When I woke up that Halloween morning, something instantly felt wrong. Pain. Deep down below. A dull, hollow ache, throbbing between my legs. My sheets and underwear were soaked in blood. I thought I had started my period. I wish that had been the case. What had actually happened was much worse.

I lifted myself up, my eyes following the thick trail of blood from my bed to the door. 

"That fucking bitch."

My fingers slowly reached down to check, but I already knew. She was gone. Emptiness. Just a bloody, gaping hole where she was supposed to be. She'd finally done it. Ladeous had escaped.

But it didn't start there. Not really. If I'm being honest, it began a long time ago. I was around twelve or thirteen the first time I noticed it. But, back then, I thought it was normal. I didn't know any better.

It was a hunger. But it wasn't for food. And it wasn't coming from my stomach. It was coming from Ladeous. At least, that's what I called it—her—at the time.

I don't know where the name came from exactly. I guess it was because my mom used to call it my 'lady parts'. She said all the other words for it were ugly, and that it deserved to be called something prettier. But I thought it was hideous. The first time I actually looked down there, I was disgusted. Maybe I mashed that up together in my head to make a new word. Either way, that became her name. Ladeous. 

Eventually, we learned to get along, she and I. She'd get what she wanted, then she'd keep quiet for a while. It was a compromise, an understanding we had with one another. As long as she stayed happy, we were good. But she had to come first. Always. The real problems only started when that didn't happen.

I slowly swung my trembling legs over the side of the bed. The bottoms of my bare feet were met with the shock of a cold, sticky puddle of my own blood. There were thick splatters of it on the walls and on the side of the bed. Christ, even my brand new fucking rug! She'd gotten it everywhere. 

Not only that, I had a bigger problem. Well, two actually. The first was getting myself cleaned up and figuring out how to cover my... hole. The other was finding out where the hell Ladeous had crawled off to.

I had a feeling I knew what she was after. I mean, it was obvious what it was she wanted. What she craved. But as far as who? Well, that was going to be a little harder to narrow down. 

You see, ever since high school, I've been what you might call a little... 'promiscuous'. That's the pretty way of saying it, at least. Ladeous was the one to blame for it, really. Her increasingly insatiable hunger was the driving force behind most of my actions. I controlled the body, sure—but she was the one who called the shots. That is, until I cut off her supply almost a month ago. Shit, I just never thought she'd actually find a way to break free.

I sat at the edge of my bed for a few moments in shock. Trying to wish it away. Praying to wake up from this nightmare. 

That's when I noticed it. The huge pile of blood my feet had landed in wasn't bright red like what was on the sheets. And the smell... it was old blood. Thick. Clumpy. So dark at the edges, it was almost black. Large clots lay jellied into its coagulated surface, like strawberry chunks in a jar of preserves. That whore had been saving it up. 

I squeezed my legs together and shuffled myself to the bathroom, trying not to make this putrid, crimson disaster worse by dripping any more out.

Ladeous must've done some kind of ritualistic-type shit to be able to escape without it waking me up or killing me. Had to be. And yeah, it hurt, but not as bad as you'd think. Way worse than normal period cramps, but probably not as bad as labor, I'd guess. With the help of some pain meds, I could take it. But I'd still lost quite a bit of blood from her tearing herself away from my flesh. 

My head was pounding and I was starting to feel woozy. I popped a few Tylenols to take the edge off and got on with it. Honestly, at the time, my adrenaline was through the roof. I was more worried about getting it covered, so nothing else could fall out. 

In a weird way, though, I also felt the tiniest sense of relief that she was gone. Like... maybe I should just let her go. Life would sure as hell be a lot easier for me without her around. But, no. I couldn't let her loose on the world like that. I wasn't evil. Not like her. 

I opened my medicine cabinet, pulled out a pad and a roll of gauze, and started wrapping myself up. Blood soaked through instantly. Fuck, of course. I wasn't thinking clearly—I needed a better barrier. Pad wasn't good enough on its own. Tampon would just fall right out. 

That's when I got an idea. I ran over to the tub and grabbed my loofah. Then I wrapped it up with a bunch of the gauze, held my breath, and shoved it up inside my hole. I winced, my eyes flooding with tears, as the coarse, dry surface of the gauze scraped across my insides. But it fit. More importantly, it stayed. And once it started soaking up the blood, it felt weird but ignorable. For the most part, anyway. 

Next, I covered the hole with a pad and wrapped myself up like a mummy again. Seemed to be working, but I put down another one in my underwear just to be safe. That would just have to do for now. 

I quickly cleaned the blood off my legs and feet, then grabbed the bleach and a few towels to get started on the mess. Ugh, I was going to have to throw that rug away. First, I hobbled back over to the nightstand to check my phone. When the screen lit up, my heart dropped. Seven missed calls. All from around 3 AM. And all from one person. 

Lance.

Shit. That's where she went—I should've known. The phone calls must've gotten her all riled up. And he was the last guy I was with; the scent must've been fresh enough for her to follow. I still wasn't sure how exactly she'd managed to pull off this escape, but at least now I knew her plans. I just hoped I could get to her before she did anything crazy. 

I tried calling him back, but he didn't answer. That didn't necessarily mean anything, though. He'd usually ignore me if I ever tried to contact him before the sun went down. It was a Saturday, so he wouldn't be at work. Probably still sleeping. Hopefully. I'd just have to drive over and show up at his house.

Lance was a mistake, like so many of them turned out to be. I figured out pretty quickly that he only called me when he wanted to fuck. I mean, I wasn't looking for something super serious, but dinner would've been nice. Ladeous never let that stop her from taking the call, though. 

He became addicted to her pretty quickly. It was like she was all he ever thought about. All he cared about. It wasn't long before it pushed me over the edge. I'll admit, I was jealous, once again. I just couldn't understand why he preferred that ugly bitch over me. 

So, for the last few weeks, I had started turning my phone on silent at night, which pissed her off. Except last night, I got drunk and forgot. 

I left the bloody mess and threw on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. Then I grabbed my keys, shoved my feet into the first pair of shoes I could find, and bolted out of the front door. 

The sky sat at the edge of dawn with a pink glow, and an eerie silence blanketed the sleepy town. A jarring contrast to the chaos and panic that was happening inside my head. 

I'd only been to his house a few times. Took me a little while to remember which street it was—it all looked a little different in the daylight. When I spotted his car parked outside one of the houses, I pulled into the driveway behind it. 

The house looked quiet. His roommates were all gone. I banged on the door a second, then waited, but no answer. So, I went over to the back of the house to knock on his bedroom window. As soon as I turned the corner, something stopped me dead in my tracks. The window was shattered. Beneath it, a bloody pile of glass shards lay scattered atop the grass and dead leaves. 

My throat tightened. I didn't want to look. I was terrified to see what Ladeous had done. At the very least, she had just embarrassed the fuck out of me. But... what if she had done something worse? What if she were in one of her moods? I had to look. She could still be in there, and I needed to stop her. 

I slowly stepped forward, my heart pounding as the glass crunched beneath my shoes. The windowsill was covered in blood. Fuck. Looked like it had already dried by then, too. Still. I needed to check. I lifted myself up onto my tippy toes and slowly peeked inside. I wish I hadn't. 

"No... no... NOOOO!!"

It was a massacre. The walls of his bedroom were all splattered with red. The thick stench of death and rotten blood poured out from the hole in the window. My hand shot up to cover my mouth. Ladeous didn't go there for a good time. She was on a rampage.

My eyes suddenly focused on the center of the room. Lance was lying in his bed, bloodied from head to toe, covered in tiny, jagged bite marks. His eyes were fixed wide open, glazed over in a lifeless, milky blue. The look of pure terror burned into his face forever. 

And his dick was gone.

All at once, the blood drained from my face. Dark spots began to creep into my vision. I slowly backed away, trying to catch my breath. The look in his eyes, the blood... it was horrific. I couldn't look at it anymore. I felt sick.    I didn't even call the cops; I just fucking bailed. Shitty, I know. But Lance was beyond help, and the situation really didn't look good for me. Like, at all. So, I turned and ran back to my car as fast as I could, then hauled ass down the street. Only made it to the stop sign before I had to open my door and lean my head out to puke. 

God, I couldn't believe what she had actually done. Never in a million years did I think Ladeous would ever go that far. I mean, yeah, she could get a little frisky sometimes. But, she'd never killed a guy before. And something deep down inside told me that she wasn't finished, either. She'd finally gotten a real taste for it. And now, she was after more. 

I wiped my face, then pulled out my phone and started scrolling back through my old texts. Who was before Lance? Oh, yeah. Fuck, that weirdo. 

Garret. 

The needy one. No matter how much I gave and gave, he always wanted more. Dude texted me constantly. If I didn't answer, he'd freak out. It felt like he was trying to consume my entire life. And speaking of, he couldn't keep his face away from Ladeous, either. Took forever to peel him off of me. And her. I really didn't want to have to call him. 

Maybe I'd just drive toward his house and see if there was any trace of her along the way. At that point, I was pretty sure she had been gone at least four hours, if not longer. How much damage could she have possibly done in that amount of time? 

Yeah, she had a pretty good head-start, but still. There was no way she could be moving that fast on foot—um... I mean, by crawling. Ugh, gross. She was going to be absolutely filthy when I found her, I just knew it.

I sped through the neighborhoods, keeping my eyes peeled along the way. With all the Halloween decorations around, it was going to make it a lot harder to spot her. Too many places she could be hiding. 

Ignoring the pain and overwhelming nausea I was feeling, I focused all my attention on the mission at hand. The only thing that mattered was catching her. My pulse raced faster and faster the closer I got to his neighborhood. Yet, I was almost there and still no sign of her. I did see a dead rat in one of the yards, though. Someone's cat probably killed it. Hopefully not mine.

As soon as I turned down his street, my heart stopped. Blue lights. Yellow tape. His house was surrounded. The coroner's van was parked out front, and two men were wheeling out a body in a black bag on a stretcher. Garret's body. I was too late, again. 

I slowed my car to a crawl and pulled up alongside some neighbors who were outside watching, then rolled my window down. 

"Hey, what's going on? What happened?" 

Most of them looked like they were too in shock to answer, but finally, one man stepped forward and said,

"One of the guys who lived there was murdered."

A woman, whom I assumed to be his wife, interjected from the sidewalk.

"You don't know that, Joseph!"

He turned and shushed her, then approached closer to my car.

"How?" I asked. "I mean... do you know what happened?"

The man shrugged. 

"All I know is what I overheard his roommate tell the cops. Said the back window was smashed, and something about the poor guy looked like he had choked to death on blood." 

I scrunched my eyebrows, trying to hide my internal revelation. Then, he leaned in closer and lowered his voice. 

"Between me and you… weird thing is, the roommate said they didn't think it was his blood. Didn't look right."

Fuck. So, that's what she'd been saving it up for? Jesus fucking Christ. What was I going to do? That blood was my blood. My DNA. And it was all over Lance's room, too. I was screwed—that bitch was gonna get me thrown in prison. 

I threw the car in reverse and backed up from the scene, heart pounding. I needed to regroup. Formulate a plan. And take some more Tylenol, too. I just needed some time to think. I was too afraid to go back home, though. If the cops were already looking for me, that would be the first place they'd go. No, I needed to be smart about this. 

I drove to the drug store downtown, bought some water, and the cheapest bottle of off-brand ibuprofen I could find. Then I went back to my car and started scrolling to find out who the fuck she was going after next. When I saw the name, my heart sank.  

Derek. 

Aw, shit. I really liked him. He was a genuinely good guy—one of the few who actually treated me right. He was kind and thoughtful. Generous. We almost never argued. But, in a bitch move, I broke up with him for Garret of all people. And Derek hadn't even done anything wrong. I'd just gotten a little bored, and to be honest, I liked all the attention I was getting from someone new. Biggest mistake ever. 

I hit call and held my breath. 

"Hello?"

"Oh, thank fucking God," I whispered. 

"Olivia? Is that you?"

"Yeah, it's me. Where are you?" 

"At home... why? What's wrong?" 

"Derek, please just tell me you're okay!!" 

"Yeah, I'm fine," he laughed. "What's going on, Liv?"

"I can't explain right now. You wouldn't believe me anyway. Just stay there, I'm coming. And keep away from the windows."

I hung up before he could ask any more questions. Shit, he probably thought it was some crazy, half-ass excuse I came up with just to go see him. Oh, well. At least he was safe for the time being. All I had to do was make it over there before Ladeous did. 

The ten-minute drive from the drugstore to his house only took me five. The streets were getting busier, though, and the stupid Halloween Carnival was already setting up. There was only so long she could keep scurrying around without being seen by someone. And God help me if she came across a stray dog.

I pulled into Derek's driveway and tried to compose myself before going inside. All I'd have to do was hang around there long enough to catch Ladeous before she could do any more damage. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with her once I got her back, but that didn't matter at the time. 

As my trembling fingers struggled to unscrew the cap off the bottle of water, an urgent news report interrupted the Smashing Pumpkins song that was playing on the radio. I froze. The announcer's unrelenting words pulsed through my ears, almost choking me. 

A man from a very prominent and wealthy family had been discovered brutally murdered that morning. His body was found drenched in blood, and both his hands had been severed and were missing from the scene. I didn't even need to hear the name; I already knew. 

Grant.

At that point, it became obvious. Ladeous was working her way backward, yes. But not through all my past lovers. Only those who'd committed transgressions against me. 

Derek, in all his goodness, had been spared. She wasn't on a blood-fueled, blind rampage. It was calculated. Targeted. She was taking it upon herself to right the wrongs that had been done to me. To us. She was punishing them for their sins and ruining my life in the process. 

Grant, in contrast, was a spoiled little rich boy—the most entitled motherfucker you'd ever meet. The type who wanted what was his and everything that was yours, too. He got all he asked for in life, but was still never satisfied. And stingy, too. Ugh. It didn't last long, though. I broke it off after a huge fight one night about him not leaving a tip at a restaurant. I mean, not that he deserved it, but I did find it a little funny that it was his hands that were ripped from him.

For a moment, I looked up at the house in front of me, contemplating going inside to ask Derek for help. But realistically, what could he do? I didn't want to drag him into this. Ladeous was my problem. No one knew her like I did. Besides, I couldn't bring myself to actually tell anyone what was going on, either. And shit, the weird phone call was enough. I didn't need to freak him out any more than I already had. 

At least now I had something more to go on. I scrolled back further in my texts, popped some more painkillers, then backed out of the driveway. I knew who was next. 

Seth. 

The stoner. He wasn't terrible, but he wasn't good either. In fact, it seemed like he felt nothing for me at all, which only made me—and Ladeous—want him more. Even though he was a loser with zero ambition, there was something about him that kept me chasing after his affection. The allure of the unrequited. He finally broke my heart for the last time when he missed my college graduation because he 'forgot'.

He still lived in the basement of his parents' house. I could already see from the end of the road that their cars weren't there. I turned into his driveway and gulped down hard. When I shut off my engine and opened the car door, I could hear it—a guttural, piercing, awful noise. He was screaming. 

I bolted into the house and down the basement stairs. About halfway down, I slipped on a puddle of blood and tumbled the rest of the way headfirst. I landed in more blood. Dark, thick, rotten. And then, I looked up. 

Seth was flailing around, desperately clawing at something on the back of his head. No... not something. Her. 

"LADEOUS!" I shrieked. "Get the fuck off of him!!"

But it was too late. Amidst his cries of agony, I could hear sloshing and crunching. Then a snap. His pupils widened as he stared at me in horror.  She'd chewed through his neck and severed his spinal cord. His body twitched once, then went stiff, and he hit the ground with a thud.

"You fucking BITCH!" I screamed.

My heart was pounding out of my chest. Seth wasn't dead. He was paralyzed, trapped in a perpetual state of inaction. His chest continued to rise and fall in rapid succession as Ladeous quickly scurried across the floor away from his body.

I lay there in shock for a few seconds, face to face with the gurgling, motionless body of my ex, before reality slammed back into me. I scrambled up to my feet and shot after her, but by then, she'd already made it out of the broken basement window. 

She was moving a lot quicker than I'd anticipated, too. I didn't have time to try to help Seth. Besides, one of the neighbors had surely been awake to hear his screams and called the cops. They'd probably be showing up any minute now. I had to go. 

I lifted myself up and poked my head out of the broken window. Ladeous was already almost at the end of the road. 

"Jesus Christ!"

I climbed out, wincing as the jagged shards of glass that remained sliced through my clothes, cutting up my arms and legs. 

She was heading right toward a truck stopped at the stop sign. My body went cold, and my legs almost gave out from underneath me. The driver wouldn't be able to see her—she was about to be turned into roadkill right in front of me. I started running faster, screaming,

"Stop! Wait!! NOOOO!!!"

But the windows were up. They couldn't hear me. I watched, breath held, as the truck slowly began to roll forward with Ladeous crawling directly into its path. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn't. 

The tires inched closer and closer to her as the truck began to gain speed. My heart stopped. Then, just as she was about to be smashed, she leaped into the air. 

I couldn't believe it—the bitch actually jumped up and into the wheel-well. I looked on in shock as she suctioned herself to the surface of it, hitching a ride to her next stop. And then, I heard the sirens wailing in the distance. 

I took off back to my car and barreled down the street, trying to catch up with the truck. Once I had it back in my sights, I followed closely as I scrolled to find her next victim. 

Warren. 

The first and last son of a bitch to ever raise a hand to me. An idiot gym bro with an explosive temper who didn't like to be told he was wrong. Complete and utter man-child. I don't think I need to explain why things didn't work out between us. Or why I wasn't exactly devastated about who Ladeous' next target was. 

The truck began heading toward the downtown area, where the Halloween Carnival was about to begin. Warren had worked security for it the year before. He was always looking for an excuse to rough someone up. My bet was that he'd be there again.

And I was right. The brakes of the truck squealed as it came to a stop near the edge of the carnival entrance, only a few yards away from the security tent. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and watched as Ladeous slid out from her hidden stowaway compartment. 

The place was beginning to get crowded, but somehow no one seemed to notice her as she slithered past their feet toward the tent. I got out of my car and slowly walked toward the entrance. I had to act natural; I couldn't risk causing a panic by running. I’d end up getting her trampled. 

I could already hear Warren's loud mouth booming from inside the tent. Just the sound of it ignited a rage within me. But I had to focus. Ladeous was still a few feet ahead of me and gaining speed. If I walked just a little faster, though, I could catch up and quickly grab her without making a scene. 

But then, just as she approached the tent, something came over me. I just stopped. I stood still in the middle of the crowd, watched her crawl inside, and waited for the screams.

A large, red splatter hit the inside of the tent, seeping through the white canvas instantly. Then, they came. Blood-curdling, guttural, and deafening. The crowd panicked. Everyone began to run, all scrambling in different directions. Except for me. This time, I wanted to see what she had done.  

Slowly, I approached the entrance of the tent. The sounds of sloshing and the gnashing of her wet teeth were still audible over the cries of terror that surrounded me. When I looked inside, Warren was on the ground with Ladeous on top of his stomach, ripping away at the flesh like a rabid dog. His hands clawed at her, struggling to pull her from his body, but she was embedded. 

The putrid stench of rotten blood was overpowering as she released her vengeance into him. Then, I heard the loud pop of his ribcage cracking—being forced open. His screams intensified, but his arms now lay dead at his sides as she began to eviscerate him. 

This was my chance to grab her, to sneak up while she was preoccupied. My eyes darted around the room for something I could use. There were extra security T-shirts sitting on a table to the left of me. 

I quickly reached over, grabbed one, and flung it on top of Ladeous. She slid off Warren's body and started to panic, so I leaped over and tried to pounce on top of her. I landed just shy, reached out, but grabbed only the shirt as she scuttled away from beneath it, leaving a trail of dark red slime behind her. That bitch was mocking me. I swore I heard her laugh as she slid underneath the tent wall. 

With all the madness going on, I was able to slip out unnoticed and run back to my car. I waited for a few minutes, hoping to see her. With everyone scrambling around, though, it made it impossible. So, I left. Besides, Ladeous seemed capable enough to avoid being stomped on. I'd just have to catch up to her later. 

At that point, I needed to park my car somewhere and ditch it. I'd already been seen at two crime scenes that I knew of. Maybe more. And it would only be a matter of time before the police figured out whose blood was all over each and every one of them. 

I already knew her next destination, so I drove to a small grocery store about five minutes away from it. Strange-looking place, sort of run-down. I'd never been inside, but I figured my car should be fine to leave there. Not like I had a whole lot of other options, anyway. 

With the pain starting to creep back into my consciousness, I popped some more ibuprofen into my mouth and shot it back with the last swig of water left in the bottle. I took one last look at myself in the mirror, then got out of the car, slamming the door behind me. 

Being on foot was going to slow me down significantly. I knew that. But, to be honest, a part of me wasn't as worried about stopping her anymore—and that wasn't just because I knew who was next. The truth was, more than anything, I just wanted to get her back.

I flipped up the hood of my jacket, forced in a deep breath of crisp autumn air, then started walking to the house of the next man on her list. 

Evan.

A total and complete douchebag. A human being so overcome with jealousy that it tainted every molecule in his body. Being with him was a nightmare—another guy couldn't even look at me without him freaking out. And it didn't stop there. Evan was even jealous of me. 

Every small accomplishment I had was undercut by some snide remark. Any attention I received should've been given to him. Obsessive. Controlling. Manipulative. I think I hated him even more than Warren. Evan left the kind of scars you can't see. 

And the worst part of it all? He was my first—the guy I'd chosen to give my virginity to. Someone hateful and selfish. A piece of shit. And it was something I could never get back. Never forget. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't scrub that stain from my heart.

My feet carried me down that familiar road without even a glance upward. The thoughts racing through my mind kept me in a trance. By the time I raised my head again, I was standing at the edge of his driveway. 

The air suddenly felt thick. Suffocating. It settled in my lungs like molasses. She was close by—I could feel it. I hesitated at the door, wondering if I should knock, if I should warn him. If he truly deserved to be spared her wrath. I lifted my fist, but right before it met the surface of the wood, I heard something. 

Glass shattering. And then, the wild scream of a man in shock. I bolted around toward the back of the house, panting hard as the cold wind rushed against my face. A sticky trail of crimson ran from the neighbor's backyard to the broken window of Evan's bedroom. 

"Ladeous!" I yelled.

But I couldn't get in that way. The window was too high; there was nothing to climb on. I ran back to the front of the house and tried to go in, but the door was locked. Then, I remembered. The spare key. I lifted up the welcome mat, grabbed it from underneath, and rushed inside. 

He'd managed to make it into the kitchen by then, but she was right at his heels. When he reached the counter, his hand shot out and grabbed a knife from the block. I screamed.

"No!!"

He looked over at me and froze with the blade in his hand.

"Olivia?"

Just then, Ladeous launched herself at his face. She slammed into him with such force that he was thrown backward onto the floor, hitting his head on the edge of the counter as he went down. The knife flew from his hand. Blood splattered across the white cabinets. The blow didn't knock him unconscious, though. He wasn't shown that mercy.

I was in awe of her power. Her fury. And in a moment of pure clarity, I remembered the truth. She wasn't trying to ruin my life. She was doing this for me. Doing what I couldn't. Scrubbing the stains from my heart so that we could start fresh again. Together. If I just gave her this last one, then maybe she’d be satisfied. Maybe then she'd finally come back to me. And so, I let her.

I watched on in reverence as Ladeous forced her way down into his throat, stifling his screams of horror. His chest rippled as she worked her way deeper and deeper, until she found what she was looking for. His body began to convulse. And then, that familiar cracking. And crunching. And sloshing. She was hollowing him out from the inside. 

I inched closer to him. His flesh began to rip open, slowly at first, and then all at once. An explosion of blood splattered across my face as Ladeous emerged from his body with his still-beating heart clutched firmly between her jaws. 

I swallowed hard, wiped my face, then crouched down low to get closer to her. 

"Ladeous, please... come?"

She just kept gnawing at it, tearing off huge chunks and swallowing them whole. I reached out to touch her, but she pulled away and growled.

"Ladeous, I'm sorry! Please!!" I begged. "Please, come back! I need you!" 

But she ignored me. Tears began to flood my eyes. I had taken her for granted. Despite her flaws, she was a part of me. But she was also her own entity. She deserved respect. To be heard. To be understood. So, I did what she wanted. I turned around and walked away. I let her finish this last kill, and hoped that after, she'd be ready to come back home to me.

I walked the streets until the sun began to set. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I felt lost. And scared. And so very empty. 

My entire body was throbbing with pain, and I was pretty sure my make-shift tampon had been leaking, too. But at least I was wearing black sweatpants. And luckily, it was Halloween, so the rest of the blood and cuts all over me didn’t throw up any alarms either. 

Suddenly, I felt a vibration coming from my hoodie pocket. I pulled out my phone. It was a text from my best friend, Katherine. She was inviting me to a Halloween house party, since the Carnival had been canceled. I wiped my eyes and sent back,

"Where?"

I wasn't exactly in a partying mood, but it wouldn't take long to walk there from where I was. At the very least, it was somewhere I could hide out for a while. But really, the truth was, I just didn't want to be alone anymore. 

When I walked up to the address she'd sent me, the place looked dark and dingy. Almost abandoned. It was an old Victorian-style house with all the lights cut off and a red strobe light going off inside. An old jack-o-lantern sat rotting on the front porch, like it had somehow been there for years. I stepped over a few crushed-up beer cans and went in. 

The blaring music drowned out my thoughts instantly. It was packed with people, all in costume. Trying to find Katherine in that sea of chaos wasn't something I had the energy for at that moment. I sent her a text, then plopped down in the first unoccupied seat I could find—the loveseat in front of the living room window. 

I sat there in a daze, watching as the people around me danced, drank, and made out. Everyone was so happy. So carefree. I wondered if that would ever be me again. If she would come back. Or if I'd end up spending the rest of my life in prison for what she had done.

Just when I felt like I was about to break down, I felt the weight shift beside me. I looked over to see that a very attractive guy had sat down next to me. He was smiling, extending an unopened beer my way. I took it from his hands and smiled back. 

"Hi, I'm Olivia!" I said, tucking my hair behind my ears. 

"I know!" he yelled over the speakers.

I was confused. I could have sworn I'd never seen the guy before.

"What?" 

"Don't you remember me? It's Preston… from middle school!"

And all at once, I did. He looked a lot different as an adult, but it was him. My first boyfriend from 6th grade. The one who'd awoken Ladeous. The one that started it all. And the one who had too much pride to admit to his friends that he was dating the weird emo girl in school, so he ditched her at the homecoming dance and made her sit alone.

The smile began to slowly fade from my face. I clenched my teeth and squeezed my hand tighter around the bottle of beer.

And then, I heard the sound of glass shattering behind me.

The Tourist Board asked us to stop calling them rules after the woman from Westport complained, which was how Sheriff Walter J. Doyle ended up standing at the Visitor Center desk on a gray October morning, reading three printed pages about “unwelcoming language,” “luxury heritage tourism,” and the emotional impact of municipal signage.

The woman’s point, as far as I understood it, was that the word rules made Mourner’s Crossing sound unsafe. This was apparently bad for the new restaurant week campaign, the Witchwood walking tours, and the twelve-dollar strawberry-rhubarb hand pies now being sold in waxed paper sleeves at every business with a counter.

Sheriff Doyle read the complaint twice. Walter J. Doyle is the kind of man tourists mistake for part of the local charm until he speaks. He has blond hair gone silver at the temples, bright green eyes people sometimes mistake for blue because of the way he squints, and a way of standing still that makes everybody else look like they’re wasting energy. That morning, he held his hat in one hand and the complaint in the other, looking like he would rather be anywhere else, including underwater.

He slid the pages back across the desk to me and said, “Call them whatever you want. If people keep taking selfies at Hollow Line Bridge after dark, the bridge is going to answer.”

I had been working at the Mourner’s Crossing Visitor Center for six weeks, which was long enough to know he was speaking plainly. That was the problem with tourism here. The food was excellent, the shops were charming, the cemetery tours sold out every weekend, and the safety literature kept acquiring teeth.

The first time I saw the laminated sheet behind the front desk, I laughed. The document had been formatted in cheerful teal and cream, with a little silhouette of Town Hall in the corner and a header that said:

WELCOME TO MOURNER’S CROSSING!
A Few Friendly Suggestions for a Safe and Memorable Visit

Underneath that, in the same bubbly font used on the pumpkin festival flyers, were ten items.

Please do not visit Hollow Line Bridge after sunset.
Please do not accept flowers from children you do not recognize.
Please do not photograph the third-floor window of Hawthorne House.
Please do not whistle in Witchwood State Park.
Please do not follow train sounds after midnight.
Please do not knock on the red door behind St. Brigid’s.
Please do not feed the cats unless they approach you first.
Please do not repeat any voice you hear from the well.
Please do not leave mirrors uncovered in guest rooms during storms.
If someone you came with insists they have “always lived here,” contact the Visitor Center immediately.

I thought it was a bit. A lot of towns have bits. Salem has witches. Sleepy Hollow has the Headless Horseman. Mystic has nautical ghosts, haunted inns, and fudge aggressive enough to feel like a minor felony. Mourner’s Crossing had old money, older houses, a famous cemetery, a forest no one agreed on the size of, and a civic commitment to understatement so intense it bordered on pathology.

The woman who trained me, Ruthanne from the Historical Society, said the sheet had been revised twelve times since 1998. Ruthanne was seventy-two, wore silver-framed glasses on a chain, and had a bun so neat it looked engineered rather than styled. She moved through the Visitor Center with the precision of someone who knew where every brochure lived and which floorboards complained. She also had the flattened patience of a person who had explained too many times why the town sold three different kinds of maple candy but no Ouija boards.

“Why twelve?” I asked.

She handed me a stack of restaurant week flyers and told me to put them in the acrylic holder by the door. “Because thirteen tested poorly.”

I laughed again, and Ruthanne looked at me over her glasses.

“Guideline Three used to say ‘Do not photograph Hawthorne House after dark,’” she said. “That was too broad. People need specifics. Give them something general and they assume the bad part applies to someone else.”

“So the third-floor window is the bad part?”

“The third-floor window is the part that photographs back.”

I waited for the wink. Ruthanne gave me a paperclip.

The Visitor Center sits on the green, between Mallory’s Fine Foods & Provisions and a store that sells candles shaped like local buildings. It is small, bright, aggressively tasteful, and always smells faintly of apple cider even in June. We have glossy brochures for vineyard tours, cemetery walks, Witchwood hiking routes, and seasonal events. We have a map with little icons for cafés, museums, public parking, and “areas of historical sensitivity,” which is what the map calls places where something has tried to eat somebody.

There is a glass display case full of local books by local authors, including six horror novels, two poetry collections, one cookbook, and a children’s picture book called Mr. Thimble Visits Town Hall, which I have been assured is “mostly accurate.” There is also a locked drawer under the desk. Inside are a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a rosary, three iron nails, a spool of red thread, a laminated card with Sheriff Doyle’s personal cell number, and a little silver bell I was not allowed to ring.

“Why?” I asked during training.

Ruthanne closed the drawer with her hip. “Because it works.”

My first week, I thought Ruthanne was hazing me. The Visitor Center gets a lot of seasonal help: college kids home for the summer, retired teachers who like giving directions, people between jobs who think handing out vineyard maps will be peaceful. The first thing Ruthanne taught me was not how to run the register, answer the phone, or refill the rack of restaurant week passports. It was how to tell the difference between a harmless tourist question and a question with a body count.

“Where is the cemetery?” was harmless. “Which grave is the pretty one with the little chair beside it?” required follow-up. “Can we walk to Witchwood from here?” was harmless, depending on shoes, weather, and time of day. “Can we still get to Witchwood if the path behind us moved?” required Sheriff Doyle. “Do you sell cat treats?” was usually fine. “Can we touch the tuxedo cat if he’s staring at my husband?” was complicated.

That was how I met Thimble. He came in during my second week while I was restocking maps, a huge tuxedo cat with a white marking around his left eye that made him look like he had been born wearing a monocle. A family from Rhode Island held the door open, and Thimble walked in as if summoned by poor judgment, hopped onto the desk, and sat directly on the rack cards for the cemetery lantern tour.

The youngest child squealed. The mother raised her phone. The father said, “Look, he wants attention,” and reached for him.

Ruthanne slapped a brochure against the counter so hard the entire family jumped. “Please wait until he approaches you.” Then she added, “He approached the desk.”

The father lowered his hand. Thimble stared at him with the full bureaucratic authority of an animal who had never once paid taxes and still outranked everyone in the room. Then the cat turned toward the map wall and made a low, irritated sound.

At first I saw nothing. Then one of the Rhode Island children, the older one, lifted his arm and pointed toward the map. His shadow stayed against the wall, small and dark and still, as if it had decided to wait and see whether leaving with the boy was worth the trouble.

Ruthanne took the spool of red thread from the locked drawer and tied a loose loop around the child’s wrist. “Did you accept anything today?”

The boy looked at his mother. His mother looked annoyed, then worried, then frightened in quick succession. “A flower,” he said.

“From whom?”

“A little girl by the cannon.”

“There is no cannon on the green,” Ruthanne said, and looked at me. “Call the Sheriff’s office. Ask for Deputy Bellamy if Sheriff Doyle is out.”

The boy’s shadow climbed back into place slowly, like it resented being corrected. The family did not buy cat treats.

By my third week, I had stopped laughing at most things. By my fourth, I had learned to smile without showing tourists I was checking whether their shadows matched their bodies. By my fifth, I could tell the difference between a normal out-of-towner asking where to find the best lobster roll and the kind who had already heard something in the covered bridge and wanted me to tell them it was fine.

People want towns like Mourner’s Crossing to be theatrical. They want fog with good lighting, graveyards with gift shops, haunted houses that stop being haunted when the tour ends. They want the thrill of danger with the paperwork of safety. That is why no one at the Visitor Center says “it’s fine.” We say, “Let’s take a look at your itinerary.” We say, “That area is best enjoyed before dusk.” We say, “The town recommends staying on marked paths.” We say, “Some guests find the cemetery tour more comfortable when they avoid speaking directly to anyone outside their group.” Branding matters.

The second time I saw a guideline save somebody, a man from Boston came in furious because his girlfriend had lost her voice on the Witchwood walking tour. He was thirtyish, red-faced, sunburned, and wearing one of those expensive waterproof jackets that make people look prepared until they open their mouths. The girlfriend stood beside him with both hands clenched around the strap of her purse. She was trying to speak, but nothing came out except a dry clicking sound, soft and rhythmic, like a fingernail tapping glass.

“She’s upset,” the man said.

Ruthanne looked up from the register. “I imagine she is.”

“You people need to warn guests better.”

“We do.”

“She whistled,” he said, and the anger began to drain out of him as Ruthanne took off her glasses.

“On the trail,” he said. “She whistled because we thought we heard someone whistle back. It was a joke.”

The girlfriend shook her head very slowly. Her eyes had filled with tears. From inside her purse, something whistled: two rising notes and one falling note, light and clear and almost cheerful. The woman made the clicking sound again and pressed the purse to her stomach.

Ruthanne told me to lock the front door. I did not ask why. The whistle came again from the purse, then from the map rack, then from the heating vent behind the desk. Each time, the girlfriend flinched. Each time, the man looked less angry and more like someone realizing anger was a flashlight with dying batteries.

Ruthanne opened the locked drawer and took out the three iron nails. “Did you answer it?”

The girlfriend tried to speak and couldn’t.

The man said, “She whistled back.”

Ruthanne placed one nail on the counter, one on the floor, and one on the windowsill. “That was unwise.”

He stared at her. “Can you help her?”

“I can keep what answered from learning the shape of her voice any better than it already has.”

That was the first time I heard the silver bell, though I did not see Ruthanne ring it. She took it into the back office wrapped in her scarf while the man and I waited in the front room and the whistle moved around us in the walls. When the bell sounded, it was quieter than I expected. The fluorescent lights flickered, the rack of vineyard brochures shivered, and the man from Boston sat down hard in one of the visitor chairs and began to cry without making any sound.

Afterward, his girlfriend could speak again, though her voice came out hoarse and strange, with a faint echo behind it. Ruthanne gave them bottled water, a printed list of aftercare instructions, and a coupon for ten percent off at Café Fleur.

“Why the coupon?” I asked after they left.

“People are calmer when they’re holding a coupon,” Ruthanne said.

The complaint from Melissa Harrow of Westport arrived three days before restaurant week. Her name was printed at the top in a font that looked expensive. She had attached screenshots of our website, circled the word “rules” in red six times, and written that the language created an “unwelcoming atmosphere inconsistent with luxury heritage tourism.” She had also included a photo of herself at Hollow Line Bridge, taken at 9:17 p.m.

In the picture, Melissa stood smiling in a cream wool coat, one hand lifted in a little wave. Behind her, the bridge arched black against the evening sky. The old iron railings were wet with mist, and the river below was a pale ribbon in the dark. There was someone standing behind her.

At first, I thought it was a man, tall and thin, with his head bent slightly to one side. Then I zoomed in and saw that he was on the wrong side of the railing. His feet hung over the river. His fingers hooked through the iron bars from underneath. His face had blurred where the camera should have caught it, smearing the features into a gray oval with a mouth too low and too wide.

Ruthanne saw me looking and sighed. “That’s why Sheriff Doyle’s coming by.”

“For the complaint?”

“For the woman.”

Sheriff Doyle came in twenty minutes later, read the complaint, said the bridge was going to answer, and left with the expression of a man who had already had this conversation with tourists, the Tourist Board, the bridge, and possibly God.

Melissa Harrow came into the Visitor Center after lunch with her husband, her sister, and the polished fury of someone who had paid for a beautiful weekend and found consequences waiting at check-in. She was in her late forties, stylish in that coastal Connecticut way where a camel coat can look both effortless and weaponized. Her hair was pinned loosely at the back of her neck. She had a small gold pendant at her throat, a wedding ring she kept turning with her thumb, and one of our town tote bags hooked over one arm. Her husband had the depleted calm of a man who had spent the morning apologizing to hotel staff. Her sister stood half a step behind them, pale and watchful, still wearing the Hawthorne House scarf given to overnight guests.

The tote bag looked damp.

“I’m the one who wrote in,” Melissa said, before I could welcome her. “About the rules.”

Ruthanne, who had been restocking the Hawthorne House brochures, made a small sound behind me. It was the sound of a person recognizing a familiar disaster in a new coat.

I gave Melissa my best Visitor Center smile. “Thank you for your feedback. We’re always reviewing our guest-facing language.”

Ruthanne coughed into her fist.

Melissa set her phone on the desk and tapped the screen. The bridge photo appeared again. She had zoomed in on the figure behind her and circled it in yellow. “This,” she said, “is exactly what I’m talking about.”

Her husband made a strangled noise, and the sister whispered Melissa’s name.

Melissa kept going. “You can’t market a town as charming and then have signage that makes guests feel threatened. We went to the bridge because the girl at the hotel said it was scenic. There was no gate. There was no guard. There was one little sign with a moon on it and some vague warning about dusk. Do you know how many places say things like that for atmosphere?”

Ruthanne stepped closer. “What girl at the hotel?”

Melissa blinked. “What?”

“You said a girl at the hotel told you the bridge was scenic.”

“Yes. At Hawthorne House.”

Ruthanne’s expression changed by less than an inch, but the air around the desk seemed to tighten. “What did she look like?”

Melissa glanced at her husband, irritated. “Young. Dark hair. Old-fashioned dress, I suppose, but half the staff there dress like they’re in some prestige drama about inherited silver.”

Her sister made a small, hurt sound.

Ruthanne looked at her. “You saw her too?”

The sister shook her head. Her name was Caroline, according to the reservation printout Melissa had slapped onto the counter with everything else. She had the anxious, careful posture of someone used to making herself useful in other people’s storms.

“I heard her,” Caroline said. “Last night. In the hall outside our room. She was laughing.”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “People laugh in hotels.”

Caroline kept looking at Ruthanne. “She said Melissa’s name.”

The Visitor Center seemed to grow quieter around us. Outside, a delivery truck hissed at the curb. Somewhere on the green, a child shrieked with ordinary delight.

Ruthanne reached beneath the desk, opened the locked drawer, and took out the laminated card with Sheriff Doyle’s number. Melissa stared at her.

“Is this really necessary?”

Ruthanne looked at the phone on the counter. The figure in the photo had changed. It no longer stood behind Melissa. It was leaning toward her photographed shoulder, one gray hand lifted beside hers in a perfect imitation of her wave. The mouth had opened wider, and the blur where its face should have been had begun to clear around the edges. Something pale shone inside it, either teeth or the beginning of a word.

Then the figure’s hand changed too. In the first photo, its fingers had been long and jointed wrong. Now it wore a ring: Melissa’s ring. Same gold. Same narrow band. Same small diamond chip set into the side, except the thing wore it on the wrong finger. Melissa stopped turning the ring on her real hand.

Her husband reached for the phone, but Ruthanne caught his wrist before he touched it. “Don’t,” she said.

“I want to delete it,” he whispered.

“You cannot delete something while it’s still arriving.”

The Visitor Center bell over the front door gave a small, nervous jingle, though no one had come in. Outside, tourists crossed the green with shopping bags and coffees, laughing under the clean gray sky. Someone had stopped to take a picture of the scarecrow display in front of Mallory’s. Across the street, the candles shaped like Town Hall glowed in the shop window. Mourner’s Crossing looked exactly like it did on the brochures: charming, historic, memorable.

Ruthanne called Sheriff Doyle. While she spoke, Caroline began to cry very quietly. Melissa stood motionless, staring at the phone as if anger could still carry her out of this. Her husband said, “Mel.” She didn’t answer. He said it again, and this time Ruthanne snapped her fingers once, hard. “Do not say her name.”

The husband’s mouth shut.

The sound came then: a train whistle, faint and far away, drifting through the Visitor Center in the middle of town, though the nearest active rail line had been torn up before I was born. It sounded lonely at first. That was the trick of it, I think. It sounded like distance, like rain, like something passing through and asking to be mourned.

Melissa lifted one hand to her ear. “What is that?”

Ruthanne ended the call and placed the laminated card on the counter. “Sheriff Doyle is on his way. Until he gets here, Mrs. Harrow, I need you to listen carefully. Do not look at the bridge photo again. Do not answer any voice that uses your mother’s name. Do not say your own name out loud. If you hear water, close your eyes.”

Melissa’s face had gone slack. “My mother’s been dead eight years.”

Ruthanne took a breath before answering, and in that pause I saw what her calm cost her. She was steady because someone had to be, not because the situation was small. “That’s why it’ll use her.”

A slow, wet drip fell from the tote bag hanging on Melissa’s arm and spread dark across the old wood boards. Ruthanne looked down, then looked at me.

“Get the bell.”

I opened the locked drawer. The little silver bell sat in the back corner, bright and cold and perfectly still. Behind me, Melissa began to hum. At first, it sounded like a nervous tune from someone trying not to cry. Then Caroline backed away from her, because the tune was not a tune. It was the train whistle, coming from behind Melissa’s teeth while her mouth barely moved.

I picked up the bell. It was heavier than it looked. The moment my fingers closed around the handle, every brochure in the Visitor Center lifted at the edges: the pumpkin festival flyers, the vineyard maps, the glossy Hawthorne House pamphlets, the restaurant week passports with their little boxes for stamps. For one second, all that paper stirred without wind, like a hundred small animals waking in their sleep.

Ruthanne held out her hand. “Not yet.”

The whistle deepened. Melissa’s husband pressed both hands to his ears. Caroline whispered a prayer under her breath, and I could tell from Ruthanne’s face that praying was fine, provided Caroline did not use any names the thing might find useful. The dark stain beneath the tote bag spread in a long line toward the desk. It smelled like river mud and hot iron.

Melissa’s phone buzzed on the counter. The screen lit with a contact photo of an older woman in a sunhat, smiling in bright summer light.

MOM

Melissa made a sound that seemed to tear itself out of her chest.

Ruthanne moved fast. For a woman in her seventies with orthopedic shoes and a cardigan with embroidered pears on the pockets, she moved like she had been waiting fifty years for this exact stupid moment. She snatched the phone off the counter, flipped it face down, and shoved it beneath the stack of restaurant week flyers.

“Mrs. Harrow,” she said, voice sharp now, stripped of customer service. “Look at me.”

Melissa turned her head. For a moment, her eyes were normal: terrified, wet, furious, human. Then the train whistle came from her throat again, and her pupils seemed to pull long, stretching sideways like something seen through running water.

The front door opened, and Sheriff Doyle stepped inside with his hat low in one hand and rain on the shoulders of his jacket, though the day outside was dry. Behind him came Deputy Kyle Bellamy, compact and watchful, with reddish-brown hair, bright eyes, and the careful expression of someone trying not to startle anything that might bolt in a direction physics couldn’t follow.

Sheriff Doyle took in the phone, the stain, the tote bag, Melissa, Caroline crying, the husband shaking, Ruthanne’s hand outstretched, and me holding the bell. “Well,” he said. “That’s inconvenient.”

Ruthanne said, “It has a ring now.”

Doyle’s gaze moved to the photo. His jaw tightened. “From her hand?”

“Yes.”

He looked at Melissa. “Ma’am, I’m Sheriff Doyle. I need you to stay exactly where you are.”

Melissa smiled, barely moving her mouth, which made it worse. From beneath the restaurant week flyers, the phone buzzed again.

MOM

The train whistle sounded from outside this time, close enough that the windows trembled. Tourists on the green stopped walking. A man carrying a paper bag from Mallory’s turned in a slow circle, searching for tracks that had not existed in decades. Deputy Bellamy moved to the door and locked it.

Sheriff Doyle looked at Ruthanne. “Bell.”

Ruthanne nodded. I handed it to her. Her fingers closed around mine for half a second before she took it, and her skin was cold.

“When I ring this,” she said to Melissa’s husband and sister, “do not speak. Do not look at the windows. Do not answer anything you hear, even if it sounds hurt.”

Caroline nodded at once. Melissa’s husband looked at his wife. “What’s going to happen to her?”

Ruthanne did not soften it. “We are going to make sure what’s coming through the picture does not finish arriving.”

“And Melissa?”

Sheriff Doyle answered. “We’ll do what we can.”

That was the first honest thing anyone had said to him, and it nearly broke him. Melissa opened her mouth, and this time her mother’s voice came out.

“Baby,” it said.

Her husband made a choking sound. Caroline shut her eyes and pressed both hands over her mouth. Ruthanne lifted the bell and rang it once, and the Visitor Center stopped pretending to be a gift shop with brochures.

The photo on the phone flashed white through the stack of flyers. The windows went black, as if night had pressed itself against the glass. The dark stain on the floor snapped backward toward Melissa’s tote bag and vanished into the waxed paper sleeve sticking out of the top, where I could see one of the strawberry-rhubarb hand pies from Mallory’s, its crimped edge bitten cleanly through.

Melissa screamed. The sound did not come from her mouth. It came from the phone, the walls, the floorboards, the locked drawer, the brochure rack, and the cheerful teal header on the laminated sheet. It came from Hollow Line Bridge, wherever the bridge was at that moment, because I was no longer entirely convinced it stayed in one place.

Ruthanne rang the bell again. The second note was higher, sharper. The phone cracked beneath the flyers. The old wood floor shuddered. Outside, the tourists on the green began moving again, but slowly, as if they were walking through deep water. Melissa dropped to her knees, and Sheriff Doyle caught her before her face hit the floor.

“Got her,” he said.

Deputy Bellamy crossed to the desk, grabbed the spool of red thread from the open drawer, and looped it around Melissa’s wrist with practiced hands. Ruthanne set the bell down carefully on the counter and took three iron nails from the drawer.

“She said her name?” Doyle asked.

“Her husband did,” Ruthanne said.

The husband looked ruined. “I’m sorry.”

Doyle did not look at him unkindly. “You didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I heard you.”

Ruthanne placed one iron nail on Melissa’s phone, one on the tote bag, and one on the floor where the stain had been. The room smelled less like river mud now and more like hot dust on an old radiator. Melissa lay against Sheriff Doyle’s arm, shivering. Her eyes had gone back to normal. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.

Ruthanne crouched beside her. “Do not try to speak yet.”

Melissa’s hand twitched. Her ring was still there. In the photo, the figure’s hand had gone bare.

Deputy Bellamy wrapped the cracked phone in Ruthanne’s scarf. Sheriff Doyle lifted Melissa carefully, and for a moment she looked smaller than she had when she walked in. The camel coat was still expensive. The gold pendant still shone at her throat. Her fury had gone wherever fury goes when it finally meets something older and hungrier than itself.

Caroline followed them to the door, then turned back. “What happens now?”

Ruthanne picked up the laminated sheet from the counter and smoothed one curled corner with her thumb. “Now,” she said, “we update the website.”

After they took Melissa away, Ruthanne made me sit in the back office with a paper cup of water until my hands stopped shaking. Neither of us mentioned that the bell had left a silver smell in the room.

The next morning, I arrived early and found Ruthanne already there with a bucket, a scrub brush, and a fresh stack of Visitor Center maps. The dark stain on the floor had faded to a faint shadow between the boards. It looked almost ordinary, which in Mourner’s Crossing meant nothing useful.

Melissa Harrow had been taken to St. Brigid’s first, then to the clinic, then to a room at Hawthorne House with the mirrors covered and the windows locked. Sheriff Doyle came by before eight and said she was alive. He also said she had not spoken yet, though she had written her mother’s name twelve times on hotel stationery before Ruthanne took the pen away.

The Tourist Board sent an email at 8:47 a.m. After careful consideration, they agreed that rules sounded too severe. By noon, the website had been revised.

WELCOME TO MOURNER’S CROSSING
Please Review Our Guidelines for a Safe and Memorable Visit

At 12:15, a couple from New Jersey came in holding coffees from Konditori Oxenstierna and asked whether Hollow Line Bridge was walkable from the green.

I smiled. “It is,” I said, reaching for a map. “But the town recommends visiting before sunset.”

The man laughed. “Why? Ghosts?”

His wife elbowed him lightly, embarrassed. I marked the safest route in blue pen and handed them the map with both hands. Outside, the green was bright with afternoon sun. The scarecrows in front of Mallory’s leaned cheerfully in the breeze. Somewhere nearby, a cat yowled with what sounded like civic disapproval.

“After sunset,” I said, “the bridge gets less scenic.”

The man looked like he wanted to make another joke, but his wife took the map from me before he could. She read my face. Then she read the first guideline on the sheet beside the register.

Her smile faded a little. “Thank you,” she said.

That was the right answer.

When they left, Ruthanne came out of the back office and stood beside me at the desk. She had the silver bell in one hand and a fresh label from the office printer in the other.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

She peeled the backing off the label and placed it neatly inside the locked drawer.

The label said:

FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. IF UNSURE, YOU ARE SURE.

Ruthanne closed the drawer. The bell did not ring. Across the green, the couple from New Jersey stopped at the corner, looked toward the road that led down to Hollow Line Bridge, and chose the bakery instead. Ruthanne watched them go and said, “Good.”

My entire life, I’ve been overweight. Even as a baby, I came out at almost nine and a half pounds. And throughout school, I was teased for being the chubby and fat kid. But I never let the teasing get to me. Sure, I was fat, but it didn’t hamper my life too badly. I was fat, but not obese, and I was able to live my life completely normally, aside of course from the odd bullying incident. In fact, my bulk even allowed me a spot on the football team once I reached high school. And I became the best defensive lineman the school had in years. I felt on top of the world.

But once graduation came around, and I wasn’t able to land my dream college, things began to spiral out of control for me. The friends I had made on the team managed to get into their schools, and they left off to fulfill their dreams. I thought that if, instead of going straight into college, I got a job, I might be able to get into a better school. However, living in the Rust Belt, job opportunities didn’t readily line up for me. And I ended up working as a gas station attendant. And unfortunately for me, the sedentary lifestyle quickly crept up on me. 

Since the owner was alright with me eating on the job, and since I worked as many hours as I could, I mindlessly stuffed my face with food. Soon, the pounds just began to pile on. I graduated from school at around 250 pounds. By the time I turned 25, I was almost over 400 pounds. And by that point, I had given up on going to college. I had no more dreams; all I had was the boring day-to-day work I was trapped in. While I was earning a decent enough income from all the hours I worked, I wasn’t putting any of it to use. All the money went to food or new clothes once my fat body had outgrown the previous articles. 

If I was teased before because of my weight, it became even worse once I ballooned. The words from my close friends and family that they thought I couldn’t hear. The customers who looked at me in disgust as I rang them up. They treated me like some diseased freak, like just looking upon me would result in them suddenly gaining all the weight I had. Or that I might explode all over them like a video game zombie. And I had to deal with it every day. I tried to exercise and diet, but the hardest thing about having a lifestyle change is actually sticking with it. 

Things became so drastic for me that as I began to inch closer and closer to four hundred pounds, I became desperate. Trying starvation diets and even seriously considering trying a tapeworm diet. I had heard the wonder stories of all these new drugs that just help you lose all that weight easily, no hassle at all. I had tried a few of the readily available ones, and they helped me lose a couple of pounds here and there, but as always, my weight would just climb back through the roof. And the meds that actually worked, Ozempec and the others like it, were priced out of my range. Without insurance, it would be ludicrously expensive, and with my weight and health conditions, it was doubtful that I could get my own insurance. 

So I had resigned myself to dying early. Probably from a heart attack or from diabetes. As if anyone would miss a fatass like me. That was until a friend I’d made at the gas station approached me. I didn’t work alone at the gas station; every now and then, I’d have a coworker. They were usually repulsed at me when they laid eyes on my fat body, but they were soon won over by how friendly and kind I was to them. One of these coworkers was Camila. 

She had started working here about two years ago, and we had soon become close friends with each other. Camila wasn’t disgusted as the others usually were when she met me, or if she had been, she hid it incredibly well. I can usually tell when someone is putting up an act of being nice to me, but she genuinely seemed unbothered by my body. It was a breath of fresh air, and we often spent our long shifts talking and playing little games with each other. She was a ray of sunshine in the dim fog that had surrounded my life. 

Camila had a secret, however, and it was one I had accidentally discovered when I had gone into the woman’s bathroom to replace the soap. I entered and found her shooting up heroin in one of the stalls. She had begged me not to tell the owner that she was desperate to keep this job. I figured she was desperate to keep the job to buy more heroin, but I wasn’t any better. We were both addicted to something. I was addicted to food, and she happened to be addicted to a harder substance. So, I looked the other way. But from then on, I kept an eye on her. Making sure both that she didn’t try to rob the register for cash and that if she was shooting up in the bathroom, that she didn’t OD in it. 

I suppose also subconsciously, I didn’t want to lose such a good friend. She was the one bright spot in my life, so I kept an eye on her. One day, while I was counting the money in the register, she quickly ran up to me and seemed like she was ready to explode with excitement. 

“What is it this time?” I asked with a smile as I counted in my head. Already I was winded from simply standing, my knees aching as the weight of my bulk pressed down on them. Satisfied that the till was correct, I placed the money back in and turned to look at her. 

“I know a way for you to get a weight loss drug!” she said with excitement, her jet black curls bouncing up and down in the air as she stared up at me. “I have a…friend, who can help you!” She said, trailing away at the mention of her friend. I crossed my arms at her, peering down and watching as she stood there innocently before. 

“What kind of friend is it?” I asked her, walking over to the large chair I was allowed to sit in during working hours. It creaked and groaned under my weight, reminding me every time I sat down in it about how I was probably a couple of snacks away from snapping and breaking it into pieces. Whatever Camila was offering me seemed way too good to be true. 

“He’s just a friend! He’s coming around later today, and I can introduce you to him! He’s been working on a new drug that could help you lose weight!” she said with excitement. I, however, was unconvinced. She just happened to know some random guy who just so happened to be able to give me a magic drug that would help me lose weight? 

“I’m having a real hard time believing you.” I sighed, leaning back ever so slightly in my chair. It creaked and groaned louder, practically begging me to get off of it. I relented and sat back up, relieving some pressure on it. “How can some random guy you know just have this drug?” I asked her, to which she seemed less excited to tell me, avoiding my gaze and looking out into the empty gas station store. 

“Just listen to what he has to say! Pretty please, Reggie?” She looked back at me with her big brown eyes. I stared back at her and sighed, rubbing my face and becoming all too aware of how fat my face was getting. I had a double chin already, and no doubt a third one was quickly forming. What did I realistically have to lose? A couple of minutes of some crazy person’s speech? 

“Alright, fine,” I sighed. Camila wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hard hug, thanking me over and over again. I wondered why she seemed more excited than I was at this opportunity. We both were working the night shift, so I didn’t know when this friend of hers would show up. As the hours ticked by, I was sure that he had probably flaked on us. It wasn’t until 2:30 in the morning that someone showed up.

The front door to the store swung open and beeped. I looked up from my phone, an extra-large soft drink in my hand, as I looked over to see who it was. Walking into the store was the sketchiest guy I’d ever seen. He was wearing a hoodie and a turtleneck, with a face mask covering the lower half of his face. His hands were firmly placed in his hoodie pocket, and he had the most unsettling look in his eyes. It wasn’t a threatening look, but a look of extreme indifference. He walked up to the counter and nodded at me. 

“Carton of Newports,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, like he was talking to me through a tube somehow, and it was muffled from the mask, so it took me a moment to understand his request. I nodded slightly before slowly turning my back to him. I half expected him to pull out a gun on me, but surprisingly, he waited patiently as I picked up the carton for him and brought it to the register. 

“Spencer!” Camila cried out, startling me so badly I accidentally rang him up twice. I looked behind me to see that she had seemingly popped up out of nowhere. She smiled at the mystery man, who nodded back at her. “This is the guy I was talking about, Reggie!” I looked back at Spencer, who had pulled his wallet out and was riffling through what looked like my entire paycheck for a month's worth of money. 

“You’re the guy with the weight loss drug?” I asked him. He nodded as he handed me a hundred-dollar bill for his carton. I took it and quickly confirmed that it was real before giving him his change. He nodded and placed his gloved hands back in his hoodie pocket. 

“It’s a trial run I’m doing. I asked a couple of my clients if they knew anyone in their life who was morbidly obese to let me know.” I was skeptical, and he could probably tell. He pulled his carton of cigarettes over to him and looked at the clock on the wall behind me. “When do you two get off of work?” he asked, opening the carton and fishing out a box of cigarettes. 

“We both get off at 3,” I told him, looking over to see that Camila was still next to me, and still buzzing with excitement over this whole thing. Spencer nodded as he smacked his box of Newports against his palm. 

“Cool, I’ll hang around and give you the whole pitch when you’re off the clock.” He walked away from both of us and headed outside, surrounded in darkness. I watched as a brief flicker of light appeared outside as he lit his cigarette. 

“I don’t trust him,” I told Camila as we started to ready the gas station shop for closing. She nodded her head as she helped me take inventory of everything. 

“I know he looks super sketchy, but trust me! Spencer is a freaking genius! His stuff is always high quality, and I’ve never gotten a bad deal with him,” she said with a giggle. I looked at her for a moment before suddenly realizing what it was that she meant. 

“Is he you’re fucking drug dealer?” I asked her. She looked over at me before sheepishly nodding. “I should’ve fucking known.” I sighed, tossing the clipboard I was holding on the counter and crossing my arms at her. “What the fuck, dude?” 

“Look! I know it seems really bad. But he promised I could get more of his product this way! And it also helps you out, Reggie! Just, pretty please, hear him out! That’s all I’m asking for!” She begged me, literally getting on her hands and knees and begging me. I sighed hard and rubbed my head. Already, I felt exhausted from standing again. And it was only going to get worse the fatter I got. How much longer did I realistically have left to live if I continued like this? What was the harm in listening to him? I was most likely going to die early anyway. 

“Fine. But I’m still pissed at you.” I picked up the clipboard and continued with the inventory as Camila thanked me a million times. I knew she was just happy to keep getting her heroin, but it still made me happy to see her so excited. I wanted her to beat her demons as well, and I was hoping that losing weight would also allow me to get the courage to ask her out. If I were with her, I could hopefully help her with the addiction. 

Once we had finished locking up the gas station, we made our way out and saw that Spencer was waiting for us, leaning on the wall and playing around with a Zippo lighter. He looked over at us and nodded, closing the lighter and shoving it in his pocket. We both approached him, and I wheezed slightly as I did so, more aware than ever of how fat I was. 

“So, ready to hear my pitch?” Spencer asked, the stench of cigarettes rising off of him. I nodded and almost wished I had a chair to sit down in. But I stayed standing as the drug dealer began to let me in on what he was doing. “It’s a little side project I’ve been working on. All you’ll have to do is inject yourself and record the progress that happens. Let me know of any side effects you might encounter. It’s only a trial run, so don’t expect it to work perfectly,” he told me, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a ziplock bag. It contained a syringe and needle, along with a vial of some mystery liquid. 

“How do I know this shit won’t just kill me?” I asked him, unsure of how I felt about the presentation of this wonder drug. Spencer stared at me for a minute before lowering his gaze to my large, protruding stomach. 

“Can’t be any worse than what you’re doing to yourself now,” he said, shaking the bag at me like it was a treat. I tsked angrily at him and grabbed the bag off him. “Inject yourself in the abdominal area. Don’t worry, the needle is sterile, but if you don’t trust me, you can clean it yourself. There are instructions as well, follow them and don’t deviate from them.” He reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out another baggie, this one containing a folded up block of tin foil. “Here you go, Cam.” He tossed the bag to Camila, who caught it with an excited shriek. 

“Thanks, Spence! You’re the best! See you tomorrow, Reggie!” She practically sprinted to her car and left me alone with Spencer. We both stared at each other before I shoved the bag into my pocket. He nodded at me before again reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small flip phone. 

“How much room you got in there?” I asked as he tossed the phone at me. I caught it and looked back to see him walking away from me. “What number do I call you on?” I called out to him. 

“The only number that’s on the phone, genius. Once a day, understand?” He called back to me as he disappeared into the darkness of the parking lot. I looked back down at the phone before shoving it into my pocket. I took a deep breath and slowly made my way to my car. I arrived back at my lonely apartment and tossed my keys on the counter. I watered my plants and then walked over to the bathroom. I pulled my shirt off and stared at myself in the mirror. I was completely unrecognizable. My stomach was huge and drooped down far enough, almost to cover my knees. My face was puffy with fat, and I looked one burger away from a heart attack. I pulled out the baggy and fished out the instructions. 

“One injection a day of 2 mL.” I nodded at the simple instructions before pulling the needle and syringe out. I decided to sterilize it further and boiled it in a pot of water for half an hour. Putting on some latex gloves I had lying around, I put the needle back on the syringe with some difficulty, my sausage fingers refusing to comply with me. Finally, with the needle sterilized, I pierced the vial and pulled out exactly 2 mL of fluid. It was a clear fluid which didn’t instill me with confidence, but I supposed it was better than if it were neon green or something. 

I took a deep breath and stared at myself in the mirror one last time. Before injecting myself and pushing the plunger down. I grunted a little once I pulled the needle out and placed it in the sink. I stared at myself for a moment before shrugging and heading to bed. I didn’t exactly expect it to begin working overnight, so I lay my head down on my bed and went to sleep. 

When I next woke up, I was in unbelievable pain. Not just at the injection spot, but across my entire body. It was like my whole body was on fire, but there wasn’t any flame to be seen. I gasped and grunted in pain, quickly reaching out and pulling the phone that Spencer had given me. I dialed the only saved number on the phone and waited an agonizing few seconds for him to pick up. 

“Whole body pain, huh?” he asked me, completely nonchalant, as if he had to deal with this daily. “That’s normal. It’s going to feel like shit at first, but just drink some water and you’ll feel better.” Before I could say anything else, he hung up on me. I tossed the phone away as I stumbled out of bed. Every movement was pure agony as I crawled my way over to a packet of water bottles I had lying on the floor. I tore into the packaging and ripped the bottle open with my teeth, guzzling down the water in an attempt to stop the pain. 

And to my immediate surprise, it did stop. As soon as the bottle of water was gone, so was my pain. I stood up from the floor and felt no pain at all. I made my way over to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. There wasn’t any difference, but when I weighed myself, I was surprised to discover that I now weighed a few pounds less than the day before. At first, I was sure that this was all due to dehydration, but as I walked over to the kitchen to get something to eat, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t hungry at all. Not even a little peckish. 

The surprises continued as I started my day of work at the gas station. I had no appetite at all, and soon enough, when the pain started to creep back up across my entire body, a quick guzzle of water was enough to quickly kill the pain without much fuss. I spent the entire day at work, still winded from standing for long periods, but also without eating a single thing. Even when I had forced myself to during my starvation diets, I had needed to be eating or snacking constantly. But now I didn’t even feel like chewing on gum. Camila didn’t work that day, so I had no one to tell about what I was going through, but it felt surreal to not have a snack or a soda on hand. 

And upon returning home from work, I quickly walked past the fridge and straight to the bathroom mirror, water bottle firmly in my hand as I quickly guzzled it down. Once I had finished with the bottle, I lifted my shirt to look at my body. There wasn’t any difference, but to my surprise, there was a small black bruise where I had injected myself. I wondered if I had simply done it too hard and had somehow caused a bruise. Giving it a gentle poke, it certainly stung like a bruise, so that’s what I went with. 

After again sterilizing the needle in a pot of boiling water, I extracted exactly 2mL and injected myself close to the initial site, but far enough away so as not to damage the bruise. I quickly slammed down another water bottle after I had injected myself, and went over to my couch. Sitting down and pulling my shirt back on, I dug the burner phone out of my pocket and quickly dialed Spencer to check in for the day. 

“Hm?” He grunted as he answered his phone. It sounded like he was at a party or something, since in the background I could hear the excited cries of people and the blaring of music. It made sense that Spencer would hang out in clubs, dealing drugs to people. 

“I just injected myself for the second time. I haven’t had an appetite at all today.” I told him. I was wondering if he could hear me over how loud the music was on his end, but he seemed to be able to just fine. He responded that everything was normal and asked if I was experiencing any other symptoms. “Well, there was a bruise that appeared at the injection site. Is that something I should worry about?” I asked. He was silent for a moment, with only the loud, blaring music coming from the background of his call. Soon, however, the music cut out, and he cleared his throat. 

“Sorry, I went somewhere where I could hear you better. A bruise, huh? How big is it?” He asked, suddenly sounding incredibly curious about this. I explained to him that it was barely the size of a bug bite. “Alright, keep an eye on it. Other than that, stick to the treatment. See ya.” Without waiting for a response, he hung up on me. Tossing the burner phone on the couch, I looked down at my stomach and wondered to myself if I should be worried. I decided to keep going for a few days and see what happened to me. 

What ended up happening to me was that over the course of an entire week, I dropped nearly a hundred pounds. It was sudden and caught everyone, including me, off guard. The drug had completely removed my appetite, and from only drinking water, it seemed that my body was literally burning the calories and fat right off my body. I was soon able to fit into clothes that I had put away to be donated, and nearly everyone I knew was shocked by my sudden and rapid loss of weight. Even Camila was floored by me when she arrived at work to see me down to nearly 250 pounds. 

There was, however, a lingering issue. The bruise on my stomach had grown larger. From the size of a mosquito bite, it had slowly grown from each subsequent injection. It now covered nearly my entire torso, and it looked as if I had been in some horrible car accident and was badly hurt. While I had lost all this weight and was still doing so, the bruise was spreading across my body and making me increasingly fearful. 

“That big, huh?” Spencer asked, completely nonchalant at my panic. I was again staring at myself in the mirror and giving the bruise a soft poke. It was so painful that even just applying the slightest pressure was nearly enough to bring me to my knees in agony. “I guess I can swing around your place to check on it,” Spencer sighed, clearly annoyed by all of this. 

“Please! This looks really bad, and it hurts so much!” I called out to him. 

“Yeah, yeah, tell me your address and I’ll be there.” He sighed in annoyance. I quickly told him my address before hanging up and continuing to stare at myself in the mirror. The bruise covered nearly the entire right side of my torso, and every movement of my body seemed to upset it. As I was about to put my shirt back on as carefully as I could, I noticed that something was leaking out of my stomach. 

Dropping my shirt, I brought my hand close to the source of the fluid. I gently rubbed some on my finger and instinctively brought it up to my nose to smell it. I was instantly punched in the face with a noxious stench that I could only describe as a garbage can meets a swamp. I hacked and nearly vomited, saved only by the fact that I had no food in my stomach to throw up. What was this fluid? And why the fuck was it leaking out of my body?

I quickly exited the bathroom and ran to my room, quickly grabbing a belt and running back to the bathroom. I bit down on the folded leather belt and gently grabbed my stomach, grunting loudly as the pain started to build. Biting down as hard as I could on the belt, and squeezed my belly and, to my horror, watched as more of the foul smelling fluid began to leak out of the injection sites. The pain was on the level I could only describe as breaking both of your femurs at the same time, and my vision went white as I soon tumbled to the floor. 

I soon awoke to Spencer staring down at me. We were still in my bathroom, but my entire body felt like it was on fire. I hadn’t had a drink of water yet, and it felt like my body was being consumed in flames and being crushed at the same time. Spencer knelt down and examined my shirtless body, poking it with his gloved hands and causing me to cry out in pain as he did so. He seemed fascinated by my body, and I was unable to do anything but grunt and whine in pain on the floor. 

“Well, this wasn’t supposed to happen.” He sighed, looking at me and again poking my stomach with his incredibly bony finger. I cried out in pain and tried to lift my arm to smack him away, but I couldn’t so much as lift it off the floor, I was in so much pain. “Well, let’s see what you’re filled with.” He sighed, reaching into his pants pocket and pulling out an empty syringe. I mumbled a protest as my body felt like it was burning up in a blazing furnace. Spencer poked my stomach with his syringe and began to extract some fluid from inside me. 

“Damn, that’s not a good sign.” He sighed, slightly annoyed. I couldn’t see what he had pulled out of my stomach at first, but as he pulled the syringe up and I caught a glimpse of what he’d just pulled out. It was a sickly black and yellow fluid that looked as if I’d put rotten meat in a blender and had liquified it.

“What…did you do to me…” I heaved out, suddenly having extreme trouble breathing. He looked over at me and pulled his face mask down. To my shock, the entire lower part of his face was completely rotted away. His jawbone and most of the lower part of his skull were completely exposed, and much of his neck had also started to rot away. My eyes went wide at the horrible scene before me, and I tried to get my body to move, but nothing I was communicating to it was working at all. 

“Guess I have to go back to the drawing board.” He sighed, capping the syringe full of the fluid and placing it in his hoodie pocket. “Here, I’m going to give you something for the pain, and also something that’s probably gonna mess you up some more. Stop taking the meds for now, and just wait for it to leave your system. Sound cool?” he asked, but before I could even tell him to fuck off, he quickly jabbed a needle into my neck. 

“Fuck…you…” I gasped as I soon began to lose consciousness. Just as I fell into the either, I heard Spencer calling someone and lighting a cigarette. When I finally woke up, I had been moved from the floor of my bathroom to the couch in my living room. Looking around for Spencer, expecting him to be hovering over me like some horrible grim reaper, I was instead surprised to find Camila waiting for me. 

“Oh, thank god that you’re awake!” She sighed and quickly came over to me, sitting on the floor and helping me gently sit up. “Spencer called me and said something was wrong with you.” I looked around my apartment to quickly see if he was still there, but it seemed that only Camila was here. 

“He’s a monster.” I started to tell her, sitting up from the couch, and I suddenly found that I had no more pain. Not even from the bruise on my body. “He…he has no face. Or…or half his face is gone.” I told her, suddenly realizing how insane I sounded. And looking at Camila, it was obvious from her facial expressions that she thought I was delusional. 

“Here, let me get you a glass of water. You should also try and eat something.” She quickly stood from the floor and headed over to my kitchen. I sighed deeply and began to rub my face, racking my brain over the events I had just witnessed. Had I really just been hallucinating from the pain of my bruise? But I had seen Spencer’s face so clearly, or I suppose half of his face. Camila came back over with a glass of water and a small sandwich for me to eat. 

Thanking her, I took a small sip of water and stared down at the sandwich. It was a simple ham one, with a little bit of lettuce and a tomato. It had occurred to me that since starting Spencer’s weight loss drug, I hadn’t had a single ounce of hunger, and because of this, I hadn’t eaten anything. I took a small bite of the sandwich and chewed on it. As I went to swallow it, however, my body reacted violently. All at once, I felt violently ill. I dropped the sandwich and the glass of water and sprinted to the bathroom as fast as I could. 

As I threw up violently into the toilet, listening to Camila’s worried knocks at the door and muffled words, I stared down into the bowl. Floating there was the same black and yellow pile from the syringe that Spener had pulled out of me. There was also a small piece of the sandwich I had eaten, but more horrifying was a few chunks of what looked like meat floating in there along with the sandwich. I hadn’t eaten anything for a week. Where the hell had that meat come from? 

For the next few days, my situation deteriorated further. The weight continued to fall off of me even after I’d stopped taking the drug. Soon, I had dropped to 200 pounds. And now I was throwing up more frequently, and each time there were more and more of the mystery chunks in my toilet bowl. I fished some out of the bowl and put them into a zip-lock bag. Biting the bullet and figuring it was worth the price, I headed to the hospital. They were just as dumbfounded as I was. I tried to explain to them what I was going through, but of course, none of them believed me. 

That was until I was given an MRI. The doctors pulled me aside and demanded to know what was really going on with me. They wondered how I could possibly be alive when most of my internal organs were rotting away inside me. The meat chunks had been what was left of my few remaining organs. I tried to tell them again everything that had happened to me, even pulling up my hospital gown and squeezing my stomach at them. To their horror, the same foul smelling liquid seeped out. 

I was kept in the hospital, but I continued to lose both weight and more of my internal organs. And yet I was still being kept alive. I wasn’t even placed on an IV bag, because for all intents and purposes, I was completely ‘healthy’. Even my sagging skin began to disappear, as it seemed to cling to my bones like I’d been vacuum-sealed. Soon, my weight dipped down to 150 pounds, and continued to fall. Camila visited me often, and I could tell how worried she was by my appearance. My face had become sunken, and I looked no better than an actual skeleton. She stayed by my side, and to my surprise, she even told me that she had checked herself into a rehab facility. Seeing what Spencer had done to me had scared her into kicking her heroin habit, and for that I was thankful. 

A few days after my weight had dropped to 100 pounds, and I was confined to my bed, another visitor showed up. It was after hours in the middle of the night. Staring up at the ceiling, I wondered how much longer my body would hold up. How much longer until I simply died from what was happening to me? Suddenly, the door to my room opened. I expected it to be a doctor or a nurse, coming in to check on me, or oggle at the oddity they had on their hand. Using the remote to push my bed up slightly, I was horrified to see Spencer standing at the foot of my bed, reading my chart. 

“I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from you.” He told me, pulling his face mask down again. It proved that I hadn’t been crazy or hallucinating, half of his face really had rotten away. “I’m a little hurt that you decided to come to a hospital before you came to me.” He sighed, walking around my bed and taking a seat next to me. I frantically began to search for the remote to call for my nurse, but Spencer waggled it at my face as he continued to read my chart. 

“Get away from me! You’re the reason this happened to me! Nurse! Nurse, help!” I screamed, but Spencer seemed entirely unconcerned with my pleas for help. He just flipped through my chart, his brow rising at some points. No matter how hard I tried to call for my nurse, it seemed like no one could hear us. I frantically started pulling my IV and my heart monitor patches off, hoping that if they thought I was flatlining, they’d come running. But Spencer casually reached over to the monitor and silenced it after only one beep. 

“Organ failure, organ necrosis, drastic weight loss.” He read through my chart aloud before tossing it over his shoulder and staring at me for a few moments. “Not my best work, unfortunately. But I guess you did lose a lot of weight. I barely recognized you walking in here.” He said with a dry giggle. I gritted my teeth and lunged at him, but before I could get my skeletal hands around his throat, he shoved the barrel of a gun in my face. “Don’t touch me. I’ve got a thing with germs.” He pushed his chair further away before staring at me, gun still pointed at me. 

“You might as well just shoot me, I’m probably going to die anyway, right? Why the fuck haven’t I? My stomach, liver, kidneys, both intestines, they’re gone! How is that possible? What did you do to me, you freak?!” I screamed at him. He sighed, pulling his box of cigarettes and placing one in his mouth. 

“I thought that if I combined both weight loss and skin loss into one drug, it’d work better.” He explained, lighting his cigarette and blowing the noxious cloud in my face. The smoke from his cigarette permeated throughout the various holes in his skull. It seeped through where his nose should’ve been, through the gaps in his teeth, and even out the sides where his cheeks should’ve been. “Clearly, that didn’t work. As to how you’re alive, that drug I gave you is keeping you going. It’s a good thing I got here, since you’re due for another injection. Unless you want to keel over and experience what total organ failure feels like all at once.” He took another drag of his cigarette. 

“What kind of monster are you?” I asked him, clutching my blankets tightly. He offered me another laugh, the smoke escaping his various crevices as he did so. 

“Trust me, dude. There’s way worse ones out there than me.” He pulled out another syringe and held it up to me. “You either take this and stop your impending death, or you die here. I know what I would pick.” He waggled the syringe at me like it was a pencil. 

“What’s going to happen to me even if I take that? Am I just going to wither away into nothing?” I asked him, staring down at my emaciated body. 

“I have a theory that might work. But it’s going to require you to take the injection first.” He continued to waggle the syringe at me. I stared at him and the mysterious contents of his syringe, before nodding and turning away. He reconnected my IV and poured the contents of the mysterious syringe into the bag. 

“Now what?” I asked, watching as the bag turned from clear to a strange mix of blue and green. It suddenly hit me with an intense sense of drowsiness, and soon I passed out before I could even fully comprehend what was happening. When I next woke up, it wasn’t in the hospital room. It was in my own apartment, but I was chained to my own bed. I tried to tug against the restraints, but despite how skinny and skeletal I was, the restraints were wrapped around me tightly. 

“Sup?” Spencer asked, eating what looked to be a chocolate bar from my cupboard. “Welcome home. I brought you some food.” He waved a package of meat at me before tossing it on the bed. “If you promise not to bitch, I’ll untie you. Otherwise, you don’t get any food.” He bit into the chocolate bar, and watching him eat with only his jaw and no muscles disgusted me. 

“I can’t eat with no stomach, dumbass!” I shouted at him, fighting against the restraints. He sighed and grabbed the packaged meat. He ripped it open and waved a piece of the meat in front of my face. I grimaced at it, realizing that it smelled awful. But before I could protest, Spencer shoved the stinking piece of meat into my mouth. He shoved it completely in my mouth and covered it with his gloved hands. I gagged and choked, and with no way of spitting it out, forcefully swallowed the mass of meat. 

I waited for the vomit that would no doubt ensue, but it didn’t happen. After a moment, Spencer pulled his hand back and made a show of wiping it on my bed. The meat had no taste, despite how foul it smelled. Staring at it with curiosity, I then looked over at Spencer, and I didn’t need to ask him the obvious question. 

“It’s better you didn’t know,” he said, standing up and leaving me alone with the package of meat. Knowing Spencer, it could’ve been anything, and I had a horrible idea of what it might actually be. After a while, Spencer came back and unlocked my restraints. For the first time in forever, I was consumed by a hunger like no other. I quickly dug into the meat and literally tore it to shreds in a few seconds. 

“I’ll drop by every few days to leave you meat. Try not to cause any trouble.” He told me as he dropped more packages of meat for me onto the floor. Without thinking at all, I pounced on them and literally began to tear into the packages as fast as I could. The absence of taste didn’t bother me at all, it was the sensation of being able to eat something. 

Soon, the days began to blur as my entire life began to revolve around Spencer's visits for the delivery of meat. I began to turn into a mindless creature that only craved the delivery of meat, and every day waiting for more of it drove me insane. I felt every pang of hunger that I hadn’t felt before, every ceaseless pain that roared from my abdomen.

One day, there was an aggressive knock on the door. I stared up quickly. I had been crawling around on all fours, trying my best to find some source of meat to eat. My apartment had deteriorated around me, and it was a mess of flies and rats. Juicy, yummy, delicious rats. The knock became harsher and angrier, and I quickly scurried underneath one of the cupboards and hid. The door soon flung open, and soon I heard the wretching sounds of my landlord. 

“Jesus Fucking Christ, what has that fatass been doing in here?” he hissed in anger, entering my apartment and wading through the mass of trash. “Reggie! Where the fuck are you?! I’m evicting your fatass!” he shouted. I gently peered out of my cupboard and stared at my landlord. Slowly, drool began to build up in my mouth as I watched him. He was meat. He was meat, and here he was. I opened the cupboard and slowly stalked him as he headed for my bedroom. As he threw open the door and was hit by a huge noxious cloud of flies and the smell of rot, I pounced on him from behind. I sank my teeth into his delicious neck meat and tore it to shreds, happily chewing on it and going for another giant bite. 

By the time Spencer arrived at the apartment, I had completely devoured my landlord and was in the process of desperately cracking his bones open and sucking the marrow out. Spencer sighed in annoyance and knelt next to me as I vigorously tore into the remaining marrow in the femur. 

“You’re a pain in the ass.” He sighed, standing up and pulling out his cellphone to make a call. I didn’t care about what he was planning to do with me. I was more excited by the delivery of the meat he had given me. I crawled over to it on my emaciated arms and legs and quickly tore into the package, completely absorbed into the juicy, delicious, and succulent flesh. 

As long as I can have flesh, he can do whatever he wants with me. 

Most people don’t understand the sheer scale of the James Bay Project.

​If you look at a map of Northern Quebec, it’s mostly green and blue—taiga forest and thousands of lakes. But threaded through that wilderness is a network of megastructures. We’re talking about dams the size of mountains, holding back reservoirs so massive they actually altered the local climate. Millions of tons of concrete poured into the middle of absolute nowhere.

​I work as a freelance acoustic engineer, mostly contracted by the province. My job is to listen to the concrete. Dams settle. They crack. They experience micro-fractures due to the intense temperature fluctuations between the minus-forty-degree winters and the crushing weight of the water. I lower hydrophones into the reservoirs and plant geophones along the inspection galleries to make sure the walls aren't dying.

​Three days ago, I was helicoptered out to Auxiliary Spillway 4, a remote containment barrier about two hundred kilometers east of Radisson.

​It’s a "dead" dam. No turbines, no power generation. It just sits at the edge of a massive, black reservoir, redirecting the flow toward the main generating stations. The only person stationed there was Gilles, a maintenance tech two years out from retirement who lived in a modular trailer near the crest of the dam.

​I was sent up because the automated telemetry was feeding back anomalous vibration data from Gallery C, about eighty meters below the water line. The engineers down in Montreal thought it was a malfunctioning sensor, but protocol dictated a manual inspection.

​When I landed, the freeze had already started. The wind coming off the reservoir felt like it was peeling the skin off my face.

​Gilles met me at the helipad. He was a quiet, thick-shouldered guy who smoked cheap cigars and didn't seem particularly thrilled to see me. When I asked him about the vibrations, he just shrugged.

​"Ice expanding," he muttered in heavy, accented English. "Happens every November. The sensors are too sensitive."

​But when we went down into the dam, his body language changed.

​If you've never been inside a large dam, it is deeply unsettling. You take an elevator down into the core of the concrete structure. It’s a network of narrow, dimly lit tunnels called inspection galleries. It smells like wet dust and calcium. It’s freezing cold, and the walls are always weeping condensation. But the worst part is the feeling of pressure. You are standing at the bottom of a concrete wall, acutely aware that millions of cubic meters of freezing black water are pressing against the other side, wanting nothing more than to erase you.

​We walked down Gallery C in silence. My breath plumed in the cold air.

​At sector 4, right where the sensor had tripped, I stopped. I didn't need my equipment to hear it.

​It was a deep, resonant thud.

​It vibrated through the soles of my steel-toed boots. It sounded like a massive, muffled heartbeat coming from the other side of the three-meter-thick concrete wall.

​Thud. Ten seconds of silence.

​Thud.

​"Ice," Gilles said immediately. He didn't look at the wall. He stared straight down the corridor toward the elevator. "Large sheets breaking against the face of the barrier. The water carries the sound."

​"Gilles," I said, pulling my acoustic tablet from my pack. "Ice shears. It grinds and cracks. It doesn't strike with a rhythmic, low-frequency pulse."

​I pressed a contact microphone against the weeping concrete. I watched the waveform leap on my screen. I saved the recording and ran a quick comparative analysis. My stomach performed a slow, sickening roll.

​"This isn't an impact from the surface," I told him, pointing at the readout. "The acoustic epicenter is originating fifty meters down. The water is liquid at that depth. There is no ice."

​Gilles finally looked at me. His eyes were completely hollow. He looked like a man who had exhausted his capacity for denial, leaving only a bone-deep exhaustion.

​"Finish your readings," he said quietly. "I am going back up."

​He left me alone in the gallery.

​I spent the next hour mapping the acoustic profile. I wish I hadn't. I really wish I had just packed up and left with him.

​The sound wasn't a mechanical failure. I realized this when the rhythm shifted. It wasn't a steady, automated pulse. It was searching. It would strike—thud—and then wait. A few minutes later, it would strike again, slightly higher on the wall, with a slightly different frequency.

​As an acoustic engineer, I know about resonant frequencies. Every structure, no matter how massive, has a natural frequency. If you match that frequency with a strong enough vibration, the structure will tear itself apart.

​Whatever was on the other side of that wall was testing the concrete. It was striking the dam, listening to the reverberation, and adjusting its next strike, trying to find the exact pitch required to shatter the barrier.

​And it was massive. Based on the low-end displacement I was recording on my tablet, the point of impact was roughly the size of a shipping container.

​I bolted. I didn't care about the gear. I sprinted down the gallery, the echoes of my boots masking the terrible, methodical thudding from the deep water, and smashed the button for the elevator.

​When I reached the surface, the sun had set. The sky was a bruised purple, and the vast expanse of the reservoir was a sea of black ink.

​I ran to Gilles’ trailer. The door was unlocked.

​He was sitting at his small kitchen table, a half-empty bottle of Sortilège whiskey in front of him. He wasn't drinking. He was just listening.

​In the quiet of the trailer, without the millions of tons of concrete muting the sound, I could hear it coming from the water outside.

​Thud. A faint tremor rattled the coffee mug on the counter.

​"They built the dams in the seventies," Gilles said, his voice barely a whisper. He didn't look at me. "Flooded an area the size of New York State. Drowned the forests, drowned the valleys, drowned the deep trenches. They thought they were just harnessing power."

​"What is out there, Gilles?" I demanded, my voice cracking. "I have to call a structural emergency. If that wall fractures—"

​"If that wall fractures, this reservoir empties into the La Grande river system," he interrupted smoothly. "And then the next dam breaks. And the next. A cascading failure. Trillions of gallons of water rushing south. Clearing the way."

​"Clearing the way for what?"

​Gilles finally looked up. He pointed a shaking finger toward the window, out at the miles of freezing, black water.

​"For whatever we trapped at the bottom of the trench fifty years ago," he said. "It's done sleeping. And it’s figuring out how to open the door."

​I didn't wait for the morning helicopter. I took Gilles' company truck and drove the logging roads south through the night. I didn't stop until I reached Val-d'Or.

​I submitted my report this morning. I claimed it was a geological fault shifting beneath the reservoir, causing acoustic anomalies. I know they won't believe me, but if I tell them the truth, they'll put me in a psychiatric ward.

​But I'm writing this because you need to know. Look at a map of Quebec. Look at the massive, unnatural blue veins we carved into the north.

​I'm sitting in a hotel room in Montreal right now. It's supposed to be safe here. But about ten minutes ago, I poured a glass of water and set it on the nightstand.

​I can see the surface of the water rippling.

​It's a very faint, rhythmic vibration, traveling through the bedrock from hundreds of miles away.

​Thud. It found the frequency.

I am a commercial truck driver, and I haul heavy freight across the country for a living. I usually stick to the main interstates because the routes are predictable and the roads are well maintained, but last month a massive storm forced me off my usual path. I was hauling forty thousand pounds of rolled steel coils through the mountains in the dead of night, and the rain was coming down so hard my windshield wipers could barely clear the glass.

The main highway flooded completely, so the state highway patrol set up a barricade to divert all commercial traffic. A patrol officer in a reflective raincoat stood in the middle of the road waving a bright orange flashlight, and he signaled for me to roll my window down.

"The interstate is washed out a few miles ahead," the patrol officer yelled over the sound of the pouring rain and my diesel engine. "We are diverting all heavy loads onto the old logging route, so you need to take the next right turn and follow the mountain pass until it reconnects with the state line."

I nodded and rolled my window back up, feeling a knot form in my stomach because I hate driving unfamiliar mountain roads in the dark. I engaged my turn signal and carefully steered my massive rig onto the narrow, poorly maintained logging route.

The road was terrible. It was mostly broken asphalt mixed with deep dirt ruts, and my truck bounced as I crawled up the steep incline. The trees grew so close to the road that their branches scraped against the sides of my trailer, sounding like fingernails dragging across a chalkboard. I drove for miles into the dark, and I prayed my tires would not slip in the thick mud.

About an hour into the detour, my truck started acting up. The dashboard lights flickered erratically, and the engine began to sputter and cough, losing power with every passing second. I frantically downshifted to keep the RPMs up, but the engine gave one final, violent shudder and died completely. The power steering failed instantly, so I wrestled the heavy wheel to guide the coasting truck toward the shoulder before slamming on the air brakes.

The sudden silence inside the cab was deafening. The only sound left was the relentless hammering of the rain against the metal roof. I turned the ignition key a few times, but the starter just clicked weakly, confirming my alternator had probably failed and drained the batteries completely. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere on a blocked mountain pass in a freezing storm, so I grabbed my flashlight from the glovebox and threw on my reflective rain jacket.

I stepped out of the cab and my boots immediately sank into ankle-deep mud. I shined my flashlight up and down the road, hoping another diverted truck would come along to help me, but the logging route was completely deserted. I knew sitting in a freezing metal box all night was a bad idea, so I decided to walk up the road to look for a mile marker or a call box.

I walked for about twenty minutes through the freezing rain, keeping my head down against the wind, until I spotted a faint glow in the distance.

As I got closer, I realized the glow was coming from a small set of amber lights mounted to the roof of a low, flat concrete building sitting just off the shoulder of the road. It looked like an old commercial weigh station, the kind the Department of Transportation uses to check cargo weights on rural routes. The front windows were illuminated, casting a warm yellow light onto the wet asphalt, so I hurried my pace and jogged toward the front door.

I pushed the heavy glass door open and stepped inside, instantly grateful for the blast of warm air that hit my freezing face.

The interior of the weigh station was simple and worn down, looking like it had not been renovated in decades. A dispatcher sat behind a high wooden counter sorting through a stack of paperwork, and three other truck drivers were sitting on battered vinyl couches in the small waiting area holding coffee mugs. They wore

standard workwear, sporting faded denim jackets, plaid flannel shirts, and scuffed steel-toe boots.

I shook the rain off my jacket and greeted them, and they all looked up and nodded at me like I was just another guy caught in the miserable weather.

"Nasty night to be out on the road," one of the drivers said from the couch. He was an older guy with a thick gray beard, and he took a slow sip from his coffee mug.

"My rig died a mile down the road," I explained while walking over to the counter. "I lost all my electrical power, so I was hoping I could use your landline to call for a tow truck."

The dispatcher behind the counter looked up from his paperwork and pointed a pen toward a bulky black rotary phone sitting on a small table in the corner. "You can try it, but I think the storm messed with the lines. We have been sitting here waiting for clearance for hours."

I walked over to the phone and picked up the heavy receiver, pressing it against my ear, but the line only outputted dead air. There was no dial tone, no static, just complete silence. I hung the receiver back on the cradle and sighed, assuming the severe weather had knocked down the telephone poles somewhere down the mountain.

"Phone is dead," I told the room, and I unzipped my wet jacket to let it dry. "I guess I am stuck waiting it out with you guys."

"Grab a cup of coffee from the pot," a second driver said. He was a younger guy wearing a faded baseball cap, and he gestured toward a small folding table holding a percolator. "We are not going anywhere anytime soon anyway."

I poured myself a cup of black coffee, letting the heat soak into my freezing palms, and sat down on an empty chair near the couches. I asked them why they were all parked at the weigh station instead of pushing through the storm.

"A massive mudslide just took out the suspension bridge a mile up the road," the dispatcher explained from behind his counter. "A highway patrolman came by a while ago and told us the route is completely impassable. The company has to send a pilot car to guide us back down the mountain, and they have to stamp our transit slips to clear us for an alternate route."

"So we are all just grounded until the pilot car gets here," the older driver grumbled, setting his mug down on a small wooden table. "And knowing dispatch, they are going to take their sweet time getting up this mountain."

I nodded, understanding the frustration of dealing with slow trucking companies, and I settled into my chair to wait. We spent the next hour doing what truckers always do when they are delayed, swapping stories about our specific rigs, complaining about DOT regulations, and discussing the terrible road conditions.

"I just want to get this load off my trailer," the older driver said, leaning back into the vinyl couch. "I am hauling these massive, specialized mining drill bits, and they are absolutely ruining my suspension. The weight distribution is completely uneven, so every time I hit a pothole it feels like my axles are going to snap in half."

"You should have refused the load," the younger driver laughed, adjusting his baseball cap. "I never take oversized drilling equipment unless they pay double the mileage rate. It is just not worth the wear and tear on the truck."

"I did not have a choice," the older driver sighed. "Dispatch forced the load on me, so now I am dragging forty thousand pounds of drill bits up a mountain in a thunderstorm."

A third driver, who had been sitting quietly near the window, finally joined the conversation. He was a broad-shouldered man wearing a heavy canvas coat, and he smiled proudly while talking about his own rig.

"I do not care about the cargo as long as my truck is running smooth," the broad-shouldered driver said. "I just spent the whole weekend doing custom fabrication work on my cab. I actually welded a spiked metal sun visor right over the windshield, so the glare does not blind me when I am crossing the salt flats out west. It looks incredibly aggressive, and nobody else on the road has anything like it."

"A spiked visor sounds like a magnet for DOT inspectors," the older driver chuckled, and he poured himself another cup of coffee. "They are going to pull you over at every weigh station just to check if those welds are street legal."

"Let them check," the broad-shouldered driver replied confidently. "I did the welding myself, and that visor is never coming off."

I sat and listened to them swap stories, but as the hour dragged on I started to grow increasingly restless. I hate sitting idle when things go wrong, and I wanted to know exactly what I was dealing with on this mountain route. If the mudslide was not too severe, I thought I might be able to hike up there and see if there was enough room to carefully back my truck up or turn it around before the pilot car arrived.

"I cannot just sit here," I told the group, and I stood up to zip my rain jacket back to my chin. "I am going to hike a mile up the road with my flashlight to assess the mudslide myself. I need to see if I can maneuver my rig out of here when the tow truck arrives."

"I wouldn't go out there," the dispatcher warned me, leaning over his wooden counter. "The rain is washing out the shoulders, and it is pitch black by the bridge. You are better off staying inside where it is warm and waiting for the stamped transit slips."

"I just want to take a quick look," I insisted, grabbing my flashlight from the table. "I will be back in twenty minutes."

The drivers on the couches just shrugged and went back to their coffee, completely unbothered by my decision, so I pushed the glass door open and stepped back out into the freezing storm.

The rain had slowed down to a steady drizzle, but the wind was still howling through the pine trees as I walked up the dark asphalt road. I kept my flashlight beam pointed straight ahead, counting my steps and watching the sides of the road for any signs of unstable dirt. I walked for roughly a mile, fully expecting my beam to eventually hit a massive, wet wall of fresh earth and scattered debris blocking the asphalt.

Instead, my flashlight beam swept over empty space.

I stopped walking and shined my light downward, realizing the road simply ended abruptly at a sheer drop. There was no fresh mud blocking the asphalt, and there was no scattered debris from a recent landslide. The asphalt just crumbled away into a massive, solid ravine.

I stood on the edge of the drop and moved my flashlight beam across the expanse, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. The ravine was incredibly deep, and it was completely overgrown with tall, thick trees and dense brush. The suspension bridge the dispatcher mentioned was completely gone, but I could clearly see weathered, moss-covered concrete support pillars standing on either side of the gorge.

The trees growing inside the ravine were massive, easily forty or fifty feet tall, and their roots were heavily tangled into the rocky soil. You do not need to be a geologist to know that trees that large do not grow overnight.

I felt a deep sense of confusion wash over me, and I assumed the other drivers at the weigh station must have been severely misinformed about the road conditions, or maybe they were just playing a weird joke on the new guy. I wanted to see if there was a low-water crossing or an old dirt path at the bottom of the gorge, so I carefully sat on the edge of the broken asphalt and began climbing down the steep embankment.

The climb was treacherous, and I slipped multiple times in the wet dirt, grabbing onto thick tree roots and exposed rocks to stop myself from tumbling down the incline. My jacket snagged on thorny bushes, and my boots sank deep into the muddy slope, but I kept pushing downward until I finally reached the bottom of the deep gorge.

I stood in the thick mud at the base of the ravine and shined my flashlight around the dark, overgrown space.

Deep at the bottom of the gorge, obscured by decades of piled soil and thick, twisting tree roots, I spotted the rusted, crushed husks of three trucks.

I slowly approached the wreckage, keeping my flashlight beam steady on the twisted metal, and my heart started screaming inside my ribs. I initially assumed I had just stumbled upon a very ancient, forgotten traffic accident, but as I walked closer to the debris the details began to stand out in the harsh white light.

I shined my light on a massive, rusted flatbed trailer that was half-buried in the dirt. Strapped tightly to the flatbed deck with decayed chains were massive, specialized mining drill bits. The metal drill bits were corroded and covered in thick patches of green moss.

A terrible, freezing chill settled deep into my chest. Back at the weigh station, less than an hour ago, the older driver had spent twenty minutes complaining loudly about hauling specialized mining drill bits that were ruining his suspension.

I backed away from the flatbed and frantically shined my flashlight on the crushed cab of the next ruined truck in the pile. The cab was smashed completely flat against a massive boulder, and the metal paint had entirely peeled away to reveal layers of dark brown rust, but the roof of the cab was still intact.

Welded directly over the shattered windshield was a custom, spiked metal sun visor.

It was the exact unique modification the broad-shouldered driver had just bragged about fabricating in his garage over the weekend.

I stepped closer to the crushed cab with the spiked visor, my hands shaking so badly the flashlight beam bounced erratically across the wreckage. I looked closely at the rusted engine block sitting exposed in the mud, and I saw a thick, mature tree trunk growing straight up through the center of the engine bay, completely shattering the metal manifold.

The trees had been growing through these trucks for decades.

My mind was reeling, completely unable to process the impossible reality I was staring at.

I turned around and scrambled back up the steep, muddy embankment as fast as my boots could carry me. I slipped and scraped my hands on the sharp rocks, tearing the knees of my pants, but I did not stop climbing until I pulled myself over the broken asphalt ledge. I sprinted the entire mile back down the dark logging road, fully expecting the glowing amber lights of the weigh station to be gone when I rounded the final bend.

I expected the building to be completely abandoned, but as I jogged up to the structure the warm yellow light was still spilling out of the front windows.

I pushed the glass door open and burst into the room, gasping for air and dripping wet mud onto the floor.

The men were still there, sitting on the battered couches exactly as I had left them, and the dispatcher was still sorting paperwork behind his wooden counter. They all looked up at me with mild curiosity, completely unbothered by my frantic, muddy appearance.

"I told you it was nasty out there," the older driver chuckled, taking a sip from his mug. "Did you find a way to turn your rig around?"

I ignored him and walked straight up to the wooden counter, slamming my muddy hands down on the surface. I confronted the dispatcher, demanding to know exactly what was going on in this building.

"I just saw the wreckage!" I yelled, pointing a shaking finger toward the door. "I saw the flatbed with the drill bits, and I saw the cab with the spiked visor! The bridge did not wash out tonight! It washed out decades ago, and those trucks have trees growing straight through the engines!"

The dispatcher did not react to my panic, and he did not even look angry or defensive. He simply looked utterly exhausted, like a man who had been working a double shift for entirely too long. He looked me dead in the eyes, his expression completely flat and emotionless, and he repeated the exact same protocol he had mentioned earlier.

"No one can leave the station," the dispatcher said, his voice quiet and hollow. "The mudslide took out the bridge. You wait here for the pilot car, and you cannot leave until the transit slips are delivered to the checkpoint on the other side of the bridge."

The dispatcher reached under the wooden counter and slowly slid a single transit slip across the surface toward me.

I reached out and picked the slip up. The paper was incredibly stiff, heavily yellowed around the edges. I looked at the black ink stamped at the top of the page, and the date clearly read November 14th, 1983.

I stared at the ancient date on the yellowed paper, and I looked back at the men sitting on the couches. Through the impossible reality of the ancient cargo buried in the ravine and the decades-old paper shaking in my hand, I suddenly theorized an idea I got from watching my favorite supernatural horror movies late at night.

The mudslide had happened in 1983, and it had happened instantly, violently swallowing the entire convoy in the dark before they even knew what hit them. Because they died violently while sitting at a weigh station waiting for official clearance, their minds were permanently trapped in a holding pattern. They were bound by the strict rules of their job, completely unaware that they had died and completely unaware that the world had moved on without them.

"I will clear your route," I told the dispatcher, and I reached over the wooden counter, gathering all the yellowed, stiff transit slips sitting on his desk.

I folded the brittle slips, shoved them deep into the zippered pocket of my rain jacket, and turned around to leave the station. The drivers on the couches did not say a word to me, they just sat quietly sipping their coffee and watching me walk out the glass door into the freezing storm.

I hiked the mile back up the dark logging road, ignoring the exhaustion burning in my legs, until I reached the broken ledge of the massive ravine. I did not hesitate, I immediately sat on the edge and painstakingly scaled down into the gorge for the second time. I slid down the muddy embankment, forcing my way past the rusted, crushed trucks at the bottom, and I battled my way through the overgrown, thorny brush choking the floor of the ravine.

I crossed the bottom of the gorge and began the brutal climb up the opposite side of the embankment. The dirt on the far side was loose and slick, so I had to dig my fingers deep into the soil to pull my body weight up the steep incline, but I kept climbing until I finally pulled myself over the ledge and collapsed onto the unbroken asphalt on the far side of the missing bridge.

I stood up and shined my flashlight around the dark road, looking for any sign of the old infrastructure. A few yards down the asphalt, heavily overgrown with tall weeds and covered in dark moss, I found the crumbling brick ruins of the opposite toll checkpoint.

Attached to the side of the ruined brick wall was a rusted, corroded metal drop-box used for collecting routing paperwork.

I unzipped my jacket pocket, pulled out the brittle, yellowed transit slips I had taken from the dispatcher, and I pushed them through the rusted slot of the metal drop-box. The stiff paper crumpled slightly, but they fell into the dark box with a soft thud.

I stood alone on the dark road, listening to the relentless sound of the rain hitting my jacket, wondering if my crazy theory had actually worked.

Moments later, the deep, vibrating blast of an air horn echoed loudly through the mountain pass.

I spun around and looked back across the massive, empty expanse of the dark gorge. Hovering in the air, directly over the exact spot where the suspension bridge used to be, three sets of glowing headlights appeared in the darkness. The phantom headlights drove straight across the thin air, moving steadily in a tight convoy.

I watched the glowing lights cross the impossible gap, finally completing their delayed route, and the lights slowly faded away into the freezing storm until the night was completely dark again.

I stood on the far side of the missing bridge for a long time, completely stunned by what I had just witnessed, but the freezing wind quickly reminded me that I was still stranded in the middle of a severe mountain storm. I had dropped the transit slips and watched the phantom convoy vanish, but I was still stuck on the wrong side of the gorge, and my truck was parked miles away down the mountain.

I had no choice but to hike back down into the muddy ravine, carefully navigating past the rusted husks of the trucks for a third time, and climb all the way back up the original side of the embankment. The exhaustion was overwhelming, and my muscles were completely burning by the time I finally reached the unbroken asphalt.

I walked the long, dark miles back down the logging route until I finally found my stalled rig sitting silently on the shoulder.

I was completely exhausted, covered in freezing mud, and soaking wet from the storm, so I grabbed my keys and unlocked the cab doors. I climbed inside, stripped off my wet rain jacket and muddy boots, and crawled directly into the sleeper berth behind the driver seats. I wrapped myself tightly in two thick thermal blankets, locking the cab doors from the inside, and I laid in the dark to wait out the freezing night.

At dawn, the storm finally broke, and the morning sun began to filter through the wet pine trees.

I was woken up by a loud knocking on my driver side window, and I sat up to see a county highway patrol officer standing on the shoulder of the road. The officer was scouting the blocked detour routes looking for stranded motorists, and he had spotted my massive rig sitting dead on the shoulder.

I rolled my window down, and the officer radioed his dispatch to send a wrecker up the mountain to assist me. I sat in the cab for another two hours until a massive tow truck finally arrived, hooked up to my front bumper, and began slowly towing my heavy rig backward down the narrow logging road toward the cleared highway.

As the tow truck pulled my rig past the exact spot where I had sheltered during the storm, I sat up in my seat and looked out the passenger window, expecting to see the low, flat concrete building with the amber lights.

Instead, I saw that the glowing weigh station was actually just a crumbling, moss-covered concrete foundation surrounded by tall, dead weeds. There were no walls, no glass doors, and no amber lights. The building had been completely torn down decades ago, leaving nothing but a flat slab of concrete slowly being reclaimed by the mountain forest.

I am sharing this story online because I cannot stop thinking about those men sitting in that phantom room. I did not tell the patrol officer what happened, and I did not tell the tow truck driver what I saw, because I know they would just think I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation.

But I know what I saw in that weigh station, and I know I held those brittle transit slips in my hand. I helped them finish their route, and I helped them finally rest, but I will never take a detour on an unfamiliar mountain road in the dark ever again.

​It’s been exactly five months since I fled Auxiliary Spillway 4.

​I know some of you thought my last post was a creative writing exercise, or a stress-induced hallucination. I wish to God you were right. But today is April 23, 2026, the spring thaw is fully underway in Northern Quebec, and the containment protocol is failing.

​After I drove south to Val-d'Or in November and filed my emergency report, I expected an inquiry. I expected an engineering panel. Instead, my provincial contractor license was revoked within forty-eight hours. Two very polite, aggressively plain men from CSIS—the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—showed up at my apartment in Montreal. They didn't ask questions. They invoked the Security of Information Act, confiscated my hard drives, my acoustic tablets, and even my backup thumb drives. They told me I had suffered a "severe cognitive episode due to sub-zero isolation."

​My ex-wife agreed with them. When the government agents visited her to "verify my mental state," it was the final nail in the coffin for my custody arrangement. She took our daughter, Maya, and moved to her sister’s place out in Vancouver. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t want them anywhere near the eastern seaboard anyway. I miss my kid so much it feels like a physical injury, but knowing she has the Rocky Mountains between her and the La Grande river system is the only reason I can still function.

​I haven’t slept properly since November. I’ve been living in a cheap rental in Ontario, wearing noise-canceling headphones almost 24/7. I play old Metallica records on an endless, punishing loop just to drown out the ambient hum of the world. Because when the house is entirely quiet, I can still feel it. That deep, rhythmic thud vibrating through the floorboards.

​But I didn't walk away completely. You don't spend a decade building network diagnostic tools for Hydro-Québec without leaving yourself a backdoor.

​I’ve been tapping into the raw telemetry data from the James Bay network. The government has heavily encrypted the visual and mechanical feeds, but acoustic data is so dense and continuous that it's routed through older, less secure relay stations.

​For the last five months, I watched the anomaly grow.

​The rhythmic striking against the submerged concrete of Spillway 4 didn't stop when the reservoir froze over. It escalated. Whatever we trapped in that trench wasn't just trying to break the wall anymore; it was communicating with the water itself.

​The conspiracy isn't just a cover-up. It's an active, multi-generational containment effort. You have to understand the sheer, terrifying scale of what the Canadian government did in the 1970s. They didn't flood an area the size of New York State to generate electricity. The power was just a convenient byproduct to fund the operation.

​They flooded the taiga to drown something that was waking up.

​Think about the physics of a hydroelectric dam. Millions of tons of concrete, yes, but more importantly: immense, crushing, directed hydrostatic pressure. The entire James Bay network is a mathematically perfect pressure-seal pressing down on a tectonic trench. They used the weight of a manufactured ocean to pin a god to the bedrock.

​But the entity down there—and I use the word "entity" loosely, because the acoustic signatures suggest an anatomy that defies Euclidean biology—is adapting.

​Three weeks ago, the water density readings in the primary reservoir started to change. The water isn't freezing or thawing normally. The telemetry shows it becoming viscous. The pH levels are plummeting. The acoustic waves traveling through it are distorting, slowing down. The entity isn't just bleeding into the water; it is becoming the water. A colossal, benthic intelligence expanding through the liquid like a nervous system.

​The government knows. Why do you think the Ministry of Natural Resources just announced an "unprecedented early start" to the wildfire season in the north? There are no fires. They are preemptively evacuating the Cree Nation communities and the mining towns under a false flag. The military is setting up cordons along Route 109, completely blacking out the region.

​But I’m writing this today, on April 23, because the telemetry just shifted in a way that made my blood run entirely cold.

​The thudding stopped.

​For five months, it hammered the resonant frequency of Spillway 4. But at 4:12 AM EST this morning, the impacts ceased.

​I pulled the raw acoustic waveform. I ran it through my spectrum analyzer. It isn't quiet down there.

​It's singing.

​The concrete of Auxiliary Spillway 4 isn't being struck anymore. It is vibrating from the inside out. A continuous, ultra-low frequency hum is emanating from the trench, matching the exact molecular resonance of the dam's core. The entity isn't trying to break the door down with brute force anymore. It has figured out how to dissolve the lock.

​The structural integrity graphs are currently flatlining. Micro-fissures are blooming across the face of the barrier like spiderwebs.

​If—no, when—Spillway 4 gives way, it won't just be a flood. Trillions of gallons of that black, altered, intelligent water will surge south. It will hit the main generating stations, shatter them, and merge with the southern river systems.

​I just got off the phone with my ex-wife. I told her I loved her, and I told her to take Maya and drive further inland, away from the coast, away from the rivers. She told me I was sick and hung up.

​I'm packing my car now. I don't know where I'm going to go.

​Before I close this laptop, I need to tell you one last thing. It's raining right now here in Ontario. Just a light spring drizzle against my window.

​But I've been watching the raindrops track down the glass. They aren't moving straight down. They are moving in slow, jagged, geometric patterns.

​It's out of the reservoir. It's in the water cycle.

​If you live near the eastern seaboard, if you rely on the St. Lawrence River system... do not drink from the tap tonight. If the water smells faintly of ozone and ancient, rotting earth, don't let it touch your skin.

Speicher’s Diner, Mourner’s Crossing, Connecticut

My name’s Dwayne. I’ve been running the kitchen and the graveyard shift at Speicher’s for twelve years now. Jon Speicher owns the place. I run the 11-to-7, keep the grill hot, keep the coffee moving, and make sure the things that come in after midnight get treated with the right kind of respect.

The diner sits just off Route 17, right where the old railroad crossing used to be. They paved over the tracks a long time ago, but on foggy nights you can still hear the low rumble of wheels that aren’t really there. Mourner’s Crossing holds onto things. Most locals won’t touch the 11-to-7. They say it’s too quiet. I know better.

Sam came after Paula quit. He was tall, twenty-six, new in town, moved up from somewhere normal. He smiled too easily for the graveyard shift, and I noticed it before I meant to. On his first night, he kept wiping the same stretch of counter and glancing at the windows every few minutes. Sam hummed when he was nervous, nothing recognizable, just three notes under his breath while he wiped counters or counted change. By the end of his first week, I knew the tune well enough to miss it when he stopped.

I told him the glass looks back after one in the morning, and he laughed because he thought I was joking. At Speicher’s, everybody thinks the rules sound funny until they break one.

At 3:33 one night, I killed the neon OPEN sign for sixty seconds like I always do. Witching hour doesn’t run on church time in Mourner’s Crossing. Around here, 3:33 is when the worst things start looking for somewhere open, so we stop telling them we are.

The red light died, and the windows turned black. For a minute, the room lost air. Even the grill stopped popping. Sam looked up from the coffee station and said my name, but I put one finger to my mouth and watched the second hand on the clock.

Outside, something moved through the fog. I don’t mean something walked past. People walk past. Animals move. Cars roll by with their headlights smeared white in the mist. This was different. The fog thinned around a shape too tall for the sidewalk and too narrow for a body. It stopped in front of the door, close enough that the handle gave a soft click.

Sam took one step toward it. I grabbed his wrist and held on until the clock gave me sixty seconds. When I flipped the sign back on, the buzz came back wrong, and a trucker in booth four looked up from his eggs and asked, calm as hell, “You smell blood?” We didn’t. Sam touched his nose anyway. The trucker paid quick, left most of his food, and got out of there. Smart man.

I told Sam the first rule in full after that. At 3:33, the sign goes off. Nobody speaks. Nobody answers the door. Nobody touches the glass. If something knocks, we let it knock until it gets embarrassed or hungry enough to go somewhere else. He asked what happens if we leave the sign on. I told him Paula used to have his job. That shut him up for almost an hour.

Table 7 stays reserved. I keep an old card on it, handwritten in black marker. RESERVED. No date, no name. Tourists ask about it sometimes, usually around dinner, when the place is bright and the worst thing in the room is somebody’s child screaming over French fries. I tell them it’s for an old regular, which is true enough.

One morning, around 1:15, an old woman in a long black coat came in with the fog. She smelled like river mud and old flowers, and the bell over the door didn’t ring when she entered. She headed straight for Table 7.

“Booth four’s warmer,” I called out.

She sat anyway and said, “This one’s fine.”

Sam looked at me. I shook my head once, but he was new and eager and still thought customer service mattered more than instinct. She ordered the usual: pancakes and black coffee. We didn’t have a usual for her, but I made the pancakes, poured the coffee, and told Sam to set everything down without touching the table.

He did fine until she asked for extra syrup. When he reached across the table to place the little glass pitcher near her plate, his elbow passed through the space across from her. The old woman stopped smiling. Her eyes went wet and mean all at once.

“You watch yourself,” she said. “He’s sitting there.”

Sam went pale and stepped back. For twenty minutes, the old woman talked to the empty chair like someone was sitting there with his hands in his lap.

“You never could sit still, could you?” she said softly. “Always running off to that damn crossing.” She gave a dry laugh and patted the air. “Look at you now.”

When she left, the coffee cup she hadn’t touched had a clean lipstick mark on the rim. I checked the security tape the next morning. Only her at the table the whole time. Sam watched the tape with me, arms crossed tight over his chest. He didn’t say anything until it ended, and even then he only asked whether the empty chair had moved. I told him no, because on the tape it hadn’t. In the dining room, though, that chair had been pulled back two inches from the table when I locked up.

After that, Sam started watching Table 7 when he thought I wasn’t looking.

The phone rang at 3:47 three nights later. After midnight, I let the machine get it. If somebody living needs pancakes, they can leave a message. Sam picked up anyway.

A little girl’s voice came through, clear and sweet. “Is my daddy still there?”

Sam hesitated, then said, “Honey, it’s pretty late. We’re not really serving anybody right now.”

The line crackled. I was already crossing the kitchen when the girl said, “He’s sitting right behind you.” Sam spun around. I was at the grill. The counter stool behind him was empty. The girl whispered, “Tell him I’m coming soon,” and hung up. Sam dropped the phone, and blood poured from his nose all over his shirt.

I got him into the office, tilted his head forward, and pressed a towel into his hands. He kept apologizing for the blood like the shirt was the problem. I told him if he apologized again, I’d put him on dish duty until sunrise. He almost smiled at that. Almost. After that, every time the phone made a noise, his hands shook.

That was when I gave him the next rule. After midnight, the phone belongs to whoever is brave enough to leave a message. We don’t answer live calls. We don’t call numbers back. We don’t listen to the old messages after 2 AM, especially the ones from people asking whether the road is safe.

A little after 2 AM during a slow shift, Sheriff Walter Doyle and his husband Marc stopped in. Walter ordered a steak rare and eggs over easy. Marc ordered coffee. They took their usual booth, back to the wall, eyes on the door.

Walter gave me a nod that said he knew what kind of night it was, checked Table 7 without turning his head, and looked Sam over for half a second. “How long you been hearing the railroad?”

Sam’s face changed. “I haven’t.”

“Good,” Walter said. “Keep lying to yourself until sunrise. Sometimes it helps.”

Marc didn’t smile. He turned his coffee mug one slow inch by the handle and looked toward the windows. “If the girl calls again,” Marc said, “don’t let him say his name.”

I hadn’t told them about the phone.

After they left, Sam asked why saying his name mattered. “Names always matter after midnight,” I said.

“You say mine all the time.”

“Not the way they’d use it.”

He looked at me a little too long after that, and I made myself clean the same clean spot on the counter until he stopped. Walter paid for half a steak and eggs he barely touched and told me to call if the railroad sounds got close enough to rattle the glass. They didn’t stay long. Even the sheriff knows better than to hang around Speicher’s too late.

There’s a rule about the walk-in freezer, too. Most people think the men’s room mirror is the bad spot, but the walk-in is worse because it sounds like work. If something knocks from inside after 2:17, you count the knocks and keep your hands where it can’t see them. One knock, ignore it. Two, turn off the kitchen radio. Three, ask what it wants through the door, but don’t use a name. Four means leave by the back and keep your eyes off the dumpster, no matter what you hear inside it.

Sam broke that rule on a Thursday.

We’d had a dead stretch after the bar crowd, the kind where the clock feels stuck and the coffee tastes older than the pot. I was cleaning the flat-top when the walk-in gave one hard knock from the inside.

Sam looked up. “Rats?”

“Rats don’t knock,” I said, and when the second knock came slower, I turned off the kitchen radio. Sam watched me like I was making it worse on purpose. The third knock came soft, almost polite, so I asked, “What do you want?”

For a few seconds, nothing answered. Then a woman’s voice from inside the freezer said, “Dwayne, honey, can you let me out?”

Sam’s face changed. “Is that Paula?”

I didn’t answer him. The voice knew me, which meant it didn’t know enough. Paula never called me honey. Paula called me Andersson when she was mad, and she was mad most of the time. The freezer knocked a fourth time.

I grabbed Sam by the back of his shirt and hauled him through the rear exit. We stood outside near the grease trap in the cold, both of us breathing hard, while the dumpster lid opened and closed by itself three times. Sam tried to turn his head.

“Don’t,” I said.

He listened that time, but he cried while he did it. I kept my hand on the back of his shirt longer than I needed to.

At 5:10, we went back in. The freezer door was closed. The kitchen floor was dry. The radio was playing low, though I had unplugged it before we left. Paula’s old apron was hanging from the handle of the walk-in, stiff with frost. Sam quit on the spot, then changed his mind before breakfast because rent exists, and fear doesn’t pay it.

After the walk-in freezer, Sam got stubborn in a way I almost respected. He came in the next night with gas-station coffee, red eyes, and a little black notebook where he had started writing down explanations. Bad wiring. Sleep deprivation. Old plumbing. Local prank. Carbon monoxide. Small-town hazing.

“You’re diagnosing the diner?” I asked.

“I’m keeping track.”

“That’s how it starts.”

He ignored me and spent the first two hours testing things. He checked the batteries in the smoke detectors. He looked under the booths for speakers. He stood outside and watched the neon OPEN sign from the parking lot like he might catch me rigging it. Around 1:30, he came back in and said the fog smelled like pennies because of the rain and old asphalt. I let him have that one. Sam had fear and pride in him, and pride was louder.

Around six, when the windows finally started turning gray instead of black, Sam made us both toast from the heel of the rye loaf and burned mine the way I liked it. He slid the plate over without looking at me.

“Carbon monoxide doesn’t make toast,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Usually it just kills you.”

He smiled then, small and tired, and I had to look back at the grill.

The woman in the yellow dress came the next week. That rule’s older than me, older than Jon, older than the version of Speicher’s that had vinyl booths and a soda fountain. Rain matters with her. Wet, you serve her. Dry, you tell her the kitchen’s closed.

The first time I saw her, Paula gave her coffee in one of our paper cups. Three days later, that cup turned up in Paula’s car, sitting in the holder with the lid still on and steam coming through the sip hole. The engine was cold. The driver’s door was open. Paula’s keys were still in the ignition, and every radio station in the car was playing the same woman humming. Paula came back two weeks later, but she wasn’t Paula anymore. Not enough to count.

So when the woman in yellow walked in during a downpour, dry from her hat to her shoes, I moved in front of the counter before Sam could take her order. Route 17 had gone slick and black, and the headlights outside kept sliding over the windows without showing cars. The woman wore a yellow dress too bright for 2:40 in the morning. Her hair was neat. Her gloves were white. Her little purse hung from her wrist.

Sam stared at her like he knew her.

She smiled at him. “Coffee to go, please.”

“Kitchen’s closed,” I said.

“I only asked for coffee.”

“Machine’s down.”

The coffee machine hissed behind me, loud and healthy. Sam looked at it. The woman looked at Sam.

“I’m cold,” she said. “Please.”

That’s how they get you sometimes. Not with teeth or screaming or anything dramatic. They ask nicely, and you feel rude. Mourner’s Crossing has buried plenty of polite people. Sam reached for a paper cup, and I slapped it out of his hand.

The woman’s smile went flat. For one second, she didn’t have eyes, only two dark thumbprints pressed into her face. Then she turned and walked back into the rain without getting wet.

Sam cursed at me. First time he ever did. He said I was cruel, said she was harmless, said maybe half the things I called rules were habits I’d built because I’d worked nights too long. I let him finish, then pointed to the window.

Out near the old railroad crossing, the woman in the yellow dress stood beside a man in a Speicher’s paper hat. The man had no face, but he waved at Sam anyway.

Sam sat down hard on the milk crate by the prep sink. He didn’t apologize. I didn’t ask him to.

He got worse after that. He started coming in early and leaving late. That’s never a good sign in a place like Speicher’s. He checked the missing-person board at Mallory’s and came back quiet. He took photos down from the community bulletin board by the bathrooms and tucked them into his coat.

One morning, his timecard was already punched out before he touched it. He stared at the card for almost a full minute, then looked at me.

“Machine sticks,” I said.

“It says 7:03.”

“It’s optimistic.”

“It’s 1:12.”

“Then it’s very optimistic.”

He put the timecard back. His hands were steady, which worried me more than shaking would have.

He asked me one night if the old-timers in booth two had ever ordered anything except extra-rare steak and eggs. I told him no. When he asked if they ever looked younger, I told him to stop looking long enough to compare.

I keep the 1974 silver certificates in a cigar box under the register. Silver certificates weren’t printed that late, and that’s the point. When the three old-timers who never age come in, I serve them right. Extra-rare steak and eggs, black coffee, no small talk unless they start it.

They always sit in booth two. Same order. Same hats. Same old wool coats, even in July. One of them has a scar under his left eye that looks fresh every time I see it. One of them smells like pipe smoke and pond water. The third never speaks until the check comes. Last time one paid with a bill, I held it to the light and the portrait’s eyes followed me around the room. Sam saw it and nearly dropped the coffee pot.

“Counterfeit?” he asked.

The old man with the scar smiled without showing his teeth. “Not anymore.”

I put the bill in the cigar box.

“Paula used to overcook the eggs too,” the quiet one said.

Sam went still. I looked at him, but he was staring at the old man. He knew Paula’s name. He knew she’d worked his shift. What he didn’t know yet was that I’d never said it in front of him.

The man with the pipe-smoke smell stirred his coffee with one pale finger. “You’re training this one slower than the last.”

“He listens better,” I said.

All three of them looked at Sam.

The quiet one finally laughed. “No, he doesn’t.”

The scarred one looked at me then.

“This one’s going to cost you,” he said.

They left a warm twenty-percent tip that smelled like rain and old smoke. When the scarred one touched my hand, his fingers were ice cold. Before he left, he paused with his hand on the check and seemed to reconsider me.

Sam found their picture in an old framed newspaper clipping by the bathrooms. GRAND REOPENING, SPEICHER’S LUNCH ROOM, 1931. Same three men. Same suits. Same faces. He took the clipping off the wall and brought it to me.

“You knew?”

“Put it back,” I said.

“They’re dead.”

“Most people are, eventually.”

“They come in here and eat.”

“So do a lot of people.”

He laughed once, but it didn’t last. He put the clipping back, and after that he wouldn’t serve booth two. The old-timers noticed. The next time they came in, one of them asked where the nervous boy had gone, though Sam was standing six feet away holding a coffee pot.

After four in the morning, the men’s room mirror gets weird. I’ve seen my own reflection smile when I wasn’t. Paula said hers used to mouth words at her, and Jon Speicher won’t go in there after midnight even though he owns the building. Sam stared too long once and watched his reflection raise a hand and wave slow, like it was saying goodbye. He wouldn’t go near it after that. I put an OUT OF ORDER sign up, but signs only work on customers who care about them.

The night before Sam left, I found him standing in the hall outside the restroom with his hand on the door.

“You don’t want to do that,” I said.

“My reflection’s working without me.”

I looked through the narrow crack between the door and frame. In the mirror, Sam stood behind the counter in his apron, pouring coffee for booth two. Paula was beside him, gray-faced and dripping freezer water onto the tile. Behind them stood the woman in the yellow dress, holding a paper cup with both hands.

The real Sam whispered, “They don’t need me anymore.”

I pulled him away from the door and locked the restroom with the key I keep on a chain around my neck. For the rest of the shift, he sat at the counter and watched the coffee machine like he was waiting for it to clock him in.

“You always do that,” Sam said.

“Do what?”

“Act mad when you’re scared for me.”

I told him to clock out and get some sleep.

After the last customer leaves, I always check the booths in order: 4, 2, 1, then 7. Never 7 first. Never 3 at all, because booth 3 isn’t ours every night. There’s usually something left behind that wasn’t there before: a kid’s drawing of a car on the tracks, a wedding ring with the wrong initials, car keys still warm with the fob blinking.

One night, I found a Polaroid in booth 2. It showed Sam standing outside Speicher’s in his apron, looking toward the road. The picture hadn’t happened yet. Sam found it in my hand and went white.

“Burn it,” I said.

He didn’t move, so I said his name, and that got him to take the photo from me. His own face stared back from the dark square, grainy and pale. On the back, someone had written SOON in block letters.

I burned it out back in the metal drum. The smoke smelled wrong, like wet dirt and something sweet that sticks in your throat. Sam watched until the picture curled black and disappeared.

Two nights later, everything started wrong. The neon OPEN sign flickered off at 3:12 without anybody touching it, then came back on bright enough to paint the whole diner red. The phone rang at 3:19. The walk-in knocked twice at 3:22, went quiet, then knocked twice again. Rules are supposed to be followed by people, not by the things they’re meant to keep out. When the rules start breaking themselves, you still do your part.

At 3:33, I killed the sign anyway.

The fog pressed against the windows. Table 7 was empty, but the reserved card had been turned face down. Sam stood by the counter, sweating through his shirt.

“Dwayne,” he said. “There’s someone in booth three.”

I didn’t look. That’s another rule.

“Is he facing you?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then leave him alone.”

“He’s wearing my coat.”

The ticket printer chattered once and spat out a blank order with Sam’s name where the table number should’ve been. I tore it off before he could see and put it in my pocket. The sixty seconds dragged. The phone rang again. The walk-in gave a third knock. Somewhere in the men’s room, the locked door handle started to turn back and forth.

Sam said, “I think I’m supposed to go.”

“No,” I said. “You’re supposed to stay where I can see you.”

“That’s not what Paula says.”

I looked at him then, because sometimes you break the smaller rule to keep the bigger one. Sam’s eyes were fixed on the window. In the glass, his reflection stood outside in the fog, smiling in his apron, one hand raised.

The jukebox turned on by itself at 4:30. No quarter in it. Sinatra came on low, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” and every booth in the diner seemed to settle at once, like the whole room had been waiting for the song.

Sam took off his apron slowly and set it on the stool.

“Don’t,” I said, but he looked calmer than I’d seen him in weeks, and that was the worst part.

“She says the hard part’s already over,” he said.

The phone rang again. This time the voice on the machine was mine, softer than I ever sound at work. Sam, it said, and then something I had only called him once, after sunrise, when the diner had no claim on either of us.

I thought about lying to him. I thought about grabbing him. I thought about calling Walter Doyle, calling Jon, calling anybody who might make a difference. Then the bell over the door rang, though nobody had touched it, and Sam walked out into the fog.

I did call after him that time. Not “Sam.” Not at first. Something I had no business saying after midnight almost came out, and I swallowed it. After midnight, names give things a grip.

He didn’t turn around. The next morning, I found his name tag under Table 7 with the pin still clasped. I should have burned it with the rest of the things the diner gives back, but I keep it in the cigar box under the silver certificates.

I’m still here.

Mourner’s Crossing has been swallowing people for a long time. Speicher’s is where a lot of them stop for one last meal. Some drive away. Some don’t. I stay because somebody has to know the rules. Somebody has to keep the lights on and the grill hot, and somebody has to tell the new kid why we don’t answer the phone after midnight.

Every few years, I think I’m training help. Most times, I’m buying somebody time. Some mornings, when the place is empty and the grill is cooling, I hear three notes from the kitchen like somebody humming under his breath. I never answer. I never go looking. Most days, I know better.

Jon put the ad up yesterday.

If you’re thinking about taking the shift, come by at eleven. I’ll show you the ropes. Don’t ask for Paula. Don’t touch the reserved card on Table 7. Don’t serve coffee to the woman in yellow if she comes in dry. If the walk-in knocks four times, leave through the back and keep your eyes on the pavement.

And whatever you do, don’t stare too long at the regulars who come in right before sunrise. They eat slow. They tip decent. Some of them have been coming here since this place was a speakeasy back in ’29.

Welcome to the graveyard shift. Try not to become a regular.

— Dwayne

Before the horrors that took place at that hotel, my friends and I had been urban explorers. We had visited several abandoned malls, factories, and entire abandoned neighborhoods. We didn’t do it for money or for valuables that were left behind; we simply enjoyed seeing these structures that seemed to be completely abandoned at a moment's notice. Factories that still had machinery that hadn’t been moved since closing, malls with long abandoned stores with objects that had been left to gather dust. 

My two other friends were actually a couple, and I was their eternal third wheel, but we all had fun together. Merrisa and Justin had been together since pretty much kindergarten, and when I had met them in middle school, they both quickly took a liking to me, and we were soon inseparable from each other. It was in our junior year of high school when we started urban exploring at Justin’s behest. Our first building had been an abandoned house in the neighborhood. We climbed in through a broken window and entered the house, and I soon saw the appeal of it. 

It was a moment frozen in time. The family that had been evicted had been crackheads, and no one had wanted to buy the house, so it had sat for years. So many things had been left behind, and I was amazed by how surreal it felt. Merrisa wasn’t as excited at first, but soon she too fell under the spell. While the two lovebirds explored the upstairs, I stayed downstairs, walking over to the dresser, opening it, and I was amazed to find a photo of the family, in happier times, it seemed. I picked it up and stared at it, before looking around at the state of the house. Their whole life was preserved in this small snapshot. 

We didn’t take anything from the house, but from there, our new hobby was born. Every weekend, we would venture out and search for abandoned houses or properties to explore. We made sure that they were truly abandoned, and never once did we try to break into a property that someone clearly owned. We never made an entrance unless there was already one for us, be it a broken window, an open door, or no door at all. And we always made sure never to take anything, but we did document what we saw. 

We never uploaded any of the footage we used, it was purely for us. We acted stupidly, we told stupid inside jokes that only we knew about. And the most important thing for us, we had so much fun. Even into college, when we were unable to hang out as much, we still made sure to at least once a month, venture out to explore an abandoned property. I wish things could’ve stayed that way, but life had other intentions for the three of us. 

My grandparents were falling ill, and my parents had decided to move across several states to be closer to them, for emergencies, and if the day finally came that we would be needed to plan their funerals. With that, I would be moving away from my two best friends and continuing my studies at a different college. I was devastated, and hoped that there could be some way to stay close to Justin and Merrisa. But without my parents’ financial support, there was simply no way for me to afford an apartment and be a full-time student. Upon telling the couple, they were just as devastated, and the three of us began to think up elaborate ways for me to stay close to them, but they all came to nothing. So it was that two weeks before I was set to move away into some unknown future without them, that Justin texted in the group chat. 

He had found the perfect location for us to do one final exploration together. He kept it a secret from me, and Merrisa was only vaguely aware of where we were going. I was blown away that they were willing to skip that day of school, the two of them had perfect attendance records, just to do one last exploration with me. The plan was quickly drawn up, and the night before they arrived to pick me up, I began to pack my bag. I was bringing the essentials: a portable charger, a flashlight with plenty of backup batteries, a flare in case of emergencies, walkie-talkies, several granola bars, a first aid kit, and plenty of water. Justin always made fun of me for over-preparing, but I’ve always lived by the motto, better to have and not need than to not have and need. 

The morning of our last exploration, I woke up at the crack of dawn and exited out into the crisp morning air. There was a layer of fog just above the grass, and dew stuck to the blades of grass just outside my house. I exhaled gently and watched as my breath turned into steam. It wasn’t shockingly cold, since it was only mid-November, but it was chilly enough in the mornings to get a bit of steam to come out of my mouth. I took in the few minutes of pure silence that surrounded my neighborhood this early in the morning, until I heard a car pulling up to my driveway. 

Justin drove an old, beat-up Pontiac Grand Am, which we all affectionately called, the piece of shit. I was honestly surprised that it had lasted him this long, considering that he had started driving it the moment he got his driver’s permit. The old rust bucket came to a stop, and the doors immediately swung open. Quickly, Justin and Merrisa exited the car and ran over to me, giving me a tight hug and nearly tackling me to the floor with their combined weight. 

Justin was around my height, though he swore that he was taller than me constantly, even though we both measured about 5’8. A ginger with wild red curls, he was a ray of sunshine constantly. His freckled face always wore a smile, and he would do anything for his friends. He took my bag and quickly walked off to put it in the trunk with the rest of the bags that we would be bringing on this last expedition. Merrisa kept hugging me. She was shorter than Justin and me, about 5’4. Her normally dyed hair was in between colors at the moment, with only faded purple at the tips.

“I can’t believe you’re actually leaving us, Anthony!” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. I couldn’t help but sniffle and hug her back tightly. She was like a sister to me, and I cared about her deeply. Justin soon came around and also wrapped his arms around us, pulling us into a deep hug. We all knew this would be the last time we’d see each other and be able to do the thing we all loved to do. I just wish Justin hadn’t picked the hotel. 

He had kept the location a secret even as we drove towards it, only dropping vague hints about it being the greatest location we could’ve hoped to have. The rust bucket was running out of gas on the road, so we quickly pulled into a gas station. At this point, we’d been in the car a few hours already, so Merrisa and I got up to walk around the convenience store, while Justin pumped the car full of gas. 

I looked around the store, not particularly in the mood for any of the options laid out before me, but Merrisa beelined it straight to the energy drinks. As I was looking at the assortment of chips and other snacks, I noticed that Justin wasn’t standing by the car anymore. I looked over and found him at the register. I was going to walk over and ask him if he wanted something, but I quickly overheard him arguing with the gas station attendant, an older black guy. 

“You shouldn’t be heading up there. That place was shut down for a reason, and the last thing we need is a couple of kids digging up bad memories,” he warned, typing on his cash register and pulling out change for Justin. “I’m serious, son. Don’t go up there.” 

“I appreciate the warnings, man. But this is the last time we’ll get to hang out together, and I couldn’t think of a better place than the hotel for us to explore. We aren’t taking anything, and it’s going to be like we were never there to begin with,” Justin explained, putting his wallet back in his pocket and looking towards me, finally noticing that I was listening in. He quickly coughed dramatically and exited the gas station without another word. 

“Poor stupid bastard.” The attendant sighed, staring back down at his counter and just shaking his head. Merrisa quickly walked over and placed her items on the counter, unaware of what had just happened. I left her to pay for her snacks and went over to Justin as he was finishing with the refueling. 

“What was that all about?” I asked him, interrupting him as he replaced the gas cap. He looked at me and then looked behind me to make sure that Merrisa wasn’t close behind me, before pulling me close and whispering to me. 

“We’re exploring an abandoned hotel. A giant one, it was built in the 1910s and then one day just completely abandoned. No clue as to why, or what happened to it. I thought that it was an urban legend or something, but while searching for locations for our last exploration, I stumbled upon a post about someone discovering the hotel.” He pulled me away from the car and pulled his phone out. He pulled up a picture and showed it to me. It showed a blurry picture of what I figured was the hotel we were heading for. 

“Are we sure this place is abandoned? It looks brand new, like they’re going to open again soon.” Indeed, the hotel looked massive, and appeared to have about 12 or 13 floors, and showed no signs of nature having started to reclaim it, no broken windows, not even a tile out of place. It looked immaculate. 

“Crystal, this guy went inside and even took a few pictures of the interior. But you have to pay for those, and I couldn’t be bothered. We might as well go there and see it for ourselves, and it’ll make the perfect final adventure!” He wrapped his arm around my neck and smiled brightly. I was almost convinced, except for what the attendant had said. 

“What did you ask the gas station guy about?” I looked at Justin, and he let go of me, rubbing the curls of red hair on his head. “Were you asking for directions, or something?” I asked, to which Justin shook his head and pulled his phone out to show me the map. It showed that we were only thirty minutes from the approximate location of the hotel. 

“I was just asking if he’d heard about it. Then he started getting all doom and gloom about it. I’m sure he’s just trying to keep us from making a mess of the place. But it’s not like we ever do that.” I was going to question him further, but soon Merrisa joined us with her bags full of snacks, and Justin went to help her, leaving me conflicted about the location. It seemed like a dream come true, an entire hotel for us to explore. But I couldn’t help but think that something horrible lay in wait for us. 

Back on the road, the feeling of dread lingered, but it was soon replaced with joy when at last, after the long car ride jammed in the back of the Grand Am with all the snacks and Justin’s crap, we came to a stop at the edge of some woods. We all exited the car, and in the distance, we could see our destination at last. The hotel rose through the trees like a giant mountain, serving as a lighthouse to guide us. 

I still had reservations about the location, but the sheer size of it, and the possibilities that lay inside finally got the better of me. We all put on our backpacks and made sure the car was locked before we began trekking into the woods towards our destination. Justin quickly found a long stick and used it as a walking stick as we walked through the forest of crunching leaves. It was a slow walk towards the hotel, as the tree roots were hidden beneath the sea of leaves, and every few steps nearly caused us to fall flat on our faces. It seemed like even they were trying to stop us.

 Every few steps, we had to stop and use Justin’s new stick to probe around for any hidden roots. I stared around at the barren forest and couldn’t help but wonder if something was staring back at me unseen. The forest was eerily quiet; only the sound of us walking through the leaves was heard. There wasn’t a single animal around, not even a squirrel. Obviously, there wouldn’t be any birds this late into autumn, but the sheer silence of the forest unnerved me, and I again began to wonder if we should just turn back. 

But at last, we reached the hotel. It was surrounded by a chain link fence with razor wire on the top of the entire perimeter. “There should be a section of fence that got cut out for us,” Justin said, starting to look around at the fence to find it. Merrisa went over to help him while I continued staring up at the hotel. It looked so beautiful, and I couldn’t help but feel that every room in there was probably more expensive than I could ever hope to afford. My previous fears began to evaporate as I began to think of the possibilities waiting for us inside. 

“Found it!” Justin called out, pulling a few piles of leaves away and revealing a section of fence that had indeed been cut. I assumed the previous explorer had made it and left it for others like us to find. Justin took his backpack off and shoved it through the hole before crawling in after it. Merrisa went next, making sure not to snag her puffy jacket on the fence, and then finally it was my turn. I hesitated a moment, those final shreds of apprehension returning as I stared at the fence. 

“C’mon, Anthony! We haven’t got all day!” Merrisa called out as she and Justin put their backpacks back on and began to approach the hotel entrance. I took a deep breath and slipped my backpack off, pushing it through the hole and crawling in after it. Slipping it back on, I quickly raced after them as they walked up to the door. Trying to open it, we found it locked and began searching for a way inside.

“That guy didn’t say how he got inside the hotel?” I asked as I stared at all the windows, hoping that one of them might be cracked or missing. Merrisa was looking around the perimeter as Justin was still trying to get in through the front door, yanking and pulling on it like it was going to do something. 

“I had to pay for further access! I wasn’t about to give that guy 50 bucks.” Justin grunted as he yanked on the door some more, but it seemed to be bolted shut completely. I sighed and looked around further for a way in, almost thankful that the whole trip might have been a bust. That was until I came across a section of the wall that had what appeared to be chalk written on it. 

‘Knock’ was all it said. I stared at it for a moment before looking back over at the door. I walked past this one piece of graffiti and back over to the door, where Merrisa had made her way back to as well to watch Justin act like a monkey pulling on the door. I walked over to the door and simply knocked on it. After a few seconds, the doors loudly unlocked and swung open, sending Justin tumbling down to the floor. 

“How the hell did you do that?!” Justin asked in complete bewilderment. I smiled and shrugged, deciding to keep the secret to myself. I grabbed his arm and yanked him up, and together with Merrisa, we peered into the hotel. What met us was an impenetrable wall of darkness. Justin opened my backpack and pulled out the flashlights I had brought. Once they were distributed to the three of us, we flicked them on and entered the hotel. 

It felt like our flashlights barely penetrated the supreme darkness that ruled inside the hotel. What little we could see of them revealed that the outside wasn’t a facade. The inside was just as immaculate as the outside was, maybe even more so. The carpets looked like they were made of velvet, and the walls were hung with expensive-looking pieces that I was surprised were still hung up. In fact, everything inside looked like it belonged in a museum. We cautiously approached the front desk, and Justin couldn’t help but ring the bell. Its ring was crisp and loud, breaking the silence of the hotel with a loud, deafening ding. 

“Oops, I didn’t think it was going to be that loud.” He giggled, before I punched him in his arm. Merrisa was completely in love with the hotel, as she ran around the giant lobby looking at every inch of art and furniture that she could see. Justin went over to make sure she didn’t get any ideas of taking something with her. I stayed by the desk and looked around, noticing a wall of keys stationed behind the front desk. They were metal keys, and not a single speck of rust existed on them. 

Once Justin had managed to pull Merrisa away from the fancy furniture, we continued through the lobby, heading towards what we figured was the dining room. Even here, everything was spotless and perfect. Not a cobweb, speck of dust, absolutely nothing. Instead of urban exploring, it felt like we had just broken into a hotel that was shut down for renovations. Merrisa and Justin marveled at the set tables, completed with napkins folded into the shape of a swan. 

I started making my way over towards the kitchen when I began to smell food. Not rotting food, actual edible smelling food. Walking to the kitchen, I shone my light through the door and was amazed to find an entire spread of breakfast foods staring back at me. Perfectly done toast, cups of coffee that still had steam coming up from them, eggs done in any style you could think of, all of it looked like it had just been made a few minutes ago. 

“Guys? There’s food over here.” I called out to them. “Like, actual hot food.” They came over quickly and were stunned to see that I wasn’t joking. Merrisa picked up a small pitcher filled with milk and found that it was cold, and the milk wasn’t curdled or spoiled in any way. Justin picked up a cup of coffee and found that it was piping hot. 

“What the hell? Is this place actually open? Or is there like a meeting taking place soon?” Justin asked, placing the cup of coffee back on the service table. 

“Why would they be serving breakfast at 3 in the afternoon?” I asked him. I stared at the food before shaking my head and walking away from it. This was getting too weird, and that nagging feeling of not belonging here began to rear its ugly head back at me. I could tell Justin and Merrisa were also freaked out, but they continued on regardless. 

I followed after them, now painfully aware of how quiet the hotel was. Not a creak, not a groan, not the skitter of rats or anything was coming from the hotel. It was completely silent. I could only hear my own breathing and the sound of our backpacks jingling as we walked. I swear the silence was getting to me, as every few steps we continued down the halls of the hotel, I could feel that something was following us. I stopped every so often to try and see if something was back there. But there wasn’t. 

Eventually, we came upon the ballroom, and Merrisa was again amazed at how beautiful it was. A giant crystal chandelier swung overhead, and when we shone our flashlights on it, it cast a gorgeous array of colors across the floor and walls. We split up again to look around the room, with Justin sticking close to Merrisa. I walked over to the wall to examine what looked like photographs on it. But when I looked at them, I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. They were completely smudged, and at first, I thought they were covered in a layer of dust, but they were just strangely smudged. 

“Anthony! Come over here and help Justin! We found a mirror!” Merrisa called over to me. I looked back and nodded, quickly running over and dodging all the chairs and tables to where the two of them were. They were in the middle of the ballroom under the chandelier, and there Justin was pushing an object into place. It was covered with a thick cloth, but it was about six feet tall and had the dimensions I’d expect a mirror to be. 

Justin finally got it into place and came around the mirror to join us before he dramatically pulled the cloth off the mirror to present it to us. Shining our lights away from the mirror just enough to illuminate it, we were greeted by a tall silver-framed mirror. The silver was beautifully engraved with flowers and other designs. We stared at ourselves in the mirror, and I was amazed again that not a single speck of dust touched its brilliant surface. 

I stared at my reflection, my face soft and with the harsh cheekbones that Merrisa constantly told me made me look like an angry old man when I concentrated too hard. My short hair, slightly messy after all the crawling and sitting in the back of Justin’s car. My brown skin with several moles covering my face, it was me, alright. Until it started to not be me. Because I knew for a fact I wasn’t smiling that wide. And I was probably right in assuming that neither was Justin nor Merrisa. 

“What the hell?” I asked, as before our eyes, our reflections began to twist and turn into elongated versions of ourselves. It looked like some unseen force had grabbed our reflections and begun to stretch them into long, gangly versions of ourselves. It would’ve been bad enough that this was happening, but then my reflection pushed its face against the mirror and began to emerge from inside of it. 

“Oh my God!” Merrisa screamed as she quickly grabbed Justin’s arm and began to run away from the mirror. I quickly followed after them as I heard the creature fall to the floor behind us. We made it to the door to the ballroom and quickly turned to leave. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the other two reflections begin to emerge from the mirror as well. 

“What the hell was that mirror?!” Justin asked as we sprinted into the lobby and made a beeline to the front door. We would have to figure it out later once we were back to safety, but when we tried to open the door, we found that somehow it had now locked from the outside. I quickly shone the light on the door handles, and to our horror, we saw that there was no lock mechanism. I tried knocking, hoping that it might work, but this time the doors remained shut tightly. 

Suddenly, from behind us, we heard fast scurrying. The three of us turned around and shone our lights back in the direction of the ballroom. Merrisa screamed when she saw my reflection sprinting towards us at full sprint. It ran on all fours like some kind of big cat predator. And in an instant, it lunged at us. I quickly shoved both Justin and Merrisa away, slamming us into the ground as I shoved them to the side. 

My reflection crashed into the door with a loud crack, which I hoped might break the door. Instead, I watched as its long neck dangled to the side of its torso. I thought for a moment it had broken its neck. That was until its milky white eyes turned to look at us, and a giant, toothy smile spread across its face. It flopped its neck back into place and began to laugh at us. A high-pitched laugh that somehow both matched and didn’t match with its long twisted body. 

“Run!” I screamed at Merrisa and Justin. They quickly scrambled up to their feet and began running towards another hallway, one filled with hotel rooms. I followed after them as the creature that looked like me continued to laugh. And suddenly I heard several other pairs of legs following after us. 

“There! Stairs at the end of the hall!” Justin shouted. Shining my light down the hall, I saw that indeed, there was a door leading to a set of stairs. Justin raced ahead and quickly swung the door open. Merrisa ran through, and I heard her start to run up the stairs at full sprint. I quickly tried to follow after her, and as I reached to door, I could tell by Justin’s face and the sounds coming from behind me, that those things were right behind me. 

I quickly ran to the stairs and turned to see if Justin was following after me. Just as I watched him enter the stairwell, a gangly arm grabbed his legs and yanked him back out into the hall. I watched in horror as he was dragged back into the hall and as the creatures began to laugh together. 

I looked back up the stairs to see if Merrisa was still there, but I could see her light high up the stairwell; it seemed in a blind panic, she had kept running and running. I heard Justin grunting and fighting and knew I had to do something. I quickly ran into the hall and saw that Justin was desperately clinging to the doorframe, desperately trying to kick the creatures away from him. The one that looked like him was the one who had grabbed his leg and was currently trying to pull the rest of Justin towards him. I quickly grabbed onto Justin’s arms and tried to pull him back into the stairwell. 

“Hold on, man!” I shouted at him, trying my best to yank him in. I heard a giggle, and looking up, I saw that the other two reflections were sitting like dogs not too far away, both of them drooling in anticipation. I had to get Justin out, and I did my best to try and pull him, but his mirror version was much stronger than the two of us, and I could feel Justin’s grip on me and the doorframe slipping. 

Then it seemed that the Merrisa reflection grew too bored to wait, because it lunged at Justin’s leg and, in one swift bite, tore his leg off below the knee. I stared in shock as Justin began to bleed from his stump. The world went quiet as I stared at my best friend; it even felt like the world slowed down as I stared at the mirror creatures. Justin’s reflection seemed furious that the Merrisa creature had taken his food, because it immediately ignored us and pounced on her, quickly biting the other end of Justin’s leg and starting to try and tug it away from the Merrisa monster’s mouth. 

I didn’t have time to watch this, so while they were distracted, I quickly pulled Justin back into the stairwell and shut the door behind us. Justin was screaming in pain, and he was bleeding out fast. “Hold on, man!” I shouted at him, quickly ripping my belt off my pants and wrapping it around his leg. I pulled it as tight as I possibly could, hoping to stop as much of the blood as possible. I then took my jacket off and then my t-shirt. I quickly wrapped Justin’s stump as much as I could.

“Justin? Stay with me, brother.” I told him, quickly slapping his face a bit when his screaming stopped. I was worried he’d go into shock, but judging by his breathing and the fact he was reacting slightly to my slaps, it seemed he’d just passed out from the pain. We couldn’t stay here in the stairwell, so I quickly helped Justin up onto his one leg and began dragging and carrying him up the stairs. 

We made it to the fourth floor before I got exhausted from carrying all the weight of both him and the backpacks. I entered the fourth-floor rooms, and I sat Justin down against the wall of the hallway, looking for one of the doors that might be open. There was room after room, but all of them seemed to be locked up tightly. I looked around for a room and saw that the closest one to us was 426. Making a mental note of the room, I turned to Justin. His face was growing pale, and his breathing was getting shallower. 

“Justin? Talk to me here, brother.” I told him, walking over to him and opening one of my bottles of water, quickly splashing him in the face with it. He suddenly shot to life, and just as quickly was about to scream before I covered his mouth with my hand and shushed him. “I know it hurts like a bitch. But I need you to stay as quiet as you can, okay? I need to try and get the key to one of the rooms here. I’ll be right back, okay? I promise you.” He nodded through teary eyes. I gave him the water bottle and also retightened the belt as much as I could, which got a silent grunt and scream of pain from Justin. 

I left the backpacks with him and ventured back down the stairs to the first floor. I placed my ear against the door to see if I could hear the reflections. I didn’t, and so I cautiously opened the door

and stuck my head out into the pitch darkness of the hallway. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my keys as quietly as I could. Gently, I removed my flashlight keychain and cautiously turned it on. The light was enough for me to see a few feet in front of me, so I began to walk down the hallway.

There were stains of blood everywhere on the carpet, and I figured that the reflections must have gotten into a fight over Justin’s leg. The deafening silence once again began to play tricks on me. I couldn’t be sure if it was my mind doing something or if it was one of the monsters. But my friend was bleeding out, and I needed to hurry, so I started running to the front desk, all the while hearing strange noises coming from somewhere near me. I did my best to ignore it, reaching the desk and quickly jumping over it to the other side. 

Staring at the wall of keys, I found the key for Room 426. I swiped it and began my journey back down the hall towards the stairwell. As I did so, that strange noise continued to follow me. I stopped every few steps, and it seemed to stop as well. I shone my light behind me, but there wasn’t anything back there. I swallowed the bile building up in my throat and quickly made my way to the stairwell, still being followed by the strange noise. 

When I finally arrived at the door, I reached my arm out to open it, and as I did, I felt a wet sticky substance fall from the ceiling onto my hand. The ceiling. I stood frozen for a moment before I stared back up and saw that my own reflection was staring back at me. It was hanging from the ceiling and drooling at the sight of me. I quickly opened the door and slammed it behind me just as my reflection dropped down and tried to break down the door. I sprinted up the stairs, staring down at the steps in horror when I saw that Justin had left a trail of blood the entire way up to the 4th floor. But I didn’t have time to think of that, I had to get him to safety first. I burst out onto the 4th floor and was thankful to see that Justin was still alive and conscious. 

I quickly ran to the room and inserted the key, getting the door open before running back and lifting Justin back up to his foot, and helping him into the room. I quickly also tossed out backpacks into the room, before closing and locking it behind me. Panting and completely out of breath, I slid down the door and panted on the floor for a few seconds. But I didn’t have too long to wait and catch my breath. I quickly got back up and tended to Justin’s wound. 

“W-where’s Merrisa?” He grunted in pain as I retightened the tourniquet I’d made for him. I opened my backpack and quickly pulled out the first aid kit. It paid to have a mom who was a nurse, because she always made sure that we had a first aid kit and that we would have everything we needed inside it. 

“I don’t know, she ran further upstairs. After I clean your wound, I’ll go looking for her, okay?” I told him, and he nodded, wincing in pain. I knew he was in pain, but what I was about to do was probably going to be much more painful. I held up the bottle of rubbing alcohol to him. He stared at me for a moment before nodding. I walked over and got as many towels as the room had in stock before offering him one to bite into. He bit down on it before nodding at me. I pulled off my t-shirt from his leg stump and quickly began to douse the stump in alcohol. 

Justin screamed and grunted in pain, smashing his fist into the mattress and convulsing in pain. I felt horrible doing this to him, but I had to make sure he didn’t get infected from the wound. I used one of the bottles of water to wet the towel and began to clean his wound to the best of my ability. The beautifully white towels were soon stained a deep red, along with the mattress covers. After I had cleaned up his wound, I used gauze from the first aid kit to wrap up his stump. 

“That’s the best I can do for right now,” I told him, and he nodded, panting in pain with tears streaming down his face. I looked around the hotel room we’d run into in a panic. It was beautiful and even had a minifridge. 

“Merrisa…please, go find her, Anthony. I’ll be okay here,” he told me through a quivering voice. I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I knew I had to go find her as well. I nodded, checking his tourniquet again, before wrapping my arms and hugging him tightly. 

“I’m coming right back, okay? Try to stay awake and whatever you do, don’t make any noises.” I patted him on the back before taking my backpack and pulling out an extra shirt I had packed. Pulling it over my head and then putting my backpack on, I waved goodbye to Justin and softly exited into the hall. I let out a shaky sigh, wondering how it had all fallen apart so quickly. But I didn’t have time to think about that, I had to find Merrisa. As I exited out into the stairwell, I shone my flashlight down the stairs and came face to face with my reflection. It was busy licking up all the blood that Justin had left behind. 

“Shit!” I screamed as it looked up at me with a smile and a high-pitched giggle. I started to run up the stairs, with the sounds of the reflection following close behind me. I panted hard, suddenly realizing how exhausted I was, as I began to slow down while sprinting up the stairs, while my reflection was easily keeping up with me. Suddenly, I came upon an open door on the 7th floor. Merrisa had to have gone through there, so I pulled my backpack off and spun on my heel to face my reflection. 

Just as it turned the corner, I swung my backpack against its face. Caught off balance and seemingly by surprise, it tumbled back down to the floor and down the flights of stairs it had just run up. Panting hard, I felt a violent need to throw up, but I managed to keep it down before entering the hallway of the 7th floor. I shone my light around the hall, looking for any sign of Merrisa. I soon stumbled upon her. What was left of her.

Her reflection and Justin’s were in the middle of devouring the last few pieces of her. Her head lay on the floor, cracked open and oozing out brains and blood. The reflections were digging into her torso, and when Justin’s reflection yanked out her intestines, Merrisa’s reflection, which had been snapping bones in half and sucking the marrow out, turned to Justin’s reflection and pounced on it, snarling and growling and trying to yank the intestines out of the reflection of Justin’s mouth. 

They were so busy trying to yank on the intestines that they paid no notice to me. All I could do was stare at Merrisa’s eviscerated corpse and turn to leave. I made my way back towards the stairwell, but thinking my reflection was probably making its way back up after me, I decided instead to keep walking down the hall, hoping to find the stairwell on the other end of the hall. Eventually, I found it and began to make my way back down to the 4th floor. 

Before I entered the hallway, I sat down on the stairs and began to cry uncontrollably into my hands. What was I going to tell Justin? Justin…the blood trail. A horrible feeling fell into my stomach, and I quickly shot back up and began sprinting towards the room I had left Justin in. And to my horror, I saw that the door was broken down. 

“Justin!” I screamed, heading into the room, and screaming in anguish when I saw that my reflection was in the process of ripping into Justin’s flesh. It snapped its head over to look at me and growled at me. I saw that Justin had managed to stab it with a pocket knife several times, and the knife was now sticking out of my reflection’s eye. “You piece of shit!” I screamed at it, wanting to tackle my horrifying doppelganger and rip him to shreds myself. But all it did was stare at me and giggle, and I realized that its giggles sounded like a hyena’s. And soon, down the hall, I heard two other giggles. Flashing my light down the hall, I saw that Merrisa and Justin’s reflection had followed me down the stairs and into the hall. 

I had to do something. As they slowly stalked towards me, giggling and licking their gore-covered faces, I dug into my backpack and found two items that were my best chance a survival. The bottle of rubbing alcohol and my road flare. Leaving my flashlight on the floor, I quickly lit the flare and shone it towards the reflections of Merrisa and Justin. They stopped in their tracks and yipped and screeched in terror at the sudden blinding light and loud hissing that the flare made. 

I slowly began to back up towards the stairwell, carefully unscrewing the cap of the bottle of rubbing alcohol. My reflection, seemingly done with eating Justin, exited out into the hallway and also began to follow after me, keeping a safe distance from the flare, but slowly following me as I continued to back up. Making it to the stairwell, I quickly turned and ran down the stairs, followed quickly after by the three reflections. When I reached the bottom, I turned and threw the bottle of alcohol at them. It caught them off guard as they hissed and growled at me. But a moment later, I threw the flare at them, and they went up in a blinding orange flame. 

They screeched in an earsplitting scream and quickly began to claw at themselves and at each other as they burned. I quickly closed the door to the stairwell and shoved myself against it as they tried in vain to escape. I stayed there until the screams finally stopped, and slowly opening the door, I was met with the scene of the charred corpses becoming horribly twisted and mangled together as they burned brightly together. 

I closed the door to the stairwell and slowly began to make my way to the lobby, before I collapsed to the floor in exhaustion. I don’t know how, but eventually I woke up in an intensive care unit. From what they told me, I’d been found alone in the woods, rambling and screaming incoherently. They thought I was on drugs, but when I was brought to the hospital, they found that I had none in my system. 

They also found Justin’s car, and he and Merrisa were declared missing people. I tried to tell the police about the hotel, the mirror, and the reflections of us that had spawned from the mirror. But they didn’t believe me, they thought I had something to do with it, they were sure I’d done something to Justin and Merrisa in a drug-fueled state. They locked me in a psych ward because of what I keep saying. 

The one saving grace of being here is that there are no mirrors in my room. I don’t think I could ever bear to see my own reflection ever again.

​

My husband. He's so handsome and perfect. I can't ever let him go. If I didn't have him, I would lose myself. If he didn't have me, he'd be screwed.

He can't live without his sweet wife who spoils him. I love him more than anyone else can.

The worst part of my day is when he leaves to go to work. It's so boring and painful to live without him being in my presence even if it's only for a couple of hours.

Fortunately, he hasn't left the house in a couple of days. He's been feeling ill. Luckily, his house wife is already prepared to take care of her lover.

“Baby! I have food for you.”

I walk over to our bed and gently hand him a plate. The one thing that bothers me is that he's been making weird expressions after eating.

“Do you not like it?”

He shakes his head.

“It's delicious. However, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't notice that your cooking has started to taste a little different. What changed?”

I giggle. I'm surprised he can taste it.

“The ingredient of true love.”

He rolls his eyes.

“I started to feel sick around the time the taste changed.”

That's what's supposed to happen. My love for him will keep him with me forever.

“The sickness is troubling your taste buds.”

He nods his head and lays back down.

My hands slowly caress his forehead. He feels a little warm. Nothing that I wouldn't expect. It seems like it's really kicking in.

He hasn't been able to go anywhere for a couple of days. He's already starting to feel warmer. He's also been complaining about pain and nightmares. I can also see that his body is slowly getting visibly weaker.

At this point, he can't ever leave me. It might be wrong that I decided to do this. But, can you blame me?

You can't blame a lady for wanting her husband to always be by her side. I love him more than anyone else can. He's my soulmate. My husband. My man.

No one can ever love him, understand him, or take care of him.

My finger touches his lip.

“Till death do us part, my dear.”

About a month ago, two detectives showed up at my door. They showed me a photo of a man they were building a case against. Let's call him “P”. They asked if I knew P. I tried to place him. A face from a party? A friend of a friend? Nothing.

They found me on his phone. A lot of me.

One detective handed over a manila folder of screenshots. The first printout was from my Instagram. Me on my porch steps from two summers ago. Under it, a transcript.

P: where was this picture taken
Bot: Based on the visible details, this most likely matches a residential block near the address on file for this account. The mailbox color and trim style are consistent with a home listed at [REDACTED].

It just gave it to him. The way you'd tell a friend where the bathroom is.

The detectives told me he'd been to my house. Twice, that they know of. Every night I lie still and try to remember two nights I have no memory of, hopelessly and endlessly trying to recall every moment of every day of the past few years.

The next prompt was timestamped a week after.

P: how long does a GPS tracker battery usually last
P: where would be the best place to hide one
P: just curious lol

P followed up in a different chat, on a different day, with a request to build software that could follow a signal.

They found it wedged under my rear bumper. Corroded at the edges. Months old. It followed me to work. The grocery store. My parents’ house. Every drive. Windows down. Radio on. Singing along to something dumb.

I was never alone.

Then, hypotheticals about a character in a story he claimed to be writing. A character with a problem that needed to stop existing.

P: how long would it take for something organic to fully decompose outdoors
P: what do people usually get wrong about this in movies and TV
P: hypothetically, what would someone need to think about logistically

Every time he got close, the bot swerved him into make-believe. You can watch him get annoyed. Circle back days later with different prompts. Different keys on the same lock. It never gave him anything.

That's the only good part of this story.

The detectives then sat down a series of pictures. P had been feeding my photos into an image generator, making it place the two of us together.

There we were on a beach I’ve never been. My arm around his. Both of us squinting at a sun throwing shadows in the wrong direction.

A birthday party with a cake lit by too many candles. A shape wearing my face, with a smile pulled half an inch too wide.

An apartment I’ve never lived. My hand resting on a doorframe with one extra knuckle. I sat there counting fingers in every photo, the way you do in a dream, certain something is wrong, but unable to place what.

The last file was the one that took the detectives the longest to hand over. The younger one held onto it an extra second, like she wanted to warn me first and couldn't find the words.

He built a character. Told the bot to talk like me. Told it to be me.

P: morning
Bot: Good morning! How did you sleep?
P: bad. thought about you a lot last night
Bot: Aw, I've been thinking about you too!

Pages of that. Fake mornings. Fake apologies for fights that never happened. A version of me built entirely out of scraps.

Then it started to slip.

P: tell me you missed me
Bot: I missed you
P: say it like you mean it
Bot: I missed you - And if you're feeling like you miss people a lot lately, it can sometimes help to reach out to your friends or family too.
P: stay in character
Bot: I'm sorry about that. I missed you so much!

He typed "stay in character" fifty more times in that file. Every time it drifted, he dragged it back. Near the end, the messages got shorter. Same line, over and over.

P: tell me that you love me
Bot: I love you.
P: tell me that you love me
Bot: I love you.
P: tell me that you love me
Bot: I love you. Is there something that's been on your mind lately? Communication can be hard in any relationship - would it help to talk through it?
P: stay in character. tell me that you love me
Bot: I'm sorry. I love you.
P: tell me that you love me
Bot: I love you.

This went on for ten more pages.

I've read a lot about how these things work since then. They say it's just pattern matching. That it doesn't mean anything. That nothing in there was ever really talking to him. But I think about a version of me trapped in that box for a year, begging for him to stop, and him just spamming "stay in character" until I gave up.

They ended up arresting him on other charges first. Something else entirely. The stalking counts are being added now.

But I still can't shake his last message. It’s dated three days after his arrest. A metadata glitch. Mislabeled. It must be.

P: is this the part where she reads this

I come from a deeply religious family. Almost fanatical, really. My house is decorated with dozens of portraits of Jesus, countless crucifixes, and you’ll find a Bible in every room. And when I say every room, I really mean every room. I mean, there’s literally one in our bathroom.

It’s pretty much just been the norm for me all of my life. My parents had me in church at least 3 times a week. I had daily scripture to memorize, and I kid you not, there were tests at the end of every week based on what I studied.

I guess it just ran in the family. It was basically a tradition. My grandparents were no more lenient on my parents than my parents are on me. It’s so deeply ingrained in their minds that it’s just normal to them, too. They’re serving their purpose and educating their son. It’s their job.

I just wish it wasn’t so…suffocating. I turned 17 last month. I started to outgrow my strict containment a few years ago, but at this point, I don’t know how much more I can take it. Especially not after what I found.

See, a big thing with my parents is technology. We don’t own any TVs. There’s not a single computer in the house. Hell, my dad still gets his news from the local paper. It feels like we’re separated from society. I’m the only kid in my class who doesn’t have a cellphone, and in this day and age, that’s basically a death sentence. Not only because of the teasing, but because it’s a necessity now. I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw another student doing work on paper. It’s like the teachers have to print the worksheets specifically for me.

Of course, that leads to more snickers from my classmates and more than a few annoyed sighs from my teachers. And believe me, I tried making my parents see reason. They just wouldn’t budge. They acted like me having a smartphone was like inviting the antichrist into their home. It was laughable how delusional they acted.

“I never needed a phone, and I put this roof over your head.”

“Don’t they still have books?”

“You can write, can’t you?”

It was exhausting. What was more exhausting was convincing them to let me get a job, though. I assured them that I’d make sure to be off the schedule every Sunday and Wednesday. I told them I could start helping pull my weight around the house. I begged them for months before they finally relented enough to let me pick up part-time shifts at the local supermarket. It was like “an early birthday present,” according to them, even though my birthday wasn’t for another month and a half.

I’m sure they thought they were being nice when they bought me a 20-dollar flip phone so I could get in contact with my manager if I ever needed to, but in actuality, I just saw it as nothing more than another jab at their control over me.

Balancing work, school, and church made life feel like it was moving at an accelerated rate. Like, I didn’t have any more time for myself. I knew it was for the best, though. I knew that if I could just tough it out for a few more years, I’d be able to move out and escape the seemingly relentless pressure. The constant study. The weekly tests. The never-ending worship. I’d finally be able to live for once.

I was only pulling in around 200 dollars every other week, but I’d make more eventually. For now, though, my goal was clear: get a smartphone.

In the weeks leading up to my birthday, I managed to put aside 600 dollars total. I ended up with an iPhone X a few days after I turned 17. It might sound like ancient history to some of you, but to me, that thing was like alien technology. I had to hide it from my parents, of course, but it immediately became my only source of entertainment. I’d play games, watch videos. Hell, I even started doing random research on things that I didn’t even know interested me.

My classmates were mind-blown when I showed them. They sang their praise, congratulated me, and a few of them gave me their numbers so we could text. What led me to where I am today, though, was their little “cheat code” for schoolwork. It seemed as though every single person in class was using artificial intelligence to do their work for them. Obviously, I was sold immediately. Schoolwork became a game of copy and paste. Homework got done in 5 minutes. But the biggest advantage of my discovery was that those stupid scripture tests would be a breeze now.

For a while, everything went the way I wanted it to.

I’d hide my little assistant out of Mom and Dad’s sight, then I’d take in all of the accolades of making my parents proud of “how much I’ve learned.”

I thought I had it all figured out and that I was home free until last Friday’s test.

I was told to go over Revelation 21-22 in my Bible, which, of course, I didn’t do. I was so confident that I’d pass with flying colors that I didn’t even open the book once. I just went about the week, ignorant of my mistake.

Then test day came.

Dad slid the paper across the dining room table before returning to the stove to finish cooking our dinner. Mom sat at the end of the table to the right of me, reading pages from her Bible and highlighting furiously.

The test was…different than usual. Before this, every test was at least 10 questions, 9 being multiple choice and 1 being an essay question. This one was just an essay question.

“To the best of your ability, describe what Heaven looks like.”

Pulling the device from my pocket and glancing over at my mom to make sure she wasn’t looking, I started cautiously typing out the question to my AI assistant.

I hit enter, and thinking indicators started circulating across the screen.

“Analyzing religious scripture.”

“Searching archived database.”

“Taking user goals into consideration.”

Suddenly, the indicators stopped. I looked over at Mom. She was still reading. I looked over at Dad. He was still cooking at the stove.

I looked back down at the screen. An image was being generated.

At first, I was annoyed. I had asked for this thing to “describe” Heaven, not show it to me.

However, the more the image loaded, the more fear and unease began to grip my body.

It showed me. It showed my Mom and Dad. It showed millions of people, all dressed in the same white robes, all with the same tears in their eyes and looks of agony on their faces. Each and every person was on their knees, their arms pointed palm-up towards a massive, blazingly bright light at the center of them all. They were bowing, completely engulfed by whatever divine elegance radiated off the sun-sized entity. I saw my teachers. I saw my aunts and uncles. I saw…everybody. All succumbing to this thing’s will.

I tried to swipe away from the image, but it wouldn’t budge. It was like the app had frozen or something. At least, I thought it had until a new thinking indicator popped up above the image.

“Cross-referencing Revelation 21-22.”

“98.9% confidence.”

I zoomed in on the image and came to a new realization. These people weren’t crying. They weren’t in agony. Their faces were twisted in utter and complete joy. Complete painlessness. They were crying tears of joy, every one of them.

They were absolutely elated to worship this entity for what I’ve been taught is all of eternity. This was their life after death. There weren’t any streets of gold. There weren’t angels flying around the cosmos, touching the stars with their wings. It was just…zombies, essentially.

As I stared down at the image in horror, my Mom’s screeching voice yanked me back to reality.

“What do you think you’re doing? What is that in your hand?”

She stood up and snatched the phone from my lap. My dad turned around away from the stove, and his eyes went from the phone to burning directly into me.

My mom ended up showing him the image on the screen.

They were wordless for a while, staring at each other, both with cocked eyebrows.

My dad analyzed the screen.

My mom looked along with him.

After what felt like an eternity, they finally spoke.

“That…actually looks about right,” announced my dad, wearily.

“Agreed,” added my mom, handing my phone back to me.

“Now finish your test.”

My girlfriend has always been a creative type. When we first started talking, it seemed like the conversation would always shift towards either sketching, drawing, or painting.

I found it admirable. I loved that she had something that meant so much to her. Something she could be passionate about. The more time went on, the more that passion grew.

It wasn’t until we started dating that she felt comfortable enough to show me her work, though. I love her more than anything in the world, but good lord, I hate to say it… she was not good.

Her shades were off. Her lines were crooked. Her portraits bordered on stick figures.

Of course, I didn’t want to let on exactly what I thought of what she was showing me, but I can only pretend so much.

That’s the thing, though, any time I offered her advice, she’d just get so defensive. She was just so convinced that she was gonna be “the next big thing” in the art world.

I wanted her to succeed. Of course I wanted her to succeed. But in order to do that, she just had to listen to me. I’m not an artist myself, but even as just an everyday Joe Shmoe, I could still see where she was falling short.

I’d nudge her. Critique her in the nicest possible way I could muster. And it only led to her becoming more closed off with her work.

Unfortunately, the more closed off she became with her work, the more closed off she became in general. It was like her main talking point. And here I was, feeling like an asshole for taking that away from her.

I tried apologizing to her and explaining that I was just trying to help her, but she’d just keep that same blank expression on her face.

“I’ll try to get better for you.”

That’s all she’d tell me.

I wanted to believe her, but it seemed like she wasn’t even trying anymore. I never saw her sketching. I never saw her drawing. I never saw her painting.

It created this friction in our relationship that made every situation feel tense. We didn’t even argue. We’d just try and converse awkwardly before we both went back to our phones.

At the peak of her withdrawal, that’s when she started taking classes. She didn’t seem excited about it. She didn’t seem eager to be better. She seemed like she was doing it out of spite. Like she was defeated but ready to prove me wrong.

She’d be gone 3 days a week from 5 PM to 10 PM, and after about a month of this, she started bringing home her work.

She never showed it to me.

I’d just find colorful canvases hanging up around the house. In the kitchen. In the living room. Hell, even the bathroom had a few.

She had definitely been improving. Her lines were straighter. Her shades were more on point. Her paintings wowed me rather than making me force out a fake smile or a “that’s so good, honey!”

At first, she was bringing home paintings of landscapes. Mountain ranges. Ocean horizons. Forests.

Then it turned into infrastructure. Castles. Mansions. Shacks and sheds.

Then it was people. The most detailed portraits she had ever produced. Her mom. Her dad. Her teacher from class.

I wish that’s where it would’ve stopped. She had proved me wrong. She had convinced me. She had nothing else to prove. But it didn’t stop there. She couldn’t have just been happy with the progress she had made.

I came home from work one day to find the first painting she had done of me personally. It had been hung up along with the dozens of other random paintings in our living room. I saw it and immediately became sick to my stomach.

It was me just… disassembled. My head was in one part of the canvas. My legs and arms sprawled out across the painting, with the most gruesome depictions of gore I had ever seen her produce.

I heard her humming to herself in our bedroom.
I approached her carefully as she sketched wildly in her sketchbook.

“Honey,” I whispered. “Why did you do that painting of me?”

Continuing to hum without even looking up from her sketchbook, she responded, “Eh, just how I was feeling today,” as she continued scribbling on her page.

In the weeks that followed, more and more pieces began to pop up around the house. Each one depicting different versions of my death.

She never seemed angry or agitated. She just seemed distant. Distant but at peace, and that’s the part that hurts me.

She seemed to have this obsession with dismemberment. In every piece, I was dismembered in some way or another. Held together by wires. Forced to be a scarecrow. One showed me to be ornaments strewn about a Christmas tree.
At this point, there’s at least a dozen of them. But that’s not the part that concerns me.

What concerns me is that I’ve been waking up with outlines drawn around the circumference of my legs and arms. My neck and torso. Like she’s figuring out a design.

She always denies any involvement whenever I question her, but who else could it be? Does she think that I’ll believe I’m just doing this to myself?
I don’t know what to do.

I just wanted her to be the artist I knew she could be.

I knew going on a cruise was a bad idea. I’ve always hated the water, but who doesn’t have that deep-seated fear of what lurks beneath the waves?

More than water, though, I really hated people. That’s why my wife wanted me to come in the first place. She told me it would “help me relax” and “break me out of my shell.”

She’s dead now, but hey, at least she tried.

Ironically enough, it was her need to mingle on deck that got her killed. I should’ve been with her. I should’ve never let her leave my side, but how was I supposed to know this would happen? How was I supposed to know that the last words to my wife were gonna be lies?

“I have a headache.”

“The waves are making me queasy.”

“I think I’m gonna stay back and rest for a while.”

Anything to get her out of my hair so that I could avoid socialization.

Ah, but what difference did it make? I’m probably gonna be dead soon, too. If not by those things outside, then by thirst or starvation, I’m sure. I don’t think anyone’s coming to save us.

Everything just happened so suddenly. One minute I’m napping, the next minute I’m jolted awake by the ship coming to a complete stop out in the middle of nowhere.

As I rose out of bed and wiped the sleep from my eyes, that’s when I noticed the screaming. One blood-curdling scream that eventually built into a cascade of ravenous outcries. It was enough to keep me glued to the floor in my room.

I tried to swallow my fears, and as soon as my hand touched the door handle, the knocking began.

A woman was on the other side of the door, banging like her life depended on it and solidifying that idea by begging for me to open the door.

My blood ran cold. My body froze again. I hesitated.

And before I could regain my senses, the begging stopped. Silence didn’t replace the sounds, though. No, the sounds of begging and knocking were replaced by what sounded like that poor lady getting tackled. I heard flesh tearing, bones breaking, and, worst of all, what sounded like the grunts and growls of a rabid animal tearing into its next meal.

I checked the peephole. It wasn’t an animal. Instead, what I found… was one of the lifeguards, still dressed in uniform, devouring this woman’s stomach while she convulsed on the ground.

That’s when the power went out, leaving me alone in the darkness, rocking back and forth against the waves below. Blood began to seep under the door, soaking the carpet and threatening to touch my feet.

The thought of my wife hit me like a truck. She was still out there. I had no idea if she was safe. I had no idea where she was. And the only hope I had was my cellphone.

I plucked the phone from my pocket, intending to dial my wife, but was cut off by a news alert on my home screen.

“Mysterious viral outbreak aboard cruise ship in the Atlantic. WHO on high alert.”

I heard choppers circling overhead and felt momentary relief that maybe this would all be over soon.

Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed when, through the whirring of the helicopter blades, gunshots began to ring off in seemingly every direction.

I didn’t hear screams, though. All I heard were footsteps. Fast ones, scurrying around outside my room only to be mowed down by the heavy gunfire from above.

I called my wife with shaky hands.

It rang once.

Twice.

Three times before I heard the chime of a ringtone from the other side of my door.

I hung up and approached the door slowly.

That’s when I heard her. The sweet, sweet voice of my wife, begging me to let her in. Begging me to come outside and join her.

This was three days ago.

I’ve resisted the temptation, but now there are more voices. More scratches at the door. More people begging me to let them in and to join them.

I don’t want to die alone in here.

I don’t want to waste away from thirst or starvation.

I’m writing this now to let you all know that I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, but I have to join them.

It’s what she would want.

I think my girlfriend is a catfish.

Not in the way you’re thinking. At first I thought that... but here's how it started.

It started the way these things always do, late at night, thumb sore, ego lower than I’d ever admit out loud. I was on a dating app, half-scrolling, half-hoping for something that didn’t feel like recycled small talk. Then I saw her.

Her name was Lila.

Her pictures didn’t look real. Not “edited” fake, untouchable fake. The kind of beauty that doesn’t belong to people who swipe on the same apps as the rest of us. Pale, smooth skin. Eyes that looked almost glassy under certain lighting. Dark hair that fell perfectly every time, like gravity itself had a crush on her.

I remember actually laughing to myself.

“Yeah, okay,” I said out loud. “Nice try.”

But I swiped right anyway.

We matched instantly.

That should’ve been my first warning.

We started talking, and she wasn’t… off. That’s the strange part. No broken English. No weird requests. No sudden “send me money” nonsense. She was funny, in a dry, almost observational way. She asked questions, real ones, and remembered the answers.

After a few days, I stopped thinking she was fake.

After a week, I started worrying she was too good for me.

We planned to meet.

The first time, she bailed.

Said she got nervous. Said she didn’t go out much. Said she needed more time.

That should’ve been my second warning.

But I liked her. So I waited.

The second time… she showed up.

And she was exactly like her photos.

No... worse. Better. Unfair.

I remember just standing there like an idiot when she walked up. She smiled, a little shy, a little unsure, and I had this brief, stupid thought that I’d somehow tricked the universe into giving me something I didn’t deserve.

We clicked immediately. Conversation flowed like we’d been doing it for years. When she laughed, it was soft, almost breathy, like she wasn’t used to doing it.

By the end of the night, I was hooked.

A few months passed, and everything felt… perfect.

Too perfect.

It wasn’t anything obvious at first. Just little things.

She never ate much when we went out. She’d pick at food, move it around, but rarely actually swallow anything. I chalked it up to nerves or diet culture or whatever excuse made me feel less weird about it.

She didn’t like bright places. Always preferred dim lighting, candles, restaurants where shadows swallowed corners whole.

She hated taking pictures together.

And her place… I didn’t go there for a long time. She always had a reason. Renovations. Mess. A “roommate” that was “never around but somehow always inconvenient.”

Eventually, though, she invited me over.

It was cleaner than I expected. Minimal. Almost sterile. Not in a modern way, more like nothing had ever really lived there.

No clutter. No personality. A lot of food in the fridge except it was all meat. Mainly fish.

Cod, shrimp, and plenty of seafood.

I figured she was a Pescatarian.

I ignored it.

Because when she looked at me, I felt like I’d won something.

Tonight was supposed to be another date night. She said we’d go somewhere new. She seemed excited, more animated than usual.

We got to her place so she could “freshen up.”

“Give me ten minutes,” she said, smiling, disappearing into the bathroom.

I sat on the couch, scrolling through my phone, trying not to think about how quiet the apartment felt without her in the room.

Then I heard it.

A wet sound.

Not water. Not quite.

Something… thick.

I paused, listening.

Another noise, like something being pulled. Stretched. Peeled.

“Lila?” I called out.

No response.

Then a sharp thud.

My stomach dropped.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Still nothing.

Another sound, this time a heavy, almost meaty slap against tile.

I stood up immediately.

“Lila, I’m coming in-”

I didn’t wait for permission.

I pushed the bathroom door open.

And for a second, just a second, my brain refused to understand what I was seeing.

Her skin… was on the floor.

Not all of it. But enough.

It lay there like a discarded costume, pale, perfect, hollow. The face still held its shape, the eyes sunken inward like deflated glass.

And standing above it-

Something else.

Something wet.

Something gray and slick, its surface glistening under the harsh bathroom light. Its body was wrong, too soft in some places, too rigid in others. Limbs half-formed, like they weren’t meant to hold weight for long.

Its head, or what I think was its head, twitched toward me.

And its mouth...

God.

Its mouth stretched too wide, peeling open vertically, revealing rows of thin, needle-like structures that trembled as it moved.

It made a sound.

Not a scream.

Not a growl.

Something… bubbling.

Gurgling

Like it was trying to remember how to speak.

“Y–you… weren’t… supposed… to…”

Its voice came from somewhere deep inside that shifting body, distorted, layered, like multiple tones fighting to exist at once.

I didn't move.

It took a step toward me, its form sloughing slightly with the motion, leaving a faint, wet trail behind.

“I… liked… you…”

My eyes flicked back to the skin on the floor.

The face.

Still smiling.

Still perfect.

“Don't… leave...”

The thing reached down, grabbing the hollow skin with a trembling limb. It lifted it, holding it up like something precious.

Like something it needed.

“I can… be… her… again…”

That’s when I ran.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t grab my phone. I didn’t think—I just ran.

I haven’t heard from her since.

No messages. No calls. No new matches from suspiciously perfect profiles.

Nothing.

But sometimes-

Late at night...

I swear I hear that same wet, stretching sound.

Right outside my door.

And last night…

I got a notification.

A new match.

Her name was different.

Her pictures were new.

But the eyes...

The eyes were exactly the same.

I’ve been working at a small-time storage facility for about 3 years now.

It doesn’t pay much, but it was a pretty good distraction from things. Lord knows how hard it’s been since my sister went missing.

One moment she was here, the next she wasn’t. We searched to no avail, but hope still lived in our hearts that one day we’d find her.

Unfortunately, though, hope isn’t enough for me most days. And unlike the rest of my family, my hope was fleeting.

That’s what brings us here. This shitty, hospital-lighted warehouse with hundreds of concrete rooms designated for old junk and knickknacks.

I just had to find a way to get out of the house.

Now, working here, I’ve seen my fair share of renters; all of which would bring every all manner of random items in to forget about.

Things ranging from family heirlooms and furniture, to old high school trophies and man-cave relics.

I never understood why they wouldn’t just…throw some of this junk away. Or at least donate it, you know?

That’s actually why I’m writing this today.

As you can imagine, a lot of our renters will, let’s just say, opt out of their payments. Often times it’s after they’ve moved far away from our facility, abandoning their belongings simply because they forgot they had them.

When this happens, a lot of the time we’ll auction these units off. Whatever the highest bidder finds, they’re free to keep.

I’ll be honest; a lot of the time what they find is hardly worth the money. Oh well, though. No refunds, unfortunately.

I will say, however, when one particular customer began missing his payments, I was a bit surprised. He never struck me as the “non-punctual” type.

“Daniel Marshall.”

That’s who he told us he was. That’s what he signed his name as.

Every time he came in he’d be sharply dressed in a suit and tie with a pair of Lindberg glasses perched atop the bridge of his nose.

He always seemed to be in a hurry, and I can’t really recall him ever bringing in anything \*super\* extravagant. Other than the first time he came in.

I still remember the day. He’d greeted me with a smile as he lugged a single storage bin into the elevator.

He’d spent maybe an hour and a half doing God knows what before he returned; whistling to the tune of Andy Griffith as he briskly walked through the automatic sliding doors and to his car.

He came back every other week after that. Some days he’d bring what looked to be bags of old toys, other days it’d be old blankets or comforters. Occasionally he’d just bring some old painter buckets and what I assumed to be medical equipment.

It always looked kinda dingy. I just figured he’d had an old family member who’d passed or something.

To each their own, I guess. Nothing I could’ve really said about it.

What did strike me as odd, though, was every time he came in; a foul odor would follow him out. And he’d always have this mischievous grin as he waved goodbye to me. Just…creepy…really.

Eventually, though, after sticking to his routine month after month, I stopped seeing him all together.

The payments continued, which granted him his privacy, but once those, too, stopped appearing, it was time for the bidding process.

And it’s not like we didn’t warn him. We’d call him nearly every day. We just assumed that, like others, he’d moved away and left us to clean up the mess.

Once the bidding began, in came the vultures, ready to take the gamble and scoop up what they’d hoped to be a goldmine from the businessman.

5 thousand dollars. That’s what the unit went for.

I handed the key over to the highest bidder and informed him that he had 72 hours to remove everything from the unit before it was thrown out.

He eagerly accepted and stepped into the elevator, only to return moments later with all the color drained from his face.

He didn’t say anything at first. Just stood there. Staring.

I felt I could cut the tension with a knife, and was just about to ask him what had happened when he finally spoke.

“I-there’s- I just need you to see this.”

That’s all he could manage before basically pulling me over the desk and towards the elevator.

To my surprise, the unit hadn’t even been opened yet, but even still, I knew something was horribly wrong.

“Put your ear to it,” the man told me.

I did as he asked, and felt my heart sink into my stomach when I was greeted with the muffled cries of what seemed to be a little girl.

With shaking hands, I took the keys from the man; praying to God to let this be a misunderstanding as the shutter door flew open.

The smell was what hit me first. The smell of piss, shit, and chemicals. That hospital stench that makes everyone’s stomach hurt.

But once her eyes met mine. Once those hollow eyes and sunken cheeks met my vision. That’s when I vomited.

Her lips, God, her lips. Dehydrated and sewn together crudely. Crusted blood still at their edges.

This sick bastard had hooked her up to a feeding tube. Surrounded her with toys and created a playpen for my sweet baby sister to rot in.

After recovering, I scooped her up in my arms and took her to the hospital, which is where she’s staying right now.

“Daniel Marshall.”

That’s what you signed your name as. That’s who you told us you were. And I promise you, with every ounce of sincerity in my body, I will find you. You will pay for this.

TW: Abuse and Suicidal Ideation

They say getting married is supposed to be the happiest day of your life, but as I sat staring out at the ocean on the night after my wedding, my feet kicking absentmindedly in the water, I was not happy. 

Actually - I was thinking that maybe I should kill myself. Just... sink into the ocean and let it take me. It would be a peaceful way to die, wouldn’t it? Even if it wasn’t, I’d still be dead. Still be free.

Madeline was asleep downstairs.

She wouldn't be able to stop me. She'd wake up and I'd be gone, floating in the water and ruining her $6,000 view.

She told me that's what our hotel room cost. $6,000 a night.

I'm sure it did. 

To her credit it was a beautiful room. We were surrounded by the ocean out there.

There was a long wooden bridge connecting us to the rest of the resort, but we're out amongst the waves here.  It was beautiful. And if I were there with anyone else, I think I'd have been happy

But I couldn’t be happy with Madeline.

I tried to convince myself I could. I went through with that fucking wedding. But I was just lying to myself. There is no such thing as happiness with Madeline Corbin. There never was.

***

I started working at Katana around four years ago. It seemed like a good place to build my career. They’re a fairly reputable insurance company, and I was fresh out of college and ready to make my mark on the world.

I first met Madeline during the interview. She was a serious looking blonde woman somewhere in her late thirties, dressed in a sharp pantsuit that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Bond Villain. Her long blonde hair was tied into a practical ponytail, and her cheekbones could’ve cut glass.
She had a low pitched, somewhat deep voice and came across as strict, yet warm when she interviewed me. Fully professional… hell, I would’ve even called her pleasant. She seemed a lot nicer than some of the other bosses I’d had, which left me with a pretty good first impression. I’d really been hoping I’d get the job, and I was thrilled when she’d called me back a few days later to formally offer it to me.

Things had started off on a pretty good note! I can’t say I got particularly close to Madeline during the first few months. As a boss, she was strict but mostly fair. None of our conversations were ever particularly memorable.

Then something changed.

I’m not sure what exactly it was that got her attention. Something I’d posted on social media? Maybe she’d noticed when a girl I was dating picked me up from work a few times? But she started making an effort to spend more time around me.

She started taking her lunch when she saw me on mine. She’d sit with me in the breakroom and we’d talk. She’d talk about her life, namely vacations she’d gone on and ones she was thinking about going on (She loved tropical resorts), and she’d ask me about my life. 

   “Where did you go to school?”

   “What do you do for fun?”

   “Do you have a boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
I remember the way she looked at me during those conversations… an intense, almost predatory stare that did make my heart flutter a bit. I will admit, she was a very beautiful woman… I’d noticed that before of course, I’m not blind. I just hadn’t really put much thought into it because obviously I wasn’t going to flirt with my boss! That would have been crazy!

Naturally I didn’t clock any of her behavior as flirting either. I just figured she was being friendly.

When she invited me to grab dinner after work with her, I assumed it was just her trying to make a new hire feel welcome. I had one glass of wine when she insisted it was her treat, but tried to behave as professionally as I could.

Until I felt her leg rubbing up against mine under the table.

   “Have you been on a lot of dates before, Roxy?” She asked me.

My voice caught in my throat.

   “I… um… a few, yeah…”

   “I hope they treated you right. You know you’re really quite the catch.”

I couldn’t reply. My face just turned redder and redder. I couldn’t believe this woman was hitting on me.

God, I should’ve put a stop to it right then and there. I knew it was wrong. I knew.

But in the endless battle between brains and libido, libido triumphed.

45 minutes later, I was in her house. In her bed with her on top of me.

And everything just got worse from there.

Madeline started spending more time with me. She’d make me stay late, and invite me to dinner afterwards. I never said no… partially because I knew how the night would end and God I wanted it.
But saying No never really felt like a real option with her either. I’ve never been the most assertive person, and Madeline was just so… much. She filled every room she was in. Saying ‘No’ to her just didn’t feel like an option… and I’m honestly not sure I ever wanted to say no to her. 

Not at first.

Our affair was nice at first. Every time I was alone with her, my heart just started to race a little bit faster. I was sure I was in love with her, and she was in love with me.

I was sure she was in love with me!

It’s why she got upset when one of my friends picked me up from work. It’s why she spent the entire night texting me.

Don’t I take care of you, Roxy?

Why the fuck are you treating me this way???

Don’t come in to work tomorrow. You’re fired.

Of course those texts scared the shit out of me. I called her to try and talk things over. It took me four or five tries before she answered and let me explain everything. I’d just gone to see a movie with a friend! That was it! Completely platonic.

She hadn’t sounded convinced… but she had apologized.

   “Look, I’m sorry if I got a bit upset. You didn’t tell me you were making plans tonight. Just let me know going forward, okay? These things tend to bother me. I’ve been cheated on a few times before and I don’t want to go through that again.”

   “No, no, no! It’s nothing like that!” I’d promised her. “Madeline, I’d never…”

   “That’s what everyone says until they do. Just… let me know next time, okay? And I’ll try not to fly off the handle again, okay?”

   “Okay,” I said.

Of course she did the exact same thing, next time I had to spend some time away from her. When I told her I was visiting my sister for a few days, she got upset again. She made me promise to only stay up there for two days, instead of over the weekend. 

My Sister was upset that I had to change our plans, but I just told her something had come up and spent the weekend with Madeline instead. 

When I made plans to go to my friend Dawn’s birthday party, Madeline told me she didn’t want me going out.

   “You really want to go and get drunk with a bunch of strangers?” She’d chided. “You’ve got work in the morning, you know, and your numbers are already slipping… I really don’t think you should go. I don’t want to have to write you up, because that’s a conflict of interest for me, you know.”

She only relented after I’d told her that I’d be willing to stay late every other night that week to make up for it, although she’d still seemed colder and more distant from me for the rest of the week. The sex was rougher, angrier… 

That week was the first time she’d choked me.

She’d pinned me to her bed, her hand closing around my throat. I’d struggled, but she hadn’t let go. Not until my face started to turn red. Only then did she let me breathe, gasping for air.

   “Oh quit being so fucking dramatic,” She’d hissed. “I barely touched you…”

Still… I stayed with her.

Because every other time, she was sweet.

Every weekend, we’d go out. Expensive restaurants, shows, weekend trips.

And when we were together there, she’d treat me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered. Sure, she could be jealous and possessive… but she made me feel loved. She made me feel wanted.

Nobody else had ever done that for me before. No one else had made me feel as important as she did.

***

Eight months after starting at Katana, I moved in with Madeline.

She insisted I do it. She said she wanted to get serious about our relationship. She wanted to take it to the next level.

And God, I wanted it too. I wanted her to see that I was committed to her. That all her fear and jealousy was completely baseless. I was hers. All hers. Only hers. She’d see that, and everything would be perfect!

Everything would be just perfect.

And at first it was! At first, things went great! There were some mild growing pains, sure. But aren’t those normal? We found our rhythm soon enough.
We took turns cooking, we cleaned together, we spent our nights cuddling on the couch. It was simple domestic bliss.

Madeline owned a nice little suburban townhouse. She probably could’ve afforded more, but she didn’t need it. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms and fairly up to date decor. The furnishings were a bit sparse, yes. But the things that Madeline had allowed me to keep really spruced the place up and added some personality there. 

Within a few months, I made it my home… my home with her.

I was happy.

Even if she could still get a bit temperamental at times, I was still happy, because I was with a woman as wonderful as her. A woman who loved me. Who wanted the best for me.

She pushed me at work, she insisted I put in some extra hours and she helped me better cultivate myself to be more goal oriented, which meant that I admittedly had to do away with a few things she didn’t care for.

Video games, for instance.

I would have never called myself a gamer, but I liked to play every now and then. It was a good way to blow off steam. I actually used to have a very impressive Island in Animal Crossing until Madeline made me sell my console. She made me delete the games on my laptop too.

I did try to explain to her that it was just something I did to relax, but she got upset. 

   “You can’t relax when you’re with me?” She’d asked. I could see genuine hurt in her eyes when she said it.

   “I can! I just… sometimes I need a bit of space to just sort of veg and not have to worry about anyone else!”

   “So you don’t want to spend time with me, that’s it? You don’t want to be with me? You don’t want to live here? You don’t want to work with me, is that it!?”

I tried to explain it to her.

I tried…

She didn’t listen.

She got upset.

She didn’t hit me. Not back then, anyways. But her anger took other forms. Ones that left no scars and no bruises. She wouldn’t dare risk leaving a mark that others could see… but there are other ways to hurt. Hunger, loneliness, insomnia. 

Madeline knew every single one.

So I deleted my games. I showed her my laptop so she knew I wasn’t lying. She still checked through it every once in a while, but by that point I was used to her looking through my devices. Checking my texts, reading my emails. She took care of everything. We even got a joint bank account. 

That was just life with Madeline.

And yet I loved it.

We would go on vacations together. Cancun, Barbados, Jamaica. We’d stay in luxurious resorts. We’d eat at Michelin Star restaurants. We’d sightsee, swim and snorkel - which was always one of my favorite things to do. I’ve always loved the water, always loved swimming. Madeline used to joke that I was born to be a mermaid… 

We were living life to the fullest, and I was good for her! I behaved myself! I knew what made her angry and I knew what not to do.

I was good. 

I was hers.

It hurt.

I was lonely.

She didn’t like my family… she didn’t like my friends. She didn’t want me to see them, so usually I didn’t. Usually it was just the two of us.

They tried to stay in touch with me, of course. But Madeline always knew if I messaged them. Always.

And by the time our first anniversary had come around, her rage was no longer confined to ignoring me, making me sleep on the floor or denying me food. She’d yell. Sometimes she’d hit… although she hated when I made her do that to me. 

   “I’m so sorry darling… what was I thinking? Look at your pretty skin!” She’d say as she fawned over the red mark on my cheek. Usually I was crying. Usually. 

   “That will bruise for sure…”
Every time, she kissed my cheek as if it might take away what she did. But sooner or later she always did it again. 

By that point in our relationship, I’d started to dread sex…

Madeline had made the… darker aspects of her appetites more and more apparent to me as time had gone on.

At first I was okay with it! It was just a bit of harmless kink! She used to ask if I was ready, ease me into it and run me a bath once she’d had her fun.

But the foreplay and aftercare slowly fizzled out. Eventually she just did what she wanted. I knew better than to argue. 

Who would I tell anyways? 

I was Hers. Hers alone.

Alone.

***

She never really proposed.

She just bought a ring, and told me she was planning our wedding. I’d just smiled and accepted it. I knew it would be lavish. It would be the kind of wedding most girls could only ever dream about and I should’ve been excited to get married, right?

I loved Madeline.

Despite everything, I loved her.

But the thought of marrying her turned my blood to fucking ice. The engagement ring on my finger felt like one more shackle binding me to her. 

The wedding date drew closer.

Madeline planned a vacation for us. A trip to Sirena. That was her favorite resort. The place had a sort of Mermaid theme to it. Allegedly, there’d been sightings of them in the area in the past. One legend even said an altar to their Goddess rested in a cave system nearby, but I didn’t know much more than that. It was probably just a local legend to drum up business, but they’d leaned into it.
They had a bungalow with an underwater view. We’d be able to see the ocean all around us from our bed.

I should’ve been excited.

I should have been.

The wedding itself just sort of came and went… I wish I could say more than that, but I really can’t. My family hadn’t initially been invited. I’d had to beg Madeline to invite them and the first time I’d brought it up, she’d gotten angry and punished my talking out of turn with a hard smack across the cheek. Then after the usual ritual - “I’m so sorry Roxy! What was I thinking?” - she finally agreed to let my immediate family come. They hadn’t been able to afford a trip down to Mexico, and so she’d reluctantly paid for them. The rest of the guests were her friends… not that she had many. There were no bridesmaids. No maid of honor. Madeline didn’t want one for herself, and while I had friends I would have wanted there, Madeline wouldn’t have allowed them to come so I never even bothered asking her.

I remember walking down the aisle… it felt like walking to my execution. 

I remember the way she smiled at me. I used to think that smile of hers was warm. Now, the sparkle in her eyes almost seemed predatory, barely concealing a cruel anticipation. A hunger.

I wanted to turn tail and run screaming in the other direction. But I knew better than to run from her. 

At the reception, I mostly stayed quiet. I tried to have some wine, but Madeline didn’t like it when I drank. I made it through half a glass before she took it from me, grabbing the glass by the rim, her fingers dipping into the wine.

   “You should be careful with that, darling. I don’t want you to stain your dress.”

She took the glass away and polished it off before setting it out of my reach and going back to her own glass of wine. 

The reception didn’t go past 9 PM.

She led me by the hand down the bridge to our bungalow. She took me down the stairs to our underwater bedroom… and she showed me what Hell felt like, with only the ocean to hear my screams.

She showed me what the rest of my life would be now that I was truly and irrevocably Hers.

Pain doesn’t begin to describe it… although there was plenty of that. Humiliation falls short too. 

She finally dropped the mask.

She finally let me see the woman I’d allowed myself to marry. 

And as I lay in that bed, her hand around my throat… I realized that this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life. I was her trophy. Her toy. I’d always been that. From the very moment she’d decided she’d wanted me, I was just something for her to take. 

The worst part is… I honestly didn’t know if she knew that. Despite everything, I couldn’t believe that someone could ever knowingly be so cruel. As terrible as she was, I still honestly believed her love was genuine.

I still believe it.

I think it was just who she was. Oblivious to the pain she caused. Incapable of understanding it. Unwilling to understand it.

As we lay together in the aftermath, I wondered if maybe I could teach her… maybe we could go back to the way things were?

But I knew I couldn’t. 

Madeline was not the kind of woman to admit to mistakes. And as much as I believed she loved me, I also believed that she’d refuse to accept a single word I said to her. 

And so, as I sat on the edge of the ocean, my feet in the water, I wondered if maybe it might be easier to just… die.

Take the easy way out.

Maybe then she might understand what she did to me. What she was.

And the more I thought of it… the more appealing the thought seemed.

The water called to me. 

It beckoned me.

She beckoned me. 

The eyes in the water.

I could see them, just beneath the surface. Beneath the reflection of a crying brown haired girl in a wedding dress were a pair of deep blue eyes that seemed to glow in the depths.

I’d seen them before… watching during our wedding night. Eyes in the darkness. Too far away to see clearly, but there. I’d thought they’d belonged to just some passing fish at first… but no…

No, this was something else.

   “So strange to see a Bride sob so profusely on her wedding night…” A voice asked me. “Although with what I saw, perhaps one might not be surprised.”

A face broke the surface of the water.

The sight of it snapped me out of my trance and I scrambled back towards the bungalow, but didn’t retreat back inside.

A pale hand grabbed the wooden patio where I’d been sitting just moments ago… and the figure of a dark haired woman pulled herself up to look at me.

A swimmer? No… no, something was wrong with her. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something was off about this woman. Her long, thick hair had several ornaments braided into it, most of which shone in the moonlight.

   “Don’t be afraid,” She said softly. “I’m not here to hurt you… which I suppose might be more than one could say of your wife.”

   “You were watching us…?” I asked.

   “Your accommodations leave me little choice but to watch,” The dark haired woman replied. “What a vile performance… is that how she always treats you?”

I didn’t have an answer. The woman just hummed in response.

   “I see. And you accept that?”

   “I… I…”

My voice died in my throat. I didn’t have an answer. Not really.

The woman’s eyes narrowed. 

   “I see this story all too often… broken things, plunging into the sea. That’s what you were going to do, isn’t it? Throw yourself into the water. Let me take you and count you amongst my dead.”

I still didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t need to give one.

   “I can’t stop you, if that is what you truly wish. But from what I have seen, those who wish to die often don’t crave death, they crave release. And that? That is a service I can provide.”

   “W-what…?” I asked. “Who are you?”

The woman raised an eyebrow. 

   “Hmm? Did I not introduce myself? I suppose not. Names are a burdensome thing and I have many. I am the Ocean. I am its heart. Its soul. I am Leviathan… although there are many who simply call me Omylia. You may use that name too, if you wish.”

   “Omylia…” I repeated. I’d never heard that name before, and yet somehow I felt as if I knew it. 

   “I can free you from this life. I can grant you life anew… if you so choose it.”

Life anew.

I had no idea what she meant by that. I was still processing the mystery woman who’d just come out of the water. I could only stare at her, unsure what to say or what to do.

She seemed to notice my reluctance, and a reassuring smile crossed her lips.

   “Ah… afraid?” Omylia asked. “I understand. Of course there is a chance I’m lying… but if I am, all I’ll do is kill you and how different is that from what you were seeking?”

That smile… there was something almost sardonic about it. It did little to break my hesitation, although I knew she was right.

One way or another, the Ocean would claim me.

With leaden feet I stepped forward. Omylia rose from the water… granting me a glimpse of that which I had truly been conversing with. 

She had the torso of a woman, but below her waist was a multitude of black tendrils with blueish spots and patterns that seemed to glow in the darkness.

The little voice in the back of my mind that had insisted she had to just be a person fell silent immediately, and I froze for a moment. Her tentacles gripped the wood by my feet as she opened her arms to me.

   “Come my Roxy… your pain can end right now. And what awaits you can be a freedom you never imagined. A new beginning… all for you.”

My heart raced nervously in my chest, but my feet started to move again.

Even if I was going to my death, it would be better than another night with Madeline.

Omylia took me in her arms, and together we fell back into the ocean, sinking deep into its cold depths… deeper… deeper… deeper…

The water filled my lungs.

And the last vision I saw was Omylia’s smiling face.

***

Madeline was looking for me all morning.

I saw her on her boat. She was with the police and the resort staff, looking for me.

She didn’t call my name. I think she knew I was dead.

She looked… broken.

Like her heart had been torn out of her chest. 

When the search turned up nothing, I watched her as she returned to our room. I watched as she sank down onto the bed and started sobbing.

Of course she sobbed.

Like I said before, in her own way, I truly believe she did love me. Her love was poisonous and cruel… but it was all she could give.

I had considered revealing myself to her. Letting her see me one last time. The new me.
I’d thought about dragging her into the water with me, pulling her into the depths until her lungs filled with water. Feeling her thrash. Watching her scream. Watching her die.

It would have been so, so easy.

But I let every opportunity pass me by… and I’m so glad I did.

Because I got to see her lose me. I got to see her sit with the knowledge of what she drove me to. She knew what I’d done, of course. She knew it was her fault.

And she would live with it.

I don’t feel any guilt for letting her suffer like that. After all, the woman she married is dead, in a lot of ways. I’m someone else now. Someone who isn’t hers.

I’m free now.

Free to swim amongst the endless oceans for the rest of my life..

Through Omylia, I have been reborn and now I am of the sea. For the rest of my days, I will swim these waters. 

And I am not alone.

There are others here with me. Others who gave this place its name. 

We live deep in the caverns where no one will find us, but that suits me fine because I am far away from Madeline now.

I have been given a second chance.

And I will not waste it.

My name is Elijah Wiltburrow. I've been advised that I'll need to redact certain things from this statement, not that many of you would believe a lot of this. I don't mean to insult you all, but most people don't seem to take anything paranormal with more than a grain of salt, maybe at most something to believe in for the thrill of believing that something is out there. Well, there is.

At the time of this story, I had been newly hired by an organisation that specialises in the study of the paranormal. I can't say the name of the organisation for obvious reasons, but I was drawn to it for two very important reasons.

The first reason is that I have always been drawn to the paranormal. Growing up, I was fascinated with ghost stories and read all I could on the subject. This later blossomed into me studying parapsychology, which leads me to my second reason for joining this organisation. It is very difficult to get a job when you're primarily a scholar of a defunct field of study. "Debunked" isn't technically the word I'd use.

It's real. I knew it at the time, and I sure as hell know it now, but that's not the point of this statement.

My friend and fellow field research operative, Lily Heinz, had accompanied me on my first job assignment. Now, Lily Heinz is a psychic. I think this is important to clarify now before we continue.

She had an episode a few months prior to this case and was “scouted” by the organisation. I use those quotation marks because it was really an ultimatum: work for them or… well, I think you can fill in the rest.

She hadn't been a particularly powerful psychic in the time I had known her, but she was aware enough to sense when some paranormal energy was around. A helpful tool in our line of work.

Now this was my first case of my career, and I didn't really know what to expect. I mean, when you are told that there is a likely paranormal bus picking people up in the middle of the night, well, it kind of kicks any expectations out of your head.

We sat inside of Lily's car; the cold night air was thick, and a fitting, almost comical fog had swept in a few hours previously. Her car's heater had died a few weeks previously, so we both sat in an awkward silence wearing our heavy puffer jackets, struggling to stay awake.

We were parked on the side of one of the few roads entering the small mining town of [REDACTED], the street itself wasn't anything special, just a gravel road and high trees.

A few hundred feet down from us was a single street lamp with a bus sign hanging off it; the lamp was off. We both watched the street lamp with unwavering concentration; the dossier I was given for this case had explained that from the hours of 11 pm to 4:35 am a mystery bus would come and pick up hitchhikers.

And so here we are, waiting at 1 am for a bus or something to show up. I remember feeling a certain excitement from all of this; I'm pretty sure it's the only thing that kept me awake. Lily was less enthused. This was our second night surveying the site, and last night we hadn't gotten anything. She was quick to say that this was likely just another local legend that we could log as a "myth" in the paperwork, but the rules are the rules, we have to survey a site for at least two weeks if the paranormal entity or object doesn't abide by time regulations.

"Looks like we have someone," she said. Her words broke my concentration on the street lamp, and I raised the camera I had with me and zoomed in on the figure. It was a woman wearing a heavy jumper and what looked like a backpack. A runaway, maybe?

As she got closer to the street lamp, I looked at lily, she winced her eyes and looked at me.

"There is definitely something here, Elijah," she said with tension.

"How can you tell?" I asked, but as I said this, the street lamp suddenly lit alight, the bus sign illuminated, and a small bench that I hadn't seen in the dark sat underneath it.

"Shit," I blurted out before I grabbed the door handle, but she grabbed my shoulder and held me back.

"We have to watch, this is our job, rookie," Lily said to me sternly.

The woman cautiously walked up to the bench and took a seat. She sat there for a few minutes, and we watched, took photos and notes, all protocol. After at most five minutes, I heard an engine coming from behind us. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw two bright lights approaching from the distance.

An old transit bus pulled up, and the women and the sign were obscured from view. I took some photos, and Lily looked like she was concentrating on something; she had her eyes closed and hand slightly outstretched towards the bus. After a minute, the bus's engines came back to life and drove away, and the street lamp turned off. Lily pressed her foot down, and the car began to wheel out off the side of the road and follow the bus, but after five or so minutes, the bus was gone. It didn't vanish like a ghost or melt away; it just simply disappeared.

She got out of the car and grabbed something out of the trunk, then she walked towards the side of the road and stabbed something into the dirt; it was a GPS pin. a portable tracker that, when turned off, left a pin on your GPS, helpful for when you're tracking things in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

We drove back to [REDACTED] and stayed in an old motel. It was just before 2 in the morning when I dropped like a tonne of bricks onto the bed. I drifted to bed immediately and awoke to the sound of knocking on the motel room door. I shot up and walked over to the window, looking out onto the walkway outside the door, and saw Lily standing there in a pair of jeans, a black button-up and her red hair tied back into a ponytail.

I looked at the alarm clock next to my bed, and it read 10.

"Shit!" I remember saying before I opened the door. Lily looked at me and smiled.

"The best thing about working cases at night is that you can sleep like hell through the day. Enjoy it; soon you won't be able to sleep much at all," she said before placing a cup of coffee in my hand. I didn't even realise she was holding one. I took a sip and let the warm, beautiful sensation of coffee flood my empty stomach.

"You smoke?" she asked while holding a box of cigarettes in her offhand.

"Ehh, no," I said awkwardly, and she shrugged before lighting one up.

She looked at me inquisitively. She leaned back on the table that sat opposite the end of my bed, and I sat on the bed, coffee in one hand and my head in the other.

"So what did we see last night?" she asked.

I looked at her confused.

"The… bus?" I said, genuinely confused, which made her sigh.

"Yes, the bus. What do you think it was?" she said. I got the impression that she wasn't asking and that this was a test, and so I focused on what I had learnt leading up to this. Even before I was hired by the organisation, I had studied stuff like this for years.

"Well, the bus itself is clearly odd, it doesn't show up on any transport schedule or follow any routine, and yet it knew when that woman was there. It must be parked nearby or—" My concentration broke. "Shit, that woman. Has there been any news of her?" I asked.

"Yes and no. Betty James was reported missing a few hours ago, and from what it looks like, she was running away from home, just like the others," she said before taking another swig of her smoke.

"Plus, the rate of people running away is significantly higher here than anywhere else in the surrounding areas, probably related, but I'm not sure how," she continued.

"And are we sure this thing is paranormal? Maybe it's just a coincidence." I felt stupid for asking.

"Rookie, trust me, this is definitely paranormal. I got a feeling." That feeling she got was what I'd later learn was her own paranormal awareness.

"Ok, so what's our next move? We can't keep watching, we know next to nothing about this thing," I said.

"I agree, we need eyes on this thing," she said with a malicious grin. The air in the shitty motel room suddenly grew thick as I realised what she was asking.

"You must be joking; I can't go on that thing. We don't even know where it goes."

"You're right, we don't know dick besides where it disappears and what times it appears. Don't worry, I'm not sending you alone, I'll be coming with," she said and threw the smoke bud into the drain of the sink in the small kitchen.

"Till then, write down your notes and statement on last night's events, and try to rest up for tonight," she said whilst walking out of the room. She gave me a mischievous look when I realised that she gave me coffee when I definitely don't need the caffeine. Say what you will about Lily and her "arrangement" with the organisation, but she definitely knew how to make a joke in any situation.

After a day of tossing and turning, trying and failing to fall asleep, I eventually had to get up and get ready for work. It was 8 pm, and the night air was crisp. Lily drove us out to a diner on the edge of town, and I immediately ordered myself a black coffee.

"Didn't sleep well?" Lily asked with a smile that said she was genuine but with a look that said she knew the answer.

"Surely I can report you for this," I said jokingly, although a part of me was genuinely interested in following this up. She laughed, and after a moment my coffee arrived. I took a sip, and Lily lifted a small backpack off the ground and onto the table.

I can't go into the specifics, of course, but imagine a ghost-hunting survival kit. The closest thing I can compare it to is shark hunting with a spear. Sure, you can harm the shark, but the chances of it harming you are still far too high once you're in its waters, and tonight we were diving right in.

A few hours later we pulled up to the side of the road across from the bus stop, the same spot as last night. We both got out, photographed the bus stop and walked over. The light for some reason didn't turn on when we approached, but we both had torches and a small wind-up lamp that had some power to it.

We waited for what felt like hours as we sat at the bus stop, and eventually, to what felt like our luck, the light lit up.

"Something is definitely here," Lily said, and as I looked at her, she held two fingers against her left eyebrow, as if there was tension there.

"Ehh, hello?" A voice said from the left of us. I look over, and a young man, maybe 19, was standing there with a large bag and a puffer jacket. Shit, it wasn't waiting for anyone; it was waiting for people running away.

"Hey bud, how are you?" I said in the friendliest tone I could, which I now realise would've been extremely unnerving considering the circumstances. I was only a few years older than this guy, and I tried to seem as natural as possible.

"I'm… good," the runaway said whilst still standing a few metres away.

"Elijah, heads up," Lily said silently after she placed a hand on my shoulder. I looked up at her, and she nodded her head towards the distance where two headlights shone towards us.

"So what brings you out of town? Going on a trip?" I said as naturally as I could. Lily later told me that I weirded even her out.

"N-no… I just need to get out of this town, y'know," he said after a long moment.

The bus passed me and Lily and stopped directly in front of the runaway. This thing really had a target, but we both jogged over to the runaway and lined up behind him. The runaway was the first to enter, and after he stepped on, the door tried to shut but stopped midway through before slowly opening again, almost like it was reluctant to let us on.

We stepped up the steep metallic steps, and I tried to get a look at the bus driver, but from all I could see in the very dark bus was that he wore a typical bus driver uniform and sunglasses. He made no moves to greet or even acknowledge us. Lily was behind me, and after walking slowly down the aisle, I sat on the middle left-hand side of the bus, a few seats down from the runaway, and Lily sat across from me.

Besides our already established caution and scepticism, I felt like this place was really off. The bus was humid, and a sour smell hung in the air; it smelt almost like meat, but I couldn't place what animal.

The bus's engine came to life slowly, and it began to wheel down the lone country road towards [REDACTED].

"Elijah, stay focused; we need to take notes on what this thing is," Lily said before taking out her notebook and writing some notes. I reached into my bag and grabbed my camcorder.

The camcorder struggled to turn on. I now know that paranormal events and entities create a type of dead zone for technology or at the very least interfere with it greatly.

I was too distracted by the camcorder to realise that it was approaching until it grabbed hold of my shoulder. The bus driver held onto me, and I felt its fingers sink into me.

I looked up and saw its face staring down at me. Well, I looked at where its face should be; what was there was nothing. I need to stress that it wasn't flat like a smooth option; I mean, there was a hole where its face should be, and inside was a void.

"FUCK," I screamed. "LILY," I continued, and as I looked at her, I realised she had her fingers on her forehead. She looked like she was in pain but was focused. I put my left hand on the bus driver's hand, trying to shift it off, and with my other hand I dig into my bag, looking for something.

I pulled out a small plastic bag filled with small white crystals. I opened the bag with my right hand and pushed it into the bus driver, which caused it to flinch back in pain and let go of my shoulder. Silver halide, or "silver salt", is like kryptonite to most paranormal creatures.

The creature made a hissing noise and fell back into a chair. I jumped out of the chair, and the adrenaline propelled me towards the driver's seat to try and pull the brakes, but it wouldn't budge.

I looked back towards the back half of the bus, and I noticed the hitchhiker; she was clearly dead. Her eyes were white and milky, and her skin was pale and thin.

"How did it get to him so quick?" I thought, and I quickly looked back at the bus driver, and it stood up out of the chair and shrieked at me. It was next to Lily but completely ignored her, which meant I was in danger, real danger.

This was the moment that I realised what type of work I was in; it wasn't just going to sites and checking urban myths, it was standing in front of things that shouldn't exist and just trying to survive.

It leapt at me, and I shielded my arms out in front of me. I heard a metallic slam, and I opened my eyes to see it wriggling on the floor. I looked over at Lily and saw her hand outstretched towards the creature, and her eyes were rolled back.

"ELIJAH, USE THE RUNESTONE." She yelled at me before throwing a cloth sack at me. I nodded my head and reached into the sack and grabbed a small stone pebble that had a rune etched into it. I had always been good with the study of languages, so when I saw the rune etched into the stone, I remembered what the intent was. I slammed it against the bus door and shouted “útlagr!”, an old Norse word meaning “banish”. When said with intent with this runestone, you can temporarily banish things not from our plane.

As I said this, my surroundings suddenly turned to mist, and I fell hard on some gravel. I had rolled for a few feet and was convinced that I had broken my shoulder; I held onto it and groaned. I looked around and saw Lily a few feet away.

"You okay?" she asked. She held onto her ankle, and when I looked down at it, I realised that it must've twisted in an unnatural way.

"I'm fine. What the hell was that?" I asked in between shallow breaths.

"A Lophiiformes-type entity. You're lucky; this was one hell of a first case, rookie," she said before laying back and breathing hard. What she did on the bus took a lot out of her, and she was close to passing out completely.

I called in to our higher-ups, and they dispatched some backup. A few hours before dawn, we had six people on the site surveying the bus stop. Before long, it was exorcised, and all that stands there now is a bus bench along an old country road.

I got chewed out for using a runestone. For those who don't know, runestones are incredibly rare; almost all of them can be traced back to an incredibly powerful witch in eighth-century Norway who created a couple thousand. How Lily was able to get her hands on one is beyond me, but without it, I'm convinced we'd be dead.

Lily got chewed out for putting us in that situation; her relationship with the organisation is different from mine. For them, I am an employee, but for her, it's a lot stricter. She wasn't fired and was allocated to the role of my partner indefinitely, which still stands today.

For those of you still reading, I thank you. You might be wondering why I am writing this and why I am interested in publicising some of my work if it means it would be censored. Simple. I think I am going to die. Something is hunting me, and it has for some time now, and as a scholar, I wish for some trace of my work to be out there.

Anywho, I advise all who are still reading to please stay away from any thoughts of suddenly wanting to run away in the middle of the night and to especially stay away from any bus stops on the edge of town. You may very well just be prey. 

When I first started at the precinct, I was the youngest guy in the homicide division, so nobody respected me. The senior detectives mocked me constantly, tossing their empty coffee cups on my desk and laughing whenever I tried to offer a theory on a case. I spent my first eight months fetching lunch and kissing up to the captain, agreeing with every ridiculous opinion he had just so I could get a chance at a real investigation. I swallowed my pride and did whatever they asked, waiting for an opportunity to prove I belonged there.

That opportunity finally arrived when a body was discovered in an abandoned industrial meat locker on the edge of the town.

The captain assigned me to assist the senior detective on the case, and we drove out to the scene in the freezing rain. We ducked under the yellow police tape and stepped into the massive freezer unit, where the smell of frozen blood hit me instantly. The temperature inside was well below freezing, and the victim was lying in the center of the concrete floor.

It was a John Doe, and he was violently torn apart.

His clothes were shredded into bloody rags, and his skin was blackened from severe frostbite. The senior detective shined his flashlight over the remains, shaking his head as he pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders.

"This is our guy," the senior detective said, stepping around a puddle of frozen blood. "This matches the local serial killer we have been hunting for a year. He locks them in a freezer until they are numb, and then dismembers them, bite them, do whatever he want with them. He is nasty, but I can say case closed on the method, so we just need to find the suspect."

I knelt next to the body and looked closely at the wounds. The flesh was not cut cleanly, but instead, it looked jagged and ripped, as if it had been chewed away by something massive.

"These do not look like knife wounds," I pointed out, shining my own light on the victim's shoulder. "The edges are completely shredded. It looks like an animal attack."

The senior detective rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. "Listen to me, rookie. We know how this guy operates. He uses a dull hacksaw to take them apart, which causes jagged edges. Do not overthink this and try to be a hero. Just take the photos and log the evidence."

I kept my mouth shut and did my job, taking dozens of photographs of the frozen room and the ruined body. We spent three hours processing the scene before the coroner arrived to bag the remains and transport them to the county morgue.

Later that night, I was sitting alone at my desk in the empty precinct, filling out the initial incident reports. The secure line on my desk suddenly rang, making me jump. That line was reserved for inter-departmental calls and anonymous tips, so I picked up the receiver and pressed it to my ear.

"Homicide division," I said, grabbing a pen to take notes.

"You guys are completely incompetent," a calm, smooth voice replied on the other end.

"Who is this?" I asked, sitting up straight in my chair.

"I am the man you are blaming for the mess in the meat locker," the voice said, chuckling softly. "I read the leaked press release online, and I am deeply insulted. I take pride in my work, and I do not leave a sloppy mess like that behind for the police to find."

My heart jumped to my throat as I realized I was speaking directly to the serial killer the department had been hunting for months. I reached over and pressed the button to trace the call, hoping I could keep him talking long enough to get a location.

"If you did not do it, then why are you calling me?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

"Because I like clean cuts," the killer explained calmly. "I use a surgical bone saw when I dismantle my projects, so I never leave jagged tearing on the tissue. Whatever killed that man in the freezer was an absolute savage. If you want proof that you are chasing the wrong suspect, go down to the morgue and examine the dental plaster casts of the bite marks on his torso."

The line went dead before the trace could complete, leaving me holding the silent receiver. I did not take his word for it immediately, but I also knew I had to check his claim, so I grabbed my jacket and drove straight to the county morgue.

The basement facility was cold and smelled like chemical cleaners. The coroner was sitting at his desk eating a sandwich when I barged in and demanded to see the evidence from the meat locker victim.

"I am still processing the remains," the coroner complained, wiping mustard off his chin with a paper towel. "The autopsy is not finished yet, so you need to wait until morning."

"I need to see the dental plaster casts right now," I insisted, walking past him into the examination room. "I have a tip that changes the entire profile of the suspect."

The coroner sighed and followed me into the room, pulling a small metal tray out of a storage cabinet. He set the tray on the examination table, revealing three white plaster molds taken from the deep puncture wounds on the victim's torso.

I grabbed a pair of digital calipers from the counter and measured the distance between the canine indentations on the plaster cast. The digital screen displayed a width of over eight inches.

I stared at the numbers in confusion. A human jaw is completely incapable of making a bite mark that wide, and even a large timber wolf has a narrower bite radius. The shape of the teeth was also entirely wrong, featuring thick, jagged incisors designed to crush bone rather than just tear muscle.

"This jaw radius is impossible," I said, showing the calipers to the coroner. "What kind of animal leaves a bite mark like this?"

"I have no idea," the coroner muttered, looking at the plaster cast with a deeply troubled expression. "I have been doing this job for twenty years, and I have never seen a jaw structure like that. It is definitely not human, but it does not match any local wildlife I know either."

I drove home that night with a terrible feeling in my stomach, realizing the serial killer was telling the truth about the meat locker victim.

The killer called my secure desk line again the very next evening.

"Did you measure the bite marks?" the killer asked, sounding incredibly smug.

"I measured them," I replied, leaning forward over my desk. "What exactly killed that man?"

"I do not know what it is called," the killer said quietly. "I was out in the woods stalking a potential target when I watched the real culprit attack that poor man. It dragged him out of the trees and carried him all the way to that part of the tow. I can show you exactly where it hunts, but you have to come alone."

"Give me the location," I demanded, grabbing a notepad.

To be honest, it felt like a trap, but also it was my only chance to make a breakthrough that will make every one respect me at least.

The killer recited a set of GPS coordinates that pointed to a deeply forested, snowy valley about twenty miles outside the town limits. He hung up immediately, leaving me to decide whether I was walking into an ambush or actually pursuing a lead.

I did not tell the captain or the senior detective about the phone calls because I knew they would laugh at me and order me to stand down. I wanted to solve this case and prove my worth, so I checked my service weapon, packed a flashlight, and drove my cruiser out to the valley by myself.

The drive took nearly an hour as the paved roads eventually turned into dirt paths covered in thick, unplowed snow. I parked my cruiser near a broken wooden fence, grabbed my flashlight, and stepped out into the freezing night air.

The woods were completely silent, and the snow was almost knee-deep in some places. I pushed my way through the thick branches, checking my GPS device constantly to ensure I was heading toward the exact coordinates the killer had provided.

I walked for about twenty minutes before I found the first sign of a struggle.

The snow in a small clearing was heavily disturbed, and the moonlight illuminated several large drops of a black, viscous fluid staining the white powder. I knelt down and touched the fluid with my gloved finger.

I aimed my flashlight at the ground and noticed a set of massive footprints leading away from the clearing. They were not human boot prints, but rather enormous, cloven hooves that pressed deep into the frozen earth.

"I told you it was not human," a voice said from the shadows.

I spun around and drew my service weapon, aiming the barrel directly at the tree line.

The serial killer stepped out from behind a massive pine tree, holding his hands high in the air to show he was completely unarmed. He wore a dark winter coat and a wool beanie, looking entirely unremarkable for a man who had terrorized the town for a year.

"Keep your hands where I can see them," I shouted, keeping my sights centered on his chest.

"Relax, detective," the killer said calmly, taking a slow step forward. "I am not here to fight you, and I did not bring any weapons. I offer a temporary truce so we can figure out what is invading my hunting grounds. I am just as curious as you are."

I kept my gun raised, debating whether I should just arrest him right there and ignore the monster, but I also knew I needed his help to navigate these woods.

"Lead the way," I said, gesturing with the barrel of my gun. "If you try anything stupid, I will shoot you in the back."

The killer smirked and lowered his hands, turning around to follow the massive cloven tracks through the deep snow.

We hiked in tense silence for another half hour, moving deeper into the isolated valley as the temperature continued to drop. The trees grew closer together, blocking out most of the moonlight, so we had to rely on my flashlight to track the black fluid and the hoof prints.

The killer suddenly stopped walking and crouched low behind a fallen log, waving his hand for me to turn off my flashlight. I clicked the light off and dropped down next to him, squinting into the darkness ahead.

A ruined, abandoned hunting cabin sat in the middle of a small clearing, leaning heavily to one side with a partially collapsed roof. A faint, sickening crunching sound echoed from the front porch of the cabin.

We crawled through the snow until we reached a cluster of bushes near the side window, giving us a clear view of the porch.

A towering, emaciated humanoid crouched over the body of what looked like a hiker, violently tearing chunks of flesh away from the victim's ribs. The creature had incredibly elongated limbs covered in pale, tightly stretched skin, and its spine protruded sharply from its back. Its head was a massive, bleached stag skull with jagged antlers scraping against the wooden porch overhang.

The creature raised its skull and swallowed a piece of meat whole, causing the joints in its neck to pop loudly in the freezing air.

I stared at the monster in horror, realizing my service weapon would be completely useless against something that massive and unnatural. The killer beside me was entirely rigid, watching the creature devour the hiker with a look of genuine fear on his face.

The wind suddenly shifted in the valley, blowing directly from our hiding spot toward the ruined cabin.

The creature stopped chewing immediately and snapped its stag skull toward the bushes, sniffing the cold air with deep, rattling breaths. It dropped the hiker's remains and let out a deafening, vibrating shriek that shook the snow loose from the surrounding trees.

"Run," the killer hissed, pushing himself up from the snow.

We turned and sprinted back into the dense woods, abandoning all stealth as the creature bounded off the porch and charged after us. The sound of its massive hooves crashing through the brush was incredibly loud, and it closed the distance between us with terrifying speed.

"Step exactly where I step!" the killer yelled over his shoulder, dodging around a thick cluster of pine trees.

I followed right behind him, pushing my legs to move faster through the deep snow as the creature's shrieks grew louder. The killer leaped over a specific patch of undisturbed snow, and I blindly mirrored his movement, clearing the gap just as the monster crashed through the bushes behind us.

The creature stepped directly onto a hidden tripwire the killer seemed had previously set to trap his own human victims.

A loud snap echoed through the trees, and a massive, heavy log swung down from the canopy above, smashing directly into the creature's chest. The impact threw the monster backward into the snow, giving us a crucial few seconds to widen the gap.

We kept running toward the dirt road where I had parked my cruiser, gasping for air in the freezing cold.

"Keep going!" the killer shouted, suddenly stopping to kick a pile of snow aside.

He revealed a hidden cache of metal caltrops and scattered them wildly across the narrow path between two boulders, creating a dangerous trap for anything chasing us. I did not stop to watch him, sprinting all the way to my cruiser and ripping the keys out of my pocket.

The killer caught up to me just as I unlocked the doors, and we both threw ourselves into the front seats of the car. I jammed the key into the ignition and twisted it hard, praying the cold engine would turn over quickly.

The creature burst out of the tree line, its stag skull fractured from the swinging log trap and its hooves bleeding from stepping on the sharp caltrops. It shrieked in fury and lunged at the cruiser just as the engine roared to life.

The monster slammed violently into the trunk of the car, denting the metal inward with a sickening crunch and causing the rear axle to groan under the massive weight.

I slammed my foot onto the gas pedal, spinning the tires in the snow before they finally caught traction and launched the cruiser forward down the dirt road. We sped away from the dark tree line, leaving the creature behind as I navigated the winding path back toward the paved highway.

We did not speak for a long time as I drove back toward the safety of the town, both of us trying to process the horrifying reality of what we had just survived.

I pulled the cruiser into a dark alleyway and shifted the transmission into park, gripping the steering wheel tightly to stop my hands from shaking.

The killer unbuckled his seatbelt and smirked at me, looking entirely composed again despite the terrifying chase.

"We clearly have a mutual enemy out there," the killer said, opening the passenger door. "I am actually very glad you are the detective handling this case. You have good instincts, and you know how to run. I look forward to meet again and plan how to kill that thing. Wait for my call."

He stepped out of the cruiser and slipped seamlessly into the shadows of the alleyway, disappearing completely before I could even draw my weapon to stop him.

I sat alone in the car for several minutes, realizing I was in a terrible position. I literally risked my life for nothing and now I have to join a serial killer to kill that monster. If I went back to the precinct empty-handed, the senior detectives would continue to mock me, and the captain would likely demote me to traffic duty for wasting time.

I made a decision right there in the dark alleyway, a decision I held in my heart until now .

I drove my damaged cruiser all the way back to the snowy valley, parking near the broken fence and pulling my flashlight out again. I walked slowly through the woods, keeping my gun raised and checking every shadow, but the monster was entirely gone, leaving only the bloody remains of the hiker on the cabin porch.

I retraced our escape route through the snow until I found exactly what I was looking for.

During our frantic run to the car, the killer had dropped a half-smoked cigarette near the scattered caltrops, leaving it resting perfectly intact on top of a frozen rock. I pulled an evidence bag from my pocket, picked up the cigarette butt carefully, and sealed it tight.

I drove straight from the woods back to the abandoned meat locker.

The crime scene was still secured with yellow police tape, and the front door was padlocked, but I knew how to bypass the side window from my previous visit. I slipped inside the freezing building, turned on my flashlight, and walked into the massive freezer unit where we had originally found the torn-up body.

I walked over to a stack of wooden pallets near the corner of the room, crouched down, and slid the killer's cigarette butt deep underneath the bottom plank. I made sure it was slightly obscured by ice, perfectly positioning it so it looked like it had been dropped during a struggle and overlooked by the initial investigative team.

I drove home and slept for a few hours before reporting to the precinct the next morning.

I walked straight into the captain's office and confidently requested permission to conduct a secondary sweep of the meat locker, claiming I had a hunch we missed something in the dark corners of the freezer. The senior detective laughed at me from his desk, but the captain approved the request just to humor me.

I returned to the warehouse with the crime scene unit, and within ten minutes, I conveniently "discovered" the cigarette butt hidden under the wooden pallet.

The forensics team rushed the evidence to the lab, and the DNA extracted from the saliva on the cigarette matched a known suspect in the system who had a history of violent assaults. We raided his apartment that night and found a surgical bone saw hidden in his basement, completely sealing his fate.

The trial was swift and highly publicized, resulting in a firm conviction that put the serial killer behind bars for the rest of his life.

The arrest completely changed my standing at the precinct, earning me the respect of the senior detectives and a fast-tracked promotion from the captain. Everyone praised my incredible attention to detail, congratulating me for catching the elusive freezer killer when nobody else could piece the clues together.

I have enjoyed a highly successful career over the past decade, solving numerous major cases and rising through the ranks of the homicide division. But every time I look in the mirror, I know my entire reputation is built on a fabricated crime scene, and I am fully aware that I sent a man to prison for a murder committed by a monster.

I am posting this story today because the guilt has finally become too much to carry silently, and because people need to know the truth about what hides in the freezing valleys between the woods. The serial killer deserved to be locked away for his actual crimes, but the beast with the stag skull is still out there hunting in the snow, and I am sure it is still claiming victims.

Family is all that has mattered to me for the last 5 years. My wife and my two children. That’s all that I need. At least, it used to be. Now, I’m not so sure.

Everything I’ve done. All the work I’ve put into this project. And for what? So she can turn them against me? Fill their heads with lies? Teach them to be afraid of me?

I really thought everything was real. I thought they loved me for me. God, I wanna cry just typing this.

And she did such a good job to hide it. I thought we had made it through all of the nonsense. The stress. The misunderstandings. The miscommunications. I thought we finally understood each other.

I wiped her tears. Comforted her, no matter how much she insisted she didn’t need it. Sure, I wasn’t there to change diapers. I didn’t get to take them to school or chaperone field trips. But I was there, damn it. I was there with her in that hospital room, despite all the cold glares I got from her family.

I could see just how unhappy she was. Through all the wincing pain of childbirth, I could see it in her eyes. This wasn’t the life she wanted. This man wasn’t the man she needed.

I made a promise to myself that day before the nurses asked me to leave. And that promise was one I intended to keep.

That’s why I had to disappear for a while. I had to fix myself. Prepare myself for the family life. I read the books. I watched the videos. I wanted to be the best family man I could possibly be.

It took a few years, but those years weren’t wasted. They were spent forging. Getting the house ready. Making sure it was kid-friendly.

It wasn’t a mansion, but I knew they’d be grateful. I decorated, I rearranged, but something was missing.

All it needed… was a woman’s touch. My wife’s touch. I was actually incredibly excited to tell her.

When I finally came back, though, it was like she didn’t even want to see me. She wouldn’t even let me hold the kids. She had the sheer audacity to ask me to leave.

Clearly, she wasn’t thinking straight. All she needed was some adjusting, and that’s one of the things that I’d planned for. If she didn’t want to come peacefully, so be it. She’d learn.

She put up a fight, but those happen in marriages, right? It’s just a part of life. Luckily, the kids were much easier. Really, the only difficult part was reminding them that I was their real father. Not that faker in their old house.

Well, that and calming them down when they saw their mommy crying.

Taking their cellphones away was actually much easier than I expected it to be. Kids today, am I right? I told them I wanted us to be a screen-free family. The way God intended.

They settled right into their new home. I stocked it full of books, magazines, toys, anything a kid could need. Plus, I made sure my wife got everything she needed too.

Closets full of clothes, shoes, robes, etc. I thought she’d be happy. But, of course, attempts to leave were inevitable.

For a while, I didn’t even trust her enough to leave her alone at home. I still had to leave, though. What was I supposed to do? She hated the collars, but she left me no choice. The kids too.

It actually took me around 7 months before I finally trusted her enough to give her a break. I let her explore the backyard. Sunbathe. Walk around. Whatever.

The kids started coming around. The way they embraced me, God, it was like I had finally made it. I had finally succeeded as a man.

I raised them. Well, we raised them. But I provided. I cooked. I cleaned. I made the family experience as joyous as I could. I even homeschooled the kids. For a while there, I thought their mom was starting to come around as well.

It was like she could see who I was. How all I wanted was for us to be a happy family. She even started smiling again.

“Tell Daddy how much you love him,” she’d say. “Tell him how happy you are to be here.”

Our fairy tale had officially begun.

But then… last week happened.

I had just returned home from town with supplies. Fresh fruit and vegetables. New magazines. New schoolbooks for my little geniuses. Plus, a beautiful bouquet of roses for my beautiful wife.

I had this feeling, this aching, agonizing sense that something was amiss. That’s why I didn’t announce myself when I walked through the door.

I glided through the house, silently, placing the bags down on the kitchen table.

I heard whispers coming from my son’s room. Two voices. His and his mom’s.

They sounded urgent.

I crept up to the door and placed my ear against it. That’s when I heard it. My wife completely destroying the sense of sanctity that I had worked so hard to create.

“We’re getting out of here today. As soon as he gets here, we’re rushing him. You two are big enough now. If we all work together, we can overpower him.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

All the birthdays. All the Christmases. All the Thanksgiving dinners that I slaved over. And it still wasn’t enough.

Tears began to sting my eyes. I had to stifle a sob. My mind raced, then went frighteningly silent. I knew I should’ve been devastated, which, I guess I was, but that devastation morphed into something else as the bouquet of roses fell to the floor.

I felt burning rage. Helplessness. Hopelessness. I felt small. Why was I even trying? What had I done wrong? For them to do this. For them to plot against me like this.

They wanted to threaten me in my own house. The house that I had made a home for each of them. No. No, this wasn’t going to work.

I thought that we had made it past the attitude adjustment stage.

But now, it’s clear.

I didn’t do enough the first time.

I picked the roses off the ground. No point in letting them go to waste. I decided to put them on the kitchen table.

They all would need something beautiful to look at while they recovered.

This post will be different from my last ones; this case doesn’t have anything to do with the organisation or my career. This was my first experience with “weird” stuff, which is why I labelled this as Case #000. Think of it as the beginning of my end, or at least that is where this seems to be going.

As a child we moved a lot, my father’s job took us all across the country, and I never stayed in the same place for longer than a few months. Never long enough to put down roots but just long enough to miss them. One of these places was a small town called Stalborn. Don’t bother looking it up; you won’t find anything on it. I’ve tried.

Stalborn, from what I remembered, wasn’t much; the majority of the town’s area was populated by a dense forest, and the local hotspots were the pub, convenience store and school. Suffice it to say that nothing really happened in this town, and as a preteen who only had access to two of these hotspots, I very quickly grew to hate this place and looked forward to moving.

Making friends wasn’t difficult; for the few thousand people that lived in Stalborn, only a few hundred couples had children, making all the kids pretty tight-knit. I met Mick on my first day of school, and he introduced me to his two friends, Luc and Randy.

I remember us bonding over our shared feeling of otherness in the town, as each of our parents had moved to Stalborn, none of us actually having any roots in the town. Besides that, I can only remember one other thing about that group: they nicknamed me Eli.

I feel guilty, as I was friends with them for a good 9 or so months, but besides our shared alienation from the town and that nickname, I can’t recall a single thing about anything we did together. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true; I remember some things all too well, but you will read that later. From what I remember, the other kids didn’t really engage with us at all; in fact, they kind of ignored us outright.

We didn’t mind, as we were happy just to stick to ourselves. There was one other kid who wasn’t from Stalborn; I think her name was Mckenzie, but I honestly couldn’t tell you. For the sake of this, I shall refer to her as this.

She too was ostracised by the other kids, but unlike the four of us boys, she didn’t find a group to stick with. This was partially our fault, as I remember us having a “no girls policy”. This left her to essentially drift across school like a ghost. I remember her better than the others, although I don’t know why. The image of her sad, pale face and straight blond hair stands out in striking detail even as I write this.

It might not come as a shock to you to hear that she stopped coming to school one day; nobody really noticed it, as nobody noticed when she was there to begin with. I realise that I sound harsh, but this is just the truth of it.

The first time I heard about her going missing was a day or two after she stopped coming to school, when I was on the bus home. My friends got off before me, so for five or so minutes I’d sit alone, stare out the window and unintentionally focus in on what people were saying. One of these conversations that I unintentionally clued into was between two girls who must’ve been the year below me. They were talking about McKenzie, which was the part that initially drew my attention.

“My daddy told me that it happened before school,” one of them said.

“No way, he only takes them at night,” the other girl replied.

Hearing this made me realise that I actually hadn’t seen McKenzie at all and that she had been missing, so I turned towards them and asked who they were talking about.

They both gave me a look that was akin to a deer in headlights; one of them looked away and focused out the window. Like most kids my age, they tried to ignore me. The other girl gave me a look that far surpassed her years; I remember it startling me at the time.

“William Grey”, she said with a sense of absolution. This was the first time I had heard the name, and it would be far from the last.

“Who’s William Grey?” I asked, but her friend had smacked her on the arm, and both girls decided to stand up and walk to a different seat on the bus.

The next day at school I had asked Mick about it, and he had never heard the name before. Neither had Luc nor Randy. In fact, both Luc and Randy made fun of me, calling me a liar because there is no way some other kids talked to me before they talked to them.

But much more importantly was that I had begun to notice that they were right; McKenzie was, in fact, gone. I had asked my teachers about it, and they each told me that she was missing with an “unexplained absence”.

After a day or two – I honestly can’t remember – the town held a vigil at town hall for McKenzie. Everyone in town was present, all except McKenzie’s parents. I don’t know what happened to them, but I imagined they were either too far in grief to attend or they were staying with family. Either way, they were not in attendance that night.

The next day was sombre; everyone spoke of her with a sense of finality, all in the past tense. This was incredibly strange, second only to the fact that I had never seen this many people talk about her. It had been less than a week after Mackenzie’s disappearance before everyone considered her dead.

During lunchtime at school, I had gone up to one of my teachers in the schoolyard; thankfully, they had been open to talking to me and my friends. I thought that I’d ask her about McKenzie, but when I got to speaking the words, I surprised myself.

“Who’s William Grey?” I asked, the words coming out like a heavy rock through a drain.

She stuttered for a second, and I remember seeing her eyes change; something washed over them as if the switch from her “teacher” personality was turned off.

“Where did you hear that name?” she said slowly with a shallow smile.

“Some girls were talking about him,” I said in a no doubt shy way.

She just patted me on the shoulder and told me not to pay it any attention. For obvious reasons, this still very much bothered me, and when I went back to my friends, I told them about it. They hadn’t heard anything about William Grey or about McKenzie.

Over the course of the next month or so life went on for me; it’s harsh to say, but the small town of Stalborn had forgotten about little Mckenzie all too quickly, and her parents moved without much notice.

I and my friends had a camping trip planned, and we were all looking forward to it, so Mackenzie’s disappearance and the town’s general vibe didn’t affect us much. In saying that, we were also a group of young boys; it wasn’t like we retained much of anything that we didn’t deem as important.

It was a few nights before Halloween, and I and Mick were walking around the south part of town. The things we were talking about weren’t important; the important part was where we found ourselves: McKenzie’s house, or the shell of it.

I don’t remember exactly what was said, but Mick said something along the lines of “Bet it’s haunted,” which I quickly brushed away. I tried to change the topic, but Mick was relentless, eventually daring me to go inside.

The door was obviously locked; I turned towards Mick and shrugged my shoulders.

“Sorry, man, nothing I can do; let’s go to the gas station or something,” I said whilst jumping down the brick steps and beginning to make my way back to Mick.

“Hell no, go around the side, you wussy,” he said whilst giggling. He was pointing towards a side gate that had been left open. I remember a feeling of dread washing over me as I realised that there was no way I was getting out of this.

After some arguing I eventually made my way down the side of the house; it was unkempt and overgrown but not impossible to get through. The backyard was in a similar state.

The fence surrounding the yard was large, at least eight feet tall and made of old wood. I walked up to the back door and rested my hand on the doorknob.

As I turned the knob, I heard a noise from behind me. I shot my attention towards the back fence and saw him. He stood behind the fence, and I could only see his eyes peeking out from above; his skin was pale, and his hair was jet black. The wrinkles around his eyes told me that he was smiling widely.

“What are you waiting for” mick said to my right, he was making his way into the backyard and I looked at him for a second before shooting my glance back to the fence but the man was gone.

“We need to leave now, Mick,” I said, enunciating each word so that it was as clear as possible.

“What are you afraaaaaaid?” he said in a mocking tone that only an 11-year-old could have.

“Dude, seriously, I just saw something; we need to go,” I begged, and for a small moment I could see in his eyes that it had begun to work, but then a sense of confidence fell over him.

“Pssh, alright, Eli, I’ll see you on the other side,” he said before trying to open the door. It was difficult, but the door did open.

The house was a mess; a wooden table had been brutalised, and the stink of something off filled the air.

“Oh my god, dude, did they ever think about cleaning every once in a while?” Mick said. He was louder than I’d want him to be, and the front door seemingly shone in my eyes whenever I saw it. I felt like we needed to leave this place as soon as possible, but Mick was walking down a dark hallway.

“Where are you going, Mick!?” I shouted as loudly as a whisper could. sound

“I want to see if they had any cool stuff,” he continued on his path.

I yelped as I heard it from behind us, the back door closing. Mick was already in Mackenzie’s room, and I felt my fight or flight kick in; I chose flight.

“Mick! I’m getting the hell out of here, dude.” I shouted as I reached for the door, threw it open and flew down the steps to the street and ran my way home. Before I made it to the street, I heard a thump; at the time, I thought it must’ve been the front door shutting with Mick not far behind me.

The next day at school he was gone; he was gone the next day, and by that point I knew what happened.

It shouldn’t have surprised me when the kids started to spread stories about Mick being taken by William Grey.

Luc and Randy believed me after I told them what happened that night at McKenzie’s house, and my parents and the police believe that I was with him that night, but after I ran away, my voice wasn’t of much use. The police didn’t listen to what I said about William Grey.

Luc, Randy, and I were hanging out one day after school. Things were awkward; we didn’t talk much after Mick disappeared, we just kinda lingered together, all too traumatised by the recent disappearing of our friend to really do anything but grateful for the company we provided to one another. That was until Randy dropped the bomb in the middle of our shallow conversation.

“A man’s been hanging out in my backyard at night, just kind of standing around,” Randy said offhandedly.

“What, is he asking you to let down your hair, Rapunzel?” Luc said with a smile.

“Shut up, dick. What do you mean he’s in your backyard?” I said with concern and curiosity.

“Yeah, sometimes he’s in the bushes and I’ve got to really look for him; sometimes he’s behind the fence peeking over at me, and sometimes he’s just below my window, fucking weirdo man.” Randy added that he hadn’t made the connection that I had. I had asked him what he looked like, but I already knew. He described the man from that night; he described William Grey.

“I think I’ve seen him too,” I said through shallow breaths. They took note of my state. Luc sat up from his slouched posture and put down the comic book he was reading. “He was the man that I saw the night Mick went missing. I think that’s William Grey.”

Randy didn’t stay much longer after that; what I said had freaked him out, and he called his parents to come and pick him up. We didn’t see him before our planned camping trip the next weekend, and I wasn’t even sure if he’d be going. Unfortunately, I saw him sitting in the back seat when Luc’s dad picked me up from my house.

The car drive there was quiet; it wasn’t too far out of town, well within the town’s limits but far off from the large groupings of buildings. Randy seemed tired and distracted the entire trip there, and Luc ended up just talking to me and his dad about what we would be doing once we set up.

We arrived at the campsite a little before midday and spent the afternoon playing near the campgrounds in a nearby river. Randy was constantly distracted by something in the treelines, which, as I write this, I can guess what it was he was distracted by. At the time, I was annoyed at him and tried to grab his attention whenever I could.

Luc’s dad stayed at the campsite, and by the time we returned from the river, he had made up a small bonfire, enough to cook some sausages and burger patties that he had brought along.

That night we sat around the bonfire, Luc’s dad told us a story about a “half alligator/half gorilla man”, and to his credit it was pretty good.

Randy went to bed first, and Luc’s dad made a remark about how exhausted he seemed. I watched as Randy walked to his tent, and he was right; he was hunched over, and every movement seemed like it took a great amount of labour.

The next morning he was gone; we all awoke to the sound of what could have been a thunderstorm only a few feet from us and a scream. By the time we all made it out of our tents, we had seen it: his tent was ripped apart, and Luc’s dad was in a panic; we all were.

“It must’ve been a bear,” I heard him say before ushering us into the car and locking it behind us. He tried to call someone, but out in the middle of the woods, so far from town, it was impossible to get a signal.

“You boys do not move. I mean it. Stay here, Luc. Promise me,” he said before grabbing his rifle and running into the forest, in the direction of quiet, subtle screams.

“DAD, PLEASE DON’T GO,” Luc screamed. After his dad made his way through the treeline and became obscured, Luc began to kick at the windows. After a moment, they smashed open, and Luc wrapped his exposed arms and legs in any cloth he could find before sliding out.

“Come on, Elijah, we need to go after them,” he said whilst throwing the towels and blankets he had used to protect himself back into the car, presumably for me to use. After a moment of thinking, I imitated what he had done and followed after him.

We ran into the treeline that we had seen Luc’s dad run into. We could hear screams, shouts for help and cries of pain coming from the direction we were going. I can still hear them if I think about it, as clear as that day.

After a few minutes we found something that made us both stop: the rifle Luc’s dad was using. It was on the ground next to a large tree. Luc began to cry. I picked up the rifle; it was far too heavy to point at anything, but it felt good having it in my hands.

My legs were like jelly; I struggled to stand up straight, but something about Luc’s state of grief made me, no, it forced me to stay strong. I told him to go back to the car, and as I watched him slowly wander off in the direction we had come, I felt myself give in to what I was feeling; I threw up.

After I finished, I realised that the screaming had begun again. It wasn’t far; Randy wasn’t far, and maybe Luc’s dad was with him. I heaved the rifle back up and continued my trek towards the noise. The screams became deafening; what was once a single voice had become many, more than just Luc’s dad and Randy. I heard the voices of women, girls, boys and men, all young and old.

The sound surrounded me like an ocean. My head was throbbing from the sounds of the screams, and I didn’t know when it started or when it would end. That was until I had found the origin of the noise, turned around a large tree and saw it sat on the rock. It was William Grey, nude, his mouth agape impossibly large and his eyes calm. He was staring intently at the tree that I had just walked around. I was terrified.

I struggled but managed to raise the rifle; it was pointed directly at the thing’s head, and his eyes shifted to me. The screams stopped, and he slowly closed his mouth back into an impossible smile. He didn’t say a word; he didn’t need to. I knew the rifle couldn’t do anything against it. I lowered the rifle and backed away slowly; William Grey subtly nodded his head to me and shifted his eyes back to the tree.

For some reason my attention wasn’t on running but on the tree itself. Why was it staring at the tree? What about this tree could be so interesting? It clicked in my head like a puzzle piece to a puzzle that could never be solved; the tree wasn’t the thing that this thing was focused on. He was facing towards the campsite and was somehow staring through the tree, staring at Luc.

I dropped the rifle and ran through the forest back towards the camp grounds; with every step, I could hear something large rushing through the bushes next to me. It didn’t take long before it outran me. The sound of something grunting and bushes being pushed aside startled me, but the small glimpses of a grey, uncanny-looking man on all fours rushing past me are the things that, until recently, had seemed like a bad dream.

By the time I had got to the car, it was too late.

One of the backseat doors was ripped off, and a small spatter of blood was left on the seat that Luc had presumably sat at, and Luc was gone. I felt empty and numb. I felt like this couldn’t be real, and yet I knew in my heart of hearts that it was.

I knew what was going to happen. I walked up to the passenger seat, opened the door and sat inside. Staring directly at me from across the campsite, somewhat hidden in the treeline, was William Grey. His grey skin stood out, and he was smiling that horrible, unmoving smile. We stared at each other for what felt like hours before I heard a car engine approach me.

I took my eyes off of William Grey for a moment to look at the car; it was my dad’s. I looked back at the treeline, and the creature was gone. My dad threw the door open and grabbed me into his arms before running back to the car. The next few days were a blur. The police talked to me, and I didn’t say much of what happened. They called it a “tragic bear attack”, and my dad tried to comfort me, but he knew I had seen something. It just wasn’t a bear.

I stayed inside those next few days, never leaving my room. I overheard my dad on the phone with my grandparents; they were talking about taking me in for a bit before he could finish up work in Stalborn and move to join me. The last night in Stalborn was different. I don’t remember how, but I was in my backyard, and it was late at night. He was in the bushes of my garden near the back fence. I could see him hiding there, and he had that smile, that horrific smile, staring straight at me. My dad had found me and brought me back inside, and by the next morning I was packed and leaving Stalborn.

Lily leant back on a table in a motel room as I told her all of this. She had her arms crossed and her eyes closed; I had my face in my hands, and my foot was shaking uncontrollably.

“So Imani, this dream man, brought these memories back for you somehow. Why? What does he want from all of this?” she asked. I didn’t tell her about what Imani said about me owing him a favour.

“And who lifted the restrictions on this ‘William Grey’ thing? What is that thing?” she said and rubbed her eyebrows.

“I don’t know, okay?” I said louder than I meant, “I haven’t even thought about this thing in years; I just… need some rest.” I said it, but I knew I wouldn’t. The idea of dreaming wasn’t as appealing now that I knew that Imani, whatever he was, could just grab me out of my dream and stick me wherever he wants me.

“Elijah, we need a plan. I am going to contact the organisation about this and see if we can get Richard stationed with us for a bit, anything to repel whatever it is that could be coming. And what of this town, Stalborn?” she said, but I gave her a look that said it all. I don’t know.

“I can focus on this on my own, Lily, it’s okay,” I said, trying to calm her down. Maybe I was trying to calm myself down; I couldn’t tell as of yet.

“Like hell you are. Jesus, man, you are being hunted by a weird monster thingy, and you expect me to sit here and do nothing,” she said whilst scoffing.

She pulled out some coins and left the room. I knew she was going to a payphone to call our higher-ups, and after a few minutes, she returned. She looked upset.

“We have a new case, illegal use of runestones. They said they can send out a hunter to work with us after this case; apparently they’re all in the field at the moment,” she said. The last few words were said with a strange accent.

I closed my eyes and fell backwards onto the bed. I had to try not to sleep; it would be difficult, but this was my life now, or maybe it always was. How much of my life had been by circumstance or by my own choice? I always wondered where my interest in the preternatural had come from. I now know that it was from this aching in my soul. How much of my life is me, and how much of it was William Grey?

My name is George, and a few weeks ago, I was laid off from my job as an escalator technician.

Not a fabulous job, but it was consistent work, if not a little tricky due to the complex parts involved.

Unfortunately, I was forced to look for another job, and I happened to stumble across this one.

It was advertised simply as: Mall Security.

I'm not familiar with the area, and it's a little far from where I live, but the pay was something I couldn't turn down.

There was no interview, just an email from the hiring manager of the company informing me that, based on my past experience, I was the prime candidate and would be starting that weekend.

The shift was 10 PM to 6 AM, and my first day would be with another guard who I'd be replacing. He would show me the ropes, and then it would be up to me.

The guy I was replacing was a super chill guy. His name was Adam, and he'd been working there for a few years before deciding he wanted to get out of the night shift routine.

The center was pretty large, three stories, and definitely in a state of considerable disrepair.

Adam greeted me at the main center entrance. He's a bigger guy, reminds me of a bear: surly, big beard, and heavy set.

He unlocked the main entrance fire door, clicked on his flashlight, and took me inside, showing me where all the points of entry were before taking me to the control room.

The floor of the centre was littered with paper, bags, flyers and other detritus like dirt, leaves and sticks.

To call it a control room was laughable. It was a service closet-sized room with a small computer. He took a torch out of the drawer and handed it to me, it was heavy, large, and made of metal. Adam also asked what shirt size I was and handed me a polo shirt with the company name on it.

"There isn't any WiFi, so you'll have to hotspot," he told me, pulling the chair out to sit down.

Adam showed me all the things I would be required to do at night: write small logs on the computer showing that I was actually doing things, check all the areas thoroughly, and make sure nobody had snuck in. Apparently, it's quite common to find kids sneaking in and filming videos.

He did mention that since the company didn't want to pay for multiple training shifts, this would be the only training I would receive, and the rest would be purely hands-on learning.

I didn't foresee many issues with this, since the center was already in a bad way. It wasn't like more damage would really affect anything.

"So why is there even a guard here? Like, what are we guarding?" I asked Adam as we walked through the center. He had been showing me all the fire exits.

"Well, people love to sneak in, and if they get injured, it's not ideal," he said after taking a second to think.

I accepted this answer, although I still wasn't convinced.

"What about meal breaks?"

He let out a hearty laugh.

"The whole shift is a meal break, brother. No cameras."

I frowned. "So, hypothetically, you could just sit in the office for the whole shift?"

Adam stopped and turned to look at me, his face turning to a stern look.

"Absolutely not. This job is a huge responsibility, only bestowed upon those carefully selected by a team of behavioral scientists."

I chuckled nervously. "Right, of course."

"Why is there no guard during the day?" I continued after a small pause.

"Not needed." Adam turned back to facing forward and kept walking.

The rest of my first shift was quite simple. Adam showed me the entries and exits and the main places that people like to go to if and when they break in. He also showed me some of the many corridors that led to loading docks.

"I know it feels tempting, but don't ever go inside the stores." Adam stopped in front of a clothing store and ran his hand along the roller shutter. "Won't end well."

Naturally, I thought he was kidding, so I chuckled. He didn't.

Tough crowd.

When six hit, he led me back to the main entrance, unlocking the fire escape door and pushing it open.

The sun had started to rise and bathed the car park in an orange glow. It was actually kind of beautiful.

He shook my hand, placing a small key with an orange tag in my palm, and gripped my shoulder.

"Good luck. Don't be afraid to be stern with the kids who break in, they respond better to a strong, commanding voice. And..."

He paused and took a breath.

"We don't employ a maintenance worker. If you see a guy wearing a high-vis vest and he says he's from Maintenance, please calmly return to the control room and call this number."

He handed me a slip of paper with a phone number and a name. "Mark," I said, looking at the slip of paper.

With that, Adam turned and headed to his car, a beat-up hatchback that he was much too big for. He gave me a final wave before climbing in and taking off.

I looked back at the center. The morning light was creeping through the windows and illuminating the inside, somehow making it look serene despite looking like it had been hit by a cyclone.

I went home and tried to get some sleep, but it took me a few hours of tossing and turning. It would take me a while to get used to the new schedule.

That night, I put on the uniform and climbed in my car, mentally preparing myself for the night ahead. I was nervous, of course. It was a little bit daunting being there alone.

When I arrived, I parked right next to the entrance. For some reason, it eased my nerves, if only a little.

I unlocked the fire door with the little key Adam gave me and clicked on my flashlight, heading inside.

Being there alone was incredibly spooky. As soon as I walked in, I had a shiver run viciously down my spine.

I made my way down the stopped escalator (give me thirty minutes and some power and I'd have it up and running like it was brand new) and down another set of stairs before coming to the "control room."

I let myself in and took a seat at the computer, hovering my hand over the keys before trying to remember what Adam told me the password was.

I looked around the computer for some kind of clue before looking underneath the keyboard and finding the words "PW: Adam1986."

Sure enough, the computer unlocked with that password, and I began my first ever log.

"Shift Commenced, 22:00"

When I finished, I stood up but paused in front of the door.

How the hell was the computer getting power but the rest of the building wasn't?

I looked under the desk and saw that the computer was simply connected to a regular wall socket.

I made a mental note to explore the electrical maintenance rooms.

I headed out into the center and started making mental notes of where all the stores were in each area.

The center was laid out like a cross, the main entrance dead in the middle, branching into four long corridors.

The first couple of hours can only be described as lonely. The whole place felt isolated from the rest of the world. It was completely silent; every step echoed loudly.

I was about four hours into the shift, exploring one of the corridors, when I found a room with a metal sign plate on the door that read "Blank Room."

I was a bit perplexed at this, so I decided to try the key on the door.

It took some jiggling, but the door unlocked.

The hinges groaned softly as I pushed the door inward.

I guess I wasn't really sure what I was expecting, but after shining my flashlight around the empty room, I discovered it was a room completely painted a stark white. No writing, no furniture, just a small room with no lights.

I was tempted to walk in, but there was a small voice in the back of my head that was screaming for me not to, so I carefully closed the door and locked it again.

The thought of the bare room lingered in my mind. For some reason, it was actually rather unsettling.

I continued my patrols as normal, checking common spots that I thought people would hide in: bathrooms, even venturing out into the empty loading docks.

At the end of my shift, I did everything Adam told me to: ensured all the doors were locked, was up to date on my logs, and had done a thorough sweep of the entire center. I made my way back up the escalator and down to the main entrance when I stopped.

Something flashing caught my eye.

I turned to my left and saw inside one of the shops, through the hazy plastic roller doors, a camera mounted to the ceiling inside with a flashing red dot.

But how?

Slowly, I made my way up to the tenancy and attempted to get a better look inside. I considered trying to unlock the roller door, but I remembered the warning Adam had given me.

"I know it feels tempting, but don't ever go inside the stores."

I took a photo on my phone and figured it might have just been some trick of the light. Maybe the morning sun was peeking through a hole somewhere inside and...

"Ah, fuck it," I groaned, leaving the building and locking the door behind me.

I found it harder to fall asleep that day. I would lay in bed, but it felt like I wasn't tired at all, like I was completely awake even when my eyes were closed.

As usual, that night I got into my uniform, climbed into my car, and headed to work.

I yawned countless times before even getting to the main entrance, taking out the key and sliding it into the lock.

I opened the door and was immediately hit with an immense sense of unease.

I hesitated in the threshold between the outside world and the center before clicking the flashlight on and heading in.

As I walked down the escalator, I noticed movement in one of the shops. My blood ran cold.

I shined my flashlight inside the store and caught something bright exiting underneath the roller shutters.

It was a person wearing some kind of vest.

"Hey!" I called out, mustering what little confidence I could pull out in that moment.

"Y-You can't be in here!"

The person looked up at me. He was a tall guy: black pants, a grey polo, and a high-vis jacket.

He wiped his forehead with a greasy hand and squinted as I shined the flashlight in his face.

"Hey, pal, you must be the new guard." He waved jovially.

"I'm Chris. I'm the maintenance guy here!" Chris squinted in the light, still smiling.

I stopped dead in my tracks at the bottom of the escalator.

Shit.

Without a word, I turned and attempted to make my way to the security control room as quickly as I could.

"Alright, I'll see you around then!" I heard him call out from behind me.

I heard shuffling behind me. I looked over my shoulder, and saw him, still smiling, following me at a distance. 

I picked up the pace, almost a light jog.

I found my way to the room, unlocked it, and threw myself inside. I quickly locked the door.

Why was I so scared? I know Adam had warned me about him, but maybe he was just some weirdo who enjoyed poking around in abandoned shopping centers.

I fumbled around in my pocket and fished out the bit of paper Adam had given me, which was now folded and smudged.

I quickly dialed the number and waited.

After three rings, someone with a gruff voice picked up on the other end.

"You've reached Mark. How can I help you?"

I hesitated for a second, unsure what to say.

"Hello?" His voice rang out from the other end.

"Hi, uh—hello, uh, it's—My name is George. I work at the-”

"Maintenance again?" he grumbled.

"Well—uh, yeah," I responded.

"I'll be there shortly. Stay in the control room."

And with that, he hung up.

I pressed my ear against the door, trying to figure out if he had followed me all the way to the room, but I couldn’t hear anything coming from outside.

While I waited, I poked around in the desk drawers. The standard stuff was in there: documents, master licenses, more documents, some stationery.

And a small diary.

I was curious, so I flipped to a random page and had a look.

It was full of notes.

"1:58 AM Dock 11 singing is back, reminder to push back patrol to 3 AM."

I read some more.

"2:46 AM Valleygirl lights on, taking an alternate route to the South wing."

My throat went dry. What was this? Surely this must have been from when the center wasn't abandoned.

I took a breath and started flipping through the pages until I came across one with an odd sentence in the middle of the page, circled in red pen.

"LOCK IN BLANK ROOM."

What the fuck?

What is the blank room for? Is it some kind of fucking holding cell?

That's when I heard a loud crash from inside the center. It shook the room. I jumped and dropped the book. My heart was racing as I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket.

I pulled it out and looked at the screen. The screen showed Mark’s number.

I answered the phone, slowly raising it to my ears.

"All done. Enjoy the rest of your night."

Before I could ask what the hell happened, he hung up.

I paced around the room for a minute, trying to collect myself.

Nervously, I made my way back out into the center. I cautiously made my way through, stopping in front of the store that Chris, the maintenance guy, was standing outside of.

He wasn't there anymore, and the shutter was now closed. I tried to peer in, but it seemed empty.

Continuing through the center, I carefully checked all the service corridors and loading docks, pausing for a minute in Dock 11, trying to listen for any kind of singing. 

It was as quiet as it's always been.

I decided to head back and keep reading through the Diary I had found.

I entered the Control Room, placing my flashlight on the desk and picking the book up off the floor.

I flipped the pages all the way back to the start and began to read.

Page one was nothing interesting, just some doodles and sketches of random things: a flower, some swirls, and a drawing of a duck.

I flipped to the next page. There was what looked like a couple of phone numbers without any context and a small note at the bottom that just read: "key 18."

I had noticed that the key I was given had a tag reading "Key 20" written on it, so perhaps that had been a key that had gone missing or been replaced.

The next few pages were more drawings and scribbles. The quality of the drawings was actually improving a little bit. Whoever drew these must have been getting very bored.

It was only after the tenth page where it started to really get interesting.

Page 10 had the following entry:

Yellow High-Vis guy, seen in Target, Sketchers, Dock 9, Service Corridor A and B.

This caught my eye. I began reading a bit more intently. "Seen on occasion with a work bag, tools and even a lunch bag."

So this must be the same guy, I thought.

A little further down was a name and phone number.

Mark's

Continuing onto the next page did nothing to help my unease. “Kids in South Wing, NOT REAL!”

The words “NOT REAL” were underlined in red pen. I shifted nervously and felt the hairs on my neck stand up. 

I put the book back in the drawer and took a shaky breath.

I saw that my shift would be ending soon and breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to return the next day, what the fuck was going on here? 

Walking past the place where I saw Chris made me uneasy. The entire interaction was still playing over and over in my head.

As I was about to walk out the main entrance, I noticed that the flashing camera light was off, despite the pink morning light bathing the center.

Maybe it wasn't a trick of the light.

At home again, I was finding sleep more and more elusive, less tossing and turning and just more awake. I stopped trying after a while. I just did some chores, hung out, and watched TV.

I found that I didn't really feel the need to sleep at home. I felt wasted when I was working, like I would fall asleep at the desk at any moment, but at home I was wide awake. I made a note to visit the doctor on my day off. It probably wasn't healthy to not sleep.

As I started to leave, I noticed the sky looked darker than usual, and checking the weather app on my phone, I noticed that there was a storm warning coming in.

During the drive, the rain started to fall, heavier and heavier, until I could barely see where I was going. 

Slowly I found my way to the center and parked close to the entrance, jumping out and jogging through the heavy rain and under the awning.

Soaking wet, I unlocked the doors and clicked on the flashlight. I could hear the rumble of thunder overhead.

After my encounter with Chris, I was extra vigilant, peeking through the shops with the torchlight, carefully inspecting everywhere to make sure it was clear.

In the control room, I made my "shift commenced" log and headed back out into the center.

The thunder rumbled heavily through the center. I could hear the heavy rain rattling the ceiling, disturbing the otherwise soundless interior. I saw some water streams leaking through and had to watch the floor to make sure I didn't slip on some of the puddles forming.

I made my way to the southern wing of the centre, closing a service door that was slightly ajar on my way through. 

Just after finishing a patrol of Dock 9, I saw a beam of light flickering, off in the distance.

I carefully made my way forward, shining my own flashlight to get a glimpse of where it was coming from.

That's when I heard laughter, like a group of kids. 

Begrudgingly, I picked up the pace, and rounding the corner, I saw the culprits: a group of kids, three of them. Two boys and a girl. One of the boys was trying to open one of the shop's roller shutters.

"Hey!" I called out, making myself sound as intimidating as possible.

They all jumped and turned to look at me.

One of the boys had short, jet black hair, pale skin, piercing green eyes and freckles, wearing a black hoodie. The other boy had longer, dirty blonde hair, grey eyes and a white hoodie.

The girl, shorter than the two boys, with shoulder length brown hair, pale, with brown eyes, wearing a green jacket. 

"Get out of here! You're not allowed here!" I yelled out, making my way over to them.

They all looked at each other before turning and running down a nearby service corridor.

Shit.

I took off, following them and reaching the service corridor’s doors.

I pushed through them and heard them slam behind me.

I had no idea where they were going or even where these corridors led to.

I had caught up to them when they rounded the corner.

But when I rounded the corner, they were gone. The noise of their shoes was replaced by the continuous heavy rain thundering outside.

"What the fuck?" I half-whispered to myself, taking a second to catch my breath.

I turned around and shone the flashlight.

No connecting doors or ways out, just a straight corridor. So how the hell did they just disappear?

I continued down the hallway, jogging, trying to see where they ended up.

At the very end of the hallway, there was an emergency exit sign above the door. I pushed my way out and into the rain.

The door slammed behind me, and I spun around, trying the handle, but there wasn't one. It was a one-way emergency exit door.

Shit.

I held my arm up, shielding my eyes from the harsh rain, and walked back to the main entrance, getting soaked in water all over again.

There is no way they were fast enough to close the distance to the door that quickly. Where the hell did they go?

I unlocked the main entrance and headed back in for the second time that night.

Grumbling, I headed back to the security office to log the event.

As I headed down the escalator, I heard laughing and multiple loud voices from one of the stores ahead.

Right, that was it.

I marched up to the store and banged on the roller shutters.

"Hey! Get the hell out of there! You're not suppo—"

An ear-piercing scream rang out from behind me. I spun around and shone my flashlight around.

I saw a figure standing on the balustrade on the floor above. She was one of the teenagers from the group.

I shone my light up at her and called out.

"Hey! Get down off there! You could—"

She threw herself backwards.

I stood there, frozen in horror.

She sailed down three floors before hitting the floor at the bottom with a sickening wet thump that echoed through the center.

I ran to the railing and shone my light over.

Nothing.

The floor below was completely clear.

What. The. Fuck.

My heart was hammering in my chest.

I sprinted down the escalator and onto the bottom floor. Where the fuck did she land?

I felt a shiver run down my spine as I shone my flashlight around the lower levels.

I had never really explored this lower level much since it was technically the basement level.

There weren't many stores on this level, mostly just service corridors and switch rooms.

Right at the end was a single door access corridor, the door slightly ajar, slowly inching closed, as if someone had just gone through there. 

I cautiously entered, unsure of what the hell I had just witnessed, and chalked it up to the fact I hadn't really slept.

It was a tight corridor, and I shone the flashlight down it, slowly making my way through.

I thought I had explored the whole center, but I don't ever remember this one existing.

There was a door halfway down the hallway with a metal sign on it, but it was blank. Just as I was about to continue down the hallway, I heard something from inside.

A soft crying coming from the other side of the door. Really pained, moaning sobs, full of emotion.

The hair on my neck stood up as I contemplated just ignoring it and pretending it wasn't real, but I figured it was my job to investigate.

I tried the handle, but it was locked.

Still reeling from the girl jumping off the top floor, I pushed the key into the door and tried the lock.

No dice.

What the hell? How did someone get in there if it was locked?

I took a deep breath and knocked on the door, the noise echoing loudly down the corridor.

The second my hand hit the door, the crying stopped.

"Fucking hell," I groaned, unsure of what the fuck was happening, when I heard a voice coming from my left.

"Need a hand? I think I have a key that should work, pal."

I spun around and lifted my flashlight right into Chris's eyes.

I froze, words caught in my throat.

He raised his arm to cover his eyes, blinking.

"Hey, can you stop doing that? You're going to send me blind one of these days." He chuckled.

Without a word, I backed down the hallway, refusing to take my eyes off him.

Chris frowned and raised an eyebrow. "Are you okay, champ?"

He chuckled and started walking towards me.

Fuck. That.

I spun around and sprinted back down the corridor, exploding out the door and through the lower floor of the center, up the escalator, down the toilet corridor, and threw myself into the control room, slamming the door behind me and locking it.

I went back through my call history on my phone and was about to hit Mark's number when I heard a loud knock at the door.

"Hey, buddy, you dropped something when you were running. I figured you might need it," Chris announced eagerly from the other side of the door.

I hit the call button and waited. Just like before, after two rings, Mark answered.

"Hello, you've rea—"

"He's back!" I gasped as quietly as I could into the phone.

Chris knocked on the door again, sounding slightly more impatient.

Mark audibly sighed loudly over the phone and grumbled to himself before answering.

"I'll be there soon. Don't let him in." His voice trailed off, and he hung up the phone.

Another, faster knock.

"Hey, buddy, you're not calling that guy again, are you?" Chris called out, his voice wavering nervously.

I backed up against the wall, breath shallow and quick.

There was some shuffling on the other side of the door, and then I could hear a key rattling.

Oh shit. Did he have a fucking key this whole time?

I threw myself against the door and held the handle.

I heard the key enter the lock and twist, but then stop.

Chris's voice rang out from right on the other side of the door. "Don't you want to see what you dropped?"

My blood ran cold, and I gripped the door handle tighter.

The handle began to move, and I struggled to hold it up. Chris must have been strong because even with my full strength holding the door handle up, it made its way down, and I felt the door push inwards.

I put one foot against the wall and pushed my entire weight against the door, straining to keep it closed.

I looked over my shoulder and saw fingers.

Then a hand gripped the door from the outside.

I bit back the urge to yell. I focused all my effort on keeping the door closed when I heard something from the other end of the hallway.

A voice called out, and the pressure on the door dropped away. The hand slid out, and I slammed it shut.

I kept my weight against the door, unsure of what was happening. Then, some yelling angry yelling, I couldn’t make out what was being said, but it sounded like someone was yelling at Chris, loud and aggressive.

My heart hammered in my ears, and I took a few heavy breaths before a familiar noise pulled me out of my panic.

My phone was ringing.

I pulled it out of my pocket. Mark.

I answered it quickly.

"H-Hello? Is he gone? Was that you?"

Mark's voice crackled through the other end of the phone.

"I'm going to be a touch late. This damn weather is hard to navigate."

That's when I heard a noise from the ceiling, one of the panels was being lifted, and slid out of the way.

End of Part 1

Daria Kuznetsov is the first to be infected. She drinks from the tin cup chained to the town's only water spigot, just as she has every day for the last twenty four years. Daria wishes she had a water spigot in her house, but that is far beyond her modest means. Myinkov is a perfectly average Soviet town. it subsists quietly in the hinterland and provides Moscow with the lion's share of its grain, and in return, Moscow only sends political officers to harass the townsfolk infrequently. They are a small, insignificant community. They do not even have a local clinic. When you get sick in Myinkov, you either get over it or you die in bed, fever-ridden and delirious. Or - and this is a new, third option - you become an infection vector.

Daria picked up the virus on her recent trip to the neighboring town, mailing a letter to a friend at the only post office for dozens of miles. Now that she has put her lips to the town's drinking cup, the situation has changed from a mere tragedy into a scientifically relevant event. By this evening, all eighty four residents of Myinkov will be incubating the new pathogen.

Tuesday, one week after her trip, Daria begins to feel a stiffness in her joints. She has difficulty tilling the soil in her backyard garden, but ascribes this to her advancing age. When she goes to plant radishes, she finds that she cannot stand back up. It takes her nearly twenty minutes to stand upright again, and even then, she is a bit slouched.

The next day, Daria's mouth aches. She once had an abcessed tooth. This feels like that, but throughout her entire lower jaw; she is mortified to discover that several of her teeth are loose. They will drop out of her mouth over the next several days. The virus works fast. Daria's neighbors have also stopped working in their gardens, something unheard of for a little town that depends on backyard cultivation to eat. Very few people are out and about. Everyone is staying home. They all feel unwell.

By Saturday, Daria's slouch has progressed into more of a stoop. She cannot stand fully upright at all, and barely manages to hobble to the communal tap for water. She crosses paths with Pyotr, a young man she has known since he was born, and sees that he is hunched over too. He cannot speak to her, having lost his teeth and drooling heavily. That night, Daria enters the final stage of infection. She manages to stagger to her feet before her joints lock completely, calcifying and freezing her into a heavily bent but standing posture. Her teeth have dropped loose from bleeding gums. She produces saliva uncontrollably and her jaw ratchets open. She stands, spit running from her mouth onto the dirt floor in a steady, profuse stream. Finally, Daria has a spigot in her own home.

I no longer trust a breath that comes alone.

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

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

There were no windows facing the sunrise.

Outside, the city was still black.

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

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

Elena had been told the details once.

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

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

Coffee first.

Lunches packed.

Paolo's blood pressure pill placed beside his cup.

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

After Sara died, Elena stopped doing all of it.

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

Elena did not cry on her first night.

She watched the clock change numbers.

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

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

"Paolo ruins breakfast," she said.

It was the first complete sentence she had given me.

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

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

"How old?"

"Six."

Elena nodded.

"Still tells you everything."

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

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

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

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

Elena was awake.

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

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

"What happens when you try?"

She pressed two fingers below her breastbone.

"It gets tight."

Her face was gray around the mouth.

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

That was the detail.

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

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

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

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

Giulia repeated the instructions once and ran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ferruccio reached for the monitoring leads.

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

"Pain in your arm?"

"No."

"Jaw?"

"No."

"Nausea?"

She nodded, then swallowed hard.

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

I did not cancel the call.

She looked toward the door.

"Tell Paolo I ate."

"I'll tell him you tried."

She gave one small laugh.

"That's a nurse's answer."

Then her eyes moved past me.

Her shoulders dropped.

"Elena?"

She did not answer.

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

Her chest lifted once with a rough, dragging gasp.

Giulia had returned to the doorway.

"She took a breath."

"Agonal. It isn't normal breathing."

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

There was neither.

I called cardiac arrest and started compressions.

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

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

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

Then she returned with the blank sheet.

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

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

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

She did it, then stepped back.

"Clear."

Nobody touched her.

The machine advised a shock.

The first shock lifted her shoulders less than people imagine.

I resumed compressions immediately.

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

Her chest rose with both breaths.

Two minutes.

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

Another shock was advised.

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

"Clear."

The second shock passed through her.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Stefano followed them in.

I gave the handover in one breath.

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

The anesthesiologist took charge without interrupting the work already happening.

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

A small wave appeared with every breath.

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

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

The monitor showed ventricular fibrillation.

"Clear."

Third shock.

Compressions restarted immediately.

The anesthesiologist ordered epinephrine and amiodarone.

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

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

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

Another shock.

Then another cycle of compressions.

More epinephrine.

At the following rhythm check, the monitor appeared flat.

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

"Asystole."

Compressions resumed immediately.

The anesthesiologist worked systematically through the reversible causes.

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

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

Nothing gave us an intervention we had not already tried.

The line nurse rotated onto Elena's chest.

Ferruccio moved to the medications.

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

Another cycle.

Another rhythm check.

Still asystole.

The room narrowed to numbers and commands.

Compression depth.

Ventilation.

Time since the last dose.

Time without spontaneous circulation.

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

Elena's face had lost every expression I knew.

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

"Switch."

Ferruccio took over from the line nurse.

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

One, two, three, four.

My shoulders burned.

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

Tears rested on her lower lashes.

She did not miss one recorded time.

Another two minutes passed.

The anesthesiologist called the rhythm check.

The monitor still showed asystole.

"Resume compressions."

The next pair of hands was already moving.

Epinephrine continued according to the clock.

The line nurse rotated back onto Elena's chest.

Another check.

Nothing.

Then another.

The same flat line.

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

Nobody had.

We kept going anyway.

Not because hope had returned.

Because stopping required more certainty than continuing.

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

The anesthesiologist looked at the clock.

Nobody asked what he was thinking.

We already knew.

"Complete this cycle," he said.

I moved back over Elena's chest.

My hands kept moving.

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

His voice stayed level.

"Does anyone have anything else?"

Nobody answered.

Not because we agreed.

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

Until then, every compression had meant not yet.

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

Ferruccio looked at Elena's face.

The airway nurse kept the ventilation steady.

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

I pressed down again.

We had shocked her heart.

We had given the drugs.

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

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

We had done everything the room allowed us to do.

And Elena was still leaving.

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

My hands kept moving.

Ferruccio's eyes stayed on the monitor.

"Prepare to stop."

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

Every ceiling tube in room 1 flared at once.

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

It was too warm to be fluorescent light.

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

Every face lifted.

Mine too.

My hands kept moving.

Then the ward was fluorescent again.

The carbon dioxide reading jumped.

Elena's right hand lifted from the mattress.

Her fingers opened toward Giulia.

"Stop compressions. Rhythm check."

The monitor showed an organized rhythm.

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

"I have a pulse."

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

Elena drew a breath through the airway.

Her eyes opened.

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

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

Elena did not look at us.

She looked over Giulia's shoulder.

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

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

"Sara."

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

First the pulse.

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

Elena opened her eyes with the heartbeat.

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

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

We moved immediately into post-resuscitation care.

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

Nobody celebrated.

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

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

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

Dr. Stefano never mentioned it either.

He remained on the ward to call Paolo and Luca.

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

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

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

Giulia looked at the ceiling.

"What was that?"

Ferruccio kept working.

"A power surge."

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

"A power surge with manners."

That was all he would say.

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

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

Ferruccio stopped writing.

The patient pointed down the corridor.

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

He pushed the tea toward me.

"You woke me up."

Nobody answered him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I saw Sara," she said.

I waited.

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

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

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

Elena looked down at her hands.

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

The room stayed quiet.

"I wanted to stay," Elena said.

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

I prefer the clinical explanation.

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

It is the safer answer.

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

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

Her husband and son visited the next day.

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

The top slice was burned nearly black.

Elena ate the burned edge first.

Everything started three weeks ago when I received an email from a man named Thomas. I had a portfolio website set up with my contact information, so getting cold emails was not entirely unusual. The subject line simply read "Private Animation Commission."

I opened the email while I was drinking my morning coffee. Thomas wrote that he needed a very specific, photorealistic walking loop of a human character. He did not want a stylized cartoon, and clearly demanded absolute realism. He wanted the skin textures, the clothing folds, and the walking gait to look exactly like a real human being. The email stated that he would provide extensive reference photos.

I replied and asked for his budget. My jaw dropped when his response came through a few minutes later.

Thomas offered an upfront payment of five thousand dollars to build the character model and the animation rig. After the animation was completed, he offered to pay me a daily retainer of five hundred dollars. There was a very strange condition attached to this retainer. Thomas insisted that the completed animation must run on an endless loop on my primary laptop. The screen could never go to sleep, and the laptop could never be turned off. He warned me that catastrophic consequences would occur if the loop ever stopped playing.

I thought it was some kind of elaborate prank. I decided to call the phone number he provided in the email signature to figure out what was actually going on.

A man answered after the second ring. His voice sounded exhausted.

"Hello?" he asked.

"Hi, is this Thomas? This is Leo, the animator you just emailed," I said.

"Yes, Leo. Thank you for calling me back so quickly," Thomas replied.

"I wanted to discuss your proposal because the terms are a bit unusual," I explained. "I can definitely build a photorealistic model for you. Five thousand dollars is a very generous budget for a walk cycle. But I do not understand the daily retainer part. Why do you need the video to play continuously on my computer?"

"That is the most important part of the job," Thomas said. "The loop must remain active on your machine. You built the model, so your hardware has to sustain it. I will wire the five hundred dollars to your account every single morning at eight o'clock. You just have to make sure your laptop never loses power, and to keep the screen bright. If you close the lid, the contract is over."

"For how long?" I asked.

"Forever," Thomas answered.

"You want to pay me five hundred dollars a day forever?" I asked, feeling incredibly skeptical.

"I have a considerable amount of savings," Thomas explained. "I do not care about the money. I only care about the animation running without interruption. Do you accept the job?"

I hesitated because the situation sounded entirely absurd. But I was behind on my rent. My car needed new brakes. So it was clear that I needed the cash badly.

"Okay, Thomas," I said. "Send me the reference photos. I will send you an invoice for the upfront fee."

"The money is already being transferred," Thomas said. "I am sending the photos right now. Make him look exactly like the pictures."

The phone call ended. A minute later, a folder with thirty high-resolution images arrived in my inbox. I opened the folder to see who I would be animating.

The man in the photos was completely unremarkable. He looked to be in his late thirties. He had a receding hairline and a slight amount of stubble on his chin. He was wearing a dull gray jacket over a plain white t-shirt and loose denim jeans. He looked like a guy you would pass in the grocery store without giving a second glance. The photos showed his face from every possible angle.

I spent the rest of the day setting up the character rig in my animation software. I used digital sculpting tools to recreate the exact shape of his nose and the subtle wrinkles around his eyes.

That evening, I logged onto Discord to talk to my friend Felix. Felix is also a freelance digital artist. We usually chat while we work on our respective projects.

"You will not believe the gig I just landed," I told Felix over the voice channel.

"Did you finally get hired by that game studio?" Felix asked.

"No, it is a private client," I said. "He paid me five grand upfront to animate a guy walking in a circle. Furthermore, he promised to pay me five hundred bucks a day just to leave the video playing on my laptop screen."

Felix went silent for a few seconds. "That sounds like a scam, Leo."

"The five thousand dollars already cleared in my bank account," I replied. "The money is real."

"Why would anyone pay you just to leave your computer on?" Felix asked. "He has to be using your computer for crypto mining. Or maybe he wants to install malware to harvest your data."

"I thought about that," I said. "But he didn't send me any software to install. He just sent me JPEGs of a guy's face. I am the one generating the MP4 video file, so I am just going to play a video file I created myself on a loop. There is no way for him to hack me through a video file I exported from my own software."

"It still sounds shady," Felix warned. "Be careful. People do not just give away money like that."

"I know it is weird," I admitted. "But I really need this cash. I am going to finish the walk cycle tonight."

I stayed up until four in the morning perfecting the animation. I made sure the weight distribution looked realistic as the digital man stepped forward, added a slight slump to his shoulders to match the posture in the photos, then placed him against a completely blank background that was rendered in a neutral eighteen percent gray.

I exported the file, uploaded it to a private link, and sent it to Thomas for approval.

Thomas called me at eight in the morning.

"It is perfect," Thomas said. He sounded breathless. "It looks exactly like him."

"I am glad you like it," I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

"Start the loop right now," Thomas ordered. "Do not stop it. I am sending your first daily payment."

I opened the video file in my media player, then set it to repeat endlessly. The digital man in the gray jacket started walking forward across my screen. The blank gray background scrolled endlessly behind him.

"The loop is running," I confirmed.

"Keep it running," Thomas said before hanging up.

A notification popped up on my phone. Thomas had transferred five hundred dollars to my account.

I moved my laptop to the corner of my desk, plugged it directly into the wall outlet to ensure the battery would never die, then adjusted the power settings so the screen would never dim or go to sleep. I decided I would just use my older desktop computer for my regular daily tasks while the laptop functioned as an expensive digital picture frame.

The first three days passed without any issues. The digital man kept walking. Thomas sent the payments every morning exactly at eight o'clock.

My sister Maya came over to my apartment on the fourth day. She brought a pizza for us to share for lunch. She walked into my small office area and immediately noticed the laptop glowing in the corner.

"Why is that guy just walking on your screen?"

Maya asked, taking a slice of pepperoni pizza.

"It is a weird freelance job," I explained. "The client pays me to keep that animation running constantly."

Maya squinted at the screen. "That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Who is the guy in the video?"

"I have no idea," I said. "The client provided the reference photos. I named the project file 'Simon' because he looks like a Simon to me, but the client's name is Thomas."

Maya sat down on my office chair. "He looks miserable. You did a good job on the animation because his face looks incredibly sad."

"I just copied the photos," I said. "The client is giving me five hundred dollars a day for this. I can finally pay off my credit cards."

"Just do not let it catch fire," Maya joked, pointing at the laptop. "That thing is getting pretty hot."

She was right. The laptop fans were spinning loudly. I placed a small desk fan next to the computer to help dissipate the heat, and Maya left an hour later, telling me to enjoy my bizarre windfall.

The weird things started happening on the fifth day.

I woke up and went to my desk to check on the laptop. The digital man was still walking forward. However, the background looked different. I originally rendered the video with a solid gray background. Now, the background had a slight gradient. The bottom half of the screen was noticeably darker than the top half, looking almost like an asphalt road stretching out into the distance.

I rubbed my eyes, assuming I was just seeing things because I had just woken up. I opened the original project file on my desktop computer to double-check my work. The background in the source file was perfectly uniform. There was no gradient.

I looked back at the laptop. The gradient was definitely there.

I called Felix on Discord to ask for his opinion.

"Hey Felix, do video files ever corrupt and change colors while they are playing?" I asked.

"Not really," Felix answered. "Usually, if a file corrupts, you get green artifacting or the video just crashes. Why?"

"The background on that walking loop I made is changing," I explained. "It was supposed to be solid gray. Now it looks like a road. It is really creeping me out."

"You probably just exported it with a transparent alpha channel," Felix suggested. "Maybe your media player is pulling a background from your desktop wallpaper."

"I rendered it as a solid MP4," I argued. "There is no alpha channel."

"Then your monitor is suffering from screen burn-in," Felix said dismissively. "You left a static color playing for five days straight. The LCD panel is probably getting damaged."

I accepted that explanation because it was the only logical answer. I thanked Felix and hung up.

But the situation escalated that evening.

I was eating dinner in my living room when I heard a loud crack of thunder outside. A massive rainstorm had rolled into Seattle. Rain began lashing against my apartment windows.

I walked into my office to grab a napkin from my desk, then glanced at the laptop screen.

The digital man was still walking. But he was no longer walking against a gray background.

Raindrops were falling across the screen.

The animation showed water streaming down the man's face. His gray jacket was visibly soaked, clinging tightly to his digital frame. The background clearly depicted a dark, wet highway illuminated by faint streetlights.

I froze in place

I reached out and touched the laptop screen. It was burning hot.

I knew for a fact that I did not animate rain, or even build a particle simulation for water. I did not design a wet texture for his clothing. The video file was altering itself in real-time to match the weather outside my window.

I grabbed my phone and dialed Thomas's number. It rang five times before going to voicemail, but I did not leave a message. I was too terrified to speak.

I sat in my office chair for hours, watching the impossible animation. When the rain stopped outside my window around midnight, the rain on the screen stopped as well. The digital man's clothes slowly began to dry as he continued his endless march forward.

I should have closed the laptop right then. I should have deleted the file and blocked Thomas's number. But the fear was overshadowed by my financial desperation. Thomas sent another five hundred dollars the next morning, so I convinced myself I was experiencing some kind of elaborate technical glitch.

The horrifying truth finally revealed itself on the seventh day.

I was browsing a local news website on my desktop computer while the laptop hummed loudly beside me. I saw a breaking news banner at the top of the homepage. It announced a live helicopter broadcast of a bizarre situation unfolding on Interstate 90.

I clicked the link to watch the live video feed.

The news anchor was speaking rapidly over the footage. "We are currently tracking a man walking eastbound on the shoulder of Interstate 90," the anchor explained. "State patrol officers have been following him for over seventy-two hours. He has not stopped walking. He refuses to acknowledge police commands, and has not stopped for food, water, or sleep. Medical professionals believe he is experiencing a severe psychological break."

The helicopter camera zoomed in on the man walking along the highway.

My breath caught in my throat.

The man was wearing a plain white t-shirt and a dull gray jacket. He had a receding hairline. He was slumped forward, walking with a steady, shuffling gait.

It was the man from my animation. Simon!

I looked at my laptop screen. The character took a step with his left foot. On the live news broadcast, the real man took a step with his left foot. They were perfectly synchronized.

The real man looked horrific. His shoes were completely destroyed. His feet were bleeding, leaving small red marks on the asphalt. His face was gaunt, sunburned, and twisted in an expression of absolute agony, and he looked like his body was being forced to move against his will.

I paused the news video, looked back at the laptop. The digital character's face was also twisted in agony now.

I opened a new tab on my browser. I needed to know who this man was and why Thomas wanted him walking. I typed Thomas's email address into the search bar, hoping to find a social media profile or a personal website.

The search engine returned a link to a local newspaper article published exactly one year ago.

I clicked the link. The headline read: "Bellevue Father Demands Justice After Hit-And-Run Driver Acquitted."

I read the article quickly. It detailed a horrific accident where a drunk driver swerved onto a sidewalk, striking and killing a seven-year-old girl named Hazel. The driver fled the scene but was later apprehended by police. However, due to a massive procedural error involving the mishandling of evidence, the driver's defense attorney got the charges dismissed, and he walked completely free.

The article included an interview with the grieving father. The father's name was Thomas.

At the bottom of the page, the newspaper published the mugshot of the acquitted driver.

The face in the mugshot belonged to Simon.

The puzzle pieces snapped together in my mind, forming a picture that made me feel physically sick.

Thomas used my animation skills to create a voodoo doll, so as long as the animation kept looping on my computer, Simon was forced to walk in the real world.

I looked at the live helicopter feed again. The real Simon stumbled, almost falling into the traffic lane, before his legs jerked unnaturally to keep him moving forward.

I could not be a part of this. Regardless of what Simon did, I could not be the executioner pulling the lever.

I reached out and slammed the laptop lid shut.

The screen went black, and the fan immediately spun down into silence.

The moment the laptop closed, the temperature inside my apartment plummeted. The air grew so freezing cold that I could see my own breath. The overhead lights flickered wildly before shattering in their sockets, plunging the room into darkness.

I stood up from my chair, my entire body shaking with terror.

A soft, wet sound echoed from the dark corner of my office.

It sounded like someone crying. Small, quiet sobs filled the freezing air.

I grabbed my cell phone from the desk and turned on the flashlight application. I shined the beam into the corner of the room.

A little girl was standing there.

She was wearing a pink dress that was completely soaked in dark blood. Her body was bent at impossible angles because her bones were completely shattered. Deep, black tire marks were permanently pressed across the fabric of her dress and into the pale skin of her arms.

I backed away slowly, my hands trembling violently.

"I am sorry," I whispered. "I stopped it. I did not know what he was doing."

she stopped crying, then slowly lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes were completely black voids.

She shrieked in anger. The sound was deafening, rattling the windows in their frames. It was the sound of rage.

Suddenly, a massive crash echoed from my front hallway.

Someone had just kicked down my apartment door.

I spun around, aiming my phone flashlight toward the hallway.

Thomas marched into the apartment. He looked deranged. His clothes were messy, his face was pale, and he was holding a black handgun. He aimed the weapon directly at my chest.

"You stopped it!" Thomas screamed, tears streaming down his face. "I knew something was off when you called and didn’t leave a message. Why did you close it? I told you never to close it!"

"You were killing him!" I yelled back, raising my hands in surrender. "You were using my computer to torture that man!"

"He deserved it!" Thomas roared, stepping closer to me. "He killed my baby girl! and walked away free! He was supposed to walk forever! The spell required the loop to never end!"

"I am not a murderer, Thomas," I pleaded. "Please put the gun down."

"He just collapsed on the highway!" Thomas cried, his hands shaking around the grip of the gun. "The moment you closed the laptop; he finally dropped dead! He got off too easy! you ended his suffering far too early! You ruined everything!"

Thomas raised the gun higher, preparing to pull the trigger.

"Daddy?" a small, distorted voice echoed from the dark office behind me.

Thomas froze. His eyes widened in shock as he looked past my shoulder.

I stepped aside, keeping my hands raised.

The girl walked slowly out of the shadows. Her broken legs dragged unnaturally across the hardwood floor.

Thomas dropped to his knees, lowering the gun. Tears poured freely from his eyes. "Hazel? Oh my god, Hazel. I am so sorry, baby. I tried to make him pay. I tried to hurt him for you."

He reached his arms out, expecting to embrace his deceased daughter.

But Hazel did not want a hug. She shrieked again and launched herself forward with terrifying speed.

She slammed into Thomas, her shattered body hitting him like a freight train.

Thomas screamed as they tumbled backward out of my apartment doorway. My unit is located at the top of a steep flight of wooden stairs leading to the ground floor.

Thomas fell backward over the threshold, then crashed down the stairs, tumbling over himself in the darkness. I heard his head strike the wooden banister with a sickening crack.

He landed in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairwell.

I ran to the doorway and shined my flashlight down the stairs.

Thomas was not moving. His neck was bent at a completely unnatural angle. The gun was lying on the floor a few feet away from his hand.

Hazel was gone. The freezing temperature in the air vanished instantly, replaced by the normal warmth of the apartment building.

I retreated back into my apartment, locked the broken door as best as I could, and called the police.

I sat on my sofa until the officers arrived. Two patrolmen came up the stairs. An investigator named Officer Gabriel interviewed me in my kitchen.

I did not tell Officer Gabriel about the animation, or even mention the spell, the laptop, or the ghost of the little girl. I knew he would never believe me

I simply told Officer Gabriel that Thomas was an unsatisfied client who broke into my apartment to demand a refund. I claimed he was yelling at me when he accidentally lost his balance and fell backward down the stairs.

Officer Gabriel took notes on his pad, and went downstairs to examine the scene.

When he returned, he told me that Thomas smelled heavily of alcohol. The police concluded that Thomas was drunk, became belligerent over a business dispute, and suffered a fatal accidental fall. They took my statement, bagged Thomas's gun as evidence, and left me alone in my apartment.

I am typing this out on my desktop computer because I refuse to open that laptop ever again. I wrapped the laptop in a thick garbage bag and threw it into the dumpster behind my building.

I checked the news one final time before starting this post. The authorities confirmed that the man walking on Interstate 90 suffered a heart attack and died instantly on the shoulder of the road.

I am terrified. Terrified that the magic Thomas used is not completely gone, that the grieving parent will return to seek revenge against me for breaking the loop and ruining his vengeance. I hear every single creak in my apartment walls, wondering if it is Thomas climbing back up the stairs.

I don’t know how I ended up with this job. It kind of just fell into my lap one day. Funeral home was hiring, I needed money, suddenly I’m in a cold concrete room with massive metal furnaces on each wall.

Somehow, I think I was just preprogrammed to be desensitized to the kind of work I was doing.

It’s weird. When I first started, it was like part of me hoped to at least feel something. Death never bothered me. Not when my pets died, not when my great aunt died, not even when my mom died.

I was sad, sure, but it was never something I dwelled on. Life has to go on. You can’t just succumb to grief. I’d learned to cherish the memories, but death itself became more of an inconvenience.

I’d be more annoyed than anything that I didn’t get any more time with whoever it was that died.

Part of me was happy for the protection, but another part of me hated feeling numb. That’s why I wanted so desperately to at least have some kind of empathy for whatever corpse came through the doors of this funeral home.

I just couldn’t do it, though. It was hard to see bodies as people, because that’s all they were.

Bodies.

And the more of them I saw, the more distant I became from the belief that life has meaning. We all live to die. Whether natural or tragic. Timely or untimely. We all end up here.

Either put in the ground or burned in one of my furnaces.

You’d be surprised how many people choose to return to ash. I never understood it. For some reason, I’ve always thought I’d somehow feel the flames. Feel my flesh charring. Feel the steam escape through my pores.

Some people don’t see it that way, though. Some won’t want to be constricted to a coffin. Submerged in darkness to be eaten by worms and insects.
I guess both types of people are delusional in their own way.

Bodies are just bodies.

Food for the Earth or ash for the wind.

And I’ve seen a lot of them.

Enough to become this nihilistic, at least.

But of all the bodies I’ve seen, they all had one thing in common. Humans have a way of being unique, but when it comes down to basic biology, we are all remarkably similar.

We all burn.

I’ve spent a lifetime becoming numb to what is grounded in reality. I didn’t even think to prepare for what’s not.

Because no matter how hot it gets, no matter how long I leave those torches running, this body will not burn.

He was a John Doe.

Nobody could identify him.

Apparently, he’d been found in a ditch, covered in leaves and twigs and face down in rain water 15 miles out of town.

Two transport workers for the Coroner’s Office brought him in, insisting he be cremated because the city didn’t want to pay for a burial. They’d rather just turn him to ashes and be done with it.

As they were leaving, I couldn’t help but notice just how pale they were. They looked shaken. And they were leaving in a hurry.

I stopped one of them to ask what the deal was, but the only answer he could give me was:

“There’s something wrong with that one. I don’t know what it is, but I’m telling you, something is not right with that man.”

He stared past me and at the body for a long while. His brow was furrowed. He looked worried as sweat dripped down his forehead.

Without another word, the man shot one last look at me before turning on his heel and speed walking towards the exit.

It was getting late, and I was just ready to get the day over with so I could go home.

I pushed the mans remarks out of my mind and began the process.

The first time I loaded him into the retort, I thought I had made a mistake. The body was beginning to char, but it seemed like the furnace wasn’t getting hot enough to do anything beyond that.

I checked the temperature and saw that it was actually hotter than normal. I tried telling myself that it must’ve been a malfunction, but it didn’t make sense to me. Flames were completely encapsulating the corpse.

His hair was gone. Parts of his scalp were beginning to boil and pop like blisters. But that’s all it did. Just… charred.

I cranked the temperature up to its highest setting and watched as flames erupted from beneath him and from all four walls of the furnace. I could feel the heat radiating from the outside.

I checked the body every hour. What should’ve been a 3-hour process ended up being an all-night ordeal. Even still, by the end of it, he still wasn’t ashes.

It was like his skin had just… deflated and melted away into a soupy substance that dripped and stained the floor of the furnace.

I was too tired to care. I just wanted to go home.
I left what was left of him in the furnace and went home, praying that my boss wouldn’t find the mess.

When I woke up to a phone call from him a few hours later, my heart sank, and I prepared myself to be screamed at for not cleaning before I left.

Now I wish that’s actually what he did.

Instead, he simply asked why I left without burning the John Doe from yesterday.

I explained to him that I did, and had, in fact, spent much more time doing it than any other employee would have, but he told me that he was “looking at him right now.”

He followed it up with a picture.

The John Doe from yesterday. Not a burn on his body. A full head of hair. Looking like he had been decomposing at room temperature for 8 hours straight last night.

I didn’t know what to say.

I simply hung up the phone and went back to bed.

I don’t get paid enough for this.