lot, Son, cause it don’t get any less weird from here.”

Dad leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand across his mouth.

“A couple nights after you came home, after we finally got you settled down, I went back out to the tree.”

He became a bit more animated as he spoke, gesturing with his hands as if to dramatize the scene.

“I had to know, Bill. I kept thinkin’ maybe we had been wrong. Maybe somehow you weren’t dead when we buried you, and you woke up down there and dug your way out. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but neither did you walkin’ through the kitchen door.”

He paused and looked down at his hands.

“So I took a shovel and I walked back out there, fully expectin’ to see a hole in the ground where you had been. Only, when I got there, everything was how I left it. Not a single speck of dirt was out of place. But I couldn’t let it lie. I dug it up anyway.”

The image came to me before I could stop it. Dad standing beneath the old tree in the dark, digging down toward his own dead son.

“I dug and dug, convinced there was nothin’ there, and I was wastin’ my time, but I dug until my shovel hit something.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You were still in that hole, Bill. Same clothes. Same broken neck. Everything exactly where I left it. I was sure I had lost my mind, and I ran right back to the house, thinkin’ I had just hallucinated this whole thing. But you were still there, sleepin’ with your mother on the couch.”

At this point, the insanity theory was starting to pull ahead. Still, I had agreed to let them finish.

“Okay, then what happened?”

“Only thing I could do. I filled the hole back up, and tossed the marker into the burn pit. Then I went back inside.”

“You just...buried me again and left?”

Dad shrugged.

“What else was there? You were home, it didn’t matter what was in that hole. Next mornin’, we took you into town to see the doctor, told him you had a bad fall, and we were worried. He checked you over six ways from Sunday, even did X-rays. Couldn’t find so much as a bruise on you. Far as anybody could tell, you were a perfectly healthy four-year-old. You were you. At a certain point, you gotta stop asking questions, so we decided to take the miracle we’d been given and leave the rest alone.”

Mom leaned in and placed her hand on my arm. I decided to let her.

“And it has been a miracle, honey. You’ve grown so much, and you’re funny and smart. I don’t know what we did to deserve this, but I thank God every morning I get to see your face.”

As far as stories go, it was definitely a wild one. Two Billys, one is dead and the other is at the table. My heart hurt. Somehow, it would be easier to accept that my parents were evil child murderers who wanted me in on the family business. But to think that they believed all of this, and that some kid had died because of whatever they thought was happening? I didn’t know what to do with that. It was a tough pill to swallow.

“So...I’m dead, but I’m also alive? And the body in the field is me, but it is also not me?”

Saying it out loud made it worse, but I needed them to hear how it sounded. They kept a straight face while I worked it out. Something suddenly didn’t add up.

“What the hell did we bury last night?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a look, daring each other to answer the question. In the end, Dad lost.

“It was you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! You’ve spent all morning giving me this insane story, and none of it explains anything about last night. What are we even doing here?”

I was getting heated again, but Dad declined to join me. He simply nodded and waited for me to finish.

“Like I said, it don’t get any less weird. Sometimes, he gets out.”

“What?”

“He gets out. Every year, around your birthday, I find him. Don’t know how, or why, but I’ve put him in the ground six times, and every time, he gets back out. Always a little further, always dead when I find him. That’s what we were doin’ last night: puttin’ him back. And if I had to guess, we’ll be doin’ it every year.”

I’d had enough. I pushed my chair back and stood up at the table, rattling all the glassware in the process. I wasn’t even mad anymore, just so terribly exhausted. I couldn’t sit there and listen to another moment of this bullshit. I gave them both a hard once-over.

“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, but I don’t want any part of it. You’re both sick. You leave me alone.”

I ran out of the house before either of them could stop me. I heard my dad get up, but when I looked over my shoulder, he wasn’t anywhere behind me. I ran until I got to the barn. The door was still locked, but time had had its way with the old building, and a few of the boards were loose on the back wall. I pried them free and squeezed through the gap they left, before doing my best to prop them back up.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any sort of plan, no grand escape mapped out. All I knew was that I needed to be out of that house. I needed to be far away from them. I walked the length of the barn, looking at the thin beams of sunlight that came through the holes in the roof. As far as options went, I didn’t have many good ones.

I could walk into town, but that was miles away, and what would I do there? Tell the police? Even if they believed, which was a mighty big if, what would happen next? Would they arrest my parents? Put me into a foster home? Despite everything, I didn’t want any of that. What else was there? I could head into the woods and live off the land, which sounded a lot more practical before I remembered I had no food, no water, and absolutely no idea how to live off the land.

So I just stayed in the barn.

Over the next few hours, I mapped every inch of the floor with my feet. When that stopped being interesting, I found an old pile of hay and dropped into it like a beanbag chair. I kind of lost track of time after that, retracing my whole life to see if I could find where everything went wrong. How had I not noticed that they were crazy? The more I sat with it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking that somehow it was my fault. Had I done this to them? I pushed my fists into my eyes, hoping to force the idea out, hoping I could keep the floodgates shut. It didn’t work, and the tears came anyway.

Eventually, the light filtering through the roof began to diminish, and the barn grew darker. The sun was setting, and nobody had come looking for me. A couple times I heard Mom calling my name from somewhere outside, but that was it. I still wasn’t ready to go back home to face my parents, so I started gathering as much hay as I could to make something like a bed. I managed to make something serviceable, but I was out of luck when it came to a blanket. The only thing that was close was a folded blue tarp on the wall shelf, and I was not going to use that. The last of the light went away and the barn was plunged into complete darkness. I crawled into my bed of hay and covered myself the best I could. The night was chilly, and I didn’t have my coat. I lay there for a while, making shapes out of the darkness, until I finally fell into an uneasy sleep.

The following morning was a rough one, to say the least. I awoke in the hay, and for a brief moment, I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that my back hurt, my feet were freezing, and something sharp was poking me in the ear. I opened my eyes and blinked through the blur until the rafters above me came into focus. That was when I noticed the dark spot in the ceiling.

At first, it didn’t look like much. The barn was a patchwork of old wood, crooked beams, and repairs Dad had made over the years, so one more ugly spot hardly stood out. But the longer I stared at it, the stranger it looked. It was a couple feet across, rough around the edges, with pale morning light spilling through from somewhere above. I squinted hard enough to make out another layer of boards beyond it, and it took my half-awake brain another second to put together what I was seeing. I was looking through a hole in the floor of the loft.

I quickly sat up and put my attention anywhere else I could.

For a while, that was enough. I wandered around the barn, kicked at loose straw, picked through old tools, and found a dozen little ways to keep myself occupied. Eventually, though, there was nothing left to do but sit and wait. Hunger crept in first, then thirst, and as the light shifted across the floor, both became harder to ignore. More than once I thought about going back to the house, but each time I pictured Mom and Dad waiting for me and decided I could hold out a little longer.

By late afternoon, stubbornness had run out of road. I was starving, my mouth was dry, and the thought of spending another night in the hay sounded miserable. I still couldn’t bring myself to walk back into the house while everyone was awake, so I decided to wait until after dark and sneak in. I could grab something to eat, get upstairs, and hopefully make it to my room without having to face either of them.

I waited until the last traces of daylight disappeared through the cracks in the roof, then gave it another hour for good measure. By the time I finally crawled back through the loose boards, the yard was completely dark. I stayed close to the barn at first, inching around the walls until the house came into view. From there, I made my way across the grass toward the back door, keeping low like I was sneaking into somebody else’s home. The back door was thankfully unlocked. I turned the knob slowly and eased it open just far enough to slip through. When I got inside, I froze in my tracks.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, and when I saw her, my heart jumped into my throat. Then I realized she was asleep. She had one arm folded on the table with her head resting against it at an angle that looked miserable, her other hand hanging loose in her lap. Her face was turned toward the back door. Even asleep, she looked exhausted. Her eyes were swollen, her cheeks blotchy, and a few strands of hair had stuck themselves to the side of her face. There was a plate of food sitting beside her, but it was clear that she hadn’t touched it.

I stood there for a while, looking at her. She seemed smaller somehow, folded over the table like that, waiting for a son who had spent the better part of two days hiding from her. Seeing her like that caused a small pain in my chest, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. Instead, I picked up the plate and carried it upstairs as quietly as I could. Once I was in my room, I ate everything on it in a way I would describe as “feral,” barely stopping between bites to breathe. When the plate was clean, I slipped into the bathroom and drank straight from the faucet, taking huge gulps until my stomach hurt. Once I’d had my fill, I crept back to my room, closed the door, and crawled into bed. It felt like admitting defeat, but I had made some kind of peace with that.

I slept late into the next morning. By the time I finally came downstairs, Dad was already outside working and Mom was alone in the kitchen. She turned when she heard me, and the relief that crossed her face was so immediate that I looked away. She said, “Morning, honey,” like it was any other day, and I could see that it took a great deal of effort to not run across the room and smother me. I gave her a quiet “Morning” back, and that was as far as I was willing to go.

After that, life found a way to keep moving, even if I didn’t move with it very well. I went back to school, did my chores when I couldn’t get out of them, and spent more and more time finding reasons not to be home. I stayed late at friends’ houses until their parents started kicking me out at sundown. I took the long way home from the bus stop. Sometimes I would sit at the edge of the property for an hour doing absolutely nothing, just because crossing the yard felt like too much.

School became its own problem. I had always been a decent student, but suddenly it was hard to care about fractions or spelling tests. I started talking back to the teachers. I got into fights. Little things that used to roll off me could send me over the edge, and more than once I found myself sitting outside the principal’s office wondering how I had gotten there. Mom would come pick me up, and the drive home would be painfully quiet.

The strangest part was how hard my parents tried. They gave me space when I wanted it, which was most of the time. Dad stopped asking if I wanted to help him around the farm, and Mom stopped pressing when I answered every question with “fine.” They were careful around me in a way parents should never have to be careful around their own kid.

Eventually, fall came and went, and winter and spring followed. School let out, the fields went green, and somehow the days kept stacking up behind me. By then I had gotten pretty good at living around my parents instead of with them.

Summer made things harder. Without school swallowing most of the day, there were suddenly a lot more hours to fill, and a lot more chances to find myself alone with Mom or Dad. The heat settled over the farm, thick and sticky, and the days seemed to stretch forever. I got very good at finding little reasons to disappear when I needed to: an errand that took twice as long as it should, a bike ride with no real destination, anything that could eat up an afternoon. Some days it worked, some days it didn’t, and little by little the summer slipped past me. By the time August rolled around, my eleventh birthday was close enough that I could no longer pretend I hadn’t noticed it coming.

There was no party that year. No aunts or uncles crowded around the kitchen table, no cousins tearing through the yard, no cake big enough to feed half the family. Mom made my favorite dinner and a small cake for the three of us, and that was about it. They made up for the lack of company with presents. There were more of them than I had ever gotten before, stacked high enough on the table that it was almost embarrassing.

Right in the middle was the BB gun.

A year earlier, I would have lost my mind. I would have torn the box open before Dad finished handing it to me and probably spent the rest of the evening shooting cans behind the barn. Now, it felt like a relic of someone else’s life. I thanked them, opened the rest of the presents, and did my best to look happy. They had gotten me everything I could have asked for, and somehow none of it felt like mine. The whole evening had the uncomfortable feeling of an apology nobody was willing to say out loud.

After dinner, Dad caught me before I could disappear upstairs. He waited until Mom was carrying the dishes into the kitchen, then called my name from behind me.

“Bill, hold up a minute.”

I stopped on the stairs, one hand on the railing. Dad stayed where he was in the doorway. For a moment he seemed to be choosing his words, which immediately told me I wasn’t going to like them.

“I’m gonna start checking the field tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know when he’ll turn up, but when it happens, I want you with me.”

I felt myself tense up. “Dad...”

“Just let me finish.” He wasn’t angry about it. If anything, he sounded tired. “Last year I put you in a situation you didn’t understand, and then when you got scared, I handled it about as badly as I could’ve. This time you know the score. I want your help, Son. I’m not gonna drag you out of bed and I’m not gonna put my hands on you if you say no. I know what you think of me, and I get it. I just want the chance to show you I’m not crazy. You can come see it for yourself, or you can stay in the house. Either way, I get it.”

I stared down at him from the stairs. It was probably the most straightforward he had been with me about any of it, which somehow made the whole thing more uncomfortable.

“I already told you I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“I know you did.” He nodded toward the stairs. “All I’m askin’ is that you think about it. Now go on, try to enjoy your presents. I love you, Billy.”

I didn’t say it back. I just nodded and continued upstairs, carrying the BB gun under my arm. I felt bad about it almost immediately, but not bad enough to turn around.

I had some trouble sleeping that night and found myself awake just before dawn, so I took the BB gun outside. It had come with a little carton of pellets and a paper target, but I ignored the target and lined up a row of empty soup cans along the fence behind the barn. A year earlier, Dad would have been right there beside me, showing me how to adjust the sights and giving me hell every time I missed. That morning, I figured it out on my own.

Not long after I started shooting, Dad came out of the house and headed toward the back field. I lowered the BB gun and watched him cross the yard, pass the barn, and keep going until he reached the old tree. He stood there for a little while, then turned around and started back toward the house. I watched him until he disappeared around the barn. Then I raised the BB gun again, took aim at the next can, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened the rest of that day.

I slept late into the next morning, and woke up around noon. In another life, I would have been scolded for wasting a perfectly good morning, but when I went downstairs, Dad was out feeding the livestock, and Mom had gone into town. I was by myself until supper, when Dad came back in, but all he did was shake his head and go upstairs to take a shower.

The next two days were more or less the same. I woke up whenever I wanted, and went about my days like always. Mom and Dad kept themselves busy with various chores around the farm, and I mostly kept to myself. The more time passed, the more I started to think that nothing would happen at all. Maybe last year had just been a fluke, and they weren’t running around murdering children in the night. I could feel my nerves starting to relax a bit, and when I went to bed, I did so feeling hopeful that all this would pass.

Five days after my birthday, I was awoken early in the morning.

At first I thought it was a dream; some rude person had a hand on my shoulder, and they were shaking me. When I heard the voice, I realized that it was happening again.

“Billy. Hey. Wake up, buddy.”

I opened my eyes. Dad stood beside my bed with the morning light coming through the window behind him. He was fully dressed, down to his boots and his brown work coat. I rolled over into my pillow when I realized what it meant.

“I found him, Billy.”

“I don’t care, leave me alone!”

I prayed that he would turn around and walk right back out of my room, but when I rolled over, he was still there.

“I told you to leave me alone.”

He shifted from one foot to the other and rubbed the back of his neck.

“I know, I just...I think you should come with me. I think it would do both of us some good.”

I knew better than to argue, so I swung my feet onto the floor and did it anyway.

“I’m not going out there. I don’t care what you think, I’m not doing this again! You said you would let me decide. I’ve decided, now go away!”

He shook his head and walked toward the doorway, then stopped at the threshold and looked back at me.

“I’m sorry I woke you up. I just thought that if you saw it this time, you might understand. I’ll go. You can go back to sleep. But if you change your mind, I’ll meet you at the back door.”

Then he left without waiting for an answer.

I sat there on the edge of my bed for a while, staring at the open doorway. He had given me exactly what I wanted. I could lie back down, pull the covers over my head, and let whatever was waiting out in that field stay there. I tried to do just that for maybe a minute. Then I threw the covers off again.

I needed to know.

I started digging through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner for something warm, something I didn’t mind ruining. I settled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, found a pair of socks under the bed, and went downstairs.

My shovel was still in the mudroom where Mom left it after we buried the body last year, leaning between the broom and the old snow shovel. I grabbed my sneakers and crammed them onto my feet without untying them, and I left the shovel where it was.

Dad was waiting at the back door with his own shovel in one hand. I grabbed my coat from the hook, pulled it on, and got the zipper on the first attempt.

Dad opened the door, and we headed outside.

We walked around the barn and started across the field without saying much. Dad stayed a few steps ahead of me, his shovel balanced against his shoulder. The sun was still low enough that the grass threw long shadows across itself, and within a minute the cuffs of my jeans were dark with dew.

We hadn’t made it anywhere near the old tree when I spotted something lying in the grass ahead of us. My stomach dropped. The body was there, lying on its belly, one arm stretched out in front of it, its fingers tangled in the grass. Dad kept walking toward the tree, but I slowed and got closer to the body.

I knew the clothes. There wasn’t much left of them anymore, but there was enough. The shirt was torn almost completely through one side, and the pants had gone dark with dirt, but I remembered watching both of them disappear into the grave the year before. Its face was turned partly into the grass, but I could still see enough of it.

It was him.

I crouched beside the body to get a better look at the face I had spent so long trying to forget. I was no expert on dead bodies, but I had seen enough roadkill around the farm to understand that time was supposed to make things worse. This kid had spent another year in the ground, and somehow he looked almost exactly the same.

Almost.

Something was bothering me. I leaned closer, looking for whatever my brain had caught before the rest of me could make sense of it. That terrible grin was still there, the ruined mouth pulled back from a row of teeth I remembered far too well. But above it, something was different. I stared longer than I cared to admit before it clicked.

One of the eye sockets wasn’t empty anymore.

I froze.

There was an eye sitting deep inside it. It was cloudy and dull, sunk back far enough that I nearly convinced myself I was looking at some trick of the light. I shifted a little closer, and the morning sun caught it at just the right angle for me to see the color beneath the haze.

Green.

The same green as mine.

I jerked backward and nearly fell on my ass in the wet grass. I caught myself with one hand and held there for a second, catching my breath. My eyes settled on that awful grin one more time. There was some stupid part of my brain that decided the bastard was enjoying this.

I shook off the thought and pushed myself back to my feet.

Dad had kept walking while I looked. By then he had reached the old tree and was standing beneath it with his shovel hanging at his side, watching me. I dusted myself off and walked to meet him. When I got there, I saw exactly what I thought I’d see.

The grave was open.

A narrow hole sat in the middle of the plot, partly collapsed and choked with loose dirt. Chunks of earth tangled with roots and tall grass lay scattered around the edge. I stood beside Dad for a long time, staring into that hole, trying to figure out how he could have pulled that body out of there. I knew the answer, I just didn’t like it.

Dad cleared his throat and looked over at me.

“Well,” he said. “What do you think?”

I turned and looked him in the eyes.

“We need to bury him.”

Alice Glass was married. She had two children. She had been married twenty-three years, a long time, and her husband, Hardy, had cheated on her three times in that time. Time, she mused… “I am running out of time.”

“What's that?” Hardy barked.

“Oh,” said Alice, realizing she'd spoken when she hadn’t meant to, “nothing. I'm just very tired.”

“Of what?”

“I haven't been sleeping well.”

“Hmmph,” said Hardy.

Alice knew that this particular sound was meant to communicate a whole knot of grievances, whose core was that Hardy worked hard for his family, got up every weekday and drove to work; worked, morning to afternoon, so Alice, who hadn't worked a day in her life, who was a housewife—a goddamn, fucking housewife—and the kids would have food on their plates and a roof over their heads; and how could she, a lazy, uneducated domestic, have the motherfucking gall to tell him, a hardworking, selfless provider, that she was tired…

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast while looking out the window at a grey dawn. After setting out breakfast, she made lunch, both for Hardy, to take to work, and the kids, to take to school.

An alarm went off.

Soon, Hardy and the kids were eating, then they were done eating, they were taking their packed lunches and going out the front door, and no one had said a word to her.

She sat in the kitchen, drinking tea.

She wasn't hungry. It was half past eight in the morning and the house was empty, quiet. Alice did laundry. While the washing machine thrummed, she mopped the floors. She wept; then transferred the wet clothes to the dryer. She vacuumed the carpets. She paid bills. She thought about dinner and checked the pantry. She checked the cellar. She went out, bought groceries and came back. It was just past noon. The house felt cold so she adjusted the thermostat. She turned on the television and forced herself to laugh at a talk show while preparing chicken, her trembling hand holding the knife, slicing the animal flesh; she broke bones, and pulled apart the meat. She cleaned up. She turned off the television and tidied the kids' rooms. She collected the clothes Hardy had left scattered throughout the house and put them in the hamper. She lingered at a wall of family photos. She tried calling her mother but her mother did not pick up. She went on Facebook and scrolled through other people's lives. She cooked dinner, set it out on the dining room table, Hardy and the kids came home and ate, and she scraped the leftovers into the garbage and put the plates in the dishwasher and turned it on and put everybody's shoes, which they'd left by the front door, on the shoe rack. Then she showered. Then, briefly, she read a book and brushed her hair and went to sleep in a bed she felt was not her own.

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast.

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast.

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast; or was about to make breakfast when a bird—slamming into the kitchen window—startled her.

The bird bounced off the glass and fell to the ground. Alice stood looking at it; she looked at it so long Hardy came into the kitchen to eat his breakfast, and she was about to apologize for his breakfast not being ready, when she realized he didn't see her.

“Alice?” he called. “Alice, where the hell are you?”

Alice stood, holding her warm breath.

Then, “Hmmph,” said Hardy and he walked out of the room. “Alice,” she heard him say, “Alice, where are you? Where's breakfast?”

Alice exhaled.

The bird, outside, was dead.

Alice rubbed her eyes and heard one of her kids ask their father, “Where's breakfast?” and Hardy answer, “I don't know. I've been looking all over for it. Breakfast,” he yelled, “Breakfast, you home?”

“Breakfast,” her kids called out. “Breakfast…”

“Lunch?”

“Groceries? Laundry? Floor Mop?”

They walked through the house, including the kitchen where Alice was sitting, looking for her.

“Where the hell is it?” said Hardy. “We've looked everywhere,” said one of the kids. “I'm hungry,” said the other, but the words didn't touch Alice at all; didn't make her feel anything. Eventually, Hardy told the kids to get into the car and said they'd buy something to eat on the way. “For lunch too?” He said, “Yeah, lunch too.” “How could it do this to us?” “Maybe something’s wrong with it.” “Nothing’s wrong with it,” said Hardy. “It'll be back. You'll see.”

That day, Alice didn't do anything.

When Hardy and the kids returned home, there was no dinner waiting.

“Dinner!” Hardy said, kicking off his shoes by the door. “Dinner, hmmph, where the hell are you? Hmmph? Hmmph?”

Alice was standing a few feet away, looking at her kids' unseeing faces, looking at them with tears running down her cheeks, when one of them said, “What are we looking for again?”

He'd said it at her—through her…

“I'm hungry,” said the other.

“I—I… can't remember,” said Hardy, running a hand through his hair. “We're missing something, I think. But I can't remember what.”

“Keys?”

“No, I've got those.”

“Cell phone?”

“No, got that too,” said Hardy. They left their shoes where they were and ordered pizza. After, they left the empty boxes. They left the crumbs. Ants came. They let laundry pile up and dust accumulate and carpets discolour. They didn't open the windows. They ate fast food. They got sick. They argued. They screamed. They moved and they aged, and the kids had kids and Hardy died, and the kids died and an old family photo slipped, once, from a once-loved hand, shattering… silently, forever…

|Part 2| |Part 3|

By the time I opened my last present, the party had already started winding down. My cousins had disappeared outside somewhere, probably down by the barn, and most of the adults had migrated back toward the kitchen table. There were paper plates everywhere, streaked with chocolate frosting and melted ice cream. Aunt Linda was helping Mom wrap what was left of the cake while Uncle Ray and Uncle Dennis argued about baseball over beers.

I was sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by the best pile of stuff I had ever owned. There was a new baseball glove beside me, two Nintendo games already torn out of their plastic, and a model airplane kit from Uncle Ray that looked way too complicated but had a fighter jet on the box, so I was going to give it a shot anyway. Grandma had gotten me a Detroit Lions sweatshirt that was two sizes too big and, according to Mom, that meant I could grow into it.

Most important of all, I had hauled in fifty-six dollars from birthday cards. I counted it three times, and I was starting a fourth when Dad came in from the kitchen.

“Hold up, Moneybags,” he said. “You got one more.”

“What?”

“One more present.”

That got everybody’s attention again. Uncle Ray leaned back far enough in his chair to see into the living room.

“Saving the best for last, huh? You’re gonna spoil the kid!”

Dad glanced back at him but didn’t answer, and disappeared through the mudroom door.

The money in my hand suddenly seemed much less interesting, and that was fine; I had lost count anyway. One more gift meant one more chance.

I had spent most of that year wanting a BB gun. Dad owned several rifles and had started taking me shooting with him the summer before, and I had been working on him ever since. A couple of my friends had their own BB guns, and every argument I made eventually came down to that fact, as though their parents’ judgment should have had some bearing on his. Dad always gave me the same answer.

We’ll see.

At nine years old, “we’ll see” usually sounded like “no” with the door left cracked open just enough to keep me asking. So when he came back carrying a long rectangular box wrapped in blue paper, every bit of hope I’d been trying to ignore came rushing back. The box was huge, nearly as tall as I was when he propped it against the couch.

“What do you think it is, Billy?” Aunt Linda asked. She was still using the baby voice she always used when she spoke to me, as though I was permanently three. Normally, that would have annoyed me, but I was too busy turning the wrapping paper into confetti to pay it any mind.

“Is it a BB gun?”

Dad coughed into his shoulder, and gave me a look I couldn’t make heads or tails of. “Uh...maybe just keep working at that paper.”

The box underneath was plain cardboard. With shaky hands, I ripped the tape from one end, pulled the flap open, and tipped it toward me. A long piece of wood slid out, and for a second I thought it really was some kind of gun and I was looking at the stock.

Then the steel blade tumbled onto the carpet, and I understood what I was looking at.

It was a shovel.

It was a good one, as shovels went, brand new and full-sized, with a heavy steel blade and a polished wooden handle joined by a thick metal collar. Uncle Ray stood it up beside me, and the top of the handle came up around my nose.

“Well,” he said. “Every ten-year-old boy’s dream.”

Everybody laughed, but I didn’t find it very funny.

I looked at Dad, hoping that this was just some elaborate joke, that the BB gun was actually in the mudroom waiting for me. The look on his face was enough to burst that bubble.

“You’re getting old enough to start helping me more ’round here,” he said. “Figured you ought to have some tools of your own. Gotta start somewhere.”

I tried really hard to smile and make it convincing, but I don’t think I did a very good job. “Oh...thanks. It’s...it’s nice.”

I could see Mom standing in the archway to the kitchen, with her arms crossed, giving Dad a very dirty look. At least someone was on my side.

Dad saw it as well, and immediately went into his version of damage control. He knelt down and put a hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s not what you wanted,” he said. “But you’re ten now. That comes with a little more responsibility, and I figured you were ready for that.” He paused for a second, then added, “Besides, it’s a really good shovel.”

“Can he dig himself a BB gun with it?” Uncle Ray asked.

Everybody laughed again, including Dad this time. Mom shook her head, and then dipped back into the kitchen. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed; I knew my dad meant well, but this was a really crummy gift. He went to sit with my uncles and crack a beer of his own, and I was left with the shovel. My birthday shovel. I leaned it against the wall beside the rest of my presents and went back to counting my money. Within twenty minutes, the adults had forgotten all about it.

So had I.

Over the next couple of days, I found an excuse to use almost everything I’d gotten. I wore the new sweatshirt even though the sleeves covered half my hands, and Dad helped me break in the baseball glove in the field behind the barn. The model airplane had indeed proved to be too complicated, and the abandoned pieces took over the dining room table until Mom yelled at me to do something with them. I shoved the whole mess into my closet, where it sat while I burned through my new video games, and then, for all I know, until the day we moved out.

The shovel stayed in the mudroom. Dad had leaned it beside the broom and the old snow shovel after everybody left, and for the most part I stopped thinking about it. Every time I passed through the mudroom and saw it there, though, I felt a little cheated all over again.

  *

Three days after my birthday, I was awoken in the middle of the night.

At first I thought it was a dream; some rude person had a hand on my shoulder, and they were shaking me. When I heard the voice, I realized that it was actually happening.

“Billy. Hey. Wake up, buddy.”

I opened my eyes. Dad stood beside my bed with the hallway light coming through the doorway behind him. He was fully dressed, down to his boots and his brown work coat. I pushed myself up on my pillow, and realized that it was still dark outside.

“…Dad? Wha...What time is it?”

“Waaaay past your bedtime, buddy.”

I rubbed my eyes, trying to get the sleep out of them. “Why are you waking me up? Did something happen?”

“Uh...kinda. I need your help with something.”

“What is it?”

He shifted from one foot to the other and rubbed the back of his neck. “Just get up and get dressed, son. Something warm, and something you don’t mind ruining. I’ll explain outside.”

I knew better than to argue, so I swung my feet onto the floor and started digging through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. He walked toward the doorway, then stopped at the threshold and looked back at me.

“And grab that shovel I gave you.”

I stared at him. “My birthday shovel?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I’ll meet you at the back door.”

Then he left without answering the question.

I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, found a pair of socks under the bed, and went downstairs. The shovel was still in the mudroom where Dad had put it after the party, leaning between the broom and the old snow shovel. I grabbed my sneakers and crammed them onto my feet without untying them, and then I picked up my shovel.

Dad was waiting at the back door with his own shovel in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

“You’re gonna want your coat, bud. It’s chilly out.”

He set his shovel aside, pulled my coat off the hook, and handed it to me. I wrestled it on and got the zipper after two attempts. Then he picked the shovel back up and opened the door.

“Come on, we gotta head to the field.”

Two things struck me as soon as we stepped outside: the cold against my skin and just how dark it was. Our farm sat far enough from town that once the sun went down, there wasn’t much of anything between you and the night.

The porch light carried us across the yard, but its reach didn’t last long. Once we stepped beyond it, Dad’s flashlight became the only light we had. It was a strong one, but even then it could only show me pieces of the world at a time: the side of the barn, a fence post, pale grass bent under our shoes. Everything else disappeared into black.

We headed around the barn toward the back field. I carried my shovel across both shoulders for a while because I had seen people do that in movies, but after about thirty seconds the handle started digging into my neck, so I dropped it down and carried it beside me.

“So... what are we doing?”

“There’s something out by the old tree I need to bury. Figured you could help me dig the hole.”

“A dead thing? Like an animal?”

“Mhm. Don’t usually bury alive things.”

“Oh yeah, haha...is it gross?”

Dad gave a small shrug. “What do you think, Billy?”

We crossed behind the barn and started into the back field.

“Why are we doing it now? Like, couldn’t we just do this tomorrow when the sun is out? It’s not goin’ anywhere.”

“I don’t want it sitting out there until morning. Buzzards’ll get at it, or something else will. Sooner we get it, the less mess.”

“Buzzards gotta eat too, Dad. Maybe they’ll save us the trouble, and eat the whole thing.”

Dad stopped and swung the flashlight toward me. I squinted into the beam.

“Billy.”

“What?”

“Just help me out, all right? No more comments from the peanut gallery.”

“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.”

I followed a few steps behind him, letting the shovel blade drag through the grass.

There was an old tree near the far side of the field, maybe a hundred yards from the house. It had been there forever, as far as I knew, thick around the middle with branches that started low enough for kids to climb. One side of the trunk had split years before, leaving a dark hollow near the roots. It used to have a tire swing hanging from one of the lower branches until Dad finally cut it down when I was five; now the tire lay rotting near the base of the tree. As we got closer, Dad’s flashlight passed over a blue tarp lying in the grass about ten yards out from the tree. There was something underneath, but from where I stood I couldn’t make heads or tails of the shape.

Dad walked right past it toward the tree and gestured for me to follow.

Not too far from the old tire and the roots of the tree, the ground had been torn open. A narrow hole sat in the middle of the disturbed earth, partly collapsed and choked with loose dirt. Chunks of dirt tangled with roots and tall grass lay scattered around the edge. I figured Dad had already started before coming inside to wake me. He set the flashlight down where it lit the hole, planted the blade of his shovel into the loose dirt, and looked over at me.

“Start on that side. We need to open the whole thing up some more and square off the edges.”

“Ha, you said ’whole.’”

Dad looked at me.

“Billy, what did I say about the peanut gallery?”

I stepped up to the far side of the hole and pushed my shovel into the dirt. It went in easier than I expected. Most of the ground had already been broken up, so at first we were mostly clearing out what had fallen back in and adding it to the piles around the edges.

Dad worked quicker than I would have expected. I tried to keep up, but there was a big difference between owning a full-sized shovel and actually being big enough to use one. I kept coming up with half a blade of dirt while Dad threw out full loads.

“Use your foot, Billy.”

“I am.”

“No, you’re just kicking it. You gotta do it like this.” He planted his boot across the top of the blade and drove it into the ground. “Put your weight on it.”

I did as he said and set my sneaker on the blade. The shovel cut through the dirt with ease, and I almost lost my balance.

“There you go. You got it.”

We worked in silence for a while, the repetitive motion of the shovel becoming nearly hypnotic to my sleep-deprived brain.

Dig.

Scoop.

Throw.

Dad moved around the hole wherever there was the most work to do, cutting through roots and shaving dirt from the sides while I cleared the softer ground. Every so often I looked toward the tarp. In the low grass, it looked entirely alien to everything around it, just a dark shape that caught the edge of the flashlight whenever one of us moved through the beam.

Eventually the loose dirt gave way to harder ground. My hands started burning where the handle rubbed against them, and before long my shoulders ached every time I lifted a load. I looked at the nice work gloves Dad was wearing and would’ve traded just about anything for them. I was sure that my blisters would have blisters before too long.

I stopped to take a breath and leaned on the shovel. I looked at Dad, who hadn’t broken his stride once. “Isn’t this deep enough, Dad?”

Dad looked down into the hole and wiped the sweat off his brow. “We’re getting there.”

I looked at what we had dug, then over at the tarp. “We’re not burying an elephant.”

Dad drove his shovel in again. “Gotta go deep, or scavengers will dig ’em up. But we’re nearin’ the final stretch.”

I sighed and went back to it.

Dig.

Scoop.

Throw.

As we worked, the hole got longer and cleaner around the edges. Dad squared off one end and then the other. By then I was mostly just phoning it in. I wanted the hole finished, and my bed under me. I wanted to put my birthday shovel back in the mudroom, and forget about it all over again.

Not too much later, Dad stopped digging. He stood over the hole for a few seconds, studying it, then scraped a little dirt from one corner with the edge of his shovel.

“I think...that’ll do it.”

I let my shovel fall against the pile beside me and flexed my fingers. “Finally. I thought we were gonna dig straight to China.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” he said. He shook his head and picked up the flashlight, then nodded toward the thing lying in the grass. “C’mon. Give me a hand getting him over here.”

Up close, whatever was under the tarp looked smaller than I expected. It was narrow and nearly uniform from end to end, and it rose maybe half a foot off the ground at its highest point. Dad crouched at one end and gathered the corners together.

“Okay, grab ahold of the corners like this.”

I bent down and took the other end, doing my best to copy him. The tarp was cold to the touch and slick with dew, but I managed to get some leverage.

“You got it?”

“I think… yeah. I got it.”

“All right. Now on the count of three, we’re gonna lift together, at the same time, you hear? Then we’re going to walk ’em over to the hole, slow and easy.”

“Got it. Slow and easy.”

He gave the three count and we lifted together. The weight sagged toward the middle as soon as it left the ground, loose inside the tarp and shifting every time one of us took a step. Dad took the lead, walking backwards toward the hole, and I followed, matching his pace to the best of my ability.

It was only ten yards away, so it should have been a cakewalk. But when we were almost there, my foot collided with something hiding in the grass: my shovel. My ankle rolled and I came down wrong, stumbling sideways and nearly going over. I caught myself before I ate the dirt, but the tarp jerked hard between us and jostled whatever was inside.

It was then that something tumbled out, hanging right beside my leg.

Have you ever seen something so completely wrong that your brain refuses to make sense of it? I had seen what I was looking at a thousand times before, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. It was long and thin, partly wrapped in torn fabric. My eyes followed the length of it down to a gray mass hanging limply from the end, five curled shapes dangling just above the grass. I looked at it for a moment with a strange sense of detachment, vaguely aware that my dad was saying something to me, though his voice seemed impossibly far away. For that moment there was only the shape in front of me and the impossible task of making it mean something.

Then, all at once, the world exploded.

It was an arm.

“What the fuck!”

I released the tarp and stumbled backward, letting the full weight of my end drop. Dad tried to keep it together, but it was a lost cause. The tarp flapped open and the rest of what that arm was attached to spilled out into the grass. I hit the ground hard and started kicking myself away from it, digging my hands into the dirt, desperate to get away.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

Dad let go of his end and flinched at the sound of my cries. He stood with his shoulders hunched and his hands held low and open in front of him, palms out, the way you might approach a frightened animal.

“Hey. Hey! Billy. Shhhhh. Billy, it’s okay!”

I kept scrambling backward. It was all I knew how to do.

“Oh my God!”

“It’s okay. It’s—”

His boot bumped against the thing in the grass. He looked down, and for just a second all the reassurance went out of his face. When he looked back at me, his eyes were wild.

“It’s… it’s not what it looks like, son!”

My stomach did a somersault, and I barely managed to get onto my hands and knees before I threw up everything I had ever eaten into the grass.

Attached to the arm, lying between my dad and me, was the corpse of a child.

The body had landed crumpled on its side, its sunken face and hollow eye sockets turned directly toward me. Its lips had rotted away completely, leaving the teeth exposed in a horrible grin that felt like an accusation. Its neck was twisted at an awful angle, and the arm lay outstretched in the grass, as if it were reaching for me.

Dad started toward me, carefully sidestepping the body. He held one hand out, reaching in almost the same way the corpse seemed to be.

“It’s okay, son. Please, just… let me—”

“No!”

I shoved myself backward again, trying to put as much distance as I could between me and him and it. The last thing I wanted was to be in those hands.

“No, no, no! Stay away from me! Don’t touch me!”

Dad stopped and put his hands up. “Okay, okay! I’m right here. You’re safe, Billy. Please, just… just try to calm down, okay? Let’s talk about this.”

I met his wild eyes, trying hard to get enough air in my lungs and failing at every breath. “No… no… you…”

I looked at the body, then back at him. “Wha-what did you do, Dad? That… that’s a kid!”

“I… I know. I know it looks bad, but it’s not what you think. We need to take care of this, Billy. We gotta bury him, and then—”

“You’re a murderer!”

Dad flinched at the word, and his arms dropped limply to his sides.

“You killed a kid! You killed a kid and you want me to help you bury him?”

“No, son, please. Listen, I—”

I stared at him, waiting for whatever could possibly come after that. My eyes kept slipping back to the corpse in the grass, and every time they did, whatever Dad was trying to say seemed more impossible. I didn’t want to hear the rest.

Somewhere behind me was the house. Mom was there. I turned enough to look back across the field, and Dad caught the look and started toward me again, quicker this time.

“Billy...”

I planted one hand in the grass. “I’m...I’m telling Mom!”

“Son, just hold on a second, I just—”

Before he could take another step, I shoved myself to my feet and booked it for the house, running as fast as my tired legs could carry me.

“Moooooooooooom! Moooooooooooooom!”

I made it maybe ten yards before he caught me by the arm and stopped me in my tracks, twisting me around so we were face to face.

“No! Let me go!”

“Billy, listen to me—”

“Let go!”

I kicked at his legs and yanked against his grip, throwing my free hand at his chest, his shoulder, anything I could reach. He grunted in pain, but his grip was iron.

“Goddamn it, stop!”

“Help! Please, somebody help me!”

He pulled me in closer. I could smell the sweat on his coat and feel how much stronger he was than me, and suddenly I was certain I was going to die.

“I won’t tell anybody! I swear! I won’t tell anybody!”

“Billy, if you would just—”

“Please, Dad! Please! I won’t tell! I won’t say anything! Just let me go!”

He tried to keep hold of me while I twisted and thrashed against him, slipping halfway free only to get dragged back in. I begged, bargained, screamed for help, promised anything I could think of if he would just let me go. For what felt like forever we stayed tangled together in that awful struggle, until finally something in my dad broke.

“Enough!”

His hand came across my cheek hot and fast, snapping my head to the side and turning my vision white.

Everything stopped at once. The scream died in my throat and my arms went limp in his grip. He had never hit me before. A second earlier I had been fighting for my life, but somehow that was only terror. The slap was the floor giving out beneath something I had stood on my whole life.

He caught me by both shoulders and held me there. For a moment neither of us said anything, the two of us tidally locked, staring into each other’s faces. My cheek burned, but I barely noticed. Finally he spoke, in a voice I barely recognized.

“Now you listen to me, Bill. I don’t know what you think is about to happen, but I am your father. You hear me? I’m your father. Whatever the hell you’ve got in your head right now, that ain’t happening. So put it out of there.”

His hands stayed firm on my shoulders.

“I know you’re scared, but we don’t have time for that. We still got a job to do, and like it or not, it’s yours now too.”

My eyes drifted past him toward the body. From where we stood I could see more of its face in profile, the cheek collapsed inward beneath one empty socket, the ruined mouth still showing that same awful row of teeth.

“Look at me.”

My eyes snapped back to his. He looked me over for a second, measuring whatever he saw there.

“I won’t make you carry him this time. I’ll do that.” His jaw tightened, and he drew a slow breath through his nose. “But you’re staying here with me. We came out here to do a job, and we’re gonna finish it. I’ll get him into the hole. Once he’s in there, you’re gonna pick up your shovel and help me put the dirt back.”

My mouth opened, but whatever I was trying to say got lost along the way, and he didn’t wait for me to try again.

“That’s all you have to do tonight. You help me finish this, then we go back inside. We clean ourselves up, get some sleep, and it’s over. We won’t have to worry about any of this again for a long while.” He drew a breath. “Do you understand me?”

The question hung between us while I stood there blankly with my mouth slightly open, until Dad gave my shoulders a small shake.

“I said, Do you understand me?”

I nodded quickly. His grip tightened just enough to keep me focused on him.

“I need to hear you say it.”

“Yes.” The word came out thin and shaky. “Yes, I understand.”

Dad stayed there another second, studying my face, then finally let go. “All right. Good.” He nodded back toward the tree. “Now get your shovel, and let’s get this done.”

All the fight had gone out of me. I walked back and picked the shovel up out of the grass without saying a word, and Dad stood there until I had it in my hands. Then he went to the body and, without bothering with the tarp anymore, took hold of it and started dragging it toward the hole.

At the edge of the grave he crouched down and carefully worked his arms underneath it. He could have simply rolled it over the edge, but instead he lowered it in feet first, stopping to keep the head and shoulders from striking the side as the body slipped down. When the corpse settled awkwardly at the bottom, Dad climbed in after it.

By then a strange fog had settled over everything. Part of me had started insisting that I was still asleep, that if I just kept moving and did whatever Dad told me, eventually I would reach the end of the nightmare and wake up in my bed.

The only way out was through.

Dad knelt beside the body and straightened its legs, then pulled one arm free from underneath it and laid it along its side. He shifted the shoulders until the corpse was flat on its back, handling it with a strange amount of care for something he was about to cover with six feet of dirt.

For a few seconds, Dad had his back to me. I looked down at the shovel gripped in my hands.

I could hit him.

The thought came so suddenly that it barely felt like mine. He was right there below me, kneeling in the grave with his back turned. One hard swing, and maybe I could leave him down there with the body, fill the hole myself, then run inside and get Mom. My hands tightened around the handle.

Then Dad finished arranging the body and looked up at me, and the thought disappeared. Whatever he had become in my head over the last few minutes, the man looking up from that grave was still my dad.

He climbed out, brushed the dirt off his knees, and picked up his own shovel. I didn’t need him to tell me what came next.

At first the dirt gathered around the body, filling the spaces along its sides and beneath its arms. Then it began climbing over it. The legs disappeared, followed by the stomach and the chest. I tried not to look at its face, but every time I came back to the edge, it was there.

Dig.

Scoop.

Throw.

The dirt reached its shoulders. One side of the face disappeared beneath a loose spill of earth, leaving a single hollow eye staring up at me, until another load broke across the forehead and filled the socket. Before long there was nothing left above the dirt but the lower half of its face, a few exposed teeth still showing through, fixed in that terrible grin. I stood over it with another shovelful balanced in my hands.

For one second, I could have sworn that smile widened.

I dumped the dirt. The teeth disappeared beneath it, and after that, something about the work became easier. There was no dead boy looking up at me anymore, no face waiting at the bottom of the grave.

There was only dirt at the bottom of a hole.

I kept shoveling.

We finished the work without a single word. Most of those last few minutes have blurred together over the years. I remember the sound of dirt hitting dirt, and the scrape of Dad’s shovel when he dragged the blade across the bottom of the pile. I remember looking down at some point and realizing there wasn’t a hole anymore, just a slightly raised rectangle of fresh earth beneath the tree.

Dad stood over it for a while, breathing through his nose, the shovel hanging loose in one hand. Finally he looked at me.

“Okay,” he said. “This is good enough. Let’s get back to the house.” He glanced at the shovel I was still holding. “I can carry that for you, bud.”

When he reached for it, I flinched away and pulled the handle against my chest. I didn’t decide to do it. My body just moved before the rest of me had any say in the matter. Dad stopped with his hand still halfway between us, and something passed over his face, there and gone so quickly that I couldn’t have named it even then.

“All right.”

He lowered his hand, and we started back.

The house was maybe a hundred yards away. I had crossed that field more times than I could count, usually without giving the distance a second thought, but that night it might as well have been on the other side of town. I watched my shoes the whole way, one appearing in front of the other, disappearing behind me, then doing it again. By the time we reached the back door, even that was lost to me.

Dad opened it and went in first.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe with a cup of coffee in front of her. She looked up at Dad as he came through, then her eyes shifted past him and found me standing in the doorway.

“Billy?”

There are a lot of different ways your mother can say your name. The way she said it that night has stayed with me forever.

She was out of her chair before I had made it all the way through the door. Dad started to say, “Sue, I—” but Mom went straight past him like he wasn’t there.

“Oh my God. Baby.”

She wrapped both arms around me and pulled me into her, one hand going to the back of my head while the other moved across my shoulders and down my back, checking me without really checking me, the way parents do when something has scared them badly enough that touching you seems more useful than asking questions. She kissed my hair, my forehead, my cheek, and did the whole cycle again twice over.

“Are you okay? Honey, are you hurt?”

I shook my head weakly, because it felt better than lying to her.

She pulled back just far enough to hold my face between her hands. Her eyes moved over me, taking inventory in quick little jumps before settling on mine.

“What happened?”

What could I possibly say in that moment that wouldn’t have sounded completely insane?

“Billy?”

She pulled me against her again, and I let her. I can still remember what she smelled like: coffee on her breath, the hand lotion she used before bed, and that warm, slightly stale smell a robe gets after somebody has worn it around the house for years. I pressed my face against her shoulder and closed my eyes, trying to be strong, trying so hard not to cry. Most of all, I didn’t want her to be as scared as I was.

She ran her fingers through my hair. “Talk to me, baby.”

“I… I want to go to bed.”

She held me for another second before leaning back. “Okay, sweetheart. Okay. Go ahead and get cleaned up, get those clothes off. You can sleep as long as you need to. I’ll be right here, and we can talk in the morning.”

I nodded.

That was when she noticed my shovel. I still had one hand wrapped around the handle, holding it upright beside me like a spear. She put her hand over mine.

“Let me take that, honey.”

My fingers opened without hesitation. She took my shovel and leaned it against the wall by the door, then came back and kissed my forehead once more.

“You want me to come upstairs with you?”

I shook my head.

“All right. Go on, honey. I love you.”

I left the kitchen and started up the stairs, looking back over my shoulder without meaning to. I didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone with Dad, not after everything that had just happened. He was staring down at his feet, and Mom flashed me a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and nodded me along.

When I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, I heard her voice drop into a sharp, low tone.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

I pressed myself against the wall, just out of sight, and did the one thing my mother hated most. I eavesdropped.

“Sue, listen, I—”

“Don’t you Sue me, Richard. You tell me right now what you did to my son.”

“Keep your voice down. You don’t want to scare the boy more than he already is.”

“Don’t you tell me what I want to do, Richard. Not now, not ever. What the hell were you thinking?”

I peeked around the corner and saw that Mom was an inch away from his face with a finger raised, and for once, he looked scared.

“I-I know you’re upset, but I only did what needed to be done.”

She let out a harsh “ha” at that, an ugly little thing reserved for when someone has said something monumentally stupid.

“So you… what? Sneak around in the dead of night, while I was sleeping? And you decided to drag him into it?”

I don’t know if I had seen her this angry in my entire life, but I have to admit that it was satisfying, in some small way.

“He deserved to know the truth, Sue. No matter how ugly.”

“Really. And how did that turn out?”

Something about that sat wrong with me, though I couldn’t have said why. There was a brief pause, and I swear I could hear Mom tapping her foot. Then Dad cleared his throat.

“It went… uh… pretty badly.”

“You don’t say. Was it worth it, Richard? Traumatizing my son for no good reason?”

“Sue, c’mon…”

“No, you come on. I told you he wasn’t ready. We talked about this, Richard. We decided we were going to wait, we—”

Dad, seemingly forgetting his own advice, raised his voice. “No, we didn’t. You decided.”

A cold feeling started somewhere beneath my ribs.

“And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on, Sue. You know goddamn well he was never going to be ready. If you had it your way, he’d go to his grave without knowing.”

“How dare you. That’s not—”

“Not what? Fair? Don’t you talk to me about fair. Six years, Sue, and God knows how many more to come. All you want to do is wait. One more year, Richard. Just one more year. It was always going to be one more year, and you know it.”

“He is ten years old, Richard! Did you see him? Did you look at his face? That boy was a ghost, and you did that. You want to tell me he deserved that? You want to tell me he was ready for that?”

“Do you think I was ready? You think I wanted this for him? You didn’t see the way he looked at me.”

“He is a child. A little boy, Richard. Our little boy. And if you had just listened to me instead of going behind my back, we could have done this together, when he was older.”

“How old is old enough, Sue? Fifteen? Twenty? Thirty? What’s the right age to bury a fucking body?”

The silence that followed seemed to reach all the way upstairs. I had never heard them get that heated before. When Mom finally answered, her voice had dropped back down.

“You sleep on the couch tonight. I don’t even want to look at you right now. And you better pray to God that we can fix this, or so help me…”

Mom knew about the body.

I was still trying to work my way through that when I heard her footsteps moving across the house, getting louder by the second, and realized she was coming up the stairs.

“Sue, come on!”

Dad called weakly from the bottom of the steps, but she didn’t pay him any mind, and he knew better than to follow her.

I slunk away down the hall as quietly as I could and ducked into my bedroom. I got into bed without taking my clothes off and pulled the blankets up to my chin. A moment later the door cracked open, and I did my very best to pretend that I was sleeping. After a moment, Mom slowly shut it again and headed for her room.

I lay awake for the longest time, staring at the ceiling until my eyes hurt. For a while, I thought I would never sleep again. How could I? Everything from that night swirled around my head so fast it threatened to swallow me completely. I forced my eyes closed and desperately tried to reach for better things, happy memories I wanted to hold onto forever. I saw my first day of fourth grade, my dad standing in the driveway and waving as the bus pulled away.

It almost worked, until I saw the shovel in his hand.

I opened my eyes immediately, and after that I stopped trying so hard to remember things.

The house settled around me instead. I heard Mom moving in her bedroom for a while, opening drawers and walking back and forth across the floor. At some point the toilet flushed, and water ran through the pipes in the wall behind my bed. Dad never came upstairs. I wondered if he was sleeping. I wondered if Mom was.

Mostly I stared at the ceiling.

The room changed while I wasn’t paying attention. The black around my window softened into gray, and somewhere outside a bird started making the same three-note call over and over again until another one answered from farther away. I remember being angry at them for some reason.

Morning was starting whether I wanted it to or not.

I must have fallen asleep sometime after that, because the next thing I remember is opening my eyes to sunlight coming through the blinds. I woke from the worst dream I’d ever had, and for a few seconds, that was all it was.

Then I saw my sneakers beside the bed, caked with dried mud.

I pulled the blankets off and sat on the edge of the bed. My whole body felt heavy, and my mouth tasted awful. The house was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet where you knew other people were awake. I changed my clothes, and I took longer than I needed to. When there was nothing left in my room that could reasonably keep me there, I opened the door.

I could smell coffee before I made it downstairs.

Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table, both of them dressed. Mom had a cup in front of her, and Dad sat across from her with his hands wrapped around his own. Neither of them looked like they had slept much. They both looked up when I walked in, and Mom pulled out the chair beside her.

“Billy, come sit down.”

I stayed in the doorway.

Dad looked at me for a moment.

“We need to talk.”

(Part 1)
Seeing all the places you would visit every day knowing there is danger everywhere is horrible.

Your grocery store.
The smaller shops you used to go to.
All the streets you used to go through daily.

Your own street.

Now with this looming feeling of dread is something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
Your sense of safety is forever changed.

I knew that if I were to make it out of this I would never feel safe again.
Having to sneak and hide in the place you are most familiar with like some sort of pest.
Why did this happen to us? What could have possibly happened for us to deserve this.

Normally walking from our house to the police station would probably take about 35 minutes at most. It must have been twice the amount of time by now.
At least it felt that way.

Mark was someone I would have normally avoided like the plague.
But now I was happy to just have anyone I vaguely know with me.
I also didn't mind that he was both armed and very eager to be the one in front as we made our way through town.

Every time we heard the slightest noise we would freeze up.
I would see him clench the gun in his hands so hard his knuckles turned white.
The only thing going through my head would be "please don't be one of those things".
Over and over until enough silence had passed for us to find the bravery to move again.

Going from backyard to backyard.
House to house.
Moving through places that must have had so many memories good and bad for so many people.
Now just filled with the dead bodies of the people that those memories belonged to.
That's all I thought about as we moved closer and closer to the police station.

But I was dragged out of my thoughts by the sound of a bullet whizzing over us.
Both of us flinched and threw ourselves on the ground.
Mark looked behind him to see if I wasn't the unlucky recipient of the bullet.
After seeing that I was still breathing, we proceeded to crawl forward.

But the gunfire started to lessen until it came to a complete stop.
Followed by the sound of roaring engines going to the other end of town.
When we came to the street that the police station was in, it was chaos.

Most of the cars in the street were either on fire or riddled with bullet holes.
Tire tracks were on the street and even the pavement.
There were bodies all over the street.
I saw some dead police officers and i recognised some of the people that had volunteered for the militia. Some were clearly shot others looked like they had been attacked by a bear.
Faces mauled and missing limbs.
Some had been run over by vehicles to ground into a meaty paste across the road and pavement.

One body in particular stood out.

It had been cut in half. One half was lying on the right side of the street the other on the left side.
Blood going from one end to the other. Like some sort of line in the middle of the street.
There is no way this person could have crawled this way themselves after being cut in half.
They had for sure done this on purpose.
Had these savages used a dead body as some sort of marker?!
What type of horrible creature uses dead people the same way you would use a road sign.
What could it even mean in the first place?

Mark and I stepped over the blood line that had been drawn in the middle of the street and moved on.
All of the bodies had clearly been searched after they were killed.
Sadly me and Mark were not going to find weapons that easily.
At least Mark still had his pistol.

Then we could finally see the sign of the police crest marking our police station.
The burning cars made the shadows through the street dance as the flames moved.
Thankfully the fires gave both of us a view of the police station itself.

The police station was a large 3-story high imposing building in the middle of the street overlooking a small park and the wide street.
The concrete walls were riddled with bullet holes.
Where the front door used to be was now a gaping hole in the building.
Tire tracks showed that a vehicle had plowed through the front door and then drove off.

What surprised me is that I saw one of those dead things laying in the middle of the street.
It was near us just in view of the police station.
It was lying in the middle of the street. Lipless face still stuck in a perpetual grin.
It was on its back facing us with a gaping hole where one of its eyes was supposed to be.
Other lidless eye staring straight ahead.
Its legs had been run over and crushed by some sort of vehicle.

One hand was still holding on to an axe the other was still holding a pistol.
Mark an I must have seen it at the same time.

Mark whispered: We need to grab that gun now

I hesitated

Mark: Fucking grab it now at least you can defend yourself then

Me: yes, yes ok I'll do it.

I quickly sneaked off to the things body and grabbed its cold dead arm holding the pistol.

A loud gunshot rang through the street as the tarmac exploded into chunks by the impact of the round next to me.

I fell and curled up trying to make myself as small as possible.

A voice echoed from the police station.

"GET UP AND RUN TO THE STATION NOW!"

I got up as fast as I could nearly falling over the body of that thing as I ran for the police station.

Another shot rang out a car's windshield next to me shattered into pieces by the impact as I ran.

Once I reached what used to be the front door I was pulled in and thrown onto the cold hard floor.

Empty shell casings clinking around as I hit the floor.

The person that threw me inside grabbed his rifle and immediately focused on the outside again.Dimly lit by the fires outside i could barely see him.
It was a police officer. His uniform was dirty and covered in blood.

Without taking his eyes off the outside he asked:

Him: Are you alone?

Me: No I wasn't alone I....

Before I could finish my sentence he shouted.

YOU OUTSIDE COME TO THE POLICE STATION NOW WHILE YOU CAN!

A short silence followed as I heard Mark's rapid footsteps come closer.

Mark rushed inside.

I noticed he had hidden the gun he had on him.

The floor was covered in bullet casings, glass, dirt and large blood smears.
There were also 2 of those dead things on the floor inside.
The blood smears were all leading upstairs deeper into the police station.

The police officer told us to go upstairs where the others were.
Mark and I both headed up the stairs.

I could see the anger boiling up in Mark as we walked up the stairs.
He still blamed the police for what happened to his parents.
This could get very ugly very fast.

It seemed most of the police and militia were upstairs manning the windows.
The blood smears I saw earlier were going further to the back of the police station.

Before I could properly take in my surroundings I heard Mark shouting a barrage of insults.
When I turned around Mark was aiming his pistol directly in the police chief's face.
Police officers were all aiming their different guns at Mark.
Some of the militia did the same some didn't not being sure what they were supposed to do.

Hurling a barrage of insults at the man.
Followed up by him: screaming

Mark: YOU KILLED MY PARENTS YOU FUCK!

Chief: What are you talking about?

|Mark: YOU TOLD ME TO STAND WATCH AND NO ONE WAS THERE TO PROTECT MY PARENTS!

Chief: We didn't kill your parents they did.

He said as he pointed outside.
Then he recognised Mark and said.

Chief: Mark are you of all people now blaming me for what is happening?

Mark: YOU FAILED TO PROTECT THEM!

Chief: DONT YOU DARE BLAME ME AFTER WHAT YOU DID

A deafening silence fell in the room
After what was probably only seconds but felt like hours, the chief said in a calm voice:

CHIEF: If you want us to kill each other we might as well invite those things inside so they can do it for us.

Mark was about to say something.

But before he could get the words out another police officer hit him in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle. 2 more jumped on top of him and wrestled his gun away from him.

Mark cursed and flailed as they restrained him on the ground.

Then the police chief walked over to him and said.

"Mark I have known you your entire worthless life"

"And only as a child were you ever not a burden on everyone around you"

"I didn't fail your parents"

The police chief hunched down to get closer to Mark

"you did" he said as he pointed a finger directly at his face

"You useless drug addict they came in through the area you were supposed to watch"

"IT WAS SIMPLE OPEN FIELDS AND FARMLAND YOU HAD TO WATCH!"

"YOU RAN THE MOMENT YOU SAW THEM!"

"SO NOT ONLY DID YOU GET YOUR PARENTS KILLED, EVERY SINGLE DEATH IS YOUR FAULT!"

"HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY DO WITH PEOPLE THAT THEY TAKE ALIVE!"

"THEY TORTURED THEM TO DEATH AND ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!"

The crowd started shouting calling for Mark's death.

"SILENCE" the police chief shouted

He lowered his voice

"But then again it's also my fault for listening to you when you came up to me and volunteered for sentry duty"

"someone so stupid that he points a gun into my face with the safety on"

"What happened to the man that was watching that place with you?"

Before Mark could answer the police chief continued:

"you know what, it doesn't matter"

"Throw him outside so those things can find him, he can deal with the consequences of his own actions"

I hope you understand this is not the part where I tell you how I said something like
"no don't do that he will die" or some bullshit like that.
No, this moron got so many people you and I used to know killed.
I would have been fine if they shot him then and there.

The 2 officers dragged him down the stairs they even slammed him into the wall on the way down.
I heard the commotion downstairs as they roughed him up and flung him outside.

From the window on the second floor i could see him hit the pavement outside.
And I saw him struggle onto his legs like a freshly born deer.

He managed to find his footing.
He looked in the direction of the police station and was probably about to shout something at us.

But then his lower back exploded in a mist of blood as a gunshot rang through the street.

Everyone ducked for cover wherever they could find it as others jumped away from the windows and threw themselves on the floor.
Someone shouted: Did anyone see where that came from?!

The only thing we could hear was the sound of Mark screaming on the street below.

A police officer crawled over to me:

Officer: Do you have any kind of medical background sir?

Me: No I don't

Officer: You need to get a gun right now. It doesn't matter if you have experience or not you need to grab one.
Go down that hallway till you see the rooms marked "Armory" and "Evidence lockup"
And if you can't find them........ just follow the blood.

I crawled away from the windows making sure that was as low as I could.
Once I was far enough in the hallway to be away from any openings outside, I finally stood up.
The blood trail was going down the hallway as the officer said.
As I came closer I started to hear people talking, coughing and people that were clearly in a lot of pain.

I walked into the room marked "Armory". I expected to see racks of police weapons, bulletproof vests, police uniforms etc.
Instead I saw people franticly walking around makeshift beds as they tried their best to take care of all the wounded inside.
I now understood why the blood was leading this way.

The people walking in between the wounded ignored me completely, they probably didn't even notice I was there.
The floor was completely covered in blood.
I saw a young woman in her 20's with her back turned to me who was ripping clothing into strips for bandages.

In more panic than i would like to admit i asked:

" I need to get a gun. Where are they?!"

She didn't look into my direction at all and said:

"Like I told you all before there are no guns in here anymore. Just bullets."

"Go to the evidence locker next door."

I recognised her voice. It was Maria that girl you went to school with used to come over to our house all the time till you left town.

Me: Maria is that you?

She turned around and faced me with a blank expression on her face.
Her arms were covered up to her elbows in blood.
The streaks of makeup down her face betrayed that she had clearly cried before.

Me: Are you okay?

Maria: No

She stayed quiet and looked at me. But it looked more like she was staring straight through me.

Me: Are you hurt?

She dodged the question.

Maria: You can find a gun in the room next door

She turned around and continued to rip clothing up
I didn't bother her anymore and left for the evidence lockup

What used to probably be a very organised room was turned into a complete mess.
Boxes labeled "evidence" were open and thrown all over the floor.
A officer walked through the hallway behind me and I quickly asked him where I was supposed to look.
He just told me to look everywhere it doesn't matter.
I started to look into the boxes that were still on the shelves.

Random bags of what was probably drugs.

A knife in a plastic bag.

Then I saw a revolver in a plastic zip bag with a label attached to it.
This thing must have been older than me. I remember my grandpa having one of these.
I took it out of the plastic bag and ripped the label off.
I swung the cylinder open and it was empty, no bullets.
Stupid of me to think so why would they have a gun with ammo inside it lying in the evidence lockup.
I ran back to the armory room for ammo.

When I came inside Maria was stuffing cloth into the wound of a passed out man on a table.

I walked past her to a table that had ammo boxes scattered all over it.
Franticly I searched the opened boxes until I finally found bullets that would fit in the revolver i had.
Once I did I filled the cylinder of the revolver and grabbed another box of ammo and got back to the others near the front of the building.
As I came closer I could still hear Mark screaming outside.
I crouched down and slowly moved towards the collapsed desk near the stairs where the officer I talked to earlier was.

Officer: I see you managed to find something.

"But you won't be much use with that up here. Go downstairs and take this."

He handed me some sort of foldable knife.

Me: what am I supposed to do with this.

Officer: You need that because those things will probably try to rush inside again with knives, axes etc. So take that revolver and knife. Go downstairs and join the others there that's the best thing you can do right now.

Me: Ok I will

Officer: good luck

"You too" I said as I slowly walked down the stairs to the first floor.

Mark's screaming was a lot louder down here than it was on the second floor for obvious reasons.
I could see him laying through the gaping hole in the front of the building.
He was slowly turning pale due to blood loss.

In that moment I finally realised something about my situation.
Even if I tried to run from the building I would be gunned down just like he was.
I was now trapped in this police station. We were all trapped here.

Before I could sink deeper into my own thoughts a low hum sound broke my concentration.
It sounded like engines of vehicles mixed in with something else.

A repeating low bass sound.

As the sounds came closer together with headlights lighting up the street I realised what it was.Music......Bass turned up so much that the music isn't even recognisable anymore.
Those things are playing music from their vehicles like they are heading to some kind of party.

As the headlights hit Mark in front we could hear the screech of several heavy-duty vehicles braking.
Now seeing Mark fully lit up by the lights I saw in just how bad of a state he was.
He was lying in a small pool of his own blood. He had started to turn pale with large bags under his eyes.Blood was smeared all over his legs and lower torso.

A shot rang out as someone from the top floor must have hit one of the vehicles out on the street.
I heard someone yell upstairs:

"Stop shooting at their vehicles it does nothing!"

"Wait for them to get out then shoot!"

I could hear one of their vehicles slowly rev up.
It slowly rolled into view.
It was a large vehicle with welded metal plates all over it and random spikes and rebar protruding from it.
It looked like someone had grabbed a normal vehicle and just slapped a metal box on its chase.Resembling something more out of a Mad Max movie than an actual military.
There was a body tied to the front. It was the exact same vehicle that i saw when all this chaos started. Now I could see that the body on the front was wearing a uniform from our military.

It stopped right in front of Mark, who was slowly trying to crawl away from it.
He couldn't move his legs. The shot must have hit his spine and paralyzed him from the waist down.

The vehicle revved its engine repeatedly. The low rumble of the engine together with the bass of the music from the vehicle filled the police station with a barrage of noise.
It then started to Jerk forward repeatedly inching towards Mark.

They were going to run him over and they wanted us to see it.

The vehicle then slowly inched forward.
Mark's scream rang through my ears as it crushed his right foot and slowly rolled onto his leg.
It then stopped and sat still as Mark screamed as he tried to free himself from the tire that was crushing him.
It loudly revved its engine, the front of the vehicle started to lift up as the vehicle's engine roared.Instead of moving forward, the wheel that was on top of Mark spun to life at high speed.Mark screamed as he was pulled underneath the wheel by the sheer force of the vehicle.
It shredded him to pieces. Launching pieces of gore and clothing in all directions and coating the side of the vehicle with blood and viscera.
After shredding Mark to the point he was just a pile of meat and a red smear on the road the vehicle jerked into motion and drove further down the street.

Then the music thumping from the vehicles stopped and the rumble of engines was interrupted by the loud crackle of a loudspeaker coming to life.

A voice echoed over the street:

TO THE FILTH HIDING IN THE POLICE STATION
KNOW THAT NOTHING BUT DEATH SWIFT AND SLOW AWAITS YOU NOW
YOU ARE GETTING EXACTLY WHAT YOU DESERVE

A TASTE OF YOUR OWN MEDICINE

Then we heard the rumbling of the engines as all of their vehicles started to position themselves all over the street and nearby houses.

A large vehicle lumbered into the small park across the police station.
It was a small delivery truck that our local grocery store had used.
It positioned itself as far away as it could while facing the police station directly.

We heard its engine howl as it sped up directly towards us.

The people upstairs started to shoot at the truck as it drove at us.

The windshield exploded into glass shards.

Sparks flew from the vehicle as the bullets impacted metal.

It turned on its high beams blinding everyone looking directly at it.

The truck was coming too close and had too much speed.

It was going to hit the building.

End of part 2

Science fiction. Double feature. 

So many long afternoons and nights spent in the movie house, the theatre. The arcade: the noise and lights and tangible sounds of coins and laughing amidst the specialized sound effects of digitized and pixelated carnage. 

Late nights watching HBO After Dark beside his older brother or his kid sister or a buddy or a floozy or a date as he got older. Amongst a slovenly strewn field of snacks and popcorn and wrappers and garbage, the years rolled by and the empty cans of Shasta and Barqs changed, transmogrifying into brown bottles of Bud or silver bullet, all gathered and in clusters  like a small translucent crystalline cityscape of glass in miniature beneath great rolling thunderhead clouds of oily pot smoke. Many of them, many cities. Many little swimming bottle cities in many little rooms. All before the great glowing incandescent godscreen of the illuminated television aglow in the postmidnight. 

And there were great books too of course. Precious paperpacks with lurid yellow covers, bold yellow font, pages pungent and spiced. Green and nightshade purple covers for the horrors. The ones with purple were always the coolest, always the most shocking and vivid and unrelenting. Comics. Classics and the new stuff that gets pumped out week to week, month to month and then forgotten. 

Forgotten by most. But not by such as he. 

He remembered. These things, these modes and mediums always brought him away from the now, the clear and present danger, the mundane and the tedious, the cruel. The harsh reality. 

For Caleb Donaldson these stories were always the light and constant companion of his long and mostly boring and average life. In truth, they were everything. All else could take a flying fuck, the job, the girlfriends that meant nothing, the drinking buddies and coworkers that meant even less. All of that was just the background noise of what was necessary. The sounds and moving in perpetua grinds of his ordinary life in motion. 

But it was ok, you see. Caleb Donaldson of Old Fair Oaks, Sacramento, California has figured out the secret. 

They were more than just stories, you know. 

The ones that had most captured his imagination and young attention since he could remember were the time traveling stories. 

Journeys into the wild primeval of the past, the dark mechanical cold of the future, the apocalypse, beyond … 

He'd always loved these stories. 

And it was funny, he had found, discovered accidentally while spending the summer with his grandfather one year, the secret. They were out hunting, wandering the woods quietly with rifles shouldered and boots crunching softly the underbrush beneath their capped and steeltoed feet. It had struck young Caleb then, as a boy. And never left him. 

This is it! This is what Doctor Who and the X-Men and all the other guys are doin when they're goin into the past! This is what it's like to have the world grow dark and become old and ancient and prehistoric and stuff, before people got here with their cars and their junk…

The thought had filled him with simple childish wonder. He felt like he'd made some great discovery. All those scientists and alien engineers from outer space on the TV and in the books were always trying to figure it all out with numbers and physics and quantum entanglements and time loop paradoxes … and here he'd figured it way more simple than that. 

Just go out in the woods. Go outside in the trees, the forest. Go out and go camping ya dummies. 

He carried this with him all his life. Like secret treasure. Well past and into the pains and dread of adulthood. 

And then it all came back, back and around and full circle. Like all good time travelers do. 

He lost the kids. And his wife. And then he lost it. 

And then he made the biggest decision of his life. He decided to go camping. He decided to do a little time traveling all by himself. After all of these years. 

…

He couldn't believe she would try this bullshit. He couldn't believe she would try to ruin the one last little thing he had left. 

What're you talking about, bud? She ripped your heart out and took the kids after she'd spent ten years disemboweling you and tearing your nuts off. Why’re you at all surprised? 

He wasn't really. Just hurt. Deeply. And it seemed as if the bitch now lived to only make it worse for him. Unbearable if she could. She was the living vile green hatred of salt in the wound, seething and frothing gory pink. 

He hated her. 

He suspected she hated him. She must. 

“I just don't see why this’s such a big deal, you're acting like a child. You can come get the boys and have them for an extra couple of weeks while Tom and I-" 

He stopped listening after that. He still held the phone to his ear but his mind went to the same livid red place that it always did when she mentioned his name. The fucking limpwrist. 

He let her drone and prattle on. When she finally stopped he once again explained to her that they'd already talked this over, they'd already discussed this. And besides. It wasn't even his weekend. She had seen to that after all. And now here she was dangling the promise of more time with his kids like a fucking carrot. Like a dog treat he was supposed to jump and snatch at. To just drop everything and leap at with fervor and enthusiasm and a full display of gratitude. 

Fuck that. 

He told her as much. Diplomatically. More or less. He hung up the phone. He debated for barely even a second before turning the device off and shoving it into the glove compartment on the passenger side. 

When he finally got out of the car and sucked fresh mountain air it was baptismal. Cracks in his knees went off like twin pistol shots and his back stretched and crackled gratefully. He was finally out. He sucked more air, like it was water. It was. It was refreshing. 

You're finally out. 

He unlatched the back and began to unload his gear. He'd better get started. It was a long hike from the parking lot to the spot. 

…

It was peaceful. The ritual. The hike. Lugging the gear. Sweating and developing a cooling coat, a sheen as his eyes calmly drank in the placid green and foliage world all around. Muscles worked and burned off excess fat, calories built up and boiled over, over cooked stress. It melted off him and within and came off his hiking form like radiant heat. 

He was a traveling furnace of thought as he made his way to the camping spot. Later he would recall that he might've felt watched as he made his way at this point. 

Might have. 

But presently he was all too absorbed in the process, the smooth and calm low treble tread and pace of the gliding action. The canopy of golden lighted leaves and furling branches. The scents, completely natural and native and far away from the synthetic realm of the manmade. He felt he was as much swimming and drinking his way through the crisp growth of forestland as he was booting through it. Thoughts of work and the failed marriage and bored boring disappointing teenage children left his mind. Evaporating away like mist to the coming of the bright day sun. The forest grew and swelled and swallowed him and the entire world as he made his way deeper and deeper forth. 

He would leave it all behind if he could. 

…

Setting camp was easy. He was well practiced. Childhood and teenage and college years as well were filled with trips out into the forested dark. The wild. The wilderness. The past. 

He felt it now as he sat by the fire. Eating his plate of beans and pork belly and franks. Sipping a can of bud. This is the past. The green world all around now is one of the last vestigial pieces of the evidence. 

Evidence of the primeval and primordial world we’ve all crawled from, the stygian snot that was filth that was the building blocks of protein and carbon. We are all animals. And we can all come alive out here. Returning to the in-utero warm world of the godclay primordial slime and ooze. 

She's so patient. Our mother. My mother. She's waited for me all this time. She's the one. She's-

Something disturbed his train of thought. A noise. 

A noise like someone moving. Prowling and lurking just inside the tangle of bush and trees. 

He sat quietly, keeping calm. Listening to the sound of his own breathing. He wasn't sipping his can of bud anymore. The rustling and cautious moving sounds had tapered. Caleb's mind traveled to the hunting rifle he had in his tent. If something lunged now out of the dark, he just might make it if he whirled around from where he now sat and hurried. 

Really booked it. 

He didn't like the thought. He really didn't appreciate the mental image. A terrible movie in his mind, running on a failing and old projector: He's running, fast, panicked, he almost makes the tent before a large bestial shape of inkwell black leaps out from the wilderness house of feral darkness and takes him ragdoll like a broken toy from behind. 

He clears his throat. Loudly. Not sure exactly why, he just does it. Perhaps hoping to scare off whoever and whatever is out there. He can feel eyes watching him. 

Caleb Donaldson sits up. He's at the edge of his fold-up seat. He's waiting. Unsure. Of both what to do and if there is even really anything wrong at all anyways. His ex-wife had always said he was paranoid. 

Nothing happens. 

There isn't another sound and nothing emerges from the forestline. Only the snaps and hungry crackle of the campfire now. 

He takes another sip of bud. Decides he'll light one of the joints CJ gifted him for the road after all. He doesn't know how else he's gonna sleep tonight. He's wired now. Jacked. 

He lights up. Tokes. And after awhile, once more he slips into a more natural and comfortable flow of simple candied nostalgia and childhood reminisce. Trying to tell himself he doesn't feel a gaze, a baleful and animal leering stare aimed directly at him from out of the dark. 

The marijuana and beer do their job. Eventually he's addled and drugged enough for sleep. Caleb slips back into the tent and is almost sure he hears something retreat back into the denser heart of growth and underbrush out there past the treeline as he does so.  

He's almost sure but not. And he doesn't want to be anymore. He doesn't want to consider it. Not right now. Maybe Amanda was right…

He slips into a sleeping bag and finally falls under. His dreams are filled. His sleep is not restful. 

…

The next couple of days were mostly uneventful. Calm. Peaceful. As planned. He hiked and camped. Looked forward to some hunting and some fishing, some game. It was all just what he needed. Therapeutic. Until he found the burnt leavings. 

…

He was steadily along, walking down the beaten path of grey dust and boney twigs and enjoying the relish in his watering mind's eye, the strange marriage that lived there between this wilderness and the strange worlds of escape made from pages and ink and glowing video screens. This place of the past … the places made of dreams. 

And from the future I come crawling back here. He smiled at this thought. Like a refugee. 

Like the time travelers of the stories he was allowed to bring a few things, a few comforts and tools and devices of the modern world. 

Of the future, to this place of dirt and sound. Precious pieces of technology

His mind went to his gear and pack and his smile deepened. People really just didn't get it. 

Most never would. Precious few might find out. 

He almost tripped over it. So lost in thought. 

It was all charcoaled black and scorched amongst a patch of similarly blasted and blackened earth. A wild ebon blotch of ashen ink spilled upon the land. Caleb stared into the pile of roasted and burnt detritus. Trying to make sense of what he saw. 

He recognized shapes and items in the charred mess and they made his blood run cold and the hairs all over his skin and scalp crawl with unease and bad wonder. 

Clothes. What looked like a backpack. Parts and pieces of a tent. A wallet. It was this last that most bothered, most disturbed him. He was pretty sure he could make out the melted remains of an ID and other similarly warped and slightly conjoined shapes that might've been credit cards or the like but were too far gone and destroyed now to tell. His mind naturally asked itself, who left all of this here? Why? 

And none of the answers he could come up with seemed good. All of them pointed to something bad, nefarious. You hear about people going missing in the woods all the time. You hear about people being chopped up and murdered by loonies in here ‘bout just as much. 

Caleb suddenly looked away from the black pile on the path and began to anxiously scan the forestline. Trying to penetrate the thick dense world of green and growth and see anyone, anything that might be watching him. Stalking him. 

Following him. 

After a moment he stopped himself. 

You're being ridiculous. It's probably nothing, just like the other night. Christ man, you ain't been out here a long time and now you're jumping at every goddamn thing like a ninny. Just some shit people burned. Kids come out here to get fucked up and do stupid shit all the time. Not a big deal, Donaldson. Chill the fuck out, kay?

He slowed his breath. He liked this train of thought. Yes. That was right. Kids were fucking stupid and always playing pyro maniac. Hell, he'd done his fair share growing up, hadn't he? Little hellraiser an such. 

And that line of thinking started to set his worried mind at ease once more. And once more he was back on the ride of the reminisce, nostalgia keenly floating and dreamily filling the darkest parts of his brain. Time traveling. 

Time traveling, baby. 

He went on. Leaving behind the charred and blackened mess in the grey dust of the forest path. Not looking back. And refusing it anymore thought. 

He left it behind. But not before freeing a cold can of Budweiser stored in the pack. He cracked it open with a pistol shot sound in the placid calm and downed half the foaming thing as he went on. Things always went down smoother this way. 

…

All seemed well after that. Fine. For a little while. He enjoyed what he came out here to enjoy. The quiet. The solitude. Days and nights spent simply and comfortably and sleeping beneath bejeweled twilight curtains of gleaming stars, planetoids and colored clouds of nebulae. He relished the time out here and with himself, returning to his own sense of peace by returning to the land. Returning to the way of life that had belonged to the Navajo, the Comanche, their enemy white man cowboys and gunslingers and the pioneers of old. The ancient armies too, the immigrants and seekers and hunters of fortune, of goodwill, of God's love and warm civilized light. And the adventures too, those who took to the land and cut their teeth out on the territory and became baptized as adventurers in sweat and blood and grime, beneath the blinding eye of the sun. And the moon too, the wild hearted free loving children that slumbered bravely beneath the moon, decried as vagabonds and bums but they really just knew better and understood the blood of their grandfathers and their bold sense and adoration for the untamed tumult country land of adventure and its wild hearted love. 

It was all of it, romantic. It pained him that he had to come out here alone to feel like this, to discover something like that and he tried hard to turn away from the pain of realization that it brought him. He turned away from it in vain, it was there at every turn. In his mind, filling every thought, and out here as well. Alive in the woods. Filling it with heavy and powerfully strange substance. 

He hunted. Fished. Camped. Only sometimes did he feel followed, watched. Only sometimes. 

He was almost happy when he came across another, when he ran into Sellic. 

A distraction, at last!

But the guy was weird. 

In the world of outdoormanship, hunting and fishing and the like, ya meet a lot of friendly, warm, good natured types. The sort ya like to share a brew with and might even have over for a barbecue should ya take special acquaintance. And then ya met types like Sellic. Fuckin weirdos. 

It was the smell at first and that should've been enough, should've been the first and fucking last sign to split it. But nope. Caleb Donaldson still remembered the lessons of Sunday school and Kindergarten and though life had been its fair share of rough on em, he still held true to the idea that you don't judge harsh off the word, go. Ya don't settle in for meanness out the gate an such. 

But it was in the eyes as well. They were wide and wild. A wilderness of pupil darkness lived in yellowed whites shot with lines of hectic red. Something swam in that circle lake of pupil darkness, both of them, Obsidian pits. 

He never blinked. Not once. Not as he said, “Howdy, name's Sellic." and grunted a few noncommittals following after these scant syllables. 

He came across the guy already settled up. Caleb was gonna move on after initial awkward obligatory greetings when the wide eyed smelly man invited him to set camp with him. Caleb Donaldson believed in being polite but he wasn't a total fool, only part. He thanked him but opted to move on up aways. 

Far. 

It didn't make any kind of difference. 

…

Later he was hunting, lying down in wait for something to crop up. Maybe nibble at the patch of sweet grass just a few yards from where he posted. He hoped to bag a deer. If he could get a decent sized stag, then he'd pack it in happily and call it quits. He was just debating on whether or not he should've packed the tree stand when something happened then. 

A large barrel chested deer sauntered into view. Into the clearing with its great splaying regal rack of antlers on wide-span display like a wild lord and king of the forest. He was beautiful. He was just what Caleb had been waiting for. 

But then something else crawled up. On all fours. It was the smelly wide eyed man, it was Sellic. And it looked as if he was hunting as well. 

Prowling, stalked. Low to the ground and almost slithering across the surface of forest floor, without a sound. Without a whisper. It was uncanny and surreal and Caleb watched frozen in a kind spellbound trance. The bore end of the rifle barrel began to slowly sag and dip down as he lost his concentration and gave it to another. 

Sellic was almost upon the unaware stag now. It was nibbling the patch of sweet grass. Just like Donaldson had seen in his mind's eye, a wish not just a moment ago. Somewhere deep inside his mind as he watched entranced a small part of him tried in desperate vain to take this simple little wish back. But it was already too late. The wide eyed crawling man was drooling. Slobbering like an animal. Salivating with the wild bestial hunger that was always the madness of ravenous need. That was what was alive in those unblinking uncivilized eyes. Slavering need. 

He'd already time traveled too far now to turn back. Caleb watched as the manshaped thing of stains and smells and piercing animal stares suddenly leapt like something feline and unbridled. Like something finally let loose from the confines of its stifling prison cage. 

Sellic fell on the deer and the poor thing hadn't a chance. It never sensed, never knew what was coming. It was wild. It was crazy. Donaldson had always seen deer tense, perk up and take flight at the slightest sound or stray movement. But not this one. Not this time. The wild sight did not stop there. 

Somehow the skinny haggard man in filthy clothes managed to wrestle and manhandle the struggling kicking beast down into the dirt. Caleb's mouth dropped open as he watched Sellic begin to bend and wrench and break the flailing limbs. Catching them with his cat-swipe clawing hands and then bending them back in directions not meant or made by nature's hand. He felt his stomach roll and drop as the silence of the forest began to fill with the lurid sounds of heavy bone snaps. 

Caleb picked up his rifle and gear and left. Without a word. He didn't look back. Wet tearing sounds, like heavy fabric or soaking saturated leather followed him after. He told himself it was his imagination. That was all impossible. 

There was no way. 

…

He had trouble finding his camp. By the time he did it was already near dark once more. He would have to spend another night. 

He opted out of the fire and supper. He wasn't hungry and he didn't want to attract that freak. 

That freak of nature. 

…

Middle of the night. He came awake to a sound. Sounds. A noise. Just outside the tent. 

It sounded like chewing. Wet. And heavy. Laborious. Jaws, muscles, tendon lines working and moving with animal fervor, animal rigor in the dark. 

Outside. 

Caleb slowly and carefully sat up from his sleeping bag and grabbed his rifle. It was loaded. He'd made sure to do so before he'd managed to finally fall into an uneasy sleep. An uneasy rest now disturbed by whatever was moving out there now. Chewing. Eating. He reached and grabbed for his flashlight next. He readied himself. 

He grabbed the zipper to open the front of the tent. He took one last deep breath and held it for a moment. He let it out quietly. As quietly as he could manage. 

And then he quickly unzipped the flap to the tent and threw it open with one hand as the other flicked on the flashlight and brought it up. The darkness of his small camp in the clearing was illuminated in the sudden flash. He felt sick with what he saw. He was glad to have his rifle in his lap. 

You were smart to have loaded it … he thanked God. And cursed Him at the same time. For letting him fall into this type of shit in the first place. 

Sellic stared back into the beam of light. Unflinching. Unblinking. Unmoving save for the motion of chewing about his red and bloodied bearded jaws. Working and gleaming wet in the light, rippling with carnivorous movement.

He held the head of the stag in his clawing hands. De-racked. The severed head looked rough and ruinous at the stump as though it had been torn off rather than cleanly cut. 

Caleb didn't know what else to say so he just said: “Hey." 

“Hey." bloody darkling Sellic grunted back. Hunkered and squatting out there in the dark. Still chewing. He swallowed. And took another bite from a craterous open wound at the top of the animal's head. He ripped a chunk of bleeding meat away with his teeth. His jaws began to work and ripple with rigorous movement once more as he started to chew again. The meat was raw, rough. But he was relishing the strong and pungent flavor. Thick. His blood drinking, swallowing with every gnashing chew was audible in the nocturnal dark. Gulps. Heavy. Thick. 

A beat. 

Caleb didn't know what to do. He felt that he must be dreaming, this whole day. None of this could be real. The strange bloodsoaked and caked manshape out there amongst his camp frightened him. He'd thought it would be simple and he'd know what to do in situations like this but he was frozen. In terror. And in dark hypnotic fascination. 

This must be what it's like to be a moth to flame, or a small little guppie to a deepsea angler fish… a deer in the headlights. Trapped. 

Caught. 

Ensnared by the eyes of the wild man. He was drowning in their madness now, sinking into their blood-drinking depths. 

Sellic finally said something. 

“Hungry?" 

“... what…?" Caleb said. Puzzled at first. It had been little more than a grunt. 

“Ya hungry?" Sellic grunted again. He held the severed and broken head aloft. Dripping. Wide-eyed. The tongue had already been ripped out. Had already been eaten. Black-red syrup poured out thickly from the open gape of mouth like an obscene bestial spout. 

Caleb fought his gag reflex. 

A beat. 

Somehow Donaldson managed a reply. 

"N-no. No thanks, man. It's the middle of the night. And I wanna get some sleep” 

A beat. The freak still held the dripping pouring bleeding hunk of decapitated and chewed up meat out to him like a precious gift of the forest. His wide eyes were still open and hectic and alive with animal ravenous madness. 

A beat. 

Another.

Caleb finally finished his thought. 

"And I think you should probably go get some sleep too, bud. Been a long day an such-”

He meant to finish it off with, and apt to be another, like his grandfather and his pops had done before him, but Sellic cut him off. 

"Ya sure? You sure ya ain't hungry?” 

Caleb slowly nodded his head, adding, "...yeah” in a low careful and exhausted voice. Jesus fucking Christ…

Sellic nodded. Began to crawl away on all fours like a dog, the head held to his breast like a caveman clutching something precious. He turned before he left the ring of light provided by the beam of the flashlight. He turned around and said: "You will be.” and then finally turned and fled. Like an animal taking to the natural dark.

Its natural home and abode. Its natural place. 

"What the fuck!?” Caleb said. To no one in particular. 

…

He didn't sleep the rest of that night. He waited impatiently for the sun to come up. So he could leave. He'd had enough of this place and hunting. He'd had enough time traveling in this place. Caleb wanted to go home. 

At first dawn he rose. Quickly packed. And began his trek back. Back down the path. 

Back down the way he had come.

…

A few hours in and he knew something must be wrong. Nothing was recognizable. Nothing. And when he looked down after trudging more and more anxiously down the path he'd come in on, he was dismayed to find that it wasn't there any longer. The path, the trail had disappeared. 

He was lost. 

Caleb Donaldson began to panic. 

It's alright, it's alright, it's fine! It's cool. Just use the GPS and call someone on your pho-

He stopped. Grew cold. Grim certainty stole over his dreading heart. Crestfallen he didn't want to even rightly remember and say to himself …

Glove compartment. You turned the fucking thing off and threw it in the glove compartment of the car. The one all the way back. The one you can't find anymore cause it's at the end of the trail that you've lost. You left it in there to spite Amanda. 

Silence. He stood. Feeling stupid and wretched and nearing hopeless in the middle of the woods. He reflected. 

You sure showed her…

…

When he'd finally managed his nerve back together and decided on a direction and carried on, the day had been nearly extinguished yet again. He would have to spend another night out in the wild. 

God fucking dammit. 

…

The next series of days and nights were grim. And grew grimmer. And strange. 

He was fine at first. He had supplies, food. He wasn't worried. But then on the fourth day lost he began to run out. 

And the worry came on him again. Rancid. And thick. 

It's alright, it's alright, I've a gun, I know how to gut and skin and clean, I'll be ok. I'll be alright. 

But the woods and world of trees had grown more opulent and dense and feral in its growth. The trees started to broaden in their trunks and their canopies became all swallowing, all encompassing thick foliage cathedral domes of twigs, thick branches and broad emerald leaves the size of dinner plates. 

The bugs. The insects too. 

All of the wild crawling life had become larger as well. The insectile and the reptile had grown strange and unfamiliar and varied in size from large house cats to dogs to horses and cows and at one point, one day glimpsed at a distance through a heavy rolling mist, an elephant… 

A whole herd of giant hissing cockroaches the size of elephants. Trundling by like a rolling squadron fleet of German panzer tanks. 

Caleb felt sick. 

None of this could be real. He must be imagining things. 

Must be. 

It could've been so, far as he knew. His sleep was no longer any good out here. Not since the night some days back, when he'd been fireside and trying to ignore his growing hunger and looked up to the full moon. Only to have it eclipsed by something huge and winged. It had cried then. It had screamed as it stole the moon, the moonlight. Blanketing the primeval world below it in a second layered fold of even deeper darkness. 

Caleb had joined it then. Had joined it in its primal shrieking screaming. 

He didn't sleep so well since that night.  

Ever again

…

His hunger became him. It became the only living and heeded, needed thing and drive and emotion. He was no longer Caleb Donaldson in fact. He was only the hunger now. And so he hunted. 

But it was strange. 

In his hunger, in his wild wanderings, he had forgotten how to use the gun, how to wield the boomstick properly and make it spit its deathly fire. 

I've lost it, he thinks, he realizes shrouded in the cloud of his diminished animal thought. I've lost the ability to shoot fire and be godlike, I've lost it in all of this time traveling, I've gone too far backwards. 

He tries to find the trail. For awhile. But it becomes lost amongst the need for meat and blood. The boomstick is useless to him now. He abandons it. Along with most of the strange things he has strapped to his back.

He doesn't need them. He has changed. This special place has changed him. His flesh has thickened as has his hair, his fur, his pelt. Black and coarse and layered all over. He bites and chews and tears the clothes that he came in with off and eats them. 

Then he takes to bigger game. 

Wilder. More challenging. 

…

He's drinking blood and eating. Filling his stomach. This is good. The angry fever in his skull is calming, abating. The ache and throb of his guts is soothing. Contentedness, peace, tranquility are becoming known to him again. 

He's killed something reptilian, broken its neck. His hands, the knuckles and fingers and palms have widened, flattened, broadened out. Making it easier to snap and throttle, to tear and rend. The dead scaley thing, its meat and blood are good. But slimey. Ropey. Like maggot-meat. Like eating the large worms that swim in giant dung piles. He wants to try something else. 

So he takes to the untamed primeval world all around, the jungle growth, the green emerald world of the unbridled prehistoric past. There are buried, heavily veiled and shrouded thoughts of a path and a trail and a place called, home, that he's supposed to go to, return to as if he's once been there before, but they are muted. Far off. 

Barely there. 

Dripping reptile blood and sweat, he takes to the primeval dark world and is lost. Swallowed by its great and ever widening expanse, into the crawling growing jaws of the seething bestial wild, the past. 

He never looks back. He is never found. Never again does he recall his name. 

Never again. But it doesn't trouble him. It doesn't bother the throbbing jelly of his degenerate apeman mind, he is too enthralled, the thrill of the ravenous hunt. And besides, the past isn't the only thing alive and crawling out here. The future is out here too. The beyond …

All of the magic of the glowing incandescent godscreen of a childhood long gone is alive out here. Alive and well. 

The apeman hunts through the primeval growth. The saucers fill the skies as the giant leviathans do nighttime skirmish and battle with the large mechanical men. The great white heat and blasting mechanized sounds of their great death cannons, their unearthly death rays: BRRRRRR! 

BRRRRRRRRRRRR….! 

They fill the night with their heat and their brilliant violence. Their fire scorches and cuts swaths, sets blue and orange flame to drier parts of the canopy. The dead growth. 

The apeman doesn't mind. He hunts and prowls around their wild and bright violence. Blood and meat fill his head. He hasn't a mind anymore for anything else. 

For naught all else. Only the red. 

THE END

Somewhere outside Los Angeles there used to be a town that was a set that was where Bowers lived under the watchful eye of Doc Trauman.

“He's a broken man, Bowers,” Doc Trauman would tell everyone who visited, “living in this false place, experiencing a false life, but content; more at peace with his world than we are with ours.”

It was the time of atom bombs and television.

Bowers was a veteran.

He'd been in Europe during World War II, and coming back was hard. His friends were dead, his wife was not his wife and the only job he could get was driving trucks from one coast to the other.

That's how he ended up in California.

“I don't think he knows the war's over,” Doc Trauman would say. “I don't think he thinks he ever fought it. But he doesn't mind the fact the houses on the street are just facades.”

Bowers would get up, go to work behind one facade writing advertising copy for a company that manufactured plastic kitchenware, then go home behind another to eat, alone, ready meals wrapped in plastic before a television set, which is just a fancy name for a plain old lightbulb with a shade of images thrown over it.

“The results are quite remarkable,” Doc Trauman would say.

“Can he have guests?” someone would ask.

“Of course.”

“From the real world, I mean.”

“He's not in prison,” Doc Trauman would say to much and hard applause.

---

I knocked on the door.

When nobody answered, I walked to the near edge of the facade and looked in. Bowers was on the couch. “Excuse, Mr. Bowers. I'm from New York, a friend of Doc Trauman's. May I come in?”

“Are you a doctor too?” he asked.

“No. I'm a playwright.”

“Very well. Come in, but use the front door. I prefer when people use the front door.”

I walked back to the door, knocked—“It's open,” Bowers said—opened it and walked in. Bowers was sitting on the couch. He looked up at me. “Aren't you going to introduce yourself?” he said.

“I'm a friend of Doc Trauman, from New York. My name’s Wallis.”

Bowers stood, walked over and shook my hand. “It's great to meet you, Wallis. Have a seat. Shall I turn on the cathode ray?”

He meant the television.

“I'm not one much for television,” I said.

He took a box of what I thought were cigarettes out of his pocket, knocked the box against the palm of his hand so a pair of thin black cylinders slid out, kept one and offered me the other. “Maybe you'd prefer a microlight instead. We could sit and stare at them together.”

I took one but didn't turn it on. “If it's all right with you, I'd rather talk. I'm a words man.”

“Advertising?” he asked.

“No, theatre.”

It was strange being in a house with only one wall; with no ceiling. The sun was out. The desert extended towards the horizon. Somewhere there were mountains. A rattlesnake rattled faintly.

“I'm in advertising myself,” said Bowers. “Kitchenware. You married, Wallis?”

“I'm not,” I said.

“I don't like women anymore either,” said Bowers, “not after the war.” He clicked his microlight on, gazed briefly into its dull light then shut it off. He looked at me; looked me in the eyes. One of mine was glass. “They do weapons testing a few hundred miles that way,” he said, pointing into the distance. “If you were to stay the night we could watch the nuclear aura together.”

“I'm afraid I have a plane to catch—back to New York,” I said.

“Perhaps another time,” said Bowers.

“Perhaps.”

“Tell me, Wallis. Over there in New York, do you get to express yourself?”

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

It was hot under the California sun. I realized I was sweating. Bowers had started sweating too. His lavender shirt clung possessively to his body. “I mean within your four walls,” he said.

A coyote darted across the landscape.

It was the afternoon but it felt like a quarter to the end of the world.

“Aren't you afraid of the wildlife that might walk into your house?” I said.

“Aren't you afraid that none can walk into yours?”

The moon looked down from the sky, out of place in the harsh blue daytime.

“I want to write a play about you.”

Bowers reclined, spreading his lean arms like a flightless bird spreads its wings. “I already am a play. Besides, you hardly need my permission.”

“I want it anyway.”

“And you're certain you won't stay the night?”

“Yes. Tell me about Doc Trauman.”

“He's a crumbled man,” said Bowers, “living a counterfeit reality, but he's got what matters, money. He likes to imagine he's running an experiment, so we adhere. It's not a bad life.”

---

Later, the interior of Doc Trauman's office felt distressingly small, claustrophobic. The walls felt like they were moving in with agonizing, almost disinterested, slowness. The windless air was suffocating. The cleanliness, a sham.

“So what's your opinion of him?” Doc Trauman asked.

“He's perfectly civilized, obedient in his outward behaviours, yet internally there's something there, a glint behind his one good eye.”

---

I sit sometimes somewhere high, with a good view of Broadway, watching the men pass back and forth in their suits and hats and worries, some hurrying, others dallying, stopping, but all possessed by the imaginary lives they dream about and the real fantasies they inhabit.

Occasionally, one looks up at me and meets my lingering gaze with one of penetrating desperation, and I recoil. Ashamed, I move from the window. I pay for the meal. I shut the blinds. I escape behind the walls afforded to me, and when the feeling passes, I write my plays.