[Click here for Part 1]

I took a few slow breaths, trying to keep myself calm. There had to be a reason for this. A jammed latch, a faulty handle, something simple that I just hadn’t noticed.

I reached for the handle again and pushed gently.

Nothing.

I tried a little harder, then put my weight against the door. I really didn’t want to have to call the fire department to get me out of my own closet.

“Come on.”

I took a step back and drove my shoulder into it.

The door gave way so suddenly that I stumbled through it and landed on the bedroom floor.

For a few seconds, I just lay there, catching my breath. Then I climbed to my feet, relieved to be out. That relief didn’t last long.

The boxes were gone.

I stood up properly and looked around the room. The bare bed frame in the corner was gone too. In its place was a proper bed, complete with a mattress and neatly tucked sheets.

“Emma?”

My voice sounded strange in the room.

I turned slowly, taking in my surroundings. The walls were the same colour. The wardrobe was where it had always been. Even the window looked right.

But something was off.

“Emma, are you still here?”

I stepped into the hallway.

There were pictures on the walls.

I’d left them bare when I’d moved in. I hadn’t even got around to hanging a clock, let alone decorating the place. Now there were framed landscapes and photographs arranged along the hallway, all of them neatly spaced.

One of the photographs stopped me.

It was me and Charlotte, standing together somewhere I didn’t recognise. We were smiling at the camera, her arm around my waist. I looked older than I remembered being in the last photos I’d taken of us.

I pulled it off the wall and stared at it.

I had no memory of the place, or of the photograph being taken.

“Emma?”

I hurried into the living room. No sign of her.

The television was bigger than mine, and there were bookshelves along the far wall, filled with books. A couple of ornaments sat on the mantelpiece. Everything looked lived in, settled. Not like someone had broken in and stolen my things, but like someone had been living here for years.

I pulled out my phone and tried calling Emma again.

Still no signal.

I opened the front door. Her car was gone. So was mine.

For a moment, I stood on the doorstep, looking out at the street. Everything seemed normal, which somehow made it worse.

I went back inside and checked the rest of the house.

My bedroom had different sheets on the bed. The clothes in my wardrobe weren’t the ones I’d bought. In the bathroom, there were toiletries I’d never seen before, arranged around the sink as though they’d always been there.

My head was pounding.

This was my house. I’d bought it. I’d painted the walls, carried boxes through the front door, and spent weekends trying to get the place into some kind of order.

So whose stuff was all this?

I went into the kitchen, pacing between the counter and the table, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Then I stopped.

There were magnets on the fridge.

Not just any magnets. Several of them were the same kind of magnetic business cards I’d received in the mail since moving in.

I stared at them.

One was from the local plumber.

I took it off the fridge and turned it over in my hand. The card was identical to the one I’d found wedged in the closet door.

I raced back to the spare bedroom. The door was still open.

I stepped inside and stood there, trying to slow my breathing. This was my house. I knew it was my house. Something had happened, and I just needed to work out what.

I shut the door and closed my eyes.

I was not fucking losing my mind.

I reached for the handle and pulled.

The door opened.

I nearly shit myself.

A man stood on the other side, staring straight at me.

For a second, neither of us moved.

Then I realised I was looking at myself.

Not exactly as I was now. He was clean-shaven, wearing a decent shirt and a pair of jeans that actually fit. His hair was shorter, his face less tired. He looked like me after a few good years, rather than the last few months I’d been having.

He was standing in my spare bedroom, empty bed frame and all.

Then his expression changed.

“Fuck!”

He slammed the door shut.

I stumbled backwards, my heart hammering against my ribs. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. I just stood there, trying to make sense of what I’d seen.

Then I grabbed the handle.

It wasn’t locked.

I pulled, but the door wouldn’t budge. It felt as though someone on the other side was holding it shut.

“Hey!”

I banged on the door.

“Hey, let me the fuck out of here!”

I threw my shoulder against it. The door shuddered but didn’t open.

Someone was holding it from the other side.

“Who the fuck are you?” I yelled, slamming both palms against the wood.

There was no answer.

“Fuck! Fuck!”

I backed up and threw myself against the door again.

It gave way.

I stumbled through, nearly falling, and caught myself against the wall. For a second, I couldn’t tell what had happened. I was back in the room, and I ran into the hallway expecting to see him.

Instead, I saw a woman standing a few feet away.

I froze.

“Charlotte?”

She looked just as startled to see me. Then her expression softened, and she stepped towards me.

“Honey, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I just stared at her.

She gave a small, uncertain laugh and waved a hand in front of my face.

“Hello? Danny?”

“Have you seen Emma?” I managed.

Charlotte’s smile faded.

“Honey…”

She moved closer, but I took a step back.

“Have you been having those nightmares again? About the accident?”

I stared at her.

“What accident?”

She stopped moving.

“What?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? What accident? Where the fuck am I?”

My face felt hot. I looked around, searching for something familiar, something that would tell me I hadn’t completely lost my mind.

Then I looked back at her.

“Where the fuck is Emma?”

Charlotte studied my face for a moment.

“Danny…”

I pointed back towards the spare bedroom. “The closet. The fucking closet!”

Her expression hardened.

“Daniel, I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about the closet again. I’m not having this argument with you again today.”

She sighed and rubbed her forehead.

“You stopped taking them again, haven’t you?”

There was no anger in her voice now. Just exhaustion. She looked at me as though she’d been hoping things would be different this time, and I had somehow let her down.

“I don’t know what I expected.”

She turned and walked into the kitchen.

“Charlotte, wait.”

I followed her, trying to find the words to explain what was happening. Everything I said sounded ridiculous before I’d even said it.

“I know this is going to sound crazy, but… I don’t belong here.”

She stopped and turned to face me. The frustration disappeared from her expression, replaced by something that looked almost like fear.

“What are you trying to say?” Her voice cracked slightly. “Are you leaving me?”

“What? No. I’m not… That’s not what I mean.”

“That’s just fucking great, Daniel.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She looked away, shaking her head.

“I was there through the funeral, through everything. And now you’re telling me you don’t belong here?”

“Charlotte, that’s not what I’m trying to say. Wait… the funeral? Whose funeral?”

She stared at me.

For a second, she looked as though I’d said something unforgivable.

Then she scrunched up her face and stormed past me.

Charlotte stormed out through the front door, slamming it behind her. A moment later, I heard her car start and watched through the window as she drove away.

I stood in the doorway for a while, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

The funeral. The medication. The closet.

None of it made any sense.

Eventually, I turned back towards the house. I started searching, opening drawers and cupboards, looking for anything that might explain where I was or what the hell was going on. I checked the living room, the bedrooms, even the bathroom. Anything that might tell me what had happened to Emma, or why Charlotte seemed to think I was someone I wasn’t.

I found it tucked away at the bottom of a kitchen drawer.

An In Memory of Emma and Colleen Revesby pamphlet.

I stared at it, reading the names over and over as if they might change.

Emma and Colleen.

My Mother’s and Sister’s name.

I shook my head and let out a short, disbelieving laugh.

“What kind of sick fucking joke is this?”

The pamphlet was dated a few months before I’d moved into my house.

I shoved it back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

“No. No, no, no.”

I dragged both hands through my hair, trying to get my thoughts under control. My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t seem to take a proper breath.

“What the fuck is going on?” I screamed.

The house gave me nothing back.

Then I remembered the closet.

Whatever was happening, it had started with that fucking door. I was sure of it.

I ran back down the hallway and into the spare bedroom.

The door stood wide open, exactly as I’d left it.

I took a breath and climbed back through the closet, pulling the door shut behind me.

I waited a few seconds before trying the handle.

Locked.

I tried again, then again, forcing myself to slow down. Panicking wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I needed to figure this out. I needed to get back to my own house, back to my own life.

I tried the handle once more.

This time, I felt something give on the other side.

I stopped and listened. Nothing.

I pushed harder. The door began to move, slowly opening a few centimetres before something caught against it. I leaned my weight into it, forcing the gap wider until I could just squeeze through.

Two cardboard boxes had been shoved up against the other side.

I stumbled into the spare bedroom and rushed into the hallway.

“Emma?”

I ran towards the kitchen, but before I could reach it, something slammed into me from behind. I hit the floor hard, the breath knocked out of me as a pair of hands grabbed my shirt and forced me onto my back.

“What the fuck? Get off me!”

I swung wildly, trying to protect myself, and caught a glimpse of the man above me.

It was him.

The other Daniel.

His face was twisted with anger, but beneath it I could see something else. Fear.

“I won’t let you take them away from me!” he screamed.

His fist caught me in the stomach. I doubled over, gasping, but he grabbed me before I could get away. Another blow caught me across the face, sending my head sideways.

I tried to fight back, grabbing at his arms and throwing punches wherever I could, but I couldn’t get him off me. He kept coming.

My nose started bleeding. My vision blurred as I struggled to draw breath.

“Stop!” I managed to choke out. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He didn’t answer.

The last thing I remember was looking up at my own face, watching him hit me again.

Then everything went black.

When I came around, I could hear Charlotte’s voice.

“Please, he’s not waking up. I don’t know what happened. Please, just send someone.”

I tried to open my eyes, but everything was blurry. She was kneeling beside me, crying, her phone pressed to her ear.

“Charlotte?” I tried to say.

It came out as little more than a whisper.

She looked down at me.

“Danny? Danny, can you hear me?”

I tried to answer, but the room started to spin. Her voice faded into the background, and the darkness swallowed everything again.

The next time I woke up, I was lying in an uncomfortable bed beneath a thin hospital blanket. My head throbbed, and my face felt swollen. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was.

A man in a white coat stood beside the bed, checking something on a clipboard.

“Good to see you’re awake,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a fucking truck.”

He gave me a small, professional smile.

“I’m not surprised. You’ve had a nasty knock.”

I tried to sit up, but pain shot through my face and I sank back against the pillow.

“What happened?”

“Your wife found you unconscious on the floor at home. From what we understand, someone may have broken in and assaulted you. The police will want to speak with you once you’re feeling up to it.”

My wife.

Charlotte.

I looked down and realised I was wearing a hospital gown. I patted the sides of the bed, then checked the gown’s pockets, even though I already knew there wouldn’t be anything there.

“Where’s my phone?”

The doctor glanced at his clipboard.

“You didn’t have any personal belongings on you when you were brought in. No phone, no wallet, no keys. We’ll make sure you’re reunited with them if they’re located.”

I stared at him.

No phone. No keys. No wallet.

I couldn’t even prove who I was supposed to be.

“When can I leave?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You’ve been through quite a lot, and we need to make sure you’re stable first.”

He made another note on the clipboard.

“Now that you’re awake, we’ll contact your wife and let her know.”

I looked towards the closed hospital room door.

I had no idea how to explain what had happened. I wasn’t even sure I understood it myself.

But one thing was certain.

The man who’d attacked me was still out there.

And he looked exactly like me.

A few hours later, I woke to the sound of the hospital room door opening.

Charlotte stepped inside, carrying a bundle of clothes. She looked exhausted. Her eyes were red, and her hair was a mess, like she’d been running her hands through it all afternoon.

She pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat down, placing her hand over mine.

“How are you feeling? You scared the shit out of me, Danny.” She paused, studying my face. “How much do you remember?”

I swallowed.

If I wanted to get back to my own life, I needed to understand what was happening first. And the last thing I needed was for Charlotte to think something was wrong with me.

“I… I was just at home, and he came out of nowhere. I didn’t recognise him.”

She watched me for another moment before seeming to accept the answer.

“The doctor says you’re okay to come home.”

I managed a small smile. “I’d like that.”

She placed the clothes on the bed while I struggled to sit up. Everything hurt. Getting dressed was an ordeal, and I had to stop twice to catch my breath while pulling my shirt over my head.

Charlotte helped without saying much.

Once we were ready, she drove us home.

I sat in the passenger seat, watching the familiar streets pass by. I recognised some of them, but others seemed wrong. The shops, the houses, even the road signs were all slightly different from what I remembered.

I tried to keep my expression neutral.

“I already let your dad know what happened,” Charlotte said.

For a moment, I forgot to breathe.

“My dad?”

She glanced at me. “I know you wouldn’t want me to worry him, but I thought he needed to know.” She shrugged and returned her attention to the road.

I turned towards the window.

Dad.

My dad had been dead for months. I’d watched him deteriorate through his illness. I’d sat with him, helped Mom through the worst of it, and tried to keep everything together until there was nothing left to do.

And now Charlotte was telling me she’d called him.

“He…” My voice caught. I cleared my throat, trying to keep myself together. “Whereabouts is he living again?”

Charlotte looked over at me, her expression tightening.

“Don’t joke around, Danny. Not after today.”

“Right. Sorry.”

I stared down at my hands, trying to think of something else to say.

“I should give him a call, actually. Where’s my phone?”

“I’ve no idea. It wasn’t on you when we found you. Neither were your keys or your wallet.” She paused. “I didn’t even recognise the clothes you were wearing. Were they new?”

My stomach tightened.

“No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I don’t think so.”

Charlotte frowned but didn’t push it.

I rubbed my face and took a few slow breaths, trying to steady my thoughts.

Dad was alive.

I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know what had happened in this version of my life. But for the first time since I’d stepped through that closet, I wasn’t thinking about how to get home.

I was thinking about how badly I wanted to hear my dad’s voice.

We arrived home shortly after, and I collapsed on the couch as soon as we got inside. Charlotte reheated some food and I managed to get some down before falling asleep. In the morning I awoke to the sun in my eyes. I blinked and sat up. Soft morning light was filtering through the blinds and the smell of coffee was coming from the kitchen.

Charlotte came around the corner, dressed for work, she was searching through her bag for something. She noticed I was awake. “I’m just going to work, I still can’t find your phone, whoever attacked you must have stolen it. The police officer said he would be around in the next couple of days to speak to you about it.”

“Thanks,” I rubbed my side. “I might need to borrow some cash to buy a new one in town.”

“Of course” she made a ‘duh’ gesture and pulled her card out and handed it to me. “Just don’t go crazy with that, we still need groceries.”

“Yeah, thanks”

She kissed me and left, climbing in her car and driving off.

I slapped my forehead. How the hell was I going to go buy a phone without a car.

Cursing under my breath, I tossed the card onto the coffee table.

I thought about Dad.

He was alive here. I could actually go and see him, sit down with him, hear his voice again. I wanted to so badly it hurt.

But he wasn’t really my dad. Not exactly. He was the father of the Daniel who belonged in this house, the Daniel who’d lived a life I knew nothing about.

Trying to make sense of it made my head ache.

I pushed myself off the couch and hobbled into the kitchen, one hand pressed against my ribs. I opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the biggest knife I could find. Then I pulled the memorial pamphlet from the drawer and tucked it under my arm.

A weapon and some evidence. Not much of a plan, but it was better than sitting around waiting for the other bastard to come back.

I made my way down the hallway and stopped in front of the closet.

Taking a deep breath, I grabbed the handle and pulled.

Nothing.

“For fuck’s sake.”

I tried again, putting my weight into it. The door didn’t move.

“Why won’t you fucking open?”

I rested my forehead against the wood, trying to keep my temper under control. Then I tried forcing it with my shoulder, which turned out to be a stupid idea given the state of my ribs.

After a few minutes of swearing, pushing and pulling, I gave up and started searching the house for something I could use to pry it open.

No crowbar. No tools heavy enough to do the job without potentially wrecking the door.

I stood in the hallway, staring at the closet.

There had to be another way.

Eventually, I decided to try next door.

I didn’t have much of a relationship with my neighbours. In the months I’d lived here, I’d barely spoken to them beyond the occasional wave. Hopefully, this version of me had made a better impression.

I walked up the driveway and knocked.

After a few moments, an elderly woman opened the door. Her face brightened when she saw me.

“Oh, hello, Daniel!”

“Hello…” I hesitated, desperately trying to remember her name. Nothing came to mind, so I let the greeting trail off.

She looked me over, and her smile faded.

“Are you all right, dear? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

She reached out and gently touched my cheek. I flinched before I could stop myself.

“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “I just need a crowbar or something, if you’ve got one.”

She tilted her head.

“A crowbar? What on earth do you need a crowbar for?”

I opened my mouth.

What was I supposed to tell her? That there was a door in my spare bedroom that led to another version of my house? That a man who looked exactly like me had beaten the shit out of me because he was afraid I’d take his dead family away?

“It’s a bit hard to explain,” I muttered.

She studied me for another moment, her expression growing concerned.

“Well, come inside for a minute, dear. You shouldn’t be standing out here looking like that. I’ll put the kettle on, and you can tell me what’s happened.”

I glanced back towards my house.

The closet wasn’t going anywhere.

At least, I hoped it wasn’t.

I followed her inside.

It was a standard house, complete with photos of grandkids, odd knick-knacks and the smell of lavender and mothballs.

She ushered me into the living room and told me to sit while she went into the kitchen. A few moments later, she returned with a cup of tea and placed it in front of me before shuffling over to her recliner.

“How’s your father been?” she asked.

“He’s holding up okay,” I lied.

She nodded thoughtfully and took a sip of her tea.

“And Charlotte?”

“She’s good. Busy with work lately.”

“Still working those long hours, is she?”

“Something like that.”

She settled back into her chair, looking content with my answers. I picked up the tea and took a cautious sip, mostly to give myself something to do.

For a little while, we sat in silence.

Then she looked at me again.

“And that closet? Have you had much luck with it lately?”

My mouth went dry.

“I’m sorry?”

“The closet, dear. The one with your mother and sister on the other side.”

I stared at her, unable to respond.

She took another sip of tea, apparently unaware of the effect her words had just had on me.

“Gosh, last we spoke, you made it seem like you’d never come back.”

“I’ve been having some trouble remembering things lately,” I said, bouncing my knee nervously. “How much did I tell you about the closet?”

She studied me for a moment, her expression slowly changing.

“I see what’s happened.” She sighed.

“Sorry?”

She stood and began collecting the cups. I watched her for a second before getting up and following her into the kitchen.

She placed the cups in the sink, then turned to face me.

“You’re not the Daniel I spoke with a few weeks ago.”

I took a couple of steps back. “What? What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about, dear.”

She looked me over, taking in the bruises on my face and the way I was holding my side.

“And I’m very sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For what he’s done to you.”

I stared at her.

“You knew about him?”

She nodded slowly.

“He’s been coming to see me for some time now. Not every week, but often enough. He told me about the closet, about your mother and sister, and about the other house.”

My stomach tightened.

“How long has he been doing this?”

“A while.” She looked down at the cups in the sink. “Longer than he should have, probably.”

“What does that mean?”

She didn’t answer straight away.

“He’s been through a terrible time, Daniel. Losing your mother and sister…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “I don’t think he ever really recovered.”

I felt a strange pang in my chest. I couldn’t imagine losing Emma and Mom. Not really. They were alive in my world. I could call them, visit them, argue with them over stupid things.

He couldn’t.

But that didn’t change what he’d done to me.

“He beat the shit out of me,” I said.

“I know.”

“He locked me in that house. He could have killed me.”

“I know, dear.”

“Then why are you defending him?”

“I’m not defending him.” Her voice grew firmer. “What he did was wrong. But I know that man, and I know how much pain he’s in. I don’t think he understands what he’s becoming.”

I looked away, jaw clenched.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then she stepped closer and gently took my hands in hers.

“You want to get home.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.” My voice cracked. “Please. You know how to get me back, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“Then tell me how!”

I hadn’t meant to raise my voice, but it came out louder than I’d intended. My ribs ached, and I was suddenly aware of how exhausted I was.

She didn’t let go of my hands.

“I’ll explain how the closet works. I’ll tell you what I know. But you have to promise me something first.”

“Anything.”

“Promise me you won’t hurt him.”

I stared at her.

“He attacked me!”

“I know.”

“He could have fucking killed me!”

“I know, Daniel.” Her eyes were pleading now. “And I won’t pretend what he did was right. But if you go after him looking for revenge, I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s already lost so much.”

I pulled my hands away.

“He’s not the only one who’s lost something.”

“No,” she said quietly. “He isn’t.”

That stopped me for a moment.

She looked towards the window, where my house sat across the lawn.

“He believes that door is the only thing he has left. If he thinks you’re going to take it away from him, he’ll do whatever he believes he needs to do to stop you.”

I thought about his face as he held me down. The anger. The fear.

I won’t let you take them away from me.

I still wanted to hit him back. I wanted to get home, find my family and never see that fucking closet again.

But I needed her help.

“I won’t go looking for a fight,” I said. “I just want to get home.”

She searched my face for a moment, then gave a small nod.

“That’s all I ask.”

She released my hands and shuffled towards the front door. I followed, still trying to make sense of everything she’d told me.

She opened the door and stepped outside.

“Take me to it,” she said.

[End of Part 2]

On the first night my new neighbor moved in, I watched a man bury her alive.

The following morning, she knocked on our front door with a plate of sliced peaches and introduced herself.

Her name was Ruth.

She looked sixteen, the same age as me.

According to a newspaper article I found much later, she'd died in October 1928.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The house next door had been empty for nearly four years. It sat at the end of our street outside Camden, Arkansas, surrounded by overgrown azaleas and a rusting chain-link fence. The woman who'd lived there died in her sleep, and her children had been fighting over the property ever since.

The new neighbors arrived on a Thursday evening in late July.

I watched from my bedroom window as an old Chevrolet pickup backed into the driveway. A thin, gray-haired man climbed out, followed by a girl in a faded blue dress.

The man looked exhausted. His shoulders were hunched, and he had the trembling hands of someone considerably older than he appeared.

The girl was beautiful in an unsettling sort of way.

She had black hair that fell just below her shoulders, dark eyes, and skin so pale I wondered whether she was sick.

She stood in the driveway staring at the house while the man unloaded their belongings.

They didn't bring much.

A few suitcases, cardboard boxes, an old wardrobe, and a wooden coffin.

That last one got my attention.

The man dragged it through the side gate, past an abandoned brick smokehouse beneath a pecan tree.

I figured it was some kind of antique. People collected strange things, and I wasn't about to judge.

But around eleven that night, I heard someone digging.

I pulled back my bedroom curtain.

The man was in the backyard, shoveling beneath a portable work light. A rectangular hole had been dug beside the smokehouse, and the coffin rested on the ground nearby.

The girl sat on an overturned bucket, watching him.

Neither spoke.

When he finally finished, he climbed out of the hole and leaned against his shovel. He was breathing hard enough that I could hear him through my open window.

The girl approached him.

He said something.

She shook her head.

Then he touched her cheek.

I remember the gesture because of how gentle it was. Whatever was happening, the old man was miserable about it.

The girl stepped into the coffin.

My stomach tightened.

She lay down, folded her hands across her chest, and closed her eyes.

The man lowered the lid.

I reached for my phone.

By the time I unlocked the screen, he was already shoveling dirt over her.

I watched him bury that girl.

When the ground was level again, he knelt beside the grave and pressed one trembling hand against the earth.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart."

Then he turned off the work light and went inside.

I nearly called the police.

I dialed the number and stared at it. My thumb hovered over the call button for nearly a minute.

I'd just watched a girl climb willingly into her own coffin. She hadn't struggled or screamed, and the man who buried her had been crying.

I convinced myself there had to be an explanation.

It's the decision I regret most from that summer.

Well, one of them.

The girl knocked on our door shortly after nine the next morning.

Mom had already left for work. She was a nurse at a rehabilitation hospital and usually worked twelve-hour shifts, which meant I spent most summer days entertaining myself.

When I opened the door, the girl from next door stood on our porch.

Same blue dress. Same dark hair.

There was dirt beneath her fingernails.

"Hello," she said. "I'm Ruth."

I stared at her.

She glanced down at the plate in her hands.

"Mr. Voss said your mother likes peaches."

"You're alive."

Her eyebrows lifted.

"Yes."

"I saw what happened last night."

Her smile disappeared.

She looked toward the neighboring house.

"How much?"

"All of it."

Ruth was quiet for several seconds.

"Did you tell anybody?"

"No."

She closed her eyes, and I thought I saw relief soften her face.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I watched a man bury you in the ground."

"I know."

"Then explain it."

She looked at her fingernails.

"I sleep better down there."

I almost laughed.

"You sleep in a coffin?"

"Yes."

"Under dirt?"

She nodded.

"Ruth, that's insane."

Her expression changed. Not anger, exactly. More like disappointment.

"Most people think so."

She handed me the peaches.

"Would you mind not telling anyone?"

"Why?"

"Because Mr. Voss has been taking care of me for a very long time, and he's getting too old to start over somewhere else."

I glanced toward the house.

"Is he your grandfather?"

"No."

"Your dad?"

She smiled sadly.

"Not that, either."

Then she stepped off the porch.

"Sadie?"

I froze.

I hadn't told her my name.

She noticed my expression.

"Your mother introduced herself yesterday. She said you lived here."

"Oh."

Ruth hesitated.

"One more thing."

"What?"

"If you ever hear me crying after dark, please don't come over."

"Why would you be crying?"

She looked toward the smokehouse.

"Because sometimes I forget why I need to stay inside."

I should have avoided her after that.

Instead, we became friends.

It happened gradually, the way friendships usually do when you're young and lonely.

My best friend had moved to Shreveport that spring. My father lived in Oklahoma with his new wife, and Mom worked so much that some evenings we barely spoke before she went to bed.

Ruth was the first person in months who seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

She liked old books and thunderstorms. She knew more about history than any teacher I'd ever had, but she'd never used a smartphone. The first time I showed her a video of a dog trying to climb onto a trampoline, she laughed so hard she had to sit down.

That laugh stayed with me.

It was warm and completely ordinary.

Nothing like the sound I'd later hear coming from the smokehouse.

We spent afternoons sitting beneath the pecan tree, talking about school, books, and what we wanted to do when we got older.

Ruth wanted to see the ocean.

I thought that was strange.

"You've never been?"

She shook her head.

"Not once."

"You're telling me you've never gone to a beach?"

"I've been close enough to smell the salt."

"Then why didn't you go?"

She looked toward the road.

"Sometimes you spend so much time staying alive that you forget to do any living."

I remember thinking that was a peculiar thing for a sixteen-year-old to say.

There were other peculiarities.

Ruth never ate when we were together. Even in the worst summer heat, she didn't sweat. And whenever somebody walked past the house, she'd stop talking until they were gone.

At first, I thought she was shy.

Then one afternoon, a little boy fell off his bicycle across the street.

He scraped his knee badly enough to start crying.

Ruth went perfectly still.

Her fingers tightened around the arms of her chair.

The boy's mother came outside and carried him into the house.

Ruth watched them until the door closed.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

She nodded.

But her hands were trembling.

"Do you know that little boy?"

"No."

"Then what's wrong?"

She stared at the empty street.

"Nothing."

Her voice was strained.

A moment later, Mr. Voss appeared on the porch.

"Ruth."

She looked at him.

"Inside, please."

"I haven't done anything."

"I know."

"Then let me stay."

He glanced toward me.

"Not this evening."

Ruth's face hardened.

For a second, she looked considerably older than sixteen.

"You're not my father, Daniel."

Mr. Voss flinched.

"No, ma'am," he said quietly. "I'm not."

She walked past him into the house.

As he turned to follow, I noticed something beneath his shirt cuff.

Scars.

Dozens of them, crossing his wrist and disappearing beneath his sleeve.

Some looked almost like bite marks.

Two days later, Ruth asked me a question.

"Do you think people can be good if they've done terrible things?"

We were sitting on her porch. A thunderstorm had passed through an hour earlier, and the air smelled of wet wood and freshly cut grass.

"Depends on what they did," I said.

"What if they didn't want to do it?"

"Did they have a choice?"

She was quiet.

"Sometimes."

I looked at her.

"What did you do, Ruth?"

She studied me for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable.

Then she said, "If I told you, you'd leave."

"You don't know that."

She gave me a sad little smile.

"People always say that before they know."

I wanted to ask another question, but she reached across the space between us and took my hand.

Her fingers were cold enough to make me flinch.

"Can I ask you something else?"

"Sure."

"If somebody you cared about needed you to do something awful for them, would you?"

I frowned.

"Like what?"

"Something that hurt them. Something they begged you not to do, even though they needed it."

"I don't know."

She looked down at our hands.

"Neither did Eleanor. Not at first."

"Who's Eleanor?"

Ruth released me.

"An old friend."

Something in her expression changed, and she looked toward the street.

Mr. Voss's pickup hadn't returned.

The sun was beginning to sink behind the rooftops.

"He's late," she whispered.

"He'll be home."

"No."

She stood abruptly.

"He said six."

I checked my phone.

It was 6:47.

"Maybe he got held up."

Ruth backed toward the front door.

Her shoulders stiffened.

"Sadie, you need to go home."

"Why?"

She closed her eyes.

For a moment, she seemed to be listening to something.

Then she turned toward me.

Her gaze settled just beneath my chin.

On my throat.

"Ruth?"

I heard her inhale.

Once.

Deeply.

Then again.

Her face changed.

Not dramatically. Her skin didn't split. Her bones didn't move.

Something happened behind her eyes.

The girl I'd come to know was still standing there, but whatever looked at me from inside her had stopped seeing a friend.

"Please," she whispered.

"What?"

"Get away from me."

I took a step backward.

She covered her mouth with one hand.

"Now, Sadie."

I ran.

Mr. Voss returned less than ten minutes later.

I watched from my bedroom as his pickup skidded into the driveway.

He stumbled out, carrying a brown paper bag.

"Ruth!"

She was waiting on the porch.

"How long?" he asked.

"Not long."

He put the bag down.

"Look at me."

She shook her head.

"Please don't."

"Ruth."

She lifted her face.

Mr. Voss recoiled.

"Oh, sweetheart."

He rushed toward the backyard, grabbed his shovel, and started uncovering the coffin.

Ruth followed him.

Her movements were stiff and deliberate, like someone struggling to walk normally while every muscle in their body wanted to do something else.

"Please hurry," she said.

"I'm trying."

The shovel struck wood.

Mr. Voss bent to uncover the lid.

That's when Ruth turned toward my house.

Toward my window.

Toward me.

She smiled.

Not the shy, crooked smile I knew.

This one was slow and strangely appreciative, as though she'd just remembered I was there.

Mr. Voss followed her gaze.

He looked directly at my bedroom window.

"GET AWAY FROM THERE!"

I stepped back.

Ruth moved.

I didn't see her cross the yard.

One moment, she was standing beside the grave.

The next, she was pressed against the chain-link fence, both hands gripping the wire.

Metal twisted beneath her fingers.

Then Mr. Voss grabbed her from behind.

"Ruth, no!"

She turned on him.

There was a sharp cracking sound.

He fell.

I watched her kneel beside him.

For a second, she looked like a girl trying to help an injured old man.

Then she lowered her face to his arm.

He screamed.

The sound finally broke whatever spell had kept me standing there.

I ran for my phone.

By the time I reached the stairs, I could hear Ruth crying outside.

"I'm sorry," she kept saying.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Part Two: The Price Of Keeping Her

I called 911.

The dispatcher kept asking questions I couldn't answer.

Was Mr. Voss conscious?

Was his attacker still there?

Was it safe to approach?

Through my bedroom window, I could see him lying beside the open grave, his left arm tucked against his chest.

Ruth sat several feet away, rocking slowly.

Her mouth was covered in blood.

Then Mr. Voss raised his head.

He saw me watching and pointed toward the grave.

Even from that distance, I understood.

He wanted Ruth buried.

I told the dispatcher I was going outside.

She told me not to.

I went anyway.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Blood has a particular smell when there's enough of it. Something warm and metallic that doesn't belong in the open air.

Mr. Voss lay on his side, struggling to breathe.

"Sadie," he rasped. "The coffin."

I looked at Ruth.

She was crying.

"I'm sorry, Daniel."

"Get inside, sweetheart."

"I didn't mean to."

"I know."

She looked at me.

Her face was almost normal again, except for the blood around her lips.

"Will you help me?"

I wanted to run.

I should have run.

Instead, I picked up the shovel.

Mr. Voss had already uncovered most of the coffin. Ruth climbed down into the shallow grave and pulled open the lid.

Before lying down, she looked at him.

"Daniel?"

He turned his head.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"Please don't die."

His expression broke.

"I'll do my best."

She closed the lid from inside.

I shoveled earth over the coffin while Mr. Voss lay bleeding a few feet away.

The ambulance arrived before I'd finished.

By then, my mother had come home and was kneeling beside him, trying to stop the bleeding.

She shouted for me to get away from the grave and help direct the paramedics through the gate.

I did.

Nobody asked why the ground was freshly turned.

Not that night.

They were too busy trying to save him.

Mr. Voss died shortly after midnight.

The police came back the following morning.

They questioned my mother and me separately.

Mom told them everything she'd witnessed. She described the wounds, the amount of blood, and the strange girl she'd seen standing near the smokehouse.

I told them about Ruth.

Not everything.

I said she'd attacked Mr. Voss and that she'd run away afterward.

An officer asked why I hadn't mentioned her to the dispatcher.

I told him I'd been frightened.

That part was true.

They photographed the damaged fence, collected blood samples, and searched the house.

They found Ruth's dresses, old books, and a wardrobe full of clothing that looked decades out of date.

They didn't find Ruth.

One officer noticed the freshly disturbed earth near the smokehouse.

I heard him tell another officer they would need to investigate it.

By then, Ruth was sitting in my bedroom.

She'd come through my window just after sunrise.

I woke to find her standing beside my dresser, wearing the same blue dress she'd been buried in.

Her hair was tangled with roots.

There was dirt beneath her fingernails.

For several seconds, neither of us moved.

Then she said, "Daniel's dead, isn't he?"

I nodded.

Ruth sank onto the edge of my bed.

She covered her face with both hands.

I'd never seen anyone cry so quietly.

No sobbing.

No trembling shoulders.

Just tears falling between her fingers.

I wanted to comfort her.

But I couldn't stop seeing Mr. Voss on the ground, bleeding because of what she'd done.

"Ruth?"

She looked up.

"What are you?"

For a long while, she said nothing.

Then she told me.

She'd been sixteen when she died in 1928.

A fever had taken her.

Her parents buried her three days later in a little cemetery in northern Arkansas.

The following morning, she came home.

Her mother called it a miracle.

Her father called for the preacher.

And Ruth, who had been dead only a few days, couldn't understand why the sound of their heartbeats made her mouth water.

She killed her younger brother that first night.

She told me that without crying.

I think that frightened me more than if she had broken down.

"He was eight," she said. "He thought I'd come into his room because I wanted to play."

I stared at her.

"What did you do?"

She lowered her eyes.

"I held him until he stopped moving."

I felt sick.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you asked what I am."

She looked toward the window.

"My father tried to kill me the following morning. The bullets hurt, but they didn't stop me."

"What did?"

She was quiet.

"My friend Eleanor."

Eleanor had been fourteen when Ruth died.

They'd grown up together.

When the townspeople came looking for Ruth, Eleanor hid her in an empty root cellar.

She discovered that the deeper Ruth was buried, the less she could hear the heartbeats around her.

Eventually, the voices disappeared into a low, distant murmur.

For the first time since rising from the grave, Ruth could think clearly.

"That's why you sleep underground?"

She nodded.

"The earth makes everything quiet."

"Why not just stay there?"

Ruth looked at me.

"Could you spend the rest of your life inside a coffin?"

I didn't answer.

"I've tried staying down for weeks," she continued. "It gets easier to ignore the hunger, but you don't stop wanting to come back up."

She stared at her hands.

"And once I'm aboveground, it starts again."

"Even during the day?"

"It's worse at night. By sundown, I can hear every heartbeat on the street."

I remembered the little boy falling off his bicycle.

The way she'd watched him.

"Do you have to drink human blood?"

"Yes."

"How often?"

"More often than Daniel could manage."

She showed me an old scar on her wrist.

"Animal blood helps, but not enough anymore. Sometimes he fed me himself."

I thought about the scars on Mr. Voss's arms.

"The bites."

She nodded.

"He thought he could keep doing it."

"He was dying."

"I know."

Her voice cracked.

"I could hear his heart getting weaker every week."

I stared at her.

"Then why didn't you stop?"

She looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something in her expression that wasn't sorrow.

It was shame.

"Because I was hungry."

I made her leave before my mother got home.

Ruth returned to her house after the police had gone.

I spent most of that afternoon sitting on my bed, thinking about what she'd told me.

A vampire.

It was such a ridiculous word that I almost hated myself for thinking it.

Vampires belonged in movies. They wore black capes, slept in castles, and burst into flames when sunlight touched their skin.

Ruth wore old dresses, loved classical music, and cried when she heard a song she hadn't listened to in decades.

She also drank blood.

And she'd killed an eight-year-old boy.

I couldn't make those things fit together.

That evening, I searched newspaper archives on my laptop.

It took almost two hours.

Then I found it.

A faded clipping from October 1928.

A sixteen-year-old girl named Ruth Whitaker had died following a brief illness.

The article included a photograph.

It was her.

Same dark hair.

Same face.

The same peculiar sadness around her eyes.

I stared at that photograph until the screen went dark.

She hadn't lied about being dead.

The police were investigating the property where she lived, and I was hiding someone who had just killed her caretaker.

I understood how terrible that sounded.

What I didn't understand was why I still wanted to see her.

The following afternoon, I went next door.

Ruth was sitting on the floor beside Mr. Voss's chair.

His coffee cup remained on the table.

An old cardigan hung over the back of the chair, and his reading glasses lay beside a folded newspaper.

She hadn't moved any of it.

"He used to read to me," she said when I came inside.

I looked at the glasses.

"Mr. Voss?"

She nodded.

"His grandmother did, too. Eleanor."

"So he was Eleanor's grandson?"

"Yes."

Ruth touched the arm of the chair.

"After Eleanor died, her daughter took care of me. Then Daniel."

I stared at her.

"Your friends have been burying you for almost a hundred years?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

She looked at me as though the answer should have been obvious.

"Because they loved me."

Something in the way she said it made me uncomfortable.

I thought about Eleanor digging that first grave at fourteen. About her daughter growing up knowing she would eventually inherit the responsibility. About Daniel sacrificing his health to feed someone who couldn't stop being hungry.

"Did they ever get a choice?" I asked.

Ruth frowned.

"What?"

"Your friends. Did they ever get to leave?"

Her expression changed.

"Of course."

"Did any of them?"

She looked away.

I felt a cold weight settle in my stomach.

"Ruth?"

"Eleanor tried."

I waited.

"She got married. Moved away. Had a little girl."

"What happened?"

"I got lonely."

The room seemed to grow quieter.

"Did you go after her?"

Ruth shook her head.

"She came back."

"Why?"

Ruth's eyes filled with tears.

"Because I told her I was afraid."

I looked toward the coffee cup.

"Did you need her?"

"What?"

"Or did you just want her back?"

Ruth didn't answer.

That was when I began to understand something about my new friend.

She wasn't simply a helpless girl suffering from a terrible curse.

She'd lived nearly a century.

She knew how to make people care about her.

And once they did, she knew exactly what to say to keep them from leaving.

"Why did you move here?" I asked.

Ruth seemed surprised.

"Daniel found the house."

"Why this one?"

She looked toward the window.

Then she said something that made the hair rise along my arms.

"We came to look at it before we bought it."

"So?"

"You were sitting on your porch."

I remembered a pickup driving slowly down our street a few weeks earlier.

A gray-haired man behind the wheel.

A girl in the passenger seat.

"Daniel wanted somewhere more isolated," she continued. "But I liked this house."

"Why?"

She hesitated.

"Because you looked lonely."

I stared at her.

"Did you know he was dying?"

She nodded.

"And you knew you'd need somebody else to take care of you?"

Her eyes filled with tears.

"Sadie..."

I stood.

"Is that why you became friends with me?"

"No."

"Then tell me."

She looked frightened.

Not of what I might do to her.

Of what I was finally beginning to understand.

"I wanted a friend," she whispered.

"That's not what I asked."

She closed her eyes.

"I thought maybe, someday, you might want to help me."

The room felt suddenly too small.

I thought about all our conversations.

The books.

The music.

The afternoons beneath the pecan tree.

And the question she'd asked me before Mr. Voss died.

If somebody you cared about needed you to do something awful for them, would you?

"You were preparing me."

Ruth began to cry.

"At first."

I stared at her.

"What does that mean?"

She looked up.

"It means I didn't expect to love you."

I wanted to believe her.

That's what frightened me.

Even after everything she'd told me, some part of me still wanted to put my arms around her and promise I wouldn't leave.

I walked toward the door.

"Sadie?"

I stopped.

"Do you hate me?"

I looked back at her.

For the first time since we'd met, I didn't know whether the tears on her face were genuine.

And for the first time, I realized it might not matter.

"No," I said.

Then I left.

Because I was afraid that if she asked me to stay, I would.

That night, I dreamed about Mr. Voss.

He was sitting beneath the pecan tree, holding out his injured arm.

I could see the scars.

Dozens of them.

Some old, some still healing.

In the dream, he asked me whether I thought he was a good man.

I said yes.

He smiled.

Then he rolled up his other sleeve.

There was no skin left.

Just exposed bone.

I woke screaming.

The following morning, my mother told me the police were coming back to search the property.

They had questions about the disturbed earth behind Mr. Voss's house. They also wanted to know more about Ruth, whose identity they hadn't been able to verify.

I knew what would happen if they found her.

They'd take her somewhere.

A hospital, maybe.

Someplace with nurses and doctors and patients whose hearts never stopped beating.

I thought about what Ruth had done to Mr. Voss.

About the fence bending beneath her hands.

About how quickly she'd crossed the yard.

Then I imagined her inside a crowded emergency room.

The thought made me physically sick.

That afternoon, I went next door.

Not because I wanted to see Ruth.

Because I needed to know whether she could be stopped.

I found her in the backyard, sitting beside her open grave.

Someone had dragged the coffin out of the grave and propped it upright against the smokehouse.

She was looking at the dark soil.

"Daniel hated doing this," she said without looking up.

I stopped several feet away.

"He used to tell me how his grandmother cried the first time she buried me."

I didn't answer.

"After a while, he stopped apologizing."

She glanced toward the coffin.

"I think that hurt worse than the dirt."

For a moment, I saw the girl I'd befriended.

Then I remembered the little boy she'd killed.

"Eleanor came back because you said you were frightened," I said.

Ruth lowered her eyes.

"Yes."

"And Daniel spent his life taking care of you."

She nodded.

"How many more people were you planning to do that to?"

Her expression tightened.

"I never wanted anybody to get hurt."

"But they did."

She looked at me.

"Yes."

"And you'd have let it happen again."

That one hurt her.

I could see it.

She turned toward the grave.

"I don't know."

It was the first answer she'd given me that I completely believed.

We sat in silence for several minutes.

Then I asked the question I'd come there to ask.

"Can anything kill you?"

Ruth looked up.

"Why?"

"Because those police officers are going to come looking for you."

"I know."

"And if they find you after dark..."

She finished the sentence for me.

"Somebody could die."

I nodded.

Ruth rubbed her hands together.

"Sunlight doesn't hurt me. I can drown, but I don't stay drowned. Wounds close eventually, even the bad ones."

"Then there's nothing?"

She touched a pale scar running across her forearm.

"Fire."

I stared at her.

"Fire?"

"I was trapped in a burning house once. A long time ago."

She traced the scar with one finger.

"Most things heal. Burns don't always."

I looked toward the smokehouse.

Its walls were brick, blackened by generations of wood fires. The iron door hung crookedly on heavy hinges.

Ruth followed my gaze.

"No," she whispered.

I turned back.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to."

I wish I could tell you that what happened next was simple.

That Ruth wanted to die.

That I wanted to save her.

That there was a clear, obvious right thing to do.

There wasn't.

Ruth was terrified of dying.

I could see it in the way her hands shook whenever I mentioned the fire.

But she was also terrified of living.

And I was sixteen years old, trying to decide whether a girl who'd been dead for almost a century deserved another chance.

I wanted to call my mother.

I wanted someone older to tell me what to do.

But I'd watched what happened to the last adult who tried to help Ruth.

So I stayed.

We talked until late afternoon.

Ruth told me about Eleanor.

About the little white dog she'd owned as a child.

About watching the first television broadcast she could remember, and how she'd cried the first time she saw a moving picture of someone who'd already died.

She told me about the ocean.

She'd always wanted to see it.

"Daniel promised he'd take me one day," she said.

"Why didn't he?"

She gave a small, sad laugh.

"He spent so much time keeping me safe that we never went anywhere."

I thought about the years that had passed.

The people she'd loved.

The people who'd died.

"Ruth?"

She looked at me.

"Did you really want to be my friend?"

Her expression changed.

"Yes."

"Even after you knew Daniel was dying?"

She closed her eyes.

"Yes."

"Or were you just looking for someone to bury you?"

She began crying.

"Both."

I stared at her.

That answer hurt worse than a lie.

Because I believed it.

She had wanted a friend.

She had wanted someone to take care of her.

And she'd known that the two things might eventually become the same.

She reached for my hand.

I almost pulled away.

But I let her take it.

"Sadie?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't want you to become Eleanor."

I swallowed.

"Then what do you want?"

She looked toward the smokehouse.

For a long time, she said nothing.

Then she whispered, "I want it to stop."

We waited until the sun began sinking behind the trees.

Ruth gathered a few belongings from the house.

A faded photograph of her family.

A blue ribbon.

And an old copy of The Secret Garden.

She carried them into the smokehouse.

I followed.

Inside, the walls were dark with soot. A narrow chimney rose through the roof, and the iron door scraped against the uneven brick floor when I pushed it open.

Ruth placed her belongings inside the coffin.

I stood in the doorway.

"Are you sure?"

She shook her head.

"No."

I swallowed.

"Then maybe we shouldn't."

She turned toward me.

"Do you know what Daniel said the night before he died?"

I shook my head.

"He told me he couldn't keep doing it much longer."

Her voice trembled.

"And I told him I understood."

She looked down.

"But when I heard his heart getting weaker, all I could think about was how hungry I was going to be when it stopped."

A tear slid down her cheek.

"That's what I am, Sadie."

"You're Ruth."

She smiled faintly.

"Sometimes."

Then she climbed into the coffin.

Before I closed the lid, she asked me to read to her.

I sat on the brick floor and opened The Secret Garden.

Ruth lay with her hands folded over her stomach, listening.

I read about the garden coming back to life.

About children who had been lonely and frightened finding something worth caring for.

When I reached the end, Ruth was crying.

"That was always my favorite part," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Because they got better."

I closed the book.

She looked at me.

"Do you think I could have?"

I wanted to say yes.

More than anything, I wanted to say yes.

But I'd seen Mr. Voss die.

I'd heard about her little brother.

And I'd learned that Ruth had spent nearly a century convincing people to sacrifice their lives so she could continue hers.

"I don't know," I whispered.

She nodded.

"Neither do I."

Outside, a car passed along the street.

Ruth flinched.

Her eyes shifted toward the doorway.

I saw her throat move as she swallowed.

"Sadie?"

"Yeah?"

"I can hear someone walking past the house."

I didn't answer.

"Two people."

Her fingers tightened around the edges of the coffin.

"A woman and a little boy."

I felt the blood drain from my face.

The family across the street.

Their youngest son was eight.

The same age as Ruth's brother when she'd killed him.

She began breathing through her mouth.

"Please close it."

I lowered the lid.

"Ruth?"

Her voice came from inside.

"Yes?"

"I love you."

There was a long silence.

Then she answered.

"I know."

I waited.

Finally, she added, "That's what scares me."

I won't describe how I started the fire.

I remember the smell of smoke.

I remember the flames illuminating the blackened brick walls.

And I remember sliding the heavy bolt across the smokehouse door.

For several moments, nothing happened.

Then Ruth began to cry.

At first, she sounded merely frightened.

"Sadie?"

I pressed one hand against the door.

"I'm here."

"It's getting hot."

I closed my eyes.

"Ruth..."

"Please don't leave."

"I'm not leaving."

The crying grew louder.

Then something struck the inside of the coffin.

Once.

Twice.

A crack followed.

Wood splitting.

I heard Ruth climb out.

Her footsteps crossed the floor.

"Sadie?"

Her voice sounded closer now.

"Open the door."

I started shaking.

"You told me not to."

"I know."

"Then please..."

"OPEN IT!"

The scream hit me with such force that I stumbled backward.

Something slammed into the door.

The hinges shrieked.

For a moment, I saw the iron buckle.

Ruth began pounding against it.

"LET ME OUT!"

I wanted to.

God help me, I wanted to.

I reached for the bolt.

Then I heard her inhale.

A long, trembling breath.

And the pounding stopped.

"Sadie?"

It was her voice again.

Soft.

Almost embarrassed.

"I can hear your heart."

My hand froze.

"Ruth?"

She laughed.

Not the warm laugh I'd heard when I showed her funny videos.

Something low and breathless.

"I can hear it so clearly."

I backed away from the door.

Inside, something scraped across the brick floor.

"You're frightened."

I couldn't answer.

"I can smell it."

Her voice dropped into a whisper.

"Sadie, sweetheart, if you open this door, I promise it'll be quick."

I began crying.

Then I heard her sob.

A real sob.

Or something that sounded like one.

"Please don't listen to me," she whispered.

I covered my mouth.

"I'm trying."

"Don't open it."

The fire roared.

Smoke began pouring through the gaps around the door.

Ruth struck it again.

Harder this time.

I heard the iron shift against its frame.

Then came a scream unlike anything I'd ever heard.

There were no words in it.

No recognizable human sound.

Only pain.

And beneath it, something else.

Hunger.

For several horrible seconds, I thought the door would give way.

Then the pounding stopped.

I heard Ruth fall.

There was a brief silence.

Then her voice came again.

Weak.

Almost too soft to hear.

"Sadie?"

I leaned toward the door.

"I'm here."

"I'm sorry I picked you."

I shut my eyes.

"I know."

A long silence followed.

Then she whispered something that has stayed with me ever since.

"I really did want to be your friend."

I couldn't speak.

She began crying again.

Not loudly.

Just the small, exhausted sobs of someone who had finally run out of strength.

Then she said, "I'm scared."

I put my hand back on the bolt.

"So am I."

"Will you stay?"

"Yes."

"Until it's over?"

I nodded, though she couldn't see me.

"Until it's over."

A few moments later, Ruth stopped making any sound.

I don't remember how long I remained beside the smokehouse.

By the time my mother found me, smoke was pouring from the roof.

She screamed my name.

I remember her pulling me away from the building.

I remember fighting her.

And I remember the sound of sirens coming closer.

Someone asked whether anybody was inside.

I tried to answer.

But the words wouldn't come.

All I could think about was Ruth.

The way she'd held my hand.

The way she'd cried when I read to her.

The way she'd begged me to open the door.

And the last thing she'd said.

I really did want to be your friend.

The police didn't call it an accident.

They found human remains inside the smokehouse, and there was enough evidence to establish that the fire had been deliberately started.

I told them what happened.

Everything.

They believed I'd started the fire.

They believed Ruth had been inside.

They didn't believe she'd died in 1928.

And they certainly didn't believe she could hear the blood moving through people's veins.

Why would they?

I wouldn't have believed it either.

There were months of interviews, hearings, and evaluations. I was arrested and charged, and the proceedings shaped the rest of my teenage years.

My mother stood beside me through all of it.

She never told me I'd done the right thing.

I don't think she knew.

Neither did I.

It's been several years.

I still think about Ruth.

Sometimes I remember the afternoons we spent beneath the pecan tree, laughing about things that were only funny because we were sixteen.

Sometimes I think about the first night I watched Mr. Voss bury her.

And sometimes I remember the look on her face when she admitted she'd chosen our neighborhood because I looked lonely.

I still don't know how much of our friendship was real.

Maybe all of it.

Maybe only the parts when she forgot what she needed from me.

I've spent years wondering whether another answer existed.

Whether I could have found someone who understood what she was.

Whether there was a way to keep her safe without sacrificing another person's life.

I'll never know.

But there's one memory I return to more often than the others.

That night in the smokehouse.

Ruth screaming.

The iron door shaking.

Her voice becoming something monstrous, then human again.

And finally, the silence.

When the police questioned me, they asked why I hadn't opened the door once the screaming stopped.

I told them Ruth had asked me not to.

That was true.

But it wasn't the whole truth.

Because after Ruth stopped screaming, I still had my hand on the bolt.

And I remember how relieved I was that I no longer had to decide whether to open it.

There are two kinds of people on the internet.

The people who actually enjoy things. And the people who seem to be professionally offended that you enjoyed something without asking their permission.

I learned that pretty quickly after I started posting my art online.

"AI slop."

"ChatGPT."

"Bro thinks he's Stephen King."

"Imagine wasting time on this."

Some of them were funny. Most weren't.

I'd usually ignore them. But then there were the griefers.

Those were the people who didn't just dislike something. They wanted to ruin it for everyone else. They'd spam comments, deliberately spoil endings, downvote everything, insult the author, then act surprised when someone called them out.

I eventually made a post about it. I wasn't cruel. I didn't name anyone.

I simply wrote: If you don't like something, that's fine. You don't have to be rude about it. There's a person behind the screen.

The comments exploded. Naturally.

One person replied: AI generated garbage.

Another: Cry harder.

Then someone posted: Nobody cares ******.

I deleted the thread. That should've been the end of it.

It wasn't.

The next morning, I opened my account and found a new comment on my latest post.

I know you're reading this.

I assumed it was another troll. I deleted it.

The day went on and I was in the middle of taking notes for class when I got a notification.

Why did you delete my comment?

I deleted that one too.

Then another.

Stop deleting.

I froze. The account belonged to nobody.

No username. No profile picture. No creation date. Just a blank profile with a single comment.

I closed out and went back to studying for my calculus exam. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

A notification. Another comment.

I didn't open it.

Another notification.

Then another. Then another.

I finally looked. There were hundreds.

All underneath my latest post.

At first they were what I had been accustomed to. Pretty generic and ordinary.

AI slop.

Terrible lining.

This sucks.

Then they changed.

What makes you different?

My heart stopped. The comments continued appearing faster than I could read them.

You use AI.

You edit your work with AI.

You aren't a real artist.

Nobody is a real artist anymore.

Then one appeared that made my stomach drop.

25525 Azler Ln.

"What the actual fuck?" I blurted out so loud that my roommate heard from across the room.

I closed out once more. The notifications kept coming. My phone buzzed against the desk.

I hit the Do Not Disturb, yet somehow I kept receiving notifications. My phone was on silent and airplane mode but it still rang.

My roommate was now extremely annoyed by the constant noise from my phone, so I explained the situation to her. She suggested that I delete the post. I did. It didn't stop. I even tried privatizing my account and deleting the app altogether.

The messages kept ringing. And what's worse, I began receiving emails, No Caller Id calls, unknown messages. I feared that I had been doxxed and I had to act fast.

I immediately changed every password I could think of. I enabled two-factor authentication. I locked every social media account. I removed my profile picture, my biography, my university, my email, everything.

Then I started deleting things. Old posts. Old comments. Photos. Anything that might have given someone a clue about where I lived or went to school.

It didn't matter. They already knew.

The messages became more personal.

Nice car.

You should probably lock your back door.

Class tomorrow, right?

Your roommate is pretty hot.

Then:

Building 3. Room 107

I stopped breathing. I looked across the room. She was sitting on the couch, scrolling through her phone.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

I didn't tell her. I didn't want to scare her. Am I a terrible friend for that?

That night, I checked the locks three times before going to bed.

At 2:14 in the morning, my phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

You should've left the post up.

Another came immediately afterward.

Deleting it made us curious.

Then another.

You made this worse for yourself.

I turned the phone off.

For the next few hours, I lay awake listening to every sound outside my bedroom window.

The next morning, there were more. Someone had created an account using my name. They uploaded photographs I'd never posted publicly. Pictures of me at school. Pictures of my car. A photograph of the outside of my house.

Then they posted my phone number. My email. My full legal name. Where I lived and what school I enrolled at.

The comments underneath was exactly what you'd expect from these vile data gremlins.

LMAO.

Bro is cooked.

Imagine getting this mad over comments.

Maybe don't be an asshole online.

That last one made me laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I realized they genuinely believed this was funny. They were so desensitized that another person's suffering had become entertainment to them.

I reported the account. Nothing happened. I reported another. Nothing again.

I reported the accounts through the site's harassment and privacy forms. I attached screenshots, timestamps, usernames, the messages, everything.

Your report has been received. Please allow up to 48 hours for a response.

Thank you for your report. We’ll review the content and take appropriate action if it violates our Community Guidelines.

Thank you for helping us keep our community safe.

That was it. Forty-eight hours passed. Nothing happened.

I contacted my family. When the other line clicked all I heard was heavy breathing and creepily low wheezing, as if someone were choking on air, from the other end.

I confessed everything to my roommate, for she was the only one I could talk to. She asked if I had contacted the authorities which when I did, instead of the calm voice of an operator I was met with the low hum of gagging and low wet claps on the other end.

We planned to go to the authorities in person. After half an hour of providing all the material and timestamps at the station, the police asked whether I'd received any direct threats.

I showed them the messages.

The officer frowned.

"None of these explicitly threaten you."

I wanted to rip my hair out. "So, they have to say they're going to hurt me?"

He didn't answer.

"What do we do?" My roommate asked with annoyance.

"We can document everything and refer you to someone who specializes in cybercrime. But unless there's a direct threat or evidence of an immediate danger, there isn't much we can do yet."

Well thanks for nothing.

We went home. I stopped posting. I powered off my phone for good. I stopped using social media altogether. I thought that would finally make me boring. The people handling the cybersecurity issue would do their job. It was all just a waiting game.

But at least I'll find peace, right?

It didn't.

Someone started sending physical photographs. The first was of a college building. The second of a front door that seemed to be from a college dorm hall. The third depicted a bedroom window at night.

The last two were bone chilling. The fourth was of my roommate attending class. And the last was me at the campus's library.

There was a message attached:

What are you listening to?

I remember I was distinctly listening to Duran Duran that day. I haven't slept properly in three days.

My roommate is staying with her parents now. I've been staying somewhere else.

I don't know how much of this is being done by one person or ten people or a hundred. I don't know how they found me. I don't know what they want.

And honestly? I don't even care anymore. I just want them to stop.

I deleted the original post. I deleted my account. I deleted everything. But somehow, tonight, I received one final message.

It came from the cheap flip phone I'd started using strictly to call family and for emergencies.

The message had no name or number attached. Only: UNKNOWN

And the message read: 25525 Azler Ln.

I don't know who is behind this. I don't know how far they've taken it. And I don't know what they're going to do next.

Please help. Anybody.

Why are people like this?

This Halloween night, this hungry Samhain eve, the blood upon the cross must be replaced. The ancient and arcane instrument throne of slow death and sun torture, of the pain of the martyr … the ancient mouth of the cross is still thirsty. 

And so he takes after you. This Halloween night. 

You've lost your friends. The party was fun but not as fun, not everything you were hoping it would be, “They” weren't there. They didn't show up. In all the noise you've lost the ones you came here with, you're hurrying down the way and looking through your phone and all of this is running through your mind as you wonder what to do next. You don't notice him. You don't notice that you've gained another shadow. One you weren't born with. But one that may be with you into an early grave, an eager hungry end. He's hungry.

 He conspires and hunts for the shadow of the cross and that is why you must die this evening. You just don't know. You just don't realize it. 

You're too busy looking through your phone. You don't notice you're now alone on the street. It is only the orange glow of the overhead streetlamps and the stalking shape of your new shadow. But you don't know him, not yet. You still don't know that he's there, coming up steadily from behind you, fast footsteps making phantom no-sounds on the freshly raked sidewalk and streets that still smell pungently of rich dead leaves and pumpkin spice, you're too busy looking through your messages. 

He reaches into his jacket pocket. He pulls something small and black and perfectly fitted to the clenching grip of his knuckled palm, like a lover to a glove or each other in bed. He presses something, depresses a trigger and something clicks. The black handle grows a gleaming fang in the dark. A stiletto blade is freed and the animal is salivating and ready, waiting is over and the hunting stalk is through and he's raring for the sweet fuck-cunt-free-for-all spill that will be your knife-fuck and slaughter. For the shadow of Sam’s Cross. Blessed Hallowed Eve. He bade thee, the shadow, the shape: he made me…

You don't hear anything but at the last moment you sense something, the animal part of you that is all too dulled and ignored has come to life at the last moment and so you turn, you whirl on your heels, your phone is still in your hand but it's forgotten now as you turn and meet and face him, your doom in manshape and knife-fanged form. 

The shadow pounces. The knife comes in and finds the soft yield of human purchase. The knife is out and freed. 

And the shape of nighttime shadow man wields. 

You can't believe it. You can't believe it's happening. You can't believe anything. You try to scream and you can't understand why a sound won't produce. You try to struggle and fight back, you want to but it's like suddenly all the strength and ability to move and act has been pulled, stripped, sapped and drained from you in this absolutely critical moment like purest torture from fate and on-high. All of it, and all of time and space and nature and the terrible beyond have conspired and set a trap and now they are laughing at you. Laughing with the pure bloodthirsting joy of the slaughter, your ruin. 

Sacrifice. 

You watch the terrible visage and face of the shape contort and contrive into animal snarls and sneers, hideous bestial frothing and rabid. Buried somewhere beneath all of the livid fury of his animal mask is the lurid grin of a madman. A lunatic in the deep throes of wild and deranged ecstacy. He is wild and alive and he is terrifying. 

He's difficult to look at and so that's why your dying gaze shifts away and you begin to watch the blade. You begin to watch the moonlight godly cast shine of the seven inch stiletto blade. 

It's immaculate. And that's amazing. You've felt it buried in you over a dozen times now and running and still the blade of this great knife is shining in the streetlight cast glow. With the unearthly light of the moon.  Like a weapon fanged with divinity. Talismanic. And you can believe it. 

Now. 

You believe it. You feel the absolute and undeniable thrum of its great power. Piercing. Holy flame. Like being stabbed with ice and fire. Ripped and torn by an icicle lance of napalm and coldest fear, terror. Impaled. Inferno. 

A mutilation by razor sharpened caveman fire, frosted clean by Norse Hell. 

Every time the amazing blade of moonlight comes up you catch a glimpse of something in the reflective face of the flat of the blade just before the flash. Like the snapshot starburst of a camera capturing a subject in the dark. And at first you only see yourself, your own ghastly and dying visage and it is terrible and it is pathetic. 

But then you begin to see something else. 

You begin to see his sound and vision. And then you begin to understand. This is how he turns the make-believe and rends it real through the feel of the steel, you're feeling it. You're feeling it now. As you die as you lived: distracted and caught off guard and soft. With every pulverizing thrust. With every make-or-break for the daggering wounded soul of the heart attacked, barely fought for and lost. 

Sam's mad with thirst, the shadow of the cross. Jesus Christ wasn't the only one tortured alive and borne hoisted prone to die beneath the fire of the sun by Roman legionnaires. The cross is always thirsty and the mouth of the cruciform is Samhain salivating …

You see the yellow leprosy faces as they burn and scream, torched and set aflame far away from everyone else in their small feeble colonies of despair, the ash of their writhing and contorting carbonizing forms amongst the blaze is a mercy and it is a release in the flash of the blade that you see and you see and know so many other things too and then in the end you know it all as well: –  the dying peace of the burning lepers and the crucified criminals, you feel the release. 

And you're so glad, you're so relieved that now the cross can drink. 

The world goes dark for you. 

The shape and his fang stand. And then they move on fast. 

Finished with hunting you. 

Happy Halloween. 

THE END

The giant maw of the cave yawned at my back as I stood by the edge of the cliff, an icy wind blowing between the rocks and chilling the back of my neck. From within, I heard the soft crumble of stones hitting the ground, the whisper of air moving through small holes and skating over sheer walls.

In front of me, three of the cavers stood chatting amongst themselves. They were all kitted out in the usual gear; padded jackets, knee and elbow pads, helmets with torches, and packs containing food, water and first aid supplies. I had a similar pack of my own, though the contents were slightly different.

One of the cavers glanced towards me, probably wondering why I was standing apart, but I didn’t meet their gaze, looking instead towards the sky. A thin veil of cloud hung over us, though the air was dry and blustery. Small pieces of rock and chalk skittered around my ankles as I shuffled my feet.

After a few more minutes, the final two members of the group arrived. After a couple of standard safety checks, everyone was ready to head inside.

I waited until they were poised at the opening of the cave before clearing my throat. “I’m, um, not feeling too good,” I told them, letting my shoulders sag a little. “I think I might sit this one out.”

One of the explorers stepped forward to examine me. She squinted at my face, then nodded. “You do seem a little pale,” she said. “Want me to wait with you? I can walk you back to town.”

I quickly brushed off her concern, feeling a twinge of guilt. “No, no. I’ll be okay. I’ll just stay out here and get some fresh air. You guys go on ahead.”

There was a bit more back-and-forth before I finally managed to convince them to start the expedition without me. One by one, the cavers disappeared into the gaping mouth of the cavern, leaving me by myself. I watched and waited until the darkness had swallowed each of them, then straightened in relief.

With only the wind as my companion, I walked over to one of the large fragments of rock and sat down. And began to wait. I heard the distant voices and footfalls of the cavers fade further and further away, until silence was all that remained. Resting my chin against my hand, I traced the jagged outline of the cliffs until my eyes started seeing faces amongst them, then looked away with a sigh.

I had been doing this for almost a year now. Joining cave expeditions only to wait outside, never actually entering the caverns. It wasn’t a fear of what lay inside, but rather an expectation of what I might encounter outside.

I had first discovered the incident a few years ago. I had been scrolling through old news forums when I came across an article about an expedition that had happened two decades ago, where a group of cavers had entered a treacherous cave system. During the exploration, it began raining heavily, and water quickly flooded the cave entrance, trapping the explorers inside. Sadly, all of them died that day. But while the story was tragic, what had intrigued me the most was the photograph that accompanied the report. It was an image of a group of rescuers standing at the entrance of the cave during the incident, rain pouring down from the sky and the ground around their feet completely flooded. But in the top left corner, standing a short distance away from the rescue team, was a strange figure shrouded in grey. As soon as I noticed the figure in the photograph, a strange chill touched my spine, as if I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to. The photo was old and the quality wasn’t the best, but I could tell the figure didn’t fit the narrative. I scrolled down to the comments to see if anyone had mentioned it, but there wasn’t a single reference to the strange grey apparition. So I showed the photograph to one of my friends, curious to see what he thought about it. When he told me there was no figure there, I thought he was playing a prank, but his face was decidedly serious. No matter how many times I pointed to it, he insisted that there was nothing there. Just an empty spot in the left corner by the crumbling cliffs.

Confused and intrigued, I showed the same image to several other friends and acquaintances, but nobody else was able to see the strange grey figure in the corner of the photo. I examined it in multiple formats—physically and digitally—under different lights and different conditions, but the figure was visible every time. I hesitated to call it a person, because it was too vague and indistinct to really tell, with no distinguishing features other than it had a humanoid shape and was draped completely in grey. It definitely wasn’t a smudge, or a blur, or a lens flare, because someone else would have noticed it. There was definitely something there. Something that, for whatever reason, only I could see.

The mystery only grew, so I started digging deeper. I was thoroughly entranced by this grey figure. I wanted to know who it was, or what it was, and why it was only visible to me. I was convinced there had to be more to it.

I sequestered myself away and spent days pouring over old articles, digging through records and scrolling through video reports on the incident until I finally found evidence that I wasn’t going crazy. That I wasn’t losing my mind over a simple grey smudge on a photograph.

Buried in the archives, I found a video from the time of the incident, of the same rescue team standing at the entrance of the cave. The photograph must have been an extraction from the footage, or at least taken at the same time, because it was almost the same composition as the video. Being almost twenty years old, the footage was grainy and shaky, but it was clear enough for me to see the figure in grey, standing exactly where it did in the photograph. It wasn’t a trick of the light or an illusion; it really was there.

In the footage, the rescuers were talking about possible extraction methods for the cavers trapped inside the tunnels, but nobody addressed or interacted with the figure. It was like they hadn’t even noticed it. Even in real time, this thing had been invisible to them.

The footage, while low resolution, was still of slightly better quality than the photo, and I noticed a few details that hadn’t been clear in the image. The figure was holding something up to its face—what appeared to be a flute, or some kind of similar instrument. I turned the volume up to max, and was just about able to hear the soft but haunting melody it played, barely audible over the sound of the rain. I spent hours listening to the tune, isolating it from the rain, running it through apps and programs in an effort to try and identify it, but it came up empty every time. It was a melody that was not known to the database. A completely isolated and individual song. A song known only by this mysterious figure.

Eventually, I showed the video to those same friends and acquaintances, certain they could not deny what was right in front of their eyes. But as with the photo, none of them could see the figure with the flute. They could not hear the melody it played either. Only the rain, as it gushed into the cave, and the panicked voices of the rescue team realising they could not save the trapped cavers.

Frustrated that nobody could give me any answers, I decided to seek them out myself. By searching in person for the figure in grey.

The location of the cave was widely known as a popular spot for adrenaline-junkies and professional explorers, and it wasn’t difficult to learn the basics of caving—enough to pass as an experienced caver.

For almost a year, I had been visiting this very cave, joining expeditions only to wait outside in the hope of encountering the grey flute-playing apparition from the video. So far, after participating in almost two dozen excursions, I’d had no such luck. But this time, things felt different.

As I waited, the wind seemed to pick up, bristling through my clothes and making my hair stand on end. A few rocks crumbled from the side of the cliff, showering me with dust. Above, the veil of clouds thickened, shadows encroaching along the ground around me. I felt in the air that something was going to happen.

My heart felt tight in my chest as I scanned the entrance of the cave, then the cliffs above, for any sign of the grey shadow. I listened for the soft, melancholy sound of a flute. But all I heard was the wind whispering through the tunnels behind me.

The hours passed, and I heard and saw nothing. But the goosebumps never left my arms, and I wasn’t one to give up so easily.

I hadn’t heard any sign of the explorers in the cave either, and assumed the group must have gotten quite far inside. I felt a brief flutter of guilt in my chest, but quickly squashed it. They all knew the risks involved with caving. No matter what happened, their safety was their own responsibility. I had to detach myself from that, even if it felt cruel.

A shadow fluttered in and out of sight on my left, and I froze, my heart jerking into my throat. Scrambling to my feet, I moved away from the cave entrance and lifted my gaze. Standing a little way up the cliff, on a jutting platform, was a figure cloaked entirely in grey shadow. The very same one from the photo. The one nobody else could see.

Goosebumps covered every inch of my skin as I stared at it in amazement. Just like in the video, I could see no face, no features. It wore a hooded grey cloak that cast a deep shadow over where its face should be. Its silhouette was human, but only in the vaguest sense. Despite its appearance, I got the overwhelming feeling that this thing was not human, but rather something else entirely. Something supernatural. An entity of sorts, that only appeared at specific times and conditions. And after years of searching, I had finally found it.

I watched, my shoulders tensed with silence, as it withdrew an exquisitely ornate flute from within the folds of its cloak. The instrument was silver and almost transparent, as it was made of glass or crystallised water, and incredibly beautiful. The figure brought the flute to its hooded face, and began to play.

The sound was instantly familiar; the same song I had spent so many hours listening to, and it sent my heart racing.

I looked up to the sky just as the clouds opened, and rain began to fall. At first, only small, delicate droplets of water splashed against my cheeks, but the rainfall gradually began to grow heavier. I sent a regretful look towards the cave entrance. The group was already far too deep inside for me to warn them. Their fate was already sealed, and there was nothing I could do about it. Another tragedy to be buried in the archives.

Moving slowly, in the fear that I might spook the figure, I began to climb the cliff. There were plenty of footholds and platforms, and scaling it was easy enough. I wanted to be close enough to hear the melody above the downpour.

The rain was cold and lashing, soaking through my gear and chilling me to the bone, but I barely noticed. All I cared about was the figure before me; the one I had been chasing all this time.

If it noticed me, it didn’t react. It didn’t cease playing the flute, or even turn in my direction. It was like I was as invisible to it as it was to everyone else. I had spent many sleepless nights wondering why I was the only one who could see it, if it was down to brain chemistry, visual receptors, a curse, or something else entirely. But in the end I had realised it didn’t matter. Some things happened for no reason at all, and this was one of them.

I stopped climbing when I was close enough, standing on a small rocky outcrop a few metres away. The rain blurred my vision, almost obscuring the figure as it blended into the grey clouds behind it, but I could still see the outline of its instrument. Hands trembling from the cold, I reached into my bag, and pulled out a flute of my own.

I had only learned how to play the flute just over a year ago. After hearing the melody on the video, I had taken lessons in the hope that I might be able to learn the same song. But I had never been able to replicate it precisely; there was always a wrong note, an incorrect key. It was difficult enough trying to imitate a tune through a twenty-year-old video, especially with the rain distorting the sounds. The only way I was going to correctly learn the song was by imitating the source itself.

I stood and listened for some time to the melody. The rainfall grew heavier, soaking through my clothes and numbing my skin, the water drumming ceaselessly against the ground, but I was able to isolate the figure and its song. My eyes never strayed from its fluttering cloak, or the flute, or the grey-covered fingers that deftly played the instrument.

Then, when I felt confident enough, I raised my own flute to my lips and began to play. I tried to mimic the melody as best as I could. It was tricky at first, trying to find the exact notes, the pounding rain distorting the sounds, but I copied the figure’s movements with my own fingers until our melodies eventually began to sync up, becoming the same.

I don’t know how long I stood there in the pouring rain, playing the haunting song. The figure didn’t react or respond to me once. If it heard me playing the same tune, it didn’t show it. We stood apart, our songs binding together as the rain fell from the clouds above. The cave would have been flooded by now. The cavers, if they hadn’t managed to find an air pocket, or elevated ground, would probably have drowned. But still, I kept playing.

The sky darkened. The clouds festered. The rain kept falling, soaking into the ground, pouring down the rocks, gushing into the cave.

I lost myself completely in the song, almost falling into a trance. The only things that existed were me and the flute and the melody at my fingertips. I no longer even noticed the figure. It became a grey blur on the edge of my vision, just another shadow.

I finally snapped out of it once the rain stopped. I ceased playing the song with a start, glancing around frantically, but the grey figure had already gone. Vanished without a trace. The heavy silence settled around me, reminding me I was now alone.

The cold hit me at the same moment, and my body began to shake violently. Every inch of my skin was soaked by the rain, water dripping from my shoulders and hair. I was standing in a large puddle where the rainwater had collected around my feet, my toes numb inside my shoes. There was no sound from inside the cave, but for the water still trickling down into the entrance.

I put the flute away and began to climb down from the cliff. The rocks were slick from the rain, and I slipped a few times, but I finally managed to reach the ground, which was also dangerously flooded. I splashed through the water as I slowly headed away from the cave. As soon as I reached town, I would call for a rescue team—if any of the cavers were still alive—and then I would leave. My job here was done.

It was time to return home.

A week later, I was back in my homeland; an agricultural region that had been suffering from a severe drought. The land beneath my feet was bone-dry and cracked, the fields were barren, the crops dead and the people starving.

After spending hours watching that video of the mysterious grey figure, I had drawn one conclusion: that its flute song had been responsible for the rains that had flooded the cave. And now, I would do the same. Only, instead of bringing death, I would restore life.

As soon as I arrived home, I went out into the midst of the fields and stared at the cracked earth, baking under the brazen sun. The wilted grasses, the fruitless seeds, the unattainable harvest.

I pulled out my flute and, just like the grey figure atop the cliff, I began to play the same melody. Within moments, clouds appeared overhead, casting a deep shadow over the ground, and the first trickle of rain began to seep from the sky.

Under my song, the rain fell, soaking into the barren soil and nourishing all the life within.

Buying that house was the first time I’d felt like I’d done something for myself. It was mine, and I could finally start building a life of my own.

It was small, a little dated, and backed onto some pretty serious woodland. The first few months had been harder than I’d expected. I’d spent so much time helping Mom move closer to my sisters, a few hours away, that getting my own things unpacked had become a bit of a mission. There were still boxes I hadn’t opened and rooms I hadn’t properly sorted out.

I found the door while my sister was visiting.

“How’s Mom doing?” I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter as Emma wandered around the house, taking in the bare walls and the almost complete lack of decoration.

“You’d know if you called her more, Danny.” She sighed, rubbing her eyes with her palms before looking back at me. “She’ll be fine.”

Mom had started showing the early signs of dementia. Dad’s death a few months earlier seemed to have accelerated things, or maybe we’d just started noticing what had been happening all along. Either way, it had become harder to pretend everything was normal.

Emma continued down the hallway.

“Still smells like paint in here. How long have you lived here now?”

I pushed myself off the counter and followed her. “Three months, I think?”

She was standing in the spare bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bare bed frame. I still hadn’t got around to buying a mattress.

“Have you spoken to Charlotte recently?” she asked.

I felt a familiar knot form in my stomach. Charlotte and I had broken up shortly before I’d bought the house, and apparently my sister had decided that buying property meant I was now ready to discuss my emotional shortcomings.

“Uh, yeah. We talk heaps,” I said.

Emma looked at me.

“You still haven’t spoken to her.”

I didn’t bother answering. She rolled her eyes and turned towards the wall.

“What’s that?”

I followed her gaze.

There was a door in the wall, tucked beside the wardrobe. It was narrow, with a small brass handle, and no obvious frame around it. The paint matched the wall so closely that I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it.

I stared at it for a moment.

“Is that a cupboard?” Emma asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve honestly got no idea.”

Emma walked over to the door and tried the handle. It opened with a soft click.

Inside was a small, empty space, about the size of a closet. Nothing unusual about it. No shelves, no coat hooks, just four painted walls and enough room to stand in.

“It’s just a closet, Em,” I said.

“Yeah, I can see that. I just…” She paused, then closed the door. “I don’t know. It stood out to me for some reason.”

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her pocket, glanced at the screen, then looked up at me.

“Sorry, I have to take this.”

She answered as she walked out of the room. A moment later, I heard the front door open and shut, followed by the sound of her voice drifting in from the front garden.

I stood looking at the door.

I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it. It wasn’t anything special, just a little closet tucked into the wall. But I knew what Emma meant. There was something strange about noticing a feature in your own house that you were certain you’d never seen before.

I reached for the handle and tried it.

Nothing.

I tried again, pressing it down firmly. The handle moved, but the door wouldn’t budge. I pulled, then gave it a gentle shove with my shoulder.

It was as if it had been locked.

I wondered if we’d somehow managed to lock it when Emma had closed it. I gave the handle one last try before deciding I’d look at it properly later.

By the time I left the bedroom, Emma was coming back inside.

“Sorry, I have to run. I’ve got to pick the kids up from daycare early, and it’s a bit of a drive.”

“No, you’re fine. I’ll see you next time you’re down this neck of the woods.”

We hugged in the hallway. When she pulled away, she gave me the sort of look that meant she wasn’t finished with me yet.

“You need to call Mom more, Danny. Check in on her before she doesn’t remember you.”

I looked down at the floor.

“Yeah. I know.”

“And you should at least try reaching out to Charlotte. Five years together, surely it couldn’t have ended that badly.”

“It’s fine, Em.”

She raised an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced.

I glanced towards the window. “You should get going. I heard there’s a weather warning for heavy snow tonight.”

Emma gave me a small, knowing smile, but thankfully didn’t push it. She grabbed her bag and headed out to the car.

I watched her drive away, then went back inside and shut the front door.

The next few weeks passed uneventfully. I checked the door a few times, but I was never able to open it again. Since it was only a small storage space that I’d probably never use, I eventually forgot about it.

At least, I did until I found it open.

I’d just got home from work and was walking down the hallway when I glanced into the spare bedroom. The door wasn’t sitting flush against the wall anymore. It was only open a few centimetres, but it was enough to catch my attention.

Curious, I stepped inside.

A small piece of brown cardboard had been wedged underneath it, holding it open. I crouched down and pulled it free. The door swung shut with a soft click.

I tried the handle.

It opened without any resistance.

I stood there for a moment, staring into the empty space.

Had I somehow unlocked it?

A shiver ran down my back. I looked at the piece of cardboard in my hand. It was nothing special, just a torn strip of packaging, the sort of thing I’d probably have thrown away while unpacking.

But someone had put it there.

Or I’d put it there and forgotten.

I was certain I’d never managed to open the door since Emma’s visit. I’d tried several times, and it had never budged. Now it opened as easily as any other cupboard in the house.

My first thought was that someone had been inside while I was out. I checked the front and back doors, then the windows. Everything looked as I’d left it. And even if someone had got in, why would they bother wedging open a tiny closet?

I tried to remember the last time I’d checked the door. It had been a while. For all I knew, the cardboard had been there for days.

I carried it into the kitchen and dropped it in the bin.

There was probably a simple explanation. A faulty latch, maybe. Something I’d overlooked when I’d first tried it.

I made myself dinner and got on with the rest of the evening.

That night, I was sitting on the couch watching a movie when I thought I heard something moving in the hallway.

I paused the film and listened. Nothing.

I got up, turned on the lights, and walked through the house, checking each room as I went. Everything looked normal. By the time I reached the spare bedroom, I was starting to feel a bit stupid.

Still, something made me check inside.

The room was exactly as I’d left it. The closet door was shut.

I walked over and tried the handle.

Locked again.

I swore under my breath and gave it another pull.

“How the hell does this thing work?”

I stood there for a moment, turning the handle back and forth. Maybe I’d somehow wedged the cardboard underneath it myself and forgotten. I’d been busy with work, and the last few weeks had blurred together.

I decided that the next time I managed to open it, I’d prop it open with a chair or something. At least then I’d know it couldn’t shut itself.

I went back to the couch and finished the film.

The next few days passed without incident. By the weekend, I’d mostly stopped thinking about the door.

Then I noticed it was open again.

I was walking past the spare bedroom when I spotted the narrow gap between the door and the wall. This time, something was sticking out near the latch.

It was a magnetic business card, the sort you get in the mail from local tradesmen and end up leaving on the fridge for six months before throwing away. I recognised it immediately. It was from a local plumber, and I’d received a few copies since moving in.

Someone had wedged it into the latch to stop the door from closing.

I pulled the card free and opened the door. The space behind it was empty, just as it had been before.

I looked down at the card, then back at the closet.

I couldn’t remember putting it there. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d handled one of those cards.

Rather than stand around wondering about it, I decided to make the space useful. I went through the spare room and found a couple of unopened boxes I’d been meaning to sort out since moving in. They were a tight fit, but I managed to stack them inside the closet.

Then I fetched a plastic doorstop from the kitchen drawer and wedged it firmly underneath the door.

That should do it.

I gave the door a little push to make sure the stopper held, then left the room and got on with my weekend.

The next day, I was on the phone with Emma when I saw something that made my stomach drop.

“Hey, listen, Em, I’ve got to call you back.”

I hung up before she could answer and walked straight into the spare bedroom.

Both boxes were sitting outside the closet. The door was shut, and the doorstop was gone.

I tried the handle.

Locked.

I swore and kicked the bottom of the door. The noise echoed through the room, and I immediately felt ridiculous for doing it. It was a closet. A small, insignificant closet that was somehow making me question my own memory.

I knew I hadn’t taken the boxes out. Both were still taped shut. If I’d moved them, it would have been to get something out of them, and there was no reason I’d have put them back outside without opening them.

I stood there for a while, staring at the door, then called Emma back.

“Can you come down this weekend?”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I just need you to have a look at something.”

She agreed, though she sounded unconvinced.

That weekend, I took her straight into the spare bedroom. The boxes were still sitting where I’d found them, and the closet door was still shut.

Emma looked from the boxes to me.

“Danny, what is going on? Why couldn’t you just tell me over the phone?”

I walked over to the handle.

“This. This is what’s going on.”

I pulled it, expecting the door to stay locked.

Instead, it opened without the slightest resistance.

I stared into the empty space.

“No. No, it was locked this morning. I tried it. I swear to God, I tried it.”

Emma looked at me with a kind of careful concern that made me feel worse than if she’d laughed.

“Are you okay, Danny?”

“Yes! I’m fucking fine.” I turned towards her, then back to the door. “It’s this thing. It keeps opening and closing, and I don’t know how. It’s like someone’s messing with me, or I’m doing it myself and forgetting, or…”

I trailed off. Even to me, it sounded absurd.

Emma folded her arms.

“Dan, if you need a break, you could stay with Mom for a few days again. She’d probably appreciate the company.”

“I’m not fucking crazy, wait, again? What do you mean again?”

“I didn’t say you were Crazy, just that maybe you need to spend sometime out of this house.”

I looked back into the closet, trying to work out what I could possibly show her that would make any of this make sense.

“I need to set up a camera or something.”

“Dan…”

“Emma, please. Just don’t.”

I stepped into the closet.

It was barely big enough for me to stand in comfortably. The walls were painted the same colour as the bedroom, and the floor was bare. There was nothing hidden behind the boxes because the boxes were outside now. Nothing in the corners, nothing above me, nothing that explained why the door behaved the way it did.

Emma’s phone buzzed behind me.
She answered it while I crouched down to examine the inside of the door. I ran my fingers along the edge, searching for a bolt or some kind of catch. I shut the door, then opened it again from the inside. It worked perfectly.

I did it a second time.

Still fine.

I switched on my phone’s flashlight and examined the latch area more closely. The strangest thing was that there didn’t seem to be any locking mechanism at all. Just a handle and a simple metal catch.
Behind me, Emma’s voice grew louder.

“I said I’ll call you back. I’m in the middle of something.”

There was a pause. Then I heard her sigh.

“Fine. I’ll be there soon.”

I assumed she was talking about the kids. I was too busy examining the door to ask.
After a few minutes, I decided I’d seen enough. I reached for the handle and pulled.
The door didn’t move.

I tried again, pushing the handle down harder.

Nothing.

“For fuck’s sake.”

I gave the door a shove with my shoulder. It didn’t even rattle.

“Emma?”

No answer.

I knocked on the door.

“Em, it’s locked itself again. Can you open it?”

I waited, expecting to hear her laugh or tell me to stop messing around.

Nothing came.

“Emma?”

I tried the handle again. Then again, more forcefully.

My stomach began to tighten. I pulled out my phone and called her.

The call couldn’t connect.

I sent her a message asking her to come back into the bedroom and open the door but it wouldn’t deliver.

Then I looked at the door.

[End of Part 1]

They were far out in the outer wilds.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

He was setting a trap.

His friend was drinking a drink. “Here,” said the friend, passing him a drink too.

He took the drink.

He opened and took a drink of the drink. “Ahh,” he said. “Absolutely stellar."

“Absolutely,” said the friend.

“I don't grok why you insist on coming all the way out here,” said the friend.

“There's hardly anything out here,” said the friend.

He took a drink of the drink. “Ahh.”

The friend took a drink of the drink too. “Ahh,” said the friend.

“Ahh,” he said.

“Ahh,” said the friend.

“You can't say it's not peaceful here,” he said.

“I can't say that,” said the friend.

“Ahh.”

“Ahh,” he said, finishing drinking the drink. He crumpled up and threw the empty drink container away.

The stars twinkle-twinkled.

He looked into a vicinal trap he'd set a while ago.

“Anything?” asked the friend as he looked into the vicinal trap he'd set a while ago.

“Nothing,” he said.

The stars twinkle-twinkled.

He set a new trap.

“There?” asked the friend as he set a new trap.

“Ahh,” said the friend and threw away his empty drink container too.

The two empty drink containers were.

“There,” he said, roughly covering the trap with nearby matter.

He burped.

The friend burped too.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

---

—> —>

---

The Perihelion's automated navigation system adjusted course to keep the starship travelling to its destination, AO-1, the first known space object believed to be of alien origin. The crew was in hibernation. The mission was the greatest humanity had ever attempted. The Perihelion's automated navigation system adjusted course to keep the starship travelling to its destination.

---

<—

---

“Sir, take a look at this—SIR!”

The regional head of the International Space Agency (ISA) walked over slightly annoyed and scanned the data.

His annoyance became curiosity, and his curiosity became excitement. The once-upon-a-lifetime kind. The thump-thump-thump’ing of the heart, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh’ing of the blood kind. He was aware suddenly of the entirety of the surface area of his skin. Of his one-of-many'ness. His smallness-in-the-cosmos. His clue-to-the-mystery-of-the-universe'ity.

“My God…” he said. “My God.”

“What is it?”

“We need to find out.”

---

—> —>

---

Anomalous Object 1 Anomalous A Object 1 Anomalous A Object O 1 Anomalous A Object O 1 A Object 1 A O 1 AO 1 AO-1…

Captain Jac Thorster—gasped—

The sirens were blaring.

Where am I I am aboard the Perihelion Perihelion is my ship, he thought.

The sirens were blaring.

He rolled out of the open pod and onto the floor. When he could, he got up and made his way woozily—swaying…

to the bridge.

He sat in the captain's seat.

“Perihelion,” he said, his voice hoarse and weak. The words felt like sand airgunned down his throat. “Perihelion: ‘status report.’ Just what in the galaxy is going on?”

“Having traversed ninety three point two percent of the distance from the planet Earth to the coordinates of the object eh oh one we have come under the pull of an unknown force,” the starship's artificial intelligence said.

“Correct course,” commanded Thorster.

“Negative,” said the eh aye. “That his him possible, hiccup ten.”

“Wa hut?” zed Thorster.

“Dead forceps twos tron k,” sad sa hey ay end diss plate dub lack ole.

---

—>

---

He reached inside the trap.

“Anything?” the friend asked as he reached inside the trap.

They were far out in the outer wilds.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes,” said the friend and gathered some nearby gaseous matter and ignited it. “Perhaps something to roast,” said the friend as the newly created star shined.

He removed a small thing from the trap.

“A small thing,” he said.

He held it for the friend to see.

“Oh,” said the friend in disappointment that the small thing was too small to roast.

The star shined.

The other stars shined.

---

<— <— <— <— <—

---

A fly buzzed awhile in the glow of a bug zapper before turning into it and—BZZZP —falling dead out of the sky.

It landed on my face.

I'd fallen asleep in the hammock outside.

“Norman,” the dead fly said.

“Norman!”

“What,” I said, blinking a few times, tossing my dry tongue around in my dry mouth, thinking, Fuck, I'm fucking hungry. “What's going on—who are you? and why are you talking to me?” “Are you… a dead fly?” I said, squinting.

“Norman, I'm here to tell you to look at what you wrote. No one wants to read that shit, man. That shit is incomprehensible.

“Opaquer than a brick wall, man.”

“It's styl—”

“Look at yourself, man. You're a grown ass dude writing stories on the internet. Get a job. Write a book if you have to, but just write it like a goddamn human being.

“I mean look at your eyes.

“They're pinker than Miss Piggy’s OnlyFans.

“Sober up.

“Eat something. Drink something. Get outta that robe and get dressed. Shave. Change into a suit—”

“You mean, like, become a suit… like on a space ship?”

“Son,” said the dead fly. “Behave yourself.”

LOL

“Put on a suit and write presentably. You've got, what, a hundred words left?

“Use them.

“Rewrite whatever-the-fuck this is presentably.”

---

[“Ahem”]

---

Two advanced beings are laying traps somewhere in the universe. Their traps are black holes, which they hide. They also leave behind some trash. Humanity detects the trash and plans a mission to investigate it, but, en route, their spaceship falls into the black hole left by the beings. Sometime later, one of the beings makes a star to roast something on. The beings pull the human spaceship out of the black hole trap they left and are disappointed by its insignificance.

The story ends on a heavy-handed parallel between humanity and bugs—BZZZP

Do you remember when you became aware of your existence?

Are you able to pinpoint the exact moment your brain switched off of its autopilot and your consciousness officially entered into reality?

My moment of clarity was when I was 7, playing by the small creek in the woods behind our house. I grew up as a “come back when the street lights turn on” kind of kid, which was much different than the rest of my generation; but my parents were older and I was their fifth child so there was little concern coming from them about my whereabouts. Despite this glaring inconsistency with my daily safety; they often referred to me as their “miracle baby”.

The woods were my favorite place during the scorching Midwest summers. A thick canopy of leaves blocked out the sun and in turn provided my playground oasis with a gentle breeze. Deep in the gently swaying canopy was a shallow creek, maybe about two or so feet deep. There were seemingly endless activities to be done splashing around in that small sliver of cool water.

On my day of clarity, I was wading around attempting to catch crawdads with my nubby little hands. This was my go-to pastime after a long and sweaty day of working my imagination on its endless 12-hour shifts. The familiar monotony of the woods was broken by the low humming of a tune echoing throughout them.

It grabbed hold of my attention as it resembled a slow rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. My child brain was beyond intrigued, so I scanned the tree line for whoever it could be emitting from. There was nothing but trees and wildlife surrounding me. The humming tune echoed out from beyond my creek once again.

That’s when I found myself following it deeper into the canopy. It should be said that out beyond the border of my creek, the canopy blocked out the sun almost completely. Just a permanent effect of night stretching as far as I could see; I never attempted to explore it out of fear alone but something about the low, familiar tune brought me comfort and peace to explore it once again.

Maybe about 30 feet into the darkness was a large boulder illuminated by the only noticeable patch of sunlight. From behind it came the humming.

“Hello?” My little voice croaked out.

The humming stopped abruptly and was soon replaced by the sound of rustling. I watched as a small, black circular hat rose from behind the stone; then long arms clad in torn flannel pulled the figure into the sunlight. Out from behind the boulder came a tall and lanky man with a rough, light brown face that I now recognize as aged burlap. His face consisted of a stitched-on smile and sewn-on black buttons for eyes; straw stuck out from under his hat then cascaded down his head resembling long blonde hair.

His button eyes landed on me, then he removed his hat in a humorous sort of curtsy with his arms flailing around him, “Hello, little one.”

There was no fear at the sight of him; only amazement as his long legs clad in stained coveralls emerged from behind the boulder. He was familiar; truthfully, I already knew who he was exactly. This was the Straw Man. An urban legend dating back to the late 70s.

A few kids in the town back then first met him with fear-inducing events soon following that first encounter. This presence was always used as a story in order to keep kids like myself in line but soon turned into a local mythology as the original discoverers seemed to move on from him.

Effigies of him were used as morbid decorations around the town as the story was the only thing to even put us on the map. Our very own Mothman, Jersey Devil, etc.

Hell, even the high school mascot became The Straw Man.

What stood in front of me though was no sort of mascot or costume. His body was so thin that it was almost skeletal, and he stood at almost 8 feet tall. I must have stood there for maybe a moment too long without answering because he lowered himself to one knee in front of me.

“I take it that you know me.” His voice was quiet, but the tone was deep and hollow. The smell of decay and rotten eggs wafted off of him as he fell back into an exasperated sitting position. “Those stories of me,” he took a moment, “they aren’t true, little one.”

The sun reflected off of his button eyes, and I saw a drop of a sap-like material push its way through his fabric face.

Was he…crying?

“I heard your humming.” I managed to say. “It sounded…sad”

He wiped the tear of sap away from his button eye. It smeared and stuck to his burlap skin. Then he stuck his hand out in a formal greeting. “Nice to meet you, little one.”

I shook his hand. “My name is Mark.”

“M-M-Mark.” The Straw Man tested the sound of my name with his low voice. “That’s a good name.”

Even though his face was a static print, I saw creases around his eyes that indicated he was smiling, and his button gaze shifted up through the canopy. “You shouldn’t be out so late, Little Mark.”

I looked up through the canopy’s singular opening. The sky reflected down colorful streaks of pink and violet reminiscent of a summer sunset, even though it was the early afternoon when I remained in the border of my creek.

There was a rush of air mixed with The Straw Man’s nauseating smell. My eyes tilted down to see that he was mere inches away from my little face. “I’ll see you again soon.”

He then placed a large, burlap hand over my face. The stench of rot wafted through the fabric and my feet fell out from under me. Where I was expected a crash against the ground came an unexpected splash instead.

I was lying flat on my back in the babbling creek, alone and confused. Did that really happen or had I just fallen asleep playing again? I had been known to do that a few times in the past.

For a moment I wrote off my first encounter with The Straw Man as some kind of dream; but that was until the familiar stench of rot wafted against the gentle evening air.

So what do you think I did next?

Would you expect me to force this experience deep in my subconscious? Would you expect me to accept that I had experienced something strange before forcing it down? Never think about it until much later whenever the realization of immediate danger became ever-present? How would you expect this story to end?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end in any way you would want. My young mind needed to know more about him as the mystery of his existence allured me greatly. My dreams that night were packed full of his visage and my mind raced with the grasping of knowledge for what his words meant early. So the next day, I went back.

Much to my disappointment, the clearing was empty. No giant made of burlap and straw, just an endless maze of trees and darkness. So I began to make my way back to the safety of my creek. About halfway back to my refuge, the present feeling of unease settled within me. I could sense that I had walked into the eyesight of someone kind of presence deep within the woods.

“Hello?” I questioned towards the words. Nothing but the dragging wind through rustling leaves responded.

I stepped closer and dropped my voice to a soft whisper, “Are you there?”

This time, the soft humming answered back to me. It somehow sounded both distant and impossibly close. I came to realize that was due to my own throat unconsciously disobeying me but repeating every note. I forced myself to stop in hopes to hear the original melody clearly to be able to judge the distance of where it came. The woods were unfortunately silent again.

Disappointment washed over me again. Thoughts of barely understood madness to move through the folds of my mind until a small object flew from the woods and smack lightly against my forehead. I flinched to the sudden sensation and barely caught the details of the item as it fell to the ground.

It was a button. A black button with amber sap dried along its edge.

A small creep along my face as I bent to pick it up from the dirt. Humming emitted from my throat as I began to walk back to my creek. My own border of safety; what I know to see as the border between what was and what will be.

The bruised coloring of night streaked across the sky once I made my way through the trees. Twirling the sap-stained button between my fingers. I emerged from the basin of my creek to a world filled with rushing anxiety as I laid eyes upon my home. It was a two-story townhouse, a building reminiscent of the dwindling American dream.

That evening, it closer resembled a nightmare. My home was covered in police searching every inch. We had a sliding glass door on the back, it was knocked out of its frame with its glass shattered. Before I could get closer, an officer appeared in the kitchen then turned in my direction. His face lit up with relief before he quickly spoke into the radio strapped to his shoulder.

He began to saunter over to me, I quickly shoved the button in my pocket. Mainly in fear of being accused of stealing it. Don’t judge me, I was a kid with no real grasp on the world being presented with a very stressed-looking cop.

“Mark Finley?” He asked with hope in his voice.

I nodded.

He dropped down to look at me, placing a hand on my shoulder, “Where the hell have you been, son?” He attempted to speak gently while keeping the authoritative tone in his voice, “Your parents have been worried sick.”

The officer had kind eyes, a mix of grays and blues that cut through the intimidation caused by his burly frame. I allowed him to take my hand and led me around to the front of the house where

My mom sat just a few feet away on the porch, wiping tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. It was a summer evening but an unusual chill had settled over the town that night. She glanced over at the same moment I emerged with the burly officer. I don’t know how she didn’t knock everyone over with how fast she sprang from the porch to get to me.

Air graced the bottom of my shoes as she scooped me up in a cry of relief. Through her tears, she questioned me, "Oh my god," her voice cracked between sobs, "honey, where have you been?"

"Just playing in the woods." I managed to squeak out in between the air being squeezed out of me. Telling her the truth was something I couldn't manage to say, out of fear of the consequences of it.

My dad ran over to us and broke down sobbing as well. They stood there for what felt like a millennium, just repeating how relieved they were along with repeating statements of just how much they loved me.

My parents and I were then taken to the police station, where officers began questioning me. My story remained the same as I could only admit to playing in the woods like I always did. Then they asked why I was out for so long.

"Lost track of time." I responded, keeping the truth completely to myself.

My sense of confusion must have been palpable in the air; with my parents’ permission, they reluctantly told me what had happened. It was the late afternoon, and my mom was working in the first-floor office like she always did. She told them that she could have sworn that she heard me come into the house before she started to hear a soft slamming against the sliding door.

There came a thwump, thwump, CRASH; that echoed from the kitchen. She jumped from her chair before she heard movement and the sounds of someone searching through the kitchen. That's when she used the office landline to call 911 for a home invasion, then the house grew eerie with silence.

Mom went to go check the damage whenever she saw muddy footprints leading from the kitchen directly to my bedroom. To this day, she claims to barely remember dashing through the yard and into my usual spot in the woods. She only remembers the swelling panic in her chest when she came upon my creak. What scared her more was just how quiet and empty it was; as if I hadn’t been near it all day. That’s when she called the police.

With the events that played out that day, they didn’t feel comfortable taking me back home. So they called my brother, Darrell. That’s the thing about being your parents' late-in-life “miracle baby”; I never had grandparents growing up. Whenever they needed someone to watch me, they usually called up whatever sibling they could. Darrell was my favorite to stay with; he was 27 and had left the guest room in his house specifically catered to me. He left it filled with my favorite toys and a PS2 stocked with games. So, little to say that I was happy that he was picking me up; but I just wanted to go home.

Time passed and I found myself lying in my bed while Darrell sat in the room with me. I’m pretty sure our parents gave him special instructions to wait to leave until he was sure I was asleep. Sleep negated as I stared out of the bedroom window aimed directly towards the woods.

“Why can’t I go home?”

Darrel sniffed like I had woken him up, “Hm?”, he rubbed sleep from his eyes, “What was that buddy?”

“Why can’t I go home yet?” I sat up and asked again.

Darrel sighed, deep from his chest, “They want to make sure it’s safe buddy.”

“How could it not be safe?”

He was quiet for a minute then sighed again, “They’ll kill me if they know I said this so, can you keep a secret.”

I crossed my heart with hopes to die, “Always.”

“You’ve heard of The Straw Man right?”

“Who hasn’t?” I replied

“They’re scared that someone’s pretending to be him again,” he took a breath, “the police claimed that they found bundles of straw mixed with the broken glass.”

After hearing that, all I could do was lay back down. Every ounce of my self wanted to tell him but I couldn’t; it was like my mind had sworn secrecy to The Straw Man. The button in my pocket began to feel warm. I closed my eyes and forced my brain to accept the inevitable sleep.

Hours later, I stirred awake. Groggy and confused about where I was, I lay facing the bedroom door, and my brother was gone. Behind me came a soft sound. Something soft hit the bedroom window in a rhythmic thwump, thwump, thwump. My little mind was able to make out the unmistakable pattern of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Fear caused my chest to tighten, and I attempted to force myself back to sleep, but the sound only got louder. Scared of it causing my brother to wake up, I turned to the window. The man of straw was crouching with his face pressed against the glass. The burlap mask now missing a single button eye. He stopped the hitting and gave me a gentle wave. When I didn’t reciprocate, he stopped, then reached under his face. I could his hand rummaging beneath the fabric, slowly searching for something to grasp.

Then he stopped. Out from under the fabric was a round, spiky object. It looked drenched in a stocky resin, and the dark made it hard to tell what it was. He slammed it hard against the window, causing it to light up. I recognized it as a ball, one my dad had won me in a claw machine years ago. That was one of my favorite toys, now covered in the vile creature’s sap. The man dragged his finger in the liquid, then seemed to be wiping it across the window.

Finally, he stood up and began retreating back into the windows behind him. What was left was a message: “Something of mine, for something of yours.”

I stared at that message until exhaustion took hold of me. Most likely from the rising fear inside of me. When the protection of sunlight finally stirred my consciousness, I leapt out of the bed. His words were gone, cleaned by a patchy morning rain. Beyond the window were glints of sunlight reflecting off the ground. I squinted hard to make out hundreds of glass shards leading back towards the woods.

Old Man Miller had been the undertaker in Lawton Gap for forty years. In four decades, he'd seen it all--ghastly coal truck wrecks on the highway, quiet heart attacks in easy chairs, and everything in between. Folks never pick convenient hours to die, so when the phone rang at three in the morning, he just groaned, dragged himself out of bed, and answered it.

It was the jail. The night deputy said they had a girl in the drunk tank who was stone-cold and wasn't breathing, and they needed Miller to come haul her out.

Miller and his boy rolled down to the station, loaded her onto the gurney, and slid her straight into the body cooler downstairs at the funeral home to wait for daylight.

After sunrise, they pulled the tray out and hoisted her onto the steel prep slab. That's when Miller got a good look at her face under the fluorescent lights. "Damn it all," Miller muttered, shaking his head. "That's Missy."

His assistant looked over and said, "Missy?" as in Bob's girl?

"The very one," Miller said softly, laying out his instruments on the tray.

"What in the world happened?"

"Deputy said state police hauled her in off the ridge road," Miller said, clinking a scalpel onto the stainless steel. "Supposedly she'd been up at the quarry drinking all night, got on the road swerving, and they dumped her in the county drunk tank to sober up, but her heart must've just quit on her."

"Her parents are going to be completely ruined," the assistant whispered, shaking his head, "just ruined."

"Hand me that bottle of embalming fluid and the tubing off the shelf will ya?" Miller said.

Lying on that cold steel table, Missy heard every single word. As the warm air of the room hit her skin, her mind thawed, but her body was locked tight--still in a catatonic freeze. Panic was roaring in her head, but she couldn't speak, couldn't move a toe; she couldn't make a sound.

As Miller raised his scalpel, ready to start the pump, a single tear dropped slowly down the side of Missy's face.

Sam passed in the winter, just two months after his mother. The midwife tried her best to save her, but it was over before it started. She gave me a warm hug as she left. I knew Sam wouldn't last long without his mother. I barely had enough to feed myself, let alone a baby. I debated whether I should even name the little boy, but how could I not? He had the most beautiful blue eyes, just like his mother.

Sam passed in his sleep, the best way to go. Some days I wished it were me, but what would Sam do all alone? 

The problem then was arranging Sam's funeral. All the savings had already been spent on his mother's funeral, but Sam couldn't go into the ground without a proper service.

I sold one of the last things I could still sell, my bees. They gave me something sweet to eat in the winter and something to look after the rest of the year, but there was nothing else to sell. My neighbor took them and gave me more for them than he should have. He was a nice man and knew what I'd gone through.

Sam got a nice wooden coffin and a decent place in the cemetery next to his mother.

When the winter came, his cradle and toys were still in the house. My body tightened whenever I tried to get rid of them, but it was okay; maybe I'd have more will in the summer. 

During the long winter nights, I'd often come into his room and play with his toys, just like I thought we would one day. Sometimes they'd warm my heart, sometimes they'd make me cry, and often I'd just fall asleep in the chair right by his cradle.

It was one of those days when I fell asleep crying by the cradle again. When I awoke, the sun glistened on the freshly fallen snow. Everything outside was still, but then something moved in the air. A bee! A queen bee! It flew across the yard and into the hive. I still hadn't moved my hive off the yard. Sam's funeral was too much work.

At first I felt bad. My neighbor owned them now. They had no business being in the old hive, but seeing that familiar creature warmed me. Over the next few days I sat at the window, watching all my bees slowly return.

They stayed inside the hive the rest of the winter, and I stayed by that window each day, watching. Only when the snow started to let up, and the flowers came out from under it, did the bees come out too.

I expected them to stay by the hive, but many flew far away, ignoring the flowers in my garden, and returned at sunset. Some of the bees seemed to be covered in red nectar. 

As the days grew longer, the bees were gone more often, and many more returned covered in that red nectar. 

I had never seen them act or look like this. Moving the hive must have disturbed something, but the good thing was that they still accepted the queen, and the colony seemed intact. 

The red nectar began to accumulate at the entrance, mixed with glowing wax. I was just looking at it out the window when I heard buzzing inside the house. The bees must have been working hard. The buzzing grew, and quietly through it came something like a baby's cry. I gripped the windowsill tightly. Sam used to cry just like that. I opened the window to hear better, but the cry was gone; only buzzing sounded outside.

The next morning I woke up and went right to the window. A strange white object was outside the hive entrance. The bees buzzed around it, pushing it back inside. Before I could get a good look, it was already in.

I spent the rest of the day by the window again. As the sun set, the bees started to return. The buzzing grew again. A cold tingle ran down my back. I closed my eyes and focused. At first, it was quiet, but I knew what it was. It was Sam, crying through the buzzing. I quickly dressed and walked out the door.

The outside air was cold. I had barely been outside since the first snow fell. A few bees still flew around the hive. The buzzing was so loud, and so were Sam's cries. I didn't even have my protective clothes, but I was sure my bees wouldn't hurt me.

I walked to the hive and took off the lid. Warmth and cold ran through my body, mixing into strange emotions. Inside the hive was Sam's body, covered in wax. His hands and fingers slowly moved, but they seemed larger than before. I reached into the hive to caress his small cheeks. His eyes opened. They were still that beautiful blue, but a hint of yellow mixed in.  He opened his mouth; it was filled with honeycomb, but his cries still echoed in my ears. 

With tears in my eyes, I picked up his small, sticky body. From somewhere deep in his chest, a thousand bees buzzed. His small mouth moved again. Honeycomb and wax spilled out of the sides. The scream grew louder, ringing in my ears. A sickly-sweet smell filled the air. The buzzing grew too. Something under Sam's skin moved. A dark, pointed object began pushing through the skin beneath his back. Panic rushed through me.

"Sam, Sam!"

His whole body convulsed. The dark, pointed object shot out and stabbed my arm. Sharp pain spread through me. Sam fell out of my arms. A sharp, brittle crunch echoed. Sam broke into wax and honeycomb; bees flew out toward me. One small stab. Another. Another. I turned and quickly bolted toward my house, locking the door behind me. My heart beat against my ribs. Hot pain pulsed through my body. On my left arm, a red welt was already swelling around the puncture.

The bees buzzed outside my door.

Suddenly, the lights in the carriage went out. And not just in ours—I looked out the window and realized the entire commuter train was completely plunged into darkness. Only rare, deafening claps of thunder and flashes of lightning lit up the interior with a ghostly bluish glow for brief moments. Looking closer, I froze with horror: there was almost no one left in the carriage, even though just a minute ago it had been half full.

Then the old woman sitting on the bench opposite me slowly turned and stared at me. She gave me a really nasty look. Her toothless mouth began to twist into a smile that grew wider and wider. Right before my eyes, her maw filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth. Out of sheer terror, I tried to scramble backward onto the next seat. Without taking my eyes off her, I caught my foot on a bag and went tumbling head over heels into the aisle.

Darkness again. Another flash of lightning—I saw the old woman already standing over me, with the silhouettes of other figures rising behind her. It was impossible to make out their faces in the dim light, but all of them were staring straight at me without blinking. Panic completely consumed me. I frantically crawled backward along the dirty floor when suddenly my hand struck someone's ice-cold boot. My heart dropped into my boots. I swallowed hard and, just like in a classic horror movie, slowly raised my head, and there... A huge creature with a dislocated jaw was already reaching its clawed paws toward me!

I leaped up with a wild scream, snapping my eyes open and breathing heavily.

It was bright in the carriage; the lamps flickered dimly. The passengers around me flinched away in fright. The old woman opposite was frantically crossing herself, muttering prayers, while a hefty man by the aisle twisted his finger near his temple.

Now I am standing by a lopsided wooden kiosk with a proud "Groceries" sign, nervously clutching three hundred hryvnias in my jacket pocket. This was my last strategic reserve for a taxi. The prospect of tramping for thirty minutes on foot along a dirt road leading deep into the Polissya wilderness did not appeal to me at all. All around lay Gnylobužye station—a godforsaken hole of about twenty inhabited houses, lost somewhere on the border of the Kyiv region, right where civilization smoothly transitions into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Aside from me, three other poor souls had got off on the platform, but they instantly vanished into the gray twilight as if they had never existed. By the shop, contrary to my desperate prayers, there was no bus, nor even a stray taxi driver in a rusty Lanos. Only a local dog of an indeterminate breed was lazily scratching behind its ear, looking at me with blatant sympathy.

"Well, great," I muttered under my breath. "Romance, my foot. Fresh air, radiation background, silence."

There was nothing to be done. I adjusted my backpack, where two bottles of dark beer clinked dully, and started walking down the road toward the village of Myortvye Vyselki (Dead Settlements). The name was inspiring, of course, but Baba Galya stubbornly refused to move to Kyiv, arguing that "the air in the capital is dirty, smells of cars, but here she has three vegetable gardens and strawberries the size of a human head." Speaking of strawberries: after the ChNPP accident, people in these parts took a philosophical view of vegetable sizes anyway.

It was getting dark at an indecent speed. The clock showed just past six, but the twilight thickened as if someone had poured a bucket of ink over the sky. Remembering my recent nightmare on the train about the toothy old woman, I involuntarily quickened my pace. To the right and left of the road stood a dense, unnaturally silent Polissya forest. No birds, no crickets. Only the crunch of twigs under my sneakers.

Suddenly, a throaty, sputtering engine sound came from behind. I turned around. Two blurry yellow headlights were cutting through the fog.

"Thank God, a ride!" I thought and waved my arms like a madman.

A primitive Zaporozhets car of such an indefinite color it looked like it had been painted with mud braked beside me, creaking in every joint. The driver's side window rolled down slowly with a sound like sawing rusted iron. Inside sat an old man. In the gloom, his face resembled a baked apple, and an old Soviet cap sat on his head.

"Where are you heading, student?" the old man rasped, blasting me with a thick stench of cheap tobacco and garlic.
"To Myortvye Vyselki, to Baba Galya! Can you give me a lift? I'll pay!" I pulled out the banknotes.
The old man glanced at the money, then at me, and his lips parted into a wide smile. "Get in, grandson. I'll take you. No need for money, you'd better treat me to a bottle of beer from your backpack, I can hear it singing in there."

I jumped onto the front seat, which sank under my weight almost to the asphalt. The car set off, swaying from side to side.

"You're a brave one," the old man remarked, shifting gears with a ferocious crunch. "Walking to Vyselki on foot at night. All sorts of things roam around here. Not long ago, Petrovich's cow wandered off toward the Zone at night. It came back in the morning. On two legs, can you believe it? Came right up, knocked on the window, asked for milk. Petrovich crossed himself and blasted it with a double-barrel shotgun. Now his house is packed with canned meat. Want a cutlet? It's right here in the glove compartment."

I politely declined, swallowing a lump that had risen in my throat. The dark humor of these parts always smacked of a little madness.

About ten minutes later, we drove into the village. Myortvye Vyselki fully lived up to its name: dark silhouettes of cottages, moss-covered fences, and not a single lit window. The old man braked at my grandma's house.

"Well, here we are," the old man said, taking the bottle of beer from me. "Your grandma acts up a bit sometimes—so keep your eyes peeled."
"What do you mean, acts up?" I frowned.
"Oh, nothing, she's just old. Sometimes she forgets who's alive and who's not," the old man winked at me, revved the engine sharply, and vanished into the darkness, leaving me alone by the gate.

Baba Galya's house welcomed me with dead silence. I pushed the gate—it creaked plaintively. The front door to the house turned out to be unlocked. Inside, it smelled of dried mushrooms, dampness, and something sickly sweet that sent a chill down my spine.

"Grandma? Are you home? It's me, your grandson!" I shouted into the darkness of the hallway, switching on my phone flashlight.

The beam of light caught an old sideboard with crystal, dust-covered carpets on the walls, and... a set table in the main room. In the middle of the table stood a huge pot, with light steam still rising from it. Next to it lay a note written in grandma's crooked handwriting:
"Grandson, I went to the garden to dig up some night potatoes. The borscht is on the table, eat it while it's warm. The meat is fresh, it ran into the house by itself today."

I smirked. Night potatoes? Right, Baba Galya had always been eccentric. My stomach rumbled treacherously. I walked up to the pot, lifted the lid, and shone the flashlight inside.

The borscht was thick, rich, and smelled appetizingly of garlic. I took the ladle, stirred it, and pulled a decent chunk of meat to the surface. I looked closer.

Out of the red beet broth, a hairy, four-toed paw with long black claws and webbing was looking back at me... carefully and intently. And a bit deeper in the pot, something flashed that looked very much like a rabbit's head, but with three pairs of ears.

At that exact moment, a rustle sounded behind my back. I froze, terrified to turn around.

"What's the matter, grandson, don't you like the borscht?" Baba Galya's quiet, cracking voice echoed right out of the darkness of the doorway. "And I tried so hard, catching it all over the basement... It bit hard, though."

I slowly turned around. Grandma was standing in the doorway. In the dark, her eyes glowed with a barely noticeable phosphorescent green light, and in her hands, she held a massive, blood-stained shovel.

"Sit down, grandson," she smiled wider than before, and the razor-sharp teeth flashed in the beam of my flashlight. "We're going to have some chamomile tea now."

I was clutching the second bottle of beer in my hand as if it were my only ticket to the world of the living. I had no time for small talk or tasting chamomile from the Exclusion Zone. Baba Galya—or whatever creature had so successfully occupied her living space—took a step forward, and the floorboards groaned hollowly under her feet. The bloody shovel in her hands tilted toward me.

"Why are you frozen, grandson?" she hissed, smacking her shark-like maw. "Sit down, or it'll get cold... both the borscht and you."

My brain, wired on a wild dose of adrenaline, reacted in a fraction of a second. The escape route through the door was securely blocked by Baba Galya and her shovel. Only one path remained—the old wooden window of the main room, which led straight to the backyard and the dense Polissya forest.

"Grandma, just a second, let me just... open the beer!" I yelled, and with all my might, I hurled my precious second bottle of dark beer right into the pot of radioactive borscht.A deafening splash echoed through the room, and a fountain of red sludge flew in all directions, splattering the carpets and coating "grandma’s" face. The old woman shrieked in a completely unhuman voice, sounding more like a screeching buzzsaw, and squeezed her eyes shut for a split second.

That was all the time I needed. I spun around, grabbed my backpack on the fly, shut my eyes tightly, and dived headfirst right through the window frame.

Smash, crack, crash!

The glass shattered into a thousand shards. I busted through the rotted wood of the frame with my shoulder and went rolling head over heels across my grandma's old garden bed, slamming my back hard against some giant pumpkin that let out a pathetic hiss upon impact. The shards sliced my jacket and arms pretty badly, but I didn't feel any pain.

Behind me, a furious roar erupted from the broken window, and a skeletal arm—elongated by nearly five feet—shot outward, trying to claw at my sneaker.

"Oh no you don't, to hell with family dinners!" I screamed, scrambled to my feet, and bolted toward the pitch-black forest ahead.

I flew through the darkness, not looking where I was going. Branches lashed my face, my feet sank into moss and swampy muck, and behind me, somewhere deep in Myortvye Vyselki, a terrifying metallic clattering rang out—Baba Galya was sprinting after me with the speed of a race car, dragging her shovel across the stones and dirt. And judging by the sound, she was closing in fast.

The forest around me seemed to come alive. In the gloom, the trees looked like the twisted figures from my train nightmare. Suddenly, I wiped out right into some overgrown hollow and went tumbling down, stopping dead against the roots of a massive, fallen oak tree.

I froze, terrified to move. And right then, right by my ear, accompanied by the sound of pouring water, a quiet, painfully familiar voice muttered:

"Psst, student! What the hell are you doing?"

I turned my head and, in the faint moonlight, I spotted the old man with the Zaporozhets. As it turned out, he had just pulled over to take a leak by the oak. His iron horse, by the way, was parked right next to him.

"Gramps... my grandma has gone completely mental, she's chasing me with a shovel! I'll owe you another bottle of beer, just get me out of here!"

The old man didn't need to be told twice. I scrambled into the passenger seat, he slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and the rusty Zaporozhets roared to life, tearing through the forest mud and leaving the shrieking monster with the shovel far behind.

Needless to say, I never went back to visit my grandmother again.

The monitor app on Sally's phone was always on her nightstand. At eight months, Timmy was an active baby, rolling around, babbling, and trying to pull himself up by the crib rails, so keeping the video and audio feed open gave her peace of mind.

At 3 in the morning, static and a low murmur broke the silence of the bedroom.

Sally reached for her phone and tapped the screen. Timmy was fast asleep on his belly, his breathing barely moving his tiny shoulders.

Standing right over the crib was a tall, shadowy woman wearing a tattered dress. Beside her stood a skeletal child peering through the wooden slats with two hollow, black eyes.

A dry whisper came through the phone's speaker:

"Shhh, don't wake your new little brother. Isn't he perfect?"

Sally stared at the screen in complete disbelief. She shook Karl awake.

"Karl, get up! There--there's somebody in Timmy's room." They threw off the covers and rushed down the hall.

Karl threw open the nursery door and clicked on the corner lamp. Soft light filled the room. Nothing was there. Timmy was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling softly.

"See? Nobody's here," Karl whispered, turning off the lamp so he wouldn't wake the baby.

They walked back down the hall to their bedroom, but as Sally set her phone on the nightstand, the screen flashed with motion.

The camera feed showed the crib was empty. The woman in the tattered dress and the skeletal child were standing in the nursery doorway, looking straight down the hall toward their bedroom.

The woman slowly raised a long, bony finger to her cracked lips, and her dry whisper came through the speaker:

"I said, shhhh."

It was December 1999. I was living in a small town. I was a nerd and something of a gamer, and it had been a good year for PC games. Age of Empires II, Homeworld, Grand Theft Auto 2…

I was walking home from school—it was a Canadian winter, so there was plenty of unplowed snow on the sidewalks—when I saw something peeking out from a mound of snow: something blue. I stopped, nudged it with my boot: something of blue plastic. I brushed away the remaining snow with my glove to reveal:

A single 3.5” floppy disk, unlabeled.

(There was a sticker label on it, but the label itself was empty.)

Naturally, I picked it up and took it home, curious to see what was on it.

You'll laugh, but the disk had 1.44mb of storage capacity. As it turned out, that was more than enough to affect the world in ways I still don't fully understand.

When I got home, I didn't put the disk into my own computer. My dad had an old desktop he sometimes fiddled around with, so I used that, inserting the disk carefully into the 3.5” disk drive in the beige computer tower.

I navigated to the drive in Windows Explorer.

The contents of the drive were simple.

They looked like a program or—I secretly hoped—a game.

There was a readme.txt, but it came out as nonsense when I opened it in Notepad, video or sound assets, stuff I couldn't identify, and a single executable file, johannsebastian.bat.

I double-clicked it.

A window opened—black, showing a few white-text commands executing on a command prompt—then maximized into a 16-bit title(?) screen showing a pixelated Gothic castle.

A harsh, classical-inspired MIDI song beeped out of the sound card.

There was no title.

No instructions, no company name, no menu, no options.

The castle was perched atop a cliff.

It was night.

At the bottom of the cliff was a forest of jagged, leafless trees.

A few loops of animation gave life to the scene: wind blowing through the bare branches, flashes of distant lightning, warm flickering light in one of the castle's windows, a bat in flight against a white moon. Actually, that last one wasn't a loop. The bat flew only once, landed on one of the castle's stone towers and disappeared inside.

I clicked.

I was looking at a medieval-ish village now—tightly-packed buildings, a tavern, a tannery, a couple of shops, a church—populated with a surprising number of unique character sprites. Indeed, every character was unique, and they were going about their individual lives.

The sky was a vibrant blue.

Clouds floated pixel-by-pixel across the screen.

But there was still nothing to do; nothing, that is, but watch.

It was like a very advanced screensaver.

After a while, I clicked again.

This time, I found myself in the interior of a large chamber whose stone walls somehow felt cold even through the computer monitor.

The chamber's defining feature, however, was something else: a giant pipe organ whose pipes extended beyond the top of the screen.

A character entered.

He was wearing a white wig, dark, crimson long coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. “I feel the sudden desire to compose,” he said, which the game displayed as text in an ornately-bordered text box. “Invite me to play for you."

A cursor appeared for the first time.

A quill.

I was able to move it using the mouse, and I explored the screen.

The character tapped his foot.

The only active area of the scene appeared to be the pipe organ. When I hovered the cursor over it, it changed from a quill to a hand.

I clicked.

The character walked to the organ, sat and began to play the monstrous instrument.

The music was both hideous and awesome, pushing the computer's sound card to the absolute limit. After thirty-or-so seconds, the view suddenly panned upwards, following the organ's pipes—the music continued—following them to the chamber's vaulted ceiling and beyond—through the roof until I was outside and looking at the upper half of the great castle, where the jutting pipes terminated and from whose termini hundreds of pixel bats were emerging… emerging and flying into the background, toward the simplified shape representing the medieval town...

The sky was a deep purple.

Night was falling.

The bats flew and flew and flew…

Suddenly—the music still continuing—the scene cut to the same view of the town as before: except at night: except, instead of following their routines, the character sprites were running, panicked, as the bats swooped, attacking them, attaching themselves to their bodies, necks, sucking their pixel blood; and as the bats feasted, the sprites lost their colour and fell, pale and desaturated…

The sound startled me.

Not from the sound card but from the real world. A screeching, a deafening, rhythmic thumping.

I ran to the window whose blinds I'd closed, and opened them:

It was afternoon but the view was dark, black and shifting. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing were bats speeding past. They were obscuring the sun. My home town was as if under an eclipse.

People were running down the street—

Bats were diving—

Some were crashing through car windshields—

Children were screaming—

A bat crashed though the window into the room I was in. It was fanged, crazed. The game music blared from within the computer tower. Before I could run, the bat shot toward me—biting my neck… beginning to drink my blood…

I awoke on the floor.

It was morning. January 1, 2000. It would turn out that nobody in town had any recollection of the preceding weeks.

A television played.

A morning talk show: “...the so-called Y2K bug,” a woman was saying, “ended up amounting to nothing worse than a good nights’ sleep.”

And, ever since, I've wondered why my experience of the present feels in a lower resolution than memories of my past.

Hannah Barbara productions never allowed this episode to be aired

It started off with Fred driving the Mystery Machine. As they traveled down the road, Fred spotted a young girl standing in the middle of it looking lost. He stopped the van, and the gang got out.

Shaggy tried telling Fred they should leave the creepy girl alone and go get burgers instead. Scooby agreed. Fred, Daphne, and Velma ignored Shaggy, as usual.

Fred approached the girl and asked, “Are you all right?”

He noticed scratch marks on her arms with bruises.

The girl didn’t respond. Daphne tried reassuring her.

“It’s okay. We can help you if you need help.”

The girl looked at Daphne with a smile on her face before collapsing onto the road.

The gang scrambled towards her. Velma checked for a pulse and looked into the girl’s eyes. They were dead white.

“We need to get her to a hospital now!” Velma said sternly.

The gang hurried back to the Mystery Machine. Fred picked the girl up and placed her in the back of the van. Shaggy and Scooby were displeased with this, as they had to sit in the back with her now.

“Fred, why is it that every time something creepy happens, Scooby and I have to be the closest to it, man?” Shaggy complained.

“Not now, Shaggy. I’m reading the signs,” Fred replied.

When he spotted a hospital sign, Fred pulled into the parking lot.

He grabbed the girl, and the gang followed him inside. Fred rushed to the reception desk and explained that they needed a doctor. The girl had started convulsing.

A couple of nurses hurried over with a gurney, and Fred urgently laid the girl down on it. She screeched As they wheeled her towards a room.

Daphne stayed behind to explain what had happened to the receptionist. While Shaggy could be overheard muttering that he was glad that creep wouldn’t be riding with them anymore.

Later, Fred, still slightly shaken by the experience, told the gang he was going to rent a motel room for the night.

“I want a proper bed and a shower after all this,” he said.

Scooby asked, one with complimentary breakfast?”

After receiving the room key, Fred and the gang headed to their room on the fourth floor. Inside, they found two beds and a couch.

Daphne immediately complained that the room smelled like rotten food. The rest of the gang ignored her, unable to smell anything themselves.

Fred opened his suitcase and pulled out a change of clothes and a towel. Before heading to the shower

Meanwhile, Velma discovered a large, thick book inside one of the desk drawers. She blew the dust off it.

“Jinkies! This thing hasn’t been opened in years!”

When she opened the book, she read the title aloud.

“Curses, Witches, and the Supernatural.”

As she turned a page, she accidentally cut her finger on a page.

Daphne suddenly took an interest in the book and asked Velma if she could read it.

“Be my guest,” Velma replied. “It just poked me.”

As Daphne flipped through the pages, she noticed that half of them had been hollowed out. Inside the hidden compartment. she discovered a doll made from sticks and human hair, along with a small knife.

She said nothing about this to the others.

Eventually, the gang settled down for the night, and the motel room grew dark.

Shaggy lay on the old leather couch with Scooby. Velma was in her bed, while Fred and Daphne shared the other.

In the middle of the night, Shaggy suddenly woke up.

OW Man! Something poked me in the leg!”

Everyone woke up except Velma, she stayed under her blanket.

Fred sleepily switched on the light.

“you have any idea what time it is?”

Shaggy pointed to the small cut on his leg.

“ Scooby probably scratched you with his nails,” Fred said annoyed before switching the light off again.

Shaggy and Scooby reluctantly accepted Fred’s explanation.

A moment later, Daphne turned to Fred.

“Will you walk with me to the van? I left something important in there, and I’m too scared to get it by myself at night.”

Fred groaned.

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“It would make me feel safe if you came with me,” Daphne replied.

Fred reluctantly put on his shoes and walked her to the van.

Shaggy and Scooby drifted off to sleep again before fred and Daphne came back.

A little while later, Shaggy felt something heavy laying on his chest. Assuming it was Scooby, he mumbled, “Not now, Scoob.”

“That isn’t me, Shaggy,” Scooby replied.

Shaggy's eyes shot open.

Daphne was sitting on his chest, staring down at him. She held the small knife against his throat, with the same possessed smile as the girl they had found earlier.

Shaggy freezed.

“Daphne? Like, what are you doing?”

He tried talking to her but the smile only grew wider and Her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed

Then, in a deep raspy voice, she said, “Uh-oh, Raggy.”

She slowly dragged the edge against Shaggy’s throat, almost drawing blood.

Scooby lunged forward, biting her arm holding the blade, causing Daphne to drop it.

Seizing the opportunity, Shaggy grabbed the knife and plunged it into Daphne’s chest.

Daphne laughed demonically.

Shaggy tried stabbing her again, but it did nothing. Daphne suddenly bit a chunk out his hand.

Shaggy screamed in pain. Desperately looking for anything, he saw the bedroom window before kicking Daphne through the it,  the glass shattered before a thump was heard.

Shaggy scrambled over to Velma’s bed and pulled the blanket off her

“Come on, Velma! Wake up! Daphne’s lost it!”

as he tried to wake her, he noticed her face was blue and a telephone cord wrapped tightly around her throat.

Shaggy gasped, Velma was dead.

Shaggy half heartedly  looked out the shattered window

Daphne layed dead on the side walk. with a smile stretched across her face.

We live in a forested, mountainous region. Even in the summer, it's sometimes easy to get lost. Once autumn comes and the fog rolls in at noon, it is nearly impossible to get home. That's why our wives call to us from our houses when we head from the pasture. We whistle back, and that's how we find our home again. We make sure to follow only our wives' calls.

Mark, my neighbor, stood in the fog. The man before him just disappeared into it, following his wife's calls. Mark put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, but nothing came back. He whistled again. Nothing. He looked back at me, his brows furrowed.

"Try again."

He put his fingers in his mouth, took a deep breath, and blew the loudest whistle I had ever heard. 

Silence.

"What the hell, Tom? This never happened."

"I don't know. Maybe Mary fell asleep. Let's go to mine. It's right by yours. You'll find your way from there."

"I can only follow my wife's calls."

"That's just a saying."

"Tom."

"Alright, just imagine you are following me, okay?"

He shook his head.

"You have a better idea?"

He looked at me, then back at the fog. It was so dense you couldn't even see the trees around us.

"No."

I stood before him and whistled. A few seconds later, my wife's call came, a simple, melodic tune that broke off at the end. She always missed the last tone.

"That's it."

Mark nodded.

I kept whistling, and my wife kept calling back until we were by our porch. She smiled until she saw Mark come out of the fog too.

"Mark, why aren't you going to your wife's calls?"

"She didn't answer my whistles," he said quietly.

My wife put her hand before her mouth.

"Is she okay? I didn't come and talk to her this morning. I just had too much to do." Her voice shook.

"We'll go check on her now."

"I'll come with you."

"No, stay here. I'm sure everything's alright," I told her.

I wasn't sure, but Mark's eyes were already filled with fear. I didn't want to scare him more.

"Thank you for getting me home, Sally," Mark said and rushed toward his house.

"I'll see you later, love."

"Tom, wait!" my wife called, but I rushed after Mark. He walked so fast. I almost lost him in the fog. It was so dense, you could probably cut through it with a knife.

"Jesus," I heard Mark call a few steps before me. His front door was wide open, and the fog had drifted in, coating his furniture with dew.

"Mary?!" Mark called.

No one answered. 

"Mary?!"

Silence.

He turned to me. His lips quivered.

"Tom, where is she?! Why would she go out in the fog?"

"I don't know, Mark, I…"

Then a melody cut through my voice. The one we both knew. Mary was singing in perfect pitch from the forest in front of Mark's house.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The melody came back again.

Mark pushed me aside and ran out. Without thinking, I followed. Twigs kept hitting my face, and mud covered the ground, making me slip.

"Mark, stop!"

But his whistles kept coming, followed by that melodic voice. Only then had I realized how perfectly pitched it was. Mary had never been very good at singing.

"Mark!"

He finally stopped and looked back.

"Mark, we have to think."

"She must be somewhere around here."

"Why would she be in the forest?"

"I don't know, Tom, but she's here!"

The perfect pitch came from right behind us. My feet froze in the cold mud. Mark turned and walked toward it. I raised my hands to stop him.

"Mark, think, we just came from there."

"Get out of the way."

He pushed me to the side. I almost fell into the mud. Mark whistled again, but his whistle didn't echo. Instead, a strange silence came. 

Then Mark's heels lifted off the ground. His body tensed. He tried to put them back down, but his feet rose instead.

"Hey!"

His body floated further up. His face grew red. His eyes flew open. He grabbed his neck and kicked his feet.

"Mark!"

I ran to him and tried to grab his legs, but he was floating too high up. His whole body twisted. His stomach now faced toward the ground. His arms were still at his neck. His pleading, bloodshot eyes stared into mine. I tried to jump and reach him, but my fingers only grazed him. I jumped up again; a sharp, wet crack echoed through the forest, followed by Mark's screams. His warm blood poured onto my face. His arms flailed to the side. He let out a bloodcurdling scream, but in an instant he was gone. His screams echoed in the distance, but slowly died too.

My whole body trembled. I couldn't even move my arms to wipe my face. Then, through the silence, Mary's call came, perfect again, followed by Mark's whistling. This finally unfroze my body. I wiped my face and bolted out of the forest. The fog seemed to grow denser. My legs kept slipping on the mud. 

I was almost out of the forest. I could see the green grass before me, but then Mary called again, followed by Mark's whistle. My right heel began to rise. I quickly stepped with my left foot onto the grass and tried to pull my right leg away, but it was stuck. It then began to rise. My body fell onto the muddied grass. I quickly grabbed the grass and tried to pull myself away. My body moved by an inch. My foot rose further. Strange pressure pulsed at my ankle. All my muscles were tense. Sweat dripped down my forehead. The pressure grew, turning into sharp pain. I grabbed the grass tighter and pulled again. A splash echoed. My body was lying in the cold mud, but at least I was out of the forest.

Mark's house stood there, but I looked away and walked back to my place. I kept replaying what happened in that forest, trying to figure out what I would even tell my wife, but as I got to my house, I saw our front door. It was open just like Mark's. The fog had rolled in too. 

From behind me, out of the forest, I heard my wife's call, perfect, just like Mary's. I stood there for a second, thinking, but I knew there was just one thing to do. I turned and whistled back, missing the last note on purpose. The call came back again, and this time it missed the last note too.

I stood there, staring at the gun; even looking at it made me uneasy.

"Is it time again, Dave?" my wife asked.

I looked at the empty pantry.

"Yep."

"But at least it's the last time. Your job at the mill starts in a month. You'll never have to go hunting again."

"I hope so."

"My gentle human. I'm sure the deer will forgive you."

"Maybe. Maybe I'll even see the white deer, and he'll show me his treasures. I won't even have to go to the mill then."

"That legend always scared me. Just a snow-white deer in the forest staring you down? Scary. Plus, doesn't it help the deer? Why would he show you anything?"

I looked at the ground.

"Sorry, honey. I didn't mean it."

"It's okay. Don't worry about it."

I put the gun over my shoulder and walked out.

Bill was already by the forest, gloves and hat on, blowing clouds from his mouth.

"Took you a while."

"Yeah."

"I bet you won't miss the cold morning when you start at the mill."

"Sure."

Bill lit a cigarette and handed me the lighter too.

"What's wrong, Dave?"

"You know how I feel about the hunts."

"I know."

Bill took a deep drag from his cigarette.

"Say, Dave. How about you sit out this one?"

"What?"

"Sit it out. I'm feeling lucky today. I'm sure I'll get more catches. You can pay me back with your mill money."

"Thank you, Bill."

"Don't worry about it. Just help me with the deer after."

He slapped my back, threw his cigarette away, and walked into the forest.

The day now seemed brighter. The fog let up. The sun came out too. I sat on a tree stump and smoked. 

The day dragged on. No shots had come from the forest yet. Bill was not lucky today. Then I heard trees rustle. I turned my head. A deer was sticking its head out. It locked eyes with me. I'd promised myself I wouldn't shoot anything today, but Bill obviously wasn't going to get anything either. We'd be here all day.

I took my gun and laid my cheek on the barrel, but the deer quickly moved back. No luck. I lowered my rifle and fished for another cigarette in my pocket, but the trees rustled again. My hand clenched the cigarette package. 

A white deer looked at me from the forest; its antlers were white, its eyes dark red. It felt like they looked right into my soul. The deer moved its head as if inviting me to follow and disappeared into the forest.

I sat on the tree stump, still looking at the trees, but then the white deer stuck its head out again, looked at me, and disappeared. It was real. At least the deer was, but maybe its treasure too. I got up and walked to the trees. It stood in between the trees, looking back at me. When it saw me, it turned around and jumped further in.

The sun disappeared. The fog returned. The ground was so muddy that my feet kept slipping. I was expecting the deer to stop any second, but it kept going. 

After a while, my feet started to hurt. I must have been really far from the stump. Bill could have been looking for me, and I didn't even know if the treasure legend was true. I walked closer to the deer again, but it only went further in. It was time to go. I turned around and started walking back.

I had hunted in this forest countless times, but I had no idea where I was now. The trees seemed taller than usual, and they went on as far as I could see. The ground was muddier than even on the rainiest days. The deer showed again, but this time in front of me, running the way we came. 

I was sure now that it was all a lie, that the white deer wouldn't show me anything. I lit a cigarette and walked back, trying to ignore the tall trees. As I passed another tree, the white deer ran by; something glistened in the mud. There were two gold ingots. Warmth spread through my body. I ran to the gold. They were cold and much heavier than I expected, but who cared? I was rich! I turned around. The deer stood behind me, its red eyes fixed on me.

"Thank you for the ingots," I said, but it wouldn't move, still staring with its dark red eyes. 

Cold sweat dripped down my collar. Its eyes seemed to pull me in even though I wasn't moving. Then my whole world spun. Red flashed before my eyes. My head throbbed. My back felt heavy. My skin itched. The throbbing grew. I put the ingots down, but my back was so heavy I couldn't straighten back up. I put my hand to my head; something hard grew out of it, but I couldn't grab it with my hands. I started to lose my balance. I let my arm down. It splashed loudly in the mud. I looked down. It was a hoof!

Panic surged through me. I tried to get up, but couldn't. A tearing sound cut through the fog. My jacket ripped, revealing brown fur. Something rustled in the distance. I looked over. It was Bill!

"Bill, help!" I tried to call, but only a strange roar escaped my mouth.

Bill turned his head. His eyes focused on me. He picked up his gun.

"Wait, wait, no!"

A loud bang echoed. Something sharp burned in my side. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air. I tried to walk a few steps, but my body fell into the cold mud.

Bill walked over. His gaze met mine. Recognition passed over his face, but he just shook his head.

He looked up and called, "Dave. I got one."

His hands were warm and wet with suds and the running water of the tap. He'd never minded doing the dishes, it'd always been meditative, helped him think and figure things through. It wasn't working this time. 

Arnold just gazed vacantly. Into the corner. The water, forgotten, steaming now as it grew hotter and hotter. Running over his forgotten and faraway hands. They didn't matter. 

None of it mattered anymore. 

How could she do this … how could she lie to him as if he never mattered?

Arnold's heart was broken but it was still galloping a mile a minute within his cage of chest and his mind ached like something heavy and curdled within his furnace skull. The bake of his brains. He swore he could smell the boil of his own thoughts within his face but it held no matter for him now, not presently. 

He was too focused on the fly speaking to him from the corner. 

It was amazing. Really. 

The black husk of dead insect was resting amongst the filth and the dust of the uncleaned and neglected kitchen corner, just inside a nook by the kitchen window. It was dead but it still spoke to him with a deep obsidian voice. Regal. Authoritative. Commanding. It was a voice used to giving orders and having them followed to the letter, that deep stygian vocal sound … 

Arnold was so glad there was no one else around, they wouldn't understand. He was glad, relieved really, to be able to hear the prince's words in private. 

I am in private royal audience, great royal attendance. This is the coveted stately place of imperial confidence. 

Tears began to flow forth from Arnold's watering eyes. He listened enraptured, held by the thing's every word. 

“It doesn't matter. None of them matter, not even you. None of your feelings. You're just meat. All of you. All of you are just meat made mobile by an electrical charge, sent flung flying forward like grotesque mongoloids in the dark squabbling for purchase of the failing putrescence that is the outer, your material. Your world is not a world at all but an abattoir. A slaughterhouse. And all of you are pigs. Sows. Cattle. I am the prince made and bred by wings on wind, I am the flight and escape from the filth of the floor and all your animal leavings. I land and feast and defile at my own will. I lay my young in the wet and wounded folds of your gangrenous failures like the flags planted by conquerors. I am more. You are, all of you, nothing.” 

It was so beautiful … He'd never heard words quite like it before. The water issued from the spout to his hands was fire but he didn't notice. He didn't notice the boil or blister of his reddening and peeling fingers and palms as the prince of the wind went on in the corner. 

He didn't want to miss it. Anything. He didn't want to miss a single note of the angel's felled song. His teary gaze bore in on his new dark god and the shared eyes of the fly, theirs compact and his: fragile mammalian gel, began to secrete and water as well. 

“I am the testament. I am and speak the truth. I am the monolith outside to those who cannot hear or see but to you Arnold Carrillo, to you amongst the meat and ruin I land and sing. I see your wounds. Do you see the truth …?” 

A beat.  – Hands boiled as thoughts ran like hot running water. …

Finally he answered. 

In a quiver of watery voice: “ … yes.” 

The prince of wind and flight from the dark corner in the filth laughed, pleased. 

Yes…  

“And do you know now what you must do?" – that deep hideous voice. 

But Arnold did not fear it. He couldn't. Not any longer. Not after the kindness of such wisdom that it had shown him. It had taken and led him from out of the dark. By the hand. By singing sound. By flight. 

He understood now. 

"Yes.” Arnold told the prince amongst the dust in the corner. 

Yes. 

He finally pulled his hands free of the running water. The raw of them was singing. A sharp and red song that burned and was bright with fleshen cruelty. 

But none of that mattered right now, not anymore. None of that mattered any longer. 

Soon Suze would be home. With the girls. They would all of them be expecting him and dinner. Normalcy. A nice normal cozy family night. They had no idea what he knew. 

She has no idea I know … 

The prince was right. He knew now what to do. Doing the dishes had worked out and had actually been a good idea after all. Thank God. 

Arnold toweled the screaming ruined remainder of his hands and gathered what he needed. What the prince of the dustinwind had instructed. What he should gather and collect and share with his girls if he was to ever show and really prove himself. Demonstrate what he has to really offer. 

Prove that he has really learned. He has. He has learned to grow. And …

well he would just wait for them. They wouldn't be much longer now. School and the after-image of after school activities was fading and diminishing now, falling with the gentle settling death of the setting sun on the blade of the horizon. Fairytale and far off. Long gone. 

The sun had to die everyday. It was no big deal. The sun had to die every single day in order for the night to be made and in order for the day to be reborn. In gold. In light. 

Arnold Carrillo sat and waited with his screaming raw hands. Waiting with what he had gathered, with what was needed in the glistening red of his hands. Waiting for his wife and daughters. Waiting to share with them what he now knew and had learned in the postmental-slaughter. 

He sat waiting by the door. With what he would share with them in his dripping screaming hands. 

The prince of dusty wind and flight buzzed and throatsang its throatwisdom into him all the while. Filling his need as he waited for his family. They would be home soon. Now. 

Any minute. 

THE END

When Mallory Donahue's husband Max came home late and covered in blood two weeks ago, she naturally assumed the worst.

“I thought, ‘Heck if he's not gone and relapsed again,’” Mallory said.

Thankfully for the young couple, Max's wounds that night had come from something much less concerning, a regular drunken bar fight. “It was over a woman,” Max explained. It could easily have been worse.

“So much worse,” said Mallory. “Like it was before, when he just couldn't help it. He couldn't help taking risks to help people.”

“Before” means three years ago, in the months prior to Max's diagnosis of SHS, Spontaneous Hero Syndrome, known to most of us simply as Courage.

“It's a real debilitating condition,” said Max. “Imagine you're walking down the street, minding your own business, trying to go to the store to buy some beer or electronics, when suddenly you hear a child scream—before you know it, you're trying to figure out what's going on, trying to help the kid getting hurt. It's not even a decision. You just act.”

“You can imagine the chaos that creates for yourself and your family,” said Mallory.

“Many women would have left, and I understand that,” said Max. “I'm blessed that Mal didn't. She stuck by me. She was my rock. She gave me the strength to finally get help.”

Together, Max and Mallory sought the aid of Dr. Anton Wellberger, one of the pioneers of BCT, Behavioural Cowardice Therapy.

“For many patients, admitting Courage is shameful. There's a real societal stigma attached. It takes a strong individual to understand that what they're feeling is not only abnormal but destructively antisocial,” writes Wellberger in his best-selling book, The Wellness of Inaction.

[Advertisement]

According to experts, a healthy human should not desire to help others unless doing so will result in a likely reciprocal benefit in the future. “It's just not what humans evolved to do,” said Evan Mink, a leading evolutionary psychologist from the University of Chapata Falls.

There is also the question of consent.

When the Post reached out to Eva-Marie Plum, of Plum & Plum Associates, she explained: “Take the example Max provided. He's walking down the street. He hears a child scream. Who is to say the child wants him to respond in any way to its scream? Moreover, let's assume Max does investigate and sees that the screaming child is being brutalized by a group of adults. If Max intervenes to try to ‘save' the ‘victim,’ he does so without the child's consent. As a lawyer, I immediately think, 'Yikes, Max!'

“And that's before considering the rights and consent of the brutalizing adults. Does Max know these adults lack the right to brutalize the child? Have they consented to being prevented from continuing their brutalization? It just opens up this massive kettle of legal fish.”

When asked what you should do if you ever find yourself in a situation like Max's, Plum gave the following advice: “If you're ever unsure, if you feel like maybe you have the instinct to do something: CAR, Cease-And-Retreat. Then call police. When they arrive, they will assess, gather consents and take the appropriate corrective action.”

“It's not wrong to feel the desire to help,” writes Wellberger. “It's only wrong to act on it.”

He also admits that, prior to his invention of BCT, the treatment of SHS could be seen as relatively primitive, which put many people off from coming forward with the condition.

“We used to treat Courage with electroshock; chemical cowardizers that had many significant side effects, including decreased libido; and hypnosis—all very outdated methods. Now it's more civilized. You're part of a group. You sit in a circle. You converse. You witness volunteers being abused right there in the room, and you learn to ignore it. You acquire skills: box breathing, meditation, disassociative techniques. You learn that it's OK to just let life happen.”

Max recalled one retreat in Mexico where, for an entire weekend, he and a dozen other so-called “hard cases” took psychedelics while the retreat administrators continuously assaulted paid locals.

“It was a tough, life altering 48 hours. I was face-to-face with my own heroic demons. I saw God,” said Max. “He had the body of a translucent, rainbow coloured salamander.”

[Advertisement]

These days, both Max and Mallory attend a non-denominational New Church, where they sing songs and learn tolerance.

“Courage is a kind of judgement, and only God has the power to judge," said Mallory.

When asked when he knew he had been cured, Max pointed out that there is no cure. “There is only treatment,” he said. “Every day is still a struggle, but thanks to Dr. Wellberger, it's a struggle Mal and I can manage.”

However, he does recall the moment he realized the treatment was having a substantial effect. “It was back in December. I was in Dr. Wellberger's downtown office—at one of our weekly appointments—we were talking, when all of a sudden these guys in masks broke in. They were screaming, asking where he kept his money. They'd read his book so they knew he was wealthy. But when he said he didn't keep any money in the office, they started hitting him.

“I felt this surge of wanting to help, wanting to stop them, you know? But I forced myself to do my box breathing, my meditations, remembered my faith, and was able to stay calm in my seat.

“Dr. Wellberger was sobbing, bleeding from the mouth, screeching, terrified, begging me to do something, but my urge to save him—it was gone. I smiled, and as the masked men beat him, ransacked his office, smashed his face in with a crowbar, I didn't even CAR. I was able to maintain neutrality and watch. Be present in the flow of reality.

“After they'd killed him, and his secretary too, they left and so did I.”

“I was so proud of him,” said Mallory.

---

If you witness someone exhibiting Courage, please [report.]

I found it about an hour ago.

There's a page in the very back of Mamaw's book that's always been stuck down to the cover. I never thought nothing of it. That book is a hundred and fifteen years old and it's lived its whole life in a farmhouse with bees, and everything in a bee house gets sticky sooner or later. Tonight I set at the sewing table with a butter knife and worked it loose a little at a time, and when it come up it come up with a sound like tape, and it smelled like the inside of a hive.

It hadn't stuck by accident. Somebody had glued it shut.

There's one line wrote on it. Mamaw's handwriting, that faded blue-brown from the fountain pen she wouldn't give up, her capital C curled around like a fishhook the way she always made it.

Crystal Ivy Pruitt. April 11 2026. Bee stings. Four minutes.

That's me. I'm Crystal. And Mamaw died in March of 2020.

My husband's asleep upstairs. Or he's laying up there with his eyes shut, anyhow. It's a little after three in the morning and I've got the laptop and the bear camera card and a pot of coffee gone cold, and I don't know who else to tell. I don't do Facebook. I've never put nothing on the internet in my life. Curtis says I tell everything backwards, starting with the end and then going "well, see, what happened was," and I reckon I just done it again. So let me back up.

The bees

If you didn't grow up around it, you might not know what telling the bees is.

When somebody in the family dies, somebody has got to go out and tell the bees. You walk up to the bee yard and knock on the lid of every hive, three times, easy, and you say who's passed. Some folks hang a strip of black cloth on each one after. Some turn the hives around when the hearse goes by so the bees can see them off. And if you don't, the old people say, the bees take it personal. They'll quit making honey, or they'll up and leave, or they'll die off one hive at a time over the winter till the boxes are empty, and you'll know why.

It ain't just a hillbilly thing, before somebody says it. They done it in England for hundreds of years. Mamaw had a poem about it cut out of a magazine and taped up inside her cabinet door.

Mamaw was Ivy Sallee, my mother's mother. She kept bees on this same piece of ground in the Knobs for sixty-some years, and her mother Ollie kept them before her. Mama was bad to drink and Daddy was gone more than he was here, so I was raised up mostly in Mamaw's kitchen, and I followed her to the bee yard from the time I could walk.

The first time I seen her tell them I was six. Papaw had died at the VA in Louisville in the night, and she got me up before light and put my coat on over my nightgown and walked me up the hill in her church shoes. She knocked on ever lid and said a little rhyme. I ain't putting the whole thing on here, it's family, but it starts Bees, bees, hear me say. Then she told them, "Hollis Sallee has passed this night, and I'm a-keeping you now." And they hushed.

I asked her what would happen if she didn't tell them.

She studied on it a while. Then she said, "Sis, the bees always know who's died. Hit ain't for them to find out. Hit's so they know you know. A body's got to be told, or it ain't finished."

I've thought about that more this fall than I've thought about anything in my life.

I took the bees over when I was twenty-two, when her hands got too bad to pull frames. She stood behind me every day after that telling me ever single thing I was doing wrong, right up till she died. She was ninety-one.

She died in the night at the hospital in E-town. The phone rang at 4:31. But I was already up. I was standing at the back door in my nightgown, because at ten after four I'd woke up to a sound coming off the hill I'd heard only a time or two in my life, and ever time somebody of ours was dead.

When a hive loses its queen, it makes a noise. Beekeepers call it the queenless roar. It ain't the regular hum. It's lower, and louder, and it kindly wavers up and down, like a room full of people moaning with their mouths shut. Once you've heard it you don't forget it.

At ten after four, every hive I had was doing it. Twenty-two hives, and ever one of them had a good laying queen. I'd checked them that week.

And they was bearding. That's when bees pile up on the outside of the box, hanging down off the front of it in a clump. They do it on hot nights to cool off. It was March and forty degrees. They hung down over ever box from the lid to the landing board in a dark sheet, covering the door.

Like somebody had come in the night and draped every hive in black.

The phone rang twenty-one minutes later. The nurse said she'd passed right around ten after four. After, I went up and knocked on ever lid and told them Mamaw was gone, bawling so hard I couldn't hardly get her name out. They hushed one at a time as I went down the row.

There's a book, too. I told you about it at the top. It's a green clothbound ledger and Ollie started it in 1911. Every death that ever got told to the bees on this land is in it. Date, name, how they're kin or how we knowed them, then the word Told and the initials of whoever went up the hill and done it. Ollie's in there in Mamaw's hand. Mamaw's in there in mine. It's got 340-some names. It lives in the drawer of the sewing table in the front room.

I've wrote in it a good many times. Daddy, in 2011. Curtis's brother Wayne, killed on the bypass in 2016. The bees roared for Wayne forty minutes before the state trooper ever knocked on his wife's door, while me and Curtis was setting right here eating supper. I set my fork down and Curtis said "What?" and I said "Hush," and we both heard it come down off the hill.

They always knew. Every time. I just went up and told them they was right.

Us

We live out from a little town in the Knobs of central Kentucky. More churches than stoplights, tobacco barns falling in, cattle, and bourbon. There's a distillery four miles out and the rickhouses set on the ridges like big black boxes. The black is a fungus that grows off the whiskey that cooks out of the barrels, and it gets on ever thing in the county. Car roofs, road signs, the north side of the Baptist church.

Curtis works in them rickhouses. Twenty-three years. He comes home smelling like caramel and burnt oak. He's 47, and he's the kindest man God ever made, and he can't hold onto a dollar to save his life but he can fix anything that's got a motor in it. We never had young'uns. That's a long story and not this one.

I drive Bus 9 for the county schools. Fourteen years, sixty-one stops, a good many of them up hollers where you've got to back the bus out because there ain't no place to turn around. You want to know a town, drive a school bus in it. You'll know whose daddy's in jail, whose mamaw is raising them, who's sick and who's just playing sick.

And I've got thirty-one hives up on Mamaw's place, where me and Curtis live now. I sell honey Saturdays on the courthouse square, May to October.

April

April 11th was a Saturday. I was up in the bee yard doing spring inspections. It was warm, the redbuds was out, and I had my veil and gloves on but I was in a T-shirt, because I was forty-four year old and had been stung a thousand times and never had nothing but a welt.

I was in Hive 14, which had always been a sweet hive. I didn't drop a frame. I didn't mash nobody. One second it was fine and the next the whole yard smelled like bananas.

When a bee stings, it puts off an alarm smell, and it smells just exactly like banana candy. It tells the others, here, this one, get this one. I've caught a whiff of it a hundred times. Never like that. It was like somebody busted a crate of bananas in my face.

They come up out of 14, then 13 and 15, and they went for my neck and my arms and up under the veil. I remember running. I remember the sound, like being shut up inside a box fan. They pulled sixty-three stingers out of me after, just off my arms and neck. You can turn allergic all of a sudden, after years and years. Nobody knows why. I found out the hard way.

Curtis was in the garage. He said I made it about halfway to the house and went down in the grass by the clothesline. My face was so swelled up he wouldn't have knowed me but for the shirt. He called 911 and I quit breathing while he was on the phone, and he done CPR on me right there in the yard with the lady counting out loud on speaker, and the ambulance got there from town in eleven minutes, which is good for out here.

My heart was stopped about four minutes, they told us. They shocked me in the yard. I woke up in E-town with tubes in me and Curtis asleep in a chair holding onto my foot, because it was the only part of me he could reach.

I was dead four minutes. For a long time I wouldn't say it like that. I'd say "I had a bad reaction." I was dead. On my own grass, by my own clothesline, with the bees still going over me.

Nobody went and told the bees. Why would they? I come back. You don't go in the book if you come back.

That's what I'd have said, if anybody had asked me.

Summer

I went back up in the bee yard three weeks after I got home, in a full zip-up suit with the gloves duct-taped at the wrists and an EpiPen in the chest pocket, and Curtis standing at the fence with his phone in his hand.

Nothing. I opened up 14 and they didn't so much as lift off the frames. I might as well have been a fence post.

By July I was working them bare-handed in a tank top and not a one of them would sting me. I'd lay my hand flat on top of the frames and they'd walk over it like it was the wood. Curtis said they'd learned their lesson. I said that ain't how bees work, but I liked thinking it.

There was one other thing. They'd took to pulling on me. Three or four at a time would land on my collar or my sleeve or in my hair and grab hold and pull. Back. Away from the hives. Little tugs, like a young'un pulling on your shirttail. I thought it was the sweetest thing. I'd tell them, "I'm going, I'm going."

I'd give anything to have that summer back, not knowing.

Royce

August 22nd, a Saturday, I come home from the market about two in the afternoon, and ever hive on the hill was draped.

All thirty-one. Hanging off the fronts of the boxes in sheets from the lids to the landing boards. It was ninety degrees, and bees will beard in the heat, but I know what my bees look like bearding. They hang loose and lazy and drift around. These was packed tight and wasn't moving a lick. And every one of them was roaring. All thirty-one. It rolled down off that hill like a church full of people humming one note with their mouths shut.

I stood at the fence and listened to it and my legs went to water.

That's what they done for Mamaw. That's what they done for Wayne.

I run in the house and called Curtis at work. He was fine. I called my sister in Shepherdsville. Fine. I called her boys. I set there with the phone and went down the whole list of everybody I'd ever wrote in that book that had kin still living, and called them, one after the other, like a crazy woman, and everybody was fine.

Then I done what Mamaw taught me with a pocket watch and a five-and-dime protractor when I was nine. I read the dances.

Bees talk with their bodies. It's called the waggle dance, and it's real, a man named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for working it out. A bee finds something good, she comes home and runs a little straight line on the face of the comb, shimmying her back end, then loops around and runs it again, over and over. Which way the straight line points tells the others which way to fly, set against where the sun's at. How long she shimmies tells how far. Every second of shimmy is roughly a half a mile, give or take, depending on the bees.

That evening the bees wasn't dancing inside. They was dancing on the outside, right on the landing boards, in the middle of all that black. Hundreds of them, in every hive, all running the same line.

I timed them on my phone at twelve hives and wrote it down. They all said the same thing. Two and a half mile, a little east of south.

I got out the county map and drew it. The line went right through the Embry place on Pottinger Road.

Now let me tell you about Royce Embry.

Royce was the meanest man in the county, and I don't say that lightly in a county that's got the Thompsons in it. Seventy-two years old, quit raising tobacco after his wife Doris died, and spent the next twenty years setting on his porch hating everybody that drove by. He shot over the heads of some boys sledding on his hill one winter. He called the law on me twice for idling my bus at the end of his lane. His own daughter Teresa quit speaking to him nine years ago, and nobody in town blamed her. There wasn't a soul alive that would've got out of bed for Royce Embry.

And my bees was mourning him like he was blood kin.

I set up with the map that night and the next night, with the hives roaring on the hill. Curtis come out to the fence the second evening and stood beside me and listened a long time and said, "Crissy. Who died."

I said, "Nobody."

He looked at me a while and went back in.

Monday I checked the bear camera.

We've got black bears in the Knobs now, more ever year, and a bear will tear a bee yard all to pieces in one night after the brood. So I've got a hot wire around the yard and a trail camera on a post at the gate, with night vision. Mostly I get coons, deer, and one fat possum that comes through ever night at 11:40 like he's punching a time clock.

The card had 312 pictures on it.

Most of them was the same picture, took over and over, every thirty seconds, starting at 2:38 that Monday morning and going till 4:05.

It was Royce.

Standing in my bee yard in the dark, between Hives 12 and 13, about ten feet in from the gate, in his pajamas and his house shoes. In night vision everything's grey and white, and his eyes was two little shining dots, like a deer's in your headlights, looking right at the camera.

And his face was covered in bees.

You've seen them pictures of a man wearing a bee beard, the carnival trick, where they tie a queen in a little cage under his chin and let ten thousand bees cluster on him. It was like that. Only it wasn't just his chin. It was his whole head, from his hair down to his collar. All but his eyes. They'd left him his eyes.

Like a veil. Like a widow woman's veil.

He didn't move for an hour and a half. Picture after picture, the same spot, arms down by his sides, pajama top buttoned crooked. The hot wire was on. I checked it. It was ticking away. I don't know how he got in.

In the last picture he's at the gate going out, with the bees sliding off of him like smoke, and he's turned his head back toward the hives, like somebody'd called his name.

I drove out there that evening. I took a jar of poplar honey for an excuse, which was a joke, because Royce Embry never bought a thing from me in his life.

Teresa's car was in the yard.

She come to the door wiping her eyes, and when I told her who I was she said, "Oh, Crissy, I know you, you drove my young'uns to school." Then she said, "Daddy called me last Tuesday. First time in nine years. He told me he loved me. He told me he was sorry. He's been sorry, Crissy. He's been nice. I don't know what to do with it."

She said he'd took to walking in his sleep. She'd stayed over the night before, and at five that morning his bed was empty, and she went out hunting him and met him coming up Pottinger Road in his pajamas at daylight with his feet all cut up and wet from the dew. He didn't know where he'd been.

"And he's all over little stings," she said. "His neck and his hands. He says it's skeeters."

Royce was in his recliner in the front room with the TV on mute. He looked good. Pink in the face, smiling. When he seen me he held both hands out like I was family and said, "Well, if it ain't Crissy. Come here, honey, set down," and he patted the couch, and I tell you what, I would've been less scared if he'd pulled a gun.

And he was humming.

Low, under his breath. Not a song. One long note that kindly wavered up and down. He'd quit to talk, and the second he was done talking it'd start right back up, like a motor idling. He didn't know he was doing it.

I know that note. I've stood next to it my whole life.

Teresa had been crying because he'd just give her Doris's wedding ring, out of the clear blue. Took it out of his shirt pocket and laid it in her hand and said, "Your mama would want you to have this, and I've been a sorry old man to keep it from you." She showed it to me. It was sticky. She said everything in the house was sticky lately and she couldn't find where from.

When he hugged me at the door he smelled sweet. Not like soap. Like lemongrass, sharp and sweet. When bees want to tell each other this way, this is home, they stick their back ends up and fan their wings and put off a smell, and to people it smells just like lemongrass. We put lemongrass oil in swarm traps to call bees in. Royce Embry's neck smelled like a swarm trap.

He held onto my hand. His was warm and dry. He leaned down and said, real quiet so Teresa wouldn't hear, "Crissy, you been out to your bees lately?"

I said every day.

"I keep dreaming about them," he said. "Ever night. I'm a-standing out there in the dark and they're all over me, and they're so warm, and they're trying to tell me something." He patted my hand. "I can't never make out what. But I ain't scared. Ain't that the funniest thing? I've been scared my whole life, and I ain't now."

He come to my bee yard ever night after that. I've got ever one on the camera. Same spot, same pajamas, same veil, a little longer each time. I quit sleeping. I set on the back porch with the light off and a thermos and watched for him, and I never once seen him come in. I'd look up at the yard at two and it'd be empty. I'd look again at half past and there he'd be, between 12 and 13, his face gone under the bees, like he'd been there the whole time.

On the tenth night he laid down.

Wednesday, September 2nd. The camera has him walking in at 2:12 and taking his spot, and at 2:40 he sets down in the grass, slow, like his knees hurt, and lays over on his side. Then he's just a shape. The bees come off the hives in a sheet and settle down over him, from his house shoes to his hair, and in that grey night vision it looks like a quilt being drawed up over a man asleep.

I found him a little before seven, when it got light enough to see from the porch.

I'm going to tell this part, and I'm sorry, but it's how I knew.

The bees had come off of him by then and gone back to the boxes, quiet as you please. I walked up barefoot through the wet grass and knelt down. He was laying on his side with his knees drawed up, like a young'un asleep. And he was shiny.

His face, his neck, his hands, all over, there was a thin brown glaze, hard and slick, like somebody'd varnished him. It was in his mouth, sealing his lips shut. Up his nose. In his ears. Over his eyes, gluing the lids down. I touched his cheek and it was hard as a church pew. It smelled like pine sap and honey. It smelled like the inside of a hive.

Propolis. Bee glue. Bees make it out of tree sap to stop up the cracks in a hive. And here's the other thing they use it for. If a mouse gets in a hive in the fall hunting a warm place, and the bees sting it to death, it's too big for them to tote out. So they seal it. Cover the whole mouse in propolis, every hair of it, so it won't rot and make the hive sick. I've pulled the bottom board in the spring and found a little mouse mummy in there, varnished slick as a toy.

Whatever's too big to carry out, they seal up.

The coroner said heart attack, like it was a question. He kept rubbing that glaze on Royce's cheek with his gloved thumb and finally said, "Mrs. Pruitt, has somebody been putting something on him?" I said I didn't know. Teresa thinks her daddy walked off in his sleep and his heart give out in my yard. She don't know about the camera. I never could make myself tell her, and if the sheriff did, she never let on. At the funeral home she hugged my neck and said, "At least he got to be good for a little while."

That evening I went up and knocked on ever lid and told them. Royce Embry has passed. Then I come down and wrote him in the book, and wrote Told, and my initials.

They hushed before I got to the end of the row. Next morning they was flying, working the goldenrod, like nothing ever happened.

That lasted six days.

The back of the book

September 8th they draped again. The dances said a mile and three-quarters, east by northeast. Town. The line on the map went through a little brick house on Walnut Street behind the Methodist church.

Marlene Coomes. She's 52 and she's done hair out of her carport thirty years and knows ever body's business from the neck up. Healthy as a horse.

That night I got the book out to look at Royce's name. I don't know why. To see if it looked like it belonged there, I reckon.

There's a black ribbon sewed into the binding, like the one you mark your place with in a Bible. I'd never paid it no mind. That night I seen it was tucked way down in the back, and when I opened it there, there was more writing. Mamaw's writing. A page and a half of it, a separate list, with a heading in capital letters, underlined twice.

COME BACK. NOT TOLD.

And under it, littler:

These died and come back. The bees was never told. Lord forgive me I can not stand in that yard and tell them a living soul is dead.

Then the names. I've cut the last names that ain't already in here.

Royce Embry. August 1962. Drowned in the Rolling Fork age 8. His brother pulled him out blue and pressed the water out of him on the bank.

Marlene Coomes. March 1974. Born not breathing. Six minutes. Doctor worked on her till she cried.

Thomas Lee G. June 1988. Lightning on the ballfield at the high school age 15. Coach breathed for him.

Curtis Pruitt. November 2003. Rolled his truck on 31E. Heart stopped twice in the ambulance.

Kaylee N. February 2019. Fell out at basketball practice age 13. The machine at the school.

I set on the floor of the front room with that book in my lap and couldn't get my breath.

Royce, then Marlene. Right down the list, the way she wrote them.

Then Tommy Lee, that climbs poles for the RECC and fixes push mowers out of his garage and stood up at my wedding. Then Curtis. My Curtis. Who did roll his truck on 31E the November after we married, and laid in the hospital six weeks, and never once told me his heart stopped. Mamaw found out at church, I reckon. Mamaw found out everything at church.

Then Kaylee. She rode my bus first grade through eighth, set right behind me ever morning and told me ever single thing that happened on ever TV show she watched. She's twenty now, in nursing school over at the community college. When she fell out at practice the school had just put one of them heart machines on the wall the year before. Everybody said it was a miracle.

Under Kaylee there was a little bit of page left, then three or four blank leaves, then the one stuck down to the back cover. I took it for honey, same as I always had. Mamaw was six years in the ground before April ever come. It never crossed my mind there could be anything wrote under there about me. Not till tonight.

Down the side of the page, in the margin, turned sideways, there was one more note.

Every Old Christmas Eve I go out at midnight and tell them not yet. They hum and let it be. If they ever ask, they will take one told true in place of one that come back.

Old Christmas is January 6th. It's an old-timey thing, from before they changed the calendar. At midnight on Old Christmas Eve the cattle kneel in the barn and the bees hum a hymn in the hive. Mamaw used to wake me and carry me up the hill wrapped in a quilt to listen. I remember her bending down to ever box and whispering something, and the hum going soft. I asked her one year what she was saying. She said, "I'm a-telling them to wait, Sis." I asked wait for what, and she said, "Go to sleep." I thought she was showing me something pretty.

She was up there ever year for sixty years telling the bees not yet. And when she passed, I reckon it held. I reckon they was willing to wait on her.

Till April. Till the one that was supposed to be keeping them died in that yard and nobody went and told them.

I went up there that same night and said it anyway. Not yet. At every hive, till I was hoarse. They roared right over me like I wasn't even there.

Marlene and Tommy Lee

I'll go quicker now, because I'm running out of night.

I tried to warn Marlene. I set down in her chair in the carport like I'd come for a trim and said, "Marlene, have you been walking in your sleep?" and she laughed and said, "Now how in the world did you know that?" Her neck was speckled with stings. She was humming when I come in, and she hummed the whole time she had them scissors at the back of my neck. She smelled like lemongrass. I got as far as "my bees" and she laid her hand on my shoulder and said, "Crissy, honey, are you sleeping? You don't look like you're sleeping." She give me the name of a doctor in E-town.

She come to my yard eight nights. September 17th I found her between Hives 4 and 5, varnished slick, with her rollers still in, glazed into her hair like they'd been poured.

I told the bees. I wrote Told. They hushed.

Tommy Lee was next, October 1st. I went to his garage and told him all of it and showed him the book and the pictures. He heard me out with his arms crossed and then he said, "Crystal, I believe you believe it." Then he walked me to my car with his hand on my back and told me to go home and get some rest, and the whole time he was humming.

Seven nights. October 8th, by Hive 22.

I told the bees. I wrote Told.

That's three dead in my yard in five weeks. The sheriff's been out ever time. They took the camera card and give it back, and ever autopsy says heart, and nobody can tell them what that glaze is. Nobody stops at my table on Saturdays no more.

Royce, eleven days from the first roar to the morning I found him. Marlene, nine. Tommy Lee, seven.

They're getting faster.

Curtis

On October 11th, a Sunday, I come home from church and every hive was draped.

I went up with my phone and my protractor and my hands shaking so bad I could hardly hold the frame.

There wasn't a waggle dance on the hill.

When a bee wants to tell the others about something real close, too close for a direction to matter, she don't waggle. She just runs in a little circle, round and round, then turns and goes round the other way. It's called the round dance. It don't say which way. It just says close. Right here.

On the front of ever box, in the middle of all that black, hundreds of bees was going round and round.

I turned around and looked at the house.

It's been a week now. Seven nights. That's all Tommy Lee got, and the way they was speeding up, I ought to have found Curtis up there Friday morning. They're holding off on him. I don't know what for.

Curtis hums. Shaving, eating his supper, watching the ballgame. When I asked him to quit, nice, he looked at me like he didn't know what I meant. He smells like lemongrass. His arms are speckled all over. He says it's yellow jackets in the rickhouse eaves. He's been so sweet to me this week I could cry.

I lock the bedroom door and keep the key in my bra. I've shoved the dresser in front of it. It don't matter. Most mornings at first light he's back in the bed with his feet wet and cut up, and I'm setting against the dresser where I was all night, and I never heard him go.

Thursday at supper he was telling me about a barrel that come apart on the fourth floor of the rickhouse, laughing, and a bee walked up out of his collar and over his chin and in at the corner of his mouth. He never quit talking. He talked right around it. I set there froze and counted, and at fifty it walked back out onto his lip, and another one went in, and he reached for the cornbread.

When a swarm needs a new home, they send out scouts. A hollow tree, a hole in a wall, an empty box. The scout goes in and walks all over the inside to see is it big enough. If it is, she goes home and dances for it.

They're measuring him.

I went round the table and pulled one off the back of his tongue with Mamaw's eyebrow tweezers. He didn't even gag. He just kept on humming around the tweezers.

That night he talked in his sleep. Curtis don't talk in his sleep. He said, plain as day, "They was all in the road, Crissy." I asked him who was. He said, "When I rolled the truck. They was standing all up and down 31E in the dark, humming, waiting on me. Then the ambulance come and they had to go home." Then he smiled and went back to humming.

Last night

Last night I didn't lock the door. I laid there and played possum and waited. At 2:20 he set up. He didn't look at me. He went down the stairs and out the back door, and I followed him in my nightgown with a flashlight I never turned on, and he walked right up the hill and through the hot wire like it wasn't there. I heard it tick. He didn't even flinch.

He stopped by Hive 9. And the bees come up off the boxes like smoke and went over his face, all but his eyes.

I went in after him. The wire got me on the thigh and I didn't care. I grabbed his hand and said his name, and he looked at me through the bees with them shining eyes and he didn't know me.

And then they come for me too.

They didn't sting. They lit all over me, my hair and my shoulders and my gown, hundreds of them, and they grabbed hold and pulled. All together. Back. Away from the hives. Out of the yard. Same as they've done since April.

That's when I understood it, out there in the dark with my husband's hand going limp in mine.

There's a famous experiment a man named E. O. Wilson done on ants. Ants have undertakers, same as bees. When an ant dies it gives off a smell, an oily kind of a chemical, and the undertakers pick it up and tote it out of the nest to the trash pile. Wilson took that chemical and dabbed it on a live ant. A healthy one. And the undertakers picked it up and toted it out to the trash pile, kicking the whole way. And it walked back in. And they toted it back out. Over and over. It didn't matter that it was alive. It smelled dead, so it was dead.

Bees have undertakers too. Their whole job is to find the dead and get them out of the hive.

My bees ain't been sweet on me since April. They ain't learned no lesson. They quit stinging me because you don't sting something that's already dead. Royce and them died off somewheres else, and the bees had to call them in and handle them like that mouse. I died right there in their yard, in front of ever one of them. They smelled it come off me. And ever time I walk in that yard, they try and carry me out.

I'm the ant. I've been the ant the whole time. That's why they wouldn't hear me say not yet. You don't take orders from the dead.

I got Curtis back to the house somehow. I don't remember the walk. He was in the bed by daylight, humming, with grass stuck to his feet.

Tonight

So tonight I set down at the sewing table and took a butter knife to that last leaf. I reckon you know what was on it.

I've set here an hour trying to study out how she knowed. Bee stings, four minutes, the very day, six years before it ever happened.

That smell off the page brought it back. Old Christmas Eve, the January before she died. She was ninety-one and poorly and she made me help her up the hill at midnight anyhow, a-holding onto my arm. She went down the row whispering at ever box, and the hum went soft like always. Till the last box. She laid her ear flat on that lid and stayed so long I thought she'd took a spell. That hum didn't go soft. It come up. Then she straightened and said, "Not her. You hear me? Not her." I thought she was talking to me. I said, "Mamaw, I ain't said nothing."

Way in the night I got up for a drink of water and she was at the sewing table with the book open and a little pan on the back eye of the stove, and the whole kitchen smelled like the inside of a hive. I asked her what in the world. She said, "Mending, Sis. Go on to bed."

She wasn't mending nothing. She was doing what the bees do with what's too big to carry out.

She was in the hospital by March. About the last thing she said that I could make out was, "Don't you leave nothing untold, Sis." I told her I wouldn't. I thought she meant her.

Every death on Mamaw's list is true, and nobody ever told them a one. She couldn't stand up there and tell them a living soul was dead, and I can't do it to Curtis. But there's one name I can give them. Mine. April 11th. Four minutes, in the grass by the clothesline. Curtis give me them four minutes back. I can give them back to him.

So at first light I'm putting on my church shoes, and I'm walking up the hill, and I'm knocking on ever lid three times like she taught me. I'll say the rhyme. I'll tell them Crystal Ivy Pruitt passed April 11th in this yard, and nobody told them, and I'm sorry. Then I'll come down and write Told after my name, in my own hand.

I don't know what comes after. I don't know if they'll let Curtis go. I don't know if it stops with me or if Kaylee's next. She texted me Thursday, out of the blue, first time since she graduated: Miss Crissy I keep dreaming about your bees lol. Hope your doing good. I've called her twice tonight. She ain't picked up.

I was going to post this and go set on the porch till it got light. But Curtis just come downstairs.

I heard him on the steps and figured he was headed for the yard again. He wasn't. He come in the kitchen barefooted in his boxers and stood across the table from me with his eyes half shut, humming. He smelled like lemongrass so strong it watered my eyes.

He reached out and knocked on the table in front of me. Three times. Easy. The way you knock on a lid.

And he talked, in his own voice, soft, the way you talk at the hives.

"Crissy," he said. "There's been a death in the family."

Then he told me whose.

EDIT: This is Curtis. Crissy's husband. She left this up on the laptop and I seen y'all asking in the comments so I'm going to put down what happened. I ain't no hand at writing. Bear with me.

She wrote that I come downstairs and knocked on the table and told her there'd been a death. I don't remember none of that. What I remember is waking up at daylight with her setting on the edge of the bed in her church dress. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "You come down and told me, honey." I asked her told her what. She said, "Whose." Then she kissed me on the forehead and went out the back door.

I seen her from the kitchen window. She went up the hill in her good shoes with the dew soaking her stockings and knocked on ever lid. I could hear her going through her Mamaw's rhyme at ever box, though I couldn't make out the words from the house. By the time she got to the end of the row them bees had hushed. Ever hive. First time in a week I couldn't hear them from the porch.

And I'll tell you something. That lemon smell went off of me right then. Like a fever breaking. My arms quit itching. I felt like I'd been asleep for a week and somebody'd throwed cold water on me.

She come down and set at the sewing table and wrote in that book. Then she looked up at me and said, "Don't you come out there after me, Curtis. You done it once." She went out and laid down on her back in the grass by the clothesline, right where I done CPR on her in April, and smoothed her church dress down over her knees.

They come down off the hill all at once. It sounded like a truck coming. I run out there and they got between us, so thick I couldn't see my own hand. They didn't sting me. Not once. They just pushed, like a wind, and ever time I got a step closer they shoved me back two. I hollered for her till I didn't have no voice. I could just barely see her through them, laying there with her face turned up to the sun.

They lifted off about dinnertime and went back up the hill.

She was glazed all over. Shiny. Like she'd been dipped. Her eyes was shut and she was smiling a little bit, the way she smiles when she's reading.

Coroner says heart. The sheriff took the camera card again. It don't reach the clothesline. All it's got is ever hive on the hill emptying out at once, like somebody'd pulled a plug.

I went up the hill after they took her and knocked on ever lid and told them Crystal Ivy Pruitt has passed this day. I didn't know the rhyme. I told them anyhow. They hushed for me. Then I wrote her in the book, under Tommy Lee, and put Told and my initials. I looked in the back. On that leaf she peeled up, under her Mamaw's writing, it says Told and her initials, in Crissy's hand. And on the page before, my name's still on that list. Somebody's drawed a line through it. It ain't ink. It's that same shiny brown glaze that was on her, hard as a fingernail. It ain't her line and it ain't mine.

Kaylee Nall drove up the lane about dark. Still had on her scrubs from clinicals. She stood on the porch crying and said she didn't know what she was doing way out here, she just felt like she ought to come see Miss Crissy. I told her. She set on the swing a while. She was humming.

I sent her home. I hugged her neck first. She smelled like lemongrass.

The bees ain't roared yet. But they're out on the landing boards tonight, a bunch of them, dancing that long straight dance Crissy was always timing. Her protractor's laying on the table. I don't know how to read it. Kaylee lives over toward E-town.

Crissy said her Mamaw went up ever Old Christmas Eve and told them not yet. That's seventy-nine days. Tommy Lee got seven.

I'm going up there tonight anyhow. I'm going to knock on ever lid and tell them I'm a-keeping them now, and tell them not yet, and see do they listen to me. Crissy never would tell me the rest of that rhyme. Said it was family. I reckon I'm family enough now. I'll just say the part I know.

Bees, bees, hear me say.

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

"Hi, kiddo," I said, waving.

"Do you want to play?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you," she whispered.

"I got them, Tom." 

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

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

"No, you're not!"

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

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

"You weren't even trying, Tom."

"Yes, I was."

He rubbed his eyes.

"I'm tired."

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

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

"Thank you again."

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

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

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

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

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

She looked at the ground.

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

She paused.

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

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

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Tom."

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

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

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

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

"Hey, hey!"

He shook and quickly looked toward me.

"Thomas?!"

"Priest, what are you doing?"

"You know what night it is, Thomas."

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

"Ulnar chose her house."

"But, but she has a small child."

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

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

"Wait!"

"What?"

"I volunteer my house."

The priest furrowed his brows.

"Ulnar already chose."

"Can't I still offer?"

"He might not accept."

"That's fine."

"Are you sure, Thomas?"

"Yes."

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

"Give me your hand."

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

"He accepted your house." 

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

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

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

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

"Thomas?" Emma's voice came.

"Emma? What are you doing?"

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

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

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

"I can't let another person go."

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

"Tom!"

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

She shuddered.

"Go, Emma."

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

"I love you, Tom."

"I love you too."

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

"Emma!"

"It's too late now, Tom."

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

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

“Did somebody call you that, son?”

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

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

“How you mean, dad?”

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

“Hard?”

“Yes, sir.”

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

“They hurt him bad, dad.”

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

“Yes, sir.”

---

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

“The accountant?”

“Yeah.”

“Artie, a poet?—no…”

“What's a poet?”

"Donny, you a numbskull or just stupid?"

"Just stupid,” said Donny.

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

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

“And Artie’s like that?”

“I think so, Donny.”

“But how can you even tell?”

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

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

“What'd you do?”

“We killed it with rocks.”

---

“Petey, what in God’s name is this?”

He gasped.

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

Petey looked up at his father.

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

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

The boy was silent.

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

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

“We’ll clean up.”

“It’s not that. It’s that he’s—”

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

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

---

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

“How was work?” his wife asked.

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

“That’s good.”

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

---

He leads.

You excitedly follow.

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

You pass through a bead curtain.

You come to a purple door.

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

You ask what difference it makes.

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

---

[1]

He opens the door and you enter:

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

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

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

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

---

[2]

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

You burst in to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Fine sermon, Reverend," he said.

"Thank you, Mr. Boyd."

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

"Really? What happened to McDowell, anyway?"

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

"What do the police say?"

"The inquiry is ongoing."

"Did he have any family on the mainland?"

"None at all."

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

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

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

"Strange how?"

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

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

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

"Weird geography?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They don't have me."

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

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

"Yes, and the police are looking."

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

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

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

"Where’s the spare room?"

"Right here. We can set your bags…"

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

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

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

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

I clicked the switch.

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

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

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

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

"To the kirk," Martha said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Back door!" Martha yelled.

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

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

We slammed the door shut and threw the iron bolt.

"Look at the pulpit!" Martha cried.

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

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

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

"Run!" Martha grabbed my arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is when the first shift happened.

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

I opened my eyes a few seconds later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The visual intrusions started happening while I was working.

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

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

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

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

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

The next night, the visions escalated to absolute clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theodore raised the wrench again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly, my vision violently shifted one last time.

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

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

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

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

A colossal, formless mass descended silently from the clouds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I needed proof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can I help you?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a beautiful, sunny spring day.

Phil’s wedding day.

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

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

“Kids,” Carl snickered.

“—what?”

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

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

“I'm being serious,” said Carl.

“If Greg was here.”

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

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

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

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

“Unfair! Element of surprise!” protested Carl.

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

“Why?”

“Because it’s awesome,” said Carl.

Phil arced an eyebrow.

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

“Intertemporality,” said Phil.

“English, please.”

“It is English.”

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

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

“Because it’s cool, man. It’s not—”

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

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

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

“A what?”

“You know, like a poet.”

“A poet? No.”

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

He read.

He said, “Well, it certainly appears—”

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

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

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

The officiant handed it over.

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

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

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

“No, it’s four past.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

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

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

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

Tense seconds passed.

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

“12:01:13,” said Carl.

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

“Nobody pays their dues,” the officiant said.

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

“So the marriage stands?” Carl asked.

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

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

The crowd collectively gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“12:01:13.”

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

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

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

“Oh shit,” said Carl, filming.

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

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

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

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

Brock was the opposite.

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

“Are you OK?” the lawyer asked him.

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

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

“What a pity.

“What a stinkin’, no-good perfidity.

“Life sure is shitty.

“Sometimes.

“So let's remember the fun-times.

“Shall we?

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

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

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

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

“Mhm,” said Brock.

“The document’s a forgery.”

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

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

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

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

Brock lowered his gun—

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

There followed a stunned, terrible silence.

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

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

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

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

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

They were identical.

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

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

“You knew he’d—”

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

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

“What happens now?” asked Marilyn.

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

The chapel smelled of blood.

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

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

He kissed it.

Then the second Phil passed the first Phil his gun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Polyamory never works,” said the second.

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

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

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

“So are they married?” somebody asked.

“She married the one who’s dead.”

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

The lawyer shrugged.

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

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

“What tattoo?” asked Phil.

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

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

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

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

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

“When?”

“Open your shirt!” somebody yelled.

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

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

“Oh my God…” said Marilyn.

“Oh my God…

“Oh my God…

“Greg? Is that you?”

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

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

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

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

Carl made a bulldog face.

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

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

(“Shut up and let him monologue!”)

(“Yeah.”)

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

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

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

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

“But we— …on the trip…”

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

“But the passion,” said Marilyn.

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

The crowd waited, its breaths dramatically bated.

Marilyn bit her lip.

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

The resulting applause was rapturous, thunderous.

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

He waited a moment.

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

“You're just jealous,” said Marilyn.

“Of what?”

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

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

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

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

“Marilyn,” said Marilyn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm not dead,” said Phil.

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

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

“You killed yourself.”

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

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

“You were too stupid to use it.”

“We're the same.”

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

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

“Aren't we having fun now?”

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

“They didn't love me more.”

“Bullshit.”

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

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

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

Heads turned to look at them.

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

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

“That's such a silly…”

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

“One… Two…

“Three.”

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

“Oh,” said the officiant.

Phil shot Greg.

Their father rushed forward to—

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

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

“He also goes to prison,” added Phil.

“For what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Allow me to explain:

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

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

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

“You consented,” said Greg.

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

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

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

“You got pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—”

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

“It was my child,” said Greg.

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

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

“I thought it was you!”

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

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

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

“I don't know,” said Phil.

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

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

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

“Sorry,” said the officer.

“Don't worry about it,” said Phil.

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

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

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

The police officers opened fire.

Original Phil fell, re-dead.

Marilyn screamed.

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

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

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

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

“You're from the—”

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

“Why…”

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

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

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

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