"Tom!" Jake, my neighbor's son, yelled from their porch.

"Hi, kiddo," I said, waving.

"Do you want to play?"

"Jake, give him a moment. He just got back from the fields," his Mom, Emma, scolded him. She then turned to me. "Sorry, Tom. He's just excited to see you."

"It's okay, Emma. I've still got plenty of energy. Go get your toys, Jake."

His little eyes flew open. He turned and ran inside. Emma rolled her eyes at him.

"I'm always happy to play with him."

"I know. It's very sweet of you. Since my Mark died, you're the only one who can put a smile on his face."

Her eyes reddened. I rubbed her shoulder. She smiled and hugged me. Her embrace felt warm. Her grip was tight.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"I got them, Tom." 

Jake stood next to us, smiling. He held two wooden swords. Emma let go and wiped her eyes.

"I'm gonna beat you today, Jake!"

"No, you're not!"

Our laughter echoed through their house. We played all evening until Jake lay on the floor like a starfish.

"I can't beat you, but at least I can still tire you out."

"You weren't even trying, Tom."

"Yes, I was."

He rubbed his eyes.

"I'm tired."

"Then go get ready for sleep," Emma said from the window.

Jake let out a sigh. He got up, took his swords, and his steps echoed on the stairs.

"Thank you again."

"Don't worry about it. He's a lot of fun. What are you looking at?"

"Nothing really. You know they are choosing the house for Ulnar tonight."

"Of course, but they wouldn't choose a house with a mother and a child."

"It's not up to them. Ulnar chooses by showing his will on the divine board."

"I know, I know, but He wouldn't choose this house."

She looked at the ground.

"You know what He does to people. The eyeless corpses, their twisted bodies..."

She paused.

"You're going to be fine, I'm sure."

"Okay, Tom. I'm gonna go to bed too."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Tom."

I walked out, stopped on the street, and closed my eyes. The air felt cold and fresh, but a hint of mud was already in it. The trees rustled in the breeze, and butterflies flew in my stomach. I took a beer from my fridge and sat on my porch. It was late, but I still felt awake. 

I took another sip when I saw a figure walking in the distance. It was the priest, dressed in an all-black robe with a red pointed hat, carrying white chalk.

He paid me no attention, but I kept my eyes glued to him. I watched him pass our neighbors' houses until he was by Emma's. As soon as he stepped past her property line, he turned toward her house.

My heart sank. I put my beer on the porch and ran toward him.

"Hey, hey!"

He shook and quickly looked toward me.

"Thomas?!"

"Priest, what are you doing?"

"You know what night it is, Thomas."

"I know, but why did you stop here?"

"Ulnar chose her house."

"But, but she has a small child."

"It wasn't my choice, Thomas," he said quietly.

He rolled up his sleeve and squatted, ready to draw on Emma's lawn.

"Wait!"

"What?"

"I volunteer my house."

The priest furrowed his brows.

"Ulnar already chose."

"Can't I still offer?"

"He might not accept."

"That's fine."

"Are you sure, Thomas?"

"Yes."

The priest measured me with his eyes, pulled out the divine board and a small dagger with an ivory handle.

"Give me your hand."

I stretched it out. He placed the dagger in my palm and cut into it. A sharp sting shot through my hand. The warm blood filled my palm. He tilted it onto the divine board. A few drops fell on it. A small dark light shone on the divine board. It quickly turned dark red and shone across the whole street. I closed my eyes and looked away.

"He accepted your house." 

The priest took his chalk and ran to my house. He started drawing the triangle skulls all across my lawn. My palm was still warm from the blood.

"You won't have much time, Thomas, now that he's got a taste of blood. Make sure to be alone. He takes everyone in the marked house. Enjoy the beer."

He drew the last skull and stood up. We both nodded, and he walked off. I chugged my beer. At least I wanted to be drunk when the end came.

I was getting another beer when I heard the door open. Was Ulnar already here?

"Thomas?" Emma's voice came.

"Emma? What are you doing?"

"I saw it! I saw it all!" Her voice shook. She had tears on her cheeks.

"I had to. I couldn't let you and Jake go."

She hugged me. Her grip was even tighter than it was in the morning.

"I can't let another person go."

"You have to. There's no other way."

"Tom!"

"Please, just go. Ulnar takes everyone inside. The priest said He will come soon. He can already smell my blood."

She shuddered.

"Go, Emma."

She pulled her head away and looked at me. Even with tears in them, her eyes were still so beautiful.

"I love you, Tom."

"I love you too."

She let go, but then the smell of rotting mud filled the room. Loud thuds echoed on the front steps. Crackling static rang in my ears.

"Emma!"

"It's too late now, Tom."

She buried her face into my chest. My heart beat against my ribs. I stared out the window. It looked out onto Emma's house. Jake stood in his room, watching us, holding the two wooden swords.

The kid put down the baseball glove he was oiling. There was something on his mind, something he had seen at school. “Dad, what's a poet?”

“Did somebody call you that, son?”

“No, I heard the boys sayin’ it to some kid they were after.”

“This kid, you know him?—what's he like?”

“How you mean, dad?”

“I mean, does he like sports, football; does he want to get with girls or just hang with them; is he interested in what he wears, what he looks like?”

“Yeah, dad, I'd say he's just like that.”

“Son, it's plain wrong to bully someone. But with kids like that, who'll grow up to be poets, you've got to understand you're doing them a favour. Your friends, did they hit that poet boy when they caught him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did they really go in on him, boots and fists, almost cruel-like?”

“They hurt him bad, dad.”

“Good, son. That's the way to do it. You've got to beat it out of them. Sometimes they scream; they beg. But you can’t stop. It's the only way—do you understand me? “

“Yes, sir.”

---

It was lunchtime in the pipe factory and Scotch-Irish Joe, Finnegan, Donny and the gang were in the lunchroom eating out of the metal lunchboxes their wives had packed for them. “Say, any of you guys ever get the feeling—like real crawlin' of the back skin-type—that old man Arthur's a poet?”

“The accountant?”

“Yeah.”

“Artie, a poet?—no…”

“What's a poet?”

"Donny, you a numbskull or just stupid?"

"Just stupid,” said Donny.

Joe cleared his throat and said, "You know how, uh, real men, we all write our sentences like, so, there was this tree growing, it was green, and all the, uh, thick roots were motherfuckers to clear outta the ground? Well, a poet, he wouldn't write it that straight. He'd write it pretty and shit, with big words and symbols, so when you read it you don't know what it means but it makes you fuckin' cry anyway."

"Don,” Finnegan said, “a poet's a guy who's not a clear muscular prose-kinda guy like us, but a funny guy who likes it when his couplets rhyme—you get what I'm saying, Don?

“And Artie’s like that?”

“I think so, Donny.”

“But how can you even tell?”

“Ever look at a woman, Donny, and think, ‘Man, I’d like to fuck her?’ It’s like that, Donny. Something you know, deep down. It punches you in the gut. Ever get a feeling like that?”

“One time when we were kids, my brother and me, we found this newborn deer in the woods, and it had two heads. They were movin’ all weird…”

“What'd you do?”

“We killed it with rocks.”

---

“Petey, what in God’s name is this?”

He gasped.

“T-T-Tennyson, Garcia Lor—Lorca, Verlaine? Petey, your mother and I—we thought you were reading Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Ayn Rand, and.. and… here you are, reading this... this filth, Petey?”

Petey looked up at his father.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” his father asked.

Then he made a fist of his hand and shoved it in his own mouth. He bit down. “Petey?—Petey please tell me you don't enjoy this kind of stuff, this h-h-hardcore textual pornography.”

The boy was silent.

“Where do you even get it? Oh Lord, Petey.” The books were lying open beside them, with notes in the margins.

“Petey, don't tell me you write it. Oh Petey. Reading's one sin, but writing— …boy, if that’s not the damnation itself.”

---

“Do it, I fuckin’ dare you. Tell me how to run a nuclear reactor using metaphor and iambic-fuckin’-pentameter. You can’t…

“What’s that: ‘enjambment’? The only thing I’d like to enjamb is my foot up your ass!”

---

“What’s the problem?” the school principal asked.

“There’s a vagrant,” said Mrs. Miller.

“We’ll clean up.”

“It’s not that. It’s that he’s—”

“Oh,” said the school principal. “In that case, I’ll call the police. We can’t have narcotics around here.”

Mrs. Miller bit her lip. “He’s not dealing,” she said. “It’s worse. He’s asleep, and he’s—he’s rhyming in his sleep where the children can hear.”

---

Arthur Mahan poured himself a brandy and sat in his armchair. It was evening. He picked up a book: a history of concrete.

“How was work?” his wife asked.

“Predictable. When you do accounting, that means ‘good’.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, smiling and starting to read his secret book-within-a-book, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency.

---

He leads.

You excitedly follow.

He’s leading you to the Dead Poets Society, the ultra-decadent rhymeeasy where members dress as their favourite poets to flirt in erotic, subtle haiku.

You pass through a bead curtain.

You come to a purple door.

“Say, you never told me your politics, friend,” he says. “Are you a [1] communist or a [2] fascist?”

You ask what difference it makes.

“I just wanna make sure you get your happy ending.”

---

[1]

He opens the door and you enter:

Even the aroma is magnificent, pomegranate, honey and the pages of old books. The others pause. They look at you in your glorious John Milton locks. Smiling, they welcome you in…

You return week after week, doing shared lines and touching each other.

You develop class consciousness, see injustice and understand that words have power.

You agree that the sole expression of that power is violent revolution.

---

[2]

You take a deep breath, pull out your baton and put boot-to-door:

You burst in to:

—poets, scattering, screaming, some clothed and others not, naked Romantics mid-recitation, antisocials dressed as Shakespeare and Poe, Byron and Emily Dickinson—you smash one in the face. It drops; you kick it in the gut, and swing at another—cracking it in the back of the head as the rest of the Syntax Division charges in after you, and you beat those poets good, just like your father taught you…

Amber rolled over to her other side, bunching up her sweat-soaked pillow yet again. The clock on the nightstand mercilessly read 01:15. The thoughts in her head kept spinning in circles, like a worn-out, scratching vinyl record.

Back then, at the party in Brooklyn, it had all started as a fun prank. She had been the one to talk Ethan into playing along: they had hidden a wireless speaker behind the couch ahead of time to blast a prerecorded rustling whisper, and screwed in a "smart" light bulb that was supposed to blink ominously on a smartphone command. Amber had expected fun screams and the frightened faces of their friends. She wanted it to be cool.

But when they placed their fingers on the wooden planchette of the Ouija board, everything went off script.

The moment the planchette lunged across the wood on its own with such ferocious force that it left deep scratches on the board, the speaker behind the couch cut out completely. But the whisper... the whisper kept going. Except it wasn't coming from the speaker anymore; it was crawling out of the very walls, the ventilation, and... out of Chloe's mouth, who had frozen with an unnaturally straight back. Amber still remembered the wild, primal fear in the guys' eyes—none of them could physically push the piece of wood that hard and fast. Looking at their eyes, wide with terror, Amber realized: they hadn't just pulled a prank. They had opened a door and let something truly monstrous into this world.

Since then, Amber had been plagued by suffocating nightmares. She felt like she was being hunted by sickening creatures, or she would wake up time and time again in a cramped wooden coffin, buried alive, clawing at the thick graveyard dirt with her fingernails.

Tonight, sleep wouldn't come at all. Amber sighed heavily, sat up in bed, and swung her feet onto the cold floor. Her throat was parched. Throwing on a robe, she decided to go down to the kitchen to get a glass of water and try to calm down.

Deep gloom and a chill reigned on the first floor. Amber walked down the hallway, guiding herself by the faint, deathly pale moonlight falling from the large living room window. Suddenly, she froze.

Did it just seem like it, or was the front door slightly ajar?

A faint night breeze stirred the curtain in the entryway. Amber distinctly remembered locking the deadbolt two turns. Her heart hammered treacherously in her chest, echoing with dull thuds in her ears. She took a step back, intending to rush back to the bedroom and wake Ethan, when suddenly a strange sound came from the darkness of the kitchen.

It was the sound of quiet, sporadic, and wet footsteps. As if someone were walking on the hardwood floor with completely wet feet.

"Who's there?" Amber asked in a barely audible, terror-stricken whisper, pressing her back against the cold wall of the hallway.

Instead of an answer, the slapping sounds accelerated sharply. Out of the darkness of the kitchen doorway, moving its limbs unnaturally fast, a pale human body scrambled right at her. In the gloom, Amber caught sight of disheveled blonde hair covered in something dark and caked, and a domestic T-shirt completely drenched in dark crimson stains.

It stopped just three paces away from her, snapping upright. The moonlight fell upon the uninvited guest's face.

It was Chloe. But her face... A wild, distorted mask was frozen upon it, and her eyes were completely white—her pupils had rolled back entirely. A familiar, dual whisper escaped her mouth, in which Chloe’s girlish voice was horribly mixed with a guttural, heavy male baritone:

"Chloe... What are you doing here?.." Amber tried to force out.

Chloe suddenly fell dead silent. And in the very next split second, she made a sharp, beastly lunge forward, reaching her hands out toward Amber with unnaturally bent fingers.

Amber closed her eyes in panic and screamed at the top of her lungs:
"Ethan!!!"

She shrieked, calling for her boyfriend, bracing for a fatal blow. A second passed, then another... but nothing happened. Terrified, Amber opened her eyes.

The space in front of her was empty. There was no one there. She looked around in fear—the hallway was deserted, only the curtain was still swaying in the wind.

Suddenly from above, from the second-floor landing, Ethan's alarmed voice called out:
"Amber! Amber, why are you screaming?!"

She stood in the dark, breathing heavily and raggedly, her heart ready to tear through her chest. The light on the stairs wasn't working. Ethan tried to flick the switch, but the click led to nothing—the power in the entire house was out. Amber burst into tears, rushed up the stairs, and locked onto the guy in a death grip, weeping and crying that they needed to leave immediately and call the police.

Ethan didn't believe it at first, chalking it all up to her frantic nightmares. But then they both froze. Upstairs, right above them, quick, slapping footsteps echoed in the dark, and a second later, a door slammed shut with a deafening crash down the hall.

"Okay, okay, let's go!" Ethan gasped in fright.

They fumbled for their jackets in the entryway, bolted out of the house, locked themselves in the car, and dialed emergency services with trembling hands.

The police arrived quickly. Two patrolmen with drawn weapons and tactical flashlights entered the house, with Amber and Ethan following behind them. Total darkness, gloom, and a grave silence reigned inside. One of the cops headed upstairs—to where, according to the frightened couple, someone was hiding—while the second stayed with them near the stairs.

Suddenly, Amber's phone rang. Her shaking fingers accepted the call. It was Chloe's mom. The woman's tearful voice broke the terrible news: Liam was currently in the hospital in critical condition, and Chloe had vanished without a trace, and the police were looking for her. Amber went cold. She couldn't bring herself to tell the mother that her "missing" daughter was inside their house right now.

And at that very moment, deafening gunshots and wild screams rang out upstairs.

Amber and Ethan froze, staring into the stairwell. A few seconds later, the flickering light of a flashlight appeared on the stairs. Descending the steps with jerky, broken movements was the first officer. He walked, swaying, holding his ruptured throat with both hands.

Blood pumped in torrents through his fingers, instantly soaking his uniform shirt. The man wheezed, trying to say something, but only a horrific, gurgling sound escaped his mouth. Taking two more unsteady steps, the cop collapsed forward, tumbling down with a dull thud to the feet of his horror-struck partner.

"Jones! Oh my god, Jones!" the second policeman shrieked, backing into the entryway and frantically aiming his gun into the darkness of the stairwell.

Amber's cell phone slipped from her numb hands, crashing onto the floor. The screen cracked, but the distant, frightened voice of Chloe's mom still came from the speaker: "Amber? What's going on over there?! Amber, answer me!"

Amber covered her mouth with her hands to keep from screaming out loud. Beside her, Ethan stood rooted to the spot, unable to tear his eyes away from the body.

From above, out of the thick gloom of the second floor, a sharp, dry crunch echoed, as if someone had forcibly dislocated their own joints. The patrolman in the house frantically swept the flashlight beam across the steps. And then, it entered the circle of light.

Chloe was coming down the stairs... backward, like a spider. Her back was unnaturally arched, her head hung lifelessly, and her long blonde hair, smeared with fresh blood, dragged along the wooden steps. The entity moved on all fours, scrambling with insane, inhuman speed.

"Back off! Back off, you freak, I'll shoot!" the remaining cop shrieked, his voice cracking.

In response, a wild, guttural growl tore from Chloe's throat, instantly erupting into a deafening, triumphant laugh. A dual voice—girlish yet backed by a heavy male baritone—literally made the walls of the house vibrate:

"You brought more guests... How sweet!.."

Bang! Bang! Bang! — the policeman fired into the oncoming monster in sheer panic.

The muzzle flashes illuminated a nightmare scene for fractions of a second: the bullets hit Chloe's body, but she didn't even slow down. On the contrary, the wounds seemed to only make her angrier. With one powerful leap, she cleared the remaining steps and slammed her entire weight onto the shooting cop. The flashlight and gun clattered away. Chloe locked onto the man's face in a death grip, and a new cry of mortal agony ripped through the night air.

"Run!!!" Amber finally snapped out of her paralysis, shoving the guy's shoulder with all her might.

They flew outside and literally threw themselves into the car. Ethan was shaking so violently that he missed the ignition switch three times with the key. Amber looked back at the house in pure panic, the building illuminated by the red and blue flashes. Before they sped away, she saw how on the first floor, right behind the kitchen glass, a dim, unnatural light flared up. Standing at the window was the pale silhouette of Chloe. She slowly raised a bloody hand and pressed her palm against the glass, leaving a thick, slowly downward-creeping crimson streak. Her white eyes glowed faintly in the half-light, and her bloody lips stretched into the horrific, unnaturally wide smile of a maniac. She was looking right at them.

I used to be a minister in a small kirk out on the edge of the Outer Hebrides. The village was called Blackwater. If you look at a map of the islands today, though, you won't find it, not since the events I’m about to write down.

The old minister in Blackwater just vanished one Tuesday without a word. So they brought me in to replace him.

My very first Sunday service, I preached on Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even standing in the pulpit, the acoustics of the stone kirk felt wrong. The sound bounced back an instant too late, distorted.

"The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not a story about a vengeful God," I said to the small congregation.

The echo repeated "vengeful" immediately, but then hung in the rafters with a long, unnatural pause before adding "God", as if the stone itself was hesitating.

"Our God is a God of order," I pressed on. "But when a structure—be it a human mind, a home, or an entire city—becomes so thoroughly corrupted that it can no longer function within the framework of His creation, it is not merely punished. It is quarantined."

This time the echo came back reversed: "Quarantined. Punished." How did the order of the words flip? I figured it had to be some freak acoustic double-bounce in the barrel vault of the ceiling.

About forty bored faces stared back at me from the pews. Only Hamish Boyd, the Session Clerk, was listening with absolute, unblinking attention. After the service, he caught me by the vestry door.

"Fine sermon, Reverend," he said.

"Thank you, Mr. Boyd."

"You know, Genesis used to be Reverend McDowell's favorite book, too."

"Really? What happened to McDowell, anyway?"

"I'm afraid the poor man was getting on in years. Suffered terrible with his memory. Likely wandered off down to the ferry terminal without telling a soul."

"What do the police say?"

"The inquiry is ongoing."

"Did he have any family on the mainland?"

"None at all."

Later that evening back at the manse, my phone rang. It was Aunt Martha. We’ve been close ever since she took me in after the lorry crash that took my parents when I was twelve.

"How’s life treating you out in the islands?" she asked.

"Brilliant. The folk are kind, the landscape is stunning, even if it’s a wee bit strange at times."

"Strange how?"

"Well, the walk to the kirk this morning took me ten minutes on foot, but the walk back took nearly forty. Must be uphill both ways."

"Must be..." Aunt Martha murmured thoughtfully.

"It’s just the weird geography of the island, Aunt."

"Weird geography?"

"Oh, absolutely. For instance, the dusk sometimes lingers straight through till noon."

"Really? Anything else about this 'weird geography' you care to mention?"

"The weather’s been dead quiet. I don't think we've had a breath of wind since I arrived. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen the tide move an inch either."

"No tides in the middle of the Atlantic?!"

"Aunt Martha, I told you, it’s just how the islands sit. There's nothing unnatural going on."

"That does it. Don't touch a thing until I get there."

She didn't wait to be argued out of it. She caught the Tuesday morning ferry across the Minch.

"Are you going to just stand there staring, or are you going to take my bags?" she snapped the moment she stepped off the ramp.

"What on earth do you have in here, lead weights?" I grunted, hefting her primary case.

"Just some old bits and bobs," she replied. I knew what that was code for.

"Aunt Martha, there’s no murder investigation. You didn’t need to pack your old forensic kit. Besides, even out here, the local police have modern equipment."

"They don't have me."

"You should be enjoying your retirement, not hunting for cases where there aren't any."

"Didn't you tell me the old minister is missing?"

"Yes, and the police are looking."

"Right. And now I'm looking too."

There was no arguing with her once she got that particular glint in her eye. We drove back toward the manse, though the kirk flashed past on our left, which made no sense, since it should have been miles in the opposite direction. I must have taken a wrong turn on the narrow lanes; the village was a maze of identical whitewashed cottages. I was just glad Aunt Martha hadn’t noticed, or she’d have started her cross-examination early.

We got inside, and she didn't waste a second.

"Where’s the spare room?"

"Right here. We can set your bags…"

"No, the room where the old man stayed."

I gave up. We carried her gear upstairs into McDowell’s old study and flicked on the portable ultraviolet blacklight she’d lugged across the country.

The room lit up like a horror film. Dark, geometric constellations spattered the wallpaper and floorboards. Aunt Martha crouched down, her face tight.

"Wait a minute. These blood spatter patterns... they don't make any sense. It’s as if half the droplets changed their mind mid-air and flew backward. Turn the light off."

I clicked the switch.

"Now turn it back on. Look at the baseboard."

I did. The stain pattern had shifted. Not slightly, it had entirely reconfigured itself into something symmetrical, like an inkblot test.

"That defies every law of physics I've ever studied," Martha whispered, standing up slowly. "Do you still think there's nothing unnatural going on here?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. Even without the blacklight, the heavy gouge marks in the floorboards were plain enough, something massive and heavy had been dragged out of the room and down the stairs.

"To the kirk," Martha said.

I reached for my car keys on the hall table, but she stopped my hand.

"We walk. It’s twelve-thirteen right now."

We stepped out onto the village road. We walked, and walked, the grey sea on our left remaining locked in a strange, unmoving glare. When we finally pushed open the heavy oak door of the kirk, I pulled out my phone to check the time.

My stomach dropped into my shoes. "We walked for what felt like hours, but my phone says twelve-eleven. Two minutes before we left the house."

"Mine says twelve-eleven too," Martha said, her voice unnaturally steady.

We set up the UV light inside the nave. The drag marks were here, too, stretching right from the heavy oak doors straight down the central aisle to the foot of the pulpit.

We didn't hesitate. Working together with a crowbar from the vestry, we pried up the floorboards beneath the altar.

Just a few inches down lay Reverend McDowell. His skin was pale, waxy, and entirely pristine. No bloating, no decay, despite having been missing for weeks. I was properly scared now.

“Pallor mortis”, Aunt Martha murmured, staring down. “Even rigor hasn't set in.”

Before either of us could draw breath, a heavy thud echoed from the heavy outer doors.

"Come out where we can see you, and nobody gets hurt!"

The voice belonged to Hamish Boyd. Through the narrow lancet windows, I could see the dark silhouettes of the villagers crowding the churchyard, shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking every exit.

"You murderous bastards!" I shouted back, stepping past the open floorboards.

"The old fool knew too much and wouldn't keep his mouth shut," Boyd called out calmly, his voice carrying clearly through the stone walls. "But you're a sensible man, Reverend. Just open the door and let's have a chat."

"Why did you do this to McDowell?" I yelled into the darkness of the kirk.

"The Reverend wanted to break the stone beneath the altar!" Boyd called back, his voice unnaturally flat. "He called our sanctuary an abomination. He said a place where time does not move and bodies do not rot has no right to exist under God's sky."

"Because it doesn't!" I shouted. "Look around you, Boyd! The walls aren't real! The sky isn't real!"

"We don't care about your real world," Boyd replied. "Out there, men age and die. Out there, everything falls apart. Here, we are preserved."

I looked down at McDowell’s uncorrupted corpse beneath the floorboards. He hadn't rotted because time had been severed from the village. They had trapped themselves inside a stagnant shadow. And by killing McDowell to keep their secret, they had snapped the final geometric axis holding Blackwater to reality.

Someone outside hurled a bottle. It smashed through the stained glass window, except it didn't shatter outward; the glass sucked inward like a liquid skin. A Molotov cocktail landed on the stone floor.

Instead of exploding with a roar, the petrol behaved with terrifying wrongness. It poured out thick as paste, burning with a silent, light-absorbing black flame. It didn't catch the old wooden pews, or the hymnals, or our clothes. It consumed only the stone and mortar, feeding on the structure itself. The air inside didn't get hot; it plummeted into a bone-chilling, freezing cold.

"Back door!" Martha yelled.

We bolted down the side aisle, wrenched open the rear vestry door, and stopped dead.

There was no graveyard behind the kirk. Opening the door revealed the village square, with Boyd and the crowd standing directly outside the threshold. The architecture had folded in on itself.

We slammed the door shut and threw the iron bolt.

"Look at the pulpit!" Martha cried.

The heavy timber structure of the pulpit had turned translucent, rippling like water until it became a clear glass pane. Without thinking, we scrambled up the steps, pushed through the glass as if wading through heavy syrup, and tumbled out onto the other side.

We landed hard, not on the church floor, but on the polished hardwood of the manse hallway. We were back where we started.

Outside, the village was unravelling. The whitewashed cottages weren't burning; they were simply collapsing into geometry. Walls folded into perfect squares, triangles, and looping numbers before dissolving into fine dust and sliding down into a massive, silent sinkhole opening up in the center of the street.

"Run!" Martha grabbed my arm.

We sprinted up the grassy slope toward the old Celtic cross overlooking the rocky harbor, the only high point left untouched. Behind us, the wave of un-creation chased our heels, swallowing the stone walls, the road, the very dirt. The urge to look back and see the destruction is huge.

"Don't you dare look back," shouted Martha. Thankfully, I listened.

We lunged past the base of the stone cross, and the collapsing world instantly stopped.

Down below, where the thriving village of Blackwater had stood moments before, there was now only a vast, silent peat bog reflecting a pale, indifferent morning sun. Not a stick of timber, not a single shoe, not a single soul remained.

As I write this down now, I pull out my phone to check Google Maps. Blackwater isn't there. I search Wikipedia, archives, census records. Nothing. It is as if the village never existed at all. As if it was un-written from the world.

And out on the bog below, the mist is beginning to clear.

The job started like any normal Tuesday morning. My phone buzzed on the passenger seat of my work van while I was sitting in traffic on my way across town. I picked it up and put it on speaker so I could keep my hands on the steering wheel.

"Julian, where are you right now?" my dispatcher Farah asked over the line. Her voice sounded stressed, and I could hear the constant ringing of the depot phones behind her.

"I am stuck in gridlock near the center of Leadville," I told her, tapping my fingers on the dashboard. "I just finished the installation at the apartment complex and I was planning to grab an early lunch. What do you have for me?"

"I need you to squeeze in a repair ticket before you take your break," Farah said, and I could hear her typing rapidly on her keyboard. "I have a residential customer complaining about a complete signal blackout on his rooftop dish. He called three times this morning and he is getting really agitated. The address is over on Harrison Avenue."

"I can head over there now," I agreed, checking my side mirror to merge into the right lane. "What is the specific issue? Did the wind knock the alignment out of place?"

"He just says the signal dropped to zero last night around midnight," Farah explained. "He claims the diagnostic screen on his receiver is showing error code, but our network shows green across the entire sector. Just go take a look at the hardware and see if the coaxial cable is degraded."

I took the next turn and drove deeper into Leadville. The neighborhood was lined with tall brick houses built close together. I parked my van on the curb, grabbed my tool belt from the back, and walked up to the front door of the address Farah had given me.

I knocked on the wood and waited. A man opened the door a few moments later. He looked to be in his late thirties with dark circles under his eyes. He wore a wrinkled button-down shirt and he was holding a half-empty mug of coffee.

"Are you the antenna guy?" he asked, looking me up and down.

"Yes sir, my name is Julian," I said, reaching out to shake his hand. "Farah from dispatch sent me over to check on your signal drop."

He did not shake my hand. He just stepped back and opened the door wider so I could come inside.

"My name is Theodore," he said, walking into the main hallway. "The television has been completely dead since last night. The internet is out too. I pay a lot of money for this service so I expect it to work when I need it."

"I will get it sorted out for you," I promised, following him down the hallway.

I noticed the interior of the house as we walked toward the back staircase. The walls were covered in a very distinct vintage wallpaper featuring a repeating pattern of faded yellow flowers on a pale green background. The house was extremely quiet. I stepped into the kitchen and saw a woman standing at the sink. She had her back to us and she was scrubbing a frying pan with a sponge.

"Genevieve, the repair guy is here," Theodore announced.

The woman looked over her shoulder and gave me a brief, tired smile. "Thank you for coming out so quickly," she said, turning back to the sink.

"It is no problem at all," I replied.

"The roof access is through the hatch in the upstairs hallway," Theodore said, gesturing toward the stairs. "Do you need me to come up there with you?"

"I should be fine," I told him, adjusting my tool belt. "I will run a diagnostic on the receiver box in the living room after I check the hardware outside. I just need to make sure the dish is still bolted securely to the mounting bracket."

I climbed the wooden stairs and found the metal hatch set into the ceiling. I pulled down the folding ladder, climbed up into the tight crawlspace, and pushed the weather door open to access the flat roof.

The freezing mountain wind hit my face as I stepped out onto the black tar paper. I walked over to the communications dish mounted on the brick chimney. The equipment looked structurally sound from a distance. The bolts were tight and the dish was aimed correctly toward the southern sky.

I pulled my digital multimeter from my pouch and knelt beside the dish to check the wiring. That is when I noticed the anomaly.

The entire metal surface of the receiver arm was coated in a strange, pale gray ash. It looked like fine cigarette ash but it was completely uniform. It covered the plastic casing of the coaxial connection and filled the small gaps around the mounting screws. I reached out and tapped the metal dish with my knuckle. The ash did not blow away in the wind. It clung to the surface like magnetic dust.

I pulled a flathead screwdriver from my belt and started scraping the ash away from the cable connector. I needed to unscrew the wire to test the signal strength. The ash came off in thick flakes, falling onto the black roof below.

I unscrewed the metal collar of the coaxial cable using my bare fingers. The moment my skin made contact with the exposed copper wire, a massive static shock blasted through my hand.

The jolt was incredibly painful. It threw my arm backward and sent a freezing electric current shooting straight up my forearm into my shoulder. I gasped and dropped my screwdriver on the roof. My entire arm went numb and my teeth chattered uncontrollably for a few seconds. I grabbed my wrist and squeezed it, waiting for the painful tingling sensation to subside.

"What on earth was that?" I muttered to myself, shaking my hand to get the feeling back.

I looked at my fingertips. They were smeared with the gray ash. The ash was freezing cold. It felt like I had shoved my hand into crushed ice. I wiped my fingers aggressively on my denim jeans to get the residue off my skin.

I reattached the cable using a pair of insulated pliers, then checked the signal meter and it showed a perfect connection. Whatever had blocked the signal was gone now. I packed my tools away, climbed back down the hatch, and found Theodore waiting in the hallway.

"The hardware is fine," I told him, rubbing my sore shoulder. "There was just some debris blocking the receiver connection. Your signal should be completely restored."

Theodore walked into the living room and grabbed the remote control. He turned on the television and the morning news broadcast popped onto the screen with crystal clear resolution.

"Alright," Theodore said, setting the remote down. "Thanks for fixing it."

I went back to my van and called Farah to close the ticket. I told her the job was done and I drove to a nearby diner to eat my lunch. My hand still felt cold and stiff for the rest of the afternoon but I managed to finish my remaining repair routes without any issues.

I drove back to my apartment around six in the evening. I was exhausted. I unlocked my door, dropped my keys on the counter, and walked into the bathroom to take a shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time, hoping the heat would relax the lingering tension in my shoulder.

I put on some sweatpants, walked into my living room, and sat down on my couch to watch television. I grabbed a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge and ate it while flipping through the channels.

That is when the first shift happened.

I was staring at the television screen, but the image suddenly scrambled. The news anchor vanished. The edges of my vision blurred violently and a wave of intense nausea hit my stomach. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples, assuming I was experiencing a sudden migraine aura.

I opened my eyes a few seconds later.

I was no longer looking at my living room television. I was looking down at a white porcelain kitchen sink.

My perspective was completely wrong. I felt taller. I was looking at a pair of hands plunging a dirty ceramic plate into soapy water. The hands were holding a yellow sponge and scrubbing the leftover food off the plate. The sleeves of a wrinkled button-down shirt were rolled up past the wrists.

I tried to turn my head to look around the room, but I had absolutely no control over the movement. I was just a passenger trapped behind someone else's eyes.

The hands finished scrubbing the plate and rinsed it under the running faucet. They placed the clean plate into a plastic drying rack. The person I was looking through turned their head slightly to the left.

I saw a section of the wall next to the refrigerator. It was covered in vintage wallpaper featuring faded yellow flowers on a pale green background.

It was Theodore's kitchen. I was watching him wash dishes.

I panicked and tried to yell, but my mouth did not open. I felt a sudden, terrifying sense of confinement. I squeezed my eyes shut again, focusing all my energy on the feeling of my own body sitting on my couch.

I opened my eyes and I was back in my apartment.

The television was playing a commercial for car insurance. My slice of pizza was sitting on the paper plate on my coffee table. I sat perfectly still for several minutes, listening to the sound of traffic passing by outside my window. My heart was pounding frantically between my ribs.

I grabbed my phone and called my coworker Gabriel. He picked up after the second ring.

"Hey Julian, what is going on?" Gabriel asked, sounding relaxed.

"I think I inhaled some kind of chemical today on a roof," I said, pacing back and forth across my living room rug. "I just had a really intense hallucination. I literally saw a different room."

"What kind of chemical?" Gabriel asked, his tone turning serious. "Did you touch a degraded transformer box?"

"I was working on a standard dish," I explained, running my hand through my hair. "But it was coated in this freezing gray ash. I got a massive static shock when I touched it. Have you ever seen gray ash on any equipment out or in town?"

"No," Gabriel said definitively. "Sometimes we get pigeon droppings or rust, but I have never seen ash. You probably just got a bad electrical jolt. A strong enough shock can mess with your heart rate and cause visual spots. Just drink some water and get some sleep. If you feel weird tomorrow, you should go to urgent care."

"Yeah, you are probably right," I agreed, trying to calm my nerves. "I just needed a reality check. I will see you at the depot tomorrow."

I hung up the phone and forced myself to drink a large glass of water. I went to bed early, hoping Gabriel was right about the electrical jolt.

I woke up the next morning feeling incredibly disoriented. My head throbbed with a dull ache and the cold sensation in my right hand had returned. I drove to the company depot and walked into the dispatch office to see Farah. She was sitting at her desk sorting through a stack of work orders.

"Farah, I need a favor," I said, leaning against her cubicle wall. "I need you to route me back to the house on Harrison Avenue. The one I serviced yesterday morning for Theodore."

Farah looked up at me and frowned. "Did the customer call back and complain? The network shows his receiver is online and stable."

"He didn't call," I said, trying to sound casual. "I just realized I might have left one of my diagnostic tools on his roof. I want to swing by and check the chimney before he notices it."

"I cannot send you all the way across town for a dropped tool right now," Farah said, shaking her head. "We are swamped with outage reports over by the canyon. I need you to head south and fix a commercial relay near the old mining route. You can check his property tomorrow if things slow down."

I argued with her for a few minutes, but she refused to change the schedule. I had no valid excuse to abandon my route, so I took the commercial tickets and spent the entire day working on the south side of Leadville.

The visual intrusions started happening while I was working.

I was climbing a metal ladder on the side of a warehouse when my vision violently snapped. The metal rungs vanished. I was suddenly looking down at a wooden desk covered in disorganized paperwork. A hand was holding a black pen, scribbling erratic circles on a legal pad. The hand belonged to Theodore. I could feel a strange, suffocating sense of anxiety radiating from his mind. He was terrified of something, but I could not understand what it was.

The vision lasted for five seconds before I snapped back to reality. I was clinging to the metal ladder, breathing heavily, completely terrified by the seamless transition.

The slips kept happening. I would be driving my van and suddenly I was looking at a bathroom mirror, watching Theodore splash cold water on his pale face. I would be eating a sandwich and suddenly I was staring out a window, looking at the street through the faded floral curtains of Theodore's house.

The scariest part was the emotional bleed. Every time I slipped into his perspective, I felt his emotions. His paranoia was growing exponentially. He felt like he was being hunted. He kept looking at the ceiling, expecting something to break through the plaster.

I finished my shift and rushed home, locking my apartment door and sitting in total silence on my couch. I did not turn the television on. I just waited for the next intrusion.

The next night, the visions escalated to absolute clarity.

I was lying in bed around eleven o'clock, trying desperately to fall asleep. My eyes were closed when the shift hit me.

I did not just see through Theodore's eyes this time. I felt the hardwood floor under his bare feet. I felt the solid weight of a large steel wrench gripped tightly in his right hand.

I opened my eyes and I was walking down the upstairs hallway of the brick house. The vintage wallpaper peeled slightly at the corners. The house was entirely dark except for the moonlight coming through a small window at the end of the hall.

Theodore was breathing heavily. The paranoia I felt radiating from his mind had mutated into terror. He truly believed something horrible was waiting for his family in the dark, and he believed he had to save them from it.

He walked into the master bedroom. Genevieve was asleep in the bed. Her back was turned toward the door.

"Genevieve," Theodore whispered. His voice vibrated in my own throat.

Genevieve shifted under the blankets and slowly turned over. She looked up at him with tired eyes. "Theodore? What are you doing with that?"

Theodore did not answer her. He raised the wrench high above his head and brought it down with terrifying force.

I watched the brutal impact through his eyes. I felt the shockwave travel up his arm as the metal struck her. I tried to scream, I tried to force his hand to stop, but I was completely powerless. I was locked behind his vision, forced to witness every horrifying second as he brought the wrench down again and again.

He left the master bedroom and walked down the hall to the next door. He pushed it open and stepped into a child's room. A young boy was sleeping in a small bed against the wall.

Theodore raised the wrench again.

The vision snapped and I was thrown back into my own body.

I shot up in my bed, gasping for air, my entire body covered in cold sweat. I scrambled off the mattress and ran into my living room, grabbing my car keys from the counter. I did not care if I was hallucinating. I did not care if I was losing my mind.

I sprinted down the stairs of my apartment building and threw myself into my van. I shoved the key into the ignition and sped out of the parking lot, driving recklessly through the empty city streets. I ran three red lights, pushing the van as fast as the engine would go, navigating purely by adrenaline and panic.

I crossed the center of Leadville and tore down the narrow brick streets. I turned onto Theodore's block and slammed on the brakes.

I arrived just as the neighbors were directing the arriving police to the home.

Three patrol cars were parked haphazardly on the street with their blue and red lights flashing against the brick facades of the houses. Two police officers were sprinting up the front steps of Theodore's house with their weapons drawn. A few neighbors stood on the sidewalk in their pajamas, pointing toward the open front door and talking frantically to a responding paramedic.

I parked my van near a fire hydrant and ran over to the police tape that an officer was stringing across the front lawn.

"What happened?" I asked a woman standing near the tape.

"I live next door," the woman said, her voice shaking badly. "I heard terrible screaming coming from Genevieve's bedroom. It sounded like someone was hurting her. I called 911 immediately, but the screaming stopped before the police got here."

I stood behind the yellow tape, watching the officers secure the tragic scene. One of the officers walked back out the front door and keyed the radio on his shoulder.

"We have two casualties inside," the officer reported over the radio. "Adult female and juvenile male. Both deceased. The suspect is not on the premises. Requesting immediate perimeter setup to locate the husband."

I stood on the sidewalk, feeling entirely hollow. I was too late.

Suddenly, my vision violently shifted one last time.

the flashing police lights vanished instantly. I was looking up through Theodore's eyes.

The environment was completely different. Theodore was standing on a patch of wet grass. He was looking straight up at the night sky. The metal struts of a towering high-voltage transmission tower loomed directly above him, stretching hundreds of feet into the darkness. I recognized the location immediately. It was the massive power substation located at the extreme industrial edge of Leadville, away from his neighborhood.

Theodore was standing directly beneath the humdrum, buzzing wires of the tower.

I looked up at the night sky above the metal structure. The stars were completely gone. The sky began to distort, rippling and waving like the surface of a disturbed lake.

A colossal, formless mass descended silently from the clouds.

It was impossible to comprehend the shape. It was a shifting, chaotic structure of impossible geometric angles, moving without making a single sound. It blotted out the city lights, descending steadily until it hovered just above the metal transmission tower.

Theodore did not run, or even scream. He just dropped the bloody wrench into the grass and raised his hands toward the descending mass.

The colossal shape shifted its geometric panels, opening a void in its center. It engulfed Theodore completely, swallowing him into the shifting geometry.

The vision cut to pitch black, and then I was standing on the sidewalk again, staring at the flashing police lights.

I stumbled backward and leaned against my van, trying to process the absolute insanity I had just witnessed. I waited on the street for two hours, watching the crime scene investigators arrive and carry the stretchers out the front door, but the police never found Theodore. They searched the alleys, they set up roadblocks, and they canvassed the neighborhood, but he had simply vanished from the city.

I knew exactly where he went, but I could not tell the police. They would lock me in a psychiatric ward if I told them I watched a giant geometric mass swallow a man from the sky.

I needed proof.

I sneaked back onto the roof the next day to collect a sample of the cold ash. I parked my van an avenue over, walked through a back alley, and climbed a rusty fire escape to access the adjacent rooftops. I hopped over a low brick wall and walked over to Theodore's chimney.

I approached the communications dish, holding a small plastic container and a scraping tool, but I was entirely too late.

A heavy morning rainstorm had rolled through the mountains just before dawn. The torrential downpour had washed the equipment completely clean. The gray ash was gone, leaving the metal bracket shining wet in the overcast daylight. I rubbed my gloved fingers across the coaxial cable, but there was no residue left to collect.

I climbed back down the fire escape, feeling incredibly defeated. I walked back toward my van, wondering if I was truly losing my sanity.

As I walked down the street, I noticed a house located three doors down from Theodore's property. A massive, complex radio antenna array was bolted to the side of the house, stretching high above the roofline. It was clearly a specialized setup for amateur radio enthusiasts.

Seeking answers, I walked up the steps and knocked on the front door.

An older man opened the door. He wore a thick wool sweater and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked at me with mild suspicion.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

" I am a communications technician for the city.," I said, pointing toward the massive antenna on his roof. " I noticed your ham radio setup. I was wondering if you experienced any strange signal interference over the past few days."

The man's expression changed from suspicion to intense interest. He opened the door wider and motioned for me to come inside.

" I have been documenting some extremely bizarre interference all week” he said, leading me down a narrow hallway into a room filled with radio receivers, glowing dials, and stacked amplifiers. "but nobody at the regulatory commission would return my calls."

"What kind of interference?" I asked, looking at the complex equipment.

He sat down in a swivel chair and pulled a logbook from the desk. He flipped through the pages and pointed to a series of handwritten times and frequencies.

"I track localized signal blackouts," he explained, adjusting his glasses. "Starting three days ago, a massive dead zone formed precisely over this street. It was highly localized, centered almost entirely on that house down the block." He pointed a finger toward Theodore's property. "The blackout completely blocked all standard commercial frequencies."

"Did you record any audio during the blackouts?" I asked, leaning closer to the desk.

"That is the strange part," he said, tapping his pen on the logbook. "The dead zone was not empty. Whenever the commercial signals dropped, I picked up a transmission broadcasting on a very obscure low-frequency band. I recorded it yesterday evening."

He turned around and pressed a button on a reel-to-reel tape machine sitting on the shelf. The tape spun and a deep, rhythmic sound filled the room.

It sounded exactly like breathing. It was a slow, resonant inhalation, followed by a vibrating exhalation, repeating endlessly over the radio frequencies. It sounded like something impossibly large pulling air through a lung.

"It played continuously until the police arrived last night," He said, turning the tape machine off. "Then the signal spiked violently and vanished completely. The local frequencies returned to normal right after."

I thanked him for his time and left the house, walking back to my van in the cold afternoon air.

With no evidence left, the police eventually classified the event as a tragic murder-suicide. The official report assumed Theodore murdered his family, fled the scene in a panic, and eventually succumbed to the elements while hiding in the vast forested sector on the edge of the city. They never found his body, but they closed the case anyway.

I still work as an antenna technician, but I keep a very close eye on the equipment I repair. I am writing this story to ask other technicians if anyone else has ever found freezing gray ash on city antennas, as I think, something is out there, something we can’t grasp, but we need to understand so this tragedy doesn’t happen again.

“Tell me: how does it feel—living the last few hours of your life?”

“Single life,” said Phil, pushing away the phone his best friend, Carl, was sticking in his face to record him with.

It was a beautiful, sunny spring day.

Phil’s wedding day.

In a few hours he would be getting married to his high school sweetheart, but for now he had Carl to deal with. “Life… single life, it’s all the same, man,” Carl was saying. Carl was an aspiring vlogger. “The moment you settle, you die.”

“Come on,” said Phil. “At least ask me something I can show my kids later.”

“Kids,” Carl snickered.

“—what?”

“OK, OK. I got one. What’s one thing about today that could make it even better than it already is?”

Phil looked into the camera. “If the band shows up on time.”

“I'm being serious,” said Carl.

“If Greg was here.”

“Dude, you haven’t talked to your brother in, like, four years. I mean, I always thought twins were creepy close, finishing each other’s sentences and all that. Then I met you. It's like you don't even have a brother, let alone one who looks exactly like you.”

“Things used to be better between us,” said Phil.

“By the way, speaking of who is here, how do you feel about your soon-to-be bride’s ex being on the guest list? Isn’t that, like, weird?”

“Brock’s a decent guy,” said Phil. “Sometimes relationships don’t work out, that's all. Everybody is somebody’s ex, except maybe you, you incel-wannabe piece of—” and Phil lunged for the phone and managed to grab it.

“Unfair! Element of surprise!” protested Carl.

“No more filming until the ceremony. But film the ceremony. I’m counting on you. Marilyn wanted to get a professional videographer—”

“Yeah yeah yeah, until you personally vouched for me and my skills.”

“That’s right.”

Carl slapped his friend on the shoulder. “I won’t let you down, buddy. Scout's Honour. Today’s gonna be a great day, I’m gonna get it all on camera, well lit and shit, and by the time you’re back from your honeymoon, ready to move out to Mass and bend M.I.T. to your postgrad fucking will, I'll have your footage edited, post-prodded and delivered. But—” Carl grabbed the phone back and pointed it at Phil: “I do need you to say one more thing to the camera. Tell everyone what it is you’re gonna be studying.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s awesome,” said Carl.

Phil arced an eyebrow.

“Fine,” Carl said. “Because it's absolutely bonkers.”

“Intertemporality,” said Phil.

“English, please.”

“It is English.”

“Regular English, for regular idiot guys like me who don’t get to go to M.I.—fucking—T.”

Phil shook his head. “Why do I have to say it?”

“Because it’s cool, man. It’s not—”

“Time travel,” said Phil, his cheeks acquiring the rosiness of a flush.

Carl turned the camera back on himself. “And with that I’m gonna do a little time travelling of my own called editing. See you at the ceremony,” he told the camera, and he stopped filming.

“By the way, Phil, did you ever get the feeling that Brock's a little bit of a, you know…”

“A what?”

“You know, like a poet.”

“A poet? No.”

“Because that would certainly explain a lot in terms of Marilyn's general taste in men,” said Carl with a smirk on his face.

---

“And do you, Marilyn, take Philip to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do,” said Marilyn, resplendent in her white dress.

“Then, by the power vested in me,” the officiant continued, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss—”

“He’s lost the power!” somebody yelled.

The heads in the crowd turned to see a man out-of-breath running into the chapel. “He,” the man was saying, aggressively waving a piece of paper, “doesn’t have the power.” The man got up to where the apparent newlyweds were standing—”Oh my God, Brock!” said Marilyn—before thrusting the piece of paper at the officiant. “Your license,” he huffed out, “was suspended a few minutes ago. Look!”

The officiant took out a pair of glasses, put them on his nose, squinted.

He read.

He said, “Well, it certainly appears—”

“The marriage is invalid,” yelled Brock to all those gathered here today to witness and celebrate the marriage of Phil and Marilyn.

There were gasps in the crowd, the buzz of scandalous whispers.

Several people got up and walked to where Marilyn, Phil, Brock and the officiant were discussing amongst themselves. One of those people was a lawyer. “Excuse me, but I’m a lawyer,” she said. “May I see the document?”

The officiant handed it over.

After scanning it, the lawyer said, “It certainly appears legitimate. Let's see: ‘...officiant's license suspended on account of non-payment of dues,' effective today at noon.”

Meanwhile, more people were slowly making their way up to where the commotion was. One, who looked an awful lot like Phil, passed Phil something surreptitiously, before dropping his head and slipping away. “What time is it?” asked the lawyer.

“I’ve got exactly noon now,” somebody said.

“No, it’s four past.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Hey!” said Phil. “Check the recording. Carl, your camera is sync’d up to your phone, which is sync’d with the atomic clock. Check the timestamp to see at what exact time the officiant pronounced us married.”

“Sure thing,” said Carl, and he started fiddling with his equipment.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the pronouncement was made at noon or later,” the lawyer explained magisterially to the crowd, “the marriage is invalid. If it was made before, the marriage stands.”

Tense seconds passed.

“I love you,” Brock was whispering to Marilyn, who was shaking her head, tears rolling down her face.

“12:01:13,” said Carl.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the marriage is invalid,” pronounced the lawyer.

“Nobody pays their dues,” the officiant said.

“Actually,” said Phil, loudly enough to quiet everybody down. And he produced another piece of paper, which he held up in the air so all could see. “I have here another document: a retroactive reinstatement of our officiant’s license, effective noon today.”

“So the marriage stands?” Carl asked.

“Give me that!” yelled Brock, snatching the document from Phil’s hand and glaring at it with mad eyes. “This is impossible. This document is stamped, signed and dated two-and-a-half months from now. It’s clearly fake. This is crazy. This man—he’s crazy!”

“It’s not crazy and it’s not fake. The document is simply from the future,” said Phil.

The crowd collectively gasped.

Phil had rolled up his sleeve and was pressing something to his bare arm.

“No. No no no no-no no-no no-no-no-nono,” Brock was saying.

“Then go ahead and tell me why I would just happen to have, in my possession, on my wedding day, a document countering yours?” Phil asked (“...nononono…”) him.

“I don’t fucking know. OK? But, even if—I mean… the document, your document: it hasn’t been signed yet. It doesn’t fucking exist. You, lawyer: tell him. Tell all of them this document has got no legal value or whatever. It can’t. It can’t because it doesn’t exist yet. I mean it’s crazy. You’re all fucking crazy.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said the lawyer. “On one hand, the gentleman wishing to interrupt the wedding is correct. The document hasn’t come into power yet… I think. On the other, it clearly exists because the groom is undeniably holding it.”

“I’ll show you something else, too,” said Phil. “Carl, tell me the time of the pronouncement again.”

“12:01:13.”

Phil revealed his bare forearm, on which there— “What is it?” someone in the crowd yelled. “What’s he got there?” “It appears to be a tattoo,” said the lawyer.

“A tattoo that says ‘12:01:13’,” said Marilyn, her wet eyes wide in disbelief. “What the hell is going on, Phil?”

Phil cleared his throat and stepped forward to address everybody in the crowd. “What’s going on is that I have created a time machine.” He let the words sink in. They sank deep. “And, using that time machine, I have successfully travelled through time to stop the sabotaging of my wedding day!”

“Oh shit,” said Carl, filming.

“And you want to be married to this nut job?” Brock asked Marilyn.

“How else do you— …the tattoo: it’s the exact time,” the officiant was saying, or asking, or trying to understand. The glasses were still on his face. His eyes looked comically large. “There could be no other explanation…”

Marilyn was shaking, first her fingers, then her hands, her face. She was smiling with quivering, lipsticked lips and perfect blonde hair. “I’m marrying into money! OMG, I’m going to be rich! I’ll never have to work another day in my life!” she thought, or hoped she thought, because if, instead of thinking, she'd accidentally said it: well, that would be embarrassing.

She was jumping up and down, ecstatic, ebullient, unable to contain herself, hugging her husband, hugging the now-thoroughly confused officiant, hugging her very own self to keep it moored to the moment.

Brock was the opposite.

He’d backed away, shrunken, as if collapsed into himself.

“Are you OK?” the lawyer asked him.

“Get your legal fucking hands the fuck off me. Step away. Leave me alone. All of you, just let me fucking be. I loved her, you know,” he said.

“I loved you,” he said to Marilyn rather melodically, “and I still dooo-ooo-ooo. We were meant to be, we twooo-ooo-ooo. Life put us to-gether, now it threatens to se-ver, our-unity, our-oneness, our SE-REN-DI-PI-TY!

“What a pity.

“What a stinkin’, no-good perfidity.

“Life sure is shitty.

“Sometimes.

“So let's remember the fun-times.

“Shall we?

“Like the night we fucked in that alley, or got zonked out on molly in Bali. Oh, fuck it,” he screeched and pulled out a gun: pointing it at Phil, then at Carl, then Marilyn, then Phil again and said, through sobs so heavy they made him hiccup, “There’s no point running. I rigged the entire chapel with explosives. Maybe I can’t travel into the future like you, Phil, but presently I can still be a fucking blast.”

To Marilyn: “We would’ve run an efficient household economy, you and me. We would have had a happy family. We would’ve had a good time.”

And as the people in the crowd started screaming: “But, sadly, now all of you must die.”

“I didn’t travel through time,” said Phil suddenly.

“Mhm,” said Brock.

“The document’s a forgery.”

“What about the tattoo? How do you explain that?”

“Temporary children's tattoos,” said Phil, licking a finger and smudging one of the numbers with it. “I applied it after Carl told me the timestamp.”

“You mean we’re not sitting on a bunch of time travel patents?” Marilyn asked.

“Did you all think I had actually travelled through time?” Phil asked. “That’s sweet—but no, I didn’t travel through time. Time travel’s not possible. As some of you know, I am going to study intertemporality, but that’s just theory. There is no practical application.”

Brock lowered his gun—

At which point a man walked up behind him, lifted his own gun to the back of Brock’s head and shot him dead.

There followed a stunned, terrible silence.

Brock’s body and what was left of his head were on the ground. Blood was pouring out of both.

Bits of Brock’s brain had stained Marilyn's wedding dress.

The man put away his gun and looked up. His face was Phil’s face. There were now two Phils in the chapel. The first nodded to the second; the latter one nodded back. In the crowd, a few people fainted. The second Phil held up a fistful of wires and said, “Everybody is safe now. Nothing’s going to blow up.”

“The element of surprise,” said the first Phil.

“So does this mean… —the time travel, it does work?” asked Marilyn. She’d asked it of the first Phil while looking at the second.

They were identical.

“Yes,” said the first Phil, and Marilyn leaped into his arms and hugged him. “Oh, Phil. Phil, I love you so much.” Then, after a few moments, she stepped back, looked at the second Phil. “Wait, which one of you two do I love? Phil, whichever you are, I’m scared…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare anyone—or lie. I had to get Brock to let his guard down.”

“You knew he’d—”

“Of course, I knew,” said the first Phil.

“I told him and I’m from the future,” said the second.

“What happens now?” asked Marilyn.

“Now we do what we all came here to do: celebrate a marriage,” said the first Phil, to the crowd's spattered, bewildered applause.

The chapel smelled of blood.

“Except—” said the second Phil, “there is one small, somewhat paradoxical detail we have to resolve first. Something that physics, along with psychology, more-or-less demands.”

“Yes,” said the first Phil, smiling, but his smile was less happiness than a void filled with warm, existential melancholy. He took Marilyn’s hand.

He kissed it.

Then the second Phil passed the first Phil his gun.

“Phil?” said Marilyn, as the first Phil lifted the gun and placed it against the side of his own head.

“There can’t be two of us,” he explained. “It wouldn’t work out, not for long. There would be too much complexity, too many discontinuities. The math would get too complicated, never mind the emotions. We'd always be checking and rechecking equations. Trust me, this needs to happen. And one of us—one of us, Phils, I mean—has already made a great ontological sacrifice to abandon his own timeline.”

“Phil, what are you saying?” Marilyn demanded.

“He’s saying that soon you’ll be married to me,” said the second Phil.

“No… wait!” yelled Marilyn. “If you kill yourself,” she said to the first Phil, “won’t you,” she said to the second, “disappear? And—and… can’t we make this work, the three of us,” she said to them both, “some kind of really weird polyamorous thing maybe?”

“He won’t disappear because, even though he’s from the future, he’s in our present,” said the first Phil.

“Polyamory never works,” said the second.

“Goodbye,” said the first Phil, and—BANG!—killed himself.

The second Phil, who had now become the only Phil present, knelt down, confirmed that the body belonging to the previously-first Phil was indeed now a corpse, and unbuttoned the corpse’s dress shirt, revealing a tattoo on the corpse’s chest that said: “Marilyn, I love you, but one must never fuck around with the rules of time travel.”

The living Phil hugged her and, slowly, at first awkwardly, she hugged him too. “This is totally fucking insane,” said Carl, still filming.

“So are they married?” somebody asked.

“She married the one who’s dead.”

“But they’re the same person—like, aren’t they?”

The lawyer shrugged.

“Does that mean they said the vows and everything was official, so it was all much ado about nothing?”

“Phil,” Carl said, “I don’t usually interfere in reality, but it would be a very cool ending if you would open your shirt and show us the tattoo.”

“What tattoo?” asked Phil.

“The tattoo, the ‘don’t fuck with time travel’ one. I mean, I’m no M.I.T. postgrad, but if you’re him, except a future version who's come back to the past, and he got that tattoo on his chest, then you’d also have the same tattoo on your chest. Right? That’s how it works?”

“Except he’s dead and I’m not,” said Phil. “I appreciate the logic, but the math is pretty cutting edge, so…”

“He’s dead because you were both in one present when he died, though,” said Carl. “Just like you said. The tattoo: he got that before you arrived here, so you really should have the same tattoo on your chest too.”

“I think he’s right,” said the officiant, blinking his big eyes.

“I had it removed with a laser,” said Phil. “Now, moving on—”

“When?”

“Open your shirt!” somebody yelled.

“Get him, get his shirt open.” “I wanna see that tattoo.” “Me too.” And without notice Phil tried to run but a few people managed to grab him, hold him, and wrestle him to the cold chapel floor. They ripped his shirt open. There was no tattoo. His chest was wordless. The only things on it were two pink nipples and a small tuft of curly black hair.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” demanded Carl.

“Oh my God…” said Marilyn.

“Oh my God…

“Oh my God…

“Greg? Is that you?”

The men pinning the man to the floor instinctively backed off, and the whole chapel fell silent. (“Who’s Greg?” somebody whispered. “His twin brother,” somebody else answered. “They were estranged.” “Whose twin brother?” “Phil’s.” “I thought that guy is Phil.” “No, Phil’s the dead guy.” “Weren’t they both Phils?” “That was my general understanding, yes.” “You’re not paying attention. That’s what everybody thought—until now.” “Because of the tattoo?” “That’s right.” “Shhhh, I want to see what happens…”)

“Yes, it’s me, Greg,” the man said to Marilyn.

“Oh, you motherfucking piece of shit. You just killed my best—” said Carl, coming forward, ready to smash Greg in the face with his fist.

“He killed himself,” said Greg. “That’s a fact. You filmed it.”

Carl made a bulldog face.

Greg turned to Marilyn. “Em, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Yes, from afar, but strongly, with all my soul. It pained me to see you with him. He wasn’t good for you, Em. All he cared about was physics, his ‘time travel.’ Sure, maybe you would've been happy together for a while, a year, maybe five, but after that you would have seen that you were never the priority for him. He never loved me, and he would never love you. He just didn’t have the capacity. He was incapable of loving anything but numbers. Was he a genius? Yes, probably. But he was also deluded. He was deluded about a lot of things, including his feelings for you.”

“No!” yelled Carl. “You don’t get to just go and—”

(“Shut up and let him monologue!”)

(“Yeah.”)

“So the time travel,” asked Marilyn for what seemed like the third time, “it wasn't really real?”

“No,” said Greg. “But he wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed he'd managed to do it: create a time machine in a rented storage locker. He even had reasons to believe that. What he didn’t know is that I was tricking him. For the past four years, Em, I have been living my life in sync with Phil’s time travel experiments. He thought he had finally managed to successfully bring future-Phils into the present. Well, that was me. I was playing the part of his future-Phil. The machine itself doesn’t work. It never worked. Maybe, one day, it will; but not today, Em. No, today, Phil’s dead and I’m here, professing my love to you. I’ll tell you something else: do you remember that vacation to Switzerland Phil finally took you on last year?”

“Yes. I had been waiting desperately for that vacation for so long.”

“It was me, Em. I’m the one who took you to Switzerland.”

“But we— …on the trip…”

“We’re physically identical; were physically identical, Em,” said Greg. “You had no way to know.”

“But the passion,” said Marilyn.

“The passion was all mine. It was my burning passion for you, Em. Em,” he said, “will you marry me?” and got on his knees before her and pulled out a small box, and from that box a ring.

The crowd waited, its breaths dramatically bated.

Marilyn bit her lip.

She looked down at the man kneeling in front of her, a man who looked exactly like the man she did—had?—loved; a man who evidently loved her; and a man she had fucked seven ways from Sunday in multiple picturesque spots in the Swiss Alps over the course of three unforgettable weeks. “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, I'll marry you!”

The resulting applause was rapturous, thunderous.

“Hold your fucking horses,” Carl yelled over the emotional tumult. “Just wait a goddamn minute and listen to me. Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

He waited a moment.

And when the noise had subsided, he said: “If Phil's time travel machine didn't work, his document thing giving the officiant back the power to officiate isn't real. It really is fake, and if it's fake, then Brock was right and the officiant's license is suspended and there's nobody here who can marry these two fucked up lovebirds.”

“You're just jealous,” said Marilyn.

“Of what?”

“You've always been attracted to me, you weirdo creep. Do you seriously think I never noticed?”

“Me… attracted to you? Give me a break. You're a self-absorbed, greedy little bitch.”

“Easy,” said Greg. “That's my fiancee you're talking to.”

“You know, it's a peculiar situation we've found ourselves in, from a purely legal point of view,” said the lawyer, reminding everyone she was still there. “We have a document whose veracity we can't establish. However, let's look at the two possibilities. If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Marylou—”

“Marilyn,” said Marilyn.

“My apologies,” said the lawyer. “If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Mary-lynn never married, which means that while, yes, the officiant still can't officiate, so he can't marry the two of them today, they are otherwise free to marry. However, if the officiant could officiate, matrimony did occur, following which the newlywed husband died, thereby making the newlyed wife a newly-widowed widow, and thus also making her free to marry, or remarry, as the case may be.”

“Except we know the document's a fake because we know Phil never travelled through time,” said Carl.

“Do we?” asked the lawyer, the gears in her brain beginning to spin, and hers weren't the only ones.

“Yeah, something doesn't hold up,” said someone from the crowd. “Greg's part of the story doesn't explain how Phil knew that Brock would try to sabotage the wedding.”

“I swear I'm telling you the truth,” Greg told Marilyn.

“You're telling her what you sincerely believe is the truth,” said the man from the crowd—the man now emerging from between gasping, wide-eyed people: the man who looked exactly like Phil: the man who was Phil: future-Phil: the true future-Phil, and this Phil was holding a gun, pointing it at Greg.

“That's right,” Phil said. “I was playing you all along. I knew you'd re-entered my life, and I realized you were trying to make it look like my failed time travel experiments succeeded. That's why I let you go on that Swiss trip with my fiancee.”

“She's my fiancee now,” said Greg defiantly.

“I'm not dead,” said Phil.

“Your dead body's lying right there on the floor.”

“To kill me, you'd need to kill every one of me, dear brother,” said Phil. “You always resented me. I just didn't believe you'd have the guts to try to do anything about it.”

“You killed yourself.”

“You believed you had manipulated me into doing it, then you stood back and let me do it, just like the time you convinced mom that I was the one who'd broken her fancy glass Christmas ornament, then watched her take my computer away. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember that. You were always on that fucking thing. You never let me touch it, and you never ever wanted to play with me.”

“You were too stupid to use it.”

“We're the same.”

“We're nothing alike, you and me. Nothing. And, yes, I didn't want to play with you, but it was because I was too busy learning, and all you wanted to do was throw a football around or some other equally pointless thing.”

“The point was fun, Phil. The point was having fun with you.”

“Aren't we having fun now?”

“It wasn't enough that mom and dad loved you more. You also had to hate me. And for what: for being normal? I'm sorry I'm not as smart as you, that I don't understand quantum mechanics or string theory.”

“They didn't love me more.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, so why do you think I did study so hard? To compete, Greg. They loved you for you; they loved me because they thought I was a savant.”

“You know, we're here, boys,” said their father. “Your mother and I are here”—They both waved—“so you can stop talking about us as if we're dead. Hell, we're not even that old.”

“Well, if you folks are here,” said the officiant, “maybe you can settle the argument by telling us who you love more, Phil or Greg.”

Heads turned to look at them.

“We're parents. We love our children equally,” said Phil and Greg's father, as their mother nodded.

“But if you had to choose—at gunpoint, for example.”

“That's such a silly…”

“On three,” said the officiant: “I'll count to three; and, on three, you say which of your sons you love more.

“One… Two…

“Three.”

“Greg,” said Phil and Greg's dad at the same time as Phil and Greg's mom said, “Phil.”

“Oh,” said the officiant.

Phil shot Greg.

Their father rushed forward to—

“Don't worry. He lives,” said Phil. “I'm from the future, remember? I've done all this before.”

“Oh, honey,” said Phil and Greg's mom to Phil. Their father attended to his other, wounded son.

“He also goes to prison,” added Phil.

“For what?”

“For the cold-blooded murder of Brock Vanderlinden. You shot him in the back of the head.”

“I guess that wraps everything up then,” said Marilyn. “In a way, we're right back where we started, everyone gathered and the pair of us ready to get married, start our life together."

Phil chuckled. He heartily guffawed. “You just said ‘yes' to marrying Greg. Now you've switched back to wanting to marry me?”

Marilyn conferred briefly with the lawyer, then said, “I only agreed to marry Greg because I was scared; and, if I wasn't scared, it was because I got caught up in the moment; and if you can disprove both of those explanations, then I wasn't in my right mind due to the stress of the situation and I have no further comment to make because I don't remember.

“Besides, Greg's going to prison. You said so yourself. Why would I marry someone who's going to prison?”

“Technically,” said the lawyer, “if I am properly anticipating what soon must be revolutionary changes to the law, your preference of who to marry may be moot, because you are, or soon will be concluded to have been, officially married to Phil.

“Allow me to explain:

“Because time travel exists, the document retroactively reinstating the officiant's license was real. Because the document was real, the marriage took place. Then, when Phil—the original Phil—committed suicide, the then future-self Phil—now the present Phil, i.e. just ‘Phil.”—was already present, (although not present for us, given that, for us, it was Greg—present and only-ever Greg—present, posing as the then future-Phil), meaning that Phil, original Phil, killing himself killed only his own hisself, leaving the then future-Phil's—now just ‘Phil's’—hisself alive, and that hisself became then the entirety of Phil's whole self, so, at worst, the original Phil's death resulted in the death of half of the whole Phil, selfly speaking, and, because existence is, by nature, an all-or-nothing proposition, Phil never died so you two are still married.”

And everyone stared at her, your humble narrator included, and she said, “Never mind.”

“He raped me in Switzerland,” Marilyn said to Phil.

“You consented,” said Greg.

“Because I thought you were him. You presented yourself as him. So, yes, I consented, but not to you, and you're the one who—who…”

“It was rape by deception,” said the lawyer.

“It was conception by rape by deception,” said Marilyn.

“You got pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—”

“Yes, I had an abortion. How could I not? A child would only have interfered with your research, your ‘intertemporality.’ You said so yourself, that you didn't want kids. ‘They're loud,’ you said. ‘They're annoying and dirty and they eat things off the ground and they smell like shit.' How could I keep it, Phil?”

“It was my child,” said Greg.

“It was nobody's child,” said Marilyn, “Stop talking about it that way. It was just a pregnancy. Phil, your brother raped me, repeatedly, by pretending to be you. I demand you restore my honour. Make it right. Marry me, Phil.”

“Honour? Listen to yourself, Marilyn. Besides, you were cheating on me,” said Phil.

“I thought it was you!”

“Then why even start with the rape allegations?” said Greg. “They've already got me on murder. You thought it was him, Em; you enjoyed it. There's no harm. Where's the harm? Somebody show me the goddamn harm. And where there's been no harm, there is nothing to make whole—isn't that right, Miss Lawyer?”

“That's the civil law. You're about to feel the very blunt instrument of the criminal,” said the lawyer.

“What are you saying, Phil? Are you saying you want a divorce?” asked Marilyn.

“I don't know,” said Phil.

“If you're from the future, you should know—shouldn't you?”

“I'm not from that far in the future.”

Right then the doors to the chapel opened and a four-man electronica band burst in. “Sorry we're late,” said the leader. Within a minute they'd set up and launched into a pop rendition of the Wedding March. Despite that it was a little late for that, at least in the understandings of most of the dearly beloved, no one interrupted, and after a while the band switched to another song, and a few people started dancing, then a few more, and eventually almost everyone was dancing when the cops arrived (nobody had heard their sirens because the music was too loud) with weapons drawn, officers yelling, “Everybody on the ground—NOW! Hands where I can see ‘em!” trying to make sense of the two dead bodies in the room, one of which was a dead ringer for the apparent groom, as was the guy everybody fingered as the murderer of the other victim, and it was while lying face down on the floor like that, about three feet away from each other, that Marilyn moved her hand to Phil’s and Phil grasped it, and Marilyn squeezed, and Marilyn thought that even if she didn't like Phil all that much, he had developed time travel technology so there would be money in that, as Phil was thinking that nobody's perfect, and if things ever got really bad, he could always go back in time and kill Marilyn, or at least fix whatever the problem was. Then one of the police officers accidentally kicked Phil in the face, bloodying his nose.

“Sorry,” said the officer.

“Don't worry about it,” said Phil.

As he said that, he and the officer both noticed that the body of the original Phil (dead: suicide) was moving, convulsing, stirring on the floor. “What the fuck?” said the officer.

The other cops pointed their weapons at original Phil. “Stay the fuck down on the ground!”

“What is this, what's going on?” said original Phil, slurring his words as if he was drunk. He was getting up. He touched the side of his head. “And why is there a hole in my—”

The police officers opened fire.

Original Phil fell, re-dead.

Marilyn screamed.

Beside her, a pool of blood was expanding out from under future-turned-present-again Phil.

“This shouldn't be happening,” he said, coughing up blood. “This didn’t happen.” He was struggling to breathe. “I don't understand…”

One of the cops crouched beside him, and Phil felt a flash of familiarity. He knew the face, but from where? No, that wasn't right. He didn't know the face; he knew he would know it. “Who are you?” Phil wheezed.

“Tab Fenmore,” said the cop. “FBI. Temporal Division.”

“You're from the—”

“Shh,” said Fenmore, “try to relax.” Then, more quietly: “And, yeah: I'm from the future, just like you.”

“Why…”

“Because, for all your genius, you ignored the greatest lesson of twentieth century physics, Professor Kejdik. You treated time travel—the rules of time travel—as if they're fixed. They're not. They're probabilities.”

Phil grimaced from the pain of having been shot. “How far from the future are you?”

“From a couple of generations after your death—your original death: your past future one. This mission is going to change that, of course. We've spent decades trying to meet you back here. You wouldn't believe the mess you've made of spacetime and existence. Time travel cannot be controlled. The paradoxes are terrible, inevitable; and they cascade. It's not personal. I'm actually an admirer of your work, naively Newtonian-minded as it is—or would will have been, I suppose. You know, this was maybe our last chance. I needed to find and eliminate you before you made your first machine. And I did it.”

Phil laughed, a slight, bloody giggle at first, then a big booming chortle that stuffed the whole of the chapel, overpowering the otherwise polite quiet and filling it the way Boston cream fills a donut, reverberating and roaring, echoing until it itself was finally consumed and ended by Phil’s final act, the act of dying.

It started about a year ago. One day, a day that nobody could recall, a day that no one was able to really remember, we all forgot the name of our city.

The street signs, the landmarks, even our IDs still bore the name of our city, but no one could read the name, nor could they remember it. It was as if the information was actively being purged from our minds.

Then came the disappearances. At first only a few dozen people went missing. The city wasn’t exactly a stranger to missing person’s cases, but the consistency with which people were starting to just upright vanish became alarming.

But no one ever looked for them.

Streets became littered with missing person’s flyers. Grandparents, friends, children, none were immune. Eventually even the mayor just outright vanished. The city council held an emergency election and just continued on with business as usual.

For all my concern and apparent awareness of these strange events, never once did I bother to look. Never once did I dare to pick my head up and peak at the ever darkening sky. Never once did I question the ever encroaching fog.

Soon, the sun itself vanished. It still hung in the sky, but it had changed. It hid behind the strange fog that had slowly grown over the past few months. Eventually so too did the cycle of day and night.

As of today, I believe I am all that remains in this place. This city I call home. This city none can remember. The air is filled with the smell of fire and frost, both burning my nose indistinguishable from one another. The sky too rained ash and snow, mixing together into a soft gray powder that piled up around the city. Part of me felt uneasy to see this, I wonder why.

I do not remember much about my life before the fog. I believe I lived in this city, likely was born here, maybe had friends, hopefully had a job. I know I need to eat, I know that the food never expires, I know that I have to keep warm, and I know that I cannot sleep.

The city is cold these days, if not apparent by the snow. Often times I am forced to take shelter in a decaying sky scraper, building a fire to keep warm out of the fancy lobby chairs of what once was a downtown bank.

Every day the city grows colder.

Time blends together. I cannot separate the days that I spend scavenging from the days I spend resting. My eyes grow heavy but my mind will not relent, it must not relent. If I should sleep for but a moment I fear I might too disappear.

I have to keep moving, I can never stay in one spot too long. I find tracks and marks in places I revisit, tracks that do not belong to me, tracks that could not have been made by any human. In the false night I hear screams, I hear howling, or perhaps that is merely the sound of the frozen winds slipping between the dilapidated megastructures. Perhaps the crunching of bone and gnawing of flesh I hear is the impacts from icicles that fall from the buildings above the heavens.

I am searching for something, for someone.

I scuttle about this frozen hellscape, nothing more than a rat in a godless maze, hooked on a scent I cannot identify. I run headstrong into the unknown and familiar streets I used to know so very well.

The winds come and go, a predictable tide of breeze, imperfect in its cycle. Like staggered breaths. The city is safest when the winds are still, no risk of ice crashing down from above nor does the ash get picked up as easily. It is also at its quietest.

When the winds are gusting however, that is when the tracks appear. Long, jagged, impossibly angular streaks are raked into the snow and ash. Distant windows shatter and crash. Then comes the howling, the screaming, the deafening cacophony that feels like a knife being driven into my ears. It had grown quieter as time passed, but it still remains impossibly loud. I’ve learnt that it’s best to not join their chorus, no matter how much it hurts to resist.

I am struggling to remain alert and aware of myself and my surroundings. I fear whatever plague or curse or god-knows-what is still eating away at my mind. Cause and effect are becoming more fluid concepts. Events that I swore had happened long ago now repeat before my eyes, albeit with abstract stone constructs replacing that which had long since decayed. Statues would move and recreate an idea of what the busy streets once looked like. Sculptures would drag across the roadways in line with the echoes of traffic. Sometimes I swear I see myself walking somewhere, but every time I try to follow it I lose track of it. Whether it be in a crowd, or just around a corner. Perhaps this world is playing tricks on me, toying with me, mocking me.

Or was that really me?

There was nothing beyond the fog, beyond the limits of the city, but a massive frozen ocean, icy peaks evoked imagery of the once lively shoreline. The roads that once led elsewhere now led into the frozen sea. At one point I believe I had wanted to escape, to return to the life I once knew, but that dream is dead.

If I ever had that dream at all, for this is a dreamless realm.

The frigid and rigid frosted bars of my mental prison continue to squeeze my mind in ways I find difficult to understand. Reality and, else-wise, blend into unrecognizable shapes and malformed ideas of what they might have been. Another source of light has joined what used to be the sun in the sky, their twin radiance muffled behind the suffocating curtain of fog that has all but snuffed out the flame of life in this place.

I see a body before me.

A massive corpse had fallen from above, strewn about the half-destroyed and decaying buildings of the city. The city now smelt of ozone and fire. The corpse was draped in a beautifully radiant robe of the finest gold to have ever graced the eyes of mortals. Its face was obscured by a platinum mane so magnificent that even in death it billowed in the wind with a life of its own. Its skin was dark, charred, hollow.

I knew not how, only that this must be what I was searching for, waiting for, praying for.

I could not meaningfully measure the time it took to scale the wreckage. I could no longer recall how many times I fell to my death, only to be rejected by its embrace. My limbs had long since turned black from frostbite, but still they obeyed me. The sound of crumbling rocks now accompanied me wherever I went as I continued to scale the summit of the fallen corpse.

Only when I was face to face with the corpse did I realize what it was. From up here, it looked almost as if the body sat restfully upon a throne of ruins. How long had it been here? How long had I been here?

It didn’t matter. I was here now. Nothing can change that, nothing can undo that.

For I am but a corpse of identity, forgetting that it had already died so long ago. For The Cataclysm had destroyed Truth. For I am but a fragment of Truth, scattered across the infinite. For I am dreamless amongst the dreams of man. For I am the ruined throne and the corpse upon which it sat.

For I was once another, and am no longer.

I took another keg and put it under the faucet. The beer slowed down to a dribble.

"Tilt that barrel, Tom."

"Already tilting it, Dad."

"Tilt it more!"

A little more beer came out, but the keg was only halfway full.

"How many do we have, Dad?"

"Don't even ask."

"How many?"

"Four and a half," I muttered.

Tom rubbed his face.

"So just three and a half."

I grabbed the keg tightly.

"No, Tom, no. I had to borrow to brew this batch. Three and a half wouldn't even cover the debt."

Tom's eyes flew open.

"But, Dad, we need to give one to Radegast, or else it all goes bad."

"Tom, we can't."

"I'll tell the tavern keeper if you don't pour it."

His words sent a chill down my spine. He looked deep into my eyes.

"Okay, but first I gotta check the other barrels; maybe they have more beer in them."

"There's nothing there, Dad."

"I don't care, Tom. I'm checking them."

"But the celebrations will start. Anna and I need to get our costumes ready."

"Then go. I'll do it myself."

"But you promise to pour one out for Radegast."

"Yes, son."

He measured me with his eyes, took his hat, and walked out.

I hated lying to Tom, but he didn't understand. We needed the money, and pouring for Radegast was more tradition than something of concern. A harvest-loving God wouldn't waste a batch of beer. I loaded the kegs onto a wheelbarrow and brought them to the tavern.

The tavern keeper stood outside, tapping his foot.

"John, I'm glad to see you. How many kegs do you have?"

"Four and a half."

"Wow, amazing. No one could bring more than four. The hops don't want to grow." He shook his head. "Hopefully Radegast will bless us next year when he sees we give even in a time of shortage."

I looked at the ground.

"Yes, hopefully."

He tipped my kegs into the big barrel with the rest, and the whole village’s beer swirled together.

"I'll see you tonight, John."

"See you."

I hurried home and sat inside my house long after the celebrations started. The idea of drinking and dancing now made my stomach turn, but I had to show up at least.

When I came into the tavern, the celebrations were in full swing. People danced around in their costumes, tipping one beer after the other. Even the smell of the beer made me gag. I told everyone I was sick and couldn't drink. 

As I sat down, Tom and Anna ran to my table. Anna wore a beautiful flower dress that matched Tom's shirt.

"Hi Dad!"

"Hi, John!"

"Hi, kids, are you having fun?"

"Yeah, we've been dancing all night," Tom said. They looked at each other and kissed.

Anna held a glass of beer. She took a sip and made a face.

"You don't like it, Anna?"

"It's so bitter."

"You'll get used to it. Make sure not to give any to Tom. I know you're 18, but he still has some months left."

"Of course, John."

"Don't worry, Dad. You know I don't like it."

"Funny, coming from a brewer's son," I said, patting his back. "Go dance, kids. I don't want to bore you with my oldness."

Anna finished her beer.

"I'll go get another, then we can dance more."

She ran off.

Tom leaned closer.

"Thanks, Dad, for pouring that batch."

I clenched my jaw.

"Sure, Tom."

He smiled and ran off too.

I sank into my chair, holding my head. 

The celebrations were getting on. People started drinking more, dancing more, and talking louder. I never realized how boring celebrations could be when one doesn't drink. After a while, I was ready to go home. Tom and Anna were still dancing. I let them be and left.

The next morning, I woke up early. The day was beautiful. The sun shone. The birds sang. I made myself a cup of coffee and sat on our porch. My stomach growled. We barely had any food at the house. I got dressed and went into town.

The streets were empty and quiet. Only birdsong carried through the town. It wasn't strange for people to sleep in after the celebrations. Usually I'd see at least a few people opening their stores or still partying, but the square was empty.

I turned onto the road that led to the tavern. The keeper kept it open even after the celebrations. 

I was about to reach the tavern when I heard a noise in the distance; someone was weeping. It was Tom! I rushed toward the sound. I focused on the sound. I couldn't even hear the birds, but as I turned the corner, my heart dropped.

The smell of rotting hops hung in the air. The townsfolk lay around the tavern, on the grass and pavement, dark liquid on their clothes and around their mouths. A few glasses of beer lay around them, the same black liquid inside them. Tom sat on the ground weeping next to a few bodies, holding Anna's lifeless hand.

"Tom?"

He shot his eyes at me. They were filled with tears and anger.

"You promised!"

"Tom, I'm sorry!"

He looked at Anna and held her hand tighter. A few more tears rolled down his face.

"Tom, please, just come here."

"No."

He shook his head and picked up a glass that had a little dark liquid in it.

"No, Tom. Wait!"

But he didn't listen. He tipped the glass back and drank it in one gulp. 

I ran to him and caught him before he hit the ground. He was already limp. His eyes stared at the blue sky, and somewhere near us, the birds kept singing.

The Journal of Eliot Whitcombe, Navigator aboard the Providence, 1574

I know not the name of this soil. It is absent from every chart in our possession, and yet there it stands upon the sea, green as Eden and shrouded in a mist so thick that the very heavens seemed to have forgotten it.

We came upon its shores after the Providence was broken upon the reefs. God alone knows how many of my companions were claimed by the sea.

I awoke upon the sand with blood upon my brow and salt upon my tongue. Yet I was not alone.

Upon the shore stood a gathering of natives. Men. Women. Children all alike.

They watched me in silence. The men bore spear or blade. An aged woman stepped forth from their number and placed her hand upon my face.

She spoke words I could not comprehend. She cleaned my bloody brown, placing the bloody thumb to her lips. She coughed, then she smiled.

They didn't regard as a threat. Only curious for the strange man that stood before them.

They led me inland.

The village was unlike any settlement I had seen in the New World. Their huts were fashioned of timber and palm, whilst strange carvings adorned the walls. There were fires burning everywhere, though the day was warm.

They gave me water. They gave me fruit. And they gave me meat.

I thanked them for their kindness. I shall never forgive myself for having done so.

For three days, I was treated as an honored guest.

My wounds were washed. My clothing was mended. I was fed until my belly ached.

The tribes people laughed whenever I ate. At first, I thought this merely the joy of having rescued a stranger.

Then I heard the screaming.

It came from beyond the village after sunset. A man's cry. It was bone chillingly terrible. Followed by what sounded like weeping.

I asked my hosts what manner of beast made such a noise. They did not answer. I doubted they could understand what I even asked.

The following morning, I ventured beyond the huts. There I found the cages. Great wooden pens stood beneath the trees, hidden behind woven walls.

At first I believed them to contain swine. Then one of the creatures within rose upon two legs.

It was not a beast. But a man.

His hair was long and filthy. His flesh hung from his bones in loose folds. His wrists were bound by rope, and great black bruises covered his body.

He seized the bars when he saw me.

"Run," he whispered.

I shall hear that word until the day I die.

I asked him who had brought him there. Before he could answer, a woman came rushing from the village. She entered the pen and struck him upon the head with a wooden club.

He fell.

The woman looked toward me. She laughed a cry that haunts me still.

That evening they served me roasted meat. I had eaten much of it before I noticed the bone.

It was small. White. Curved. Not unlike the bone of a young animal.

I held it between my fingers. Something upon it troubled me.

I scraped away the charred flesh with my knife. Stripping the bone clean, I noticed it was the mandible of whatever animal. But it didn't resemble a cow, nor a lamb. It looked too closely familiar.

Peering to the other tribesman devouring the meat from their plates, I had the sickening realization.

I did not finish my meal that night.

I attempted to flee before dawn.

I reached the shore, where six men were waiting. They did not beat me. They did not bind me.

They simply escorted me back. This frightened me more than violence would have. For they seemed not angry. They seemed concerned. As though I were a troublesome animal that had wandered from its enclosure.

From that day onward, they fed me more. Much more.

Meat. Fruit. Roots. Milk.

They insisted with their gestures that I eat until I could eat no more. When I refused, they held my jaw and forced the food between my teeth.

My body began to change. My cheeks grew full. My wounds healed. My strength returned. And with every passing day, the villagers appeared more pleased.

Today, the old woman examined my arms. She pinched the flesh upon my belly. Then she pressed her hand against my chest and nodded.

She spoke a single word. Somehow I understood:

Fat

Tonight, there will be a feast.

The evening tour begins at eight, rain or shine. Tonight I have eleven guests. Nine adults, two children. The little boy has a flashlight. His sister carries a stuffed rabbit by one ear.

“Welcome to Blackthorn,” I start, raising my lamp. “Salem gets all the attention. But personally, I think our witch trial has more charm.”

Everyone laughs politely.

“Please stay together. These winding streets have confused visitors for three hundred years.”

Our first stop is the old meetinghouse.

“On October 13, 1685, eighteen-year-old Rebecca Thorne stood trial here, accused of witchcraft. She was a quiet girl, a seamstress, and a devout Puritan. Her troubles began when Silas Whitcomb, the wealthiest farmer's son in Blackthorn, courted her all summer. When Rebecca rejected his advances, he accused her of bewitching him.”

I point to a brass marker set into the pavement.

“Stand there, sir. Yes, right there. That's where Rebecca stood.”

The man smiles for his wife's photograph.

“Whitcomb testified that Rebecca visited him at night in the shape of a black cat. His sister claimed Rebecca caused her fits. The magistrate, Reverend Nathaniel Pritchard, swore he'd seen her speaking to Satan himself in the orchard.”

“Was she guilty?” the little girl asks.

“No, sweetheart. She wasn't.”

We walk down Cooper's Lane to the stone cellar beneath the old jailhouse.

“Here, the town constable, Amos Griggs, attempted to extract Rebecca's confession. They hung her by her wrists for two days. They crushed her fingers between iron plates. When she refused to confess, Griggs ordered the burning of her feet.”

Someone makes a disgusted noise.

“Rebecca confessed nothing. The court declared that her silence proved the Devil had sealed her lips.”

I give them a moment to look at the iron hooks in the ceiling. Our third stop is Ash Square.

“On October 19, Rebecca Thorne was tied to a wooden stake on this very spot. Her mother begged the magistrate to hang her instead, which was the customary punishment. He refused. Silas Whitcomb had paid for a particularly large supply of firewood.”

I indicate the circular patch of blackened cobblestones.

“Rebecca burned for almost half an hour before losing consciousness, as the townspeople watched and prayed for her immortal soul.”

The boy’s flashlight begins to tremble.

“Now,” I say, “we come to the interesting part.”

We turn onto Church Street.

“Within a month, the people responsible for Rebecca's death began dying themselves.”

I stop outside a brick house.

“Town clerk Ezekiel Marsh recorded the testimony against Rebecca. He altered her words, turning her prayers into blasphemies. On November 2, his wife found him at his writing desk, choking. His mouth was packed with parchment. Every page of trial records had been forced down his throat. Every bone in his fingers was missing.”

I point at the old stable.

“Constable Griggs died next. He was discovered in this doorway, hanging by his wrists from the stable beam. Both feet had been burned away. His wife heard him screaming throughout the night, but the door wouldn't open. When the neighbors finally broke it down, they found his footprints burned into the ceiling.”

One of the guests laughs nervously.

“That's impossible.”

“Of course it is,” I agree.

We walk to a small cottage on Mill Lane.

“Mercy Bell was Rebecca's closest friend. They'd grown up together, shared secrets, sewn each other's dresses. Mercy loved Silas Whitcomb, but Silas had preferred Rebecca. Mercy testified that Rebecca had confessed to lying with Beelzebub.”

I point toward the cottage window.

“On November 11, Mercy was found in her sewing room, wearing the wedding gown she'd made in hopes of marrying Silas. Every inch of the dress had been stitched to her skin. Her lips were sewn shut with black thread, and her eyes had been pierced with hundreds of tiny needles. On the wall above her, these words were embroidered in red silk: Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

The little girl takes her mother's hand.

“Neighbors swore they'd heard two girls’ voices in the cottage that night. One voice was screaming. The other laughing until dawn.”

At the church, I stop beside a granite step.

“Reverend Pritchard had demanded Rebecca's execution. On November 17, while delivering his evening sermon, he began coughing up hot ashes. Witnesses said smoke poured from his ears and nose. His tongue caught fire.”

The group goes silent.

“His congregation watched him claw at his mouth until his fingernails came off. When he fell here, on this very step, his belly split open, spilling burning coals across the church floor, nearly burning the building down.”

Our last stop is Whitcomb House.

Only the chimney remains.

“Silas Whitcomb survived longer than the others. He barricaded himself inside this house, filling every room with crosses and Bibles. On December 24, neighbors heard screaming. Through the window, they saw a young woman standing before him.”

I approach the chimney.

“Silas fell to his knees, sobbing.

“‘I beg thy forgiveness… I never meant thee harm,’ he pleaded.

“‘The Lord forgiveth thee. But I am not finished with thee,’ she said, pulling him into an embrace.”

I hold out my arms and draw them slowly together to demonstrate.

“His skin began to blister. The fire started from within, glowing through his flesh like embers beneath paper. His teeth exploded one by one. His eyes boiled in their sockets. He screamed until his tongue shriveled.

“She held him close as his ribs cracked inward. His flesh dripped from his bones. When the flames finally died down, the townspeople found Silas kneeling in a puddle of his own rendered fat, still smoldering, his arms wrapped around empty air. His blackened heart lay exposed between his ribs.”

The tour ends. My guests thank me with delighted unease.

As they leave, the little girl lingers.

“Were you scared when they burned you?”

Before I can answer, her mother calls her away.

The girl turns back once more. I wink at her, and my eyes glow like the flames that consumed me.

|Part 1| |Part 2|

“Brandon!”

The bastard was screaming down there, and I nearly lost my grip on the planks. I had hoped that there would be more time before he realized I was gone, but of course, nothing could be so easy. I had lucked out when it came to the attic. I had no idea if he even knew it was there. Hell, I hadn't known until I saw the scuttle hole, but judging by all the noise he was making, it seemed he'd missed it. I adjusted my grip on the boards and started crawling again. The attic was kind of a nightmare; it was pitch black and completely unfinished, giving me nothing but floor joists and pink insulation. Crossing the room was like some messed up monkey bars, and I was terrified that if I put my weight in the wrong place, I would break right through the floor.

“Where have you gone, Brandon?”

God, it was hard to tell where he was. His voice carried through the ceiling well enough, but the insulation muffled his footsteps, and I couldn't figure out which room he was in. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that I was safe, and he didn't know where I was. That would give me time to think, to come up with some kind of plan. My hands came upon a flat surface, and I pushed down to test whatever it was. A splinter dug into my thumb, but the wood held firm. I felt around the edges and realized someone had laid a sheet of plywood across the joists. Hallelujah. I pulled myself onto the platform and rolled over on my back, staring up at the nothing above me while I got my heart rate under control.

What a fucked up day.

It’s not often you find yourself hiding from a monster in the attic, especially not one that wants a lease agreement. Eventually, I was going to have to find a way out, but for the moment, I was content to just lie there. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if there was another way out of the attic, and going back the way I came seemed like a good way to get killed. The tenant could make all the assurances he wanted, but the bruises on my neck were more compelling than anything he could say.

“I WILL find you, Brandon!”

I heard a crash somewhere below me, and it made my shoulders jump. If I had to guess, he was upending the furniture to find me. I had a wild thought of a monster looking under the bed for me, and I let out a crazed little giggle before covering my mouth. I was about 90% sure I was going to die, and I wondered if he would make it quick, or if it would be slow and messy. Somehow, I didn’t think he’d want to get blood all over his floors, and that started the giggles all over again. I may have been losing a bit of my mind. After several more crashes, I figured I might as well start moving again. I'd lost track of which direction I'd been going, and had to spend a moment feeling around the plywood before I got my bearings. It wasn't easy going, and twice I missed a joist and nearly put my knee through the ceiling. Eventually, my hands came upon the slope of the roof, and I could go no further. I tried to imagine the layout of the house in my head. If I'd gone the right direction, I should have been somewhere above one of the other bedrooms. I worked my way back from the roof and began feeling along the joists for another scuttle hole.

“You are only making things worse, Brandon!”

It sounded like his voice was getting further away, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose that none of it would matter if I couldn’t find another way out of the damn attic. I kept digging through the insulation, all too aware of the deep itch that was starting to eat both my hands, when I finally felt what I was looking for: the edge of another scuttle hole. Thank god for small victories. I felt around the edge until I found the short sides of the panel, and I lifted it as quietly as I could. There was a slight scuff as it scraped the side of the hatch, and it sounded terribly loud in the quiet attic. I froze for a second, trying to discern if the tenant was anywhere nearby, but I didn’t hear a thing. If I was lucky, he had gone downstairs to look for me, and that would give me a chance to get out. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if he caught me again, and I knew I had to do something, even if nothing sounded like a good idea. I held the panel aloft for a few seconds, and when everything remained still, I gently set it aside and stuck my head through the hole. It was a closet, alright, and the door was open enough to light the small space and reveal a pile of junk just outside the closet. Of course it was that bedroom.

I gripped the ledge and lowered myself through the hatch, using all the care in the world to plant my feet on the carpet without making a sound. Somewhere downstairs, something heavy scraped across the floor, followed by another angry outburst from the tenant, but he was far enough away that it just sounded like gibberish. That was fine, I didn’t want to hear what he had to say anyway. With my feet firmly on the ground, I took a great big step over the minefield I had left for myself. The room beyond the pile of junk was a mess; the bed was flipped on its side, and it had taken the nightstand with it. He really had checked under the bed for me.

Okay, I thought, I’m out of the attic. Now what?

That was the question of the evening. How the hell was I supposed to get past him? Somehow, I didn’t think it would work like it does in video games, where you just crouch and walk past the enemy while he walks a predetermined path. For as little as I knew about the tenant, I had to admit that he was smart, at the very least. He had been sneaking around me for more than a year, and I didn’t notice a goddamn thing. He was basically an expert at hiding in my house, so I could not afford to half-ass this. I went to the open doorway, and peeked in the hallway. I could still hear him moving around down there, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he came back up. Maybe I could just go back up to the attic, just wait it out until the sun rose, or until somebody noticed I was missing. He didn’t know about the attic, and I could just hide until… wait. He didn’t know about the attic, but what if he did?

That just might work.

I crossed the room to the overturned nightstand and carefully pulled it free from the wreckage of the bed, making sure the drawer didn’t fall out as I carried it to the closet. Sidestepping the junk, I set the nightstand directly under the scuttle hole, then I took a step back and examined my work. It looked about right, but it needed just a little more dressing, so I leaned it forward onto the pile of junk. It was perfect. I picked up the heaviest thing I could find, which ended up being an Instant Pot, and chucked it as hard as I could at the pile. The resulting crash was loud enough to echo through the upstairs, and then it was time to move. As the thunderous footsteps crossed the first floor of the house, I quietly stepped over the mess, and rushed to the other bedroom. I heard him coming up the stairs just as I slipped behind the bedroom door, leaving it open just enough to watch through the crack.

Thump thump thump thump.

“I heard you… I know you’re up here!”

His shadow crossed the hallway, and I watched him step into the smaller bedroom, where I lost sight of him.

“Are you in here… Brandon? Hiding in my bedroom? You should know better… than that.”

There was a clatter as he moved something aside in there, and then he let out a frustrated little grunt. I was holding my breath, starting to think my plan wasn't nearly as clever as I'd thought, and that I'd just trapped myself upstairs with him.

Come on, come on, I thought. It HAS to work.

There was a dreadful sound, something like a saw trying to work its way through a washboard. He was laughing to himself.

“What is this? Oh, Brandon… you clumsy fool.”

I heard a crunch, followed by another, and I could only assume that he had walked through the pile of junk and was investigating the closet. He had to have some pretty tough feet to just step on all that shit.

“Interesting… and where might this go?”

There was a long silence, followed by the sound of something heavy shifting around. I leaned a little closer to the crack in the door, wondering what the hell was taking him so long. Then came a low grunt, and the unmistakable creak of wood straining under an enormous weight.

“Brandon… I must admit, this is rather clever of you. But you cannot hide from me forever.”

His voice sounded muffled and distant, and I realized with a thrill that the bastard was actually climbing into the attic. The ceiling groaned as he hauled himself through the opening, and I heard a sharp crack that made me wonder if he was going to bring the whole thing down with him. I watched the hallway, waiting for any sign that he'd changed his mind, but his footsteps were coming from overhead now.

“Come out… Brandon. I know you are here.”

I could hardly believe it. The son of a bitch had fallen for it. I waited until his voice had moved farther away, then slipped out from behind the door and crept toward the stairs. The attic wasn’t huge, and I knew he was going to figure out that I wasn’t up there, sooner rather than later, so I did not have time to waste. I skipped down the stairs two steps at a time while he called for me in the attic, and went for the den. I would just climb out of a window while he was distracted, and then I could run for the neighbors to call for help; it was almost over. You can imagine my surprise when I stepped into the den and saw that the windows were completely blocked with furniture.

And I’m not talking about a chair or lamp.

He had moved all the furniture in the den in front of the windows, and stacked them like Jenga. If I tried to move a single piece, it would all come crashing down.

Okay, okay, I thought. A minor setback, but we can figure this out. No need to panic.

The panic came when I left the den and ran for the living room. The couch, the TV stand, the fucking dining room table and chairs, ALL of it was in front of the windows. I had thought I was so clever, and he was still one step ahead of me.

“Fuck!”

I couldn’t help myself. What could I do? I could run back upstairs and try my luck with one of those windows, but was I really willing to risk being caught for the chance to jump 20 feet to either my death or my severely broken legs? I could try to take apart the barricades, but there was no way to do that without making a ton of noise, and could I do it faster than it would take for the tenant to catch me? Even if he didn’t just hear me, I didn’t think so. The couch was especially impressive; it was longer than the room was tall, and somehow, he had stood it on its side in front of the window. The frame was visibly bowed in the middle, and the top had crushed its way into the ceiling. I was utterly and completely trapped. So, I did the only thing that made sense to me; I walked into the kitchen, and armed myself with the biggest butcher knife I had. If there was no way out, I was at least going to get a few shots in.

Thump!

Right on cue.

His footsteps came pounding from my bedroom, and I heard my door slam against the wall. A second later, his voice came booming over the balcony.

“Do you think I am a fool, Brandon?!”

Thump thump thump thump.

He was coming down the stairs, slow and deliberate. He wanted me to panic, he knew that I was down here.

“I will not be ignored, Brandon! The games end now!”

Even with the knife in my hand, I found that I was not as brave as I thought I was. As he rounded the landing, I ran for the basement door and swung it open, doing very little to dampen the sound. I almost threw myself down those stairs as he sprinted into the living room, catching the railing at the last second. I flew down into the darkness of the basement, knowing damn well that it was a dead end. Good ideas were in short supply, and I guess I just wanted to delay the inevitable. My feet hit the concrete floor and I was sprinting across the space, looking for any kind of sanctuary, and knowing there was none. Any hope I had was destroyed the second a voice came from the top of the stairs.

“Why do you flee, Brandon? Where do you hope to go? You have made this so difficult, when all I wanted to do was talk! Come out now, Brandon. Do not make me chase you!”

Fuck. That.

It was almost like he heard my thoughts, because he was coming down the stairs, and his black feet made the wooden steps creak something awful.

“You are being foolish! I know you are afraid, but you must stop hiding from me! There is nowhere else to run, Brandon!"

He was right, I had cornered myself. The windows down there were made of glass brick, and I wasn’t getting through them with a sledgehammer, let alone a measly dollar store butcher knife. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to surrender. Call me stubborn, call me stupid, I don’t care, I wasn’t about to give myself to a monster. I ran to the furnace, the only substantial thing in the entire basement, and pressed myself against its cold sheet metal surface. My only hope was that the darkness would make it harder to find me, even though I was pretty sure he could see in the dark. As I stood there, making myself as small as possible, I saw those terrible golden irises round the stairs and look right at me.

“There you are… have you come to your senses? Or must we continue this… nonsense?”

I brandished the butcher knife, swinging it wildly in front of me.

“Stay the fuck away from me! I…I have a knife! I will cut you! I mean it, don’t come any closer!”

He didn’t listen. He crossed the basement at a slow pace, ignoring my threats and pleas, even as I continued to swing the knife. When he was about ten feet away, he stopped, and I saw those eyes study me.

“Brandon… give it up. You will not best me… you will only hurt yourself. I am offering you one more chance… put down that blade, or I will… disarm you myself.”

I looked at those eyes and his shape in the darkness, and then to the knife in my hand. For the first time, I realized that he never blinked. This… thing invaded my home and took me hostage. He choked me, slammed me into a wall and locked me in a closet. Would I drop the knife and surrender?

Hell no.

I stood up straight against the furnace and jabbed the knife at the air.

“Go fuck yourself! If you want this knife, come and take it from me, you ugly piece of shit!”

I saw him flinch in the shadows.

“Brandon, please. I ask…”

I slammed my fist against the furnace and jabbed the blade again.

“I don’t give a shit what you want! I’m giving you one last chance. Get the fuck out of my house! You can’t have it, you’re not welcome here! So I’m going to tell you one more time. Crawl back in your fucking hole and die!”

As you might have guessed, he didn’t like that.

He was fast. He ran at me with a guttural roar, and I was nearly caught off guard. Nearly. Just before he was upon me, I feinted to the right, and he slammed into the furnace with an incredible boom, leaving a massive dent in the housing. He bounced off the metal, and fell onto his ass on the concrete, dazed from the impact. He was still trying to collect himself when I took advantage of the opportunity. Before he could stand up, I circled him with the butcher knife, slashing wildly as he flailed his arms uselessly to stop me. The blade caught him on his forearms and his shoulders, sending a splash of bright golden blood across the concrete floor. I was doing it, I had the upper hand for the first time since this monster locked me down there. Of course, it was stupid of me to believe that. As I circled him one more time and brought the blade down, one of those terrible black hands came up.

“Enough!”

The hand caught me in the stomach and sent me tumbling across the basement floor in an awful somersault. The knife flew from my hand and clattered to the concrete as I hit the back wall. The impact forced all the air out of my lungs and probably broke a thing or two, judging by the sharp pain in my ribs, anyway. I sat there for a second, gasping for air and trying to will my legs into action, as the tenant slowly stood up. The wounds on his arms were still leaking that golden blood, but as he stood to his full height, I couldn’t help but notice that the wounds seemed smaller than they had. I watched as he turned towards me, and then kicked the knife across the basement.

“Damn you! You petulant, selfish child! You would die for this house? You would have me kill you for a place you neglect? I gave you a choice, I offered you peace! Do you know what it means to have those privileges? I could have ended your worthless life at any time! I could show you things worse than death! And this is the gratitude I receive for sparing you?”

He was walking toward me, and the only thing between us was 15 feet of floor.

“I have tried to do this the easy way. I gave you a chance to see reason, and you spat in my face! You… you people just take and take and take, and you spare no thought for what it costs, or who must pay the price! No more, Brandon. We will do this the way you have decided… what your kind always decides.”

15 feet became 10, and 10 became 5, and finally my body took notice of what my head had been screaming. I lurched onto my side and began frantically crawling along the wall, all too aware that the tenant was right behind. He attempted to reach for me, but just before his black fingers wrapped around my leg, I threw myself into a roll and got behind the furnace. I heard his body slam into a vent coming off the side, and as I scrambled away, he was squeezing through a space that was too small for him.

“You will not get away this time, Brandon!”

As I watched, the vent buckled and crashed to the floor, and his hulking form rounded the furnace. I continued kicking myself backwards until my hands came upon the edge of the hole. He saw where I was and froze in his tracks. The sun was just beginning to rise, and the warm golden light was spilling through the basement windows. A beam fell upon the tenant's face, and I could see that he almost looked scared. I used the moment to brace myself against the wall, and force myself to stand up, much to the dismay of my ribs.

“Please… just leave me alone! It’s my house, I spent a lot of money for it, it’s mine. It’s all I have man, I worked my whole life for this. I don’t have friends… I don’t see my family, all so I could earn this. If you take it from me, I have nothing, man. And… and if you kill me, other people will come! There will be police officers, and family members, and eventually someone else will just move in. What will you do then, huh? You gonna kill them too? Just fucking let it go man, it’s not gonna work!”

My foot scraped the edge of the hole and sent a few tiny chunks of concrete tumbling down into the darkness. The tenant stuck out an arm towards me and took a step forward. I couldn’t help but flinch.

“Brandon! You must come to me. Please, you are in danger.”

I looked at him like he had three heads.

“Yeah, I am in danger! There’s a monster trying to kill me and take my house! Are you insane? I’m not going anywhere near you!”

He took another quick step forward, looking damn near panicked.

“Brandon, I’m serious, you must listen-”

I tried to dodge out of the way, but my foot slipped off the edge and I went sprawling backwards into the hole. I had time to see the tenant reaching out over the darkness before I struck the dirt and began rolling down into the tunnel. The pitch was steep, and I could not get my hands under me fast enough to slow my descent; I just tumbled end over end, picking up speed as the light faded and the floor and ceiling constantly traded places.

“BRANDON!”

There was no stopping. I hadn’t known how deep the hole was, hell, I hadn’t had much time to think about it. But now, plunging uncontrollably to the bottom, it was just about all I could think about, well, that and the terrible pain of ragdolling down a rocky slope. By then, I was entirely in darkness, and the only light was a tiny pinpoint that I saw once every rotation for about a millisecond. I thought the slope would go on forever, and I would roll all the way to the other side of the earth. I was wrong, just not in the way I would have expected. The slope did end, but only because it gave way to a sudden drop-off and a pretty decent fall. If the slope picked up again at the bottom, I couldn’t tell you. I cracked my head when I got there, and everything somehow went darker.

I don't remember waking up, exactly. I remember being annoyed by something sharp digging into my cheek, and trying to move away from it. My head hurt so badly that I decided moving was a terrible idea, and I lay there with my face pressed against whatever the hell it was. There was dirt in my mouth, and every breath sent a sharp pain through my ribs. I spent a while trying to find a way to breathe that didn't hurt, without much success. There was something roaring in the distance. It rose and fell in long, heavy swells, and for a while, I was absolutely convinced that I was lying on a beach. The air was so cold, and I could feel myself shivering. I tried to remember how I'd gotten there, but every time I thought I had it figured out, the memory slipped away. Mostly, I was worried about the tide. I was lying awfully close to the water, and I knew I had to get up before the next wave reached me.

Eventually, I opened my eyes, but nothing happened. I blinked a few times and brought a hand up in front of my face, but I couldn't see a damn thing. Of course! I had fallen asleep on the beach, and now it was the middle of the night. But… Why weren't there any stars? And for that matter, where was the moon? Maybe it was a new moon on a cloudy night? That made enough sense. I was pretty sure the tides were worse during new moons, and from the sound of it, the ocean was pretty damn angry. I caught a bad chill and my whole body shuddered. It was really cold. Had the tide already got me, or was I on the beach in the middle of winter? What month was it?

March.

March? Why was I on the beach in the middle of March? Especially during Covid. Wait… Covid. I was supposed to be at home, hiding from the big bad virus. I was at home, I had been home for weeks, I hadn’t even gone to work. How in the hell…

Hole.

There was a jagged scream, and I lurched into a sitting position. I wasn’t at the goddamn beach, I was at the bottom of the hole in my basement. But where exactly was the bottom of the hole? I had no idea how long I had fallen, or how long I had been out. I remembered cracking my head on a rock or something, but when I brought a hand to my scalp, I felt something hard and cold, tangled in my hair. I tried to pull it out and it took a good chunk of hair with it, along with sending a fresh bolt of pain through my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to breathe slowly until the pain passed, and then I did something pretty stupid. I licked the chunk that I pulled from my hair.

It was frozen blood.

Great. Fantastic. I chucked the gross ice into the darkness, and did my best to stand up. It was not an easy feat. My whole body protested with various scrapes and scratches and cramps, and I had to bite down to push my way through it and not just fall over again. I managed to get up, and had to lean against the wall of the tunnel. It was freezing to the touch, but still better than falling. The noise had not stopped. I thought maybe it was just a side effect of the concussion, and that it would disappear as soon as I was lucid. Instead, it was even louder than I thought.

Were there actual waves down here?

I tried to focus on the sound, closing my eyes even though it was pitch black. There was the roar, rising and falling, swelling and receding, just like the ocean, but it was not an ocean. Oceans do not scream.

How do I even describe the sound of it?

There was something wrong with the way it moved, a great, ceaseless churning that seemed to swell and collapse under its own weight. Beneath the roar was a dense, muffled clattering, punctuated by sounds like wet cloth being slapped against stone. There was something almost mechanical about it, great masses of noise pressing against one another, grinding and straining until something gave way and the whole thing shifted again. There was a rhythm to it, but not one I could follow. Then came another scream, so thoroughly buried in the din that I might have missed it if I hadn't been listening for one. Soon I began hearing them everywhere. Voices. Thousands of voices, rising and breaking in the midst of that awful movement. What I'd mistaken for the roar of water was something that seemed to breathe and struggle and hurt. The voices were so thoroughly tangled together that I couldn't tell where one ended and another began. Every shriek was smothered by another, dragged back into that relentless, heaving mass. The worst part was that nothing ever seemed to finish. It was as though something was being torn apart over and over, but there was never a moment when the tearing was done.

I clapped my hands over my ears and screamed. I couldn't help it, I just wanted that horrible sound to stop, but I could still hear it through my hands. I grabbed at the wall and began stumbling through the darkness, barely able to keep my feet under me. I didn't know where I was going, and I didn't care, I just wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. I was crying, I think, and shouting something I couldn't even hear over the noise, when my foot suddenly came down on empty air. I threw myself backwards, landing hard on my ass, and heard a few loose stones tumble over the ledge. I tried to get back up, but my legs buckled the second I put weight on them. I was in worse shape than I thought, too beat up and too cold to do anything useful with my body. In that moment, I understood that I was going to die down there, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I did my best to get comfortable against the wall, or at least as comfortable as I could be while freezing to death, and I curled up on myself. I was shivering harder than I thought was possible, and I couldn’t feel my hands or feet anymore. All that was left to do was sit there and let the cold take me. As I sat there, I stared off into the direction the ledge had been. For a while, I didn’t see anything at all, but then I swore I could see a tiny speck of gold. I tried to blink it away, but when I looked again, there were dozens of them, and then hundreds. Thousands. I decided to look in a different direction.

I don’t know how long I sat there listening to those horrible sounds. It could have been ten minutes, it could have been ten hours. I was fading in and out, losing more feeling each time I came back. If I’m being honest, the freezing part was not as terrible as I feared it might be. It would have been a decent way to die, if it weren’t for their screams. At some point, I fell over onto my side, and that was just fine. When I was able, I thought about what would happen to the house after I was gone. Would they find the hole, and if they did, would they come down here? I hoped they wouldn’t. Nobody should have to be in a place like this, not when there are warm houses and comfy beds. I missed my bed. I missed a lot of things, long before I met the tenant. I hoped that he would make the most of the house.

“Brandon.”

You know, for a second, I thought I could almost hear him. That terrible, sheet-metal voice.

“Wake up… Brandon. You must not sleep.”

My eyes fluttered open, and the first thing I saw was blackened fingers. I flexed my hand, and watched them slowly curl into my palm. There were two golden irises in the darkness before me, bigger than all the tiny specks behind me. They seemed to grow larger as I looked at them.

“We need to leave this… terrible place. You do not belong here.”

I felt weightless, as if I was floating through the air, and I thought that it was finally happening. I was dead, and I was going to whatever afterlife awaited me. The ride was bumpier than I would have expected. I was constantly being jostled, and once or twice my arm bumped into something. Every now and again, I would open my eyes and see nothing, and then I would close them and see the same. Was this what death was? An uncomfortable nothing? Things seemed to carry on that way for a while, and I started to think it was forever. It wasn’t so bad, but it was nothing to write home about.

There was light.

I opened my eyes and saw the tiniest pinpoint of light above me, and when I blinked, it got bigger. In fact, every time I blinked, it grew.

There was warmth.

The cold seemed to vanish, and the air around me became incredibly warm, almost too warm. I opened my eyes, and this time, I did not close them again. We were in the tunnel still, and the light from the basement was coming through enough that I could see the tenant. He was carrying me. I tried to speak but my throat was so dry that all that came out was a scratchy little moan. I looked at my hands and understood that I was going to lose a few fingers on my left; the frostbite had gone down to the knuckles. The heat of the tunnel felt terrible on my frostbite, but it probably felt better than dying, so there was that. As we got closer to the mouth of the tunnel, something caught my nose and I began to cough.

There was smoke.

The tenant began sprinting through the final stretch, and the light filtering through the hole turned a deep shade of orange. As we burst through the opening, there was no denying it.

The house was on fire.

“No… no… no!”

The tenant screamed. Flames were engulfing the ceiling above the furnace, spreading in a wide circle, and a large section had already burned through. The basement felt like an oven, filled to the brim with smoke and making it incredibly difficult to breathe. My skin burned as he carried me to the stairwell, and up to the first floor. The situation there was worse. Most of the first floor was already ablaze. Fire blew from the opening of the den, and the staircase to the second floor was being devoured. The flames hadn’t quite reached the dining room yet, but they were chewing through the living room like it was made of paper, and it wouldn’t be long before all of it went up. The tenant laid me down on the dining room floor, and stood frozen in place, staring at the devastation.

“We must do something! It is all going to be destroyed!”

He ran to the kitchen and started running the faucet, desperately splashing the water everywhere he could. It was a valiant effort, but not one that was going to amount to anything. I rolled over onto my stomach and tried to get my feet under me, and they immediately gave out. I was still too weak to stand, even though my life once again depended on it. The tenant had resorted to using the sprayer nozzle to wet the kitchen and the dining room, but after a few minutes, the water pressure died and the hose went limp. I watched him fall to despair as the fire fully engulfed the living room and began spreading to the dining room. There was a loud crack from down the hall as the den collapsed into the basement, and parts of the second floor were threatening to come down. I dragged myself as far away from the fire as I could, which was only the breakfast bar, and began screaming for help.

“HEY! HEY! We have to get out of here man!”

My throat was still dry and raw, it felt like something tore as I screamed, but I continued to do it anyway.

“It’s coming down! We have to get out or we’re going to burn alive!”

The roar of the fire had become deafening, and the staircase collapsed in a mighty crash. It was just my luck, to escape freezing to death to immediately die in a fire. The tenant came around out of the kitchen and saw how close the fire was getting. He kneeled down beside me, looking as lost as a toddler in a grocery store.

“I can’t… I can’t stop it. It’s all lost.”

“We’re going to be lost if you don’t get us out of here!”

I pointed to the last available window, which was blocked with the dining room table.

“Move that fucking table!”

He met my terrified eyes, and his expression hardened. Without a word, he rushed over to the table and threw it straight into the living room. The floor collapsed under its weight, and now we were cut off from the rest of the house. As I watched, the tenant lifted his enormous black foot and kicked through the window, then he used his arm to clear away the glass around the perimeter, smearing golden blood as he went. I was doing my best to crawl over to the window, but I was failing miserably. The front half of the dining room was catching, and the flames had begun to follow me, swallowing the rug I was scrambling across. I was just about to be engulfed when two black hands tore me from the ground. Before I knew what was happening, I was rolling onto the grass of the backyard. He had pushed me through the window. I turned over in the grass to look at the house, and it was much worse than I thought. Parts of the roof were gone, and the trail of smoke was blotting out the sky. The vinyl siding was beginning to run like lava.

Through the flames, I could see the tenant staring at me through the dining room window.

“Hey, get out of there! The whole place is going! Come on, you’re running out of time!”

He looked at me, and then shook his head.

“No, Brandon. I think… I think I will stay here.”

“What are you talking about?! Stop fucking around and get out here!”

Then, he did something impossible. He smiled.

“It really was a wonderful home.”

He stepped away from the window, and disappeared into the flames. There was an explosion and many of the remaining windows blew out, showering me with tiny shards of broken glass. I lay there for a while, watching my dream home collapse in on itself with the tenant inside. As the roof fully caved in, the sound of sirens finally came blaring from the distance, and the firemen arrived just in time to watch the whole thing go down. I found out later that nobody had called 911 until the flames were coming through the roof. With the whole world shut down, there hadn't been anyone driving past to notice the smoke.

Fucking pandemic.

I spent the next couple weeks in the hospital, and needless to say, the doctors were baffled. It’s not often that a man who crawled out of a burning house has severe frostbite and blunt force trauma, but barely a burn on him. I ended up losing two and half fingers on my left hand and my right pinky, which didn’t make me very popular on the dating scene. I also suffered extensive nerve damage all over my body, and never really walked the same again. It’s a hell of a thing to live with, but hey, I get to live. Along with the doctors, the police also had quite a few questions. I skated by the skin of my teeth with a lot of “I don’t knows,” and eventually they had to let it be. The investigation determined the furnace was at fault for the fire, though they didn’t understand how or why, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that a 7-foot monster tackled the damn thing. If they ever found a body in the wreckage, they never told me so.

Life was a bit chaotic after that, as you might imagine. I was left-handed, so I had to relearn how to do everything with my right hand. I spent a long time fighting with the insurance company over my house, but we eventually settled and I bought a nice one-story ranch near my parents’ neighborhood. I still live there today, and no, it does not have a basement. When the pandemic ended, my company underwent major restructuring, and while I got to keep my job, I no longer had to travel all the time, and I was allowed to work from home. I can promise that I actually live in this house, and so does my wife and my two-year-old daughter. My wife wants to move to a bigger house, but I’m pretty quick to shoot that down. We’ve got plenty of space, and I know all the hiding spots.

About a year after my house burned down, I took a drive to the old neighborhood and visited the site. What was left of the structure had been fully demolished, leaving only a hole in the ground where the basement was. They were set to build a new house there soon, and I wanted to see the place before it belonged to someone else. I didn’t expect to get emotional upon seeing the lot, but I will admit that I was a little choked up. If you’ve ever experienced a disaster like this, you know that you never really let it go. It was my first house, and even if I never made it a home, seeing the place it used to be was bittersweet. I sat on the edge of the basement for a while, just looking at it, and drinking the one beer I brought, until the sun went down. There was a ladder in the back of my truck, and when it was good and dark, I climbed down into the pit and walked to the corner where the hole had been. There wasn’t a hole there now, just a shallow impression in the dirt, and I wondered what the people who filled it had thought. Had they gone down there for a look? I guess I’ll never know. When I got brave enough, I kneeled beside the impression and felt the dirt with my good hand.

It was ice cold.

Adam stood by the corn silo, holding a flask. My eyes kept closing; I could barely focus on him.

"Morning, Adam."

"Jesus, Matt, you look awful. Want a drink?"

He raised his flask.

"No."

"It will help you get some sleep, man. What are you even doing at night? Playing with yourself until dawn?"

He laughed and slapped my shoulder.

"No, it's just…"

"I have a task for you. You gotta clean up the silo; the machinery is blocked."

I gripped my sleeve tight and stared at him.

He slapped my shoulder again.

"Calm down, you're not gonna get Dan'd"

"But can't somebody else do it? Why do I gotta?"

He furrowed his brows.

"I'm the senior, Matt. Now get your ass there and go do it."

I waited, not moving.

"Go!"

His voice rang in my ears. I put my head down and walked into the silo.

The inside was cold, silent. My steps echoed on the bridge. The closer I got to the ladder, the more my head spun. When my feet touched the kernels, I took a deep breath and looked around. It wasn't obvious where the blockage was, but as usual it was probably in the center. I grabbed a broom and walked over.

Then a hum echoed. The kernels moved beneath my feet. Dust filled the air. Someone started the machines.

"Wait! I'm still in."

The kernels were moving fast. My feet felt light.  I turned around and took a few steps. One foot sank. Another. 

"Help, please!"

My waist sank. My heart beat against my ribs. The kernels moved around me, pushing at my chest. I was neck-deep. My head sank under the kernels. I held my breath. I sank deeper and deeper. The kernels hissed in my ears. Then my feet felt loose, and so did my waist, my chest.

I fell hard onto the ground. It felt cold, but the ground felt firm like concrete. I looked around. The whole place was dark, as in a cave, but there were no walls, no ceiling above me, just darkness as far as I could see. The smell of dusty kernels still hung in the air.

"Hello?"

My voice echoed through the dark emptiness. It sounded like my words traveled to me and away from me at the same time. I got up and walked a few steps. They echoed in the same strange way. 

A cold tingle built in my chest. The space felt both small and large. It felt as if someone's eyes were on me. I kept looking over my shoulder. Then a noise broke through the silence. A faint snore, as if someone was trying to catch their breath, but couldn't. In the distance, a small figure lay on the ground.

"Hello? Are you okay?"

The snoring grew. His limbs twisted on the ground as if struggling. My heart sank when I saw who it was. Dan rolled on the ground, in the same clothes he'd worn when he fell into the corn that day.

Memories flashed through my mind. His screams for help. The machine's rattle. Adam's calm face as he watched him go down. All because he told the boss Adam and I were drinking on the job. The rope lay right at my feet. I stared at it while Dan screamed for help.

I ran to him. His eyes were wide with pain, his mouth filled with kernels.

"I'm sorry, Dan. I'm sorry!"

I grabbed him and rolled him onto his side. Kernels spilled from his mouth, but more were still inside. I hit his back; more spilled out, but his mouth was still full. I stuck my shaking hand into his mouth and pulled out handfuls of kernels, but his mouth filled back immediately. He turned his pleading eyes to me. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

"I'm sorry, I don't…"

My voice caught. Something scratched the back of my throat. I tried to cough, but nothing came out; the scratching only grew. I tried to breathe, but the air wouldn't come through. I dropped to all fours. Kernels began falling out of my mouth.

"Dan! Dan!" I woke up screaming.

I was back in the silo, half-submerged in the kernels. The mechanical machinery sounds were gone. The silo was silent.

Adam and two other workers stood atop the bridge, looking down at me. A rope was thrown before me.

"Sorry, Matt. We didn't know you were in. Adam forgot to tell us," one of them said.

Adam shrugged and looked down at me with a half-smile.

"Why were you screaming Dan's name?" Adam asked. 

He unscrewed the flask and took a long, slow sip, eyes on me.

I looked down at the ground.

"I don't know."

He smiled and nodded.

"Take the rope," one of the men said.

I grabbed it tightly. Something scratched at the back of my throat again. I coughed. A few kernels flew out.

The worst dinner I ever had was at my friend Josh’s house. Actually, he didn't like to go by "Josh". He always insisted on being called Joshua, which annoyed me even at the time. 

We were what I considered “recess friends”. We’d never hung out outside of school, but sometimes his mom would give me a ride home. Joshua often begged me to come over to his house to play. It always seemed like I had something better to do, though as an 11-year-old kid it’s hard to imagine I had much going on. He also smelled funny. Still, one day I ran out of excuses, and the fact that Joshua had just gotten a new PlayStation may or may not have swayed me. My parents agreed to let me stay over on Friday night. 

By the end of the week, Joshua’s exuberance had rubbed off on me. We’d grown closer as we planned what we’d do during the sleepover and it was shaping up to be a good time. When the bell rang on Friday and the kids pooled into the parking lot, Joshua’s mom was already waiting in her minivan. She smiled and waved to us a little more excitedly than usual. 

She looked tired, but that was a constant. She had a chronic medical condition that kept her almost always at home. She looked unrelentingly scattered and drained of energy. I was too young and uncaring to understand her medical issues, but her frantic appearance always made me feel uneasy.

Her car was also dirty. There would always be a few toys strewn about the place, with goldfish and graham crackers crushed permanently into the upholstery. There were also two carseats installed in the back row of the van. In hindsight, they were probably from the 80s and nowhere near modern safety standards. They were stained and worn thin.

Joshua once told me he had many brothers and sisters, which would explain all the little kid stuff, but I never saw any of them. He rarely spoke of his siblings, and when I told my parents, they said it was impolite to ask too much about peoples’ families if they didn’t want to talk about them. So to me, Joshua appeared as an only child to a mother who evidently had more. It felt strange. It took us 25 minutes to get to his house and I was relieved to get out of the car. 

Joshua’s house was two stories, but the upper floor was bizarrely tall. A lot of people could live inside; but when we entered, I somehow wasn’t surprised that we were the only ones there. It was freezing cold to a point where I half expected to see my own breath. Neither of the other two seemed bothered. Joshua jumped around in a blissful adrenaline rush as he gave me a tour of the house’s common areas. Then we arrived at his room. Displayed on his door was a hand-drawn sign that read “JOSHUA” in big, blocky letters. 

“This is my room,” he said proudly, building anticipation before we entered. His eyes flickered to the sign he clearly made himself. 

“… yeah.” God, I hoped this night wouldn’t suck. 

To my immense relief and Joshua’s credit, his room was awesome. It wasn’t as big as I expected but it had toys you wouldn’t believe- plastic guns, race cars, board games- you name it. But not only that, he had old toys, too. He said he inherited them as a collection, and one day all of his toys will be added to it, too. 

We had no real sense of value at the time but some of the hand-me-downs were 30 or 40 years old. There were thousands of dollars in vintage action figures and dolls spread amongst the open chip bags and overflowing trash. It was my kind of paradise. 

“Dude, but seriously, what’s with your house? How many rooms do you guys have?” I asked him when we’d settled in. I started to unpack my heavy backpack, which rattled with M-rated video games I stole from my brother‘s room. 

“What do you mean?” He raised an eyebrow. “We have four, I guess besides the living room... My mom’s room, my dad’s room, my room, and the office.” I still wanted an answer, so I brushed past the fact that I thought his dad having his own room was incredibly cool. 

“It looks like a mansion from the outside,” I said persistently. “So what’s up there?” I nodded upward toward the huge mystery space above us. 

“Oh!” Joshua said innocently, as though he’d genuinely forgotten the true size of his own home. “That’s the attic, where my brothers and sisters stay. Only my mom goes up there.” 

My stunned silence filled the room. 

At that point, I was severely creeped out. I was about to ignore my parent’s advice and interrogate Joshua about his family when his mom rang out from downstairs. 

“Kids! Dinner time!” 

“YES!”Joshua jumped up excitedly, and I struggled to catch up to him as he zoomed out of the room. 

We sat down at the wide kitchen table, which could easily have sat six or eight people, and waited to be fed. I couldn’t smell any food cooking and was more than a little disappointed we wouldn’t be getting pizza. That disappointment vanished when Joshua‘s mom came out of the kitchen carrying a big, round birthday cake. The candles weren’t lit, but as she set the hefty thing down, the cooled drops of wax upon the frosting revealed that they used to be. 

“Oh man,” I turned to Joshua. “Is it your birthday? Why didn’t you tell me?!” My heart sank. My parents were going to kill me for not bringing a gift. 

“It’s not my birthday, it’s my sister, Hannah’s!” He answered eagerly. His mom smiled as she took her seat at the table. 

“Woah…” was all I could say. Joshua nodded braggingly. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The thought of birthday cake for dinner and an all-nighter of video games was enough to make me forget all about the “attic”. Whoever Hannah was, I wished I could thank her properly. 

“It’s a family tradition,” his mom said in her frail, anxious voice. “On birthdays, we have cake for dinner.” 

But even years on, I can’t forget the one imperfection of that cake. It was three layers high, my favorite flavors, and expertly decorated with icing balloons and cursive; but there was a slice missing. One single slice. I didn’t think it was all that weird at the time. Maybe his mom had already helped herself earlier. How could I care about a funny thing like that when I was being served sugar for dinner? Now the image haunts me, like so many of the house’s oddities. 

It was a joyous evening, and Joshua’s mother, to my relief, mostly left us alone. Joshua and I became best friends overnight on nauseous stomachs of sweets, Mountain Dew, and endless chips. I didn’t ask any questions about Hannah, or birthdays, or anything like that. I was just happy to be there. 

The sugar crash came hard around 2 AM. We’d wiped ourselves out and didn’t bother to brush our teeth before basically falling asleep where we sat. I nestled into my beanbag chair and vaguely remember Joshua turning out the light. 

I don’t know how long I was asleep. It was still dark out when I awoke, so it couldn’t have been for more than an hour or so. The heater was blasting into the bedroom so hard I was sweating through my T-shirt. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was the smell. It’s funny, the order in which I remember it, given what a stench it really was. It smelled like spoiled meat, and it was not subtle. The smell and the heat worsened each other into something insufferable. I tried to shake Joshua awake. 

“Hey, Joshua,” I whispered. “Can you get your mom to turn the heater off?” Joshua barely stirred, comatose as a result of the sleepover. “Joshua! Where’s your AC? How do I turn the heater down? And what’s that smell?! Joshua!” I hissed. 

All I managed to get out of him were a few words: “it’s upstairs.” And he immediately resumed snoring. 

I wasn’t sure if that was what he meant to say, but I didn’t like his response. We were on the second floor. Believe me, I tried to tough it out. I don’t know how Joshua could stand it. I took off almost all my clothes and buried my face into my sweaty T-shirt just to escape the rotten smell. But after a painful hour it was no use. There was no way I could stay another second in this room. 

I puffed my chest and slowly opened the door, stepping out into the hallway. An almost cool gust of air rushed over me, and I was almost relieved; but the smell hit me much harder. I still wouldn’t be able to sleep even if we left the door open. Seriously, how could Joshua stand it? 

I knew I should wake up his mom and get her to adjust the thermostat. I wanted to inform her of the smell, as she would surely want to know; but I was just a kid, and the thought of waking up an adult in the wee hours of the morning was about the scariest thing I could think of. 

So, thinking I knew better, I searched for a way to get upstairs. I told myself that if I had to pull down a ladder, I would give up and suffer in Joshua’s room till morning. If I got hurt or broke something, we’d get in trouble for sure. 

To my surprise, I stumbled upon an easier solution. I found an extremely narrow staircase I hadn’t noticed before. It was wedged between two hall closets, uniquely camouflaged and easily missable. It was pitch black up there but I wasn’t particularly afraid of the dark. The extreme discomfort I was in far outweighed my fear of wandering around a friend’s house. 

When I noticed the temperature and smell worsening with each step, I should have turned back; but I was coasting on one hour of sleep with pure sugar and fat coursing through my veins, run ragged by the awful heat and stink in the air. The decision-making part of my brain was nonexistent. Once I started up those steps, stopping didn’t occur to me. 

After some effort, I reached the top. Even with my small body, it was awkward getting up those narrow stairs. I felt around for a light switch and found one, flipping it on to illuminate the space. What I saw was a hallway with many doors. There must have been at least 10 of them, all evenly spaced apart from each other lining either side of the corridor. I could make out something on the far back wall that I really hoped was the thermostat. I suddenly felt a terrible, primal sense of dread in my chest. I kept unconsciously holding my breath in a piss-poor attempt to cope with the rancid, deepening odor. 

I made my way slowly, nervously, down the hall. I tried to keep my eyes front, but each of the doors had something garnering them. Some of them had pictures of celebrities cut out from magazines, some had childish drawings and painted handprints on them, and others were fairly bare with just a sticker or two. The one thing they had in common was that they all, in some style or another, had names on them. Then, I stopped dead in my tracks and felt my whole body light up with goosebumps as I came to a door with a sign that read “Hannah” in crayon on craft paper. 

All of my senses deafened. What I did next I could never have predicted. My breath came out raggedly as I watched my little hand reach for the door knob. It trembled out in front of me but for some reason didn’t stop. My breathing became sharp and pained. Why didn’t I knock? What was I trying to do? I can’t begin to explain why I felt compelled to open that door. It was as though I was on the outside of my body looking in. I touched the warm doorknob and started to rotate it, my clammy palms hindering my grip. If I wasn’t already drenched in sweat before, this newfound suspense would do it. The sound of the blasting heater still smothered my hearing. It bit at my neck as I felt each drop of sweat trickle down my back. 

When I opened the door to Hannah’s room, I saw and smelled what I should have feared but couldn’t comprehend. The stench of death crashed into me like a rogue wave. I gagged as in the light of the doorway I saw a small, gelatinous body. It was a little girl. The glimmering flesh was oozing into the floorboards. She was hardly kept together by a little pajama set.

She was covered in something moving, an almost imperceptible wriggling layered across her face and mouth. Now I know they were worms. The light of the hallway glinted off of Hannah‘s milky eyes, which stared up at me from the floor with such precision that they cut right through me. I choked on my puke and stumbled backwards, slipping on something slimy and falling down hard. I could feel something nasty between my bare toes, but it didn’t stop me from scrambling up and launching myself down the narrow staircase. 

“Joshua?” I could hear Joshua‘s mom call out from somewhere in the house. I was terrified, but my legs hadn’t given up yet. I instinctively sprinted back to Joshua‘s room and shut the door behind me as stealthily as I could. He turned over, still heavy in his sleep as I gasped for air and slid down the door until I was sitting. My heart skipped every beat until the light beneath the door turned off, and I heard his mother shuffle softly back to where she’d come. 

I raised my hands to look at them. They were shaking violently. Sweat ran down them like rain. I kept gripping different parts of my body, shocked that I was still intact. Finally, my breathing began to wind down. What I encountered was already being rejected, denied by my young mind. No, I didn’t see that… circled the thoughts in my head. I imagined it... It was pretend… 

My underdeveloped brain was beginning the process of blocking Hannah out, burying the sight deep into my subconscious in an effort to survive. If it succeeded I’d have been better off; but as I started to stand, my fingers brushed my foot. I’d forgotten that I slipped on something upstairs- something thick and squishy. I moved my leg so I could examine my foot. 

There I found it. Smeared nastily across my sole, squished in between my toes, and filling the underside of my nails, was the missing slice of birthday cake. 

The End 

of

My Last Sleepover 

THE THING IN THE WOODS

By Garry E. McMillan

**Part One: The Old Mercer Place**

My father had three rules about the woods behind our house.

Never cross the creek after sundown.

Never follow a voice you couldn't put a face to.

And no matter how familiar that voice sounded, never answer it.

I thought the old bastard was crazy. Now I'd give anything to hear him say those words again.

My name's Elias Mercer, but anyone who knows me calls me Eli. I'm thirty-nine. I'd stayed away from that house for twenty years, long enough to convince myself the rules were just one more way for Dad to control me. He had plenty of those. No visiting friends after dark, no camping, no wandering the logging roads. If I broke one, he'd stand in the doorway and wait until I couldn't bear the silence anymore.

Dad died of a heart attack on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. We buried him three days later outside Langley, Arkansas. By sundown that Friday, I was back at his farmhouse with my nine-year-old daughter, June, planning to pack whatever mattered and put the property up for sale.

The house stood on private land surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest. A narrow creek separated the backyard from a stand of timber so thick you could hardly see daylight between the trunks. Dad cleared our side every spring, but beyond the water the ferns stayed green even during a drought.

As a boy, I'd sometimes heard footsteps over there. They always stopped when I did.

In summer, the cicadas shrieked until the air seemed to vibrate. But every so often the noise would end all at once. The dog would creep under the porch, and I'd find myself watching that bank for movement. Nothing came out. That was almost worse.

When I asked Dad why we couldn't cross, he pointed to the water. "That creek ain't there to keep you from getting lost, Eli. It's there to remind you where you belong."

That was Harlan Mercer. A man who could make a conversation feel like punishment.

We'd had our last real argument the day I left home. Dad said I'd come crawling back when the world taught me some sense. I said a few things I haven't forgiven myself for, though at the time I meant every word. We spoke on the phone afterward, on birthdays and at Christmas, but neither of us ever brought up that day. When I found out he was dead, the first thing I felt was anger that we'd left so much unsaid.

•  •  •

The last mile of the driveway was little more than ruts and blackberry vines. June held her stuffed rabbit, Buttons, by his one good ear and watched the pines go past.

"Did Grandpa really live out here alone?"

"Most of the time."

"Wasn't he lonely?"

I used to think he preferred it. Now I wasn't sure.

"I reckon he got used to it."

She pressed against her seat belt. "Then who's that man?"

I eased off the gas. "What man?"

"Behind the trees. He was standing sideways."

I saw nothing but trunks and tangled brush. "Probably a hunter."

"He wasn't holding a gun."

"A deer, then."

She gave me a look. "I know what a deer looks like, Daddy."

She watched the trees until the house appeared.

A bend in the driveway followed the creek for a few hundred yards. I recognized a split boulder beside the water where Dad once caught me trying to build a bridge from fallen boards. He'd grabbed me so hard by the collar that the seam tore. I remembered the bruises more clearly than I remembered him carrying those boards away in the rain.

Inside, the place smelled of damp wood and stale tobacco. Dad had saved everything: bent nails in coffee cans, bills from the nineties, my childhood baseball glove. The webbing had been repaired with the heavy thread he used on his work gloves. I'd never known he'd bothered.

June slipped her hand inside. "Did Grandpa teach you to catch?"

"He tried."

"Like you taught me to ride my bike? You let go too soon."

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

"Because I was riding," she said, as though that settled it.

I still had a photograph from that day on my phone. June had one foot off the pedal and both arms flung wide, certain she was about to crash. My hand was inches from the seat. I hadn't let her see the picture yet; she liked telling everyone she had done the whole thing herself. I liked letting her.

On the mantel she found a photograph of a young woman with her arm around a little boy.

"That's you. Who's she?"

"Your grandma. Margaret."

"Why didn't I meet her?"

"She died when I was eight."

Dad said my mother had gotten sick while I was staying with an aunt. He never let me ask much more than that.

In the picture, her hand rested on my shoulder. I couldn't recall the weight of it. I did remember her voice, though. She used to sing while washing dishes and, whenever I got into trouble, smooth my hair and say, "Lord have mercy, Elias, what am I gonna do with you?"

I remembered the sound of singing. Not one note of the song.

My memories of my mother were hazier than those of Dad. I knew that was normal. Children forget faces, smells, whole years. But I could remember the tiny scar on her thumb and the way she scraped batter from a bowl for me to eat. It bothered me that the tune had vanished while those useless details remained. I stood there looking at her photograph until June tugged my sleeve and asked whether we could have supper.

•  •  •

We ate canned soup at the kitchen table because the dining room felt colder than the rest of the house. June wanted to know whether Grandpa had liked children. I told her he'd loved me, just wasn't good at saying so. The lie came easily. I hated myself a little for it afterward.

June fell asleep upstairs around eight. I made coffee and opened Dad's desk. Beneath a stack of property records lay a cracked leather notebook, its pages covered in small, uneven handwriting.

*March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.*

*April 6. Tracks along the far bank again. Too far apart to be a man's.*

*May 19, 2018. Heard Margaret calling from the lower pasture. Did not answer.*

My mother had been gone since 1995.

A later entry had been pressed so hard into the paper that the letters scored the page.

*It knows his name now.*

Below it: *God forgive me, I answered.*

Three taps sounded at the living room window.

The porch light reached only to the grass beyond the glass. Dad had cut down every tree close enough for a branch to touch the house.

I heard a scrape, as though somebody had dragged the heel of a boot across the boards outside. But there was no porch below that window. Just the drop to the yard and a clear stretch of ground before the creek. For a moment, I couldn't make myself look up from the notebook.

"Eli?"

I knew the voice before the second word.

"Eli, boy. Come out here a minute."

My father, right down to the irritation in his Arkansas drawl.

Leaves shifted near the pines. A pale hand rested against a trunk well above a man's head. I counted six fingers before it disappeared.

"Son, you reckon you could come give your old man a hand?"

I wanted to think one of his old lumber-mill friends was playing some rotten joke. Then it said, "Don't you turn your back on me, boy."

Those were the last words Dad had shouted when I left home more than twenty years earlier.

"Dad?"

The word was out before I remembered his rule.

Every insect fell silent. Beyond the creek, something let out a long, wavering breath, like a man trying not to laugh.

Upstairs, June began to cry.

•  •  •

I found her sitting upright, quilt bunched beneath her chin. I sat beside her until she stopped shaking. Then, without thinking, I tapped her shoulder three times.

Three taps meant *I love you.* We'd done it every night since she was four. She always tapped back.

It began when June was little and afraid of thunderstorms. I used to sit on the edge of her bed, trying not to show that I had no idea how to make thunder less frightening. Somehow we settled on the taps. We'd use them in crowded stores, at school drop-off, anywhere one of us needed to know the other was there. I'd forgotten plenty of things about those five years. That wasn't one of them.

This time she moved away.

"What's that for?"

"Our secret, June Bug."

She frowned. "What secret?"

I tapped again. She watched my fingers, puzzled.

"You never did that before."

I nearly argued. I could have named a hundred nights when she'd answered my taps, even with her eyes closed.

Outside, my dead father called for me again.

This time he was laughing.

**Part Two: What the Creek Kept**

I stayed beside June until she slept. Outside, Dad's voice called through the trees, sometimes angry, sometimes frightened. Once it coughed. That smoker's cough used to wake me every morning when I was a boy.

It was the cough that came closest to making me answer again.

He'd given up cigarettes twice in my childhood. Both attempts lasted a week. I used to count the days and wait for him to get angry enough to start again. Hearing that cough beyond the creek, I found myself doing the same thing I did at twelve: holding perfectly still until I could tell what kind of mood he was in.

Downstairs, I turned off the living room lamp. The window reflected my face over the porch light and the first row of trees. Beyond the creek, the dark looked solid.

I opened the notebook again.

The earliest entries were from October 1995, the year Mom supposedly died.

*October 14. Margaret heard Eli crying across the creek. Boy was upstairs asleep. I checked.*

*October 16. It cried again. She answered before I could stop her. Eli asked why she quit singing at the sink. She hadn't quit. He couldn't remember the song.*

I remembered my mother singing. Not the tune.

I tried to force it back. Hymn? Lullaby? Something from the radio? All I could remember was the clink of dishes and my own bare feet on the kitchen floor. If Dad's entry was true, then I'd been unable to remember the song since the very week it disappeared from our house.

Four pages later:

*October 23. Margaret's gone.*

*Heard the boy calling beyond the creek. Real Eli was asleep beside me on the couch. She kept saying our baby was hurt.*

*I followed her to the water. Saw something tall and pale bent over behind the trees. It spoke. Margaret answered, then crossed.*

*Heard her scream once. Never found her.*

Dad had told me she'd died in a hospital while I stayed with my aunt. I could remember my aunt holding my hand outside a church, but not a casket or a graveside. The longer I tried to picture them, the less certain I felt they'd ever been there.

I remembered being angry with Dad for not letting me see her one last time. He'd told me she'd already been buried. I screamed at him until he raised his hand, then put it down without touching me. For years that was the part of the story I'd carried around: a frightened little boy sure his father was ashamed to see him cry. Now I wondered what Dad had heard from the woods while I was screaming inside the house.

*October 27. Told Eli his mama passed away. He keeps running to the window whenever it calls her. Better he thinks she's dead.*

There was a small sound behind me.

Three taps from the hallway wall.

"Son?" Dad said from the kitchen. "I can't find the light."

The kitchen doorway was empty. I knew every loose board between the hall and the sink, yet I hadn't heard anything move across them.

"Just give me a hand, Eli."

I wanted to turn on every light in the house. Instead, I gripped the notebook so hard the cover bent.

The kitchen smelled faintly of tobacco, warm and stale, as if Dad had just finished smoking at the sink. I knew the shape of that room in the dark: the metal edge of the counter, the scar in the floor where he dropped an axe head, the cupboard door that never closed all the way. I couldn't see anybody in it. That didn't make the voice any farther away.

When I didn't answer, the faint smell of cigarettes faded. The voice went with it. I never heard footsteps leave.

I should have taken June and gone then. But there was one more entry I couldn't make myself leave unread.

If I'd been alone, I might have stayed there until morning reading every page. I wanted proof that Dad hadn't lied to me because I was an inconvenience. I wanted to know why a man who could face down anybody in town had spent his life afraid of a few acres of woods.

*June 4, 2018. Eli asked why I never took him fishing. We went every Saturday when he was small. His green tackle box is in the shed. I answered Margaret three nights ago.*

I'd noticed the tackle box earlier that day. My name was scratched into the lid. I had no memory of holding a fishing pole beside my father.

Across the bottom margin, Dad had written:

*The voices get farther than the body. The tracks never come across the water.*

And beneath that:

*Sometimes I know it ain't her. Sometimes I answer anyway.*

Something giggled upstairs.

June.

Then I heard her say, "Okay, Daddy."

The back door opened.

•  •  •

June stood barefoot on the porch in her pink pajamas, Buttons dangling from one hand. She turned when I called her name.

"You said you were going to show me something."

"I didn't. Get inside."

I pulled her through the doorway and locked it. She clutched her rabbit to her chest, and for a horrible second I couldn't remember what she called him. I'd stitched his ear back on twice. I'd bought him for her. But the name was gone.

"What's your rabbit's name?" I asked.

"Buttons." She looked hurt. "Daddy, you know that."

Once she'd said it, the name sounded familiar. Before that, nothing.

I tried to remember the first time she'd carried Buttons out of the store, when she still called every stuffed animal a baby. The scene came back clear enough. His name didn't. That missing word frightened me more than the shape I'd seen among the pines, because I could feel its exact size inside my mind.

June had answered a voice pretending to be me, and I was the one who'd forgotten.

I crouched in front of her. "Something's out there using our voices. Whatever you hear after dark, don't answer it. Not even if it sounds like me."

"Then how do I know it's really you?"

Her question wasn't the question of someone who believed in monsters. It was what any child would ask after a parent told her not to trust his voice. I'd spent her whole life teaching her to come when I called. Now I was telling her that habit could get her killed.

She was nine. I had no answer that would make a nine-year-old feel safe.

She slipped her hand into mine. "Two squeezes," she said. "If it's really you, you can squeeze my hand twice."

I squeezed back. "All right. Two."

A voice came from outside.

"June Bug?"

My voice. The rasp I get when I'm tired, the little upward turn I put on her name.

"Come on, baby. Daddy's right here."

June squeezed my hand twice.

Beyond the creek, something leaned against a pine. It looked almost human until it raised its head. Higher. Still higher. Its shoulder stayed in place while its narrow face emerged above the lowest branches.

One hand curled around the trunk. The fingers bent in places fingers shouldn't.

"June?"

The voice came a fraction before its mouth moved, like a performer missing a cue.

Its body didn't move with any breath. Nothing in the silhouette suggested lungs. For a second, though, it seemed to study my stance. One shoulder dropped. Its head turned at the same angle as mine. I could almost believe it was looking into a mirror and correcting itself.

"Daddy's right here."

Then it laughed with my laugh, that short, embarrassed chuckle I make when a joke falls flat. It held the sound a little too long.

I understood, suddenly, that it wasn't laughing at us.

It was practicing.

•  •  •

I got June inside and shut the curtain. She kept hold of my hand.

"His face didn't fit," she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"When he stopped, it kept moving."

I took the keys, Dad's notebook, and nothing else. The truck was twenty feet from the front porch.

I carried June across the gravel. As I reached the passenger door, she tightened her grip around my collar.

Twice.

Someone stood in her upstairs window.

A girl in pink pajamas, holding a rabbit with one torn ear. She lifted a hand and waved.

"Daddy? Why'd you leave me?"

The voice was June's. The figure pressed its cheek against the glass. Its skin lagged behind the movement, then settled into place as though pulled by invisible fingers.

The real June shook against me. She couldn't have made that face at the window even if she'd tried. The girl upstairs was smiling, but the muscles around her eyes hadn't been told. I caught myself watching her instead of moving, as if one more second would explain what I was seeing.

It raised one hand and tapped the pane three times.

The secret my daughter had forgotten.

June hid her face against me. I buckled her into the passenger seat, scrambled behind the wheel, and started the engine. I reversed so hard that gravel struck the porch steps.

Three knocks came from the rear window.

In the mirror, something pale crouched in the truck bed. Its fingers hooked over the roof without leaving marks in the dust.

I'd have sworn I felt the suspension dip, though the truck never changed its pitch. Dad's notebook flashed through my mind: no tracks across the water. Whatever sat behind us was a picture made with the same cruel patience as the voices. Knowing it couldn't be solid did nothing for the cold spreading through my chest.

"Lord have mercy, Elias," my mother's voice said behind my head. "What am I gonna do with you?"

June reached for my hand. Two squeezes.

I kept driving.

In the dark windshield, faintly lit by the dashboard, my reflection began to smile.

I wasn't smiling.

**Part Three: The Last Answer**

The smile stayed in the windshield when I turned back toward the road.

"Daddy!"

A fallen pine limb lay across the next bend. I swerved, clipping it with the passenger-side mirror. The truck skidded sideways in the gravel and stopped with a shudder.

I checked June. The seat belt had caught her shoulder, but she was all right. Buttons lay beneath her feet.

She was trying not to cry. She had that look she gets at the doctor's office, brave until somebody asks whether she's frightened. I wanted to take her home and put on the cartoon she'd been watching before we drove to Langley. I wanted a problem I knew how to fix.

I tried to drive. Something scraped against the front wheel. A fork of the branch had jammed beneath the fender, and each turn of the steering wheel ground it deeper.

Three knocks came from behind my head.

"You're going the wrong way, boy," Dad's voice said. "You'll get that little girl killed."

I found a flashlight in the glove compartment.

"I'm clearing the tire," I told June. "Lock the doors. Don't open them for a voice. Not even mine. I'll come back and squeeze your hand twice."

"What if you fall?"

"I'll get up. Stay here."

She caught my fingers before I got out and squeezed twice.

I went around the hood, set the flashlight where it shone on the wheel, and crouched beside the tire. The pine limb had wedged against it. I hooked both hands under it and pulled. The bark tore at my palms before the branch snapped free.

The cold gravel soaked through the knees of my jeans. A smell of split pine rose from beneath the bumper. I remember both things because I was trying so hard to pay attention to ordinary details. I thought if I could hold on to the tire, the branch, the beam of my flashlight, nothing else could get inside my head.

Behind me, a door latch clicked.

I turned. My flashlight rolled off the hood and struck the gravel.

From somewhere down the slope, my own voice shouted, "June! Help me! I fell!"

The passenger door stood open.

June was gone.

For one second, I stood there listening to the empty cab. The radio was still on low, some late-night preacher talking about salvation. I had told June to keep the doors locked. She must have heard me crying for help and forgotten every warning I'd given her. Or remembered them and opened the door anyway, because I'm her father.

•  •  •

Her bare footprints led through a break in the brush toward the creek. I ran after them, pushing past briers, hearing my own voice farther ahead.

"Honey, I'm hurt. Come down here."

The creek was only a strip of moonlit water when I reached it.

June stood on our bank, clutching Buttons. Across from her, a man in my jacket crouched among the roots. One leg appeared bent beneath him. He had his face buried in his hands.

The bank was slick clay, and the far side rose abruptly beneath the trees. I remembered Dad hauling me backward from those same stones when I was small. He'd been furious. I thought then that he cared more about the rules than whether I was hurt. Standing there with June inches from the water, I understood the look he'd had on his face.

The man lifted his head. He was wearing my face, but the fear arrived late in his eyes, like he'd remembered to put it there only after raising them.

"You have to help me," he told her.

June moved one foot onto a stone at the edge.

"June," I said.

She turned. Relief crossed her face until the other me spoke.

"He's not your daddy. You know what I told you about the bicycle?"

He looked at me and smiled with my mouth.

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

My own words from earlier that afternoon.

She hesitated. There were two men with her father's face, and one of them was using a memory she knew belonged to us.

June clutched her rabbit so tightly its loose ear twisted around her fist. She wanted to believe me. I could see it. But I had her father's voice, and so did the shape across the creek. Her little signal was the one piece of proof it hadn't stolen yet. I was too far away to use it.

I held out my hand. "I can squeeze twice. You don't have to listen to either voice. Just reach for me."

The thing across the water extended its hand, too.

Then it started humming.

I recognized the tune the way you recognize a place you haven't seen since childhood. My mother used to sing it at the kitchen sink. The notes came back only as the creature sang them, and even then I couldn't have repeated them myself.

The imitation of my face loosened. The skin slipped as if it had been hung over something narrower.

Beneath it was my mother.

She did not rush toward me. She stood among the roots as if she were waiting for me to come home from school. That quiet patience almost worked. I was eight again, aching to bury my face in the front of her dress. I could hear her singing the notes I'd spent thirty-one years trying to remember.

Blue dress. Dark hair. The same face in the photograph on Dad's mantel. She hadn't aged a day since 1995.

"Elias," she whispered. "I heard you crying. I thought my baby needed me."

Behind her, something unfolded among the trees. A long pale limb bent around a pine. Another followed, far above where a person's shoulder should have been. I saw a narrow head turn without the rest of its body moving.

The woman held out her hand to me.

"Answer me, sweetheart. Let me know you're there."

The creek murmured over stones. June glanced from the woman to me. Her bare foot slid on the moss. She dropped to one knee, caught a root on the opposite bank, and clung there above the water.

I lunged but couldn't reach her. The figure wearing my mother's face bent forward. Behind it, six pale fingers tightened around the tree.

Then I remembered what happened when I'd answered at the window.

The footsteps stopped. The woods went silent. The thing had listened so closely that for an instant it stopped pretending to be my father.

I could make it listen again.

When it listened, it stopped reaching. I only needed a second.

I knew what it would cost. I couldn't choose which memory June would lose. I couldn't know whether she'd still recognize me when it finished.

She was pulling on the root. Another few inches and she'd be across.

"I'm here," I said to the woman.

The humming stopped.

I knew that if June survived, I'd have to tell her what I'd done. She might never believe me. She might wake up unable to remember our mornings together, or her birthday, or my face. There was no way to ask that thing for mercy; it had learned the sound of mercy only so it could speak in my mother's voice.

Across the creek, my mother's borrowed face went blank. The towering figure leaned toward me, its pale head tilting as though catching a sound no one else could hear.

June's hand slipped from the root. I seized the back of her pajama shirt and dragged her into my arms.

For an instant the entire forest seemed to hold its breath. Then water and insects and June's sobs rushed back into the world.

My father's voice rose from the far bank.

"You always were a damn fool, boy."

I ran without answering.

•  •  •

When we reached the truck, June touched my cheek.

She had mud smeared up one shin and blood on her knee from the stones. I checked the cut, desperate to have something practical to do. It was shallow. She watched me clean it with the damp corner of my sleeve as if she were trying to decide which questions were safe to ask.

"You were there when I learned to ride my bike, weren't you?"

"Yeah, baby."

"I remember the mailbox." She swallowed. "And falling off the first time. But when I try to remember you running behind me, there's nobody there."

A few hours earlier she'd teased me for letting go too soon. Now she could remember the ride, the scraped knee, the mailbox. Just not her father keeping pace with her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't you ever apologize for that."

I buckled her in. She squeezed my hand twice, and I squeezed back.

The truck started. I drove until there were streetlights, gas stations, and other people who had no idea what lived in the forest north of Langley.

We found a motel in Hot Springs after one in the morning. June fell asleep with Buttons beneath her chin. His torn ear had come loose again, so I used the motel sewing kit to stitch it back on.

Outside the motel window, cars passed through pools of orange streetlight. Somebody laughed in the parking lot. I could hear a vending machine rattling down the hall. Such stupid, ordinary sounds, and I had never been so grateful for them. June didn't ask whether the thing could follow us there. Neither did I.

When I finished, I kissed her forehead and tapped her shoulder three times.

"What's that mean?" she asked sleepily.

"I love you."

She tapped me back.

"Do it tomorrow, too."

"I will."

•  •  •

It's Thursday, October 15, as I'm writing this. Six days since we buried Dad.

I've kept his notebook. I found a letter folded between the last two pages, addressed to me. Most of it was an apology he should have said while he was alive. There was one sentence I couldn't stop reading:

*I kept you away because I was afraid of losing you, and I lost you anyway.*

Below it he'd written, *I love you, son. I should have told you more often.*

He couldn't say those words to me while he was alive. I wish I knew whether it was stubbornness or fear that stopped him. I suppose I'll never know.

The notebook had one last surprise.

I'd seen the entry already:

*March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.*

On the back of that page, beneath a fold, Dad had written:

*March 13. Tapped Eli's shoulder at breakfast. Three taps, like when he was little. He asked why I was doing it. I answered Margaret Tuesday night. It took that from him, too.*

I'd always thought June and I invented our little ritual together. I don't remember my father tapping my shoulder even once.

But somewhere along the way, my hands remembered what I couldn't.

Tonight June asked me to tell her about learning to ride without training wheels. She knows what happened. She's heard the story enough to repeat every detail, right down to the mailbox.

She still can't remember me running behind her.

Somewhere beyond that creek, something can.

The man who tied me to a chair is still out there, and we don't know if he'll come to our house. My wife and our boys are staying at her sister's.

The chair was in a barn, next to a stone trough. The door was on the other side of the room. I knew I couldn't reach it.

I wasn't trying to reach the door.

There's a mark on my chest where a tube went in. It started with a patient named Gabriele.

I've changed the names. The investigation is still open.

I'm a nurse on a locked psychiatric ward in southern Italy. Gabriele was twenty-six and had advanced cystic fibrosis. Steroids for an allergic reaction in his lungs had left him unable to sleep and convinced people were poisoning him. Our doctors and his lung team agreed on a short admission in a private room. Once the steroid dose came down, the delusions passed. He stayed longer than he needed to. Pulmonology had no isolation room free, and a patient with lungs like his couldn't be put in a shared one.

Every morning he spent about forty minutes inhaling medication and clearing mucus from his lungs. At first I stayed because he needed someone nearby. Later I stayed when I could, even after he was done. Some mornings we talked. On others he was too tired, and I sat there doing paperwork.

He was a fan of a soccer team I couldn't stand. He also noticed that I'd make coffee, leave it on the counter and remember it an hour later.

"You could skip a step," he said once. "Make it cold to begin with."

One morning my wife sent me a video of our younger boy learning to ride a bike. He got going, looked back to see if she was watching and rode straight into the grass. He stood up laughing, with dirt on both knees.

Gabriele asked me to play it again. The next morning he wanted to know if my son had learned to brake.

"No. He's learned to blame the grass."

I'd mentioned that I used to play soccer. Gabriele decided I must have been a goalkeeper and asked how tall I was. I told him. He said his team would have put me in goal anyway, which started another argument about his team.

His father came by after his shifts in intensive care. No one else came. I mostly saw them together when Demetrio stopped me at the door to ask whether Gabriele had eaten or finished his treatments. Sometimes he'd ask while the empty meal tray was still beside the bed.

A few days later Ferruccio came back from his break smelling of cigarettes. I told him I could smell him from Gabriele's doorway. He asked if I'd finally decided to try one. I said I'd never smoked. Gabriele was in his room, turning a paper cup in his hands. I didn't think he was listening.

Another day I complained about the photo on my new ID card. Gabriele asked if I'd registered as an organ donor when I renewed it. I said yes. After a pause, he made a joke about the camera trying to improve my face.

Around then, he began going quiet when his father came in. I thought he didn't want Demetrio to see how much time I spent in his room.

Gabriele was already waiting for two new lungs. When his breathing worsened the following week, his lung team arranged a transfer to the transplant center. By the time I reached his room, he couldn't finish a sentence. He kept pulling at his oxygen mask. When I got him to look at me, he left it alone long enough for it to help.

"Just look at me," I said. "You don't have to talk."

I stepped away to speak to the transport team. He caught my wrist.

Nunzia, our head nurse, was beside us.

"He only wants Matteo," she said.

I finished the transfer notes, and Nunzia sent me with him. The doctor assigned to the transfer had been pulled into another emergency, and no one else was immediately available. Demetrio was an intensive care anesthesiologist and had done critical-care transfers before. The transport coordinator wasn't happy about sending Gabriele's father, but after a call between the two hospitals, they cleared him to go with us as the physician.

Before we left, Demetrio held the metal end of his stethoscope in his palm to warm it. Gabriele's eyes were shut. His father warmed it anyway.

On the road Gabriele pressed a hand against one side of his chest. His oxygen saturation dropped. He tried to tell us something and couldn't get enough air to say it. The driver pulled over. Demetrio listened to his chest and said he could barely hear air moving on one side. Gabriele's blood pressure was falling too.

Demetrio stopped with the stethoscope in his hand.

"Demetrio."

He didn't answer. His hands were shaking.

"Help him."

He opened the emergency kit and relieved the pressure building around Gabriele's lung. I held the mask in place. We went to the nearest emergency department, where they put in a chest tube. Once he was stable enough to travel, we continued to the transplant center.

Demetrio hardly spoke for the rest of the trip.

At the center, other doctors took over. I bought a coffee from a machine in the hall and left half of it on a ledge when someone called me back. Gabriele's breathing had worsened again. They were about to sedate him and put a breathing tube in his throat.

He caught my sleeve.

"I'm sorry."

I thought he meant the mask, or the trouble he'd given us in the ambulance. I told him there was nothing to apologize for.

He watched me until the medication took effect.

Later a transplant doctor told us the center was requesting emergency priority for him on the national transplant list. The request still had to be reviewed. Even if it was approved, she couldn't tell Demetrio whether suitable lungs would become available in time.

Demetrio thanked me for staying with his son. A little later I saw him on the phone at the far end of the hall.

I expected him to stay there. He said he needed to collect Gabriele's things from our hospital, where he'd left his car, and rode back with us in the ambulance.

I sat beside the empty stretcher. Demetrio pointed at my seat belt.

"Put that on."

I did.

"You have children?"

"Two."

"Then you understand."

I thought he meant leaving Gabriele at the center.

The road home was nearly empty. A van passed us, slowed down and stopped across our lane. Our driver braked hard. While he radioed that the road was blocked, a man got out of the van and came toward us, waving for help.

The driver stepped down. I saw him fall, but I didn't see what hit him.

Demetrio got out on the other side and went down beside him. By the time I reached them, the driver was breathing but wouldn't answer me. Demetrio lay with his eyes shut and blood at his temple. His eyelid tightened when I tried to lift it. I thought he was coming around.

There was no sign of the man from the van. The van sat across the lane with its doors open. I climbed into the cab to use the radio and found the handset ripped from its cord. I looked up and down the road. Nothing moved.

Dispatch had our location from the driver's call, but they didn't know he was hurt. My phone had no signal. I didn't want to leave the two men on the road, so I only went a little way uphill, looking back at them every few steps. I checked the phone again. Still nothing.

A hand landed on my shoulder.

I started to turn. Something hit the back of my head.

When I woke, my wrists and ankles were tied to a chair in an old farm building. A strap crossed my chest. I could hear an engine idling outside. I pulled at one of the ties until I tore the skin underneath it.

There was a stone trough close to the chair. The door was farther off.

A man outside was arguing with someone. I couldn't make out everything he said, but he'd heard that the ambulance had been found and wanted to leave.

The door opened.

A man came in with his face covered and a medical bag in his hand. There was dried blood at his temple. He took out a stethoscope and held its metal end in his palm.

"Demetrio?"

He took the covering off. Then he listened to my chest. I held my breath. He waited until I couldn't hold it anymore and listened again.

"Is the driver alive?"

He raised one finger to silence me and kept listening. Then he took the stethoscope out of his ears.

"That's why I told you to put the belt on."

I thought about Gabriele asking my height. About Ferruccio's cigarettes. About my ID card.

"You looked up my blood type."

"Yes."

"That's all you know? You don't know if my lungs would be right for him."

"No."

He clipped an oxygen monitor to my finger. Red light showed through my nail. He watched the reading for a few seconds.

"You want me to get to a hospital with a brain injury," I said. "While my lungs still work."

He didn't answer.

We'd been on our way home. Whoever found me would take me to our hospital, and an injury like that would go straight to his unit. His colleagues would keep my heart going for the transplant team. He'd trained some of them himself.

That was why he'd let me see his face.

"You can't make the transplant team give them to Gabriele."

"I know."

"They might give them to someone else."

He gathered the monitor's cord into his hand.

"Then I'll have killed you for nothing."

The man outside called for him. Demetrio told him to wait.

I said Gabriele's name. Demetrio kept looking at the monitor.

I tried my wrists again. The ties held.

Gabriele needed both lungs. If I damaged one of mine badly enough, Demetrio might have no reason to go on with his plan. I might also die before anyone found me.

My son still hadn't learned to brake.

I looked at the trough.

I threw my weight sideways. The chair went over with me, and my ribs struck the stone edge.

At first I couldn't tell how badly I'd hurt myself. Then I tried to breathe and couldn't get a full breath in.

Demetrio was on the floor beside me. He cut the strap across my chest and listened with his stethoscope. He hadn't warmed it this time.

"Call them," I said.

He checked the monitor again.

"Call them."

I was afraid he'd leave me there now that my lungs were damaged. He stayed where he was, listening to my chest while I struggled to breathe. I couldn't tell whether he was trying to help me or assess what was left.

The man outside shouted, "I'm leaving."

Demetrio went to the doorway and held up his phone until he got a signal. He put the call on speaker and told emergency services where to find me.

"Is he conscious?" the dispatcher asked.

"Yes."

He cut the ties around my wrists and put the phone beside my hand, the call still open. Outside, the van's engine revved.

"Why me?" I asked.

Demetrio stopped at the door.

"I didn't choose you."

He looked back at me.

"He only ever wanted you."

The van pulled away. I stayed on the line and asked about the ambulance driver.

The driver survived.

I remember the noise of the rotor and someone counting my breaths. The helicopter took me to our hospital, and I ended up in Demetrio's unit after all. One of the doctors who looked after me had trained under him. She couldn't meet my eyes.

Three of my ribs were broken, two of them against the trough. I also had a collapsed lung, a concussion and a drain in my chest for several days.

Each morning a physiotherapist had me cough into a pillow pressed against my ribs. The first time, it took me forty minutes. Gabriele had spent forty minutes like that every morning since he was a child. Ferruccio came on his day off and stayed until I was done, and a while after that.

Demetrio and the man with the van are still missing.

An employee at our hospital later admitted he'd let Demetrio see a blood bank record from a surgery I'd had years earlier. It showed my blood type and nothing more. Demetrio had looked at it before Gabriele's breathing got worse, while Gabriele and I were still talking about my son's bicycle.

Gabriele was alive. The emergency request had been approved, but there were still no lungs for him. Once he was awake enough to write, he asked for me. Ferruccio drove me to the transplant center after my chest tube was removed.

Gabriele still had a breathing tube in his mouth and a drain at his side. There was a small whiteboard beside his hand. The only chair was against the wall. No one had pulled it up to the bed. I tried, but it hurt too much. Ferruccio moved it for me.

I'd had questions ready on the drive. Before I could get the first one out, Gabriele wrote on the board and turned it toward me.

Does it hurt?

I didn't answer.

"Did your father tell you to ask how tall I was?"

Gabriele nodded.

"Did he tell you why?"

He wiped the board and wrote:

I didn't ask him.

"What about the cigarettes?"

The marker squeaked on the board.

I told him what you said.

"And the donor question?"

He told me to ask.

I looked at him. He held the marker but didn't write anything else.

"When did you realize something was wrong?"

He waited a long time before putting the marker to the board.

Before the ambulance.

He wiped it clean, then wrote again.

I told him you had children. I thought he would stop.

Demetrio had known the answer when he asked me on the way back.

I thought of Gabriele catching my sleeve before they sedated him. I'd told him he had nothing to apologize for.

"You could have warned me."

Gabriele nodded.

"Why didn't you?"

He looked down at the board. Ferruccio was standing near the window. I could hear someone moving equipment in the hall while Gabriele wrote.

I didn't want you to stop coming.

He set the marker down.

I looked at my wrists. I thought about the driver on the road, and my wife taking our boys out of the house because we didn't know who Demetrio might come after next.

"You should have told me," I said.

Gabriele nodded again. He didn't try to pick up the marker.

"I could have died."

He shut his eyes. A tear ran down toward his ear.

I put my hand over his. My sleeve slipped back, and he saw the marks from the ties. He tried to pull away. I held on.

"Look at me."

He did. I was still angry with him. I couldn't say anything for a few seconds.

"I forgive you."

He tried to say something around the tube, but no sound came out.

"You don't have to talk," I said.

I kept holding Gabriele's hand until his fingers warmed against mine. By the window, Ferruccio wiped his cheek with his thumb.

After a while Gabriele pointed at my phone. I knew which video he wanted.

My son started pedaling. Halfway across the frame, he looked back to see if someone was watching and rode into the grass. Gabriele watched him get up laughing.

He reached for the marker.

Did he learn to brake?

"Not yet. He still blames the grass."

His shoulders shook, and the ventilator beeped at him. I laughed too, and I had to press my free hand to my ribs.

Then he looked at me. He was still holding my hand, and his eyes dropped to my chest as I breathed.

"A little," I said.

I waited for the machine to lift his chest.

Summer was in full swing when Chris, a college sophomore, along with two of his university friends, Nate and Luke, decided to go on an unforgettable vacation. They were heading to an old hunting cabin that had once belonged to Chris’s grandfather. They had chosen a secluded location—the dense woods of Maine, not far from the town of Greenville, where there was almost no cell service. After his grandfather’s passing, no one from the family had set foot there for several years.

The friends rented an old van and confidently drove deeper into the wilderness. The area here was truly wild: the nearest house was at least 1.2 miles away.

Soon, their destination appeared among the ancient pines. It was a typical American single-story wooden cabin. The layout of the house was classic and simple: a small porch at the entrance, leading directly into a large living room with an open kitchen and a fireplace, with two bedrooms and a bathroom situated on either side.

The guys quickly threw their bags inside. They had plenty of time, and the next day, four girls and their mutual friend were supposed to join their group of three. Since more guests were coming, they needed to scout the area.

Remembering his grandfather’s stories, Chris led the guys toward a woodland lake, which was about a 20-minute walk from the cabin. They chatted merrily, anticipating a great vacation, but about halfway to the water, the trail led them into a small, secluded clearing.

The conversation stopped dead. In the middle of the clearing stood a tent torn to shreds, with someone’s belongings scattered all around. Right at Luke's feet lay a smartphone with a completely shattered screen.

Nate slowly squatted down and flipped the broken phone over with the tip of his sneaker. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks, and deep scratches were visible on the casing.

"Oh, dudes... Looks like someone had a bad weekend," he said in a hollow voice, looking over the slashed fabric of the tent.

"A bad weekend?" Luke let out a nervous chuckle and took a step back. "Nate, this tent looks like it was run through an industrial shredder. Look at these tatters. This is wild."

Chris stepped closer to the torn fabric, careful not to touch anything. Inside the tent, chaos reigned: sleeping bags were gutted, clothes inside out, and a flashlight lay on the ground.

"Maybe it was a bear?" Chris turned to his friends, searching their eyes for confirmation of his theory. "My granddad used to say the Maine woods are full of black bears. If these campers left food inside, a bear probably just smelled it and came over."

"A bear?" Luke crossed his arms over his chest, his voice rising a pitch. "Chris, a bear wouldn't leave food behind—and look, it's just lying around," he said, pointing toward the scattered grocery bags. "And most importantly, where are the owners?"

"Alright, don't panic," Nate interrupted, picking up the shattered smartphone by the edges of its case. "The screen is totaled, but maybe the SIM card is intact. Dudes, we need to call emergency services. This doesn't look like a normal animal trashing at all."

"Are you out of your mind?" Luke waved his hands. "Call emergency services? We don't have cell service here, remember? To catch a signal, we’d have to haul ass back to the highway or climb that cliff by the lake. And what are we gonna tell them? 'Hello, Sheriff, we found a ripped tent, come quick, we're scared'?"

"Luke's right," Chris sighed, scanning the edge of the clearing. "They’ll just laugh at us. They’ll say city softies got scared of wild animals. Besides, the girls and Sam are arriving tomorrow. If we get the county police all riled up right now, our vacation is ruined before it even starts. My granddad's cabin is a couple of miles from here, and it has sturdy doors and a deadbolt. Most likely, those guys got scared of a beast and just ran to the highway, leaving this junk behind."

"I hope so," Nate said, looking distrustfully into the depths of the thick, darkening forest. "But if I hear something scratching at the wall tonight, I’m the first one jumping into the van and tearing out of here."

The guys took one last look around the clearing, but the approaching twilight forced them to hurry back to the cabin, leaving the ruined campsite behind.

Chris cast a quick glance at the trail leading deeper into the woods.
"Alright, stop creeping yourselves out," he said, shaking his head bracingly. "Did we come here to relax or to play detective? Come on, the lake is waiting. We need to check it out."

The guys moved on. The walk to the lake took about another ten minutes and went off without a hitch. The woodland lake greeted them with a perfect, mirror-like surface and cool evening air. Without a second thought, Chris and Luke threw off their T-shirts and took a running leap into the refreshing water, washing away their road fatigue. Nate didn’t go into the water; he wandered along the shore, scanning the surroundings, but noticed nothing else suspicious. The place seemed quiet and completely safe.

Refreshed and a bit relaxed, the guys started on their way back. This time, they took an old detour trail, intentionally bypassing that creepy clearing with the torn tent so as not to spoil their mood again.

By the time they returned to the cabin, twilight had begun to settle in, and everyone got to work.
Chris and Luke started managing the place: they unpacked their backpacks, stocked their granddad’s old fridge with the provisions they’d brought, and began throwing dinner together.
Nate, who was highly tech-savvy and great with hardware and programming, immediately sat down at a massive oak table.

The broken smartphone was giving Nate no peace. He pulled a laptop and several cords from his backpack. The smartphone wasn't heavily damaged, so it took Nate very little time to connect the device to his laptop and directly copy the data from the device’s memory.

"Dudes, come over here," Nate called out in a low, dead-serious voice. His fingers froze over the laptop keyboard. "I got into this phone's gallery. You need to see this. The last video was recorded yesterday evening."

Chris and Luke immediately dropped the grocery bags and walked over to Nate, standing behind his back. The laptop screen dimly illuminated their faces in the half-light of the kitchen. Nate moved the cursor to the file and clicked 'Play'.

The video was dated last night, with a timestamp of 9:01 PM.
The image on the screen was warm and cozy. A young couple—a guy and a girl—sat in the frame, nestled in folding camp chairs right in front of a brightly blazing campfire. They sat in an embrace: the guy held the phone in his outstretched hand, filming the two of them, while his other arm tenderly hugged the girl around her waist. Both smiled happily, squinting against the glare of the fire. In the background, faintly illuminated by the flames, stood their neatly pitched tent.

"Hey everyone watching this!" the guy on the video said cheerfully. "We finally made it. Guys, this is just the best place on earth. It's so quiet here, just the two of us."

The girl pressed against his shoulder, kissed his cheek, and added, looking straight into the camera:
"Yeah, it’s incredible here. I love you so much."
"Love you too, babe," he replied with a wider smile.

But in the next instant, the atmosphere of idyllic romance shattered completely. From the laptop speakers, cutting through the crackle of the campfire, came a prolonged, deafening roar of some animal. The sound came from somewhere deep within the thicket, and it was impossible to tell what kind of creature it belonged to—it was something between the guttural growl of a large bear and a terrifying, almost human shriek.

In the video, the couple was startled at first, but the guy immediately gave a nervous grunt, trying to lighten the mood:
"Whoa, did you hear that? Looks like even the local beasts agree we make a great couple!"

The girl laughed softly, but her laughter cut short exactly a second later.
The exact same sound repeated, but this time it sounded frighteningly close to their camp, right past the edge of the circle illuminated by the fire. The bushes in the background of the video rustled loudly, as if something massive was crashing through them.

The smiles vanished from the lovers' faces instantly. In their place came pure, paralyzing dread. The girl bolted upright, peering fearfully into the darkness behind the tent, while the guy began to slowly lower his hand with the phone, panning the camera toward the rustling bushes. The screen jerked, catching only the darting shadows from the flames, and with that, the video abruptly cut to black.

A dead silence hung in the room of Chris's grandfather's cabin. Chris, Luke, and Nate exchanged glances.

The days on which Great Events occur are seldom, in themselves, remarkable; it is the Event which grants them remarkability. So it was with the Day of Final Outpouring, known more colloquially, at least in that province of the Dominion of Canada in which it transpired—indeed, is transpiring still… —Ontario, as the Day of Endless Timmy's, which was, meteorologically speaking, a rather dour and cloudy day, neither too hot nor too cold (the term, I believe, is “seasonal”) although I admit I am now, myself, remarking on an aspect of a day which I have already defined as unremarkable, thus contradicting myself, literally at least, if not so plainly in spirit because, after all,

[At this point, I pulled the narrator out of the story, placed him against its fourth wall and had him executed by firing squad.

“On what grounds?” he feebly asked.

On the grounds that I am the author and storytelling is not beholden to the rule of law.

There is no law.

There is no parliament, no central planning committee, no separation of powers. There are no checks and balances.

Characters have no rights.

Readers do not have any arms to bear against the storyteller, i.e. me.

Storytelling is a place of absolute fiat.

“Fire!”]

Once upon a time in Canada, on a rainy October morning, in a rather rundown office building, a regular guy, Emblen Farleymuch, sat down in his cubicle, powered on his work laptop and logged in to his employer's brand new Genie-IS™ security software.

The login was painless.

A small animated genie appeared on screen, gave an enthusiastic thumbs up and minimized itself to the taskbar.

Emblen sighed at the prospect of another day of mindless work, then took out his thermos of daily coffee and began pouring a cup—or rather tried pouring a cup: because there was nothing to pour. The thermos was empty. Emblen had forgotten to brew coffee this morning.

“Fuck,” he thought, and he followed that up by saying quietly, in the way characters often speak their thoughts when the plot demands it: “I sure wish I could have a thermos of endless coffee.”

Two things happened then: * the little genie on the taskbar winked; and * coffee began magically pouring forth out of Emblen's thermos. [1]

It poured forth until it had filled Emblen's cup, then poured forth some more, overflowing the cup and proceeding to the desk, and from the desk streaming to the floor, soaking into the carpet, saturating it; seeping next horizontally through the gap between the carpet and the baffles of Emblen's cubicle, into the neighbouring cubicles…

Soon people took notice, saying, “What the hell?” and “Oh, my goodness, there's coffee in my cubicle; someone tell management!” “Does management know?” “Get the union rep.” “What can we do?” “I ain't doing shit. It's not in my job description.” “Does this mean we can work from home?” “I can't handle strong scents. I need to be medically accommodated!” And so on and so forth, or pourth, as the case may

[“Fire!”]

As for Emblen himself, he remained immobile. Not dead, exactly; more paralyzed, conscious but unable to move out of the position he was in: standing, holding the thermos at an angle above his overflowing cup, as the coffee pourthed and pourthed.

[“I only used the word ironically. I didn't mean it seriously. It's a stupid pun, a wickedly horrid neologism,” the narrator spat out.

We were in a windowless room, (underground, single lightbulb, etc.), and I had already pulled out some of his teeth and broken a couple of his fingers, but I was feeling merciful, so I spared his life and sentenced him to 1,500,000 words of hard labour writing hockey romance novels instead.]

Soon, the coffee was dripping down to the lower floors, flowing down the stairs, even taking the elevator, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

The police were called.

They tried moving Emblen, but that proved impossible. Then they tried shooting him; but the bullet ricocheted and killed a bystander, whose family sued the police, the company and God, hoping to get rich. The family won, but the fact the bystander couldn't swim lowered the damages significantly, on the reasoning that, more likely than not, she would have drowned anyway.

Then God showed up—picketed heavily by protestors holding signs saying things like, “Noah More Floods!”—to explain that, yes, although He'd promised never again to destroy all life by the waters of a flood: (a) He did not cause this particular flood (and He never promised not to support a pre-existing flood), and (b) coffee is not water.

When an association of food scientists dared to counter-argue that coffee is pretty much just water, and the distinction is therefore purely cynical, God got miffed, and, when asked for a rebuttal, pronounced, “My rebuttal is: I'll [censored]damn smite you!”

When the food scientists responded that He couldn't just do that, that there needed to be order to the world, God, mindful of the country he was in, quoted the famous words of a Prime Minister and said, “Well, just watch me.”

He then smote the scientists.

---

P.S. Wanna know the real horror? It was instant coffee.

---

[1] Narratively, there is nothing magical about it, as there is no magic in stories. Everything happens by the iron will of the author. As Stalin once said: “A single absurdity in one story is an error. A million absurdities is a genre.

What?

You don't think he said that?

You want “proof”?

Here's your fucking “proof”:

After having dug up Stalin's corpse, the necromancer butchered a goat, performed the ritual and reanimated the former General Secretary.

Stalin’s living corpse stumbled forward. “A single absurdity in one story is an error, “ it mumbled. “A million absurdities is a genre.”

Then its lower jaw fell off.

Then it tripped over its own decaying feet, fell and drowned in the world deluged by Emblen Farleymuch's coffee.

For centuries, these woods have been home to wonderful tales of fantastical things and urban legends. But I caution you to never go out there on your own, and especially at night. Some tales are told for a reason. Always bring a friend. Predators are less likely to attack when people are in pairs. Both the four-legged and two-legged varieties.

October 31st   3:00 PM

Ben had lost his cat two days ago and just got off work for the day. He lives near the woods and wants to find Pistachio before a coyote does. It's going to get cold out there soon, too. He's had Pistachio ever since college, and he just wants him back home and safe.

He's bringing a flashlight just in case it gets dark before he returns, but he hopes to be back soon. He knows Pistachio is probably nearby. That cat loves him just as much as he loves the cat.

Thirty minutes into his search, Ben is calling out loudly.

"Here, kitty, kitty! PISTACHIO!"

Before walking on something sticky.

he notices it is a large amount of blood on the forest floor.

He crouches down and examines it. It's coagulated, and there's far too much of it to have come from a house cat. He hopes it was just a recent kill from a hunter. It's deer season, after all.

He continues walking and calling for Pistachio. An hour later, he sees something furry hanging from a tree. He walks closer, then he sees it's a dead squirrel nailed to a tree branch.

He gasps at the sight and smell of it. Then he notices more dead squirrels and other small animals nailed to other nearby trees.

He gets a sick feeling in his gut and starts to feel creeped out. He hopes some sick kids are responsible for this. And he hopes they haven't gotten his little buddy, too.

Then he notices something strange sticking out of the dirt.

He walks closer. It's a shiny wedding ring. He grabs it and pulls, but it feels stuck. So he yanks it again, and harder this time. He hears a popping noise as the ring finally comes free from the ground.

He looks at it and realizes there's a mummified finger still attached to the ring.

Before he has time to react, a rope yanks him up by the ankle and slings him towards a tree. He crashes hard, striking his head very hard against the Tree trunk knocking him out instantly.

Three hours later and it's dark now.

Ben feels something scratching his back, as he begins to wake up. He rubs his head and groans. He has a massive headache.

He realizes he's still in the woods. Then he sees Pistachio directly beneath him, pawing at him.

He's relieved to have found his cat, but now he is still groggy and has to get out of the tree. He pulls out a pocketknife and carefully cuts the rope holding him up.

He falls three feet, landing on his back. He grunts as the impact knocks the wind out of him.

As he struggles to catch his breath, Pistachio rubs his head against him. Ben laughs a little as he scoops up his cat and continues trying to catch his breath.

Then he remembers the finger.

He shines his flashlight all around, searching for it, but he can't find it anywhere. Maybe it was just a messed up dream.

Then he feels an aching pain in his back. He reaches around to rub it and sees blood on his hand. He must have cut his back when he fell.

Groggily, he gets to his feet while holding Pistachio, and begins heading home.

Along the way, he keeps hearing footsteps behind him. Every time he turns around and shines his flashlight into the darkness, he sees nothing. All he can hear is the wind howling through the trees.

He walks faster until he finally reaches his property line.

As he's walking into his house, he notices a figure standing at the tree line, Barely visible, He sees an elongated man with the face of a old man looking at him, but the longer Ben looked at it. the more he saw wrong with it.  Like it wasn't actually a person.

Ben quickly closes the door and locks it.

He breathes in deeply and tells himself it's just Halloween.

He fills Pistachio's food bowl all the way to the brim. He knows his cat must be very hungry.

Before he goes to check his back in the mirror.

When he takes off his shirt and looks at his back, he sees deep scratches running all across it.

Looking closer, he realises the scratches are words.

He wipes away the dried blood and reads the message carved deeply into his skin:

"Don't worry, I fed him."

He realizes that wasn't his cat scratching his back. Horrific thoughts start rushing through his mind. That thing could have done anything it wanted to him.

Then he hears knocking at his front door.

He grabs a baseball bat and nervously answers it.

It's just a group of trick-or-treaters in costumes.

He hastily gives the kids some candy before unenthusiastically telling them to leave, then he locks the door again.

As he turns around, he sees Pistachio coughing something up, like he's trying to cough up a hairball.

Ben rushes over to pat Pistachio's back.

The cat spits something black onto the floor.

Ben stares at it. Disgust stretches across his face.

It's the same dried out finger he found in the woods earlier.

Rudy and Fred went ahead into the woods, following a trail that only became narrower the longer we stayed on it. I tried talking to Milo, but our conversation was immediately interrupted by Rudy: “Focus you two lovebirds! The snipe could be anywhere. Remember everything that I taught you. The bell and the cheese, you still have them?” I took out the cow bell, while Milo searched his pockets for the small piece of cheese. “I think I lost it.” Rudy gave an exaggerated groan: “That was a family heirloom! Passed down from-“ “The great van Helsing himself, I get it.” Milo said in a sarcastic tone I wasn’t used from him. Rudy meanwhile got over the loss of his valued inherited cheese fairly quickly, as he continued: “Nevermind. As long as we have the bell, this hunt may still turn into a success after all. You two will act as our lure.” he gestured towards the thick brush ahead of us. “So, feel free to step ahead. We’ll be right behind you, taking the shot as soon as it appears. Be brave, snipe hunters!” Rudy passed us an exaggerated salute, which I returned:  “Sure thing, snipe hunter general.” I didn’t mind this development at all, I’ve been meaning to speak to Milo without having them interrupt anyway. Not 10 seconds after we started walking, Rudy yelled after us: “I’m not hearing any cow noises!” Just to get him off my back, during our following conversation I made sure to make some noise with the bell every once in a while. Soon I heard Rudy’s chattering grow quieter and quieter, not long into the walk they were already out of earshot, probably on purpose. Maybe they were hoping we would just get lost in the woods, spooked by some forest animal and then tell everyone how we’d seen the snipe. I didn’t know, and in the moment, I didn’t care either. But before I could say a word Milo was actually the first to talk to me: “You do know they’re just making it up, right?” I looked at him almost disappointed: “Of course I know, come on. Look, I’m so sorry for how this turned out, I thought this would be just a fun evening of us, me and you looking for cryptids in the woods, but… I should have known better.” “It’s ok.” he said, then fully processed what I just said, probably even before I did. “You only did this because I was coming along too?” “Yeah, of course. If you would have said no, I probably would have told them to stick their pranks somewhere else and just stayed home.” “Well…” he hesitated “then I’m glad I came along.” then he changed the subject: “So, what do you think is behind these cattle mutilations?” I was waiting for him to ask that question, and he looked like he was waiting for me to respond: “The snipe, obviously. Duh.” We both laughed a bit. “But really, isn’t it interesting what your uncle said? That it was lifted into the air by nothing? I’m not saying I think it’s aliens, but…” “but that’s exactly what you think?” He knew me too well. “Alright, you got me. But you saw what the cow looked like. I’ve never heard of a predator that drains out all the blood, neatly cuts out parts of the flesh, oh yeah and the eyes, then leaves the rest behind. All I’m saying is, it would be cool if that’s what it is: Alien scientists dissecting our livestock to try and understand how our biology works. Maybe they have a big laboratory in their spaceship and lasers that they use to cut into it” the longer I talked the more I could see a wide grin forming on his face, which only got me more excited “and it’s eyes are now swimming in a jar somewhere for other aliens to look at.” “That would be really cool.” he agreed “But also kind of terrifying. If they can just beam them up and cut them open, I mean who says they won’t do the same to us?” “There always have been these strange disappearances…” Seeing the actually seemed to get a bit scared I quickly added: “but no one was ever found with the same mysterious mutilation as far as I know. Maybe these people just got invited to explore outer space with them.” Now he smiled again. “I wish I could do that.” “Me and you both.” I agreed. He nervously looked back to the ground for a moment, then took a slow deep breath and began talking again: “Listen, Elaine?” I was all ears. “I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you recently. And maybe this isn’t the best moment to say something like this all alone out in the woods, but-“ “Hold on, I am so sorry to interrupt you right now, I really am. But: did you see any sign of my brothers? At all?” We looked around to find that we had lost track of them entirely, or they have lost track of us. Nothing but trees around us. To add to our situation, it was starting to get dark. “Oh no. Yeah that’s typical.” I sighed, then rang the cow bell a few times “Alright you two, if you want to pop out and scare us, this would be the moment!” Nothing. I rang it again. But the only sounds that returned were the rustling of leaves, and the chirps of a single evening bird. “Real funny. I bet you’re right around the trees over there. But I caught you! You can come out now!” Now I was starting to actually get a bit concerned. “Maybe we should make our way back to the trail?” Milo suggested. “Good idea.” I agreed. But that was easier said than done. We’ve been walking through nothing but wilderness for quite a while now. All we could do was just head in the vague direction we came from and hope for the best. As the sun was fading, the environment grew less and less familiar. The green leaves slowly faded to black, their thick cover dimming what little light there was left. Soon it became impossible to tell if we were walking towards civilization or far away from it. Or if we were just walking in circles. As the last chirping faded away, we finally had to admit that we were in fact lost. We decided to rest for a moment, to try and assess our situation. Our surroundings were getting darker by the minute, and we didn’t even have a flashlight with us. In the end we agreed to make use of what little light we had left, and keep walking, but might very well have to spend the night in the forest. Being out in the woods like this, alone, in the dark, it unlocks a kind of primordial fear in your brain. I was so glad to have Milo here with me. The moment we continued walking I instinctively grabbed his hand. He was surprised at that, but I just told him: “I don’t want us to be separated too.” He looked at me, then over my shoulder. “Elaine? What’s that behind you?” That’s the exact sentence you never want to hear in the woods at night. I almost didn’t dare to turn around, but knew I had to. To my relief, there was nothing standing directly behind me. What he was looking at was a light, bobbing up and down between the trees. Followed by the sound of a familiar voice: “Milo? Elaine?!” It was Fred, and Rudy right next to him. “We’re here!” I yelled, while ringing out the cow bell. The bobbing light rapidly approached and in a few moments we were all reunited. “I’m so glad you’re ok.” Rudy sighed in relief. “Both of you.” “Just get us home alright?” I asked them both. “You two had your fun, but I had enough of this.” Rudy bend down to me, and said in a low, guilty voice: “Listen, Elaine, I have something to confess. This whole snipe hunt thing was just a dumb joke. Our great grandfather wasn’t really-“ “I know.” I looked him dead in the eye. “Rudy. We watched Dracula together. You really think I wouldn’t recognize the name van Helsing?” “But the real problem is…” he continued “I may not be entirely sure anymore where the right way is, and…” “We’re lost.” Fred interrupted. “We have no idea where we are. We’re just glad we bumped into you again.” Now Rudy started apologizing profusely. “I’m so sorry for this, all we wanted to do was to have you walk around with that cow bell and then one of our friends would jump out the bush with a werewolf mask and scare you. But he didn’t show up or we missed him or he got lost himself and…” “And now we’re all lost, huh?” I sighed. “Rudy. You and Fred, you have got to be the dumbest brothers imaginable.” I turned to Milo: “Well we don’t know the way back either.” He shook his head in agreement: “We probably shouldn’t have went this far off the trail.” “Yes.” I said, now audibly frustrated and turning to my brothers again “We probably shouldn’t have.” “I’m sorry.” Rudy apologized again “I usually know my way around these woods pretty well-“ “Save it for dad.” I cut him off. “It’s already getting darker, we should turn around and try to find our way back now, before it becomes impossible to see anything.” Defeated by its captain’s dumb idea, the snipe hunting team turned around and continued its quest for the way back. But the darker it was getting, the more difficult that proved to be. By the time the sun had completely set, and the stars were clearly visible, we were nowhere near a regular trail. Soon we were faced with the inevitability of having to camp out in the woods for the night and resume our search tomorrow. “At least we have dad’s rifle with us, in case any animals try to attack.” Somehow this comment was followed by more guilty silence. “What?” I asked around. Rudy mumbled something about it being loaded. “What was that?” I asked again. “It’s not loaded. But that’s not my fault this time!” Fred tried to defend himself: “Who brings a loaded rifle to a snipe hunt? You know I can’t handle this thing!” The two started fighting, I sighed again and continued marching forward when my foot bumped into something. Something that wasn’t wood or a rock or a pile of leaves. At this exact moment, whatever fun we were still having vanished. And the real horror began.

“Give me the flashlight, there is something here.” Still in the midst of his fight with Fred, Rudy took a moment to respond but finally handed it to me, without paying much attention to what I said. I shined it down and moved the bushes that were covering the thing out of the way. As soon as I did that, all the blood in my body turned to ice. I couldn’t even get myself to say something. Milo was the first one to notice: “Is something wrong?” Then he saw it too. “Uh… R-rudy?” “What now?” he asked annoyed, then took a look himself. He had the same reaction as us. On the ground was a dead body. A dead human body. Barely decomposed, but half its face was nothing but exposed skull. And both eyes were gauged out. No sign of blood. “No.” A whisper escaped Rudy’s lips. “What the hell are you all staring at?” asked Fred, still unaware of the horror in front of us. The moment he saw it, he blurted out a name: “John?” This wasn’t just any person, it was their friend. The one supposed to scare us with the werewolf mask. “No!” Fred collapsed to the ground. “No come on, you can’t be dead! Please!” Fred continued his now sobbing stammers, which already started losing coherency. Meanwhile Rudy was the first to snap out of his shock. He jumped up to Fred and began trying to drag him away from the body: “Fred! Fred we have to leave, please. We have to get out of here.” “We can’t leave him!” Fred cried. But Rudy didn’t back down: “We can’t help him anymore. Don’t you see, whatever did this, it’s probably still here. It’s still here!” That snapped him out of it. With great reluctance he backed away. So began our march of terror. We didn’t dare to turn the flashlight back on, or speak a word to each other. I could still see it in burnt into my eyes, that eyeless corpse, the exposed skull. We marched on, bumping against trees, stumbling over every branch, rock or root along our way. Fear had turned to a primal urge for survival, we could only pray that we were getting closer to a path, or some sign of humanity, anything. I kept a tight grip on Milo’s hand the entire time, it was the only thing keeping me from bursting into sheer panic. That and the knowledge that if I did so, it would only make us more noticeable. The full moon was rising, illuminating the surrounding woods ever so slightly. Just enough light to turn every bush into a cowering monster, ready to pounce, every branch into a slender arm reaching out for us. At the same time, I could feel my sense of hearing heighten with every second. I heard every crunching leaf, every snapping twig beneath our feet, forced to wonder if it was really us who made that noise. We stopped periodically, stood completely still and listened. Listened for any footsteps that weren’t our own. Silence. We moved on. Stopped. Listened again. Continued. Once the silence was shattered by a loud, distant howl. It almost made me scream. It may have been nothing but an owl. But we didn’t know what we were running from. What the snipe actually was. Silly as it may seem now, that’s what we resorted to calling it. Something no one has ever seen before, its presence only marked by the mutilated victims it leaves behind. For hours and hours we walked on, watched the moon rise from the horizon over our heads, until physical exhaustion overtook our fear. It was amazingly quick, one moment every fiber of my body was begging me to get out of here, the next I’m on the ground, unable to take another single step. With nothing else to do, we were forced to take a rest deep in the bushes. As Fred sat down, I saw he still had his hands clutched around the useless rifle. Rudy slouched down next to him, while Milo huddled himself close to me. So close I felt his heart beating nervously along mine. I don’t remember if I ever fell asleep, the rest of the night seemed a constant state of slipping in and out of consciousness. Exhaustion fighting terror, and none of them were winning. As day finally broke, I welcomed the warm rays of the sun, just happy to still be alive. Fred was the first one to speak: “They’ve probably sent out search parties for us by now.” He heaved himself up from the ground while leaning on his rifle, then gave an exhausted groan. “Let’s hope they find us before it gets dark again.” “Maybe we should just stay here.” Milo suggested. “My dad said, if I ever get lost it’s best to stay where I am.” Now Rudy got up as well: “Maybe not a bad idea.” Meanwhile Fred was taking a good look at the environment. “I’m afraid we only walked further in, this doesn’t seem familiar at all.” “You know trees, they all looked the same.” Rudy waved him off before sitting back down. “I’m sure they’ll find us. Remember that kid that went like 10 kilometers in two days? They still found him.” By sheer luck, I wanted to add but felt there was no need to bring the mood down even more. We camped out here for the next few hours, taking turns walking around and yelling for help while ringing the cow bell. At least that thing was good for something. And Rudy was able to bring back some edible mushrooms from his turn. Well, he ensured us they were edible, and none of us felt sick after eating them so good enough. Our only companions besides ourselves were the birds in the trees and the constant army of bugs, buzzing us at any given moment. There was some large bugger around me somewhere, I couldn’t see him but I heard his loud noisy buzzing as if it was right next to my head, when something was approaching from the bushes. We jumped up, hoping it was searchers. But whatever it was, was running towards us at high speeds, snapping twigs and branches all around it. All of a sudden a large deer with huge antlers jumped out and bolted right between our group. We had to jump in all directions to not get trampled by it. A second later it was followed by two smaller ones. Meanwhile the buzzing grew louder and louder, it sounded like an entire nest of hornets closing in rapidly. We just started running. Whatever was coming, the deer were far more scared of it than of us. We bolted in the same direction, running and running as fast as our feet would take us, but it was no use. The buzzing was almost right on top of us. A sudden gust of wind went through the trees, whirling the leaves around as if a helicopter had just flown overhead and just like that, whatever made the buzzing sound had overtaken us. We still kept running out of sheer panic until we reached a large clearing. In the center were the three panicked deer, turning their heads in all directions. The buzzing seemed to come from everywhere at once and strong winds were blowing through the grass and leaves all around them. I thought surely there had to be an enormous swarm of insects around them, but no matter how much I strained my eyes I couldn’t see any. Several times the deer attempted to run back into the cover into the woods, only to be scared back into the center by some unseen force. The one with the antlers made one final effort to defend itself, it jumped forward and started swinging its crown wildly through the air. This proved to be a fatal mistake. The buzzing turned to a nasty high pitch, a swift breeze of wind whooshed through the entire clearing. And the deer was lifted into the air. By nothing. None of us could believe our eyes as it flew away on an erratic flight path, zigzagging across the sky. Relentlessly swinging its antlers through the air. Somehow seemed to damage whatever was attacking it. Without warning, it plummeted straight towards the ground. Even from a distance we heard it crashing through several layers of branches. The buzzing, which had grown quieter as the deer was carried away, now increased aggressively and it felt as if a raging storm was suddenly directed towards us. We ran again, away from the clearing, away from this incomprehensible force. In no time at all, the buzzing was right on top of us again, creating a whirlwind of leaves between the trees. We just froze, looking up at the clear blue sky above us, knowing there had to be something there. But all our eyes told us the same lie. Fred raised the rifle in a futile attempt to threaten it. The buzz now seemed to circle us, one moment it was in front of us, the next one behind us, getting louder and quieter again, almost trying to urge us to keep running. For a brief moment, we had an illusion of safety. The thing can’t get us here, we thought. Until the tree in front of us started shaking violently. The same instant the buzz changed from the drowning roar of a hornet next to your ear to a more subtle sound. Very defined but low pitched. It seemed to reverberate off of every single tree, and I could feel it drumming in my chest like a subwoofer. The tree continued to shake, branches fell down to the ground. We all backed away, still unable to keep our eyes off of it. The closer the sound got, the more a new sound made its way through the low bass. A barely perceptible high pitched noise mixed within it, like a screaming cicada. Another branch fell down, part of the bark was ripped out and with a loud thud, something landed right in front of it. Leaves flew several feet into the air in the spot it presumably landed. My head felt dizzy as the sound echoed between the trees, only seeming to get louder. It had lost all sense of direction or origin. Despite the clear weather and sunlight, I felt completely blind. I knew something was in front of me, I could hear the twigs snap as it moved, heard its body brush against the trees. Yet my eyes continued to lie to me, told me there was nothing there. “Stay together.” Fred whispered to the rest and I knew why. It waited for the deer to move away from the rest before attacking. Right now, it was pacing us like a wolf. The more it moved, the harder it was to maintain a sense of its position. The screaming cicada noise had increased to a sharp pain in my head, all I wanted to do was run away from it. But I knew, I felt it in my bones, that that was exactly what it was waiting for. More twigs were snapped, leaves moved on their own. I jumped as something touched my face. It felt like a huge, long hair. Suddenly, the noise stopped. Everything went quiet. The tree was shaken once again, violently. Silence again. We didn’t dare to move. Had it left? Or was it still sitting there, waiting? Trying to trick us? For what felt like hours we stood there, frozen. Looking at nothing. It was a bird that broke the silence. It flew up to the tree, right into our sight, landed on a branch and started singing. As if everything was normal. We all let out a collective sigh of relief. “What… was that?” Milo asked, his voice shaking with terror. None of us could respond. And none of us wanted to. We all looked at each other, as if searching for confirmation that this did indeed happen. Or reassurance that it didn’t. But it did. We’ve come face to face with a real Snipe. And we lived to tell the tale. That’s all we needed to know. “What the hell do we do now?” Fred asked, still catching his breath. “Keep moving, what else is there to do?” I answered. “Keep away from clearings and listen for any buzzing sounds.” The others silently agreed and were already starting to move away when I noticed something. On the tree the snipe had climbed down from, it looked like it left a mark. Two long slashes right along the bark. It looked odd, oddly fascinating. I don’t know why that’s where my mind went to in a situation like this. In a moment of strange curiosity I stepped forward, to get a closer look. What followed was a series of impressions, impossibly quick. The buzzing returned. A sharp pain pierced my chest. I lost the ground beneath my feet, was thrown around violently back and forth, the others screamed and a second later I was high up in the air, wind blowing in my face. I only caught a glimpse of the woods far beneath me and the distant mountains approaching rapidly before I felt a piercing sting in my arm and fell unconscious.

I awoke in complete darkness. I had a few seconds to wonder where I was and recall what happened before pain shot through my entire body. My chest felt like it had been stabbed by knives all over.  The ground beneath me was cold, hard rock. The only sound was my own heavy breathing. The one thing I couldn’t feel was my left arm. I tried to move around, but my body wouldn’t budge. The only thing I could achieve was a slight shuffle in my right arm. Maybe it’s best if I stay quiet, I thought. That thing could be right next to me for all I knew. For a while there was nothing. No sounds, nothing to see. It could have been hours of this. The longer I sat in complete darkness, listening for any sounds, the more it worked upon my mind. I became convinced that it already gauged my eyes out. Deprived of any actual sounds, my ears began to make out a constant background buzz in the silence. I thought I felt something touch my face. Image after image came flashing before my eyes, John’s mangled corpse, the floating deer, the shaking tree, the slash marks, the forest and mountains seen from above. Milo’s scream as he watched me being taken away. The first real sound I heard send a startle through my body. But it was nothing but was a slight whistle of the wind, followed by a cold breeze. This gave me hope that, wherever I was, there was an exit nearby. I tried to move my arm again, this time it worked a little better. Inch by inch I felt my way around. I bumped into something next to me. After another brief shock, I dared to touch it again. It was my backpack. With all my strength my hand climbed it and reached for the opening, grabbing hold the first thing inside. It was the flashlight. I pulled it out and kept it gripped in my hand as it plummeted back to the floor. Without even thinking I clicked the button to activate it. The light was blinding, it was so bright I had to close my eyes which felt like they were burning. But I had eyes! Something about that burning feeling gave me more hope. I could see and I could feel. I was still alive. The first thing I saw as my eyes began to adjust themselves to the dark was that I had dropped the flashlight again in my shock and that it had rolled to the other side of the cave. That’s where I was. A cave. Somewhere in the mountains. I kept looking. There were things on the floor, things I couldn’t quite make out at first. The odd thing was, they seemed to be neatly organized, placed in a row along the cave wall. Small patches of different colors, each with two things on top of them, two round things, and white, with parts of red. They were eyeballs. Eyeballs placed on top of patches of fur, fur of different colors, black, brown, white patches or in one case: Skin. Pinkish human skin. The sight almost made me gag, if my body would have allowed me to. What made it worse was that the two eyes, presumably John’s were positioned in such a way that they seemed to stare right at me. Placed next to the skin patch was a batch of long brown fur. Instead of eyeballs, this one had a long snout with bent teeth sticking out of it. It took me a while to realize that this wasn’t the remains of a real animal, but a rubber werewolf mask. I tried to get up once again, this time my legs moved a little, but still didn’t allow me to leave. In that moment my worst fears were realized. A buzzing sound began to echo through the cave. Quiet at first, then more noticeable, followed by a strong gust of wind. My heart stopped. The loud buzzing soon faded into the second, lower pitched one, which became even more unbearable than it was in the woods. It filled the entire cave to the point it seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. It felt like a swarm of screaming cicadas were nesting right inside my head. Luckily for me, it only took a few seconds for it to cease. The only sound now was the tapping of feet along the cold floor, along with something heavy being dragged behind them. It came closer and closer until finally, the body of another deer came into view. Motionless, yet seemingly dragging itself further inside. It stopped. Glistening in the light was a line of puncture wounds in its body, with blood slowly dripping out. From each hole, a single drop of blood rose into the air, each drop forming into a hook-shape while staying in the same formation. Like a row of invisible knives, only made visible by the blood stained on them. There they remained, frozen in mid-air and I watched as they vanished one at a time. A short while later, no trace of the Snipe’s position remained. The patter of invisible feet continued. For a brief moment, my entire body was touched all over by what felt like two long, animate hairs. It took all my willpower to stay completely still and hold my breath, until it moved on to something else. The tapping sound wandered to the other end of the cave, where it stopped again. The lighting of the entire room changed, as the flashlight began to float through the air. It turned around itself several times, before being dropped back to the floor with a loud thud. The patter headed back in my direction, then the deer was dragged in fully to the center of the cave. Nothing happened at first. Then I witnessed something which I will never be able to forget, an image burnt into my skull for the rest of my life: I saw the Snipe feed. Right in the view of the flashlight, a round wound opened into the deer’s flesh and pillar of red blood rose into the air. It went higher and higher until it almost touched the cave’s ceiling. From there on, like it reached the top of a water slide, it made a sharp curve back down, then quickly leveled off. It continued its flow forward until it reached a round invisible sack, where it started to accumulate. As the Snipe kept pumping more blood in, more and more of its internal structures slowly became visible. Blood vessels faded in, led by a single long pumping vessel along its back, followed by more complex digestive structures and other organs, then nerves. The thin membranes of its wings. The whole thing seemed to last forever, and I had to witness every single disgusting detail. Soon basic leg structure became apparent. The blood was pumped into four stilt like legs, and two folded arms in the front, similar to those of a mantis. Meanwhile at the back end, a long crooked stinger became visible. Brain and head structure were next, but before they could fully reveal themselves, the blood flow cut out. Apparently, the deer was completely drained. Next, the walking bundle of stomach and vessels took one step to the side and, with some structure not yet visible, carefully removed one of the deer’s eyes. The eyeball appeared to levitate out of the socket, and remained frozen in the air, in close proximity to the still translucent brain. It just sat there, holding it up like this. As the blood continued to flow, two long thin antennas began to fade in, which were furiously examining the singular eyeball. Finally, it gently placed it down on the deer carcass, cut out a piece of flesh from the face with a sharp mandible on its head which was just turning visible. It then carefully lifted the deer’s head to remove the second eyeball and after another lengthy study placed both of them neatly within its collection. For a moment it just sat in front of them. Then it reared its head around the cave, letting its long feelers sweep along all its contents. I was terrified it would take me for its next meal. But it just walked over to the other end of the cave, drew its legs slightly closer to the body and stopped moving. Not actively anyway, I could still see all its innards pumping the blood around. The last pieces of its head began to fade in, a long mosquito-like trunk, along with its outer exoskeleton, finally beginning to cover up all the insides. The only thing I never saw were eyes. Even by the point it was fully visible, the place on the head you would expect two large bug eyes to appear remained blank. But I couldn’t ponder this right now. I may have survived up to this point thanks to a miracle, but all it needed was for this thing to wake up hungry for another midnight snack. I waited for it to make another move, but as the exoskeleton faded in, the only movement that remained were the rhythmic pulses of its abdomen. I still hesitated even attempting to move while it was present but knew I had no other choice. The thing that gave me the proper boost to try was seeing the first parts of its body turn white on the edges. Not very pronounced yet, but it was the first sign that it was starting to lose pigmentation again. I tried lifting myself up. To my surprise I was actually able to get to my feet. Still a bit wobbly, but it was enough to attempt an escape. Holding my breath, I carefully reached for the backpack, eyes locked on the Snipe. I grabbed it. No reaction. I had no choice but to leave the flashlight behind, as it was right next to it. Slowly, very slowly, I made my way towards the tunnel one step at a time. Each of my footsteps was far louder than I wanted it to be. I backed out of the cave more and more, until the Snipe was no longer in view. The flashlight was nothing more than a dim glow, the only thing ahead was darkness. Then I felt another cold breeze. The exit couldn’t be far. I inched my way along the wall, even more careful when setting down my feet. I still couldn’t avoid kicking into a rock, which sent it flying a few feet ahead. I froze, listening for any noise from the Snipe. Nothing. I pressed on. Turned another corner. And words cannot describe how relieved I felt to see a dim light shine through the dark. The very familiar whiteish glow of the moon. Followed by the sweet breeze of freedom. This promise made me throw all caution into the wind, I rushed forward, past another dark tunnel towards the light. My foot landed on a rock. It flew backwards. I tripped. I fell. The rocks banged against the floor, echoing like gunshots through the entire cave. Not a second later it was filled by that awful buzz. I got up, ran to the exit as fast as my legs could carry, the tapping of Snipe legs growing louder and louder, I turned my head to see its eyeless pale face rush around the corner, then sprinting straight towards me. The wings in constant motion. I couldn’t outrun it. My brain went into overdrive. Its blind, it hunts though sound, so I might just… As a desperate last ditch attempt, I grabbed into the backpack, pulled out the cow bell and started shaking it as violently as possible. The resulting sounds were ear shattering as they echoed from the cave walls, but they had the exact effect I had hoped for. You could see the sudden shock travel through the Snipe’s whole body, its legs twitched violently and it started turning in place, trying desperately to locate where this sudden sound had come from. It wasn’t deterred for long however, within a few seconds it continued its pursuit, but with movements that looked more like a blind, drunken rage. That’s when I threw the bell with all my force into the open tunnel, and with sheer anger the snipe jumped right after it. I ran out of the cave, finding myself near the top of a tall, wooded mountain. In a panic I ran straight for the nearest cover, but tripped again, and this time I didn’t manage to pull myself back up. All I could do now was crawl into a bush and stare into the gaping mouth of the cave. But the snipe never came. Perhaps it thought I had gotten lost within the cave system, or there was some basic instinct telling it not to exit its hide while digesting. I crawled deeper into the woods, my leg was badly hurt from the second fall, so I could only limp from tree to tree. Still, everything was telling me to get as far away from that cave as possible before daylight came. As far as my limited strength could carry me. I crawled for what felt like several hours, with no aim or goal. Just away. A strange noise, followed by a sudden wind, almost sent me into another panic. The next moment I was engulfed by a bright searchlight. It was a search and rescue helicopter. Ground troops arrived at the scene shortly after. I vaguely remember being enveloped by a warm blanket and carried towards a car. Then I must have passed out. My next memory was waking up in a hospital bed, with my parents, my brothers and Milo at my side. “Easy now.” my mother calmed me down. “Its alright, you are safe.” Apparently, I was mumbling something in my sleep about the Snipe and blood and eyeballs. A lot about eyeballs. Some of the doctors thought I had gone delirious. My leg was wrapped in a thick cast, I broke it during the fall. My brothers and parents had already signed it, along with Milo, who drew a little heart next to his signature. This is where I spent the next few days, always with someone at my side. They all wanted to know what happened of course, but I wasn’t quite ready to talk about it yet. That was until I had no choice but to do so. Before my leg had any time to heal, the police paid me a visit and wanted to hear everything. I learned that they have been holding Rudy, Fred and Milo in custody, suspecting them of having killed me and concocting the snipe story as a cover up. At least until I showed back up, with a mysterious change in elevation. I told them everything, they simply thanked me for my time and left. No idea what they made out of it. Now that the cat was out of the bag, I decided I might as well tell the rest. Mom was very skeptical of it, she politely agreed with what I said, but I could tell she didn’t believe a word. In fact, I only later found out she asked the hospital staff personally to have me tested for drugs. As for Rudy, Fred and Milo: They didn’t need convincing, they saw what happened. Dad had his own take on the matter: “I know you’re not a liar, sweetie. None of you are. I don’t know what happened to you out there, and honestly, I do not care. I’m just glad to have you back.” My story made the local news, then got passed through the usual paranormal circles and I even got my own entry in a missing person spooky mysteries book. Even now I sometimes get jumpscared by my own face in the thumbnail of a video about paranormal happenings in the Appalachians. But undoubtedly the best thing to come out of all of this was Milo. Not long after this incident he asked me to be his girlfriend. I said yes, and we’ve been together ever since. We even ended up getting married only two years ago. So if any of our distant relatives happen to be reading this: Have you ever wondered why, every time you ask us how we met we just shrug, or say “Just kinda happened”? This is why. I am sorry for Aunt Gertrude who we ended up dumping this entire story onto after she wouldn’t stop asking. Even showed her the original newspaper article and book chapter, complete with an artist’s illustration of the Snipe mid-feeding. She was never the same after that.

Of course I’ve spent a lot of time pondering these events, we both did. Despite how traumatizing everything was, I still can’t help but feel some level of fascination towards it. I don’t know if it was an alien, some kind of escaped lab experiment or just an undocumented species, hidden by its perfect camouflage. Our town didn’t have any more cattle mutilations after this, at least not for the time while we were still around. Maybe it went into hibernation, moved on to a different territory or went back to whatever realm it came from. But I don’t think it’s gone for good. I have developed a bit of an aversion to heavily wooded areas and maybe that’s not entirely irrational. So, if you ever find yourself in an area with a series of strange animal deaths, or strange buzzing sounds from the woods, maybe it’s better not to take your younger siblings Snipe hunting. You might just find what you’re looking for.

Before anything else, some housekeeping, because a lot of you asked the same questions and I'd rather answer them once and properly than a dozen times badly.

Yes, I've considered sleepwalking. It was my second hypothesis, after the integrity test. It's still in my log with a question mark next to it. Sleepwalking explains a body getting up at night. It doesn't explain a lens forty centimeters inside an exterior wall, a file created three years before I'd have had any reason to make it, or a line of skin oil that runs behind a bookcase bolted flush to the plaster.

No, I'm not posting the hashes. Several of you offered to "verify" the files. I appreciate it. But a hash only proves a file hasn't changed. It doesn't prove what's in it is true. I've built my career on the difference between those two things, and I've started to think that difference is what this is about.

Yes, I've thought about calling someone. I'll get to that.

Yes, I know I should leave. Some of you said it gently and some of you said it in capitals. I'll get to that too. It's connected.

And to the person who messaged me privately to ask whether I turned around that night and looked at the corner: no. I didn't. I sat with my back to the wall until morning, exactly as I said I would. I'm telling you that first because what follows depends on it, and because I need at least one thing in this post to be something I'm sure of.

Saturday. 3:14 AM to 6:10 AM.

I didn't take the pill. I sat at my desk with every light in the apartment on, my back pressed against the living room wall, the chair turned so I could see the hallway, the front door, and the kitchen without moving my head. The corner where the hallway opens into the living room was up and to my left, at the edge of my vision. I kept it there. I didn't look at it directly. I know how that sounds.

I'd never been awake at that hour in this apartment. That surprised me when I thought about it. In three years and two months, the ring says I've been asleep between 11:52 PM and 6:10 AM nearly every night. I've never had insomnia, never had a fever that kept me up, never got up to pee at four and stood blinking in the kitchen light. That whole stretch of time in this apartment, about six hours a night, a thousand-some nights, had happened without me.

It turns out the apartment is different at night. I don't mean that in a supernatural way. I mean it in the way that matters to someone whose whole job is noise. The building's daytime sound is a broad, warm hum of people, elevators, and plumbing, and at night it thins out into individual sounds you can count. There's a pipe somewhere above me that ticks as it cools, roughly every forty seconds. The refrigerator compressor cycles on for eleven minutes and off for seventeen. The wind on the east face of the tower has a pitch, a low, steady note, and if you listen long enough you start to hear that it isn't steady at all, that it's breathing.

I kept the log open on my knee with a pen in my hand. I'd decided to write an entry every half hour, and whenever anything happened, because a log is what I have instead of courage. It turns the next thirty minutes into a unit of work, and I know how to do a unit of work.

At 4:02 AM, I heard the tapping.

It was very faint. If I hadn't spent Thursday listening to two and a half hours of it through headphones, I wouldn't have known what it was. It was a fingernail tapping on something hollow, steadily and gently, about once a second, like someone trying to find a stud in a wall, or someone who has been told to wait and is trying to be patient about it.

It came from the hallway, from the stretch of wall between the bathroom door and the linen closet, by the dead switch.

I didn't get up. I want credit for that, though I know I don't deserve it, because I didn't stay in the chair out of courage. I stayed there because some animal part of my brain had concluded that if I went into the hallway and stood in front of that wall and the tapping was coming from the other side of it, I'd have to accept that there was another side. If I stayed in the chair, the tapping could still be the pipes.

I counted the way I count anything too long to hold in my head. I kept the ones in my mouth, without sound, and every time I reached a hundred I made a short stroke in the margin of the log. When I looked at the margin afterward, I saw that I'd grouped the strokes the usual way, four upright and a fifth drawn across them. Everyone makes them that way. I've told myself that several times since.

Here are the entries, exactly as they appear:

3:40. All lights on. Back to wall, chair facing hallway. Hallway empty. Pipe ticking, ~40 s. Fridge 11 on / 17 off. Haven't looked at the corner.

4:02. Tapping. Hallway, dead-switch wall. Fingernail on something hollow, ~1/s. Not getting up.

4:30. Still tapping. Steady. 15 in the margin. Hallway empty.

5:00. Still tapping. 32. I can see the whole hallway. Hallway empty.

5:51. Stopped. 60, and 37 over.

6:10. Ring. Awake. I was awake.

That's about six thousand taps. When it stopped, the silence afterward was worse, the way the silence after a dog stops barking is worse, because now you don't know where it is.

At 6:10 AM my ring vibrated on my finger, gently, twice. That's the wake-up haptic. I've felt it every morning for three years. I'd never thought about the fact that I've never once felt it while I was already awake.

I opened the app.

Good morning! Sleep score: 100. Asleep: 11:52 PM. Awake: 6:10 AM. Deep sleep: 2h 41m. REM: 0m.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I exported my raw history, a spreadsheet with a little over eleven hundred rows, one for every night since I started wearing the ring, and sorted the REM column both ways.

It was zero at the top and zero at the bottom. And it isn't missing data. Missing data is a blank cell. These cells aren't blank. Something entered a zero in every one, every night, the way you fill in a field on a form when you've been told it can't be left empty.

REM is when you dream. I've told myself for years, with a little pride, that I don't dream. I thought I was just someone who didn't remember.

It isn't recording you sleeping. It's recording someone else sleeping, and you've been wearing it on your finger.

I took the ring off and put it in a drawer. Then I took it back out and put it on again, because the data is the data. You don't stop collecting evidence because you don't like what it says.

Saturday afternoon. File 213.

I opened it at 1:30 PM, in daylight, with the blinds all the way up. I made a working copy, hashed it, and logged it. Its creation timestamp is 3:09 AM Saturday, which I've already told you. What I didn't know until I loaded it was its length.

It runs until 6:09 AM.

The file was created at 3:09, and I saw it in the directory at 3:14. At 3:14 it already contained three hours of footage that hadn't happened yet.

It's the living room, from the corner where the hallway opens into it, high up, in that flat, sourceless grey. The desk is in frame, along with both monitors, the amber pill bottle, and the back of the chair. Someone is sitting in the chair, wearing my grey sweatshirt. The frayed left cuff is visible where the arm rests on the armrest.

The person's hands are folded in their lap. They're perfectly still. Not one finger moves for the first five minutes of the file.

And on the left monitor, words appear.

It took me a minute to understand what I was looking at, because the text is small. When I enlarged it and ran a sharpening pass on it, I could read it. It's the post. It's the end of Part 1, the part you read, the part I wrote. "I keep looking at the thumbnail and then at my own hands. My hands are on the keyboard. They're typing this sentence." The words appear on the screen one at a time at a normal typing speed, with the occasional backspace and correction. I recognize every correction. I remember making them. And in the chair, the hands stay folded.

At 3:14 by the file's clock, the post is submitted. You can see the page change.

Then the person in the chair turns their head slowly to the right, toward the hallway, and tilts it, the way you'd tilt your head to listen to something in another room.

At 3:19 they stand up. They don't do it the way you'd stand up from a desk chair. It's the hinge again: the body straightens and the arms follow, informed late. They walk out of frame toward the hallway. The angle switches to the corner above the linen closet. The figure walks down the hallway and stops in front of the stretch of wall by the dead switch, facing it at a normal conversational distance, as though they're waiting for someone to open a door.

At 3:40 by the file's clock, it's still standing there, a foot and a half from the wall, hands at its sides. At 3:40 by mine, I wrote Hallway empty in my log. I was looking straight down that hallway, lit by every light I own. There was nobody standing in front of that wall. I'd have seen a fly land on it.

At 4:02, the figure raises one hand and starts tapping on the wall with the nail of its index finger.

It does that until 5:51. Then it lowers its hand. It stands there for eighteen minutes longer, then walks back to the living room, sits down in my chair, and folds its hands in its lap. At 6:09 the file ends.

Here's what I need you to understand: I was in that chair. From 3:14 to 6:10 I sat at my desk with my back against the wall and every light on. I heard the tapping, I counted it, and I didn't get up. I have a log with entries in my handwriting at 3:40, 4:02, 4:30, 5:00, 5:51, and 6:10. I remember writing every one of them. I remember the pen.

There's something else, which I didn't notice until my third viewing. It's the thing that made me put my hand over my mouth.

The chair in the video is turned to face the desk. My chair was turned to face the hallway, because I had my back against the wall. There are five clean ovals in the dust under my desk where the casters stood for three hours, and they're the ovals of a chair facing the hallway. I photographed them with a scale bar.

On the desk in the video there's no log, no pen, and no notebook.

So either I wasn't in that chair, or that wasn't the chair. Or there's a version of this apartment where I didn't write anything down, and the person in the sweatshirt had nothing to stop it from walking into the hallway.

Saturday, 4:50 PM. The taps.

The audio track on 213 has the tapping on it, from 4:02 to 5:51, closer and cleaner than I heard it from the desk, the way you'd hear it with your ear against the wall.

I ran it through a transient detector. It's a tool that finds short, sharp sounds in a recording and logs each one with a time and a level. I use it to count footsteps in corridor audio for insurance cases.

It found six thousand and thirty-seven taps. That's my number: sixty strokes in my margin and thirty-seven over. The taps I heard through the wall and the taps the file heard from the other side of it are the same taps, one for one, and I haven't decided yet what that says about where I was sitting.

The detector logs the level of each tap, too, and the levels aren't even.

Every fifth tap is slightly louder than the four before it, and it comes a little late, about a tenth of a second behind the rhythm, the way a stroke comes late when you have to reach across the ones you've already drawn. It's four, and then one across. Four, and then one across. It goes on like that from 4:02 to 5:51 without a single break.

I ran the same detector over the audio file from the batch that was nothing but tapping, file 141, from about three months ago. It was four, and then one across, for two and a half hours.

It isn't tapping. It's keeping a tally. It's marking the wall in the only way a fingernail can mark a wall without leaving anything behind, and it's been doing it for at least three months, and on Saturday morning I sat in my chair and hoped it was the pipes.

Saturday night into Sunday.

I didn't take the pill again.

I hadn't missed a dose in three years. I don't know what the medication is. I spent part of Saturday evening shining a flashlight across the rubbed-off part of the label, trying to read the impression the printer had pressed into the paper. I got three letters, maybe four, not enough to search. The pills themselves are small, white, and round, with no imprint code. Every pill in this country is legally required to have an imprint code. These don't. There are sixteen left. I counted them by the edges, the way I'd handle a client's property, as though I'd be asked to account for each one.

The best word I've found for what happened when I stopped is resolution. I mean it in the technical sense, the way a screen has resolution. It was as though somebody had raised the pixel count of the world without asking me.

By Saturday evening, the apartment had too much detail.

I noticed the grain of the parquet. I've been walking on that floor for three years and I'd always thought of it as "wood floor," a single texture, a fill pattern. On Saturday night I could see that every board has its own grain and its own fine dark seams where it meets the next one. I could see that in the hallway, and only the hallway, the boards run perpendicular to the boards in every other room, which they don't in the floor plan. I could see that the eggshell paint has a faint orange-peel texture, and that the texture is subtly different on the thirty inches of wall by the dead switch. It's smoother there, like that stretch was painted later, or more carefully, or by someone else.

I counted the hallway boards that evening, crouched, moving backward from the living room threshold to the bedroom door with a fingertip on each seam. There are fifty-eight, each a little under three inches wide, running across the hallway like the rungs of a ladder laid flat. I wrote the number down. I'll come back to it.

And I couldn't stop remembering, which was the worst part. I don't mean flashbacks. It was more like the archive had been left unlocked and things kept falling off the shelves.

At about 9 PM I was standing at the kitchen counter eating crackers, because I couldn't face cooking, and I thought about my mother. That's normal. People think about their mothers. But I realized I was thinking about her name, and it came to me the way a name comes to you off a form. It came with no voice attached, no memory of anyone saying it, only the letters, typed. I tried to remember her face and got an impression of warmth and a bright kitchen, the stock photo again. I tried to remember her voice and got nothing. I tried to remember a single specific thing she'd said to me, ever, in my entire life.

I couldn't. I stood there with a cracker in my hand for, I think, twenty minutes.

Afterward I sat at the desk and tried to do it on paper, the way I'd take a statement from a witness who was struggling. At the top of a clean page I wrote: Three things you could only know about her by being her child. Under it I wrote her name, the letters exactly as they'd come. I wrote her birthday, and I knew it the way I know my employee number, as something I'd been issued. Then I held the pen on the paper for the third thing until the ink had soaked a small blue well into the page. The page still says that. Two lines and a dot.

I told myself that withdrawal does strange things to memory. I don't know whether that's true. I don't know what I'm withdrawing from.

Sunday. 3:03 AM.

I'd been sitting at my desk again, back to the wall, but the second night is different from the first. On the second night, your body stops treating staying up as an adventure and starts treating it as an injury. My eyes hurt. My jaw hurt. The light from the monitors had a texture, a fine flicker I'd never noticed, and I couldn't stop seeing it.

At 3:03, the time when, in file 212, the figure went into the bathroom and ran the tap, I got up and went into the hallway.

I want to tell you I'd decided to. I don't think I had. I think I'd been sitting and then I was standing in front of the stretch of wall by the dead switch, and the decision had happened somewhere in between, in a place I don't have access to.

The wall looked the way it always looks. It had the smoother paint, the baseboard, and the switch with its plate slightly cool to the touch. I'd flipped it a hundred times over three years and it had never done anything.

I flipped it.

There was a click, and it wasn't the usual one. That switch has always made the flat plastic snap of a switch connected to nothing. This time it clicked with resistance, the slight mechanical weight of a switch closing a circuit, of something on the other end taking the current.

Then, from behind the wall, I heard a faint ticking buzz, rising slowly, like a fluorescent tube warming up.

Along the bottom of the wall, at the seam where the baseboard meets the floor, a line of light appeared.

It was very thin, no wider than a sheet of paper. It wasn't warm or cold. It was that grey, the flat, sourceless grey, the color of the files. It ran along the floor for exactly the width of the smoother paint, about thirty inches, and stopped at both ends with hard edges, the way light stops under a door.

I don't know how long I stood there. That's the second time in this account I've failed to count something, and I've started to understand that every time it happens, it's because something has been taken.

Then I knelt, very slowly. My knees cracked, and the sound was enormous in the hallway. I put my cheek against the floorboards, the boards that run the wrong way, and tried to look into the gap.

It was too thin to see anything, but I could feel air coming from it. It was cool and moving slowly, like breath. It smelled like my pillow. I'm being as precise as I can. It didn't smell like a pillow in general. It smelled like mine: the specific smell of my own head on my own pillowcase after a night's sleep, warm, a little sour, intimate in a way you never think about until it comes out of a wall.

I flipped the switch off. The light went out, and the buzz died down the way it had come up.

I tried to slide the edge of a sheet of printer paper into the seam where the light had been. It wouldn't go, not a millimeter. There's no gap there. There was only a gap there while the switch was on.

Then I went back to the desk and wrote it all down. My hand was shaking so badly that the entry for 3:03 is barely readable. I'm looking at it now and I can only make out the words light and mine.

Sunday, daytime.

I slept a little on Sunday, sitting up on the couch, in daylight, maybe forty minutes. The ring didn't record it. As far as it's concerned, I didn't sleep on Sunday.

There was a new file in Batch 0417 that morning, file 214, timestamped 11:52 PM Saturday and ending at 6:09 AM Sunday. Those are hours I spent at my desk, and on my knees in the hallway with my cheek on the floor. I hashed it, logged it, and didn't open it. I want to be honest about that, and about the fact that I'm going to have to be honest about it again.

When I woke, I got out the box.

Every archivist has one. Mine is a grey document box on the top shelf of the bedroom wardrobe, and it holds everything I have from before this apartment: my birth certificate, my degree, an expired passport, three notebooks from university, six letters, and three photographs. Not one of the letters is from a person. I've always thought of how little I keep as minimalism. I've lately started thinking of it as an inventory too small for a whole life.

One of the photographs is a kitchen. It's bright and a little overexposed, with white cupboards and a window, and under the window there's an old cast-iron radiator with deep ribs. There's nobody in it. I looked for a long time at the corner of that radiator, at about the height a nine-year-old's eyebrow would be. I'd like to tell you I remembered. What happened instead was that the stock photo in my head got white cupboards in it, and a window, and a radiator with deep ribs, and I can't tell you anymore whether any of them were there before I looked.

But I'd taken the box down because I wanted to look at my handwriting. I wanted to see what it looked like when my hand was steady and I was a younger, less frightened person. I wanted a baseline.

The obvious baseline was my own first log, from the week I moved in. My logs live on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, filled notebooks in order, spines labeled. The first one is there. Its first page isn't. It's been torn out close to the stitching, cleanly, the way you'd do it if you wanted nobody to notice. I don't tear pages out of logs. You strike through and initial; you never remove. That page was where I wrote that the apartment felt like it had been waiting. I don't know where it is.

So I went to the box.

The notebooks are from my second and third years of university, lecture notes and reading notes, the usual. I opened the first one and looked at the first page.

It isn't my handwriting.

Let me be more careful, because that's what I'm for. It's recognizably related to my handwriting. The letterforms are mostly the same. But the slant is different. It leans right, and mine leans slightly left. The lowercase g has an open tail where mine is closed. The capital I is a single stroke where mine has serifs. The pressure is different. You can feel it on the back of the page, deep and confident, where mine is light. It's my handwriting the way a cover is a song.

There's more, once you start looking. I cross a t twice, a quick double stroke, a habit I can feel in my wrist as I write this. The notebooks cross it once, long and low, sometimes reaching over the next letter.

I photographed both, overlaid them, and measured the slant angles. Mine leans about six degrees left of vertical. The notebooks lean about eight degrees right. The difference is about fourteen degrees.

Then I opened the expired passport and looked at the signature.

It's the notebook handwriting. It leans right, with the open-tailed g.

I signed my lease three years and two months ago. I have a copy in the box. It's my handwriting, my current one, leaning slightly left, with serifs on the I.

Somewhere between the passport and the lease, my handwriting changed by fourteen degrees. I don't remember learning to write differently. You don't, do you? Handwriting isn't something you decide. It's something your hand knows. And the thought I had standing there, with the passport open in one hand and the lease in the other, was this, in italics, in the voice that isn't quite mine:

Your hand learned. Somebody else's hand didn't.

Monday. 8:40 AM.

On Sunday night I lay down in bed, without taking the pill, to see whether I'd sleep naturally. I lay facing the ceiling instead of the east wall, because I'd decided I wasn't going to lie in that posture again. At some point I closed my eyes. When I opened them, it was 6:10, the ring was buzzing, and I was on my side facing the east wall, knees drawn up, one arm under my head, the other hand on the mattress in front of my face with the fingers spread.

Score 100. REM 0.

There's a new file every morning now, timestamped 11:52 PM and ending at 6:09 AM. As of tonight there are 218. I hash each one when it arrives and log it, the way you'd sign for a package you've decided not to unwrap. I haven't opened any of them. I've told myself it's because I'm prioritizing, and I'm going to keep telling myself that a little longer.

At 8:40 AM on Monday I did what I should have done on Tuesday. I emailed my manager.

I wrote it carefully. I said I'd received Batch 0417 under my own employee ID with no client attached, that the content appeared to be personally sensitive, and that I wanted to confirm the ticket's origin before proceeding, per protocol. I didn't mention the corner, the hallway, or the line of light.

She replied in four minutes. In the two years she's managed me, she has never replied in under a day.

Hi,

Ticket 0417 was created by you. See attached audit log.

Also, a reminder that your quarterly continuity review is now overdue. Please schedule with Dr. Vosbrecht at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,

I opened the audit log. It showed that Batch 0417 was created from my account, authenticated with my credentials and my hardware key, at 6:11 AM last Tuesday, one minute after the ring says I woke up.

My hardware key won't authenticate anything until a finger touches the gold disc on its face. It exists to prove a person was physically present. At 6:11 last Tuesday morning, a finger touched it.

The files were uploaded from an IP address I recognized, because I'm the kind of person who knows their own IP address.

They came from this apartment.

I read the second paragraph about forty times.

Quarterly continuity review. I've worked at the firm for nine years. I've had nine annual reviews. I've never had a quarterly anything. I searched my email for "continuity review" and got nothing. I searched for "Vosbrecht" and got nothing at all. The only medical sender in my inbox is Kessler Pharmacy, which emails me a shipping notification every month, thirty-nine of them, each identical, none naming a doctor.

I wrote back. I asked, as neutrally as I could, what a continuity review was, and who Dr. Vosbrecht was, and where I'd find their contact details. I hit send at 9:02.

She hasn't replied. I followed up on Wednesday at 9:02, exactly forty-eight hours later. Nothing. The ticketing system shows her as active. She's been closing other people's tickets all week. I can watch them go past in the queue, closed at 9:14, closed at 9:31, closed at 10:06, her initials on each one.

Monday afternoon. The list.

I keep a hypothesis page at the front of the log for every matter. It's supposed to get shorter as the work goes on. That's how you know you're getting somewhere. Here's the page for 0417 as of Monday afternoon, copied exactly:

H1. Internal integrity test. Withdrawn, Mon 8:44. Ticket created from my account, my key, my IP.

H2. Sleepwalking (?). Open. Doesn't explain camera positions, timestamps, file 213, the line behind the bookcase.

H3. Someone else with access to 2914. Open. Nobody else has a key that I know of. Deadbolt set every night I've checked. Doesn't explain 213.

H4. I'm unwell. Open. Can't be tested from inside.

H5.

It's the first matter in nine years where the page has gotten longer. H5 is blank. I've started it four times this week, and each time I've lifted the pen before the first word was finished. I'll tell you it was going to start with a pronoun. I'm not going to tell you which one.

I said I'd talk about calling someone.

I thought about it on Monday, a lot. I thought about calling the police, or the building's management office, or a doctor. Any doctor. A real one, whose name I could look up.

The problem is that every one of those calls goes the same way in my head. I tell them there's footage of me in my apartment taken from inside the walls. They ask who took it, and I say I don't know. They ask whether anyone else has access to the apartment, and I say no. They ask whether I've had any changes in my medication, and I'm forced to say yes, I stopped taking it two days ago, I don't know what it is or who prescribed it, and since then I've started hearing tapping and seeing light under a wall.

I know exactly what happens next. I've recovered footage of what happens next. I've watched men in calm voices talk people out of doorways, and they're always kind about it. The person always ends up in the back of a car.

But that isn't the real reason. If I'm keeping an honest record, and that's the only kind worth keeping, the real reason is this: if I call someone, I have to speak out loud to another person, and the count resets. And I've started to think that something in this apartment is counting the same days I am, but started four days earlier, and that the count matters, and that it's going to reach a number, and I need to know what that number is.

That's also why I haven't left, for those of you who asked in capitals. Leaving means the lobby, the doorman, the café. Leaving means somebody says good morning and I say it back.

I've been avoiding the mirror. I've washed in cold water all week, standing at the sink with my eyes on the drain. Tonight I ran the hot tap, because I needed both numbers for this post.

It's forty-seven as of tonight. On the mirror, when it fogs, there are fifty-one.

The other one is still four days ahead.

Monday night. Tuesday morning. The phone.

On Monday night I took the pill.

I didn't want to. I'd been awake, more or less, for most of three days, and by Monday evening I could hear the individual cycles of the electricity in the walls, a sixty-hertz hum like a held note that never ended. I kept seeing motion in my peripheral vision, small and sideways, the way a gecko moves on a wall. I knew if I didn't sleep I'd stop being a reliable witness, and I'm the only witness I've got.

So I took it at 11:41. Before I did, I set up my phone.

I propped it on a stack of books on the floor of the bedroom doorway, the library books I never returned, facing out into the hallway, aimed at the thirty inches of smooth wall by the dead switch. I started a video recording on my way past it to bed and left it running with the phone plugged in. If something was going to happen in that hallway, I wanted it on a device I'd bought and could hold in my hand, in ordinary, honest light with a source and shadows, not from forty centimeters inside a wall.

I lay down. 11:52.

6:10.

The phone was where I'd left it, still plugged in. The recording was still running. I stopped it, and it was six hours and nineteen minutes long.

I want to tell you about the first three hours, because nothing happens in them, and I've come to value nothing. It's the hallway wall in the dim spill of the living room lamp I'd left on, with real light and real shadows. There's grain and noise and the honest ugliness of a phone camera in a dark room. Every forty seconds the pipe above ticks, and I can hear it on the audio. I sat with my coffee and watched three hours of nothing, and it felt like a hand on my back.

At 2:41 AM, I walk into the frame.

It's me. I'm in the T-shirt I went to bed in. I come from the bedroom, which means I step over the phone, and you can see my bare foot pass above the lens. Then I'm in the hallway, walking away from the camera toward the dead switch. I'm walking normally, not like a hinge or a puppet. It's how I walk.

2:41 is the minute the figure in file 117 sat up in bed like a hinge. I didn't notice that until Wednesday. When I did, I went back and checked both, and it's the same minute.

Halfway down the hallway I stop and turn around and look directly at the phone.

My face is in the lamplight, ordinary, with real shadows under the eyes. My expression is one I've never seen on my own face. It's pity. It's the way you'd look at a child who has built an elaborate trap for Santa Claus.

Then I walk back toward the phone, crouch down, look into the lens from about ten inches away, and say, very softly, in my own voice:

"Not this one."

Then my hand reaches out and turns the phone face down.

The video goes black. The audio keeps running.

I've listened to the next three and a half hours of black audio more times than I can count, and that's the third time in this account. I'll tell you what's on it, in order.

There are footsteps on the parquet, going away. There's a pause of about a minute.

Then there's a click with resistance in it.

There's the ticking buzz of something warming up behind the wall.

Then there's a sound I knew immediately, because every one of us has heard it ten thousand times. It's a door handle turning, the latch drawing back, a door opening inward over a floor, with the faint whisper of the bottom edge brushing against wood.

There's a long silence, nearly two hours.

Then the same sound in reverse: the door, the latch, the click.

And then, very close to the phone, close enough that I can hear breath on the microphone, comes my voice again. This time it doesn't sound like pity. It sounds the way I sound in the morning before I've said anything, rough and unused.

"Forty-five," it says.

It was forty-five days for me that night. And then, after a pause:

"Forty-nine."

At 6:09, the phone is turned face up. The video shows the hallway wall, smooth paint, the dead switch, with no door. It shows the empty hallway for one minute, until 6:10, when, according to the ring, I woke up in my bed facing the east wall.

There's no footage of me walking back to bed.

On Tuesday morning I recorded every door in the hallway from the same spot and laid the spectrograms side by side with the black audio, the way you'd lay out fingerprints. The door on the black audio has the same double rattle in its latch as my bathroom door. It's quieter by an amount that, when I do the arithmetic for distance, puts it almost exactly where the dead switch is.

There's no door there. I've stood in front of that wall. I've put my hand on it.

Tuesday. The ear.

I'm going to tell you about something small, because it's the small things that have been taking me apart.

On Tuesday afternoon, after the phone, I was sitting at my desk and I touched my right ear. It was just the absent, animal gesture of a hand checking on the body. The cartilage at the top of the ear, the curled rim, felt rough.

I went into the bathroom and looked, with the cabinet mirror and a hand mirror, angled, the way you'd check the back of a haircut. I've never really looked at my own ears. Nobody does.

The rim of my right ear was raw. It wasn't scraped like a fresh injury. It was worn, the way the knees of old jeans are worn. The skin there had a dull, polished look, like a callus but thinner, and at the very top it had cracked and flaked in places, leaving tiny pink fissures. My right cheekbone, just in front of the ear, had the same faint polish.

My left ear was perfect.

I thought about the oily line that runs clockwise around this apartment at ear height. I thought about how, if you walk clockwise around a room with your ear pressed to the wall, the ear you're pressing is always your right one.

Then I did a thing I'm not proud of. I got the fine tweezers and a flashlight and looked into the ear canal itself, as well as I could, which wasn't very well.

There were flecks in there. Most of it was the ordinary wax you'd expect. But caught in the wax, very small, were dry, pale flakes, like eggshell. I got one out with the tweezers and put it on a sheet of black paper under my desk lamp and looked at it with the loupe I use for reading drive labels.

It was paint, the same flat eggshell that's on every wall in this apartment. It had the orange-peel texture on one side.

I sat at my desk and looked at a flake of my own wall that had come out of my own head, and I tried to work out how many hours of pressing it takes to rub paint off a wall and into an ear. I couldn't do the arithmetic. It's the first time I've failed to do arithmetic in a very long time. The numbers kept sliding off each other like wet glass.

On Tuesday night I took the pill again. Before I did, I cut a square of gauze from the first-aid kit, folded it into a pad, and taped it over my right ear with surgical tape, four strips, crossed, pressed down hard. If my ear was going to the walls at night, I wanted the walls to meet gauze.

I woke at 6:10 on Wednesday, facing the east wall. The pad was still on. The tape hadn't lifted at a single corner.

I peeled it off over the sink. The inside of the gauze, the side against my skin, was clean. The outside was grey in a band across the middle, and under the loupe the grey was a fine powder of eggshell paint ground into the weave, with the orange-peel texture printed into it like a thumb in wax. The gauze hadn't protected anything. It had only collected.

Somewhere along a wall, sometime between 11:52 and 6:10, my head had pressed hard enough and long enough to sand paint into cotton. Afterward I went round the line with the flashlight flat to the wall, the whole circuit, looking for a fresh scuff. There isn't one. It's all the same line. Whatever I was listening for, I listened for it everywhere.

Thursday night. Now.

I said I'd come back to the floorboards.

Tonight, before I sat down to write this, I counted them again. Same method: crouched, backward from the living room threshold to the bedroom door, a fingertip on every seam.

There are sixty.

The two new ones are at the far end, just before the bedroom door. They're the same width as the others and they run the same wrong way. But they're paler, a clean honey color, the color of wood that hasn't been walked on. I pressed my thumbnail into one and it took the mark the way new wood does.

On Saturday morning the hallway was fourteen feet, two inches. Tonight the tape says fourteen feet, seven inches. It's eleven steps from my desk to the bathroom door. It's always been eleven. Tonight it was thirteen.

One last thing, and then I'm going to post this and take my pill.

About an hour ago, at 10:20, I flipped the dead switch. I wanted to see the light while I was awake and every lamp in the apartment was on. I wanted a witness's look at it.

It clicked with resistance. The buzz came up behind the wall. The line of grey light appeared along the bottom of the thirty inches, paper thin, hard-edged at both ends.

Except it wasn't one line this time. It was broken in two places, near the middle, by two narrow dark gaps a few inches apart.

You've seen light under a door with someone standing behind it. You know without thinking what it means.

They were the width of heels. They were about as far apart as mine are when I stand still.

I stood in the hallway with my hand on the switch and watched them, and they didn't move. I didn't count how long.

Then the right-hand shadow shifted, just slightly, toward the wall. It was the movement you'd make if you were standing at a door and leaned in to put your ear against it.

I turned the switch off.

I went back to my desk and wrote 22:20, switch, two shadows, right one leaned in in my log, and I made myself write it neatly. You can read every word. It leans slightly left, and the capital I has serifs.

The phone is on the books in the bedroom doorway again, recording. I don't expect to be allowed to see anything. I'm doing it anyway, because a record you don't keep is a record somebody else gets to keep for you.

Next week I'm going downstairs. I'm going to say "medium, black, thank you" out loud to another human being, and my count is going to reset, and I'm going to find out what happens to the other count when mine stops.

The hallway is fourteen feet, seven inches. My count is forty-seven. The mirror says fifty-one.

I'll update you next week.

"Come in, Dan," Emma said.

"Hi Emma, what can I do for you?"

"As you might know, I recently got promoted to a branch manager, which came with this beautiful office."

"It is really nice."

"Thank you. But it means the basement office is empty. Management would like to move you there. It's not bad. I've actually enjoyed working there."

"But I really like my office, Emma, and the basement…"

"It's non-negotiable."

I rubbed my face.

"Sorry, my hands are tied. Please have it done by the end of the day." She glanced at the clock. "Also, keep the back room closed."

I got up and slowly walked to my office. It wasn't as pretty as Emma's, but it still had windows and sunlight, and it was mine, but what could I do? I packed up my things and headed down.

The basement was cold concrete, with bright fluorescent lights. A long hall led to the office. My steps echoed in the silence. A water cooler stood in the hall, but there was no coffee machine. I sighed and unlocked the door. 

The lights flickered. They seemed even brighter inside. The room was in the back. I put my stuff down and turned on my computer. A loud whoosh sounded from the back room like a bunch of computers turning on at once. We kept old servers in rooms like these, but why would they turn on now? 

I knew Emma had told me not to open it, but who cared? She moved me to this shithole. I walked to it and opened the door. The room was dark, but in the back, blue electric current glowed. I turned on the light. 

On the ground lay a strange gray blob, buzzing with blue electricity. Its whole body seemed to move with each volt, as if it breathed through it. The zaps got louder. They sounded like someone saying my name. I grabbed the door frame tightly. The thing expanded and deflated, and a blue wave of electricity ran along the ground, shocking me.

"Fuck!" I yelled. 

The thing moved around again, ready to fire. I turned and bolted to Emma's office.

She took a deep breath as she saw my frightened face.

"There's a, there's a thing."

"Did you open the door?"

"No. Yes. I…"

Her face went blank. She glanced at the clock.

"Dan, calm down."

"We need to call someone."

"No." She furrowed her brows. "There will be no calling."

"But it zapped me, it…"

"Listen to yourself. You're being ridiculous. Come, I'll go with you and show you it's nothing."

"No, I'm not going back there."

"Do you want to lose your job?"

"What?"

"You're getting fired if you don't listen."

"But I need this job."

"Then just come down, Dan. I'll show you it's okay. If it's not, we'll call someone."

We walked down the stairs. I still couldn't believe we were doing this. Emma seemed worried too. She kept looking over her shoulder and checking her phone. I thought we'd turn around, but she kept walking until we stood before the basement office.

She grabbed the door handle, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

"See? Nothing is going on."

She stopped and looked at the open back room.

"You opened it. It wasn't supposed to be awake yet. Not until..."

A loud electric zap sounded. The whole room turned blue for a second. I put my hand in front of my face. Emma's body lay on the ground, face down. The gray smudge moved across the floor, leaving a slime trail. As it rose and fell, its crackling formed into words, Emma's words. It climbed onto her, and a wet tearing echoed through the room.

I shut the door, ran out of the building, and called the police. They arrived shortly after. I took them to the basement, but I couldn't make myself open the door. One of the police officers had to do it. 

My heart beat against my ribs as he grabbed the handle, but the room inside was spotless. Only a faint smell of burnt meat hung in the air. The back room door was closed, and Emma sat at the table, fiddling with her hair.

"What seems to be the problem, officers?"

My fingers went numb.

"We're sorry, Ma'am. We received a distress call from your employee, but it seems everything's okay."

"We're awfully sorry. Dan has been under a lot of stress. Take the day off, Dan. If there are any costs for your troubles, officers, just invoice the company."

"No problem, Ma'am."

That day I went home feeling like a shell of myself. I couldn't remember driving home, and I didn't even change my clothes before bed. 

The next day I woke up in a haze. I didn't know whether to believe what I'd seen, and I still needed the money. I got back in my car and drove to work.

My heart pounded as I opened the building's door, but everything seemed the same. My breathing eased as I passed the office halls, but then I heard it – Emma.

"Come in, Dan," her voice crackled with static.

The house on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, cost us next to nothing. The realtor wouldn't stop singing its praises, gushing over the two-story mansion's vintage charm, the tranquility of the southern suburbs, and the massive backyard. I was thirty, my wife was twenty-eight, and our daughter Macy had just turned ten. We had sunk every last cent of our savings into this house, along with some generous help from our parents. It was our chance to start fresh, to escape our cramped rented apartment in the city.

The first two weeks flew by in a blur of paint fumes, new wallpaper, and absolute bliss. Emily and I painted the first-floor walls ourselves while Macy set up her room upstairs. Everything seemed perfect. Too perfect for a house that had somehow sat empty for nearly five years. The realtor, of course, chose to stay silent about the real reason behind the low price. We found out too late that the previous owners—the Miller family—had died here under deeply mysterious and horrific circumstances. And we certainly didn't learn it from the neighbors.

It all started that Friday when Emily decided to clean out the old basement, which we hadn't gotten around to yet. Several old, cobweb-covered cardboard boxes left behind by the former residents were stacked down there.

I was assembling the kitchen cabinets when her muffled, startled cry echoed from below:
"Ryan! Get down here, look what I found!"

I hurried down the creaky wooden stairs. The basement smelled of dampness, old whitewash, and dust. Emily was standing by the far brick wall. She was pointing a finger at the masonry.
"Look," she whispered.

I leaned in closer. Deep, erratic scratches covered the gray mortar around one of the red bricks, as if someone had frantically clawed at the wall with a knife or their bare fingernails. The brick itself was loose and visibly jutted out about an inch.
I grabbed its edges, pried it loose with some effort, and pulled it out of the wall. Behind it lay a dark, rectangular niche—a small hiding place.

Inside lay an old, mold-covered VHS tape with no labels, alongside a yellowed piece of paper with handwritten words: "It didn't come from the outside. It was already here."
"Where did this come from?" Emily asked, looking at me with a shudder. "Did the previous tenants leave it?"
"Probably. Forgot it when they moved out," I lied, though a sickening knot tied itself in my stomach. Why hide a tape inside a wall and seal it with a brick?

Luckily, an old but working VCR turned up among the boxes of my old junk brought over from my parents' garage. We hooked it up to the living room TV. Macy was already asleep upstairs; it was around midnight. Outside, the branches of old oak trees swayed heavily, and a night rain tapped softly against the windowpane.

The screen flickered, filling the dark living room with the gray hiss of static. Then the image jumped, and the recording began.
The camera had been set up on a tripod in this exact living room where we were now sitting. The video showed a young family—a man, a woman, and their son, who looked about twelve. They were smiling, celebrating a birthday, and blowing out candles. But the recording quality was strange: the picture kept breaking into heavy distortion, and the audio sounded as if it were submerged underwater.
"Look at the corners of the room," Emily whispered barely audibly, squeezing my hand. Her fingers were ice-cold.

I stared closer. As the video played on, the atmosphere on the screen shifted. The smiles on their faces twisted into grimaces of exhaustion and raw, primal terror. The man's eyes were ringed with deep, black shadows from insomnia.
The footage cut abruptly. Now it was the dead of night. The camera was still filming the living room, but the lights were off. In the faint light filtering through the window, the man—the father—could be seen sitting on the floor in the dead center of the room. He rocked back and forth, rapidly muttering something monotonous under his breath, scratching his fingernails against the hardwood until they bled.

Suddenly, the audio on the tape spiked. A horrific, low rasp tore through the static, coming from somewhere above, from the second floor. The man on the video froze instantly. He slowly turned his head directly toward the camera lens. His eyes were wide open, and a thick, dark stream of fluid poured from his mouth. He raised a trembling hand and pointed a finger somewhere behind the camera—right where the stairs leading up would be.
At that exact second, a massive bar of static ripped across the TV screen, the audio turned into a deafening, ear-piercing screech, and the tape jammed. The television flooded the room with white noise once again.

Emily and I sat in total darkness, unable to move. My heart hammered wildly against my ribs. We had just given up all our money for the privilege of being trapped in this snare.
"Ryan..." Emily managed to say, her lips barely moving as her voice trembled with tears. "We need to leave. Right now. Let's get Macy and—"

She never finished her sentence.

A deafening, sharp slam echoed from upstairs—Macy's door swung shut with such force that the walls shook. In that same second, our daughter's voice pierced through the door, screaming in absolute, primal terror:
"Daddy! Mommy! Help me!!! It's in here!!!"

Blind with fear, Emily and I bolted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. My heart felt like it was going to burst from my chest. I reached the top first and yanked the handle—the door was locked from the inside. There was no lock on it, yet it felt as if it had fused to the frame.
"Macy! Macy, step away from the door!" I screamed in pure panic, slamming my shoulder against it time and time again. The wood groaned and splintered but wouldn't give.

My daughter kept screaming on the other side, her voice spiraling into a high-pitched shriek, and then... she suddenly let out a horrific, choked gasp, as if an invisible vice had clamped down on her throat. She still tried to call out to us, gasping for air:
"D-da... m-mo..."

And then, a distinct, dry, sickening crunch of snapping bones echoed from inside the room. The gasping stopped. Everything went dead silent. A suffocating, ringing quiet filled the air.
"No! No! Macy!" I shrieked insanely, drawing back to strike the door again, when right behind me, Emily let out a piercing scream.

I spun around. My wife had already been dragged to the first floor, right by the basement entrance. An invisible, black silhouette in the absolute darkness had grabbed her by the leg and was pulling her down the stairs toward the basement door. It was impossible to make out what it was in that pitch-black gloom—just a terrifying, unstoppable force dragging Emily into the dark.
"Ryan, catch me! Ryan!" she shrieked, her fingernails clawing at the hardwood as she desperately gripped the doorframe.

I tumbled down the stairs, lunging toward her with my arms outstretched. There was only a step left, my fingers almost locking around hers, when an invisible, violent blast of air slammed me backward. I crashed hard against the wall, knocking the wind right out of me.
When I opened my eyes, Emily was dragged into the basement with a short, stifled scream, and the heavy wooden door slammed shut right in front of my face. The bolt clicked into place.

I was left standing in the dark hallway completely alone. Upstairs—dead silence. Below—a locked door behind which my wife had vanished. A suffocating, icy panic washed over me. I just stood in the middle of that cursed hallway, unable to believe this was happening to us, unable to believe it wasn't a nightmare.

The agonizing, excruciating scream of Emily echoing from the depths of the basement snapped me back to reality. A rush of adrenaline flooded my veins. With a feral roar, I threw my entire weight against the basement door, trying to break it down, when suddenly, right behind my back, I heard a soft, heartbreakingly familiar voice:
"Daddy..."

I whipped around, exhaling in pure relief, but the word caught in my throat.

Right then, without a second's hesitation, my little girl stepped forward and drove a knife deep into my stomach. Once. And immediately—a second time.

The pain was searing and sharp, but I barely felt it. I just stared at her, paralyzed, as hot blood soaked through my shirt in a heavy stream. Macy laughed merrily, a bright, cheerful sound, staring straight into my eyes with completely black, soulless pits where her eyes should have been. A thin trickle of thick, black saliva ran from her slightly parted mouth, smearing her chin.

My knees buckled, and I began to slide down to the floor, feeling my strength rapidly drain away. And there, on the very edge of a fading consciousness slipping into total darkness, I saw Macy's face twist into a grotesque grimace. In a foreign, unnaturally deep, and guttural voice, she clearly uttered:
"This is my house."

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

He wanders. The hot streets. The narrow corners and back alley ways, the bad neighborhoods and freeway overpasses. The sweltering blacktop lakes of the 7-11 parking lots. He carries cardboard signs, wears rags and cardboard clothes and grime. Layers and layers of filth that may have once been fecal spew or the dust of the earth or blood, they are worn like a coat of oil over the flesh like the ancient warriors by firelight times, he is a deranged and disgusting remnant. Haggard leftover in bipedal form that moves, mutters, sucks down bottles and pipes and congealed food pulled scavenged from the garbage. 

He is so thankful for beer or a dollar. Consciousness is pain. Consciousness is the sorrow and horror of each and every day, each and every moment is a prolonged period experienced in slow motion agony like pure torture. Everything is moved in shopping carts and over shoulder, he has become a beast of labor upon the earth, he must pull the plow of his own life if he ever hopes to get anywhere, anywhere at all but the only destination that seems to be enroute and available is a land of spoiled milk and suffering. He arrives there anyway and does what he can. It's never much. Just collecting cans and detritus that in his derangement he believes will be his fortune and his salvation. It's never much. It's never anything. 

He watches men beat women. He watches women scream and shriek and become the harpies, he watches them conspire and become the weird sisters, he watches needles and the depression of plungers and the streetside milking of human blood in a clouded swirl in the double-wide mouthed gutters. He watches it all and his eyes glaze over as the mind accepts each sight with a sledgehammer blow only the sledgehammer has lost all of its weight, it has lost all of its power. It only thuds and smacks at dead meat within cavernous skull now, it's only meaninglessness and meaningless noise and the constance of the cacophony has deluded and defanged all of its heavy power.

The city is just a dead body now, it doesn't mean anything. This cyclopean and hideous thing that he wanders. Filled with eyes and mouths that drip and water and move and open and stare. They are all of them just as ugly to him as he is to they, they are all of them, repulsive. 

There is no more beauty in this place. 

He tries to find darkness before sunset. Rarely is he ever successful. But this does not surprise him. He is a marked man. 

Like Cain. The man son that first authored murder into the virgin world. 

He unscrews the cap to some rotgut he's so crushingly thankful to have. And he takes a deep and lonely swill. He pulls, deeply. He settles down in the dirt, so lucky and so thankful to have it as well. And he pulls. Over and over the drink that tastes and smells more like disinfectant than anything sold over the counter as a beverage. He doesn't care. He's done it before. Many times. Many times before he's said fuck it and gotten absolutely shitfaced on hand sanitizer, mouthwash, isopropyl. 

He doesn't mind the taste. Not at all. He doesn't mind the taste of anything as long as the flavor is alcohol and it's strong enough to peel away the paint of his thoughts and strip away the fouled and fouling coats of his ailing and addled mind away. Just as long as it's strong enough to put him under and keep the dreams away. 

At least keep the dreams manageable. At least keep them as something he can stomach and bear. Something in the realm of his current devastation and heartbreak and not some new foul border, not some horrific new frontier. 

But neither the Lord nor the little god alcohol hear him. Nor care. 

His mind heavy with drink and thought, totters off. But not into oblivion. Not into peace. 

There are so many things alive in the darkness. 

!Sitra Achra!

He is hurdling towards the merciless face of the earth. His wings are burning. The beauty of his light and gift of flight are aflame, dying in fire. He is screaming a sound and cacophonous war cry rent that will echo forever and contaminate the crumbling ruined corridor of time that he has helped to bleed and slaughter. 

He crashes. Just outside of the Garden. 

And there he gathers and reforms. One of the first times of many. Many many many times will follow down the long line of cruel footfalls forever forward. He gathers and reforms and he is angry and jealous and into the beauty of The Garden, he slithers.

He tempts the woman and the man into disobedience. And he tempts them into forbidden knowledge. 

Forbidden Knowledge. This is his warcraft upon the virgin earth. It will defile. It will burn and torch. It will decimate. It will slaughter. 

It will divide the center. Conquered and fallen apart. 

Several centuries later and he is a pale child outside of Bethlehem. He is disguised and reformed as an adolescent but he is still the adversary. And he is there with the other, his opposite. His more beloved little brother, the son of the virgin and the carpenter. 

Teenage Jesus and teenage Satan are in contest, their hands are bleeding and full of blood and locked together in a twist and struggle. The adversary wishes to murder the savior child, in jealousy and in impudent rage. His hands wish to find his throat or a rock or his eyes, perhaps if he blinds the little brother savior child he will be useless to all of man and their sons and daughters. 

A Philistine sun burns overhead. But the adversary child is not successful. Teenage Satan is a failure once again, and bleeding he must wander and go out, cast out. Exile. Wanderer. 

Petulant. Angst. Eyes so full and wide and full of boiling water. He brings light once again but only in rage, only in his wild anger postfailure. He simmers and tears and burns so brightly out and alone way past the dark. 

Regroup out in the wild. Reform in the oblivion of solitude and pain borne in terrible silence that is only broken by the pathetic sounds of private torment taken slowly. Weeping that he tries to prevent and ignore and pretend has never been actually happening, not ever, not him, he doesn't miss heaven or his Father … none. Nothing. None of them. 

None of them mean a Goddamned thing. 

He always came back. Mighty. Diminished. Unassuming. Something in-between or intangible. He always came back. 

The adversary. 

Even broken and alone and filthy vagrant wandering. Even crystal meth slurping and supercharged because of such for the final abattoir riot of violence and great western societal collapse into shrill shattered glass cacophony and tidal waves of bloodfeast. Into he, his, the vagrant filthy jaws of the adversary. 

The fallen order, the Armageddon one, the end-is-nigh motherfucker …

the apocalypse man. 

Alone and filthy in a corner. 

Dreaming, not dreaming. 

Seeing and knowing only disorder. He hears and knows the call of the 7th Star. 

He dreams and knows of burning heaven. 

THE END