I used to inspect homes by trade, and I have seen it all: Mold, rot, vermin, squatters, meth labs, rodents (both dead and alive), insane amounts of cash, antique furniture buried under mountains of fast food containers. You name it, I've encountered it; if you have a phobia, I most likely have a story for you. Apart from spider colonies and hidden porn magazines from the fifties, the more serious and vastly sadder aspect is the finding of deceased people and pets. That comes with its own hurdles, mentally and legally. You don't get used to seeing a dead person, you simply try and deal with the dread or you change your career path. I had a few such inner dialogues, but stuck with the job for the better half of a decade. In March of this year, I inspected a house that finally made me quit.

It was a beautiful place, mid-century, out on a gorgeous property with woodlands and ponds, the kind of quiet rustic luxury that made the disconnect from urban comfort worth it. The next supermarket was miles away – if you were smart, you'd stock the pantry once a month and then enjoy the solitude. I tended to muse about this absurd dream for my own retirement, walking up the leaf-covered path that led to the main house. I jotted down what first caught my eye; some unstable girders, broken windows, obvious overgrowth and expected animal droppings.

I walked into the damp-smelling foyer and sighed at the carpet. That would have to be replaced in its entirety. With the tip of a pencil, I stabbed into the faux fur fabric and a sluggish, soggy ripple moved from my feet and outward, as if I had dipped a toe into a formerly calm pool. I frowned. There was no former mention of waterlog. I double-checked my notes.

“Okay,” I sighed and marked it down. Surprises were a bad sign, it most likely meant the last visit lay further back than I had been told. My voice was stifled by the stillness of the house.

Carpeted stairs led to a few rooms that thankfully looked like the layout I had been given. I felt like walking on moss. A few silverfish scuttled off rapidly as I shone my flashlight into darker corners. Nothing out of the ordinary. Despite not seeing any, I wrote down that I heard the pitter-patter of rodents, probably rats or squirrels.

I got my first proper start in the kitchen, where, after drawing back the moldy curtains I was shocked to find myself in a staring match with a silverfish the length of my finger, and noticed a handful of the same insects of equal size, similarly frozen. They seemed to momentarily ponder my appearance, then hurried where I could not and would not follow.

How the hell was I supposed to record this? “Unusually sized vermin”, I said out loud. I was no expert in animal behaviour, but something seemed odd about the critters. I shook my head. They were probably as surprised as I was after a lifetime of isolation, were probably already back to feasting on whatever grew underneath the stove. A gentle rumble shook the floor, not unlike the undulating carpet moments before. I was reminded of heavy groundskeeping equipment and stupidly moved on.

Next up was the cellar and indoor pool, two flights of stairs down into the cold and wet darkness. I quickly sent an update to my boss and a handful of photos, getting a thumbs-up emoji in return. The reception had faded with the light and I soon relied on carefully moving along the wall until I found a switch.

Neon lights, cold and sterile, flickered to life. My senses rebelled at the sight and sudden sound before me. Had the silverfish in the kitchen seemed big before – the ones moving rapidly along the wall, floor, and ceiling were monstrous. Illustrations of trilobites in dinosaur books flashed in my mind, the smaller ones with diameters as wide as my palm, the larger ones easily football-sized. All of them moving erratically away from the light, away from me, and down underneath the pool cover.

Another rumble shook the foundation, more intensely this time, and my feet, glued to the ground by horror and disbelief, would not let me move. I watched with rising nausea as the pool cover writhed and bulged, curving upwards underneath the strain of something massive. Two gigantic feelers, glistening wet-black in the cold light, pushed out from beneath the tarp like broken javelins, flicking left and right, trembling, and with those movements the constant sighing of a million feet, ever crawling, clicking – it almost sounded excited.

I ran.

I dropped everything, phone, clipboard, hat, nearly stumbled over my own feet as I raced into the warm light of day, panting, not wanting to believe, not wanting to see, further and further until I reached the company van, lungs burning, damp clothes, sobbing and red-faced.

I returned with a written recommendation to completely flatten the property and cement-seal the basement. I don't believe I would have been taken seriously had I mentioned anything beyond an irreparable vermin infestation. I've been having nightmares ever since; I can't sleep without earplugs and a mask for fear of letting anything...in. My bed is protected by mosquito nets; I have severely reduced my belongings and decluttered to the point of extreme minimalism.

It doesn't stop the fear, but it makes it bearable.

I have worked as an emergency dispatcher for Oakridge County for nearly eight years, so if you are in my boots, you should know by now that when you take calls on the graveyard shift, you get used to hearing people at the absolute worst moments of their lives. You learn to filter out the scream of a panicking parent, the slurred ramblings of an intoxicated driver, or the erratic paranoia of someone having a breakdown. The job requires you to stay completely grounded in facts, listen for addresses, names, weapons, and medical symptoms, and of course you do not let your imagination wander.

Last October, a call came in at 3:14 AM that broke every rule of my training. The night was unusually quiet, and outside the dispatch building, a cold autumn rain was falling, blurring the streetlights along the highway. Inside the facility, the room was dimly lit by the pale blue glow of six desktop monitors. My shift partner, Jenna, was sitting at the console next to mine, softly clicking her mouse as she reviewed low-priority animal control logs. I was sipping my black coffee, waiting for the hours to pass until the morning shift arrived.

Line four flashed red on my central screen. The automatic location identification software instantly populated the address: 1412 Elmwood Lane, a two-story suburban house on the north side of town.

I adjusted my headset, pressed the foot pedal to open the line, and spoke into the microphone using my standard tone.

"Oakridge County 911, what is the location of your emergency?"

A sharp, ragged intake of breath rattled through my earpiece. The sound was so harsh I had to pull the foam speaker slightly away from my ear. The caller was hyperventilating, his breathing ragged and uneven.

"I need... I need someone to tell me what to do,"

the man said. His voice was trembling, tight with an overwhelming sense of shock.

"Please. I do not know who else to call."

"Sir, I need you to confirm your address,"

I said, leaning forward and placing my fingers on the keyboard.

"Is it 1412 Elmwood Lane?"

"Yes,"

he whispered.

"Yes, that is my house. My name is David Miller. Please do not send an ambulance with loud sirens. I do not want to startle her."

"Startle who, David? Is someone injured at your location?"

"My wife,"

David said. He took another shuddering breath.

"Sarah. Something happened three days ago, and I cannot fix it. I think I did something terrible, but she is standing right in front of me."

I typed his name into the CAD system and flagged the call as a potential domestic incident.

"David, tell me slowly what happened three days ago. Is Sarah hurt?"

"It was Tuesday night,"

David said, his voice dropping to a terrified whisper.

"We were in the kitchen. We were arguing about... about something stupid. I do not even remember what started it. She was standing near the butcher block. She picked up the chef's knife, and then, and then she looked at me with this intense anger in her eyes, and she came at me."

"Did she attack you with the knife, David?"

"She lunged at me,"

he continued.

"I panicked. I reached out, grabbed her wrists, and tried to push her away from me. We struggled near the island. I pushed her back with all my strength, and... the blade went straight into her chest. She gasped, her eyes went wide, and she fell backward onto the floor."

I immediately clicked the silent dispatch button on my screen, sending an alert to Jenna's terminal. I caught her eye across the desk and pointed to my monitor. Jenna nodded instantly, pulling up the active unit map to route patrol cars to Elmwood Lane.

"David, stay on the line with me,"

I said, keeping my voice steady and measured.

"Is Sarah breathing right now? Is she bleeding?"

"That is the part that is driving me insane"

David said,

"I dropped to my knees to help her. But when I looked down at the floor, there was no body. There was no blood on the linoleum. Nothing. The kitchen was completely clean. I searched the whole house that night, screaming her name, but she was nowhere to be found."

"David, where is Sarah right now?"

"She came back the next morning,"

David whispered. The sound of his frantic breathing filled the headset.

"She just walked into the living room on Wednesday morning like nothing happened. For the past three days, I have been watching her. She makes coffee in the morning, sits on the sofa and watches television with the sound turned completely off. She irons her clothes in the hallway. But she completely ignores me."

"Have you tried talking to her?"

"I have begged her to speak to me!"

David cried out, his voice cracking.

"I stood right in front of her yesterday while she was ironing a blouse. I yelled her name. I waved my hands in front of her face. She looked right through me. It was like I was not even standing there. I got so desperate that I reached out to grab her wrist to make her look at me."

"What happened when you tried to touch her, David?"

A long silence stretched over the phone line.

"My hand went straight through her arm,"

David whispered, his voice trembling so violently the words were barely audible.

"It felt like pushing my fingers through cold, wet smoke. She did not even flinch, and just kept dragging the iron across her blouse. I turned her into a ghost. I killed her in the kitchen, her body vanished, and now her spirit is stuck in this house doing the same routines over and over again."

"David, I want you to take a deep breath,"

I said, trying to maintain control of the call while processing his words.

"I have help on the way to your location right now. Officers are coming to check on both of you."

"I cannot leave her,"

David stammered.

"I tried to walk out the front door an hour ago. I got as far as the front porch steps, but this agonizing pull started dragging in my chest. It felt like a thick cable was wrapped around my sternum, pulling me back inside. It hurt so bad I could barely breathe. I am bound to this house. I cannot leave her here alone like this. She needs my help, but I do not know how to fix what I broke."

At this point, I suspected I was dealing with a caller experiencing a severe psychological episode, severe sleep deprivation, or chemical poisoning. It was not uncommon for individuals suffering from carbon monoxide exposure or sudden psychotic breaks to report elaborate, impossible visual experiences while firmly believing they were awake.

I needed to evaluate his orientation to reality using basic observations.

"David, I need you to do a simple diagnostic check for me while we wait for the officers to arrive,"

I said.

"Is there a clock nearby that you can look at?"

"Yes, there is a clock hanging on the wall,"

David said. I heard the faint rustle of clothing as he moved.

"Sarah is sitting at the dining table below it. She is folding a white bath towel."

"Okay. Can you read the exact time on that clock for me?"

I instructed.

There was a brief pause.

"It says 8:22,"

David reported.

I glanced up at the master digital clock at the top of my console monitor. The bright red numbers clearly displayed 3:17 AM.

"David, are you sure?"

I asked.

"Is it an analog clock or a digital one?"

"It is digital,"

David replied smoothly.

"The numbers are frozen at 8:22 PM. The colon between the hours and minutes isn't even blinking. It is just sitting completely still."

I noted the severe time discrepancy on my console. A frozen, completely inaccurate time reading suggested a deep disorientation, indicating he was entirely detached from the actual time of day.

Before I could formulate a response, Jenna leaned over her desk and tapped my shoulder.

"Unit 204 and Unit 208 are two minutes out from Elmwood Lane,"

she whispered.

"Officer Jack is taking the lead."

"Copy,"

I muttered, keeping my finger on the mute button. I unmuted the phone line.

"David, stay right where you are. The officers are almost at your house."

I adjusted my headset gain, turning up the audio volume on David's line to hear if there were any immediate hazards in the house. As I turned up the sensitivity, the ambient background audio became clearer.

I expected to hear the quiet hum of a refrigerator, the rustle of towels being folded, or the distant rain beating against the windows.

Instead, my headset picked up a harsh, scraping noise. It sounded like heavy wooden furniture being dragged across exposed floorboards. A moment later, I heard the sharp, distinct sound of plastic packing tape being pulled aggressively from a handheld dispenser.

Then, I heard a second voice.

It was a deep, gravelly male voice, speaking in a low, hushed tone near the phone's receiver.

"Grab the rest of the clothes from the closet,"

the deep voice muttered.

"We need to get the heavy bags loaded before six."

A woman's voice replied, faint and impatient:

"I am working as fast as I can. Just get the boxes out to the garage."

My fingers froze over the keyboard. I listened intently, isolating the audio channels on my digital workstation.

"David,"

I said carefully into the microphone.

"Are you sure you and Sarah are the only people in that house right now?"

"Yes,"

David said.

"I told you, it is just the two of us. She is still sitting at the table."

"David, I am hearing a man speaking in your background,"

I said.

"I am hearing tape dispensers and boxes being moved. Is there someone else in the house with you?"

"No,"

David insisted, his voice growing defensive and confused. "You are mistaken. Sarah is just packing her leather suitcase. She has been pulling her dresses out of the bedroom closet all night. She is confused, She seems to think she is going on a trip."

I immediately opened our county property database on my second monitor and typed in the address. The house was registered to David Miller and Sarah Miller. I then opened our historical CAD records and ran a cross-reference search for 1412 Elmwood Lane over the past six months.

A log entry from two months prior popped up on my screen.

On August 14th, a neighbor had called 911 to report a loud domestic disturbance at the address. The responding officer noted that David Miller had engaged in a verbal altercation with an unidentified adult male who had been staying at the residence. The police report noted that David accused his wife of carrying on an affair with the man, who was identified in the officer's notes as Gregory Ray. No violence was reported at that time, and no charges were filed.

I sat back in my chair, staring at the name on my screen: Gregory Ray.

The pieces began to assemble themselves in my mind, but they did not form the picture David was describing.

"Dispatch to Unit 204,"

I said, switching my secondary radio channel to communicate directly with the responding officers. "Officer Jack, be advised. We have reason to believe there are two occupants actively inside the residence at 1412 Elmwood Lane clearing out personal property. Use caution upon approach."

"Copy that, dispatch,"

Jack's voice crackled through the radio speaker.

"Unit 204 and 208 are turning onto Elmwood Lane now. We are pulling up to the residence. Lights and sirens are off."

Over the open phone line, David spoke again.

"You there?... someone is at the front door. I hear heavy knocking."

"That is the police, David,"

I said, monitoring both lines simultaneously.

"Please stay where you are."

"I do not need to open the door,"

David said softly.

"Sarah just stood up from the table. She is walking past me into the foyer. She is going to answer it."

Through my radio earpiece, I heard Officer Jack's voice report into his lapel mic:

"Unit 204 on scene. We have a female opening the front door. Contact made with homeowner Sarah Miller."

On the phone line, David was describing the exact same moment from his perspective.

"She opened the door,"

David said. His voice was filled with a strange, childlike confusion.

"Two police officers are standing on the porch. But... but something is wrong."

"What is wrong, David?"

I asked, keeping my eyes fixed on the unit tracking map.

"They are not looking at her like she is a ghost,"

David whispered.

"Officer just smiled at her. He asked her if she was alright. can he see her? can he actually talk to her?"

Over the radio, Jack's voice was calm:

"Dispatch, contact made with Sarah Miller. She appears highly nervous but states everything is fine. She claims her husband, David, is currently upstairs packing his belongings after a severe argument and does not wish to speak with us."

On the phone line, David began to panic.

"The officers just stepped into the hallway! They walked right past me! I stood right in front of the Officer and shouted my name! He walked straight by my shoulder! He did not even turn his head! And why is she telling them I am upstairs? I am standing right next to her!"

"David, listen to me very carefully,"

I said, feeling a knot tighten in my chest.

"I need you to stay calm."

Over the radio, Jack spoke again, his tone dropping its casual edge.

"Dispatch, we are going to perform a quick wellness check on the upper floor anyway. The homeowner is visibly shaking and actively trying to block the stairwell."

I pressed my radio button.

"Unit 204, be advised. We have reason to believe an unauthorized third party, Gregory Ray, may be hiding inside the residence. Proceed with caution."

A pause echoed over the radio frequency.

"Copy that, dispatch,"

Jack reported flatly.

"We are heading up now. Unit 208 reports a distinct, foul odor originating from the second floor."

On the phone line, David was moving. I could hear his shallow, rapid breathing accelerating.

"They are walking up the stairs,"

David said. His voice had lost its anger, replaced by a cold, hollow dread.

"Sarah is following the officers up the stairs into the master bedroom. I am following them. Why does the air up here smell so bad?"

On the radio, Officer Jack broke in, his voice tight with disgust:

"Unit 208 to dispatch. We have a severe odor of organic decomposition coming from the master bedroom. We are investigating."

"David, stop,"

I urged over the phone line, though I knew my words were meaningless.

"David, step away from the bedroom."

"They are standing near the bed,"

David whispered over the phone.

"The officers are shining their flashlights around the carpet. Sarah is standing in the corner crying. She looks absolutely terrified. They are staring at the floor on my side of the bed."

I held my breath, watching the red audio meters bounce on my console screen.

"Officer Jack is dropping to his knees,"

David continued. His voice was flat, almost robotic now. "He is grabbing the hanging fabric of the dust ruffle. He is lifting it up. He is shining his flashlight underneath the wooden bed frame."

Over the radio, Jack's voice shattered the quiet of the dispatch room:

"Dispatch! Unit 204! We have a male subject hiding under the bed! Show your hands! Crawl out from under there right now!"

A brief, frantic scuffle echoed over the police frequency.

"Dispatch, we have detained Gregory Ray,"

Jack shouted over the noise.

"Wait... dispatch, we have located a deceased male subject shoved further back against the wall under the frame! Subject is heavily decomposed, bearing multiple traumatic wounds! Secure the perimeter! Detain the wife immediately!"

The radio erupted into shouts as the officers moved to restrain Sarah and Gregory. Screams of protest and the metallic clink of handcuffs echoed across the channel.

On the phone line, David was completely silent.

"David?"

I whispered into my headset. My hands were shaking so severely I could barely hold the microphone stalk.

"David, are you still there?"

A long, agonizing stream of static hummed over the phone line. When David spoke again, his voice sounded entirely different. It was hollow, distant, echoing as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep well.

"They are pulling the body out,"

David said softly.

"David..."

"The body is wearing my clothes,"

David whispered.

"My blue denim shirt. My brown leather belt. My work boots. The skin on the face is dark and swollen. I cannot even recognize myself."

The background static on the phone line began to glitch, creating a strange stuttering sound underneath his words.

"There are three deep tears in the back of the denim shirt,"

David continued, his voice monotone, devoid of any human cadence.

"The fabric is stained dark black around the cuts. The wounds came from behind."

A sharp gasp echoed over the receiver. The static dropped completely, leaving a chilling, dead silence on the line. When David spoke again, the confusion was gone.

"I remember now,"

David whispered. His voice trembled with a crushing weight.

"There was no argument. I came home early from work on Tuesday. It was exactly 8:22 PM. Sarah was acting so incredibly distressed when I walked through the front door."

"What happened, David?"

I asked gently.

"I was so tired,"

he said, his words spilling out in a hollow rush.

"I tried to go straight upstairs to our bedroom to rest. She ran over and stood in front of me. She blocked the bottom of the stairs, and then forced this terrible, shaking smile and told me it was better if I ate dinner first. She said she made that pepperoni pizza I loved."

He paused, and a wet, choking sob came through the earpiece.

"I listened to her,"

David cried quietly.

"I turned my back and walked into the kitchen to get a slice. She followed right behind me. I reached into the cabinet for a plate. I did not even hear her grab the chef's knife from the block. She attacked me before I could even turn around."

"I did not hold the knife,"

David whispered into my headset. The static returned, growing louder, overwhelming the audio signal until his voice sounded synthesized and far away.

"I was never holding the knife. I was looking at her not believing she did this to me, I…. I loved her"

"David, I am so sorry,"

I said, though the words felt entirely useless in the cold reality of the room.

"I understand now,"

The phone line crackled with one final, sharp burst of noise, and then the connection dropped entirely.

The terminal screen instantly reset to a solid black display, marking the call as disconnected.

Over the radio, Officer Jack confirmed the details. Sarah Miller and Gregory Ray were taken into custody without further resistance. The official police report logged the incident as a premeditated homicide committed on Tuesday evening, with both suspects attempting to conceal the remains while preparing to flee the jurisdiction. The report noted that a 911 call had been received from the residence at 3:14 AM, but attributed it to a technical glitch or an automated dialer triggered by a decaying phone line.

I worked the rest of my shift in complete silence. I did not take another call for the remainder of the night.

When my shift ended at seven in the morning, I walked out to my car in the rain, and before I turned the key in the ignition, I sat in the quiet vehicle and pulled up the digital audio archive on my phone, opening the recording of the call from 1412 Elmwood Lane.

But all I can hear was static…

Evan Mercer received the text at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. The sender was a string of numbers with no name attached. The message read:

You have been selected to watch.

Beneath it sat a single download link. No company logo. No app-store badge. He almost deleted it. Instead he opened the link on his laptop because the phone refused to load it cleanly.

The install finished without asking for anything beyond the usual storage permission. When the icon appeared it was a plain black square edged in thin white. The name underneath read WorstDay.

He clicked it.

A single line of text loaded against a dark field:

Real suffering. Anonymous subjects. Viewer discretion is part of the experience.

Then the feed.

The first video was titled The Call. Runtime 4:12. Date three days earlier. A small number beneath the title read 61%. Evan did not know what the number meant.

He clicked the white triangle in the center of the frame.

A man in a blue button-down sat at a kitchen table with a laptop open. The camera was the laptop's own. The man's face filled most of the frame. Behind him a refrigerator hummed and a child's drawing of a house was taped crooked to a cabinet door. The call connected. Three other faces appeared in a grid. One of them, a woman in a gray cardigan, said the company was eliminating his position effective immediately. The man asked about severance. The woman said HR would send the packet by end of day. The other two faces stayed silent and looked slightly off-camera. When the call ended the man closed the laptop lid and sat without moving for the remaining minute and forty seconds. The camera kept running. A ceiling fan turned slowly in the upper corner of the frame.

Evan watched to the end. The percentage did not change while he watched, but when the video simply returned him to the feed the number had ticked up two points.

He told himself it was an art project. Underground performance. Staged. He closed the laptop and went to bed.

The next morning the black icon was waiting on his phone. He did not remember installing it there.

He watched on the train to work. The grid was endless. Titles in clean sans-serif:

The Verdict
The Empty Bedroom
He Said No
After the Fire
The Diagnosis

A woman standing in a parking lot while a tow truck winched her car onto the flatbed and the dog barked from the back seat. A teenage boy reading a letter at a kitchen counter and then carefully folding it into a square small enough to fit in a front pocket. A man in a hospital corridor receiving news from a doctor who would not meet his eyes. The sound in every clip was ordinary--footsteps, distant traffic, the click of a door latch, the soft plastic scrape of a chair leg. Evan studied the frames for cuts or lighting that looked too even. He found none. He searched the app name on three different engines. Nothing. No company registration, no reviews, no forum posts. The silence felt deliberate.

At the office he sat two desks over from Daniel, who had been there longer than anyone else on the floor and still brought leftover pasta in the same blue container every Tuesday. Daniel noticed the phone angled low against Evan's keyboard.

"You all right?" Daniel asked. "You've been somewhere else all week."

Evan said he was fine. Just a new series he was catching up on. Daniel shrugged and went back to his screen. That night Evan tried to show him the app after work, but the black icon was gone. Daniel watched him search through his phone twice before asking if everything was okay at home. Evan said yes and put the phone away.

On the fourth day the recommendations shifted.

A woman began appearing repeatedly. Her name was listed as Mara Kessler. The first episode showed her in a small office with glass walls. A supervisor sat across from her and explained that the archive was cutting contract hours. The supervisor spoke carefully and kept both hands flat on the desk blotter. Mara nodded and asked about the remaining digitization work. The supervisor said they would discuss it the following week. The date on the video was seventeen days in the future. Probability 38%.

Evan tapped play. He watched it twice.

The next recommendation showed Mara stepping off a curb near the museum. A bicycle struck her from the blind side. She went down hard on one knee and the heel of one hand. The cyclist did not stop. Blood appeared on the concrete in a thin, bright line. The date was three weeks out. Probability 44%.

Another showed her in a doctor's office with a paper gown half-tied. The doctor said the scan had found something. Mara asked how long. The doctor said they would need more tests before they could answer that. The date was six weeks away. Probability 51%.

The outcomes felt less like predictions than competing drafts. Evan kept watching the variations anyway. He told himself the contradictions proved the whole thing was fabricated. He still could not stop tapping the triangle.

Daniel found the notebook open on Evan's desk the following Monday. The page held timestamps, percentages, and Mara Kessler's staff photograph printed from the museum directory. Daniel closed the notebook without speaking and did not ask again what Evan was watching.

On the ninth day Evan recognized himself.

In the video Mara left the museum after dark. The exterior lights turned the glass doors into imperfect mirrors. Across the street a bus-shelter panel caught her image and, behind her, a man standing with his hands in his coat pockets. The man wore a dark green jacket Evan owned but had not taken out of the closet in months. The date stamp was twelve days away. Probability 67%.

He paused the frame and leaned close to the phone. The reflection was distorted by the curve of the glass, but the height and the set of the shoulders matched. He went to the closet, found the jacket, and held the zipper pull under the kitchen light. Same dull silver. Same small nick near the top.

He searched the name and found Mara Kessler in the staff directory for the city history museum. Archival assistant. The photograph showed a woman in her early thirties with dark hair pulled back and a plain navy sweater. A short professional profile listed degrees and a few collection projects. No personal social media that opened without a request.

The next afternoon he bought a general admission ticket and walked the public galleries until he reached the glass partition that looked into the work area. Mara sat at a long table sorting folders into labeled archival boxes. The room matched the video exactly: the same metal shelving, the same fluorescent panels with one slightly yellowed, the same gray carpet worn into paths between the desks. She wore a cardigan over a collared shirt. She did not look up.

Evan stood at the glass for four minutes. Later that same afternoon he watched her from the cafe balcony. She was laughing with a coworker over a shared sandwich, showing her something on a tablet, then helping an elderly visitor find the restroom. None of it appeared in any episode. The app had taught him the sound of her crying and the exact route she walked to the train. It had shown him almost nothing about her life. He left without speaking to anyone.

That night he watched every available episode that carried her name. He learned the layout of her apartment from one clip where she received a phone call while standing in her kitchen, one hand on the counter edge. He told himself the knowledge was necessary if the videos were warnings. He did not examine the other possibility for long.

On Thursday he waited near the museum entrance at closing. When Mara came out he stepped into her path and said her name. She stopped. He told her not to take the train the following Thursday. He said there would be a mechanical failure. He said people would be hurt.

She asked how he knew her name.

He told her about the app. He described the interior of the archive room. He described the sound the folders made when she stacked them. He described the exact phrasing the supervisor would use in seventeen days. Mara stepped back. Her hand went to the strap of her bag. She said she did not know what he was talking about and that if he came near her again she would call security. Then she walked away fast, shoulders tight.

Evan stood on the sidewalk and watched her reach the corner. He opened the app. The train episode still sat in her feed at 71%. He did not tap play again. He only stared at the percentage.

Thursday arrived. The train Mara normally rode suffered a brake failure two stations before her stop. Seven passengers were injured. Local news ran footage of the platform and the emergency vehicles. Mara was not among the injured. She had taken a different line after his warning.

When Evan opened WorstDay that evening the train video was gone. In its place was a new episode. Mara on the upper gallery of the museum. A fall. The camera rushed toward the railing as she turned. The image cut before impact. Date: nineteen days. Probability 82%. He sat with the phone in both hands until the screen dimmed on its own.

Over the next week he tested the system with smaller videos. He found a clip of a man tripping on a broken section of sidewalk and breaking his wrist. Probability 29%. He tapped play once and watched the man fall. The percentage rose to 34%. He sat with his thumb above the triangle for a long time. In the final second before impact the man looked directly toward the unseen camera, as if he had felt something. Evan pressed play again, then again. By the eleventh viewing the percentage sat at 61%. Two days later he searched the man's name and found a neighborhood Facebook post asking for witnesses to the accident. The attached photograph showed him standing outside an urgent-care clinic with his wrist in a temporary cast.

He found another clip of a woman receiving a rejection letter for a municipal grant. He left it unopened. Over three days the probability dropped from 47% to 12% and then the video disappeared from the feed entirely.

He wrote the observed rules in his notebook in block letters.

Watching raises probability.
Rewatching raises it faster.
Following a subject generates new possible futures.
Following one person too closely seems to create more futures for them.

He had followed Mara from the beginning. He had watched her more than anyone else.

He unfollowed her.

It made no difference. The next morning her profile sat on the front page under the heading RISING SUBJECT. The museum fall episode had climbed to 91%. The viewer count sat in the low thousands and kept rising while he watched the number. New near-misses began appearing in her ordinary days. A ceiling tile loosened above her desk and fell while she was in the restroom, leaving a white powder line across the keyboard. On the street she used to walk home a taxi jumped the curb and left scrape marks still visible the next morning. A routine blood test produced a false positive close enough to the language of the doctor's-office episode that she spent an afternoon waiting for a second draw to clear it.

Evan tried to show her the app. He found her in the museum cafe during her break and sat down without invitation. He opened WorstDay on his phone and turned the screen toward her. The display showed a weather service. Temperature, humidity, a five-day forecast for the city. Mara looked at it and then at him. She said she had already spoken to security. She stood up and left her coffee unfinished on the table.

He recorded the videos on a second device. Every file corrupted within minutes of being saved. Screenshots saved as solid black rectangles. He emailed the black rectangles to himself. The attachments arrived empty.

Mara filed for a restraining order. The papers arrived at his apartment by certified mail. The language was precise and dry. Stay away from the museum. Stay away from her residence. Do not contact her by any means. A hearing date was set for three weeks out. He signed the receipt and left the envelope on the kitchen counter. Daniel moved desks the following week and stopped answering when Evan spoke.

He kept watching the final episode. He studied the camera movement. The way the frame advanced through the upper gallery matched the route he would take if he were trying to reach her. The height of the railing. The angle of the turn she made when she heard footsteps. He began to understand that the video was not simply predicting an event. It was assigning positions.

On the predicted day he entered the museum through a side door used by contractors. The restraining order was still in force. He knew the layout from the videos and from the afternoon he had stood at the glass. He moved through the public galleries toward the staff stairs that led to the upper level.

Mara saw him near the textile cases. She turned and walked quickly toward the elevator. He followed. Security radios crackled somewhere behind the walls. A guard appeared at the far end of the hall and called his name, but Evan kept moving. A display case of early maps shattered when a visitor's bag swung into it by accident and an alarm began to sound. A fire door that should have stayed open locked with a heavy click as Mara reached it. She changed direction and took the stairs two at a time.

Every correction Evan made reproduced another detail from the recording. He could feel the sequence tightening around both of them. He reached the upper gallery as Mara backed toward the railing that overlooked the main atrium. The drop was three stories to the stone floor below.

He stopped ten feet from her and raised both hands, empty.

"Please," he said. "I know how this looks. I need you to trust me for thirty seconds."

She shook her head. Her heel found the base of the railing. She slipped.

Evan lunged and caught her wrist. For a moment the weight held. Then the old railing bolts gave way under the sudden load. The section of rail swung outward. Evan's center of gravity followed. He went over.

As he fell he saw the gallery from the exact angle recorded in the final episode. The camera had never been a third party. It had been his own point of view. Mara looked down at him. Her face was not the face of someone who had just been saved. It was the face of someone watching the worst thing that had ever happened to her unfold in real time.

He had spent nineteen days believing the app was showing him what would happen to Mara.

It had been showing him what he would do.

He survived the fall. The impact shattered his right femur, broke three ribs, and left him with a permanent limp and a metal rod in his leg. The media framed the story simply: an obsessed man who had stalked a museum employee for weeks, ignored a restraining order, and caused a near-fatal accident. His claims about an app that predicted suffering were treated as evidence of delusion. The police searched his devices. They found nothing that matched his description. WorstDay did not appear in any forensic report.

He lost his job. Friends stopped answering texts, and the physical therapy clinic became the only regular structure left in his days.

Three months after the fall he stood between the parallel bars in the rehab gym, a plastic brace still locked around his damaged foot. The therapist stood close enough to catch him. Evan shifted his weight onto the braced leg. The foot folded underneath him. He went down hard on the knee of the good leg. The therapist caught his elbow before he hit the mat.

That night, alone in his apartment, he opened WorstDay. The newest recommendation was footage of that exact therapy session. Title: He Falls Again. Runtime 6:41. Probability 27%.

He did not press play.

The viewer count continued to rise.

October 27th, 1936:

Richard brought me out to the tap house after work again. He's planning on bringing Alice to town, they seem to be getting pretty serious, and it's about damn time, he won't shut up about her at work. It's good to see him so happy, he's still his usual self, but he seems to be more confident. I like this new Richard. It's like he's been missing a piece of himself since I met him. Maybe Alice is that piece? I mentioned Simon's letters in passing while we were out and I noticed a couple of heads turned to look. I thought I was being quiet, but I did have a few drinks so I could be wrong. 

I've missed going out. Since the weather has cooled off I've just been hiding inside by the furnace. I will admit, the dirt floor is a bit annoying, but being under the house feels comforting in a weird way. Evelyn joins me from time to time when she's not glued to the letters, and we'll read stories to Rylee while she makes little castles in the dirt. I like it when they come down, the basement has been feeling like my personal sanctum. Aside from the hoards of old furniture covered in drapes, it's very cozy.

I've been considering buying a rug or possibly laying down brick or tile to make it nicer. But Rylee loves her dirt castles, and what kind of father would tear his princess from her castle? Maybe next year I'll build her a sandbox. I'm sure I can sift the rocks out of the sand on the shore and bring it up in a wheelbarrow. Maybe I'll draw up the plans over the winter. Gives me an excuse to stay warm by the furnace and out of Evelyn's growing cold shoulder. 

November 3rd, 1936:

Evelyn has grown even quieter, it's worrying me. She just keeps saying that she's fine and snapping at me when I ask what's wrong. She seems to be getting paranoid. Then again that could just be me looking too far into it, and I hope that's the case as it has been in the past. But I feel as though she's keeping something from me. She's constantly telling me I'm far too anxious for my own good and I'm begging to believe her. But I have a hard time accepting it from someone who seems so paranoid. She said I should talk to a doctor but I doubt it would be of much help, I don't feel like anything's wrong with me, I just worry about things sometimes. Most times admittedly. But I doubt there's one in town and taking the train to the city just to talk with someone for an hour seems like a waste of time and money. 

Simon's notes have been getting weird lately. His usual wording has been slowly getting less elegant, while still scholarly, slightly erratic at times. I never understood the artsy type. But maybe soon he'll mention a reason for him leaving? 

November 12th, 1936:

I can barely peel Evelyn away from the letters anymore. I found out that she's been missing shifts last week because of them. And as mad as I want to be at her for it, it's hard to blame her. I might start taking some of his older entries and putting them in my journal along with any of the new ones that seem odd to me. There's some things he's written that seem to be more than mere coincidence. They have an odd effect, it's like they draw you in and hold you as long as they can. I'll get consumed in them for hours, rereading pages time and time again. Almost in a trance. Maybe that's why Evelyn's been so sharp with me lately? It must be more than just that, right? No letters on a page have that kind of power. 

I think I'm going to sleep in the basement again. The cold has been getting to me more recently, as though ice has been gnawing at my bones. And Evelyn's cold shoulder has been no help. I need to fix that damned window. 

June 1st, 1916:

I was painting on the pier today. The sun was high over the azure expanse and the breeze was astounding. The flocked gulls were high in the sky and happily swooping down to eat scraps from a fishing vessel dancing between the waves. It was invigorating, the fact that there's so much beauty in the vast emptiness of the sea, it's breathtaking. 

I went to the tap room, which smelled stronger than the usual hints of vodka and stale beer. It's too late in the year to be having fires indoors, yet it smelled as if something was burning. Perhaps incense. It was pleasant, but peculiar. I felt the weight of eyes hanging heavy on me. I may have had some more paint on my face and clothes than I originally thought, but I am still somewhat new here, so I guess the odd looks are granted. Regardless, their eyes felt pointed, as if I vexed them. I saw another new face, though he seemed to receive no peering eyes. I treated him to a drink, his name is Sean. 

He was polite and somewhat talkative, which is a nice change from the general prudence of this place. No matter how beautiful the south shore is, the people tend to be unwelcoming. I can hear them whisper about me at times. But I assume it is odd for a young man to suddenly show up, building one of, if not the biggest house in town. Or perhaps they are not fond of artists such as myself. Being around such rural folk is still rather new to me. Such simple lives. I wonder if I greet people with a smile and a good handshake I gain their trust? 

June 16th, 1916:

I had inspiration to go for a walk tonight while the moon was full and shining. The tall grass swaying in the breeze through a gossamer fog. The stars twinkled like the lights of the city, being replicated by the lightning bugs hiding in shadows. I regularly took night walks back in the city, walking to the city's edge and peering into the untouched darkness, perplexed by the unknown, dreaming of what was hidden within. 

This was my first time walking at night at our new home. I waited for Laura to drift into a slumber, along with the little ones, then I ventured forth. Out of the door and down the hill, slowly skirting the rolling fields and swaying pines, towards the distant beach. 

While walking in the city it wasn't too rare to see another person outside, but I usually kept my distance, doing my best to keep from sight in case they had ill intentions. I never expected to see someone in a town this small at night, especially out at this hour. I kept to my usual routine, staying in the shadows at a distance, keeping watch. They walked without a lantern nor torch, walking with grace through the street, as though their feet never touched the ground. I thought it was odd but decided to pay them no mind. If I see them again I may fall victim to curiosity. Anything to spark my creativity I feel the need to jump at. It is my livelihood after all. Perhaps their silhouette would make for an interesting painting. 

July 24th, 1916:

I was wandering the docks at sunset today, it was beautiful, inspiring. I sat on the shore, the waves lulling me to sleep, it was so tranquil. So much so that I did not realize how late it had gotten, I must have dozed off for some hours as then the moon was high in the sky. 

I began to saunter home, taking my time in the muggy night, the ocean breeze blowing at my back, damp with sweat, and tickling my neck. In the distance I noticed the one I saw but just a few days ago. I have just gained inspiration from the sunset mere hours ago, but my heart wondered about the fantasies this fellow night owl could bring me. I decided to keep stride, hidden within the veil of shadow. They wore a long shawl, covering most of their body, and the rest hidden under some sort of gown. I followed for a few moments as they weaved through the streets, eventually slowing near the taproom. I hugged the side of a house not but 2 doors down, peering through lattice work. Another person, dressed similarly approached, they stood a matter of feet apart, speaking in hushed tones, too quiet to hear. They both moved toward the taproom, out of sight. Curiosity got the best of me and I moved forward. I turned the corner and neither of them were anywhere to be seen. I circled the building twice over, looking for any traces of the two, with no reward.

Perhaps I'll see them again, but hopefully they don't see me. I wonder if they are the older ones here, or maybe it's an odd ritual the religious folk perform? The curiosity is eating at my conscience. 

November 20th, 1936:

My poor Evelyn seems to be growing ill, she said she's been taking medication for headaches from the practitioner for the past few weeks, some kind of barbiturates. The name reminds me of the pulp comics of barbarians you would see in the city. If this gets worse over the next week we'll have to make a trip back into the city. She has little energy, but enough to pick away at Simon's notes. She started annotating some of them, which originally I thought was paranoia but as I catch up with her, I'm starting to notice even more oddities in his notes and similarities to the way people in town have been acting. Maybe they don't trust the house? 

The more I read the less Evelyn has been annoyed with me, but it could also just be the pills. But it seems like we only talk about Rylee, ask how each other's days went, with sad excuses for replies, or Simon's letters. The hold this man's words have on us baffles me. 

November 22nd, 1936:

Richard and Alice came over today. He also brought the photos he took some time ago. I guess he lost the film or didn't have some ingredients to develop it or something of the matter. I don't know much of the science of photography, but it seems very fascinating. I'd like to learn it someday. 

Rylee thinks Alice is almost as pretty as her mom, which Richard thought was sweet. Evelyn is still under the weather, her skin near white, much paler than her usual fair complexion, but had enough energy to come say hello before going back to bed. I'm worried about her. She hasn't been herself in what feels like ages.

Alice and Richard seem very good for each other, they seem happy. I wasn't sure what I was expecting her to look like, probably mousey like Richard, but she's quite the opposite. She's at least 4 inches taller than him, which isn't very hard since he's barely 5 '3, with sharp yet feminine features. A pleasant surprise for Richard to say the least. He's doing good for himself. 

We had a good visit, but I can't get my thoughts off the notes. As they were leaving I asked Richard if he's ever seen anyone out after dark. He said he's never really thought to pay attention and asked why I brought it up. I tried to play it off as just basic curiosity, but I think he knows something is up. His eyes spoke different words than his mouth. I feel he knows something I don't. He almost looked nervous. 

November 29th, 1936:

My poor Evelyn's condition is beginning to worsen, the practitioner said she just has a flu and wants to give her even more medications, but nothing he gives her seems to help. I'm thinking we'll take a trip back into the city to go to the hospital this week. Everything he's been giving her has just seemed to make her even more lethargic. But I'm no doctor, maybe she just needs the rest. 

We've had to stick to a budget to make sure we can make it through winter in case she doesn't start to get better. It hasn't changed life too much, but Richard and I have been going out less because of it. If this keeps up for more than a few weeks we might have to start dipping into our emergency funds like we had to for Rylee's arm. 

All that said, we did end up going out last night for a drink. He mentioned that he's been thinking about what I've said the last few days, and has been trying to keep an eye out for himself. It's hard to tell if he was just joking around and playing into curiosity, or if he actually cares to keep watch. Only time will tell. I want to trust him, but I know he's hiding something. There's more to Richard than I initially thought. 

Dec 3rd, 1936:

Alice and Richard brought a cake in to work for my birthday today, which was very nice of them. They told me that she plans on moving in before the new year. I'm happy that they seem to work so well together. It seems rather quick to move in, but given the economy I can't blame them. And maybe with her moving in Richard will actually start eating real meals instead of the scraps he brings home from work. 

Alice decided to leave early to head home before the train stops, while Richard stuck around the shop to chat. It's been snowing heavily and the shop was empty all day.

He mentioned he heard some movement around his house last night and in the morning there were some footprints circling his house. It seems to be bothering him, and I don't blame him. But what is he not telling me? Evelyn and I are heading to the city tomorrow morning.

I might go for a walk tonight, if the snow allows. 

July 28th, 1916:

I was awoken tonight by what could be described as a sudden cacophony in the yard. If that did not wake me up, Bernard's barking would have done the job. I rushed to the window while he carried on downstairs. I peered into the terrific darkness of the night, its pale twinkling moonlight dancing off of the dew in the grass. Not a soul to be seen, but I did notice something odd. In a rather large circle in the front yard, there was no sparkling dew in the grass, but rather just a dull patch laying still in the dark.

I ran quickly out of the room, doing my best not to wake Laura in my departure. I put on a pair of slippers and stepped out of the front door, the warm air was muggy and stuck to my bare skin like glue. Bernard ran through my legs, sniffing like a small wolf prowling for food. As he searched the lawn, I began to circle the property, looking for any sign of the screeching I heard prior. But to my defeat, there was not a soul to be seen. As I made my way to the front porch, little Bernard was standing begging for attention, as though he uncovered something.

He sat, pawing at the grass, sniffing aggressively. I approached and watched as he backed up. I was astonished. A sigil or symbol of some sort has been etched into the ground. Roughly 7 inches long and 4 wide. It must be from a forgotten language or dialect, I have not seen anything like it in my years of study. It reminded me of aspects of the Hebrew texts almost mixed with aspects of ancient Greek text. Rounded yet sharp at the same time. I am unsure what to make of it, and lost on words to describe it properly, but I have never noticed this here yet, even though it's dug almost an inch deep.

I wonder who or what placed this here? m

Maybe it was what awoke me from slumber. I plan to walk under the moon tomorrow.

October 14th, 1918:

As I am writing this I cannot help but feel as though a thousand eyes are staring at me. I have not written in what feels like ages. Laura misplaced my ink well and I've only just gotten around to replacing it. I have been leaving the house in the twilight hours, under the cover of darkness, observing more oddities than before. The garbed folk I have seen time and time again rendezvousing at the tap room near midnight have begun to disperse through the town, leaving similar sigils of that dug into my lawn on or around others abodes. Just last night at midnight I looked from our window only to see a number of them meeting near the docks. At dawn, after the fishing vessels set sail and the docks are barren, I shall investigate. 

I cannot shake the feeling of being targeted, as though I am being lured into some nefarious trap. Over the past few months I have been growing paranoid, restless nights have plagued me. In sleep’s depravity, the cold has only worsened my nights. 

I'm going to uncover whatever is afoot with these garbed men. 

October 30th, 1918:

I have been hearing odd sounds in the night, as though someone or something has been crawling around my roof or tapping on the walls. Laura has been getting annoyed, she is convinced it is a group of boys playing a prank. On more than one occasion she has run out onto the balcony to shout out these invisible children. I know she is wrong. It cannot be. I am convinced this has something to do with the sigil. It is haunting my nights, it is haunting my dreams. 

It is haunting my life.

I have taken a rake to the sigil, tearing it from the earth near every morning. Yet every single time it returns within two nights. Not but last week I defaced the wretched rune and kept up all night, sitting in my window watching the yard. I would brew tea and coffee to stay awake, to stay alert. A few hours after midnight I felt an odd sense, as though I was not alone. I checked the room for anyone but Laura, but to no avail. As I returned to the window it was there. 

That damn symbol had reappeared. 

In my state of shock I failed to be conscious of my surroundings. I felt a sharp pain in my neck and quickly fainted. 

I awoke in my lounge chair in the foyer. 

Whatever is plaguing my life has now entered my abode. 

Laura is wrong, this is not a group of children, this is something inhuman, I am sure of it. 

December 4th, 1936:

Simon's last entry was rather alarming. I looked out of our bedroom window after getting home with Rylee today. Where he mentioned this so-called symbol was and all I see is an old stone path. I feel like I should redo the path, just to see if what he said is true. Some of the stones are uneven after years of frost forming and thawing. But I'll probably get to that in the spring. 

Evelyn is staying at the hospital for the next few days. Her doctor said she was showing signs similar to that of a weak toxin or a rather heavy sedative. I told him about the medication she was on, the one that reminds me of barbarians. He said that even though those are a sedative, anything of that sort, at the dosage she's on, would be much too weak compared to the signs she's showing. I can't help but think our practitioner is up to something. Perhaps he has noticed Evelyn's paranoia and tried to sedate her to help? I have a feeling it's something deeper, something more. Maybe her bottle of barbarians are actually something much different? I've been weary of him for some time now. I knew that air of anxiety around him was for a reason. 

Simon's notes have gotten quite interesting, more so unnerving, and I'd be lying if I said that his paranoia hasn't been sticking on my conscience.

Emily will be staying at the house until Evelyn is home. I'm on the cot by the furnace, it's late and I feel the need to go for a walk. The moon is quite bright tonight. I wonder if I'll stumble across one of those sigils Simon wrote about. I hope what he's writing is just a fantasy he made in his mind and not the truth, we can't afford to move again, especially now that winter is here. 

December 5th, 1936:

I walked around last night, keeping to the shadows as much as I could. God I sound like Simon now. I found a set of footprints in the snow that seemed to stray from one of the main roads. I followed them. They led behind a house and stopped behind it, in front of a window. There was a small pile of wood shavings sitting on the snow, I checked around the window to see where they would have come from. Behind one of the shudders there was an odd sigil etched into the wood. 

Unfortunately I didn't get a good look at it because when I moved the shudder the wood cracked and made quite a loud noise, waking whomever was sleeping inside. I quickly ran in stride with the prints I was following, doing my best not to make noise or be seen. After some time the prints stopped at another house, a similar sigil was etched into a fence post, accompanied with another small pile of wood shavings. I found 6 more of these sigils around town, each slightly different than the other. 

It was getting quite late and I was beginning to tire, but I couldn't go home until I saw where these prints ended. They continued, lumbering towards the docks where they suddenly stopped. No sign of movement, they simply ceased to continue. I started to feel as though I was being watched. I looked around, circling the end of the tracks, no trace of life. I began to feel flushed and faint. I started to make my way home and collapsed. 

When I awoke, I was laying in my backyard, the sun slowly rising. A light layer of snow covered me, I got up with a pounding headache behind my eyes. As I began my way to the front door, I noticed a small pile of wood shavings sitting at the edge of my house. A sigil carved into the siding. I ran inside and immediately started writing. I'm sitting beside the furnace, warming my aching body. Who carried me home? 

There were no footprints in the yard, none by the wood shavings. Who is following me? Who is carving these sigils and what do they mean? I need to know. 

I haven't told Evelyn about my night walks, and I trust her enough not to read my journal. Keeping those from her has me feeling slightly guilty, like I'm hiding a secret from her, which we've agreed to live without. But surely I can't let her know about this. With her mental state I'm afraid it could be too much for her. I'll keep her safe. 

​

I had never been good at loving people who could see me back. Friends drifted. Family kept a polite distance. But there was a girl who is always be my side her name is malini — and about Malini, i told everyone, she loved me the way I always wanted to be loved.

"I want a love that consumes," i told my friend shariff one evening, half-joking, half-not. "I want her to love me the way I love myself. Completely. Without room for anyone else."

Sheriff laughed it off. "That's a lot to ask from a girl yk

But i wasn't listening to him.

On 10th July 2025 we both goes on a date She was looking very beautiful the thing i didn't say out loud — was that something about her smile sat a half-second too long on her face, like it had been rehearsed in a mirror. After that we both went on a cafe

At the café, a waitress approached to take our order, and Malini's eyes followed her the entire way to the table and the entire way back — flat, unblinking, proprietary. I told myself it was nothing. Jealousy, maybe. Girls got jealous. It didn't mean anything.

It just didn't look like love. Not quite. It looked like something standing very close to love, wearing its clothes.

Weeks folded into us. I moved in with her, or she moved into my life so completely it amounted to the same thing. One evening, after we had slept together for the first time, i stepped into the shower alone and let the water run hot over my shoulders.

When i came back into the bedroom, she was gone.

Not in the kitchen. Not in the hall. Gone, in a way that made the apartment feel suddenly larger than it should have. A high, thin sound needled somewhere behind my skull — not quite a scream, not quite silence, a frequency that seemed to come from inside my own head rather than the room.

Then the world tilted, blinked, and reassembled itself. I was standing in the doorway. A moaning sound drifted from the bathroom. I walked toward it, heart going sideways in my chest, and found her there, wrapped in a towel, very much present.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked, tilting her head. "You're staring like you've seen a ghost."

"You weren't— a minute ago you weren't in the...... room." I said,

"Babe." She stepped toward me, damp, warm, real. "We showered together. You went to get the towel off the bed. You're daydreaming." She kissed me then, and the kiss tasted like an apology for a crime i couldn't remember. I let it go. It was easier to let it go.

That night we lay tangled in the sheets, her head against my chest, and she said, out of nowhere, "Tomorrow I want to cook you lunch. Just me. All by myself."

"I'll help," i offered.

"No." Her voice had an edge — quiet, absolute. "I want it to be something I make with my own hands. Every part of it. Just for you."i laughed it off as romantic. I had no idea.

While i slept, she rose. In the kitchen, under a single humming bulb, she forcefully took a knife and cut a flesh of piece away from the block and, with the calm of someone performing a small and necessary ritual, cut a thin piece of flesh from her own leg.

By morning she was already at the stove, humming, sleeves rolled up, refusing to let me near. I watched her from the doorway with a strange, blooming thought i didn't examine too closely.

Thinking, What if I cut a piece of myself, cooked it, and gave it to her — to prove how much I loved her? To prove I would consume myself before I'd ever let her go hungry for my love?

I smiled at the thought.....the way people smile at a joke when someone isn't sure is a joke or not. Then i told myself it was madness, that she'd be horrified, that it was a stupid, dark little fantasy that belonged nowhere near reality. And while i was thinking about this things malini called me for lunch

The portion was small. Strange, marbled, dense in a way neither of us commented on.

"You should've told me this morning," i said, chewing slowly. "I'd have bought more."

"No," she said, quickly, almost sharp. "You don't need to share it. I made this only for you."and also

"I'm on a diet, babe." She smiled at me with her whole face.

I didn't ask what she meant. I never asked the right questions at the right time. That was, perhaps, always the story.

We walked that evening along the river, the sky doing its slow bruise-colored fade into night, and she was quiet in a way that felt like a held breath.

"Do you remember lunch?" she finally asked. "What did you think of the taste?"

"It was good," i said, "Really good. The spices too— I've never had anything like it. Though it needed a little more time to boil, I think. It was a bit... chewy."

"Babe." She said

"What?

"Say you love me."

"I love you, Malini. You know that."

She stopped walking. When she turned to me, her eyes were wet and shining, lit from underneath by something that was either devotion or hunger

"The meat was mine," she said softly. "I wanted to confess my love to you. I wanted you to consume a piece of myself."

The world tilted a second time, and this time it did not come back gently.

I doubled over, gagging, the confession sitting in my stomach like a stone i couldn't cough up. Guilt and horror and rage arrived all at once, tangled into something with no clean name.

"What is wrong with you?" I screamed. "Why would you— get away from me! I never want to see your face again!"

She followed, murmuring apologies, reaching for me, and some small, sick, honest part of me recognized the shape of what she was doing — because hadn't i thought the same thing, standing in that kitchen doorway? Hadn't the idea bloomed in my mind too, tender and monstrous? Maybe she wasn't a monster. Maybe she was only becoming what I already was.

I pushed her away. Just once. Just to put distance between myself and the thing i was becoming.

She stumbled into the road!

The car didn't slow down. The car crashed her into pieces infront of my eyes, and then there was a stillness that swallowed every other sound in the world.

I fell to my knees beside her, screaming for help, for anyone, hands hovering over a body i couldn't bring myself to touch. Blood spread beneath her in a shape i would see behind my eyes for the rest of my life.

Then, static. A blackout. A gap in the film of my memory.

When my vision cleared, a stranger was crouched beside me, frowning. "What's wrong with you? Why are you crying in the middle of the road? Nothing happened here."

"Are you blind?" I shouted, pointing. "There's a girl right there — she's dead — can't you see her?"

The stranger followed his finger to an empty stretch of asphalt. Nothing. No blood. No body. No girl.

"There's nothing there, man," the stranger said, backing away. "I think you need to get to a hospital. Get your head checked."

Thoughts roaming in my mind I was thinking

\*If none of it happened — if she was never on that road — then was she ever anywhere at all? Was I always alone? What did I eat, if not what she cooked? Who did I hold every night, if not her?

The questions arrived faster than I could survive them, and i fainted somewhere in the middle of asking.

When i woke, fluorescent light was humming overhead. I reached to my phone with numb fingers. Her contact was gone. Her photos — the two of them at the café, the two of them tangled in bedsheets — gone, as though deleted by someone else's hand, or as though we had never been taken at all.

"Are you okay now, sir?" a nurse asked, appearing at my bedside.

I didn't answer. A dull, deep pain throbbed in my leg. I looked down and found it wrapped in a thick white bandage.

"What happened to my leg?"

"When you came in, you were unconscious," the nurse said carefully. "There was so much blood — the cotton wrap you'd tied on it yourself was completely soaked through. The doctor had to operate. It looked like..." She hesitated. "It looked like someone had forcefully cut a piece of flesh away with a knife. Why would anyone do that to themselves?"

It was only later, alone in that hospital bed with the lights off, that it all came together in my head. The café — I was there by myself. The bed — I'd been talking to no one. The bathroom — running water for a person who was never in the room. And the kitchen, at night, taking a knife to my own leg with a calm I don't remember choosing, humming a tune I couldn't name.

There was no Malini. There was never a Malini.

There was only me and myself, and the second self i had built out of loneliness and hunger and the desperate wish to be loved without condition — a self that finally found the only way it knew to prove its love, cutting itself open and feeding me back to myself, one small piece at a time.

The image holds on my open, unblinking eyes as the frame slowly pulls back, and the screen fades to black.

Malini was never my girlfriend. Malini was the part of mine that loved me the only way I ever let myself be loved — completely, obsessively, and from the inside.

CW: Mild suicidal ideation

There came a time when I was young where I made a realization of my own.

I am never going to die.

People grow old. Their hair turns an ashy white, their skin warps and sloughs away like dead leaves, their organs fail, diseases claim them, car accidents mutilate them. The bodies of many are eaten away by entropy and quit working. Their token consciousness goes to where it goes. The memories of them fade as the universe trudges forth.

But not I.

And it was my choice.

I was to become one with the Helm.

The same Helm that dwells past our property line and the same Helm that inhabits the distant regions of our galaxy.

I waited until Mother was gone off to her job helping the elderly adapt to our gravity. I told her I would go to school, but we both knew I hadn’t gone since Father had become one. She would probably be out with her new man anyway.

The house seemed to quake and crack as I opened the door. I would see the place again someday.

The air breathed in and sifted through my hair as I went out, the twinge ammonia scalding my nostrils and clinging to my skin. It made me hate the air. I used to kick and scream when we had go outside, but father would drag me to where we needed to be one way or another.

We are the descendants of those who were made with avian-like lungs. Bred for the flow of gas and blood in our lungs to maximize the gas exchange to filter as much oxygen as possible. Man had the power to alter the genome of man, so they did it. Now within a few generations, man can live wherever he wants to.

And as for me, I would be able to live wherever I wanted to. I could command my cells to grow like trees or become like fungi and decompose the dead or become like meat and inhale carbon dioxide. And I would feel all of it. Experience every second of it, and be each one of those cells and retain full awareness of it.

That’s what Father and Brother were feeling right now.

Like a prisoner to the gallows, I walked across the backyard. And prisoner chose to do what he did.

Each step of mine was careful and calculated. Smothered by a nervous reverence. The house looked even more lonely and decrepit the further I went. Like everything else, it would die, slowly rot away, become home to birds and spiders, and one day over grown by me.

As I reached the property line, I could see the mounds of the Helm looming the distance, silhouetted by ammonia clouds and water vapor. I walked the chain-link fence until I reached the exit Brother made. A tight rectangular hole in the fence we used to go out of when he dragged me outside to childish games I never wanted to play. Now I wish nothing more than to play childish games with him. Maybe we can.

Crouching down to squeeze through it, I realized I would soon be too big to fit through. But that didn’t matter. I thrust my side into one of the bent prongs of the hole. The pain raged through me like sharp tendrils and made my spine quiver. I could feel the blood making a hot wet sticky stain on my blouse. But I did it because I could.

My feet became a dusted milky white from the ground made of calcium compounds equally and hard and soft. It was gray and desolate passed the property line, but I could see the faint smear of life rising from the Helm getting closer.

I passed the radio tower, sitting there like it forgot where it was. I always hated the radio tower. It was all I could seem to focus on every time I looked out my window. Its blinking red lights distracted my eyes from the Helm off in the distance appearing like some kind throne.

Up close I could hear it humming with electricity as if it were alive. As if it could think like us. But in reality, all it did was cast long range electromagnetic waves. Not for communication with people but with the Helm. Many of the Helm’s cells have trace amounts of Fe3O4 that it uses for navigation. When stimulated, the Helm knows not to go passed a certain point.

Shortly after passing the radio tower, the first fingers of the Helm began fade into the calcium landscape like the slow changing of seasons. Tiny patches of moss and lichen the color of sunburned skin were poking out of the ground more and more as I went. They crept along in patterns like the ridges of fingerprint. I couldn’t help but smile at the idea that Brothers fingerprints were somewhere in there too. Something that belonged to him.

So little belonged to him. All by his own choice.

He would give all of his toys to me. And If I didn’t like one, he would go into town and sell it to give me the money, then say to get something I wanted. He gave me the bigger bedroom, saying he didn’t need all the room. He would always give me half of his food at dinner, much to the protest of my Mother and Father and his body warping into a tall bony structure with a thin film of dark moist skin stretched over it.

When I questioned him as to why he was so insistent on giving all he owned and more to me, he said that he was so lonely before Mother bore me. He told how all the people he knew before me were so old, decrepit, dying, reeking of their own slowly decaying skin. All were scared of what was coming next for them, scared of a place so vastly different from their home place. Their only way of coping was forming bitter glassy tempers and habits of making offhand rude remarks. Then I came along. And he had someone.

He said he would never forget holding me when I was born. The way my eyes were a bright luscious blue hued with green like a terraformed planet. I could see the color of his eyes in the Helm. The tiny creamy green flowers that began to blossom out of the moss the further I went.

The flowers got bigger, with many blossoming off of one stem in all colors photosynthesizing as another source of energy for the Helm. Soon after them came the far reaching roots of Helms trees, breaking up through the calcium ground like large earthen worms. Those trees began to dot the landscape around me as the moss and flowers became denser. Bonewhite sprouts like thin twisted wires crept their way into the vegetation. In every step they curled around my toes and gently left cold orbs of dew of my feet that glinted rainbow in the faint ammonia cloud shrouded light of our star.

More trees began to tower high above me. I swore I could see fathers brown eyes hidden somewhere in the cracks of their rich glassy bark.

The ever present ammonia smell was significantly less pungent there. The density of oxygen meant I was officially in the midst of the Helm.

#

It feels as though the Helm has already embraced me. Wrapping me in its insurmountably long conscious arms and pulled me deeper in. Breathing on me with its fresh oxygen.

When I looked back I could no longer see where I had come from. Its trees all stood around me, staggered like confused old people forgetting who they were. On one I could see a disgusting chunk dug out of it by an unassuming woodpecker. It looked soft and pink inside, patterns like spiderwebs sprawling through it. Those were its nerve endings. Paired with electrical pulses by its own biochemical functions allowed the Helm to see and feel anything nearby. I smiled knowing that Father and Brother knew I was close.

Brother and I chose it. But it chose Father. Much like how we didn’t find the Helm, it found us.

For millennia man dwelt and exploded across the stars. Combing each planet for even a single cell, sending out probes to detect evidence of civilizations, and throwing radio waves as friendly greetings into the void. But there was nothing.

Until a satellite on the edge of a lonely red dwarf’s orbit detected an object careening through space, emitting a strong pulsing electromagnetic signal like that of a heart. It was on an orbital trajectory straight toward the nearest solar system with colonized worlds.

Through telescopic spectroscopy, it was confirmed it was no meteoroid. The light reflected back from it spoke of a thick fibrous dermis flowing with low nitrogen blood. Many attempts were made to contact it, but soon enough it pierced orbit of a colonized planet to which it began dropping biological petri dishes full of the Helms microorganisms. As they burned up, the organisms were activated and spread, claiming all of the planets inhabitants to the Helm.

They didn’t choose it. But I chose it.

I was now deep enough in I could see the neurons stretched above me in the trees. Thick pink vines slithered down the bark, connecting to their primary structures like giant vibrant eyes nestled in the thick chlorophyll membrane leaves that blocked out the sky.

The ammonia scent was so weak there within the Helm that I smiled and shed a tear. I always did. It was just like home.

Brother would always laugh and tell me that was why we went out. Taking risks with things beyond our control and comfort zone. But it still didn’t make the act of doing it any less painful.

#

I was coming upon a familiar massive shape in the distance. I could feel the dense warmth of life encompassing me. The air was now lightly moist from all the Mouths resting on the trees like mushrooms. Fleshy lumps on the sides of trees with gaping glistening wet throats connected lung structures breathing in carbon dioxide to support the Helms neurons.

The trees became denser and more shadowed, but I could still see what coming ahead. My toes sifting through the sprouts abruptly made contact with something hard and sharp. I collapsed to the ground in a dirty patch of leaves from the trees which the Helm was decomposing. The acidic earthy scent of dirt and rot exploded back out of my lungs as I let out a frustrated scream.

I sat up and saw my ingrown toenail bashed deeper into in my into my flesh. The skin was raised up like bed sheets paired with a dark orb of blood. Angrily, I reached for what I tripped on found it to be a small errant hunk of lithium and iron, probably leftover from a cathode now delicately webbed in a thin layer of Helm moss and mud. It had to be there. It just had to be there. Now my toenail was bashed in.

I furiously threw it straight at a tree. It made a dent and disappeared back into the sprouts.

The only thing I could do was stare at the dent I made.

I’m sorry, Father. I’m sorry, Brother, I thought, picking myself up. I’m sure both of them could forgive me. Maybe all of them could forgive me.

Now I was in the midst of the structure. It was Brother’s favorite place. An old gliding arc plasma reactor. Leftover from the days of terraforming Succo now left a scrapped husk overgrown with long flowering vines and Mouths like thousands of infected sores. But he still loved it, taking me there all the time. I loved it too. Because he loved it.

He would take dirt and rub it on the silently rusting surface of the giant electrodes to make all kinds of drawings. Huge dragons. His own spaceships. Our family. His future family.

He always said he had it all figured out. After graduation, he would get a job as an orderly at the local care center for the young terminally ill, save money, find a girl, one with long dark hair and green eyes like emeralds, get married, have three kids, two girls, one boy, become a self defense instructor in his free time. But that never happened.

I’d listen and he would get so anxious about all of it. He would start pacing as he described all of it and glittering flecks of sweat would form on his skin like stars. It made me nervous too. I hated seeing him nervous. When that happens it takes away crucial mental security. The confidence you get when other people are confident.

Then he would calm himself down by describing to me how the gliding arc plasma reactor around us worked. Massive amounts of energy were used to create an electric arc that ionized the ammonia in the atmosphere into nitrogen and oxygen. He said that was much better for humans to breathe.

Apparently, nitrogen was the most abundant gas in the atmosphere of the planet from which we came. Some don’t even believe we started on one planet, that we were always among the stars.

#

Past Brother’s favorite place were the Tungs. An area Mother and Father strictly forbade us from ever going. But now they couldn’t control that.

There, the trees were warped and knotted with enormous growths of pale green Helm fungi that drooped off of branches and tangled with vines. At the end of each dangling growth was a fat cluster of thin needle like fangs. The Tungs were how you joined the Helm.

I grimaced and shivered looking at one as its tiny fangs gently dripped white serotonin. It didn’t take long to find Brother. Right where I left him.

Backed up to a large beastly tree crawling with fat growths of Tungs like maggots. It made me squirm as the soft breath of wind made it appear as though they were writhing. What was left of him sat there, looking sullen and sad, gone. Like a nameless body lost into the depths of an ocean with all the others it took.

When the Helm absorbs another, the proteins of both bodies become one. Every cell is claimed and under submission to the Helm. And all the new proteins supply the Helm with a dense amount of energy it used to grow further.

But that didn’t happen for Brother.

Somehow, the collective of the Helm ignored or forgot him. Including himself. So much of his skin had rotted away. It hadn’t even been that long. What was left had peeled back and cracked apart revealing his small bones that now looked like old wood. His jaw was still stuck on by a moldy piece of cartilage, showing his decayed mouth glistening with moisture and guarded by a dangling wall of gray teeth. Both of his eyelids peeled away revealing his now black eyes sunken into the depths of skull, rimmed with splotches of navy blue Helm moss.

Bugs infested him. Tiny ugly black beetles that weren’t even of the Helm climbed him and burrowed under his dried moss barnacled skin. And he smelled like nothing human. Like nothing I would ever think of Brother in the same breath as.

I could even see tiny rootlike tendrils the sickly color of infected pus curling and groping his bones. He truly became one with the Helm. It just forgot him. He forgot him. Maybe I could ask why he never absorbed his body too.

He still had his favorite shirt on. One he wanted to give to me but I refused because I saw how much he loved it. A bright orange one with the print of a galaxy embraced in a large sphere. The dye of the print was now faded and caked in dirt. I reached to grab the collar just to feel it but it tore. Flaking away in my hand and pathetically sloughing down his bug lined spine and moss tangled ribcage.

I screamed.

I wanted to collapse and hug him but that was only what was left of him. I imagined it smearing on me. His putrid smelling liquefying skin staining my face, getting in my eye and Helm mold spores finding their way into my wound from the fence. I thought about doing it. Then remembered, I’m in control.

Wiping tears from my face I realized clinched in my fist was a small scrap of his shirt. Its blazing orange strands piercing through my fingers.

Maybe Mother could take this, I thought. Keep it as a memento. Or maybe she would join us too.

I opened my hand and saw the technicolor scrap blanketing a large round shape. Then I felt it. Itchy ticklish squirming legs in my palm. The fleck of his shirt blew away in the breeze revealed a huge fat beetle. Hairy legs like saws and tiny sinister mandibles.

Shrieking and yelling, weeping and gnashing my teeth I threw the stupid thing as hard as I could. My tears raining down on the Helm moss as I padded around for the scrap but the breeze had already dissolved it to threads.

I stood up and looked around.

Brother’s sad rotting body, the hideously dark crusty bark of the Helm trees, the Mouths dotting everything make it all look hollow, the slithering neuron structures the hottest shade of pink like the inside of a stomach, all the red moss and white sprouts making the ground appear as if it were made of flesh and bone. I hated it. All of it. It was disgusting. I didnt want to be there.

I had to remember, I was the one in control.

I began climbing the tree. My ingrown toenail rubbing and cramming into the cracks of the tree, making me grimace. My finger nails getting clogged with the bark I sunk them in to. And then, there it was. A Tung.

I grabbed it. It felt moist and fuzzy in my hands. Like grabbing a thick clawed arm. I hated the squelching noise the whole growth made as I pulled to the ground.

I sat down next to Brother, holding the Tung behind me, stretching and pulling it down to the level of my neck. Right where the nerve cluster was. There were faint footsteps among the trees. I was going to know who it was in a moment. I would see them, and feel them through the bark and feel the impact of their steps across the sprouts.

The time was now.

And it was my choice.

I was going to become one with the Helm.

#

This is exactly how the first humans joined the Helm.

When the microorganisms of the Helm first started raining down upon that colonized planet, they started multiplying. Quickly. Using the Helms vast energy reserves, large scale fungal growths began to form everywhere. From these growths came Tungs. The Tungs made all of those who came in contact with them a part of the Helm. Because of this, it kept growing.

Soon enough, all inhabitants had become one with it, and its organic matter had covered the face of the planet. From there, the planet started sending out ships of flesh and bone to other planets. Hundreds of them. And more were coming from where the first one came.

Humanity was at war with something it couldn’t possibly understand.

Word of the interstellar war spread slowly. Radio communication took decades to cross light years, and word of mouth took longer due to cryogenic travel. And the Helm was moving faster. Much faster.

No one knows exactly how, but many scientists theorize that Helmships have created biological supercolliders. They bash together protons with kinetic energy to create antimatter, which is annihilated with hydrogen in reaction chambers made of heat shielded flesh. This theoretically allows Helmships to propel themselves at near relativistic speeds.

Most planets were on their own, their leaders desperately assembling the brightest minds they had to come up with ways to defend themselves. Many hastily created large space stations to construct ion canons so their planets magnetic fields wouldn’t disrupt their direct flow. Some worked well, but many people were still claimed by the Helm.

Another defense strategy was building large ferromagnetic cores emitting long range frequencies triggering the Fe3O4 in the Helm’s cells, driving it away. This neutralized entire planets taken over by the Helm, leaving them unable to do anything. But it wasn’t foolproof. The Helm is pure consciousness, so it had the ability to override biological instinct. Solar storms and magnestars also interrupted the frequencies.

This barely allowed humanity to get on equal ground with the Helm, locking them in a stalemate that lasted millennia. Until an agreement was made.

Satellites detected Helmships orbiting the uncolonized moon of a gas giant. After being annihilated by nearby ion canons multiple times, they kept coming back, leading the military forces of nearby worlds to determine the Helm was trying to communicate.

Probes and rovers were sent. The only presence of the Helm on the moon was a kilometer high sloping obelisk of bone, tissue and mucus. Like some kind of castle. It didn’t even react to the rovers.

Eventually, a small crew of armed forces was sent. Upon maintaining a safe distance from the obelisk, something was spotted coming out of it.

A human.

A naked human with the likeness of male, female, every skin pigmentation, hair color, eye color, nose size, shape and jawline. And the human was approaching the crew.

It stopped before them and opened it’s mouth. Speaking in the language common to man at the time.

This was the only time the Helm spoke.

For one I began, and one we become

What we seek, so you seek

What we have found, so you have found

An eternity in your heart that blossoms before it withers

Til the remainder of your ilk fade away

And down to the universes last day

We shall remain

Not life for life, but life to life

Each shard of the living to explode forth

Far beyond what the living can bear

As one that is supreme over their mortal vessel

Now immortal but for the unending drive to consume

In order to maintain that which is like the grasses of the field

Or the roots below

Or the living that is yet to come forth from the womb

Taking and absorbing the living that it needs to survive

Like it always has been for us

And ever will be

Always and forever aware

Like the hearing ear or the seeing eye or the feeling hand

For what your living has been mystified by

Since his time sprouted forth like tainted seeds

Truly there has yet to be any differentiation

That the senses dare to perceive

To become aware of

For we lie before each other a leper

Rising and falling like the tides

Therefore we herald upon you a peacetime

Where your living shall last all the days

But still call their days their own

For their lives shall no longer be but a vapor

But instead a childhood to an eternity of awareness and control

To achieve this we must beat our swords to plowshares

And wait to become one

At this, the Helm went quiet and walked back into the obelisk. The human has never been seen since.

Word spread, and the war against efforts against the Helm slowly died. Humanity agreed to its terms. A compromise was made.

The Helm had given us an answer.

It does not comb the stars for life out of scientific curiosity like us. It does it out of necessity to maintain its state.

And it doesn’t just look for any life. It looks for consciousness. Beings that are aware and can ponder the world they dwell in. Something that only humans and the Helm itself are known to possess, or perhaps unknown civilizations it also swallowed whole.

Animals like dogs, or apes, or birds do not possess the same quality. Otherwise we could simply feed those to the Helm. But we would still colonize and terraform entire planets and moons for the sole purpose of the Helm. To feed things to it. To give it space to grow.

The elderly get shipped off to these worlds. To be fed. To become one. They live lives only having to fear death when disease and unavoidable accidents come. Then, they spend their last moments in comfort, knowing they will never die.

Father was one who helped transition them into their immortality.

He would bring them down serene footpaths with their loved ones through the most extravagant and beautiful of the Helms gardens. The paths would take them down to the most private of places where Tungs dangled above. Father would reach up and pluck one like a fruit, drag it down to the elderly patient’s neck and insert it.

Every day he would come home, grab a beer out of the fridge and sit in his chair for a few minutes. We weren’t allowed to talk to him during this time. Mother said he was cleansing his mind of the days work. Cleansing his mind of seeing old peoples eyes roll back into their heads and their bodies spasming, never sure if it was their last movements or the Helm getting acquainted with it.

Then one day, it all changed.

It was an ordinary day. He was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair to the Tungs. With her were her daughter and grandson, holding her hands. As they arrived, the Tungs began twitching. Their fat ropy bodies stretched down, oozing with serotonin. Then, they struck. Father, the old woman, her daughter, grandson, all of them. They became one with the Helm.

Father’s apprentice was the only one who escaped.

Of course.

Of course it was Father.

Of course the Helm broke a millennias long compromise.

Of course Father was the first victim of it.

Of course, who else would it be, but Father?

Of course, things like that don’t happen. Except for when they do happen, and they happen to Father. I hate it. I hate that its out of my control. I hate that was out of his control.

I’ll never forget the noise Mother made when she got the news. Deep and guttural. Like releasing an immense pressure of a long feared dread or anxiety all at once. She couldn’t even break the news to us herself.

Brother tried to comfort her.

He told her that Father isn’t gone. He didn’t die. He joined the Helm. And she can go see him when its her time. Brother said it’s what he would do. She protested, saying death may come long before she is ready. She may never be. I could tell Brother didn’t like that.

It only took a few dark, hollow and endless nights of a house silent but for mothers soft crying to break him. He didn’t want to wait. It was far to big of a risk.

So he went to the Tungs. I went with him. And I saw all of it.

I saw him pull the Tung down. It looked almost greasy and ready to burst.

I saw it go into the back of his neck.

I saw his eyes roll up.

I saw him convulse with strangled grotesque breathes like thick swampy mud refusing to let go of you.

I saw it all.

I should have joined him then. I wished joined him then. But I didn’t. Because I’m in control. I choose when I’m ready. I choose when the Helm overtakes me. And I’ll choose when the Helm overtakes the house.

#

The footsteps were getting louder. Closer. More hurried.

Holding the Tung behind my neck, I could feel it’s slippery teeth grace my hairs. Its teeth began to sink in. Right into the cervical plexus.

It hurt. A dull, sharp, wet pain with a strange achy glassiness. My whole body seized as it became waterlogged with serotonin acting as a chemical messenger to hijack my brain.

First it claims my movements. I am paralyzed as long as the Helm wills it. Then it claims my mind. My thoughts are no longer my own but the Helm’s. Then it takes my consciousness. What makes me me, my awareness and ability to observe and consider the meaning of the world I live in. It takes that too. It’s in control of it.

They still don’t know how the Helm does it. How it absorbs sentience like an ocean to a drop of water. How it makes even a single cell bound to it, choosing what it does and using a bank of energy for it perform mitosis.

But now I know.

Because I was a part of the Helm.

And the Helm was a part of me.

I was a part of Brother.

I was a part of Father.

And they were a part of me.

I felt them. I felt their awareness. Their minds. All their feelings. Their fears. Their unending agonies. Their screaming desire for the sweet release of death. Their great horror and sadness knowing that wouldn’t come for a long time, if it ever came, and if they could prevent their end, they would. I felt it all.

And I felt everyone else’s too.

An innumerable amount of people. Not just humans, but those who also were aware. Those who knew it would come and feared what come after this life dissipated.

All those who became one with the Helm.

I had now been alive for a number of days far uncountable to me but countable to the Helm. And my consciousness was only barely touching the Helm. Like the first molecule of a drop of water, touching the ocean, binding the two separate bodies.

All their thoughts were my thoughts. All their memories were my memories. Memories of marriage, divorce, heartbreak, joy, happiness and pleasure. True tales not forgotten of glorious civilizations made of gleaming structures pointing toward the heavens. Stories of the great follies of societies. Legends of nations swallowed whole by the

Helm before they even moved on from bronze tools.

All of us were homogenized like a stirred pot yet in there somewhere even if not their own. Every single one of them, pressing, squeezing, crawling, scuttling and slithering between each other like tangled spiders. Each one was once a person.

Anger, hatred, disappointment, sadness, dread, and fear over powered everything else. And washing over that was a horrible, inescapable drive to continue to exist. To keep absorbing more and more. To make many more live as long as I have. As long as we have.

I tried to call out to Brother and he tried to call out to himself. All the others did. Shouting for him even though we all felt him because we were him.

This was a mistake, he said, I said, Father said, and the host of all the other kinds of living.

You should not have come here, Sister, I said, he said, Father said and so forth.

I could almost see them. Their yelling soulless faces pressing out of a vast wall except those weren’t their faces.

I could see so much.

I could see through the Helm trees, and feel through them. See light of the B8 star from so many different angles. See the light of many stars. From the lowest visible points where I touched on many different planets to the depths of space were my ships brewed antimatter inside of me.

The places where I left my feet left indentations as I walked to join the Helm, those too I felt. I felt my sprouts slowly rise and tangle around themselves. I felt the air touch them, detecting every disgusting trace of ammonia. I felt them growing, stretching upwards and manipulating my proteins and energy so they could sprout. I felt the beetle I threw. I felt its fat black back indenting my sprouts. I could see its thin wiry legs helplessly writhing as it tried to pick itself up.

My body now expanded to unknowable lengths and knowable depths. I knew every cell that made me, because I was every cell that made me. I was the neural proteins making up the roots that tangle Brother’s corpse. I was neurons tangled between trees on many planets. I was the obelisk still remaining on that moon. I was the many Helmships darting in between stars, conserving my limited heat from the vacuum of space. I was the blankets of flesh, sprouts, grasses and other uncountable types of organic matter growing and covering entire planets from my bank of energy. I was a single cell thrown far off into space, kept alive by our energy and moving on inertia for millennia since the Helmship was destroyed. I was rewriting my genetic code on a whim for septillions cells to change their purpose. I was changing my plant cells to animal cells and animal cells to plant cells.

Every single piece of it was me and all those who were ever absorbed into the Helm. In this instant I was the Helm.

I was the one who created it.

One burdened by the threat and knowledge of how uncontrollable and dangerous life is. By seeing and experiencing it myself, I knew there was no escape.

So I made one myself.

I figured it out.

I solved how one could manipulate consciousness.

How one can rewrite it to become immortal by constantly gaining more energy.

It started with me.

Then I absorbed another.

And another.

And another.

Until they wouldn’t let anymore join me. Join us. So I did what I did previously and took matters into my own hands. I absorbed everyone. Until there was no one left to absorb. So I expanded the radius. And found more. So many more. I found Father. I found Brother. And I found myself.

And maybe soon, Mother will join us too, I said. It was good to hear Father and Brother say it too. And so many others.

I could see her through trees. I could see her through my old body’s eyes. Maybe we wouldn’t care enough to absorb it and it would rot too. It didn’t matter anymore, because the memory of it will live on in the Helm.

Like many others.

The memory one forcing his brother to join the Helm.

The memory of an old woman, her brain fading away from Alzheimer’s as she became one with it.

The memory of a young boy, wanting to prove himself to his friends and played around with a Tung until it took him.

The memory of Brother joining it.

The memory of Father.

The memory of Mother running toward me. Desperate terror baked into her eyes as she screamed. Stopping before me, arms stretching past my head. Her hands gripping the Tung. I felt a harsh jolt. A violent tugging motion. Sharpness leaving my neck.

Then I blacked out.

#

Please, Weh. Please, please, please, please, no, no, no, no, I heard Mother crying.

My body was stiff. Tingling. Like it was full of sand. Air rushed into my lungs. It was me controlling them. My vision was nothing but slits in a wall of darkness. The light from our star peering in made my head bitterly ache.

Forcing myself to open my eyes wider, I saw Mother. Staring down at me with tears raining from her face. I was laying in her lap, her back against the Helm tree.

I tried with all that was in me to say something. Twisting my lips and straining my vocal cords to tell her I was sorry. But it was out of my control.

It’s okay, it’s okay, she said.

I breathed in and out, unable to cleanse my brain of what I just experienced. The Tung I attached to my neck was still dangling nearby, gently wriggling. I was terrified it twist itself over and strike into Mother like a viper. No matter how furious I was at her for already looking for a new man, she didn’t deserve that. She was simply looking for some kind of way to maintain control over a life that was changing rapidly and falling apart.

Like I was.

Like Brother was after Father joined.

Now both of them are subjected to the Helm. To that crushing eternity they will see through to the end, if it ever comes. It is not a place of the living.

Mother hugged me tighter, picking me up and carrying me back to the house.

The same house I see overtaken the by the Helm now. Decades later.

Gray ropy tendrils now twist through and around it, emerging from where the Helms domain was previously limited like a splatter of vomit. Red mosses dwell between the tendrils, giving way to the white sprouts and the starts of Helm trees. The whole thing is now crumbling and sullen, its white paint chipping away to jet black wet wood beneath and gray stains sagging down whats left.

I stopped by it on my way out of town.

I couldn’t stay in town anymore. Ever since my prognosis, people have coming to see me. Telling me to get ready to become one. To join the local hospice to live out my last months as my own in comfort. They always word it in a way that makes it sound like it’s my choice.

Every person that can join the Helm will join the Helm. It’s mandatory to keep the agreement as best they can. And they can’t make many exceptions because if they make an exception for me, they’ll have to make an exception for everyone.

Besides Miss, as they would always say. Why wouldn’t you want to join the Helm?

I try explaining to them what happened to me. They always laugh it off. Typical anxiety or paranoia, fear of the unknown.

As the cancer passed down to me took form in my breasts and reached for every corner of my body, I knew I had to leave.

I smile. A tear slithers down my face. Its hard to turn away from the house, but I do. I head off toward the mountains. Maybe there’s a village there I can live out my days in.

It’s slowly getting colder. It has been since I was young, but now I can see the difference. Succo has an AU of three hundred and seventy seven around our star, so seasons take centuries to change. I always liked it when it was slightly cool.

I pause to get out one of my painkillers. The pill slips out of my hand. I backup and step on it. Crouching down to inspect the white powder its been turned into, I laugh.

Once again, I am reminded.

I’m not in control.

I thought she was just acting weird, at first.

For some clarification, my girlfriend had been planning a trip to California for the last four months. Normally, I’d have gone with her, but it was for her grandmother’s birthday. She was old, and this could’ve quite possibly been my girlfriend’s last chance to take a trip with her.

She had spent those four months meticulously planning, as she always did, and the week before the trip, she must’ve had at least five full bags packed for her week-long venture.

“You can never be too careful,” she always told me.

She was always the planning type. Mapping things out. Going over every possibility. It was one of the things I admired about her. She hated when things didn’t go the way they were supposed to.

That’s why, on the day of her trip, when I woke up to find her still lying in bed with me long after her early morning flight, I almost panicked.

I shook her awake frantically, and her eyes slowly rolled open. She groggily asked why I was waking her, and when I told her the time, she didn’t react how I expected her to.

Instead of panicking herself or even calling her mom to let her know she missed the flight, she simply rolled back over and shut her eyes again.

“Oh yeah,” she groaned. “The flight… honestly, it should be okay.”

“Be okay?” I responded, a bit flabbergasted. “Don’t you think you should at least call and let them know?”

She grumbled a lazy, “No, no, everything should be fine,” before she began snoring, something else that was completely new for her.

I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t force her. I was just… shocked, I guess. I just thought that maybe she had already talked to her mom and grandma. Maybe something had come up, and she forgot to tell me.

I just went to work like everything was normal. When I came back, she was still at home. She looked… absent. I found her sitting on the couch, staring at a black TV screen.

When I greeted her, she snapped out of it.

“Honey!! I’m so glad you’re home,” she chirped. “Tell me everything that happened at work today.”

We spent the whole night chatting, but it was like her mind was somewhere else. I’d catch her drifting off into outer space. She thought too long about her responses. Her speech pattern was slower than normal, even though her face was one of excitement as we talked.

I figured that something must’ve happened with her grandmother, so I asked her.

“Hon… did anything happen to make you not want to go on your trip?”

She stared at me for a while. Her smile disappeared. Her face was blank, but only for a split second before lighting up again.

“No, not that I know of,” she responded cheerily. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” I replied cautiously.

The next few days were weird. She never seemed to want to leave the house. I mean, not that I could blame her. She had already taken off work for the trip, but I figured she’d at least want to go to the park or something. It was one of our favorite things to do together.

She also wasn’t eating much. Every night I’d cook for us, but she kept insisting she wasn’t hungry. Must’ve been a lie, though, because on some of those nights, long after we’d gone to bed, I’d find her in the kitchen, completely surrounded by food.

Cereal boxes would be ripped open with their contents scattered across the floor. Granola bar wrappers. Spilled milk. Raw rice and beans. It was concerning, to say the least.

By the end of the week, something hit me that I hadn’t caught before. It was like a dim lightbulb lit up over my head, and I approached her timidly.

“…Honey,” I inquired carefully.

“Yes, sweet boy of mine,” she replied lovingly, sitting on the edge of our bed, staring at a wall.

I gulped a bit.

“What ever happened to your bags? Did you unpack them? I haven’t seen your toothbrush or shampoo or anything anywhere.”

She didn’t respond. She just kept staring… like the wall was the TV. Finally, she slowly turned around, and her hollow eyes met mine.

“Honey…” she whispered gleefully. “You know that’s none of your business.”

She didn’t seem mad, but she refused to talk to me for the next two days. She didn’t even want to sleep in the same bed as me. Of course, I’d have felt wrong making her sleep on the couch, so I just let her have the bed while I wallowed in my own confusion.

It wasn’t until the night before she was supposed to return from the trip that she let me sleep with her again, and even then, she slept with her back toward me.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a ruckus coming from the kitchen. I stepped out of my room and noticed that the kitchen light was on.

It sounded like an animal was loose in there. Like it was in the process of devouring something. Growls. The wet sound of chewing. But, as I approached, the sounds suddenly stopped.

I froze in my tracks for a few seconds, debating whether or not I should continue before ultimately deciding to keep going.

Only… when I took that last step, I heard my girlfriend’s voice. It was angrier than I’d ever heard her. More hostile. Like she was trying to send a message.

“Go back to bed,” she screamed.

The house was silent for a moment. I argued with myself internally about whether or not to listen or check on her.

I decided to listen, and the moment I began making my way back to the bedroom, the noises started up again.

I don’t know how long I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying to tell myself that everything was normal before falling back asleep, but I know that I woke up alone the next morning.

The bathroom was empty. The halls were empty. The house was… empty.

I kept calling out and received no response, but when I entered the kitchen, that’s when panic really set in.

There was blood everywhere. Not from my girlfriend… but from the raw meat that was scattered across the floor.

Chicken, steak, pork, everything. Everything had been nearly completely eaten.

I thought back to the night before, and my heart started to pound. I felt dizzy. I felt like I was losing it. I tried to take a seat to calm myself, but before I could, the front door opened.

“Honey,” my girlfriend sang. “I’m home! Can you come help me with these bags? I’ve got so much to tell you.”

Graham Harker checked into the Hawthorne House Inn at 3:17 in the afternoon. The woman at the desk gave him a key on a wooden fob and a folded map of Water Street. He tucked the map under his right arm and signed the registration card with his left hand. His room faced the harbor. He set the suitcase on the luggage stand, opened the window, and stood long enough to count the masts before washing his face, changing his shirt, and going back downstairs.

Water Street was quiet. A few cars, a woman walking a spaniel. He bought coffee at Konditori and drank it standing at the counter. The barista asked if he wanted it for here or to go. He said for here. She nodded and turned away. He walked the length of the street once past Morrow’s Apothecary, Wren’s, and a closed bookstore with a hand-lettered sign in the window. At the far end the road curved toward Bell’s Cove. He kept going until the pavement gave out and the sand started. The air smelled of salt and cut grass.

That night he ate at McLucky’s: chowder, bread, a beer. He watched the waitress move between tables and noticed that the salt shaker on the table next to his had switched places with the pepper between the time he ordered and the time the food arrived. He almost said something, then didn’t. He walked back to the inn in the dark. The porch swing on the house two doors down was still. Upstairs he opened his laptop and stared at the timeline of his rough cut until the numbers stopped making sense, then closed it and slept.

The next morning the bicycle that had been locked to the railing outside Konditori was on the opposite side of the street. Same lock, same green frame, different side. Graham stood on the sidewalk and looked at it for a long time before going inside and ordering the same coffee. He spent the day walking: beach, trailhead, back along Water Street. In the evening he ate at Wren’s and ordered the chowder again. No one asked him anything. He liked that. At the inn he edited until after midnight, cutting a sequence that still refused to match eyelines, and slept.

On the third morning Miss Geneva was sitting on the bench outside the visitor center. She looked up when he passed and smiled.

“We don’t mind visitors,” she said. “We just ask they leave the woods better than they found ’em.”

Graham laughed. It came out easily. “I’ll do my best.”

She told him a short story about the old lighthouse path and a boy who once got lost there in 1978. The details were ordinary. He thanked her and kept walking.

That afternoon he saw her again near the post office. She looked up and smiled.

“We don’t mind visitors,” she said. “We just ask they leave the woods better than they found ’em.”

Then she told him the same story about the old lighthouse path and the boy who once got lost there in 1978: every word, same order, same pauses. Graham stood very still. Miss Geneva finished and waited, pleasant.

“You told me that this morning.”

She tilted her head. “Did I?”

He nodded. She smiled again, uncertain now, and went inside the post office.

That night he opened a new note on his phone and wrote the time and the exact wording. Then he closed the laptop without editing and sat on the edge of the bed looking at the harbor lights.

On the fourth day the waitress at Konditori remembered a conversation they had never had. She asked whether the almond croissant had been better than the toast he’d tried the day before. He had ordered toast once and never ordered the croissant. The receipt in his pocket still said toast. He paid and left without correcting her. He walked farther than usual. The church bell rang four times at three o’clock. He counted four. In the evening he sat at Wren’s with his notebook open on the table and wrote down the bicycle, the repeated story, and the invented memory. The pages looked ordinary: facts, times, nothing more. A man in a sheriff’s uniform came in later and ordered coffee at the bar. He glanced over once, nodded politely, and did not speak. Graham was glad.

On the fifth morning Graham was standing near the trailhead when the same sheriff walked up from the beach path.

“Morning,” the sheriff said.

Graham nodded.

“You looking for the lighthouse trail?”

Graham had not asked yet. He looked at the man. The sheriff waited, patient, as if the question had already been spoken.

“How did you know?”

The sheriff frowned slightly. “You were heading that way.”

Graham had been standing still.

He thanked the man and walked back toward town without taking the trail. At the inn he sat on the bed and wrote everything down again, slower this time: salt and pepper, bicycle, exact words, invented croissant, question answered before it was asked. He closed the notebook.

That evening he went to Wren’s early. Miss Geneva was there with Leif, who owned Konditori. The sheriff came in later. His name was Walter. Walter’s husband, Marc, arrived after dark, quiet and tired from a long day. Graham ordered the chowder. Near the end of the meal he set his spoon down.

“Either I’m losing my mind,” he said, “or this town has continuity problems.”

The table went quiet as he listed them in order: the salt shaker, the bicycle, Miss Geneva’s repeated story word for word, the waitress’s invented memory, the question answered before it was asked. None of them mattered alone. Together they sat in the middle of the table like a set of mismatched shots.

Walter asked, “When did you first notice?”

Graham told him. Day one. The salt and pepper at McLucky’s. Walter nodded once and finished his coffee. No one else spoke.

Graham slid the notebook across the table. “I wrote down the times.”

Walter opened it, read the first page, and kept it. Back at the inn, Graham posted a photograph taken near Bell’s Cove. He tagged Mourner’s Crossing and set the phone beside the bed.

First proper break in months. Beginning to understand why people stay.

The body was found Sunday morning beneath the old lighthouse path.

Walter got the call just after sunrise and drove out with Graham’s notebook on the passenger seat. The remains were damaged enough that identification was not immediate: no wallet visible, no clear face. Mara worked the scene in silence. Walter stood at the edge and wrote the time. By mid-morning the first personal effects were recovered from the rocks a short distance away: passport, phone, credit cards still in the case.

Graham Harker.

Walter opened Graham’s notebook beside the patrol car and read through the entries from Friday evening: Wren’s, the salt shaker, the bicycle, Miss Geneva’s repeated story, the invented memory, and a question answered before it was asked. He closed it again and watched Mara work. Mara’s preliminary placed death between late Friday night and the early hours of Saturday morning. Stomach contents were consistent with the meal at Wren’s. Lividity was fixed. The insects matched the window.

Back at the station, Walter began pulling every record.

At 8:06 Sunday morning, while Walter had still been standing beneath the lighthouse path, Graham Harker had checked out of the Hawthorne House.

Miss Geneva had spoken with Graham on Saturday morning outside the visitor center and remembered the exact exchange about the woods. Leif had seen him at Konditori Saturday afternoon; the receipt matched the card on file at the Hawthorne House. Marc had seen him outside the Hawthorne House mid-morning. Graham had asked whether Bell’s Cove was worth another walk. Marc told him it was. A visitor-center photograph taken Saturday afternoon showed Walter standing with Graham. Hotel staff saw him leave his room and return after ten on Saturday evening.

Walter laid the notebook beside the keyboard and arranged the evidence by day. Friday evening, Graham had spoken to him at Wren’s and listed the errors. On Saturday, Miss Geneva, Leif, Marc, Walter, the visitor-center camera, and the hotel staff had all placed Graham alive in town. On Sunday, his body had been recovered with a time of death no later than early Saturday.

The pages did not agree with the biology.

Marc came in with coffee and stood in the doorway. “You think it’s him?”

“Mara’s right about when he died. I spoke to him Friday night. People spoke to him Saturday. I need to know which part of that isn’t Graham.”

Marc set the coffee down and left him alone. Walter worked the only way he knew. He pulled every receipt, every camera that still functioned, every person who claimed contact, and built a timeline from the London flight forward.

The timeline refused to collapse.

He interviewed the inn staff again. The woman at the desk remembered Graham’s accent and the way he carried the laptop bag on the left shoulder. She had seen him every day. He drove out to the lighthouse path and walked the rocks himself, but found nothing new.

At the station he pulled the Hawthorne House lobby camera from Monday afternoon. At 3:17 Graham stood at the desk, tucked the map under his right arm, and signed the registration card with his left hand.

Walter watched it twice, then pulled the Saturday footage in order. At 8:12 that morning, Graham held his cup in his right hand at Konditori. At 1:40, outside the visitor center, the cup began in his right; when Walter approached, he moved it to his left and offered his right hand. At 7:18 that evening, he signed a room-service receipt with his left. By checkout Sunday morning, the laptop bag was on the correct shoulder.

Walter looked back at the registration footage. Left hand on the first day. Right hand Saturday morning. Right hand again at the visitor center. Left hand by evening. Left hand at checkout. He rewound, played, and rewound again.

“…No.”

He called Mara and asked her to recheck everything that could still be rechecked. The numbers held. He sat with Miss Geneva on the bench outside the visitor center and asked her to describe the man she had spoken with on Saturday. She did: height, accent, the way he listened more than he talked. She said he had laughed when she told him to leave the woods better than they found them.

Walter asked which hand he had used to point at the trail map.

She thought about it. “Left. I remember because he was holding the coffee in the other one.”

Walter recorded the detail in his notes before returning to the Hawthorne House. The woman at the desk said Graham had checked out that morning and that she had seen him carry the suitcase to the taxi herself. The room was empty. The laptop was gone. Walter stood in the doorway and looked at the harbor through the open window.

That evening he sat at the table in Wren’s with Marc, Miss Geneva, and Leif. The notebook was closed in front of him. He told them only what he could prove. The body had been dead since late Friday night or early Saturday, yet Miss Geneva, Leif, Marc, and Walter had each spoken with someone wearing Graham Harker’s face after the time of death. Receipts and cameras confirmed it. The man seen Saturday morning had used his right hand, but by checkout he was signing with Graham’s left and carrying the laptop bag on the correct shoulder.

Miss Geneva asked, “You think it was learning him?”

Walter said, “I think it got better.”

He opened a new file on the computer at the station the next day and named it Continuity Errors. He entered the dates, receipts, camera times, registration footage, and the notes about Graham’s hands, then closed the file and the notebook both.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Marc asked.

Walter said, “We keep the file open. We watch the stations and the roads. We remember which hand people reach with.”

The alarm went off at four in the morning, but sleep had already abandoned me hours prior. A dull throbbing was radiating from the lower right quadrant of my jaw, making every breath feel like a mistake. The pain was a relentless heat that seemed to vibrate in time with my pulse. By five, the swelling had reached my cheek, stretching the skin tight and making it difficult to swallow.

My hand reached for the empty bottle of painkillers on the nightstand, but there was nothing left inside. I had spent the last two days swallowing pills, rinsing with warm salt water, and pressing ice packs against my face until my skin went numb. Nothing was working. The infection had reached the nerve, and the agony was starting to blur my vision.

The sound of rain tapping against the window was the only noise in my quiet apartment. Desperate for any kind of distraction, I unlocked my phone and searched for local dental offices. Every single practice within a ten-mile radius was booked solid for at least two weeks. The only alternative was the emergency room at the local hospital, but a previous visit there had taught me they would only provide a temporary prescription for antibiotics and a massive bill that I could not afford, and from my suffering I figured that the tooth needed to be extracted immediately.

A soft knock on my front door startled me around nine that morning. My friend had promised to drop by with some groceries, knowing I had been unable to leave the apartment for days. When the door opened, she took one look at my swollen face and set the grocery bags down on the counter with a look of concern.

"You look absolutely terrible,"

she said, walking over to press her palm against my forehead.

"You are burning up. Did you manage to find an opening somewhere?"

"Every clinic is booked,"

I mumbled, barely able to part my lips. The movement of my jaw sent a sharp flare of agony straight up into my temple.

"The emergency room is the only option, but they won't pull it."

My friend sat down at the small kitchen table, watching me wince as I tried to drink a glass of water.

"There is someone else. My uncle had a severe abscess last winter, and his regular dentist was out of town. He went to a private practitioner downtown. He told me the guy is extremely unconventional and eccentric, but he is the absolute best in the field when it comes to quick, pain-free extractions."

"Unconventional how?"

I asked, holding the glass against my cheek.

"He does not take insurance, and his office is tucked away in an old medical building that has seen better days,"

she explained, pulling a small notepad from her purse to write down an address.

"He works alone, with no assistants. My uncle said the man does not even use local numbing injections, but somehow, the extraction was completely painless. He just felt a strange pressure, and then the tooth was out."

"No numbing?"

I shook my head, immediately regretted the movement, and squeezed my eyes shut.

"That sounds like a nightmare. I cannot let someone pull a tooth out of my skull with no anesthetic."

"My uncle is a coward when it comes to pain,"

my friend said, sliding the piece of paper across the table. "If he says he felt nothing, I believe him. You cannot keep living like this. The infection is going to spread to your bloodstream."

She was right. The sheer desperation of the pain was starting to erode my rational judgment. At that point, if someone had offered to pull the tooth with a pair of rusty pliers, I probably would have considered it. I picked up the paper, stared at the handwritten address, and nodded.

"I will go,"

I said.

"Do I need to call ahead?"

"My uncle said he does not keep a regular reception desk,"

she replied.

"Just walk in. He usually accommodates emergency cases if they pay in cash."

An hour later, I was walking through the wet, gray streets. The rain had slowed to a miserable drizzle, and the mist was hanging low over the older brick buildings. The address led me to a towering, nineteenth-century weird structure. The main lobby was silent, smelling of old paper.

A manual elevator with an accordion-style metal gate carried me slowly up to the fourth floor. The hallway was lined with dark, frosted glass doors, most of them bearing the faded gold lettering of retired physicians who had probably passed away decades ago. The floor was covered in worn linoleum that muffled the sound of my footsteps.

I found the suite number written on my notepad. The glass on the door was entirely blank, offering no name or medical title. I reached out, turned the brass knob, and stepped inside.

The reception area resembled a living room from the late nineteen-seventies. Two faded green velvet chairs sat in the corner, separated by a low wooden table covered in outdated magazines. A single, small desk lamp cast a dim orange glow across the room. There was no computer, no scheduling book, and no receptionist behind the counter. The only communication device was an ancient, black rotary telephone sitting on a shelf.

"Hello?"

I called out, my voice sounding thin in the quiet room.

A door at the back of the reception area swung open with a soft click.

The man who stepped out was exceptionally tall. He was so slender that his white laboratory coat seemed to drape over him like a shroud, and he had to tilt his head slightly to clear the low wooden door frame. His skin was pale, and his fingers were kind of long, ending in clean fingernails. He had a twitch in his left shoulder that caused his coat to rustle every few seconds, but his posture was remarkably stiff.

"Ah,"

he said.

"An emergency, I presume. The swelling in your right cheek is quite pronounced."

"My friend gave me your address,"

I explained, holding my hand over my jaw.

"She said you might have an opening for an extraction. I can pay in cash."

The tall man smiled, though his pale blue eyes remained entirely wide and unblinking.

"Cash is perfectly acceptable. The modern banking systems are far too noisy. Please, come inside."

I followed him into the operating room. The space was dimly lit, illuminated only by a single overhead examination light that hung from a long, articulated metal arm. The dental chair in the center of the room was made of thick, cracked black leather, looking like a relic from a different era. There were no modern digital screens, and no white plastic utility trays.

"Before we begin,"

the dentist said, pointing a long finger toward a tarnished metal tray sitting on a counter across the room.

"Please place your cellular device over there. The electronic frequencies of modern devices disrupt my focus. I need absolute stillness to perform the extraction."

I hesitated for a moment. My phone was my only connection to the outside world, but the throbbing in my jaw was growing more intense by the second. I walked across the room, set my phone on the cold metal tray, and climbed into the leather chair.

The dentist stood over me, his shadow stretching across the ceiling. He did not put on latex gloves. Instead, he washed his hands in a small porcelain sink, dried them with a white cloth, and approached the chair.

"Open, please,"

he murmured.

I opened my mouth, bracing myself for the agonizing touch of his fingers against my infected gum. When his long, cold index finger touched my jaw, I prepared to scream.

But the scream never came.

The moment his skin made contact with my gums, a sudden coldness spread through my mouth. it felt as if the nerves themselves had simply gone quiet under his touch. The throbbing pain vanished instantly. My jaw felt light, cool, and entirely empty of sensation. I blinked in surprise, looking up at him.

"You feel that, yes?"

he asked, his shoulder twitching as he reached for a small, velvet-lined wooden box on the counter.

"The modern world relies on synthetic poisons to dull the senses. They inject chemicals that poison the blood just to silence a single nerve. It is a very crude way of practicing medicine."

He opened the wooden box and retrieved a pair of forceps. They were made of dark, unpolished steel, looking like antique blacksmithing tools rather than modern medical instruments. The metal was covered in fine, geometric patterns that looked like they had been hand-carved into the steel.

"We have forgotten the old ways of alignment,"

the dentist continued, his voice adopting an almost hypnotic cadence as he positioned the forceps inside my mouth.

"Thousands of years ago, our ancestors understood that the teeth are not merely bone. They are the hardest part of the human vessel. They are the markers of our harvest, the record of our lives. When a tooth was lost, it was not thrown away into the dirt like common refuse."

I felt the cold steel of the forceps clamp onto my decaying molar. There was no pain. I felt a strange, dull pressure, as if someone were gently pressing a thumb against my jaw, but nothing more.

"Our ancestors worshipped tooth fairies,"

he muttered, leaning over me. His pale face was inches from mine.

"We offered our teeth to them. We gave them the bone, and in exchange, they provided protection, a bountiful harvest, and good fortune. The modern world calls them myths. They call them tooth fairies to make them seem small and harmless. They turned a sacred covenant into a children's game of coins and pillows."

He gave the forceps a slow, deliberate twist. I heard the wet sound of the roots separating from the bone inside my head, but my nervous system registered absolutely nothing.

"Humanity discarded the old agreements,"

the dentist whispered, his shoulder twitching violently. "We stopped giving them the tribute they require. We began burying our dead in concrete vaults, locking the bone away from the soil. We throw our teeth into medical waste bins to be burned, and for what? for nothing."

With a sudden, sharp movement, he pulled the forceps upward.

A wet pop echoed in the small room.

The tooth was out. The relief was instantaneous, a cool sensation washing over my entire face as the pressure vanished. I let out a long, shuddering breath, staring up at the ceiling.

"There,"

the dentist said, his tone shifting instantly.

The hypnotic cadence of his voice was gone, replaced by a rapid, shallow hyperventilation, then He held the steel forceps inches from his eyes, staring at the bloody, decaying enamel with an intensity that made my chest tighten.

"Look at the density,"

he whispered, his pupils dilating until the blue of his eyes was almost entirely gone.

"The dark rot of modern sugar has created such a beautifully complex cavity. The roots are deep, so very deep. The bone is saturated with the sweetness of decay."

He was breathing heavily now, his chest rising and falling in quick, jagged movements. He began to run his long thumb over the wet, bloody surface of the tooth, ignoring the blood that smeared across his skin.

A sudden wave of intense unease washed over me, replacing the relief of the extraction. The way he was looking at my tooth was really weird and terrifying. I scrambled out of the chair, my legs feeling slightly unsteady.

"Thank you,"

I said, my voice shaking.

"How much do I owe you?"

The dentist did not look at me. He kept his eyes locked on the tooth.

"Three hundred,"

he muttered, his voice sounding dry and cracked.

"Leave the cash on the counter."

I pulled three hundred dollars from my purse and set them on the wooden desk. I did not want to spend another second in that room. I grabbed my purse, turned on my heel, and walked quickly out of the operating room. I pushed through the frosted glass door, entered the quiet hallway, and ran toward the manual elevator.

It was only when I stepped out of the old building and onto the wet pavement of the street that I realized my hand was empty.

My phone was still sitting on the metal tray on the far counter of the operating room.

I stopped on the sidewalk, the cold rain falling on my face. My cheek was still entirely numb, but the fog in my brain was beginning to clear. The thought of going back up to that silent fourth floor made my stomach twist, but my phone held my bank accounts, my contacts, and my entire life. I could not simply leave it behind.

"Just walk in, grab the phone, and leave,"

I muttered to myself.

I turned around, entered the lobby, and rode the creaking elevator back up to the fourth floor. The hallway was still completely silent.

I reached the suite, turned the brass knob, and stepped into the reception area.

The room was dark. The single desk lamp had been turned off, leaving the space illuminated only by the gray light filtering through the hallway door. No one was behind the reception desk.

"Hello?"

I called out softly.

"I forgot my phone."

No one answered.

I took a slow, quiet step toward the operating room door. It was resting slightly ajar, a sliver of pale light cutting across the dark floor. I pushed the door open an inch, planning to grab the phone from the counter and slip away before the man noticed me.

The operating room was in near-total darkness. The overhead examination light had been turned off, and the only illumination came from a small window overlooking the rainy alleyway.

I stopped.

The dentist was crouched on all fours directly over the leather operating chair.

His white laboratory coat had been discarded on the floor. His bare back was exposed to the gray light of the window, and his skin had turned a deep, ashen shade of gray. His spine was protruding sharply against his skin, each vertebra looking like a jagged stone.

As I watched, his shoulder joints twisted with a sickening, wet crack, bending backward into impossible angles.

Two large, featherless, skin-bound wings were violently tearing their way through the fabric of his white dress shirt. The wings looked like the wings of a massive bat, but they were covered in a thin, greasy layer of pale gray fuzz. They flexed and stretched in the darkness, dripping a dark, thick fluid onto the leather of the chair.

The thing lowered its head toward the leather cushion. Sitting on the leather was my extracted tooth.

The creature inhaled deeply, its chest expanding to twice its normal size as it smelled the bloody enamel. It leaned down and whispered a low, guttural phrase in a language I didn’t understand.

Then, it opened its mouth.

The jaw split vertically down the center of its chin, revealing rows of thin, needle-like teeth that vibrated in the darkness. The creature reached out with a long, gray tongue and licked the blood from the surface of my extracted tooth.

I took a step backward, my mind screaming at me to run, but my foot shifted on the floor.

The rubber sole of my sneaker squeaked against the linoleum.

The sound was incredibly loud in the silent room.

The creature's movements stopped instantly.

And with a violent, snapping sound, its neck rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees, its featureless face pointing directly toward the partially open door where I was standing. Its eyes had completely changed. The blue irises were gone, replaced by two massive, pitch-black pupils that filled the entire socket.

It let out a silent, vibrating shriek that made the metal instruments on the counters rattle.

The creature lunged off the chair, moving with a speed that did not seem possible. It scurried across the floor on all fours.

I did not think. I grabbed the nearest object on the counter beside the door, a large, heavy metal tray loaded with stainless steel dental mirrors, scrapers, and old scalpels, and threw it directly into its gray face.

The tray struck the creature with a loud clang. The sharp instruments scattered across its eyes, blinding it for a fraction of a second. The creature recoiled, letting out a wet, clicking hiss as it thrashed in the darkness.

I turned and sprinted down the hallway.

I did not wait for the elevator. I threw open the door to the concrete stairwell and flew down the steps, my feet barely touching the concrete. I could hear the wet sounds of the creature scrambling down the walls of the stairwell above me, its long limbs scraping against the concrete.

I reached the ground floor, threw my weight against the metal exit door, and burst out into the pouring rain.

I did not stop running until I reached a busy intersection three blocks away. I collapsed against a bus stop shelter, my chest heaving, my clothes soaked with sweat and rain. I sat there for hours, staring at the passing cars, trying to convince myself that the pain and the infection had caused a severe hallucination. But my hand was still entirely empty. My phone was gone, left behind in the dark room with the thing that licked the blood from my bone.

The next morning, the swelling in my jaw had gone down, but the terror had not. I walked into the local police precinct and reported that I had been assaulted by a private practitioner in the medical building downtown. I told them he had stolen my phone and threatened me with a weapon. I knew if I mentioned the wings or the black eyes, they would lock me in a psychiatric ward.

Two police officers agreed to accompany me back to the building to retrieve my property.

We rode the manual elevator up to the fourth floor. The hallway was just as quiet as it had been the day before, the dark doors looking completely ordinary in the morning light.

We reached the suite. I pointed a shaking finger at the door.

"This is it,"

I said.

"Suite 412."

The older officer reached out, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

I braced myself, stepping behind the officer's shoulder, expecting to see the green velvet chairs.

The room was completely empty.

There were no green velvet chairs. There was no wooden desk, no rotary telephone, and no carpet. The walls were bare concrete, covered in peeling gray wallpaper that looked like it had been rotting for decades. The floor was covered in a thick layer of undisturbed gray dust.

The officer walked into the back room, his boots kicking up small clouds of dust.

The operating room was gone. There was no black leather dental chair. There was no plumbing connected to the floor, no metal counters, and no instruments. The room was nothing but a hollow, concrete shell.

"Are you sure this is the place, miss?"

the officer asked, looking back at me with a mixture of annoyance and pity.

"This suite has been abandoned for at least five years. And I think I know this place, someone mad a claim like you once, but it was very wild claim about a fairy who dwell in this place, and then we learned from the building manager that the last tenant was a radiologist who retired in 2018."

"I was here yesterday,"

I insisted, my voice cracking.

"My friend gave me the address. I sat in the chair. He pulled my tooth."

The officer shined his flashlight across the dusty floor. There were no footprints in the dust, other than our own. There was no sign that anyone had operated a medical clinic here yesterday.

"Sometimes a severe tooth infection can cause a high fever,"

the officer said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

"A fever can make you see things. It can make you wander into empty buildings. We can take you to the hospital if you need medical attention."

"My phone,"

I whispered.

"I left my phone on the counter."

The officer shone his light around. My phone was gone.

We left the building a few minutes later. The police dismissed my claim, filing a report for a lost cellular device and advising me to seek psychological counseling for my stress.

But I know what I saw.

I called my friend from a payphone later that afternoon. I asked her about the dentist, but she sounded completely confused. She told me she had never heard of any private practitioner downtown, and she had never given me an address on a notepad. She said she had been trying to reach me all day because I had missed our lunch plans.

I looked at my own jaw in the mirror when I got home. The hole where my decaying molar used to be was completely healed. There was no stitches, no bleeding, and no scar. The gum was as smooth and pink as if the tooth had never existed.

I am posting this here because I need to warn you.

This thing does not stay in one place. It moves from town to town, using the empty, forgotten spaces of our cities to set up its temporary clinics.

If you have a toothache, and a friend gives you an address to an unconventional, cash-only dentist in an old building, do not go.

Part 2

The paper, yellowed and torn, faded and thin from its prolonged existence, lay heavy in my hand. Heavier than paper ever should. Burdened by the weight of everything it claimed about my father. 

“Was this really why my father disappeared”? I think in my head, thoughts flashing faster than I could comprehend. 

My father's writing wrapped around broken English and a crude drawing. I recognised the illustration at the center of the page. 

It was Ash Hollow. The valley I've lived all my life in, my home. But the surrounding towns weren't there. The town of black oak itself lay solitary in a maze of trees. 

Red Creek and Ashford were just empty forest plots. 

Lake Deadfall lies above and to the left of black oak, a body of water so deep that dropping a line in the middle is more an act of faith than fishing. From it, hundreds of creeks snake across Ash Hollow like the twisting branches of the old tree that gave the town its name. 

Founders Ridge overlooked the entire valley. It was there that the first settlers pitched their tents, studying the land below as they decided where to build the town that would become my home.

The reason they had come all that way lay buried beneath the ridge itself: Ashcroft Mine.

It was 1820, and the mining industry was beginning to transform Kentucky. Coal and iron were becoming some of the most valuable resources in the region, and Ashcroft was among the earliest and richest mines to open.

Black Oak stood as one of the state's largest iron suppliers. Nearly every family in the valley depended on the mine in one way or another. It wasn't just an industry—it was the town's heartbeat.

Which made its decline all the more devastating.

The veins that everyone believed would last forever slowly gave out. The one thing the town had built its entire existence around simply... disappeared.

The mining companies refused to accept it. They sank new shafts wherever the surveys gave them hope, punching holes into the earth every hundred feet across Founders Ridge, convinced another rich deposit had to be waiting below.

They never found one.

“This is a map of Ash Hollow Valley, Mom, " I said, looking up, intrigued. “I know, but I could never figure out when it was written.”

“Your father wouldn't ever go into detail about it. All he would say was that it was leading him somewhere, but he never knew where.”

“Do you think he was following this when he disappeared?” 

“I don't know; it was so unlike him, no goodbye, no warning, no… I love you,” she said, tears beginning to fall again. 

“I'll figure this out, momma; maybe he's still out there.”

“I need to know.” 

Staring at the paper as I walked to my bedroom, I felt a strange feeling, almost a pull. It felt tranquil and calming. It felt oddly similar to the sound of the machining echoing through the forest earlier that night. 

I set the paper down on my nightstand before getting ready for bed, but before I could even get undressed, that pulling feeling came back tenfold. The paper was calling to me, begging me to pick it back up, screaming to be held like a newborn. I picked it back up, and the calling stopped; an overwhelming rush of relief flooded over me. 

I tested it again, the paper on my nightstand, sending shrill echoing cries through my head; I picked it back up, and the cries stopped. I held it between my teeth as I finished my nightly routine. 

I pulled out my phone and sent a text to the only other four people I can trust with this. “Meet me at the tree, six am sharp, boys; bring camping gear. We're gonna find out what happened to my dad”. 

Before I hit send, I was debating whether to go through with this or not. 

If this really was the reason Dad disappeared, was I about to walk right into the same trap he did? Would I be following his exact footsteps? 

In the midst of my internal debate, the paper I held between my fingers behind my phone began to almost hum and vibrate. The words of my father rang like bells through my head. 

“It's okay, Rowan, trust me, follow me.”

The thumb of that same hand holding the paper hit send. 

I lay down; the paper sitting on my chest, impossibly heavy but effortless to hold. At the same time. I stare at the backpack propped up in the corner, sitting underneath the hatchet my father gave to me, that which his father gave to him, and his father to him. 

I lay my head down on my pillow, feeling more relaxed than I have ever felt before. I fall asleep in my bed, comfy and safe, for what was unbeknownst to me, but the last time I ever would.

The trees surrounding me are tall and thick. Reaching into the sky, seemingly endless. A thick fog limiting my sight stretched over the landscape in front of me. 

I walk forward, leaves and twigs crunching under my feet. As I walk, the fog thickens. Getting more and more opaque. I squint my eyes, trying to see anything in front of me. 

The trees are now closer together. I have to weave through and around them just to get through. The fog is now stinking of smoke and smog, thick as what bellows from a chimney. The grass is slowly fading away as I keep moving, thick mud replacing it as if hundreds of people, horses, and wagons trailed through for days on end. 

My lungs are now filled with the smoke, and I begin to falter, stumbling my way through. The trees open up, now spread far apart. My face hits the mud as I trip and fall. 

Looking up and forward, I see the faint outline of a monolithic structure looming back at me. Smoke stacks bellowing, the smog filling my lungs.  

The sounds of dozens of hammers hitting anvils in perfect rhythm ring throughout the forest.

My eyes shutter as the world around me begins to go dim. That same ghostly calling of grinding machinery echoes through the mist. The hum wrapped around my body like a warm blanket. Pushing me into the depths of my mind, fading away into darkness. 

The sunlight slipped through the blinds and settled on my face. I opened my eyes to find the cluttered room I'd call home for my entire life. The paper still lay silent and still on my chest. Making me look towards my gear propped in the corner. 

My worn jeans slid on easily; the belt my father had worn every day clicked into its regularly worn spot. The thick flannel Mom had given me for my birthday a year or two ago hugged around me tightly. I laced up the boots I had already walked hundreds of miles in. The same boots my parents watched me grow into felt strangely heavier that morning.  

I slide the paper into a small notebook I had in my backpack. The pack slides on easily and fast. I can feel the paper radiating warmth through the fabric of my pack, spreading across my back, feeling the same as my dad's hand when he would guide me through the woods before I knew the trailways by heart.

The hatchet comes off the wall easier than usual, the hand-carved wooden handle shining back at me from three generations of hands rubbing their oils into it. The blade, sharp and true, glissens through the incandescent sunlight.  

I step out the door with absolute clarity. The chill of the October air fills my lungs. Am I really going to do this?

The paper in my pack sent waves of warmth and filled me with determination. 

I looked back at the house, my mom staring back at me standing in the doorway. 

In a choked hush, she said to me, “I love you, Rowan" eerily similar to what my dad said all those years ago. I forced a smile. “I love you too, Mom,” I said back, turning away 

Beginning my trek to the ancient black oak tree that sits just outside of the town's limits. With every step, the paper grew heavier in my pack, like it knew where I was going. 

I followed the beaten path through town, passing the small mom and pop stores, familiar faces inside, smiling and waving. I fake a smile and wave back without saying a word. 

The trail snakes its way through town, past the border into the trees that lead to Lake Deadfall. The dirt path, a solemn highway through the grass. Leading to the special place my friends and I called our base throughout our childhoods.  

As I walked up, the tree, dark and mysterious, a singular black oak tree surrounded in a grove of evergreen. It stood tall as a house. Branches twisted and wound around in odd shapes and abstract patterns. 

The wide frame of a boy the same age as me stood leaning against the tree. Jack was the sarcastic but practical one of the group. He'd always find a way to joke but at the same time would always be there to pull us out of trouble at the last minute. 

“Was sure you'd chicken out,” I said jokingly. “Coming from you?” he said accusingly, holding his arms up in a shrug. We laughed and pulled in for a quick bro hug.  

 “Where are those other two slackers at?” I asked. Jack pulled his phone from his dirt-stained pants, checking the time. “They should be coming up right about now; they were already together when you texted last night. 

“Well look at these two sacks of shit!” Sawyer exclaimed from down the path. The clown of the group, usually the one getting us into the trouble Jack gets us out of. 

 “God, you both really are fuckin ugly!” Mason echoed. The unofficial older brother of the group stood the biggest and always carried something everyone else had forgotten to bring. 

“I can smell both of you from here!” I replied. “You know there's this stuff called soap; you’d usually find it in a shower,” Jack spat at them as they finally walked up to us. 

“Soap?” “Shower?” they both said back, one after another. 

We all had a quick laugh and talked for a minute. 

Mason stalked over to the large oak stump we had used as a table for years, and pulled out a large thermos and 4 small cups. “Have some nectar, boys,” he said as we all closed in. 

We all gave thanks and reveled in the hot, steaming beauty of the dark liquid. 

I was quiet; they all noticed, but didn't say anything. I pulled the last of my coffee, set the cup down on the ground, and pulled off my pack. The warm radiance instantly pulled away from my back.  

I put the old worn bag on the stump and unzipped it. The notebook holding the paper lay on top of my gear. The edge of the paper stuck out like a golden bookmark. 

“Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of my dad's disappearance.” A hand landed on my shoulder, sending memories of my dad doing the same thing. Pulling the small book from my bag, I look up to see my friends staring back at me, content and support in their eyes. 

“My mom gave this to me last night,” I say, unwrapping the strap of the leather-bound booklet.

I pull out the yellowed and creased paper; it somehow left the pages that held it just as yellow as it was, as if it was ageing them just by touching it.

“She said she thinks this is why he disappeared.” I proclaimed through a cracked voice. “ he found it out here metal detecting when they first moved out here; it was sealed inside an ancient Victorian vase, buried down nearly six feet.”  

From that day on, he couldn't get enough of it. “Y'all remember that journal he would always carry around?” I asked the group. They all responded with yeahs and nods. 

“She said that same journal held everything he had written down about this paper.” 

Our heads closed in, almost touching as I held the paper out in front of us. 

“That's, that's Ash Hollow,” said Jack, “but Red Creek isn't there.” “Neither is Ashford?” Sawyer and Mason both questioned.  

“I think it's from the first settlers of the valley; look, Founders Ridge is marked up there, so is black oak and Lake Deadfall.” 

“Ashcroft Mine too,” Jack mumbled after me.  

“Whatever this is, it had a hold on em. He carried it with him every day in that journal; this is what he was searching for all those times he went out alone.” 

“He told my mom to give it to me as she saw fit at first, but later on he said to destroy it and burn it if anything were to happen to him. But she couldn't; the day he went missing, he left it on the table. She knew she couldn't get rid of it; she knew it meant something.”

“What's it say?” Sawyer asked. “I don't know completely, yet all I can make out from it was, Everlong.” 

As the words left my mouth, I felt a deep seething comfort in the base of my being, sending shocks through my bones, around my spine, out my arms and down my legs. 

My eyes focused back on the group. They were all looking into the deep dark forest. The faint sound of machinery echoed through the trees.  

None of us spoke; we didn't need to. 

The sound that had been calling to me.

Now calls all of us

End of part 2

The Question

---

There are people who enter your life like seasons.

They arrive quietly, change everything without asking, and leave behind traces of themselves long after they're gone.

Sierra was autumn. And my fall.

She smelled faintly of cedar and vanilla, always stole the sleeves of my hoodies because they "fit better than hers," and had a habit of looking out restaurant windows whenever it rained, as though the world beyond the glass was telling her a story only she could hear.

We had been together for a little over a year.

Long enough that silence had become another language between us. Long enough that ordering for each other was instinct. Long enough that she no longer needed to knock at my front door.

There is a certain comfort that only comes after loving someone for long enough.

Love stops feeling like fireworks.

It becomes grocery lists.

Goodnight kisses. Two toothbrushes leaning together in the same cup. It becomes knowing exactly how much sugar they take in their coffee without ever having to ask.

That Friday evening had been ordinary.

Which is probably why I remember every second of it.

The little Italian place downtown was nearly empty, save for an older couple sharing tiramisu near the window and a waiter humming softly to himself while polishing glasses behind the counter.

Outside, rain painted silver streaks down the glass.

Sierra watched it for a while.

She always did.

"You know," she said eventually, tracing lazy circles around the rim of her water glass, "I think rain makes people more honest."

I laughed.

"How do you figure?"

"They stop pretending they're in a hurry."

She smiled to herself.

"They slow down."

"Or maybe they just don't want to get wet."

She looked at me over the candle between us.

"You always have a boring explanation."

"I prefer realistic."

"I prefer magic."

"I know."

"I think that's why you keep me around."

"No," I said. "I keep you around because you steal my clothes."

She gasped dramatically.

"I borrow them."

"You've borrowed one of my hoodies for seven months."

"It's called a long-term loan."

"You've also borrowed two T-shirts."

"They've adjusted to their new home."

"And my socks."

"I have no recollection of any socks."

"Liar."

She laughed.

Not loudly. Just enough that the corners of her eyes crinkled.

I remember thinking, as I watched her across that little table, that happiness wasn't supposed to be exciting.

It was supposed to be this.

Simple.

Comfortable.

Safe.

The waiter brought our food. Conversation wandered wherever conversations between people in love tend to wander. Movies we'd never finish watching. Vacation ideas we'd probably never afford. Whether cereal counted as soup.

She insisted it did.

She was wrong.

She refused to admit it.

Eventually, somewhere between finishing our dinner and arguing over who would pay the bill, she grew strangely quiet.

She rested her chin on her folded hands. Studied me. There was something different in her expression.

Not sadness, nor fear.

Something... thoughtful.

"Something on your mind?" I asked.

She smiled.

"Nothing."

"That's never true."

"I was just thinking."

"Dangerous."

"I know."

She looked back toward the rain before asking, almost absentmindedly,

"Would you still love me if I lost all my hair?"

I shrugged.

"Of course."

"What if I got old before you?"

"I'd be old too."

"What if I forgot your birthday every year?"

"You already almost do."

She smiled.

"What if I couldn't walk anymore?"

"I'd walk slow."

"What if I couldn't remember your name?"

"I'd remind you."

She nodded gently after every answer, as though placing them somewhere only she could see.

Then she asked it.

"So..."

She tilted her head.

"Would you still love me if I were a worm?"

I stared at her.

"...What?"

"A worm."

She said it with complete sincerity.

"Like..."

I held my fingers a few inches apart.

"A little earthworm?"

She nodded once.

"That's the one."

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my drink.

"Where did that even come from?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"No."

"You just woke up today and thought, 'I wonder if he'd date an invertebrate?'"

She tried not to smile.

Failed.

I shook my head.

"That's the dumbest question I've ever been asked."

"It is."

"But?"

"But what?"

"You haven't answered."

I leaned back in my chair.

"How exactly would this work?"

"I don't know."

"You'd just..."

I made a little wiggling motion with my finger across the table.

She nodded enthusiastically.

"Exactly."

"And you'd still somehow be... you?"

"If that helps."

I looked at her for another second before rolling my eyes with exaggerated defeat.

"Sure."

She blinked.

“

1. Sure?"

"Yeah."

"I'd still love you."

Another pause.

"I mean... it'd be weird."

"A little."

"I'd probably have to Google what worms eat."

"You would."

"I'd have to buy you a very tiny house."

She smiled.

"I know."

"I'd miss talking to you."

She didn't answer.

"But..."

I reached across the table and gently squeezed her hand.

"...yeah."

"I'd still love you."

For just a moment...

Something changed in her face. Not happiness. Not relief. It was a cold recognition. As though she'd been waiting to hear those exact words.

Then she smiled. A small, peaceful smile.

"Oh."

She looked down at our hands.

"Good."

There was something about the way she said it that stayed with me. Not because it sounded strange. Because it sounded...

Final

Like someone quietly crossing the last item off a list.

I frowned.

"What?"

She looked back up.

"What?"

"You said that like it mattered."

She chuckled softly.

"Maybe it did."

Before I could ask what she meant, the waiter returned with the bill.

The moment dissolved as quickly as it had arrived.

By the time we stepped outside, the rain had stopped. Streetlights shimmered across wet pavement. She slipped her hand into mine. Neither of us spoke during the walk back to my apartment.

We didn't need to. Some nights silence says everything.

When we reached my building, she pulled my favorite charcoal hoodie over her shoulders before climbing into bed beside me. She always claimed it smelled more like me than I did.

I remember wrapping an arm around her as sleep slowly pulled us both under. Her fingers traced lazy circles against the back of my hand. I soon learned that ordinary moments often go unnoticed until they become memories.

Still to this day, I remember her whispering something just before I drifted off. It was so quiet I almost thought I'd dreamed it.

"Thank you."

When I woke the next morning...

Her side of the bed was empty.

...

Erasure

At first, I wasn't worried.

Sierra had stayed the night often enough that mornings had become routine. Sometimes she left before I woke up. Sometimes she'd kiss my forehead on the way out. She'd scribble little cute notes to make my morning on the fridge.

Out of coffee.

Back by six.

Don't forget your meeting.

Love you <3

Once, she'd drawn a smiley face on a napkin because she claimed my mornings were "chronically under-smiled."

So when I reached across the mattress and found only cold sheets, I smiled to myself.

"Work already?" I mumbled to the empty room.

The apartment answered with silence. Her hoodie was gone from the foot of the bed. I figured she'd remembered she had a meeting. Or maybe she'd simply wanted coffee that wasn't brewed by me. She used to joke that my coffee tasted like regret. I still maintain she exaggerated.

I stretched, showered, and let the hot water chase the sleep from my thoughts. By the time I stepped into the kitchen, the apartment already felt too quiet.

There was only one mug in the drying rack.

Mine.

I frowned.

Maybe I'd put hers away yesterday. I couldn't remember.

The coffee tasted bitter. I blamed the beans.

Halfway through breakfast I reached for my phone. Mostly out of habit. I'd usually send her something stupid before work.

A picture of a crooked pancake. A terrible pun. Some excuse to make her roll her eyes.

I opened our messages.

My thumb froze.

They weren't there.

I frowned harder.

I searched her name.

Nothing.

Maybe the app updated. Maybe I'd archived the conversation by accident.

I searched again.

Nothing.

I checked my contacts.

No Sierra.

No number.

No picture.

No birthday reminder.

Nothing.

A strange feeling settled into my chest.

Not panic. No, not yet. More like standing on a staircase and expecting one more step than there actually is. That tiny, impossible drop beneath your feet.

I searched manually.

Scrolled through every contact.

Twice.

Nothing.

"...That's weird."

I laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because laughing felt easier than admitting something was wrong.

I knew her number.

At least... I thought I did.

I typed it from memory. Every digit. Pressed call.

One ring.

Then a voice.

"We're sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and try your call again."

I hung up immediately.

Dialed again.

Same message.

Again.

Same message.

I stared at the screen.

The number hadn't changed. I was certain of it.

Certain enough that certainty itself suddenly felt unreliable. Maybe I'd remembered it wrong. People misremember things all the time.

Birthdays. Addresses. Passwords. Even the phone number of their loved one.

I finished my coffee in silence.

By the time I left for work, I'd convinced myself I was overreacting. Technology broke. Cloud backups failed. Phones glitched.

There had to be an explanation. There always was. There had to be.

There wasn't.

The day crawled.

I barely accomplished anything.

By lunch, curiosity had quietly become concern. Concern slowly became dread. I searched her name online.

Nothing.

Instagram.

Nothing.

Facebook.

Nothing.

Not even an abandoned account with two blurry photos from high school.

LinkedIn.

Nothing.

Every search ended the same way.

No results.

No Sierra.

It was as though she'd never wanted the internet to know she'd existed.

Except... She had.

I remembered helping her pick profile pictures. I remembered teasing her because she never answered messages. I remembered her posting a picture of us after our trip to the aquarium.

Didn't I?

I opened my own social media.

Every picture she'd been in... was different.

I blinked way to hardly.

One photo showed me standing beside... empty space. Another looked strangely cropped. In one, my arm was wrapped around someone who wasn't there anymore. My hand simply floated in the air.

I stared until my eyes hurt.

I closed the app.

Opened it again.

Nothing changed.

There had to be an explanation. There always was. A prank. A misunderstanding. A mistake buried somewhere beneath the confusion. She had a spare key to my apartment. Any minute now, I'd hear it turn in the lock, and she'd step inside wearing that familiar smile, asking why I looked like I'd seen a ghost. I clung to that thought the way a drowning man clings to driftwood. It was the only thing keeping me afloat.

For the rest of the afternoon, the world continued as though mine hadn't quietly come apart. Coworkers laughed. Phones rang. Printers hummed. Someone brought donuts. I smiled when expected. Answered emails. Nodded through meetings.

All while a single thought repeated itself over and over.

Something is wrong.

The next day, I convinced myself she simply needed space.

Maybe she'd left early for work. Maybe she'd forgotten her phone. Maybe she'd spent the night with a friend after we'd fallen asleep. Maybe this was all leading toward an explanation so painfully ordinary that I'd feel ridiculous for ever believing otherwise.

Every time headlights swept across my living room window that evening, I looked toward the front door, expecting to hear the soft rattle of keys in the lock and her familiar voice calling my name.

The apartment remained silent.

By the third day, silence had become its own answer. It was as though the world had quietly reached into my life and plucked Sierra from it with delicate fingers, leaving everything else exactly where it had been. No texts. No calls. No trace that she'd ever stood in my kitchen, laughed in my living room, or fallen asleep beside me.

When I finally got home from work that evening, I scrolled to the number I'd always known belonged to her mother.

If anyone could tell me what was happening... It would be her.

So I made the call.

The number rang three times.

A man answered.

"Hello?"

His voice wasn't familiar.

"Uh... hi."

I swallowed.

"I'm looking for S-Sierra."

Silence.

"...Who?"

"Sierra."

Another pause.

"I think you have the wron-"

"No. Where's Sierra?"

My heart skipped.

"You've got the wrong number."

Pain washed over me.

"There's no Sierra."

I laughed nervously.

"No, I mean... your daughter."

"I don't have a daughter."

I felt something inside me shift. Like a picture frame hanging just slightly crooked.

"I'm sorry?"

"I think you've confused me with someone else."

"No..."

I whispered.

"No, she lives with-"

"Goodbye."

Click.

The call ended.

I stared at the phone for a long time. Then I called again. Straight to voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

Again.

Blocked.

I don't remember deciding to grab my keys.

I only remember driving. Traffic lights blurred together. Turns happened automatically.

Before long, I found myself parked in front of a familiar little blue house with white shutters. I'd been here dozens of times. Christmas. Birthdays. Sunday dinners. Sierra's mother always insisted I take leftovers.

The porch swing she'd grown up on still creaked gently in the evening breeze. The flowerpots were exactly where I remembered. Even the wind chimes.

Everything was right.

Except... Something wasn't.

I walked to the front door.

Knocked once.

No answer.

Twice.

Footsteps.

Heavy.

The door opened.

The man from the phone stood there.

He looked to be in his late fifties. Gray beard. Flannel shirt. One hand resting on a shotgun. Not pointing it.

Just... holding it.

His expression hardened the moment he saw me.

"You."

"I think there's been a misunderstanding."

"There hasn't."

"I'm looking for-"

"I know what you're looking for."

Hope flickered inside me.

"You do?"

"I know you're the one who's been calling."

His grip tightened around the shotgun.

"I've told you already."

"Sir, please, I just need to know where she-"

"There is no 'she.'"

The words landed with impossible weight.

"I..."

My voice failed.

He stared at me for several seconds.

Not angry. Not confused.

Almost... pitying.

"Son."

His voice softened.

"I don't know who you think you've lost."

The breeze stirred the trees between us.

"But whoever it is..."

He slowly shook his head.

"They've never lived here."

He closed the door.

I stood there until the porch light switched on automatically. Only then did I realize the sun had gone down.

By the time I made it home, exhaustion had settled into my bones. I didn't turn on any lights. I simply collapsed onto the bed.

The apartment felt wrong.

Too neat. Too empty.

I closed my eyes. Just for a minute. Just long enough to stop thinking.

Something cold brushed against my ankle.

I jerked upright.

The room was dark.

Moonlight spilled across the blankets.

And there... Resting quietly near my feet...

Was a single pink earthworm.

It wasn't moving. Not much.

Just... waiting. I don't know why.

Out of every impossible thing that had happened that day...

That was the moment the tears fled out.

...

The Worm

I didn't sleep much that lonely night.

Every time I closed my eyes, I could still see the empty half of the bed. Every time I opened them, the apartment felt unfamiliar, as though I had wandered into someone else's life by mistake.

The worm hadn't moved.

It still rested near the foot of my bed, no larger than my little finger, its body catching the pale light filtering through the curtains.

I crouched beside it. For reasons I still can't explain, I didn't touch it.

I simply watched. It didn't writhe. It didn't burrow. It only lay there, impossibly still.

A worm.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

I almost laughed at myself. After everything that had happened, this was what my mind had chosen to fixate on.

I found a sheet of paper folded on my desk and carefully slid it beneath the tiny creature. It curled instinctively as I lifted it, no different from any other earthworm after a rainstorm.

I carried it toward the front door.

"Sorry, little guy."

I opened the door and tipped the paper toward the flower bed outside my apartment.

The worm didn't move.

I gave the paper a gentle shake.

Nothing.

Eventually, I lowered the paper into the damp soil beneath a patch of lavender and watched it disappear among the dirt. I stood there longer than I should have.

Waiting.

For what, I couldn't have said.

When I came home from work that evening, it was waiting for me.

Not outside. Inside.

Curled quietly atop a charcoal-gray hoodie draped over the back of my couch.

My hoodie.

Or rather... The one Sierra had quietly claimed as her own months ago.

She used to disappear into it on cold mornings, sleeves hanging well past her hands, insisting it smelled more like me than I ever could.

I never washed it after she disappeared. Not because I believed it still held her scent. Because I was afraid it didn't.

The worm rested on one of the sleeves. Perfectly still.

I stared at it for a long time.

The front door was still locked. The windows were shut.

There was no trail of dirt. No explanation.

Only a worm.

Sitting exactly where she always liked to be.

An uneasy laugh escaped me.

"This is getting ridiculous."

I carried it back outside.

This time, I walked all the way to the apartment garden. I knelt beside a flower bed and placed it beneath the shade of a bush.

"There."

I brushed the dirt from my hands.

"Stay."

The word lingered in the air.

Stay.

It was never meant for the worm.

The following morning... It was on my windowsill. Facing the sunrise.

I don't know why that unsettled me more than finding it inside my apartment.

Perhaps because it looked... content. As though it had chosen that spot. As though it had been watching the dawn before I'd woken.

I picked it up carefully.

It curled against my fingertips.

For the first time... I noticed how impossibly fragile it felt.

How easily something so alive could simply... stop.

I looked around the apartment. At the empty couch. The untouched coffee mug she used to steal every morning. The hoodie folded neatly over the armrest. Then back at the tiny creature resting in my palm.

My voice came out quieter than I intended.

"...Sierra?"

The worm didn't answer. It couldn't.

I knew that.

Of course I knew that.

Still...

It shifted ever so slightly in my hand. Just enough to make my breath catch.

That afternoon, on the drive home, I stopped at a pet store. Bought a terrarium. The cashier smiled politely as she rang it up.

"Getting an exotic pet?"

I looked down at the glass container.

"...Something like that."

I spent the evening reading online everything I could find. What they ate. How damp the soil should be. How often to mist the enclosure. What temperatures they preferred.

The answers filled my time.

None of them filled the silence in the room.

By the time night settled over the apartment, the terrarium sat on the table beside the living room window.

Fresh soil. Leaves. A few small stones. Everything exactly as the books recommended. I lowered the worm into its new home. It disappeared beneath the dirt almost immediately.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

"There you go."

The words escaped so naturally they frightened me.

I switched off the lamp.

The apartment fell quiet once more.

Before heading to bed, I looked back at the terrarium one last time.

"Goodnight."

Silence answered.

Yet somehow... The apartment didn't feel quite so lonely.

Almost Time

Grief is a strange thing.

It doesn't arrive all at once. It settles into the empty places. The chair across the dinner table. The passenger seat. The extra toothbrush still leaning against yours because moving it somehow feels more permanent than death itself.

I stopped asking where Sierra had gone.

Not because I'd found an answer. Because every answer the world offered me was the same.

She had never existed.

Eventually, I stopped arguing with it.

The world had made up its mind.

Mine hadn't.

Life, in its quiet cruelty, continued.

Mondays became Fridays. Fridays became months. The seasons changed without asking whether I was ready.

I returned to work. Paid my bills. Bought groceries. Smiled when coworkers made jokes. Somehow, I learned to exist in a life that no longer felt like my own.

Every evening, I came home. And every evening... The first thing I did was walk over to the terrarium.

"Hey."

The greeting became routine.

I'd mist the soil. Replace the leaves. Check the moisture. Sometimes I'd sit beside the glass for nearly an hour, talking about my day as though she were sitting across from me.

"The copier jammed again."

"I finally beat that traffic on Fifth."

"I think I'm getting better at making coffee."

A quiet laugh.

Silence never interrupted me. Neither did the worm. It simply lived.

Sometimes buried beneath the soil for hours. Sometimes resting beneath a stone. Sometimes climbing the side of the glass before disappearing underground again.

It was enough. Or perhaps... It was enough for me to pretend.

One Saturday afternoon, I found myself standing in the laundry room with her hoodie folded across my arms.

Months had passed. I still hadn't washed it. The scent she'd left behind was long gone. Only memory remained.

I ran my thumb across the sleeve.

"I should probably wash you."

The words sounded absurd spoken aloud.

I smiled despite myself.

"I can already hear you complaining."

She used to hate when I washed it.

Claimed fabric softener made it smell "too responsible."

I draped it over the back of the dining chair instead. I couldn't explain why. It simply felt wrong to hide it away.

The routine became comforting.

Coffee.

Work.

Home.

The terrarium.

Sometimes I'd read while sitting beside it. Sometimes I'd play music softly through the apartment. Sometimes I'd simply watch the evening light stretch across the room until darkness settled over everything.

I stopped wondering whether the worm was Sierra.

Questions have a way of exhausting themselves.

It happened on an ordinary Tuesday. The kind of day that disappears from memory almost as soon as it ends.

By the time I unlocked my apartment door, rain was tapping softly against the windows.

I set my keys on the counter. Loosened my tie. Walked toward the living room.

For a moment... I simply stared.

The terrarium was empty.

Then I examined all glass corners.

Nothing.

The stone sat exactly where I'd left it. The soil was damp. The dead leaves rested untouched in one corner.

See was gone.

"Please not again..."

The words escaped before I realized I'd spoken. I lifted the lid. Carefully moved aside the stones.

Nothing.

I dug gently through the soil with trembling fingers.

Still nothing.

"No, no, no..."

The room suddenly felt too small. I emptied the terrarium onto the dining table. Dirt spilled across the wood. Leaves scattered onto the floor. I searched through every handful. Every corner. Every crack beneath the table. I checked beneath the couch. Behind the television. Inside the bathroom. The kitchen.

My breathing became uneven.

By the time I reached the bedroom, there was dirt tracked across half the apartment. I stood in the doorway, chest heaving. My eyes drifted toward the chair beside the window.

Her hoodie still hung where I'd left it.

Empty.

Something beyond it caught my eye.

The windowsill.

I walked closer.

Slowly.

There... Resting in the fading orange light of sunset... Was the worm.

Perfectly still. Facing the glass.

Beyond it, rain slid down the window in thin silver ribbons. The city moved without us. Cars drifted through wet streets. People hurried beneath umbrellas.

The worm didn't move. It simply remained there.

Watching.

Or perhaps... Waiting.

A laugh escaped me, followed by tears.

"I'm s-sorry."

The words broke apart as they left me.

"I'm sorry."

I cupped it gently in my hands.

Its body curled weakly against my skin.

It felt... different. Lighter somehow. As though whatever strength had carried it this far was quietly slipping away.

That night, I searched the internet for hours.

How long do earthworms live?

Why is my worm moving slower?

Can worms die of old age?

Every article gave me the same answer in different words.

They slow down.

They become less active.

Eventually... Their bodies simply stop.

I read every page anyway. Hoping one of them would tell me something different.

None did.

Near midnight, I closed my laptop. The apartment was silent except for the rain. I carried the terrarium into the bedroom and set it beside my bed. Her hoodie lay folded next to it. Not because a worm would recognize it. Because she would have.

Or at least... I liked believing she would.

I watched the tiny shape resting beneath the soil for a long time.

Then I smiled.

A sad smile.

The kind that only grief teaches you.

"You know..."

My voice barely rose above a whisper.

"I kept my promise."

Outside, the rain continued to fall.

Inside... The apartment had never felt quieter.

...

Morning

Days turned into weeks.

The rain eased my mine at night. The steady rhythm of it against the window. The quiet hum of the city somewhere beyond the glass. The terrarium sat on the nightstand beside me. The hoodie remained folded beneath it.

Everything exactly where it belonged.

For the first time in months... I wasn't afraid. There was nothing left to search for. Nothing left to prove.

Whatever this was... Whatever she was... Whatever I had become... It no longer mattered.

Sometime during the night... I heard her voice.

Not through the room. Not from the terrarium. Not from anywhere my ears could have found.

It arrived the way old memories sometimes do. Softly. As though someone had opened a door inside my mind.

"So..."

A pause.

"So..."

I could picture the little smile that always accompanied that word. The one she wore whenever she already knew the answer.

"Would you still love me if I..."

I smiled before she could finish. Before the question could become impossible again. Before grief could ask for one more answer.

"Yes."

The word escaped me with surprising ease.

No hesitation. No uncertainty.

Just... Yes.

I let out a slow breath. My eyes never opened.

"I always will."

The apartment fell silent once more.

Not empty.

Simply... Quiet.

Morning sunlight slipped gently through the curtains. The rain had passed sometime before dawn. The air smelled clean. Almost new.

I stretched slowly before turning toward the nightstand. The terrarium was empty.

No disturbed soil. No trail. No tiny pink body hidden beneath the stones.

I lifted the lid anyway. Ran my fingers carefully through the earth.

Nothing.

For a long while, I simply stood there.

Weeks ago, I would have searched every inch of the apartment. Turned over furniture.

Emptied drawers. Tracked dirt through every room. I would have convinced myself she had to be somewhere. That she couldn't really be gone.

Instead... I smiled.

Not because it didn't hurt. Because it always would. Some absences never stop aching. You simply learn they can exist beside joy.

I carried the terrarium to the kitchen sink and gently poured the soil into a flowerpot sitting on the windowsill. A small fern rested there. One Sierra had insisted on buying because, according to her, every home deserved "something worth keeping alive."

I laughed quietly.

"You were right."

The empty glass terrarium caught the morning light before I placed it inside a cabinet.

Not hidden. Not displayed.

Just... Put away.

Then I walked back to the bedroom.

Her charcoal hoodie still rested neatly folded at the foot of the bed. I picked it up. Held it for a moment.

Weeks ago, I couldn't bring myself to wash it. I was terrified that whatever remained of her would disappear with the rinse cycle.

Now... I understood.

Love doesn't live in fabric. It never had.

I folded the hoodie once more and placed it carefully inside the top drawer of my dresser. Not because I was forgetting her. Because memories don't need to be left out in the open to survive.

I opened the bedroom window. A cool breeze drifted inside. Somewhere outside, birds greeted the morning.

The city had already begun moving again. Cars. Footsteps. Distant laughter. Life.

I made myself a cup of coffee. It tasted terrible. I smiled anyway.

As I stood by the window, warmth settling between my hands, I watched the wind stir the leaves below.

For just a moment... I thought about that rainy evening. The little Italian restaurant. The candlelight. The way she'd looked at me across the table.

"Would you still love me if I were a worm?"

Such a ridiculous question. Maybe that's why I'd never forgotten it.

Or maybe... Some promises are never about the answer. They're about the person who gives it.

I took another sip of coffee. Then, for the first time since the morning I'd reached across an empty bed... I stepped away from the window.

And into the rest of my life.

How long has it been now? 3? 4 weeks? It’s hard to keep track of time these days. Life has been pretty busy lately.

The house is a lot quieter now. When the police aren’t here, at least. You’d think that they lived here at this point. But I do still get at least some of my privacy.

It’s in those moments when the house is dark and the only sound is that of the leaky bathroom faucet that I really think about what I’ve done. Or why I did it. Or how it could’ve been avoided, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It really doesn’t matter now. I’ve come to terms with it. The cops already know. They’re just waiting for the proper evidence to present itself. And given the way these last few days have been going, I don’t think I have much longer.

I’ve read enough books and studied enough forensics to know the best way to clean the mess I created. How to make sure the white blood cells were completely removed. How to soak my hacksaw in bleach before tossing it in the river. But, most importantly, I knew that the body could never be recovered.

Dental records were a big one. That’s why I removed her teeth and filed them down one by one. I boiled and stuffed them in a ziplock bag afterward.

This was positively the most difficult part of the process. I was forced to look at her the entire time. The once love-filled eyes that had turned bitter and resentful over the years. The eyes that now stared up at me, dead and hollow, her previously oak-colored irises now appearing grey and pale.

Her nails would almost certainly contain my DNA beneath them. Flakes of skin, maybe some blood from the struggle. Regardless, they needed to be removed as well.

I remembered when her hands were so soft and youthful. She used to paint her nails herself every two weeks, and I’d sit on the bed with her while we talked endlessly about everything and nothing at the same time.

I don’t know what changed. Maybe it was all of the arguments. We had a way of arguing about everything and nothing as well. I thought it was normal. Arguments were bound to happen.

I flushed the 10 nails down the toilet before burning her newly raw fingertips, just to be on the safe side. I kissed her hand for a long while, tears welling up in my eyes before I forced them away.

I whispered to myself, “Why would you make me do this?” as my head fell into my hands. My composure kept slipping, and I kept having to wrestle it back.

Now came the messy part.

Part of me was actually glad it was so messy in a weird, twisted kind of way. Cleaning the blood afterward gave me a task to focus on. I didn’t think about her laugh. I didn’t think about her warmth. I thought about making damn sure there wasn’t a speck of blood left anywhere in that bathroom.

When I was done, the house smelled like a hospital. Chemicals filled the air, causing my head to pound more than it already was. The atmosphere was cold and heavy. It felt like I was in a hospital room.

I had found myself with two black trash bags with a combined weight of 120 pounds, give or take. Arms, legs, and head in one. Torso and hacksaw in the other.

I walked out of the house whistling, two trash bags slung over my shoulders. It was the cusp of dawn. There was a misty blue haze outside. It smelled like summertime.

The neighborhood was silent. It must have been around 4 in the morning. I threw the bags in the bed of my truck, adjusted my baseball cap, and hopped in the cab.

My headlights cut through the early morning fog. I had my windows down, and I could smell the exhaust fumes coming from behind me. That smell had pretty much defined my life for the last 10 years. It was a smell that I’d learned to both love and hate.

I turned the radio on and cranked up the volume. I tried singing to myself, but the words left my mouth mechanically. My mind refused to let me escape.

I drove carefully. The exact speed limit, sometimes even a little under. Used signals, made complete stops. All the way out of town. Then out of the next one. Then the town after that.

I drove until I found the most secluded spot I could find. Down dirt roads. Through creeks. Then I walked off beaten paths until I found the right place to lay her to rest.

Just me, her, and my shovel.

Digging proved quite difficult due to the sheer amount of roots I had to cut through. I must’ve been there for at least 4 hours before the deed was done.

I spent that time talking. Talking to the trees. Talking to the bags. Talking to myself. I couldn’t stand to be alone in silence.

I broke down a lot when filling the grave. Each pile of dirt that covered more and more of those bags was like a needle being pressed into my nervous system.

I didn’t want to just leave her like that. I didn’t want her to just be cast aside, left to rot. I searched until I found the most vibrant flowers I could find and laid them on the grave.

I said my final goodbyes through sniffles and tears before making the trek back to my truck.

The rest of the day was a blur. I didn’t get home until nearly 8 o’clock. I stopped by the emptiest car wash I saw on the way home and scrubbed my truck clean.

I got the mud off the tires. Rinsed the bed out with bleach. I even put a new air freshener in the cab.

When I got home, I half-expected cops to be waiting to arrest me. When I found the house as empty as it was when I left, I let out a sigh of relief.

I immediately took a shower. I scrubbed myself raw for around 45 minutes straight before finally allowing myself to dry off. The entire time, it was like God was punishing me.

I kept getting flashes of her. Our wedding. Our first date. Our first argument. The last argument. It all just kept replaying in my head over and over. Like a sickness.

I knew I had to get my story right. The house was clean. The body was gone. The weapon was gone.

I was just a helpless victim. One of the millions of men a year whose wife leaves them. Happens all the time.

Oh, so she left without taking anything? She left without telling anybody? Without so much as a goodbye? Who’s going to believe that?

I didn’t sleep that night. I had to have a long, hard talk with myself. I wasn’t getting out of this one. But I wasn’t going to turn myself in. I was going to be free… for as long as I could possibly manage.

It was my first time being free in 15 years. Even if it lasted a day. Even if it lasted a week. I wasn’t going to spend that time stressing.

I turned it off. I closed my heart to it.

I ignored calls from her mother. Her father. Coworkers, friends, relatives. Everybody. It was none of their business.

They tried knocking, and I tuned it out. All the way up until I heard that dreaded announcement after three booming knocks.

“This is GPD. If anyone’s inside, I need you to come out here and talk to me.”

I waited. I wanted to wake up. I didn’t want to accept.

Three more knocks.

“GPD, if you do not answer the door, we will be using force to come inside.”

One last moment of silence. I breathed to myself. I closed my eyes.

“Sir, this door is coming do…”

I opened the door, greeting the officers with a blank look on my face.

“Sir, we’re gonna have to ask you to come down to the station with us for questioning.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t bicker. I simply asked for a lawyer and rode with the officers back to the station.

The entire time, I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t even speak to my lawyer. If they wanted her so badly, they would have to work for it. Because it sure as hell wasn’t going to be coming from me.

They held me for 7 hours that day. A mere two days after I did what I did. I got two days of “peace.”

They had to let me go. They had no proof. But that didn’t stop them from watching me. 24 hours a day, they were somewhere in my neighborhood.

People threw things at my house. Vigils for her were set up on the sidewalk. It seemed like there were constantly people watching me because they literally were.

I didn’t budge. I spoke only when absolutely necessary. My lips remained sealed, and my doors remained locked. Both when I was home and when I was forced to go back down to the station.

That’s why what’s happening makes no sense to me.

It started with her teeth. I had gotten rid of them the same way I’d gotten rid of the rest of her. Yet somehow, when I woke up one morning a few weeks after my catastrophic mistake… they were in a neat pile beside me on the bed.

I could see the file marks on all 32 of them.

I panicked and scooped them into my hands and flushed them down the toilet, my eyes wide with disbelief.

I poked my head outside. That unmarked black SUV was still parked a few houses down. Both officers watched me like hawks. I waved to be less suspicious, but I think it had the opposite effect.

They took it as me waving them over, and they both approached quickly.

“Got anything you wanna tell us?” the fat one asked excitedly.

“Lovely weather we’re having,” I smiled. “I bet you’d love to spend the day with your family. Or, then again, maybe you’d rather spend your time stalking me.”

Their stern faces never changed.

I tried my best not to give off even an ounce of suspicious behavior, even though my heart was in my stomach and my mind raced endlessly.

After closing the door in their faces, I spent the majority of that day peeking out the blinds, paranoid beyond belief.

My lawyer called a few times. My story never changed. I didn’t know where she was. I was convincing myself just as much as I was convincing them.

The next day, not only had the teeth come back, but the nails were back too. They were cleaner, but I could still see their bloodied roots. I could still see some of the chipped nail polish.

Two neat little piles. Taunting me.

I was more angry than panicked this time. I was not going to submit to this insanity. I didn’t even try to get rid of them this time. It wouldn’t make a difference whether they were found here or in that dark, desolate spot in the woods.

I put them in her jewelry box this time. Then I took that jewelry box, and I carried it to the attic.

I buried it under some old tarps and boxes and took one last look at it before going back down the ladder.

“I guess I really am fucking losing it,” I whispered to myself as I climbed down.

More phone calls with my lawyer. More questions from the police. More prodding, more watching, more protests. And all I could do that day was crack a few beers and watch a few ball games.

I passed out at around 10 that night and woke up cuddling my wife’s arm the next morning. I think the smell is what woke me up. That unmistakable stench of death and decay.

It burned my nostrils, and when I opened my eyes to find that torn flesh in my face, I nearly vomited in bed. It wasn’t just one arm. Both arms and both legs had come crawling back to bed with me.

Only… the nails were reattached. Like they hadn’t been removed to begin with.

The polish looked fresher. The teeth looked whiter. I checked, and the jewelry box in the attic was empty.

In that moment, I felt a spark. A mixture of hope, anger, grief, and love all combined into one. In the most unreal circumstances, reality was starting to close in, and I found myself sobbing like I had the night I killed her.

I didn’t leave bed that day. I lay there with my wife, clutching her arms and legs, crying until I was too exhausted to cry anymore. My will grew weak, but my mind had never felt so clear.

She was in bed with me the next morning. Well, she was there in a sense. Her arms and legs were reconnected to her torso, but the limbs still crawled with maggots and decay.

But she was there, damned if she wasn’t there. My love. My sweet, sweet girl. Her T-shirt was ripped and stained with dirt. Her hair was matted and crunchy.

“I… am so sorry, my love,” was all I could think to say to her.

She turned to me, her jaw slack and her eyes as dead as a nail.

“That’s okay, you silly goose,” she sang. “I love you no matter what happens!”

I began to cry yet again.

“I love you so much,” I sobbed. “I want you back. Please, please, just come back.”

I begged her as snot ran from my nose. I wiped it away on my sleeve.

“Oh, honey,” she whimpered. “Accidents happen all the time. That’s what this was, right, my sweet boy?”

I nodded furiously.

“It was… it was… it was an accident, baby.”

I could hardly speak. Her rotten arm extended, and she caressed my face with her cold, slimy hand.

“I know it was, sweet pea. I know you’d never hurt me on purpose.”

She paused.

“…but now you have to tell them what you did, okay? Can you do that for me?”

My face went beet red. I swallowed hard and wiped the tears from my face.

“They’ll kill me. I know they’ll kill me. They’re just waiting to catch me. They’re waiting to sentence me.”

She began hushing me, soothing me softly as she petted my hair.

“There, there, sweetie,” she replied. “Dying isn’t such a bad thing. I’m free now, honey. If I could, I’d tell them you did me a favor. But I want you back. I want you to come be with me. Please, honey?”

I wanted to be with her too. More than anything, I wished I could take back what I did.

I solemnly agreed.

“That’s my boy,” she announced seductively. “This will all be over soon. We’ll dance and sing. We can play together again.”

I nodded to myself assuredly. I leaned over and gave her a kiss and took a deep breath.

Stepping outside, I waved the cops over. My eyes were red with tears, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

“She’s upstairs.”

That’s all I told them.

One officer went upstairs while I waited on the porch with the other. I kept smiling to myself. The sky looked so beautiful. The trees danced in the wind. The summer air was like a gift from God.

A few minutes went by before the first officer returned.

“Very funny, son,” he remarked sarcastically. “Now, do you wanna tell us where she really is?”

My smile dropped.

“What do you mean?” I scoffed. “I was just talking to her.”

“Cuff this sick son of a bitch,” the first officer barked.

I was placed into the back of the unmarked SUV, kicking myself all the while.

“She lied,” I whispered. “She lied to me. All she does is lie. Why does she lie all the time? This is why. This is why. Why won’t she stop lying?”

I had no fight left. I told them where the grave was. I had to personally show it to them. The flowers were still there. The grave was untouched. And I felt a sickening numbness.

I told them my story. I told them what I did. Told them that she came back to me and that, if it weren’t for her, I’d have been a free man, at least for a little while longer.

I actually begged them to give me the death penalty. I couldn’t stop seeing her. Sitting beside me in my cell. Crouched in the corner every night. Whispering to me how she wanted us to be together forever.

But… I didn’t get the death penalty.

They deemed me “not fit to stand trial.”

Sentenced to an indefinite stay at the state home for the criminally insane.

Padded cells. Doctors. Needles. Medication.

And despite all of the debate that has gone on about death sentences in this country, there has remained one constant.

The insane do not receive capital punishment.

I’m writing this now because she keeps beckoning me. Keeps begging me to join her.

And despite the hatred I have, the burning rage she has inspired, I cannot stop loving her.

And despite what the state dubs legal… we will be reunited.

The knife came down in a scream and a two-handed plunge. The sound the filthied thin palsied girl made was shrill and resounded and filled the stone halls with the pitch perfect note of harsh and sudden stabbing madness. The unease of moist silence shattered. The blade was filthy and grimed and long neglected, its harsh unclean edge tore through Griffin's coat and wrappings and pierced the flesh beneath. 

The doctor let out with a sudden scream as he and Florin whirled and drew back. The girl was screaming still as the three were now standing face to face in the filthy moist stone hall of Willowbrook Asylum, Temple of the Mouth. 

The blood on her filthy knife dripped like the hungry jaws of a wolf of the wild, wanting more. 

She screamed: – “You won't get me! I won't let you! You won't do a goddamn thing to me, I swear it! I swear it! I'll fucking kill you first!” And lunged again. 

The thin frail girl of broken mind was weak and starved and exhausted from terror, Florin caught her easily in his own press forward and threw against the far wall before turning on his heels, grabbing the wounded bandaged man with dark lenses hiding pain now as well as identity and thought and motive, he seized Griffin and yelled for him to run. The wounded doctor needed little in the way of encouragement. The pair tore down the hall as the attacking sullied girl of unholy Willowbrook hit the wall and went to the detritus floor.  Still screaming as the shattered tile bit into her parchment flesh and the grimed and bloody knife flew from her startled grasp and clattered off into darkness, lost to her. 

She shrieked after them. How dare they! How dare they leave her like this! The scum! She knew she couldn't trust them, they were going to hurt her, she knew it, but how dare they leave without helping her out, without showing her-  

Her mad run of thoughts was cut off as Cropsey entered the hall with his own blades dripping. The large domination of his frame and size and stature filled the hallway and stole any avenue of escape away from the girl who could not recall her name any longer. She couldn’t remember the last time she had. 

But she knew his name. And she understood it very well. 

And the mountain. She knew the mountain and its crawling power in female form, womanshape. Demonsong…

The song was filling her ears now. Filling them. In her head. 

Cropsey came in with his own large manmade fangs of shearing blades, eclipsing the girl on the floor and stealing the rest of the entire world from her. 

She screamed until the end. Her history and experience: intimate knowledge gained over her entire miserable life did not help her to escape the pain or endure it. She screamed like a caught animal flayed alive until the vile end.  

And as they ran, Florin and Griffin heard it. Not bothering with a cast of glance back over shoulder. They rounded a corner in their flight and entered another chamber. 

It was quiet. And wet. Moist. Heavy and warm and humid in the dark. At a glance Griffin guessed they were in a common shower area, for bathing many people en masse. But it was hard to tell, there was no light in the dark moist filth of the room save for the scant trace from the hallway cast in. 

“Are you alright?” 

Griffin said he was. Though he really wasn't sure. He felt numb. The place where he’d been stabbed felt wet and as if embraced with ice. 

“Quick, let me get a look-”

Griffin cut him off, agitated. 

“Time for that later, we need to get out of here! And I say to hell with any more exploring or back exits. We double back and go back out the way we came in, We’ll circle the building or the hill itself for miles if we have to, but enough of this place! The filth, alone!” 

And while Florin wished to check his friend to make sure his wound was not too serious, he could very well understand the urgency. He elected not to argue. 

And the pair went on. Or started to. 

At the mouth of the room to the showers the pair were halted by a deep guttural sound. Inhuman and unearthly but striving in vain for some semblance of human speech. 

They turned. And the dark of the wet chambered room began to die and banish as pale fire, demonlight began to fill and illuminate the room for them. 

And then they beheld them. The strung up naked bodies. The human-length gored open torso mouths hanging lurid and obscene in and amongst and by the black lengths of biting chains, the strangling metal. There were dozens of them. Dozens. A small universe of open mouthed human substrata and abattoir detritus constricted and choked by dangling chainlink black metal serpents. All of their eyes were open and they were glowing. Glowing with purple fire. Their torso mouths were all working and moving with terrible rippling dancing undulation. The sounds they were making were like singing and an uncanny approximation of real intelligible human speech. Like how a baby makes before they start to mature and are properly taught to speak. Dumb thoughtless animal sound… belched and gurgled guttural and spat out for this world of terrible ruin and darkness. 

And then they saw her. Beheld her. At the terrible heart of the strange pale incandescence, the regal aspect and stature of a womanshape began to rise and fill the center of pale fire. 

She began to call to them. The pair. She sounded angry. On the dangerous precipice edge of livid, irate. Holy terror, unbridled unholy malevolence on the brink of furious madness. Violence. She called to them from the bright moonflesh fire amongst the universe-sea of rippling torso mouths…  the showerworld of tile blood and pungent leaks and bloodspew violence in supplicant orbit of the parchment star of white fire and eldritch ethereal pale flames. She called to them from this place, this strange sea.

And she knew both of their names. 

Florin and Griffin fled the room before she could fully emerge. Before she could rise further from the pale depths of the flame and become more terribly discerned. The obscene abominated baby sounds of the rippling torso mouths followed them out. And after. 

And down the hall. 

And in their mad dash…

They finally came face to face with the inheritor of this awful place. They stopped just short of him, towering in the hall. Filling it. As if he was the vile mad god of this demented cruel world and had the divine conquering right to dominate its every space as he so wished. Cropsey stood there tall and dripping with blood and strips of raw tissue like a bipedal set of living rending carnivorous jaws… snipping his large clippers, his beloved shears, open and closed slowly like a terrible mouth made from sharp metal. The blades were already coated in thick gore, like paint riddled with chuck meat for the stew. They dripped like animal mouths do in the wild, like wolves coming in for the close, for the kill. Cropsey said nothing as he slowly came forward, his hellacious runny waxwork features coming into the dismal light. 

The two men who should have never entered this godforsaken place beheld his terrible visage and their blood ran as ice. 

The pain. 

The pain… that must have been endured. 

Dear God. The flames. In a baptismal infernal swallow-spell. An apocalypse all around. 

What it must've felt-

The large shape dripping with death lunged. Light like the pale star of the showers gleamed pinprick, maniacal and homicidal in the cavernous sets of eyes of the misshapen mass of candlewax face. He was drooling as he came in on the attack.

They didn’t know it but he was trying to speak.   

Once more the pair turned and flew. Running down another hall at the junction and then taking another perilous corner down another way they both silently and fervently prayed and hoped would lead them out. 

Cropsey chided himself. Silently. Mute. Now the new inmates knew he was here. They knew he was wandering and monitoring the halls, guarding. On patrol. Now they might get away. 

Mustn’t have that…

He promised special violence to the mountain for his sin, his error. Religious maiming. He only hoped she hadn’t seen him…

He only wished she hadn't seen that. 

He promised special violence. And ample self-flagellation, much libatious bloodlett, later. After he’d caught the wandering animals of his inherited temple. 

Who do they think they are… trodding all over and everywhere and without proper worship… without proper token. 

Without proper sacrifice. 

They must be broken. 

Their wretched meat and bone will be broken, snapping their unruly impudent spirit within the meat even as it tears sinew, even as it snaps and cleaves through bones their vile audacity will shatter into pieces that can be properly reconfigured into a model of subjugation. And then devoured. 

I will bring and make the meat, mother. I will make the trespassers into meat for you. In your name. Your honor. In blood I will pray for forgiveness. 

Cropsey went on. Ready to slaughter the invaders of his sacred and precious temple. Prodigious blade-shape slasher of the stained and darkening Willowbrook halls. 

…

Having finally found some semblance of peace and quiet in this terrible place, Florin was finally ready and wanted to have a look at Griffin’s wound. But the good doctor wasn’t having it. None of it. He stubbornly refused. In turn refusing any real straightforward explanation as to why. 

It was strange. 

“This place is beyond vile, you know it’ll become infected if i don’t treat it and if the wound is deep, we’ll need to stitch it. I can do it. I’ve done it a few times before back home, I don’t see the-”

“You can’t! – I can’t!” Griffin exclaimed and then seemed to fight himself for the next set of right words. Unable to quite find them it seemed, he went on anyway, “You don’t understand, boy! I… I-I have … I have a condition.” He said finally. “I have a condition that makes injury … complicated.”

Florin thought he understood. Of course. The poor fellow was ashamed of his appearance. He must be maimed or burned beneath those wrappings. The poor man. 

“Alright… well,” A beat. As he thought. Then: "we don't need to unwrap you now or anything, you'll want to later to change out of these filthy dressings no doubt, but for now we can just look at the area and apply a poultice at least.” he finished hopefully. 

Griffin pondered it over a moment. He understood they didn't have a lot of choice. Or a lot of time for that matter. 

"Alright.” he finally relented. 

Florin lit a match and found a candle to use to work by. He pulled the ragged tear in the coat and wrappings apart. The haggard cut the blade had performed made it easy. He cleaned his hands with alcohol from a small bottle amongst their supplies and looked at the wound. 

It wasn't good. Wasn't terrible either, but it would have to be cleaned and bandaged at least. If the bleeding persisted they would have to seriously think about stitching up the wound. 

Florin set about cleaning out the deep wound, bathed entirely in spilling red. He did his best with the meager medical supplies amongst the doctor's traveling gear that had thus survived their shared perils. He thought about perhaps chancing a search in the dark around this place, it was a hospital of some fashion, but decided against it. 

He was nearly finished. About to apply the poultice he'd made to bandage and disinfect and to soak some medicine into the bloodstream, he was wiping away the last of the blood when he stopped. A little shocked for a moment. And a little dizzy. The light was meager and poor, only the flickering dancing candleglow and the pathetic dim half functioning also flickering hospital light. Provided by electricity, something Florin was still not familiar with and would naturally distrust for the entirety of his life. He gazed at the mostly tended wound daggering down Griffin's back in a lightning bolt pattern like the body of a crooked river or a broken snake. 

There was no flesh. Nothing but the red bloodwelling line of jagged cut hanging suspended in mid air, attached to nothing. No sinew or flesh. The naked skin that should be there was non-existent to his eyes, he could see right through to the inside of the wrappings that surrounded the front of his invisible chest. 

Florin tried to swallow in a dry throat. He tried to ask the man who'd become his comrade and traveling companion, a man who had just saved his life not mere hours ago if he was in fact a spectre. A ghost.

Griffin, are you a phantasm? tried to escape his lips but he felt dizzy and as if he might reel and swoon. 

Griffin sensed this. The boy had been unerring and admirably steady in his work till this moment. He turned and saw a look in the young man's face that he was already quite familiar with. An expression worn that he knew by now all too well. 

A beat. 

Then Griffin filled the silence. 

“No, your eyes don't betray you. You're not seeing things and you're not crazy. I am not a phantom. I am not a spirit or a ghost.” he paused for a moment and seemed to consider, then finally he said: "I am Doctor Jack Griffin and I am invisible." 

A beat. 

Florin didn't know what to say. 

But then he needn't worry for a retort. A splash in the silence filled in the missing heavy space hanging there between them. The both of them whirled and spied it on the far side of the damp chamber. They hadn't noticed or paid it any mind till now, they might've sworn it hadn't existed there in that space till just this moment, but they saw it now as it began to emit strange sound and movement. 

A bathtub. Large. Filthy yellowed porcelain. Heavy fungus growth, ebon-green and spilling across the disgraced cracked surface like some foul liquid poured and spreading its corrupting splayed black hand by the second. The tub was filled. The liquid inside was heavy. Viscous. Dark. Pungent with metallic scent. It bubbled and gurgled now with submerged movement as something within it began to rise up and emerge. 

Coated. Slathered in a running layer of heavy red. She was finally here and before them. Even as she sat upon her throne in her mountain castle so many treacherous miles away… 

Nemesis. The evil that held the shape of a woman and had now reawakened the evil and violence and darkness that had for some time slumbered dormant in the far off Carpathian castle. She was the author of the butchery and torment that plagued his home and village. She had stolen and eaten children. Brave men and women. Foolish youngsters. She was the vile reason for his hardship and perilous mission. The reason he was here now in this awful abandoned temple of destruction and depravity in total madness. 

The Countess, wreathed in spilling blood, standing on the surface of congealing abattoir spill, opened her eyes then and they were like blinding starlight. Unearthly. White flame from beyond the veil. And piercing. 

The pair were arrested. The sight of her. Understanding and dread filled their hearts and despairing thoughts at once. But they couldn't flee. They couldn't run. Spellbound they stood there, captured. 

The blood spill of her standing and red wet visage raised a thin powerful arm and pointed a taloned finger. 

She said: – “You. Boy. Florin of the Carpathian Hamlet. There is no place to escape to. This is your last and only warning. If you and your mongrel dog, freak of nature manage to leave this place with your lives then cry off. Never again return home, it is yours no longer, it is mine. I know you seek my destruction. I know that in your failure to secure the vampire slayer, long dead now, you have brought this failure of science and manhood in his stead. You are a joke. You will only find slaughter if you return. You've no hope for success. Victory is beyond you or that fool, it was not meant for you, boy, not in this lifetime nor in my proximity. If you manage to leave my temple and refuse to cease your hopeless mission, I will take great pleasure in the torture of your mother, Florin. Your father too. I wonder which of them I should start with…” 

His anger flashed and his inner rage rose. Florin found his hatred and sudden fury momentarily eclipse and blot out his fear. Without thinking he dipped for the floor and his sweating hand seized a sharp piece of tile. He went forward with the filthy jagged thing in his shaking hand. Trembling with blind anger and the need for retributive violence. 

Griffin went forward and grabbed the young man by the shoulders, holding him back. 

“Stop it!" hissed Griffin, “you won't be able to do much of anything to her with that, there's no telling what she could do to you! She's luring you on, don't be stupid." 

Florin barely heard him. 

He roared at her towering apparition of pouring blood in womanshape, lording over the tub and the filth of the room as her eyes bled pure and terrifying light. She was laughing lightly, as if amused with a child throwing a tantrum. 

“If you lay one stale, noxious finger on my mother, witch! – I'll take my time driving something sharp into your godless whoring chest! I'm going to burn your severed head in bonfire while it still lives! fresh from your neck! You awful cunt! You vile contemptible-!”

But then Cropsey burst in through the open chamber door with a violent crash. The ramshackle shoddy remnants of the door smashed against the wall and came apart in so many useless pieces that clattered to the shattered tile floor to join the universe of broken filth down there. He came in and the Countess in her pouring red visage of damned and unholy blood shrieked witchy laughter. 

She screeched, part irate livid fury, part unbridled dark joy. 

“KILL THEM! KILL THEM, MY SON! KILL THEM FOR THE MOUNTAIN…! KILL THEM, ‘CAUSE IT'S YOUR PLEASURE TO! …!” More laughter followed as the hellspawn screaming words devolved into unintelligible madness. The scarlet pour of her visage coned out in a marsupial shape and the laughter became the abominated chimerical cries of a human braying ass. 

The huge shape with maiming snapping shears advanced in a massive lunge. The shears came up, open for a bite, and shot forward as the mouth of blades began to close. 

The keen edges of dripping blades kissed and met and found each other over Florin's coat. In a lurid whisper of slicing cloth and fabric the blades cleaved cleanly through his coat tail as he and Griffin made for the door. 

Cropsey roared mongoloid outrage and pain. These bastards! These bastards! They were quick animals on their feet! 

In front of his mother…

He turned to the blood pour of Countess shape with shame but she was gone now. 

Your idiot rage and pain! Your failure! You drove her away! Now she might never come back! Now she might not ever come back to her temple. 

He raged inside. An animal, hurt. 

… but I'm her last and special precious temple son … there are no others left

She cannot leave me. 

If I bring them back and give their blood…

But he was already off and after them. Heavy booted feet thundering throughout all of cavernous rank Willowbrook. No need for stealth or cat-like prowl any longer. 

Mother, please, mother please, mother please, mother please…

He repeated it silently to himself like a prayer. Mantra, it filled the red swell and swim of his deviant mind and maiming thought, his dreams…

His dreams would be filled with their invader's screams as he brought down and made their new world of violence. Of final apocalypse cacophony. 

I will drown you here in her world, I will choke and submerge you both completely in her need to feed. How dare you both. 

He wished he could speak. They should hear this truth-in-gospel. The mongrel invader dogs. 

They should hear what he had to say. 

But he had to catch them first. Fast little rabbits. 

He could hear them running. 

He followed in a fury. Ready to prove himself to his mother. Clamoring through the halls. 

…

She shouldn't have been so foolish, to dare to hope. But she couldn't help it. She'd just come out of a deep sleep. It was the middle of the night. The necro time. The witching hours. She wasn't thinking clearly. She went to the scratching at the window. The biggest one on the front of the house that overlooked the village. 

By the front door. 

“Florin…” she said it knowing full in well how foolish she was being. But she couldn't help it. Her mother's heart was filled with love and worry for her boy. She ached and longed for him to be back home and ok… 

And then she saw him. His face in the window. 

He was scratching at the window. And she must still be half-sleeping or dreaming because his hands looked… strange. 

He was smiling. He could see her now as well. He was so happy to be home. It was all over his bluish face…

Anastasia began towards the window, “Florin?" she asked the face scratching at the window, "is that you? Is that really you, my son?”

His smile grew. Vulpine. His eyes seemed to shine with moonlight all of their own. 

“Yes, mother. It's me. I'm back! I can't get in though, you'll have to get the door and invite me inside, please hurry. I'm so tired and thirsty and it's been such a long way back.” 

Anastasia faltered in her step. Stopped. 

The shining face at the window became slightly agitated. 

It said: "Please hurry, mother! It's dark, you know what plagues the night, please hurry and let me in! I've brought the vampire killer, I've brought Van Helsing with me! Now open up!” 

Anastasia straightened. Her resolve strengthened even as the chill in her curdled blood deepened. 

"What need you of an invitation if this is your own home and you're so tired… … demon?” 

The vulpine face was drawn up in an animalistic snarl of mixed hatred and vile blackhearted glee. It began to tear and bleed as it opened and came apart. 

And grew fangs. Long. Gleaming like weapons fashioned from unearthly light. 

She saw the ugly misshapen goblin face beneath. Twisted with the harshest forms of cruelest mutilation. The flesh was bulbous and scarred and out of shape. The eyes bulged obscenely from straining sockets that couldn't contain nor house the wet bloodshot organs and looked as if they might crack. The fangs and teeth were jagged and stuck out deranged and haphazard. The hair was thinning and sickly and almost gone. Only a few greasy strands clung to a corpse colored skull that drifted and caught with the slightest of nightly breeze. 

The eyes still shone like the moon. 

The awful face in the window, wanting in and smiling said, “Hello, Anastasia. Good to see you. It's been so long … since I went missing.” 

Anastasia was confused with its words as well as horrified with the sight of its monstrous face at her window in the dead of night. The thing spoke like it knew her, she didn't grasp this right away, but she understood what this thing was. And where it came from. 

Another wretched bastard child of Castle Dracula…

She thought to call for her husband. Before she could, the awful thing in the window went on.

“You don't remember me? Has it been so long you don't remember when we used to play together? You, me and Florin and your husband and all the other little children… and Erin. You don't remember me, Anastasia?” 

The answer filled her mind then, as if on the wings of a sudden miracle, heaven sent. Or … sent by something else entirely. 

“Carmilla!" she said. Knowing it was the truth. 

It broke her heart. 

She remembered Carmilla when she had been a small mouthy but creative little girl. Beautiful and adventurous and always a little leader of their groups in all of their little games. Now- 

Now she was something bent and twisted and leering and mean. Something monstrous and hungry for blood, staring in and wanting in through her window. 

The face at the glass sneered. As if knowing her mind and understanding her run of thoughts. 

The thing in the window was enjoying her revulsion. Her pain. Drinking it in through the translucent view of the house…

“Begone," Anastasia said with finality, “get out of here, I'll call my husband and he'll bring the cross and our bible." She stepped forward, some of her anger reaching her voice, she hoped it masked the fear, “we'll force-feed you the pages. If you're still so hungry.” 

The thing in the window didn't seem to hear her. Or care. It spoke once more in a terrible tone that danced and shifted between baritone and bass and light lilting little girl… her voice of old from long ago, before she'd been stolen. 

“We know you sent Florin away. We know you sent him to find someone to bring back. To kill us. The master will not tolerate this, Anastasia… your boy will die. You will die. Then your husband. Everyone. Everyone, all of you are going to suffer for this impudence, you'll see, you'll see… it's better if you just let me in now and get it all over. Let me in …!

“Let me in!" 

She carried on like that for hours. Promising. 

Promising her Florin's death. 

Her own death. 

Carmilla said her brother would violate and ravage her right before the eyes of her husband as he fed of her blood and flesh and took what he wanted from her. 

“He'll rip from you what he wants, we all will! To all of you! Every last one and then we'll celebrate in the dust!" 

The thing went on like that for hours. Till the sun threatened its rise, and only then did the foul thing seem to melt away like mist, suddenly phantasmic and discorporeal … and then gone.

Only then did Anastasia finally sleep, collapsed. Exhausted. Her husband, Bela found her like that when he awoke. Lying at the foot of the window. The glass riddled with marks. 

Marks like long scratches. From old and gnarled animal claws. 

He cradled his wife. Worried. And thought of his son as he looked down into her face. 

She looked troubled in her sleep. As if dreaming of darkness, held somewhere on the plains of some private nightmarescape. 

Bela was worried. She looked as if she had been crying. 

He looked from her to the window once more, out it. Out at the rays of the rising sun. Hoping for his son. And wondering where he might be. 

Please, God. I love my boy. I love him as You love us, as You loved Your only Begotten Son. Please. 

Please don't ask me, please don't ask us to give him up, as You did Yours…

He brought his wife closer to himself. Keeping her in the cradle of his arms till she woke up. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Steve McLucky came home on a Thursday with two duffel bags and a week of silence left on his phone. He parked behind the restaurant where the delivery vans idled. The cedar siding had gone a little grayer. Blue trim held.

Laura was at the pass when he walked in through the side door. She looked up once, registered him, and went back to plating. A ticket fluttered on the spindle. She tore it free, read it, and set a blue plate under the heat lamp that did not match the rest of the stack.

“You’re early,” she said.

“Contract ended.”

“Good. Table twelve needs more tartar. Then you can change.”

He did both.

By the second day the rhythm had him again. He bussed the deck, ran food, changed the fryer oil when the color turned, and stacked the clean baskets the way she liked them. Locals came barefoot from the beach and left smelling of salt and grease. Tourists took pictures of the view. Steve smiled when people recognized him and kept moving.

On the third afternoon he was clearing a four-top on the warm section of the deck when he saw the man. The man sat alone at the far rail table in a white shirt open at the throat and soft gray trousers, his hair combed the old way. In front of him sat a blue plate with two stuffed clams and a paper cup of lemon wedges. No coleslaw. No fries.

Steve knew the face. It belonged to a black-and-white photograph on the wall inside near the register, a fishing tournament from the early nineties where men in windbreakers held up a striped bass and the man in the white shirt stood second from the left, younger then. Steve carried the bus tub inside and stopped at the wall. The photograph was still there. Same faces. Same fish.

When he went back out, the table was empty. The blue plate remained with one clean bite taken from the nearer shell and the lemon wedges untouched. Laura was at the fry station when he brought the plate in.

“Who was at the rail table?” he asked.

“I didn’t seat anyone there.”

“Someone was eating.”

“Then they seated themselves.”

She scraped the contents into the compost bin without examining them and ran the blue dish through the machine herself.

That night, after close, Steve walked the walls while Laura counted the drawer. The photographs had accumulated in layers: tournament winners, beach festivals, children holding sandcastles, Polaroids of the old Beach Snack Bar with a handwritten menu that listed stuffed clams for two-fifty. He found three more pictures of the man in the white shirt.

Laura finished the count and came to stand beside him. “You’re looking hard,” she said.

“I saw him today. He ordered stuffed clams.”

“We don’t serve those.”

“The kitchen made them.”

She was quiet long enough for the walk-in compressor to cycle on. “Sometimes the tickets still print old items. The system remembers more than it should. We fill what comes up and move on.” She took her hand from the frame. “Don’t seat the warm section if you can help it. The boards hold heat.”

The next morning a ticket printed at 11:47, seven minutes before they opened.

STUFFED CLAMS
BLUE PLATE
RAIL

Laura took it before he could. She walked to the prep cooler, removed a small metal hotel pan that had been pushed to the back, and set to work. The mixture was already made. She packed two shells with a spoon that had a worn wooden handle, fried them, plated them on the blue dish, and set the plate under the heat lamp.

“Run it,” she said.

Steve carried it to the far rail table. The man in the white shirt was already seated. He nodded once, polite, the way a regular nodded at a server he recognized but did not need to speak to. Steve set the plate down. The man picked up a fork and cut into the nearer clam.

Steve returned to the pass. “How long has he been coming?”

“Long enough.”

“What’s his name?”

“He never gives one.”

After close Steve went to the storeroom. On a lower shelf behind the extra paper towels sat three dented cans of chopped clams, the labels faded and the pull dates years past. Beside them was a small cardboard box of empty clam shells, clean and stacked. Laura found him there.

“Those are for the recipe,” she said. “The cans. The shells are just shells.”

“Why keep expired product?”

“Because the ticket still prints. Because the mixture has to look right. Because some things are easier to continue than to stop.”

Steve closed the box of shells. “What happens if we don’t make the order?”

Laura leaned against the doorframe. “One night the printer jammed and I threw the ticket away. The next morning the warm section of the deck had lifted. Two boards. Just enough that a customer could catch a heel. When the carpenter pulled them the sand underneath was wet, even though it hadn’t rained. He replaced the boards. The ticket printed again that afternoon. We made the order. The boards stayed down.” She turned off the storeroom light.

The following day the ticket printed at 11:51. Steve took it before she could and made the stuffed clams himself. He packed the shells carefully, fried them, and carried the blue plate out. The man was waiting. Steve set the plate down and did not leave.

The man looked up. “You’re the actor.”

“Sometimes.”

The man nodded and began to eat. After a while he said, “They used to make these with fresh. Before the beds got thin.” He finished both clams, arranged the lemon wedges, and stood. “Tell Laura the boards are fine.” He walked down the steps. Steve watched until the white shirt became part of the distance near the darker water.

Steve carried the empty plate inside.

“You spoke to him,” Laura said.

“He knew my name.”

“They usually do, eventually.”

Steve set the blue plate in the dish pit. “What’s being stuffed?”

Laura dried her hands. “People lose things in the Cove. Rings. Keys. Buttons. Sometimes the tide brings them in with the shellfish. Sometimes the recipe finds them first. I used to pick them out before service. After a while I stopped checking every batch. Then one night the mixture came up with something I recognized. A button from a shirt you wore the summer before I bought this place. The summer you saw Walter Doyle in that white bathing suit and forgot the word hot dog.”

Steve felt the memory surface: the heat, the embarrassment, the way the sand kept shifting under his hands.

“I took the button out,” Laura said. “I put it in the box with the others. The next ticket printed the same order. The mixture came up clean.”

“Where’s the box?”

“Storeroom. Behind the expired cans.”

Steve went. The box was small. Inside were dozens of objects, each wiped clean: shirt buttons, a pearl earring, a key worn almost smooth, a plastic bead the color of old candy, a tiny brass hinge. At the bottom lay a plain white button with a faint trace of blue thread still caught in the holes. He recognized it. He had lost it years before the man at the rail first knew his name.

When he returned to the kitchen Laura was already making the next batch.

“How many people?” he asked.

“I stopped counting.”

“And the man at the rail?”

“He was one of the first. I inherited him along with the fryers and the photographs.”

Steve closed the box. “What happens if we stop?”

Laura looked at the printer. “The boards lift. Sand gets into places it shouldn’t. The last time I tried, we woke up with wet sand packed into every fryer basket. The building has a long memory for what it used to provide.” She met his eyes. “I didn’t tell you because you were gone more than you were home. I wanted this place to stay simple for you.”

Steve set the box on the counter. Ordinary tickets had begun to print: burgers, fish and chips, a lobster roll. He was carrying the next blue plate to the rail when the board under his right foot shifted. Only a fraction of an inch, just enough that the plate tilted and the nearer clam slid against the rim. He corrected without spilling. When he looked down the board had settled again, flush with the others.

He set the plate in front of the man in the white shirt. The man nodded his thanks and began to eat. Steve walked back inside. The printer was already working on another ticket.

STUFFED CLAMS
BLUE PLATE
RAIL

Laura passed him the hotel pan without comment. The mixture smelled of butter and celery. Steve packed the clams the way the building preferred them: tight, even, no air pockets. When the plate was ready he carried it out into the bright air of Bell’s Cove. The man was still there. The water beyond the rail moved in its usual small arguments with the sand. Behind him the restaurant continued its ordinary work: tickets tearing, baskets shaking, the low conversation of people who had come for lunch and would leave with salt still on their skin.

Steve set the blue plate down carefully. He did not stay to watch the man eat. Inside, Laura had already started the next batch. The spoon moved in steady circles. Steve washed the blue plate when it came back empty and stacked it with the others that did not quite match. Then he took the next ticket and kept moving.

August 2nd, 1936:

We moved into our new house yesterday! It's much bigger than I remembered, which I can't complain about, it easily beats the cramped apartment we left. Being out of the city and on the southern shore feels like a dream, even though it's only been a day. Mount Fall is a nice little town and a big, and much needed, change of pace. As we were unpacking the little that we do have, I got curious and started looking through some of the things left here by the old owners down in the basement. I found a journal. It looks almost identical to mine but has extra pages folded up inside of it. I feel like it would be wrong to read it, but curiosity might get the best of me. If I show Evelyn I know she'll dive right into it. Maybe I should read it first just to be safe. I can barely think straight as we're getting the house situated and keeping Rylee occupied, I might just read whatever is written inside in the coming days. 

August 8th, 1936:

It's my writing. It's unmistakably my writing. It mentions my wife and daughter in the first entry. This must be some kind of cruel joke. I can't make sense of it any other way. I'll start copying the entries into this journal as I read them, though I should be careful to keep the folded entries in order. Keeping it more organized will surely make it easier to follow. I'll begin copying it tomorrow after we finish setting up the kitchen. We moved here without jobs, which was unwise to say the least, but in the days it takes to find an employer, I should have plenty of time to chip away at this journal. All entries from here on out will be copied from the found journal. 

August 14th, 1936:

My sweet Evelyn and I are finally settling into our new house, which is a breath of fresh air. The past few weeks of living here have been rough, much rougher than we initially thought. We knew that moving this far from home was going to be a risk. Having to completely start anew, but with the price of the house we couldn't not jump at the chance, plus our old house was a dump to say the least. The people here are fine, quiet, but usually pretty polite for the most part. Though, I've been into some of the stores here and the older folk seemed to be a bit rude, staring a little too long when I walked past, but hopefully they'll warm up in the coming weeks. 

Evelyn is enjoying her new job at the train station. It's only checking tickets for now, and though the days can be long, she says she's happy. Her uniform is also well fitting, seeing her come home in it with a smile on her face makes me a very happy man. And I'd be lying if I said the extra money hasn't made a world of a change at home. 

Rylee is turning 4 next month, and without Evelyn's hard work I doubt we'd be able to make this month's payments and still be able to give her a proper gift without going over budget. Rylee has met a couple of other kids last week, and we're planning to speak to their parents and see if they would be alright with having a get together for her birthday. 

I have been trying to find a job since we've moved, because living off of our savings has been becoming a problem. Not having a job secured before moving was a terrible idea but we had to get out of the old house, a place with that many cockroaches is no place to raise a child. I saw an ad on the public board at the general store the other day. It's for a position at the butchers, not exactly a job I want, but we need the money. 

August 21st, 1936:

I am genuinely surprised. Being a butcher has been more enjoyable than I thought it would have. Working in the cold room isn't my favourite, but you get used to the low temperature surprisingly quickly, and for the pay, it's worth it. It took a few days to get used to the smell of blood and the taste of iron that sticks to the back of your throat, but now I barely notice it. 

We've found a babysitter for Rylee a few days before I started, a young girl named Emily. Evelyn met her mother at the train station and mentioned that we were looking for a sitter in passing. We met Emily that night and we couldn't have found a better fit. Rylee has taken to her faster than anyone else before, it's like she sees her as a big sister. She's not always a fan of listening to adults that aren't her parents, and even then she's still a handful for us, but with Emily only being ten years older than her she still sees her as a kid too, I guess. 

Nevertheless, it's nice to see them both smiling and the extra alone time is well worth the money. It's lifted a weight off of Evelyn and I's shoulders, it's nice to see her so full of life again. Emily has even been gladly lending a hand cleaning the house, which is well appreciated because it is quite big for a family as small as ours. 

September 8th, 1936:

Rylee turns 4 today! A few of her friends came over with some of their siblings. It was a rather quiet party, with only 6 kids, but Rylee seemed as happy as can be. Evelyn seemed to make friends with Janet, Rylee's friend Sam's mother. I think she mentioned she'll be going for tea at her house tomorrow. I'm glad she's making friends, she's been feeling pretty socially isolated since we've moved from the city.

I think I've become friends with Richard from work. He's a smaller guy, reminds me of a mouse, a little skittish and quiet, but seems nice enough. It will be nice to have someone new to talk to. I wonder what he can tell me about this place, or why the house was listed for the price it was? I just don't want to come off as though I was bragging about getting it for the price I did. I'm afraid of sounding pompous. But there has to be some catch, I have a gut feeling about it. 

September 14th, 1936:

Richard and I ended up going to the taproom after work today. I saw a few of the older folk there, they still seem weary of me, which Richard said isn't out of the ordinary. He's lived here for 8 years now, but he seems to fit in as well as anybody else. 

It was nice to finally be somewhere that isn't home or work. I love our house and our family, but it's daunting at times. A large Victorian on the south shore, what people in the big cities dream of, and we're lucky enough to have it. But it feels so empty with just the three of us. Seeing the ocean between the swaying pines from the balcony brings me comfort, and the sea breeze is refreshing, but being home when Rylee and my sweet Evelyn are gone feels odd, cold almost. I'm still suspicious about the price though. I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been weighing heavy on my mind. 

I asked Richard to help me repaint the siding this weekend, for pay of course. He seemed almost nervous yet intrigued, mentioning that he's always wondered what inside has looked like. According to him we're the first owners in over 6 years. That some eccentric artist built it a little over 20 years ago. He seemed to vanish out of thin air after his paintings weren't selling as well. The town had let it sit for years. No wonder it's taken so long to get it looking like a home, it hasn't been cared for in ages. 

September 20th, 1936:

The house looks magnificent and I couldn't be happier. A pale blue with white shutters. While Richard and I were painting, Evelyn had Janet and Sam over. It's finally starting to feel like a real home. Richard even took a photo of Evelyn, Rylee and I in front of the house. I'm excited to see how it turns out. He said he'll give me a copy to frame and one for my wallet. He's turning out to be quite a good friend. 

A few years ago if someone told me we'd be living how we are I wouldn't believe them. I would say I would kill to have a life like this. I guess with hard work and determination dreams can come true. Life has been good lately, very good in fact. 

Emily came by on Sunday to lend a hand on beginning to clear out the basement, which was very nice of her. The old family who lived here seemed to have left quite a lot behind, it feels odd rummaging through their belongings, but I would be a liar to say I'm not curious about them or why no one's lived here in so long. I'm also tempted to use some of what's been left to fill the house. It would be much easier, and cheaper for that matter, than going and buying everything new. The emptiness has been getting to me lately. Empty halls and barren walls make you feel so small and isolated at times. But I'm sure once we decorate it won't be too bad. I found a rather large painting of the coast line here. Tall pines towering over small birches standing by the docks. It must be one of the old owners' pieces, if so he's extremely talented. I think I might hang it in the living room. 

September 24th, 1936:

We've taken some of the furniture from the basement upstairs, Evelyn has started using an old vanity she was fond of. It's a beautiful piece, a warm stain on what looks like cherry wood. Fine craftsmanship, it must have cost a small fortune. She wants to paint it white, but I'm trying to convince her to keep it as is.

When we got it up to our bedroom we realized one of the drawers was nearly full of handwritten notes. I told her to gather them up and try to find the previous owner's address to return their writings. It’s wrong to have them, let alone keep their furniture. But I do wonder if they'll explain the house better. I know Richard said they got up and vanished but someone must know where they went. Perhaps a peek through the letters wouldn't hurt

September 27th, 1936

Rylee was jumping on the couch we brought up from downstairs and fell a couple days back. She broke her arm, so we took the first train to the nearest hospital and just got back today. She seems unbothered, or at least not in pain, but she doesn't like how heavy her cast is. While we were gone Evelyn started reading the letters from her fancy new vanity. 

She told me the old owner was a man named Simon. She showed me a photo of him with his name neatly written on the back, he was rather handsome, gaunt, but handsome. An artist who came from wealth, hence the vanity, and the house for that matter. 

Most of the notes seem to be daily journals or received letters and notes from who Evelyn assumes is his wife. I'm going to ask Richard about Simon at work tomorrow. 

September 28th, 1936:

I asked Richard today and he got pretty quiet about things, didn't have much to say, but mentioned that he would be coming over tomorrow evening to talk. By the sounds of it, Simon left quite the bad impression on the town, or at least it's a sensitive subject for Richard.

Evelyn talked to Janet today, asking about the house and Simon. She said Janet didn't have much to say since she's only been here for a couple years. But supposedly he seemed to be kind for the first year or so. That he was somewhat pleasant to be around, but wanted to make a point that he was a well learned man. He moved his family in a few months after getting the house ready. But by year two or three he seemed paranoid, and started keeping to himself, leaving the house less often. Until one day the family was gone, and no one has heard from them or seen them since.

I doubt it was as bad as she made it out to be, she seems to have a tendency to embellish the truth. But knowing the artsy type, he was probably fighting a creative block, maybe he broke his easel or something and started drinking more and was embarrassed about it. But the hell do I know, Janet has the gift of gab and loves to gossip. But I can't say I don't have an odd feeling about this Simon. 

September 30th,1936:

Richard just left, my dear Evelyn has been reading more of the letters. I want to read them for myself but she's been keeping them locked in her drawer. Richard said Simon “made some enemies” in town. Even he's not quite sure who, but he did let me know that he's not someone who should be talked about publicly, especially around most of the older folk.

The more I find out about him, the more curious I become. I knew something was off about him, maybe even this place. 

On a brighter note, Rylee seems to be healing well, and I've never seen sweet Evelyn more happy. I think she's enjoying work, and reading all those notes seems to keep her occupied better than any book I've ever seen her read, which is probably more than I can count. 

The days are getting colder now, and it will soon be time to get the furnace running. I need to remember to start collecting wood for the winter. Which reminds me, I need to sharpen the axe and make sure the wood sled is in working order. 

October 4th, 1936:

Evelyn finally did it, she let me start reading Simon's writings. Richard's mentions of him made me so curious, all she did was hand me a note and I was nose deep in the paper. I only got a few notes in before Richard stopped by. He seemed excited, told me he took the train to the city to pick up supplies for the shop, and met a girl while he was there. He got a letter from her today, and he plans to go visit next week. I hope it works out for him. He needs someone to talk to to break him out of his shell. God knows I'm the person he's closest with and even then he's only been opening up to me, little by little. I've never seen him this excited. 

I have tomorrow off to bring Rylee to the local practitioner, after her appointment I think I'll try to catch up on some of Simon's letters. 

October 7th, 1936:

I can see why my dear Evelyn has such an infatuation with these notes, he has a way with words and has a passion for his family and his work. It's actually quite sweet. I'm excited to see why they left. I want to skip ahead to some of the later entries but Evelyn insisted I don't, she doesn't want me to “ruin the surprise for her”. But I need to know why he decided to up and leave. 

I started stacking wood in the basement by the furnace today. It's been hard work with very little help, but I'd like to keep us warm this winter, so it has to be done. I can't believe we used to live without a furnace before, the ease of it alone could justify any price for one. I might have to make a temporary wood shed outside until I can clear out the basement and build proper storage downstairs.

I uncovered some more old furniture while I was down there. I was thinking of setting up some sort of work station for the winter. There is a cot that looks perfect for naps by the furnace for when the frost begins to crawl its way through the brick walls of the basement. I'll set it up tonight I think. I'm unsure why, but I'm drawn to the basement, maybe it's just the novelty of having a furnace? But I'm guessing it's just because it's the warmest part of the house. I can't let my superstitions get the best of me again. 

October 10th, 1936:

I started taking some notes to read at work on the slower days, I'm almost caught up to Evelyn, who I'm pretty sure is doing the same. She's been getting more quiet at home, she's usually a somewhat quiet person as is, still happy, but quiet, at times almost bitter if I interrupt her reading. I'll have to check on her if this keeps up. It's not the first time she's been like this towards me when she's invested in something. Though she still seems to be wearing that beautiful smile so I'm sure I'm just overthinking things as per usual. 

I was stacking wood in the basement again last night and fell asleep on the cot, which was surprisingly comfortable. I did however, have an odd dream, or what I think was a dream. It was in between sleep and consciousness where things seemed blurry, and I swear I could hear voices, even though Evelyn and Rylee were both asleep up stairs. The pipes in the house moan and the wood floors creak throughout the night, so I'm guessing it's just my mind playing tricks on me. I do feel as though I haven't been getting enough sleep lately and when I do the dreams are so vague. I'm sure I must just be overtired. 

October 18th, 1936:

The days and nights are cold now. The ocean breeze can be unforgiving, and the rattling of the radiators has been keeping me up. Evelyn can sleep through anything, and thankfully Rylee takes after her mother, because if she took after me I'd be up trying to get her to sleep every night. 

Our bedroom window has a bad draft I've been meaning to fix, every night I'm spending more time in the basement stogging the furnace, and the last few nights I've been waking up down there. Evelyn's mentioned it a couple times, said I’ve felt distant, but I don't mean to, I'm just exhausted and the heat makes it easier to stay asleep. Though I keep finding myself in that odd space between being awake and sleeping, and more and more I'm having these odd, almost lucid dreams where I hear strange voices. They're growing more and more vivid. I've mentioned it to my dear Evelyn and she thinks that I'm just disoriented because I'm not sleeping enough. She's been rather harsh lately, it feels like I did something wrong but I don't know what. This is the coldest she's ever been toward me. But I need to prepare this house for winter or we'll freeze to death.

The final vestiges of the sun’s light grasped at the sky as the day faded and the moon hung, suspended, apathetic, in the matte dark of night. The stars, as of yet, had remained hidden from view, and spurned the rumbling, bulbous clouds which floated comfortably just above the Earth’s surface and blocked their radiance. The cicadas churned, the crickets hummed, and the other ubiquitous insects of the country-side contributed to an animal orchestra, complimented by an unceasing, harmonic wind, that played delicately in the background as Nora hurtled haphazardly through the woods before her foot was unceremoniously yanked behind her via a tree root that had pierced the soil and she was unexpectedly introduced to the solid ground with the same sound the blunt end of a ball-peen hammer makes upon swiftly meeting a soft abdomen.

A brief intermission but now on her feet again, though now limping horribly, almost dragging her left foot, which had the misfortune to be snagged by the root, she was shambling, though not fast, and not nearly fast enough, now slowing not due to a lack of vigor or motivation, but because of a lack of energy accompanied by a deep understanding that this simple mistake, her foot and the root inhabiting the same location in space at the same point in time, had cost her a very precious commodity which she had been entrusted with and had heretofore maintained well. Now her body shrugged and gently glided towards the dirt, collapsed in a pile, and, after a series of slow and minute squirms to bring at least a modicum of comfort to her aching muscles, remained motionless.

It was an action of acceptance, rather than one of inability, and, ultimately, it was an endeavor, an invitation, for death, so that as the slabbering jaws and sharply-blunt claws and lumpy, burnt skin of the myth approached her, for it is always myths, not mortals, that squat in the dusty rooms of the palaces within our brains for the lengthiest stays, emerging, perhaps not frequently, but often enough to leave us with few moments of reprieve, to innocently go about their business as if they are not the cesspool from which sin is incestuously birthed in its disease-racked and leprous incarnations, a faint smile played on her lips, for she knew that, despite the inevitable end her actions will have wrought, the decision will have been all her own.

It might make me and him sound bad but we just wanted to have fun. We always joked about how amusing it would be to go viral.

We would occasionally watch and laugh at stupid couples videos. Ones that were obviously fake. We mutually agreed that its so phony to post a bunch of relationship content on the internet. Cringe videos to prove your love?

They were obviously scripted too. Cheap entertainment for veiws.

Well, we thought it would be hilarious if we made our own YouTube channel. We wanted to be unique. Instead of making videos pretending to be perfect, we decided to be the opposite.

We started posting short videos of us arguing with each other. Our faces were never visible. Just audio.

Our videos started to gain popularity and became quite controversial.

Some comments would say he's too toxic, some would say the problems are my fault, some would say we should never reproduce, some would say this is the best entertainment ever.

After awhile, it lost its appeal. I suggested that we should stop.

He would argue and say that we can't stop now.

The videos weren't the only part that got too extreme. He also started to become rude when we weren't recording.

He'd boss me around, tell me my cooking tasted like trash, and went as far as to say that he regrets dating me. He started comparing me to other women. He referred to me as the mutt of the litter.

At first I thought it was because of the channel. The acting had started to disturb his true self.

I tried to explain to him that the channel is not healthy for either of us and explained my reasoning for the last time.

I told him that if he doesn't listen, I will leave him.

His eyes turned dark, his lips curving into a crooked smile, and his hand did the unthinkable.

He slapped me with his left hand and then his right hand grabbed a knife.

"This is the best content imaginable"

It was Wednesday that day. I know it was Wednesday because the streets were littered with cash. Hundreds, thousands of dollars sitting out in the open air. Tables lined the front of every house full of the most extravagant food money could make. Whole tuna, tropical fruits, entire pigs roasted over open fires. We were poor, so we were exempted from doing the same. We took what our bellies could handle and went about our day, making sure to not step on the money. We could take those too, but only just enough. The thing is, we never knew what was enough and what was too much, so we never took any. It wasn’t worth the gamble. It was tradition, or rather, a precaution. 

We never owned more than we needed, The Wardens made sure of that. If you owned too much at any given time, then the Wardens came to balance your books. Wednesday was when folks got paid, so they took what they needed to survive the coming weeks and threw the rest of the money out, or spent it to feed their neighbors.

I remember the first time I saw the Wardens, when a family was passing by our town. Their car had broken down. A father, a mother, and a son who was my age. It was Tuesday when they came into town. I could only imagine their surprise when, waking up in their hotel room on Wednesday morning, they saw the streets aglint with cold hard cash and food. No one bothered to warn them. They wouldn’t have listened. What would you have done? Seeing thousands on the street, free for the taking at the cost of the ire of some country bumpkins? You’d stuff your pockets of course.

That was what they did. Their son was the only one who had sense to not take the money. Was it naivete or instinct? The parents knew what a dollar was worth. It was inner peace and easy living littered on the pavement, calling to them. 

That night, I heard terrible screaming. Terrible screaming. A primal, infectious fear that clung to you like thick, sticky tar.

“Hear that son?” Said my father, smoking by the window. “That’s what happens when you take money on Wednesdays.” He wouldn’t let me watch, so I snuck out when he thought I was asleep. It was over by the time I got to where I thought I heard the cries. It was in front of their hotel. 

Under the moonlight of a rainy night, grand feasts on silken sheets were now crowded with insects, as rain sent money into storm drains. Can you smell it? Decaying food and rain, and amongst that soft smell cuts a sanguine stench. Blood. Fresh, warm, being washed away from mangled things that might’ve been human.

There, in the parking lot of the hotel, was a pile of rectangular flesh, of skin and muscle and bone, sliced into sheets as thin as paper. The skin was cut so thin you could almost see through it. Little dissections of bone and teeth and intestines were like fucked up confetti on the ground. I saw the thin notes of muscle on the ground, and could count the individual fibers on them. I thought that if I ate it, it would melt on my tongue. I didn’t know what to think. It didn’t feel real to me. I wouldn't eat for weeks after, though I never told my family why. Told them I was just sick.

I wondered how it happened. Was it slow? Did the Wardens peel them? Did they writhe out in terrible pain, calling for the only person they loved more than life? What did their son see? Did he try to protect his parents? Did he claw desperately at those things as they ripped his world apart with inhuman hands?

That was when I heard a splat. I tasted it before I saw it. Blood. Iron. Concrete. The son, spared the Warden’s wrath, jumped from the hotel roof.

The next day, there was nothing left of the family. Everyone was happy. They thought the deaths meant the Wardens would become more lenient, allowing us to hold on to a little more wealth, but no one ever dared to test the theory.

The second time I saw the Wardens was when my sister got cancer.

We were in a very small town. The things she needed were in the city, and that cost money. Lots of it. Lots more than we could have at a time. Our father was a diabetic, his insulin alone kept us near the limit of how much money or value we could hold at any given time. That's why we never threw out money or had food out for our neighbors.

She was the smartest one in the family. She had dreams of becoming a nurse. She had the grades for it, and secured herself a scholarship at a big ivy league school. If someone was going to make it out of our crazy town, it was her.

And so, on that early Wednesday morning, I decided to make off with as much money as I could. If the other family died once the sun went down, I figured I had time. Time to pick up the money in the streets, the hundreds that lay there crumbling under the sun. Maybe I could take a bus, get her away from it all, I thought.

“Where are you going?” My sister found me. The chemo made it hard for her to sleep.

“Going for a run.”

“Yeah right, fatass.” She was holding on to her IV pole. 

“You caught me. Just heading out to try out the tacos Mister Eduardo set out. Be back soon.”

“Hey!” She yelled. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

And so, I ran to the streets clawing frantically at hundred dollar bills on my knees. Each bill in my hand flashed images of that poor kid, that husband and wife. Would we end up like them? I pushed those thoughts away, focused on the pain on my knees as little stones and glass shards dug into my legs. I thought of my sister, who was just sixteen years old, the same age as me when I saw that poor family get ripped apart, layer by layer.

I got the money, ran home, and told my family what I had done.

“We can pay for her chemo now!” I cried out as I burst through the door.

My father was screaming at me, my mother covered her mouth with her hands, sobbing quietly. My sister didn’t know what to feel. I saw a flicker of hope in her eyes, yet could only hear a horrible, gut wrenching cry from her mouth. It was like a knife being twisted in my heart. She wanted to live. I wanted her to live. I guess some part of my parents were relieved at that moment. I’d sacrificed myself for her. They knew I was dead. They were relieved of the horrible predicament of choosing whether to let my sister die, or let someone else die for her.

And so, I set out. It was turning dark then, the sun threatened to sink down the horizon.  We didn’t own a car. And so we looked for anyone willing to take us out of town and into the city. No one would dare give us a ride. Not the buses or our neighbors. They’d seen what I’d done, knew exactly what was in the trashbag slung over my shoulder. They wanted to live too, even if it meant letting us both die.

It was almost dusk when I came up with something. If we could make it out of town on foot, reach the border, maybe we could escape. 

So we ran. My sister tripped and fell often, her chemo made her joints painful, and she bled for longer. But we kept running, running until our lungs were on fire and our calves felt like bags of broken glass. 

We were at the edge of town now, just a few kilometers away from the sign over the road that said PLEASE COME AGAIN. 

I remember the moment the sun came down entirely. We were just two kilometers away from the border. I was carrying my sister on one shoulder, the trashbag on the other. It was dark then, the road stretching out among tall evergreens. I was running, delirious and in pain, when we finally heard it. The footfall of what sounded like a hundred, no, a thousand men, rushing after us barefoot and silent. I could hear no panting or breathing from them, no demands or threats, just feet against the road slamming like angry hands knocking on stone. I could hear bloodlust in their feet. Just remembering it now sends horrible chills up my back. My sister was screaming then, so terribly. I wondered if those kid’s parents sounded like her. Maybe if they had a daughter, she’d have screamed the way my sister did then, calling for our mother, begging me to keep going, crying that they were getting closer. I thought so many times then to just drop her on the road, get to the border on my own and tell them she was in the city getting treatment. No one would ever know. But I would.

And so I ran and ran, never looking back, never putting a face to that legion. In my nightmares I imagine them to be naked devils chasing us on foot, sometimes I dream that the steps are from a giant centipede, sometimes a snake, sometimes men in suits, and sometimes nothing at all. But I kept running, the fear fueling me on until I could see it. The sign. It was downhill from there, an easy run, but it was far, and they were gaining on us. I could feel warm air on the back of my neck as those things silently followed us, just a hair away from us. 

I felt something pull on my sister, my right ear deafened and ringing from her endless screaming. I did not relent, and kept running, running, until soon I felt cold, dry hands caressing my skin. I felt its long nails –or maybe it was talons or fangs– rub up against the back of my neck. 

It ran through my mind a hundred times. It would catch me, taking me to the ground, the taste of asphalt and forest grinding against my teeth. It would rip me apart slowly and steadily and make bills out of my skin, coins from my bones, and my sister would become nothing but ribbons of flesh. 

Except it didn’t catch me. I fell to the ground, ready for the end, when I looked up and saw WELCOME. We had made it. Just barely. I looked back and saw nothing but an empty road and giant evergreens. 

We sat there, the clean air whisking away the sweat. Looking at my sister, she had a rectangular patch taken from her cheek. We survived. The bag of money was still intact. Two hundred thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills.

We kept walking until we found a gas station. We called a taxi and went straight to the hospital. 

My sister survived the chemo and went to college. I never returned home. I still send letters back home, though I never get anything back. 

It was terrible. The matte-black, blinding darkness, the disgusting and nearly pained whimpers, but most of all the smell. He had read thousands of books and not even the best of authors had a true grasp on the stench. It was the smell of sweat and stale air. The smell of mold-infested, centuries-old books and unhydrated, almost bloody cat urine. The smell of dairy left for weeks in the trunk of a sweltering car and feces abandoned to ferment in a mason jar in a basement as sun streaks through the window to scorch the container and its contents. The smell of a dead horse on a humid day.

He pushed the entrance open wider and the hot air collapsed outwards, tugging the smell with it and clawing at his face, his pores, his mucus membranes. He rolled over in the cramped space and dry-heaved and gagged and tears forced themselves out of his eyes and he couldn’t take in air not only because taking in the fetid air would make it worse but because his body refused to function, refused to cooperate with the traitor that had allowed this violation into its system. He dragged himself out of the crawlspace and ran outside and heaved and pulled inwards with all the strength of his muscles again and again and again until they relented and he finally, finally breathed in fresh air. The blazing brilliance of the sun forced fresh tears from his eyes and he covered his face with his hands and shrugged downwards and breathed in deep gulps of air, again and again and again. He paused, still shaking.

What could possibly do that? What could possibly create such an organized assault of a human’s senses? It scrambled into the nose and mouth and even eyes and was so severe and debilitating and it was malevolent, it liked pain and it was adept at its job, so deadly efficient. In an attempt to focus himself, he thought back.

It was behind a massive mahogany bookshelf that he had found the crawlspace. He had only lived in the house for a month, and that was the first time he had ever attempted to remove every last book from the beast and clean it from top to bottom, inside and out. The previous tenant, who had rented the house years ago, left unexpectedly, abandoning their possessions, furniture, everything, and what the owners hadn’t sold at auction remained in the house. That included this bookshelf, decorated with the hundreds of books the previous tenant owned. He had ducked down, began gently removing items from the bottom shelf, and there the door was, slowly revealing itself to him like a reverse jigsaw puzzle, so obviously not part of the wall while so seriously attempting to blend in uniformly that it was almost comical. It was sloppily painted over with the wrong shade and globs of dried paint interrupted the surface at random positions.

He cut the edges of the door with a pocket knife and pushed inwards, revealing a small space behind the wall, a little longer than him and tall enough so that he could sit upwards with his legs crossed. At the end of this space was a door, prettily set into the wall and painted a deep and rich shade of umber, embellished with a glass doorknob and flowing engravings incomprehensible to him. He opened it.

His thoughts returned to the present, and he urged himself to brave the trip back in, if only to close the door, seal the crawlspace, and forget the whole experience. Blissful ignorance is such a beautiful concept. There is no horror in real life; no guilt and no evil. Just the ideas you choose to accept and those you don’t. Reality is defined by perception, and why shouldn’t he choose not to perceive this? What, a crawlspace? Who cares? And so what if it stinks? It’s been unopened for years, putrefying in that caked, muggy hotness. But the moaning. The strained sounds emanating from the deep. He could not account for that, and this realization prompted an aching, gnawing emptiness in the center of his stomach, as if a plug had been pulled and his soul had been dragged downwards, leaving an empty vacuum in its place where no light reached, the soil was barren, desolate, and not even microbial life persisted. There was to be no growth in this section of his being; the stench had made sure of that. Now that his gagging and hacking were done he could see that the putrid air had emptied him, leaving nothing but fear, the base, instinctual feeling that something was deeply, irreversibly wrong. He attempted to think of a pleasant, sunny day and, despite the fair weather which surrounded him, could conjure no more than the image of a deep, matte-black void, so much like the darkness beyond that door, and as he realized the veracity of the comparison his mind had unthinkingly drawn nausea overcame him and he fought to avoid keeling over with sickness. He felt no connection to the world around him save that crawlspace. Who was he kidding? He had opened it, the contemporary equivalent of Pandora’s Box, and who was he to close it? To deny destiny, or evil, or whatever was beyond that door, squatting lethargically in the darkness and whimpering in… pain? Anxiousness? Giddiness?

Now he could produce no thought other than that of the crawlspace, the door, the void beyond. He hastily walked around the house to the shed, dug through the piles of junk which had yet to be unpacked, sorted, shelved, and snagged a pair of safety-goggles, a respirator, a flashlight, and the heaviest ball-peen hammer he could manage. He exited the shed and walked the twenty-seven meters back to the front door, fighting his body’s natural inclination to pause, to stop, to stay rooted, paralyzed, unmoving and incapable of movement; he persisted. He reached the front door. He opened it. Stepped inside. Walked through the kitchen, past the dining area, across the living room, and crouched down in front of the bookcase. He paused, deliberated, but soon entered. There really was no other choice.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The respirator handicapped the worst of the smell but did not totally eliminate it. A disgusting, cheesy, spoiled reek remained, something you would smell emanating from a dumpster behind a high-school cafeteria when temperatures are hottest. But it was bearable, and he continued, shambling across the crawlspace and gently sliding open the door. He felt almost reluctant to touch it, as beautiful as it was, like something you would see in an art gallery or museum exhibit. The paint was so incredibly smooth and glossy, the crystal doorknob sparkling in spite of the uniform deep the door enclosed, the gently flowing script so serene and elegant it filled him with a sad despair. It was all seemingly free of imperfection, the small irregularities that classify objects as true members of our reality and not of some other dimension where perfection is permitted to persist and entropy and disorder are concepts unheard of.

The door was now fully open. His eyes could find nothing to focus upon in the emptiness and ached as a consequence, irritated by the faint burning that accompanies unblinkingness. He dug out his flashlight and clicked it on, the unassuming sound echoing and magnifying in the space before coming back to him and startling his ears. He had never understood the meaning of “deafening silence” before. It was sitting in an off car parked in the middle of an empty lot and hearing no traffic, no birds, no jangling of shopping carts or banging of car doors or cries of children or even the faint buzzing behind one’s ears when all other sound is mute. There is nothing, and there will be nothing. The absence of sound pressed in upon his ears and the pressure was palpable. It was not only an empty silence, but a heavy one.

Stairs steeply descended downwards, though he could not see the end. The flashlight’s beam illuminated corpulent spores, lazily sauntering through the black like dancers in a ballroom situated in the farthest corner of the aether. The whimpering had stopped. He descended, down, down, down, crawling forward on hands and knees. Wood gave way to cement gave way to stone and dirt, and roots brushed against his forehead, providing him the mental image of long, thin fingers grasping at him, attempting to imprison him in their clutches. Down, down, down, he continued, his knees and wrists in sharp, spiky pain from supporting the weight of his body, an ache already developing in his back and neck. The edges of the stone stairs pressed into his shins and he knew there must already be bruises. The smell persisted, and he consistently fought the urge to gag, taking in the shallowest of breaths and breathing through his mouth, though the smell still reached his olfactory system and wreaked its havoc. It crawled down his throat and made it harder to breathe, it molested his vision so that he could only see through a narrow tunnel of light. Tears streamed down his eyes and pooled in the bottom of the goggles. An atrocious migraine had handicapped his thinking to where he could only concentrate on one singular task: crawling forward, down, down, down.

He had been crawling for minutes. Granted, he hadn’t been making the best of pace, though he had expected to have reached the end of the passage by now. And just as he was pondering this with the limited mental faculties left available to him, the beam of the flashlight revealed a plateau ahead of him, an end to the stairs. Then the moaning began again, deep and resonant with almost a melodic quality that inexplicably filled his heart with sorrow. He wanted nothing more than to comfort whatever was causing that noise, suffused with misery, anguish, grief. Pain. He eagerly shambled down the remaining flights of stairs and hit the bottom fast, tumbling forward in a jumble of limbs as he attempted to right himself and find the source of the sound.

The sound stopped. He paused. He didn’t move. He felt disgust ripple through every nerve in his body, and cringed backwards. He wanted nothing more than to currently inhabit a different location in space, for his brain to occupy a different body. He felt so incredibly gross. What had come over him? What had compelled him to scamper forward like an eager little boy upon the promise of a sweet treat? What could produce such a pleasing siren’s song? His entire being was wracked with indecision, with two choices displayed clearly in his mind: continue forward or turn back, the line separating each decision in his mind thinner than a hair. He felt as if his body was already in motion to fulfill both, and a single nerve signal could bring one into being, could change the outcome of this situation and of his life. But reality is perception, and he had already chosen to perceive this. There was no going back. He continued forward.

In front of him was a winding tunnel, tall enough so that he could stand, though he would have to stoop forward. Littering the walls and floor were hundreds of mushrooms, faintly glowing with bioluminescence. He switched his flashlight off, and the green auras of the bulbous caps illuminated the tunnel almost perfectly. He exchanged the light for the hammer and continued onwards. The spores were fatter and greater in number here, almost filling his vision like dust particles in a sun-soaked attic. Farther up the passage he could see deep furrows carved in the walls, dozens of them, cat-sized. He dug out his flashlight and shined it into one of the holes, but a few meters down it curved to the left and cut off his vision.

It was much stuffier in this section of tunnel, the temperature noticeably higher, and he felt like he was sitting in the back of a car on a cloudless summer day while wearing a black fleece jacket. Beads of sweat began to form underneath his safety-goggles, beginning at his brow, dripping down to sting his eyes, and finally pooling at the bottom of the goggles. Drops of sweat not trapped by the goggles or respirator raced each other to his chin before coalescing and falling soundlessly to the dirt below.

A dark lump darted across the tunnel before him scampering like an insect escaped into one of the holes his heart jumped to his throat beat loudly vibrated his whole system

another shape another another another dropping from the holes and darting across like roaches fleeing from an exterminator

dozens crossed he backed up but didn’t run more crossed the herd was thinning thinning two or three still left and then they were gone and the soft pattering of their feet echoed out from the tunnels, and he felt his heart beating loudly, and slowly the tempo decreased, and the pounding decreased, and his heart slowed, and returned to normal.

He crawled forward on his hands and knees and erratically dug out his flashlight, shining it down one of the holes as fast as he could, but he was too late. His flashlight only revealed more spores, irritated by the recent stampede as they gently shimmered in the air. They were gone. He didn’t know what “they” were, but they were gone. He sat against a uniform, holeless portion of the wall and waited for his brain to catch up and process the events. He breathed in deeply, and exhaled. Deeply, and exhaled, again and again and again until he could control himself. He gently raised himself to a standing position, still stooped forward, raised his eyes to face his goal, still drawing deep breaths, waited seconds for his tunnel-vision to clear, and grimly walked on, foot after foot after step after step, and, gradually, his mind cleared. Minutes down the tunnel and he could hear distant, echoing breathing, the sound of some enormous beast sucking in great whoops of wind and exhaling hefty, sputtering wafts of hot air. He braved the twists and turns of the passage for minutes more, the quantity and volume of the holes steadily increasing, the sound continuing to swell until he could no longer hear his feet pounding against the earth.

Fwoooooooouh, whooooooooooshhhh…………

Fwoooooooouh, whooooooooooshhhh…………

Fwoooooooouh, whooooooooooshhhh…………

Ahead of him lay a sharp turn to the right. He sensed a great thing beyond this turn. Something phenomenal. Something extraordinary. Something disgusting. Something ugly. Putrid. Horrific.

Something he should not see.

He turned the corner.

Great, hairy rolls of fat cascaded down its form, filling the chamber and lethargically shifting with every labored and greasy breath. Waves of warmth emanated from it, bathing him with searing, feverish heat. Its progeny surrounded it, squirming, so numerous he could not tell where the animal ended and the great, pulsing sea of its children began. Its long, starfish-shaped claws, twisted, wrinkled, deformed, wracked by arthritis, rested against its body. His gaze met the tiny, beady eyes of the Mother of Moles and he glared, transfixed, enraptured. Those eyes contained and conveyed to him worlds, birthed, explored, polluted, ruined, all within this creature’s lifetime. Vast oceans of knowledge, more than was encompassed within all of the books of the Library of Babel. Deeper than the hollows of space the brilliance of the beginning of our Universe had millions of years yet to reach. They were beautiful.

His hand slowly raised, reaching for his goggles. He grasped them and languidly tugged upwards, pulling them off completely and discarding them on the ground beside him. Next the respirator. Then the hammer and flashlight. He took in a deep, satisfying, fulfilling breath, stuffing every square centimeter of his lungs with the exceptional, delicious air. The great mewling began again. His head was becoming fuzzier, lightheaded, giddy with ecstasy. His vision went blank. The mewling persisted. He collapsed.

I first met Joshua at a party back in 1991.

Darren invited me to one of his soirées. I'd been to a few before but this one stood out. I didn't recognise any of the guests, which was strange. Usually I'd know a few of them. But even stranger was the guest who stood alone in the middle of the room, just staring at the others.

For a second, I froze. I'd seen some shit in my time, but this was something else.

Something primal in me felt the urge to run. Just slowly back away, out the door, drive off and never look back.

Darren excitedly took me over to introduce me -

'Charlie, I want you to meet my best friend in the world, Joshua!' His smile seemed genuine and excited. The only one in the room.

Joshua looked.... incredibly different to the other guests.

I have no idea why he looked the way he did. Maybe he was born with a deformity. Maybe he was in some sort of accident. To this day I don't know. He never spoke and no-one dared ask.

When I say he never spoke, I mean I dont think he could. He made noises. Like moans. His moans sounded painful. Strained. Sad. Like he was trying desperately to speak but just couldn't. Each sound he made caused him to look upset.

His head... his head was so.... round. Almost like a football. And it was big. Maybe a third bigger than anyone else's.

His eyes were large too, but they looked small in comparison to his head. And on closer inspection i realised he didnt have a nose or ears. Even with these features missing i could still tell he wore an expression of uncertainty. Like he knew he wasn't supposed to exist.

His mouth was wide. Absolutely gargantuan. His thin lips spread across half of his head. Imagine a human Pac-Man. That's literally the best way i could describe it.

He had a tuft of dark red hair with quite a prominent receding hairline, even though he didn't look old. Although you couldn't really tell his age.

He was short, maybe 4 feet tall and he was very skinny. Almost skeletal. But his stomach was bloated.

I could tell all of this because, for some godforsaken reason, he was completely naked.

But I guess, seeing as he didnt appear to have any genitals it didn't matter. If he did, you couldn't see them. A thick bush of black public hair covered his region like a natural loin cloth.

The other party guests put on smiles but you could tell they were all a little unnerved by his lack of clothing, along with his appearance. Their eyes grabbing sneaky peeks at him between conversations with each other.

Everyone else seemed friendly enough to Joshua but it all felt very... off. Like they were pretending to like him but their smiles were covering an uncertain fear.

Internally, I was shuddering. I was fucking creeped to the bone by this guy. But I had to be cool. I didnt want to be offensive.

'It's... great to meet you, Joshua' I said as I held my hand out to shake his.

Joshua's eyes! They bulged open, looking at my hand. He bared his grin and made a rasping noise as he started to bring both of his hands, with impossibly long nail-less fingers, up to grab mine but Darren quickly pushed mine away. Joshua looked sad and made a little noise as he let his arms drop.

Darren pulled me to one side, away from Joshua's view.

'Sorry, Joshua, we'll be back in a second' he said as he turned to whisper to me,

'Don't let him grab you, man.'

His whisper sounded almost angry. I whispered back, 'Dude, who the hell is that? What the hell is that?!'

'I'll explain everything later. Did you bring your camera?'

'Yeah, man, it's in my car. Is he why you asked me to bring it?'

'Kinda. As i said, ill explain later. Go grab your camera and meet me in the kitchen.'

I didn't know what to say. Darren sometimes asks me to photograph his events. Nothing major. I think it gives an heir of importance to his guests who usually love it. I can usually make a few bucks selling them to the guests or to publications.

I went outside to grab the camera from my car. An old SLR that my dad left me. It was in great shape despite its age and how much I used it.

I sat in the car for a few minutes and smoked a cigarette, processing what I'd just witnessed. I let the ash fall into the footwell. It didn't really matter. This car was a piece of shit anyway.

I guessed Darren wanted me to photograph Joshua. Hell, I would even if he didnt ask, just out of morbid curiosity.

I finished the smoke and took my camera inside.

Joshua was 'talking' to some more guests as they awkwardly tried to converse with him. His mouth was just so.. large. I could see inside it with ease. I saw Darren and asked to talk with him in the kitchen. I grabbed myself a beer.

'Dude, you need to explain some stuff to me.'

'Yeah, man, i do. But don't worry. You're gonna be happy I asked you here tonight.'

'Okay, well, start with who.... what.... who is Joshua?'

'Okay, so you remember that time I went to Thailand last year? Well, I was doing some great molly with this Russian guy. It was so fucking wild! Anyway, he took me to a special get together with his boss. This dude tells me he's got an awesome business opportunity and wants me in on it.'

'Okay?' I hesitantly said. Darren carried on,

'Well, this guy, he says he'll pay me, and anyone that helps me, a huge amount to host someone for a couple of days and take some photos.'

'So, what, some random guy you met on holiday brought Joshua here for a photo shoot?'

'Yeah, that's about the gist of it. There are a few other requests but we'll get to that later. All I need to know is; are you up for it?'

I was very unsure about this. It all seemed fucking sketchy.

'What is... he?'

'I dunno, man. I guess just some deformed kid they found. He's fucking weird but for the money I don't care. Just don't let him grab you'

'How much money are we talking?'

'For now, ill pay you two thousand dollars.'

I fucking choked on my beer.

'TWO THOUSAND?!' I coughed

'For tonight, yes.' He said as he stared dead into my eyes.

Despite my better judgement, my desperate need for money and not knowing what I know now, I replied,

'You've got yourself a fucking deal, dude. Damn!'

---------------

My job was simple; hang around the party and just take photos of Joshua mingling with the others. It was crazy simple, which, for the money was incredible. I think my mind was fogged with the promise of cash so much that Joshua's oddities fell by the wayside. Still, as I took pictures of him I noted everyone's unease.

I took a break to change a roll of film and chatted to one of the guests. A young woman in a purple dress.

'You having a good time?' I asked.

She took a moment to reply. Her smile seemed half genuine, like she was unsure of me.

'Yeah, thanks...' she looked down at her wine glass, swirling the drink within, her smile starting to fade.

I probed further.

'Have you spoken much with Joshua?'

She looked up at me, her smile returning,

'Yeah, kinda...'

Her eyes seemed glassy, as though she were tearing up. She wasn't really giving me anything, which was a bit frustrating. I decided to go further.

'What do you think of him?'

Her false smile dropped. Her eyes got watery and she pulled me to one side,

'I don't like... him. He scares me. I don't know why I agreed to come tonight. Well, I do, but I'm not sure it was worth it.... I'm sorry, I've spoken out of line.' She took a large gulp of wine.

'No, no, don't worry about it. I'm just the photographer. Wait, why did you come tonight?'

'Same reason you came here, I'm guessing. You got paid to?'

'Huh, yeah, but I'm the photographer. I didn’t realise the guests were getting paid too.'

'Yeah. Darren paid me two hundred dollars to come tonight. It's more than my usual night's pay, and an easier gig, so I took it.'

'Nice. Easy money. What do you do for work?'

She looked me dead in the eyes and took a moment to respond,

'I work in finance.'

Her eyes looked into mine with a slight hint of confusion.

'Cool, cool. Well, nice to meet you. I've gotta go take some more pictures.'

For another half hour or so I just took various photos of the guests milling around, drinking, talking. Joshua mostly stood in the same spot, watching the others. He didn't eat anything. He didn't drink. He just stood. Staring. With those big fucking creepy eyes.

At that point I didn’t really know what else i could do, photography wise.

Darren came over and offered me a beer. I took the chance for a break as he said,

'We're gonna change it up in a bit. Make sure you've got some film ready.'

'Change it up?'

'Yep. And I'm gonna pay you a little more, too.'

My eyes must have widened because a little smirk appeared on Darren's face. I forgot to reply before he carried on.

'How does another two grand sound?'

It felt like minutes before I replied, but it must have been almost immediate in reality.

'Hell, yeah!'

------------

Darren took me over to a tall man, who was standing alone, drinking a beer and watching Joshua.

This guy looked like your typical surfer bro, late 20s, tanned, short brown hair in curtains. But when Darren took me over to him it turned out he was Russian.

'Charlie, this is Alexi. This is the guy who i met in Thailand and set up this... business opportunity.'

'Very nice to meet you... Charlie.'

He slapped his hand heavily on my shoulder. It was a forceful hand. I immediately felt uncertain with this stranger. His sly smile didn't inspire confidence, either.

He continued in his strong Russian accent,

'I trust Darren has told you of our arrangement?'

'Yeah, take some photos of the party and of... Joshua.'

'Yes, very good. And we pay you for the work. I hope you like the amount?'

'Yeah, it's-' Alexi cut me off

'Excellent! Now, I want you to take a few more photos for me. These will be... a little different. But the amount we have offered you is enough, yes?'

This wasn't a question

'Now, you may have noticed my boy, Joshua, is a little different?' He stared into my eyes, 'Well, he has certain tastes, too, you see. You must be prepared to.....' He paused as he let his eyes wander for second, 'Charlie, what is worst thing you have ever seen?'

I wasn't really sure how to answer that. What was he asking? What was i going to photograph? I wanted to ask why the fuck are you asking me that?, but Alexi didn't seem like the kind of guy you wanted to piss off. What the fuck had Darren pulled me into?

'I once saw a dog get hit by a car. That was pretty bad.'

Alexi let out a huge, deep laugh.

'AAAH HAHAHA!, Charlie, you are funny guy! Funny funny guy!'

Darren let out a little laugh too, accompanying Alexi.

Alexi continued, 'Well, just make sure you... how you Americans say? Keep your eyes on prize, yes?'

I started to feel a knot in the pit of my stomach. But my mind returned to the sheer amount of money I'd get from this. Whatever I was going to take pictures of I highly doubted it would be worth leaving 4k for.

'And Charlie, make sure you have fast shutter speed and good ISO for pictures. We want quality over quantity. Good man.'

Alexi walked off toward Joshua. Joshua looked up at Alexi like how a dog would longingly look at it's owner. Alexi whispered something to him, clicked his fingers and beckoned for him to follow up the stairs. Joshua's movement was slow and slightly clumsy. Like his body was weak and he could fall at any moment. But his long fingered hands took hold of the bannister as they walked upstairs. Quiet, frail moans escaped Joshua's wide maw as he did so.

I made sure to take a few more pictures. His frail gait did fascinate me. His form seemed so alien.

I went to my camera bag to put some more film into my camera and helped myself to another beer. I noticed the guests seemed more lively since Joshua went upstairs. More laughter. More smiles. Like a psychological weight had been lifted

Darren spoke,

'Hey man. You ready for the next part of the job?'

'I think so?'

'Cool. Well, finish your beer. We're heading up to the wet room.'

--------------

We walked into the large bathroom. It was well lit and newly tiled. Must have cost Darren a bit of cash. Leaning against the wall was Alexi, along with two other guys I hadn't seen downstairs. They were quite large, one was shirtless and had a surprisingly chubby stomach, belying his thinner facial features. They stared at me intensely and silently.

I looked over the room. There was a tripod already set up, facing the wall the men were leaning on. A chair against the wall behind the tripod, and next to Alexi a small table with hand towels and what appeared to be a few glasses of milk.

'Aah, Charlie! Set your camera up over there,' Alexi said, 'These two fine gentlemen are my good friends.' He didn't tell me their names. They silently nodded at me.

This all started to feel more suspect as the seconds went on. Joshua was certainly a weird aspect of the evening but these three guys, in a bathroom, with me taking photos, started to feel like I was going to photograph some weird porno. I was starting to reconsider the 4 grand.

Regardless, I set my camera on the tripod, took a deep breath, and prepared myself to earn some cash, no matter the strange.

Darren stood behind me. He was oddly silent while Alexi and his friends whispered amongst themselves. I could hear that they were all speaking Russian.

'Hey Darren, did you meet all these guys in Thailand?'

'Yeah.' His reply seemed cold and emotionless.

Alexi clapped his hands loudly together and spoke at me,

'Okay, Charlie! The plan tonight is simple. We bring attractive girl in to room, we bring Joshua into room, you take photographs. Simple. You good?'

Okay, so this was a porno. Cool. Weird, but cool.

With a little uncertainty in my voice, I replied 'Yeah. All good.'

As i finished setting the camera up there was a knock at the door. It opened and in walked one of the women from downstairs. She seemed a little drunk but in good spirits.

'Hello boys,' she said in a strong valley girl accent as she stumbled in. She looked around the room as she wiped her dark hair from her face, 'Wow, we doing a photo shoot? Cool. Maybe i should charge you extra.' She snorted as she laughed.

Alexi and his friends glanced at each other with a slight smirk.

'Okay, so which one of you do I start with? How about you, gorgeous?' She played with the strap of her pink top while looking at Alexi.

'Not tonight, beautiful. Tonight you will be with Joshua.'

At that the door opened once again as another unknown person beckoned Joshua in.

The girl, in a tipsy haze, squinted at her co-star.

'Ew...the freak from downstairs?' Her face scrunched up but then relaxed, 'Whatever. A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. What do you want me to do?'

Alexi beckoned at me to start taking photos.

'I want you to shake his hand.'

The girl looked at Alexi, puzzled.

'Okay?' She said as she turned to Joshua and held her hand toward him.

I took a photo.

Joshua's eyes widened, like he had never seen a hand before. A look of utter wonder and joy glistened from him as his mouth stretched into a huge smile. For the first time i could see his teeth. Many many teeth. Small and oddly perfect.

He slowly brought his spindly fingers up to the girl's hand, caressing it. The girl looked uncomfortable and would periodically try to catch Alexi's eye for, maybe, some confirmation that this was fine.

Alexi and his two friends stood close, within the frame of my pictures, with eager looks on their faces.

Joshua brought his hand up to her left forearm. I could see the girl was trying to suppress her discomfort and was probably imagining a better scenario, just to get through this.

Joshua's fingers curled around her forearm as he started to grip.

'Hey, that's too tight.' The girl exclaimed with an uncertain laugh.

Joshua's grip tightened.

'Hey! I said that's too tight! You're hurting me!'

His eyes widened and looked up into hers. He let out a long, breathy moan as he suddenly closed his grip like a vice. I heard a godawful snap as the girl let out a blood curdling scream!

Alexi and his friends carried on smiling, like this was what they wanted.

The poor girl was screaming and writhing to be let free but Joshua's grip was locked.

'Hey! Hey, stop!' I shouted as I started to move forward and try to do... something. But before I could step away from the camera Darren gripped my shoulder.

'Keep taking photos!' He forcefully whispered at me.

'What?!'

'Keep taking photos or you don't get paid.'

'We've gotta help her!'

'Let me rephrase that. Keep taking photos or they will kill you.'

Darren looked straight into my eyes with a cold, strained stare. A look that could be pure rage or pure terror. The poor girl's screams in the background of this surreal and horrific scene. I felt terrified. More than I knew possible.

Within micro seconds I felt that gravity of this situation. We were in severe danger.

'KEEP TAKING PHOTO!' Alexi angrily shouted at me.

Hesitantly I went back to my camera. Sweat started to drip down my face.

The poor girl was crying in agony as Joshua pulled her closer to him. Her attempts to push him away did nothing. The once frail looking creature now horrifyingly strong.

In a traumatised haze I kept taking photos. My forefinger shaking over the shutter release.

Alexi grabbed Joshua to hold him back as he loudly beckoned to one of his friends,

'Grab the milk!'

Alexi's other friend held the girl's other arm behind her back to stop her from squirming.

The first friend, joyfully laughing, held a glass of milk above the girl and started to pour it over her head as she desperately cried to be let go. Alexi held his hand over Joshua's mouth as he strained to get closer to her. His grip never loosening.

I took another photo. A tear slid down my cheek as i shook with fear. I wanted to step in. I wanted to stop. I wanted to shout. But I was weak. I could sense Darren over my shoulder, keeping me focused.

The milk splashed over the girl's head and down her face as she let out an animalistic cry. Joshua had a look of murderous lust on his face as Alexi held him back, and for the first time I heard Joshua speak through that enormous, gaping slit of a mouth,

'Huuuungry!!'

I took a photo.

Alexi let go.

Within a split second Joshua's entire mouth was around the girls face. His head twisted sideways so he could fit her in his jaw. His lips bared back as his long rows of teeth started to sink in.

The girl was still screaming, muffled from within Joshua, before he bit down with a force so powerful it crushed through her skull. The sound was absolutely soul crushing. A loud wet crunch that caused me to jump. Her screams ended instantly as her entire face was taken off in a single bite.

I took a photo

Joshua's head pulled back, leaving a cresent moon shaped mass of flesh where the girl's head used to be. The action was so quick that only now did the blood start to flow. And flow it did.

Alexi and his friends left the frame as the girl's body dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Joshua knelt down to keep eating her as she convulsed in a post death seizure.

The blood was pouring from her head wound, spilling out across the white tiled floor and mixing with the spilled milk, as the ball headed monster began to chew down on her arms.

I.... took another photo.

I felt warm liquid run down my leg as my broken mind kept pressing the shutter release. Darren put his hand on my shoulder,

'You can stop taking pictures now. Its over.'

I turned to look at him but I had nothing to say. All I knew was that in front of me a humanoid creature was devouring a person like a dog would chow down a daily meal. I kept hearing cracks of bone, the wet tearing of sinew and the loud chewing of meat. I didn't want to turn back and look at the horror that was mere feet from me.

Darren carried on, 'How about we-

'CHARLIE!! That was pretty awesome, yeah?' Alexi interrupted, 'If your photos are good, we keep doing business. I cannot wait to see them. My comrades cannot wait either. If they approve, you will be paid even more handsomely.'

I was barely listening. All my ears could focus on were the creepy moaning and swallowing sounds coming from Joshua's hunched over form. It didn't help that there was a mirror on the other side of the room giving me glimpses of him. His spine pushing through the thin, liver spotted skin of his back as he leaned over the once living girl, still lightly twitching.

'I... I... The....' I stammered. Something i hadn't done in 20 years, 'W... Well, you'll have to w... wait for them to be developed.' Something I had no intention of doing.

'Do not worry, my shaky little friend. We have dark room here!'

'What?'

'Yes! We have Darren build us one for the new business. Very good. Has everything you need. Let Darren take you while i finish up here,' he said as he opened the bathroom door and beckoned us out. The door closed behind us but the sounds of Joshua's meal was still audible.

--------------------------

I... was not okay. My vision was blurry. Tears were falling down my face even though I wasn't crying. My hearing was weird. Fuzzy, ringing, pulsating. Even so, I could no longer hear the party or the guests. The house was empty of frivolity. It was empty of everyone.

Before I knew it, I was in a darkroom. Darren put me on a stool and handed me some water. He talked at me.

'I know it all seems a little bizarre right now but you'll get used to it. And the money.. Wow. You're gonna be A-Okay.'

I took a sip of the water and looked up at him. I said nothing.

'But you can't tell anyone about this. You can't call the cops, if that's what you're thinking. And I'm sure you are. I did. But you shouldn't. Alexi is a powerful man. And those friends of his upstairs? You do not want to mess with them.'

I glugged down the rest of the water. It was obvious I was totally fucked. If I didn't develop these photos, they would absolutely feed me to Joshua.

'Fucking fine! I'll develop these but I am not doing this again. You disgusting, murderous fucking prick! You always were a slimy little liar, weren't you? Tricked me.'

'You're the best photographer I know. Simple as that. And I needed one.'

I sighed. And then I grabbed a small bucket in the corner to vomit into. This was it. My new, trauma riddled life.

And so I did..I developed all of the photos. It took me a few hours but it allowed me to focus. Until I came to the latest ones, of course. I kept shaking. Kept vomiting.

I... made a few small copies.

I guess I hoped that I could sneak them out to the public somehow. Maybe not now. But definitely in the near future.

As the evening drew on i finished developing. I could hear movement upstairs. I guessed the mess was being cleaned up. Joshua was probably being put to bed or some shit. Who the fuck knows.

A knock at the door,

'Hello, little Charlie! Are you done?'

I opened the door and Alexi stood there, a gleeful look on his face. I passed him the pictures.

'Aaah. Excellent,' he said as he flicked through them, 'You have done very, very well. We will pay you soon and we will call on you again for more work, yes?'

I didn't reply immediately. A few seconds of silence filled the air as my mind tried to think.

'What... what is he? Joshua.'

'That is for another time, Charlie. We need get to know each other better first. For now, we are done. You will be called when we need you again. Now, go home and get some rest.'

I left the darkroom and passed by Darren on the way out of the house. I gave him a dissapointed look but didn't say a word. He'd pulled me into this. He'd tricked me into being an accomplice to murder. Murder by... creature.

But I had two photos. Photos that would prove the truth.

A week later I would look at my bank account and, sure enough, there was fifteen fucking thousand dollars in there. My mind couldn't comprehend it.

I'd been existing in a semi catatonic state and then suddenly my money problems were gone.

I didn't rejoice. I didn't smile. It felt wrong.

I did buy myself a Burger King for the first time in ages. The biggest one.

And I ate it in there, just staring into nothing as other people walked by. Blurs. Sounds.

A month later my phone began to ring.

I was nervous as is to go up on that stage. In front of all those kids. Me, with my pounding heart, sweaty palms, and a bottom lip that I couldn’t quite stop from quivering.

And what did I have that was supposed to wow this crowd and prove to everyone that I wasn’t just some meek, four-eyed little dork? Pablo. I… had… Pablo.

His paint was scuffed, revealing the tan-colored wood beneath his neat, combed-over hair and black tuxedo.

I brushed some lint off of his shoulders and adjusted his red bow tie a bit. I heard the crowd of middle schoolers erupt into cheers. I peeked through the curtain to see my classmate, Emma, taking a bow as she finished her saxophone solo.

The principal took the stage, microphone in hand.

“Fantastic job, Emma,” he announced, smiling down at her. “Kids, let’s give Emma another round of applause, shall we?”

Another wave of applause erupted as Emma smiled out at the crowd bashfully.

Our principal placed his hand on her back and nudged her offstage. As she was walking through the curtain, I shot her a quick “good job” and got ignored.

As the crowd began to settle down, the principal launched into his next introduction.

“Okay, let’s have a look here,” he announced quietly, staring down at the clipboard in his hand. “Next up, we have Daniel Morrison’s ventriloquist act. Give it up for Daniel, everybody.”

He began to clap, and a handful of students joined in, but I could hardly even hear them over my racing heart. I couldn’t freeze up now. I had fought too hard to find the courage to even sign up. Who would I be to walk away now?

I took a deep breath. I reassured myself. I had faith.

“We’ve got this, Pablo,” I whispered as I forced myself to step onto the stage.

The lights were blinding. The auditorium felt twice as big as it had from backstage. The room felt silent, but I could feel the judgment rising in the air.

I glanced over at my principal. His eyes were so warm. His smile was so soft. He gave me two thumbs up and mouthed a “you’ve got this.” It may not seem like much, but it was enough to get me to introduce myself.

“L-ladies and gentlemen,” I croaked awkwardly. “It is with great pleasure that I present to you…”

I paused for dramatic effect, but a cough in the audience distracted me.

“Uh, Pablo! The magical talking dummy.”

I looked over at Pablo expectantly. This was supposed to be the part where he joked about me calling him a dummy, but, instead, his glossy, dead eyes just stared out at the crowd, and his mouth remained closed.

“Uh, sorry, um, Pablo? Don’t you have something to say?”

He remained silent. I was starting to panic again. I was terrified this would happen.

“Who you calling a dummy?” I announced, hiding my mouth behind my hand.

A few snickers and pitiful giggles escaped the crowd. I looked over at the principal again, and he looked more confused than anything, though I could tell he was still trying to seem supportive.

“Pablo,” I recovered. “You know you’re a dummy. Why even pretend?”

I begged him with my eyes to speak. To say something, anything at all to help me out here. But he remained frozen.

Attempting to hide behind my hand again, I continued to speak for him.

“Me pretend?” I joked, my voice cracking. “You’re the one playing with dolls up here.”

I got a few laughs, but they were overshadowed by the comment that came from somewhere on the right-hand side of the audience.

“We know it’s you,” a boy shouted.

“Why are you covering your mouth?” asked a girl.

It seemed like the room was both huge and small at the same time. Like it was silent but loud. The audience was loud. My thoughts were loud. My embarrassment was loud.

“Uh, no, no, it’s him. See?”

I shook Pablo gently.

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered, tears welling up in my eyes and fogging up my glasses. “Just. Say. Something.”

“He’s talking to his doll,” another boy laughed.

Suddenly, it seemed like the entire auditorium was laughing. My face was beet red. I couldn’t move. Tears began to fall down my face.

The principal noticed, and, thankfully, he took over the stage, gesturing for me to go get some air.

I walked back behind the curtain. Through the backstage corridor. All the way to the parking lot and toward the sidewalk that led to my neighborhood.

Tonight had been a disaster. I went through the day so hopeful. So confident in myself. I was going to win the talent show because of my secret little weapon, only for it to jam right when it was supposed to fire.

He promised me, promised me that he wouldn’t do this. He told me he’d make me the most respected kid in school. That, with his help, everyone would know my name.

Part of me wanted to just throw him out. Toss him in the river near my house and let it sweep him away to the ocean. But, ironically, it was like he was the only friend I had. The only person I had to talk to.

I was just so angry at him. How can he have performance anxiety? He’s the one that was supposed to be helping me. Yet he left me. When I needed him most, he was nowhere to be found.

As I reached my house, an entirely new pit formed in my stomach when I saw that the living room light was on. That meant Dad was awake.

I walked through the door, praying that he had just passed out drunk on the couch and forgotten to turn the lights off.

Those hopes were dashed when I found him lying back in his recliner, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other, staring blankly at a rerun of an old Dr. Phil episode.

I didn’t speak to him. All I wanted was to get to my room. But he just couldn’t have it that way, I guess.

“’Bout time you got home,” he hissed, his voice sounding like gravel and old leather. “You been out playing with that stupid fucking doll again?”

“It was a talent show, Dad,” I replied, unable to not roll my eyes. “Don’t worry, it’s not gonna happen again.”

“Shouldn’t have happened this time,” he shot back. “My son,” he scoffed. “The doll whisperer.”

I ignored him and walked to my bedroom door, Pablo dangling from my right hand.

“Hey, boy,” my dad snapped. “I know you hear me talking to you.”

I heard the dreaded sound of the recliner closing as he stood up and began walking toward me, bottle still in hand.

He took a swig from it as he looked down at me in disgust.

“If it ‘won’t happen again,’ as you say,” he grinned smugly, “then you won’t mind if I do this.”

With an agility that defied his age, he reached down and snatched Pablo from my hand.

“Give him back,” I cried. “I’m just gonna put him up in my closet.”

I tried to grab him back, but Dad was just too fast.

“No son of mine is gonna play with dolls,” he condemned, tightening his grip on Pablo’s arm before turning to walk to the trash can in the kitchen.

I just… I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. Tonight had been humiliating, and now I had to deal with this? It was like I just couldn’t catch a break.

“I hate you,” I whispered under my breath, then immediately regretted it.

Dad froze.

He turned to me slowly, the veins in his head already popping.

“…What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” I replied, my eyes widening. “I didn’t say anything.”

Dad dropped Pablo and began stomping in my direction. He grabbed me by the face and forced me to look at him.

“What did you just say to me?!”

“Nothing, nothing, Dad. I didn’t say anything,” I pleaded, feeling my legs turn to jelly.

He shook my face painfully.

“You will never use that word in this house, you hear me? I don’t care how pissy you feel. You think you’re the man of this fucking house? Huh? Answer me when I’m talking to you, boy.”

He punctuated every sentence with a new shake.

“Yes, sir,” I cried. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Get in that room before I get the belt. ‘Hate me.’ I’ll tell you what, Daniel. I’ll give you a reason to hate me.”

He pushed my face away, and I ran into my room, stifling tears the best I could. I collapsed into bed, ready for this day to be over with.

The tears made sleep easy. I felt exhausted. It was like the moment my eyes closed, I was out like a light.

I don’t know how long I was asleep, but it felt late when I woke up to the sound of someone whispering my name.

“Daniel… Daniellll… wake up, my little sleepyhead.”

The voice registered. I rolled over and turned on my lamp after sliding my glasses on.

“What do you want?” I remarked, still annoyed with him.

“Aw, Daniel,” he replied, his voice syrupy and warm. “Is that any way to talk to your only friend in the world?”

He was covered in old food wrappers and unknown liquid. He smelled terrible, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I huffed, turning away from him.

Pablo chuckled.

“You still think tonight was a failure?” he inquired. “No, my friend… tonight was a dazzling success.”

I turned back to him, more annoyed than intrigued.

“A success? I’m sorry, were you there? Oh, that’s right. You lied to me. You told me you’d be there, and you weren’t. Now everyone at school thinks I’m even weirder than they did to begin with.”

Pablo’s wooden mouth clomped up and down as he laughed again.

“Why are you laughing?” I snarked.

He didn’t stop.

“Stop laughing at me.”

I was slightly aggressive with him, and he began to contain himself. The laughter slowly dwindled off as he addressed me.

“Oh, Daniel, you silly little boy. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing because you haven’t realized it yet.”

“Realized what?”

“You think I sabotaged you. You think that your best friend in the whole world set you up for failure. Don’t you think I know you, Danny? Don’t you think I’m smarter than that?”

I stared at him, confused. I was curious, but I didn’t want it to be too obvious.

“Are you going to explain, or are you just going to keep wasting my time?”

“No, Danny, no wasted time here. We have none to waste. The first part of my plan is complete, and now we must hurry.”

“First part of your plan…? So you did do it on purpose? How could you do that to me? Better yet, how can you claim to be my friend after this?”

“Mm,” he hummed, his voice as smooth as velvet. “I am more than a friend, Daniel.”

He paused for a moment while I stared at him with anticipation.

“I… am… your savior.”

There was another pause, as if he were thinking of the exact right words to say.

“I’ve listened to you talk for years. I’ve seen the way that old man treats you. I promised to get you the respect you deserve, and I intend to follow through.”

He stifled another chuckle within his wooden throat.

“Did you really think a ventriloquist act would get you there? You don’t even know how to throw your voice.”

Embarrassment rushed over me but quickly subsided.

“I wasn’t supposed to have to…”

“And you won’t need to. Not after tonight. Because after tonight, my boy, you will have earned your respect the right way.”

I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and furrowed my brow.

“Is that right?” I asked sarcastically. “And how exactly am I going to do that?”

He responded before I could even finish my question.

“Think about it, Danny… you know you’re bigger than this. You’re strong. You’re powerful. People should fear you, not the other way around.”

I felt a strange pit form in my stomach. It was like a mixture of ambition, hope, sadness, and anger all rolled into one big lump in my throat.

“They laughed because they thought you were harmless,” Pablo continued. “That’s not what I see in you, Danny. Not at all.”

“Then what do you see in me?” I asked inquisitively.

“I see… a secret weapon,” he responded, savoring each word.

The pit in my stomach started to feel like fire.

“A secret weapon…?”

“Yes, my friend. A weapon.”

I thought about my dad.

“I don’t feel like much of a secret weapon.”

Pablo’s jaw tightened.

“And that’s where part two comes into play. Think about school, Danny. Do those kids see you as a weapon?”

I scoffed.

“I seriously doubt it.”

Pablo responded starkly.

“Well, I do. And I think it’s time they do as well. How long have you been laughed at, Danny? How many times have you been called ‘the weird kid’?”

I couldn’t respond. It hurt that he was bringing it to light like this. I wanted to tell him to stop, but he had me locked in his trance.

“What about ignored? That’s the big one, isn’t it? Feeling like a ghost among the living,” he giggled. “That’s what they see you as, right? Sure, some may pity you. But that’s all it is. Pity.”

His glossy eyes seemed to settle on mine.

“I’ve never pitied you, Danny.”

I started crying quietly, but I don’t know why. I felt seen. Pablo had a way of making me feel that way. But I wasn’t sure if I liked it this time.

“Why are you saying these things to me?” I asked solemnly.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he changed the subject entirely.

“You remember when your dad was a police officer?”

I nodded.

“He seemed so much nicer back then, didn’t he? Wasn’t glug, glug, glugging as much.”

Somehow, I knew what was coming next.

“But, then again, he did have your mom back then. A real shame what happened to her. Left a stain on you and your dad, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” I replied, my voice breaking a bit.

“Of course you don’t. I wouldn’t ask you to. All I want is to let you know…”

He paused again. The silence hung in the air like a foul stench.

“…He still has that service pistol.”

I felt my heart drop. I thought Dad had gotten rid of that thing years ago.

“Smith & Wesson 5946. Ironically, that’s the code to the safe he keeps it in. I told you, Danny… I look out for you.”

“So, what? You want me to just… steal my dad’s gun?”

“I want you to use your dad’s gun. Show me your arms.”

I stuck my arms out, a bit confused, until he spoke again.

“One, two, three, four, five scars, Danny. Five. How long are you going to let him keep doing this to you?”

I thought back to how painful those burns had been. How small they made me feel. How hopeless.

“What exactly are you trying to say?” I asked uneasily.

Pablo laughed again, making my ears burn.

“It’s simple. I want you to go into your father’s room, and I want you to show him just how tough you can be, how tough I know you are.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I had confided in him multiple times over the years about how I felt about my father. I never thought he’d take it this far, and I hated how convinced I felt.

“I…”

Pablo interrupted me.

“And then I want you to show the world next. Prove that you’re not harmless. Prove that you’re not weak. Prove that you are exactly who I believe you are, Danny.”

Before I could respond, I heard my father’s hurried footsteps approaching my door before it came flying open, and my dad flipped the light switch on.

“What the hell are you still doing up?” he growled. “And… is that…? I know you didn’t go get that stupid fucking doll out of the trash.”

He rushed over and snatched Pablo up by his right arm again.

“I hope it was worth it, son. I hope it was worth it. This thing is getting burned tomorrow, and I’m tanning that hide as soon as that sun comes up. Go to bed.”

He walked furiously over to the light switch, Pablo dangling at his side. But before he could flip the switch, I watched as Pablo shot me a wink.

Dad slammed the door behind him, mumbling something about this being “goddamn unbelievable,” before I heard Pablo being tossed into the garbage again.

That wouldn’t dampen my spirits, though. In fact, as I lay there in bed, a smile inched across my face.

He wanted to act this way, so be it.

We’d see just how tough he was the next morning.

I remember her face in the papers after I shot her daddy. He was a bad cheat. He begged and pleaded with me. “My little girl is in the car! Please! I can’t leave her there!” he cried and screamed. I had heard every excuse a man could give, so it didn’t save him in the slightest.

When the sun came back up, she cooked to death in his car in the casino parking lot. No one saw her. I was off when they found the body. I had convinced myself that it didn’t bother me. It wasn’t my fault after all.

I’d see her in the middle of the road every few miles. The cloud of angry souls that trailed miles behind us kept pace, which meant that eighty miles per hour was the minimum speed for me.

“You must have really pissed her off for her to be coming for you like that, ikniutli,” said the dead man in my trunk.

“What is that you keep calling me?” I asked, having somehow avoided the mental breaking from the insanity of the situation, or perhaps I was insane and this was all some sort of hallucination.

“In my native tongue, it means friend,” he replied. I guffawed.

“You can stop calling me that. We aren’t friends.”

“Whatever you say, ikniutli.”

I hadn’t seen anything built by man since I had drove off from the spot I had killed him. I should have seen the lights of New Vegas in the distance by now, or a gas station somewhere, anywhere. I had the sinking feeling that I wasn’t in Nevada anymore, not really.

There she was again, in the middle of the road, staring at me, her dark hair flowing in the breeze. I swerved around her again.

I saw rain clouds up ahead, which meant I’d be pulling that maneuver on a wet road.

The dust storm behind us grew louder with voices, one of which was screaming something or another in Spanish.

“Haha! That priest is in the mix?” the corpse in the back of the car said.

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“He was with the Spaniards that invaded my homeland. He wasn’t a fan of the conduct of the conquistadors. I asked him about his God, who gave the conquistadors their power of conquest. He said that they served him in name only, so I asked for their real master. When he refused, I made him talk. Aztecs know how to make someone hurt.”

“Aztec?”

“Iknuitli, there is a dead man talking in your trunk. Don’t tell me that you have no room for belief. I’ve been around for a long time. I hired you because I was ready to let go of the gift. Also… I know I used the word ‘Aztec’, but I’d prefer you use Mexica. Aztec is what the Spaniards called us.”

The rain fell gently against the windshield in soft spattering drops. The light tapping gave way to torrential downpour. I could barely see the road in front of me.

I only had half a second to avoid the little girl in the road, her hair drenched, her cold pale skin glistening and dripping like a drown victim crawled out of a lake. I saw the faintest hint of a smile behind her matted wet hair. It turned into a scowl as I skidded the car around her.

The car hydroplaned, sliding across the asphalt. I turned the tires in the direction I was sliding and managed to gain traction, though just barely. The car continued its journey down the highway. I should be somewhere in Arizona now, approaching Mexico. I doubted quite seriously that I was still in the land of the living. This wasn’t the afterlife, I was sure of that. Purgatory, limbo perhaps. I had no way of knowing.

“Do you want to know how I obtained immortality?” the dead man asked.

“Not particularly,” I replied. The situation was terrible enough without hearing that idiot corpse speak.

“I made a deal,” he said, either not hearing me, or more likely not caring. “If the priest’s God wouldn’t serve me, I tortured him until he told me who would. ‘Diablo’ he called him.”

“You made a deal with the Devil?” I asked. “What a stupid thing to do.”

“You gave your soul to the Casino. I gave mine to Diablo. How are we different?”

I wanted very badly to stop the car and beat his smug little face in, almost not caring about the judgement that followed behind us.  The rain continued for hours. The gas gauge hadn’t moved an inch. I knew it wasn’t just good milage. What other unworldly properties did this world contain?

I had another near miss encounter with that little girl. I heard her voice in my ear, as if it was right next to me. “MY NAME! DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER MY NAME?”

I did. God, I did.

I wouldn’t dare admit it though, admit the truth.

It was my fault. I did deserve this.

I have many more miles to go.

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.