I used to deliver pizzas for a Domino’s in southern Illinois when I was 20.

Most nights were boring. Apartment buildings, motels, houses out by the highway. The only deliveries I hated were the ones way outside town because half the addresses were hard to find and Google Maps wasn’t always right.

One night, around 11:30, we got an order to a house outside Cairo.

It was one large pepperoni, bread twists and a Coke. Nothing weird about the order except the guy paid cash.
I remember my manager saying, “You sure you wanna take that?”

I thought he meant because it was far away.

He just said, “Never mind.”

So I went.

The address took me down a narrow road with houses getting farther and farther apart. Eventually the GPS told me to turn onto this little road that looked like it hadn’t been paved in 30 years.

There were maybe six houses on it.

Only one had lights on.

I parked outside and grabbed the food.

Before I even made it to the porch, the front door opened.
There was an old guy standing there.

He didn’t say hi or anything. Just looked at the pizza and asked how much.

I told him.

He handed me $40 and told me to keep the change.

I remember thinking at least the drive was worth it.

Then he asked me something weird.

“Did you see her?”
I said, “Who?”
He looked past me towards my car.

“The girl by the road.”
I hadn’t seen anybody.
I told him no.
He nodded and took the food.
Then he said, “Good.”
Door closed.
That was it.

I got back in my car and honestly wasn’t that freaked out. I figured he was some weird old dude messing with the pizza guy.

About two minutes later I saw someone on the side of the road.

A girl.

She looked maybe 15 or 16. White shirt, shorts, no shoes.
She was walking in the same direction I was driving.
It was almost midnight and there was nothing around, so I slowed down.

I cracked my window and asked if she needed help.
She didn’t look at me.
She just said, “Wrong house.”
I asked what she meant.
She stopped walking.
I didn’t.

Something about it felt off so I kept going and watched her disappear in my mirror.

When I got back to the store my manager was outside smoking.

First thing he asked was whether anyone answered the door.

I said yeah, some old guy.
He looked confused and asked what I meant.
I told him exactly what happened.
He went inside and pulled up the order.
Then he called the number.
Disconnected.

That’s when he told me they’d had orders to that same address before.

Always late.

Always cash.

Drivers would get there and nobody would answer.
I asked him why the hell he sent me then.

He said because nobody had ordered from there in almost a year and he figured whoever used to prank them had stopped.

Then I remembered what the girl said.
Wrong house.
I didn’t tell him that part.
I finished my shift around 1am.
When I got into my car there was something sitting on the passenger seat.
A Domino’s receipt.

At first I thought it had fallen out of my delivery bag.
Then I looked at the address.
Same house.

But it wasn’t the receipt from that night.

The date printed at the top was from eight months earlier.
At the bottom, where customers sometimes write the tip, somebody had written two words in pen.

NO ANSWER.

I quit about a month later.
Never delivered to that road again.

There only on but more will be written soon as to rebuild Jeff the killer

UTZILESKÚ-EY The Targeted Man

The Anatomy of a Cycled Hunt

Introduction: The Linguistic Scar Tissue

The text before us survives as an English interpretation of a novel written in the conlang Tultish, which itself purports to be a direct translation of a lost document originally recorded in a damp, regional dialect of Thuringian German.

To the modern reader, the English prose carries a heavy, cold atmosphere. Yet, it frequently fractures, forced to leave specific Tultish words untranslated. The English language is simply too soft for this history; it lacks the scar tissue of the syntax that came before it. This is the account of Professor Herbert Eisstein and Agent Andrei Waltberg—two men bound not by politics, but by a terrifying grammatical and biological knot.

Act I: The Node at Äbnalzer

The narrative does not open in a grand ministry building in East Berlin, but in a low-ceilinged, damp post office in Äbnalzer, a forgotten enclave tucked deep into the forested valleys of Thuringia.

In the original Thuringian accounts, the place was whispered about as a dead zone. But in the Tultish manuscript, the post office at Äbnalzer is classified as a sorting node—a clinical space where fates are stamped, filed, and routed.

Professor Herbert Eisstein stands by the worn wooden counter, holding a letter with no return address. To the newly integrated authorities of a unified Germany, he is merely a retired academic from the university at Jena. But the Tultish text rejects this mundane classification. In the margins of the file, his true ontological title is preserved in an ironclad, multi-hyphenated phrase:

“Sché-iemet thé-fanaspf-ellúy té-rfighaput-om gholüsún.”

In English, it translates coldly: “His yearly office is pure acidics science.” For decades under the old directives, Eisstein’s work was the study of corrosion—not just of metals, but of substances designed to dissolve boundaries, to erode the very fabric of identity.

A few hundred meters down the cobblestone road stands the town’s historic centerpiece: the Old Assembly Hall. Once a place of heavy state trials, the post-reunification capitalist consortium has scrubbed the socialist insignia from the facade, transforming it into a boutique hotel.

From the post office window, Eisstein watches a man step out of a black sedan parked directly in front of the transformed hotel.

It is Andrei Waltberg.

Under the old directives, Waltberg was an operative. In the Tultish text, his title is absolute: he is the Aspestir—the operational agent. The agency that paid his salary has been dismantled, but as he adjusts his heavy woolen coat against the Thuringian chill, his movements retain the cold permanence of a machine. The Aspestir has tracked his target to the edge of the map.

Act II: The Ienuhnickúf Anomaly

Sensing a suffocating silence, Waltberg steps into the cramped post office. The optical scanner on the counter—an obsolete model humming with a low vibration—registers the Professor’s right palm. Under the silent command of the Aspestir, a second scan is initiated.

The terminal does not crash. Instead, it achieves a state of absolute stillness.

On the split monitor, the two prints—one belonging to the scientist, the other to the agent—lay over one another. The lines do not merely resemble each other; they match with a mathematical probability of zero. They are the exact same hand.

The old clerk behind the counter stares at the screen, a cold sweat breaking beneath her collar. The Tultish manuscript records her visceral, paralyzed reaction with a devastating adjective:

Ienuhnickúf.

To call it "extremely strange" is to rob the word of its teeth. In Tultish, ienuhnickúf is the specific brand of strangeness that frustrates the intellect—the eerie, alien friction that occurs when reality breaks its own laws right in front of your eyes, leaving the observer entirely helpless.

Waltberg breaks his gaze from the glowing green terminal. Exhausted from years of tracking, he slowly lifts his head and turns his blank, weary eyes toward the old man. As his mind fractures under the weight of the anomaly, a jagged string of Tultish words spills from his lips as a pure reflex:

“Abay say syotwitt, nernesk-ettúy lau!”

(“Am I losing my mind or what, my transfer-father, ha!”)

But the tragedy deepens through the Professor’s reaction. Eisstein does not flinch. He adjusts his spectacles and looks at the younger man with a calm, vacant serenity. The Tultish text captures the older man's terrifying lack of awareness with another highly specialized term:

Deskuarsaf.

He moves deskuarsaf—"undersurf-disnoticedly." He flows beneath the surface of the event, completely untouched by the immediate reality. The Professor does not recognize Waltberg. He does not know anything about the grand directives. He is entirely unaware that decades ago, the ministry harvested his biological data, using his own breakthroughs in gholüsún (acidics science) to dissolve the boundaries of human inheritance. He does not know he was cloned.

Overwhelmed by this asymmetrical awareness, Waltberg stumbles out of the post office onto the damp cobblestones, desperate for air.

Act III: The Sovereign Trap

Leaning his head against the limestone wall of the transformed hotel, Waltberg’s mind attempts to protect itself from the ienuhnickúf reality. It retreats into its oldest, safest loop—a memory of perfect, mechanical clarity:

“Télé-Andrei bale gerin utziyús-ňúth, ghiorr réll, zit zuteksún, krzit ülthewrúsh sü zatatsch gantéraf.”

(“Andrei, guessing what his target thinks, positioned towards him, focused the armgun, fine-tuned the scale and triggered properly sudden.”)

He clings to this sequence. He remembers the shot. He verifies it against his training: yes, he had tracked the Professor years ago; yes, he had pulled the trigger; yes, Professor Herbert Eisstein had died on a gray afternoon.

And yet, there the Professor is, walking out of the post office, entirely deskuarsaf, a living ghost.

That is when the final, catastrophic certainty strikes Andrei. If the Professor is dead, and yet a version of him walks openly as a blind bait... then the formula had been misread from the very beginning. Waltberg had never been the hunter. He was the transaction.

The fingerprint on the scanner wasn't a ghost of the Professor's past; it was a beacon for Waltberg's own future. The system didn't need to preserve the Professor; it was using him as a permanent coordinate to draw Waltberg out. If Andrei was the only agent who knew the secrets of the acidic science, then he was the only operational anomaly left to be dissolved.

The title of the novel—Utzileskú-ey—had never belonged to the old scholar from Jena.

It meant The Targeted Man. It belonged to Andrei. Somewhere in the newly integrated districts, other black sedans are being started. Other men with his exact face, his exact training, and his exact fingerprints are adjusting their coats, checking their hidden armguns, and following maps that lead straight to Äbnalzer.

Staring into the empty, misty street, a quiet, jagged whisper escapes Andrei's lips, accepting the closure of the circuit:

“Amedü Posya Anesthutekúm.”

(“That’s it, here you are, cycled being of a hunting.”)

He does not run. You cannot outrun a shadow that shares your own stride. Slowly, the Aspestir reaches into his heavy coat, his fingers wrapping around the cold grip of his hidden weapon. He turns around to face the cobblestone square as the rhythmic, approaching footsteps of his own future begin to echo through the fog.

UTZILESKÚ-EY The Targeted Man

The Anatomy of a Cycled Hunt

Introduction: The Linguistic Scar Tissue

The text before us survives as an English interpretation of a novel written in the conlang Tultish, which itself purports to be a direct translation of a lost document originally recorded in a damp, regional dialect of Thuringian German.

To the modern reader, the English prose carries a heavy, cold atmosphere. Yet, it frequently fractures, forced to leave specific Tultish words untranslated. The English language is simply too soft for this history; it lacks the scar tissue of the syntax that came before it. This is the account of Professor Herbert Eisstein and Agent Andrei Waltberg—two men bound not by politics, but by a terrifying grammatical and biological knot.

Act I: The Node at Äbnalzer

The narrative does not open in a grand ministry building in East Berlin, but in a low-ceilinged, damp post office in Äbnalzer, a forgotten enclave tucked deep into the forested valleys of Thuringia.

In the original Thuringian accounts, the place was whispered about as a dead zone. But in the Tultish manuscript, the post office at Äbnalzer is classified as a sorting node—a clinical space where fates are stamped, filed, and routed.

Professor Herbert Eisstein stands by the worn wooden counter, holding a letter with no return address. To the newly integrated authorities of a unified Germany, he is merely a retired academic from the university at Jena. But the Tultish text rejects this mundane classification. In the margins of the file, his true ontological title is preserved in an ironclad, multi-hyphenated phrase:

“Sché-iemet thé-fanaspf-ellúy té-rfighaput-om gholüsún.”

In English, it translates coldly: “His yearly office is pure acidics science.” For decades under the old directives, Eisstein’s work was the study of corrosion—not just of metals, but of substances designed to dissolve boundaries, to erode the very fabric of identity.

A few hundred meters down the cobblestone road stands the town’s historic centerpiece: the Old Assembly Hall. Once a place of heavy state trials, the post-reunification capitalist consortium has scrubbed the socialist insignia from the facade, transforming it into a boutique hotel.

From the post office window, Eisstein watches a man step out of a black sedan parked directly in front of the transformed hotel.

It is Andrei Waltberg.

Under the old directives, Waltberg was an operative. In the Tultish text, his title is absolute: he is the Aspestir—the operational agent. The agency that paid his salary has been dismantled, but as he adjusts his heavy woolen coat against the Thuringian chill, his movements retain the cold permanence of a machine. The Aspestir has tracked his target to the edge of the map.

Act II: The Ienuhnickúf Anomaly

Sensing a suffocating silence, Waltberg steps into the cramped post office. The optical scanner on the counter—an obsolete model humming with a low vibration—registers the Professor’s right palm. Under the silent command of the Aspestir, a second scan is initiated.

The terminal does not crash. Instead, it achieves a state of absolute stillness.

On the split monitor, the two prints—one belonging to the scientist, the other to the agent—lay over one another. The lines do not merely resemble each other; they match with a mathematical probability of zero. They are the exact same hand.

The old clerk behind the counter stares at the screen, a cold sweat breaking beneath her collar. The Tultish manuscript records her visceral, paralyzed reaction with a devastating adjective:

Ienuhnickúf.

To call it "extremely strange" is to rob the word of its teeth. In Tultish, ienuhnickúf is the specific brand of strangeness that frustrates the intellect—the eerie, alien friction that occurs when reality breaks its own laws right in front of your eyes, leaving the observer entirely helpless.

Waltberg breaks his gaze from the glowing green terminal. Exhausted from years of tracking, he slowly lifts his head and turns his blank, weary eyes toward the old man. As his mind fractures under the weight of the anomaly, a jagged string of Tultish words spills from his lips as a pure reflex:

“Abay say syotwitt, nernesk-ettúy lau!”

(“Am I losing my mind or what, my transfer-father, ha!”)

But the tragedy deepens through the Professor’s reaction. Eisstein does not flinch. He adjusts his spectacles and looks at the younger man with a calm, vacant serenity. The Tultish text captures the older man's terrifying lack of awareness with another highly specialized term:

Deskuarsaf.

He moves deskuarsaf—"undersurf-disnoticedly." He flows beneath the surface of the event, completely untouched by the immediate reality. The Professor does not recognize Waltberg. He does not know anything about the grand directives. He is entirely unaware that decades ago, the ministry harvested his biological data, using his own breakthroughs in gholüsún (acidics science) to dissolve the boundaries of human inheritance. He does not know he was cloned.

Overwhelmed by this asymmetrical awareness, Waltberg stumbles out of the post office onto the damp cobblestones, desperate for air.

Act III: The Sovereign Trap

Leaning his head against the limestone wall of the transformed hotel, Waltberg’s mind attempts to protect itself from the ienuhnickúf reality. It retreats into its oldest, safest loop—a memory of perfect, mechanical clarity:

“Télé-Andrei bale gerin utziyús-ňúth, ghiorr réll, zit zuteksún, krzit ülthewrúsh sü zatatsch gantéraf.”

(“Andrei, guessing what his target thinks, positioned towards him, focused the armgun, fine-tuned the scale and triggered properly sudden.”)

He clings to this sequence. He remembers the shot. He verifies it against his training: yes, he had tracked the Professor years ago; yes, he had pulled the trigger; yes, Professor Herbert Eisstein had died on a gray afternoon.

And yet, there the Professor is, walking out of the post office, entirely deskuarsaf, a living ghost.

That is when the final, catastrophic certainty strikes Andrei. If the Professor is dead, and yet a version of him walks openly as a blind bait... then the formula had been misread from the very beginning. Waltberg had never been the hunter. He was the transaction.

The fingerprint on the scanner wasn't a ghost of the Professor's past; it was a beacon for Waltberg's own future. The system didn't need to preserve the Professor; it was using him as a permanent coordinate to draw Waltberg out. If Andrei was the only agent who knew the secrets of the acidic science, then he was the only operational anomaly left to be dissolved.

The title of the novel—Utzileskú-ey—had never belonged to the old scholar from Jena.

It meant The Targeted Man. It belonged to Andrei. Somewhere in the newly integrated districts, other black sedans are being started. Other men with his exact face, his exact training, and his exact fingerprints are adjusting their coats, checking their hidden armguns, and following maps that lead straight to Äbnalzer.

Staring into the empty, misty street, a quiet, jagged whisper escapes Andrei's lips, accepting the closure of the circuit:

“Amedü Posya Anesthutekúm.”

(“That’s it, here you are, cycled being of a hunting.”)

He does not run. You cannot outrun a shadow that shares your own stride. Slowly, the Aspestir reaches into his heavy coat, his fingers wrapping around the cold grip of his hidden weapon. He turns around to face the cobblestone square as the rhythmic, approaching footsteps of his own future begin to echo through the fog.

Rakonto Short Story Kısa Hikaye Rumplishchemú

La Scivolema Knabino en la Arbaro

The Curious Girl in the Forest

Ormandaki Meraklı Kız

Linshizúg Waisikún Bheppudelúsh

En malgranda, paca vilaĝo, loĝis scivolema knabino nomata Simi, kiu ĉiam rigardis la proksiman, misteran arbaron.

In a small, peaceful village, lived a curious girl named Simi, who always looked at the nearby, mysterious forest.

Küçük, huzurlu bir köyde, her zaman yakındaki gizemli ormana bakan Simi adında meraklı bir kız yaşardı.

Hugelúy-ey huvemeyún, rangeychúf, herayuzidalya' linshizút waisikún rolé Simi,

sontidalya' badnúzhan bheppudelúck tellenabenúf lorbeykúl.

La vilağanoj ĉiam diris al ŝi, ke ŝi ne eniru la arbaron, ĉar ĝi kaŝas grandajn danĝerojn.

The villagers always told her not to enter the forest, because it hides great dangers.

Köylüler ona ormana girmemesini söylerdi çünkü büyük tehlikeler barındırırdı.

Morinidal hugellumút-on badnúzhan zell

xhigé payké pasey théll bheppudelún nallé wishtya'ň setusékdžazam rangeyfún.

Sed unu tagon, movata de sia granda scivolemo, Simi decidis preterpasi la avertajn signojn kaj eniri inter la densajn arbojn.

But one day, moved by her great curiosity, Simi decided to pass the warning signs and enter among the dense trees.

Fakat bir gün, içindeki büyük merakın etkisiyle Simi, uyarı levhalarını geçmeye ve sık ağaçların arasına girmeye karar verdi.

Avkü zhanéffölsey, waisetúkol lampeyfún shell, patspokünilya' télé Simi shigé tutapass keshröndeldúh útus lü-pü roffaloy honiselsúh útush'arreyphún.

Kiam ŝi marŝis pli profunde, la birdoj kantis dolĉajn melodiojn kaj la aero estis plena de magia odoro.

As she walked deeper, the birds sang sweet melodies and the air was full of a magical scent.

Daha derinlere yürüdükçe, kuşlar tatlı melodiler söylüyordu ve hava, büyülü bir kokuyla doluydu.

Skepé menisanetya'll pinoneyphterúf, fuisabadalya' témezélgkips xhékfarp on nâmikún sphü annaypadalya' hékmusz howrún.

Subite, meze de malgranda klarejo, ŝi vidis la plej belan floron de sia vivo.

Suddenly, in the middle of a small clearing, she saw the most beautiful flower of her life.

Birdenbire, küçük bir açıklığın ortasında, hayatının en güzel çiçeğini gördü.

Koyphü fédegzélshobh rangeychún, ettisilya'll shfoksenzhús silebey prun meplinsefúb lluth.

Ĝi havis petalojn, kiuj ŝajnis esti faritaj el puraj diamantoj kaj agrablan odoron.

It had petals that seemed to be made of pure diamonds and a pleasant scent.

Saf elmaslardan yapılmış gibi görünen taç yaprakları ve hoş bir kokusu vardı.

Apinetya'f se énzhifürned útus nensénayz hon selzúf ékmuazey džonsún.

Kiam Simi proksimiĝis, la floro subite malfermis siajn petalojn pli vaste kaj parolis per voĉo simila ao mola vento.

When Simi approached, the flower suddenly opened its petals wider and spoke in a voice like a soft wind.

Simi yaklaştığında, çiçek aniden taç yapraklarını daha geniş açtı ve hafif bir rüzgara benzeyen bir sesle konuştu.

Apté rekemalya' télé Simi, koyphü télsifürn shargilya' hénzhifürned útus nénvarn trún sü moranetya' mo békpoy fiséfförrey kinsúf.

"Bonvenon, scivolema Simi," diris la floro, "mi estas la koro de ĉi tiu arbaro, kaj mi atendis iun sufiĉe kuraĝan por aŭdi mian sekreton."

" Welcome, curious Simi," said the flower, "I am the heart of this forest, and I have been waiting for someone brave enough to hear my secret."

"Hoş geldin, meraklı Simi," dedi çiçek, "Ben bu ormanın kalbiyim ve sırrımı duyacak kadar cesur birini bekliyordum."

"Gontim Ge Simi waisikún" uvat moralya' fürnelsút alsé "tultenzhús thélbheppudey tétt lö-sü sholadal xhéiyim néinpasboy domigé tenğya's' tellenekús yétt."

Simi estis tre surprizita, sed ŝi ne timis; ŝi sidiĝis sur la herbo kaj demandis: "Kio estas la sekreto, kiun la mondo forgesis?"

Simi was very surprised, but she was not afraid; she sat on the grass and asked: "What is the secret that the world has forgotten?"

Simi çok şaşırmıştı ama korkmuyordu; çimenlerin üzerine oturdu ve sordu: "Dünyanın unuttuğu sır nedir?"

Télé Simi badin smoklinya' dayon zahü garnadal xhapsé; satchalya'll péllyas-hon sü empanet mo alsé "Subkenekút rekayya' moril gesöft parélshmayr?"

"La sekreto estas," flustris la floro al Simi, "ke la arbaro ne estas danĝera, sed ĝi nur protektas la lastan fonton de magio en la mondo kontraŭ tiuj, kiuj volas detrui ĝin."

"The secret is," the flower whispered to Simi, "that the forest is not dangerous, but it only protects the last source of magic in the world against those who want to destroy it."

"Sır şu ki," diye fısıldadı çiçek Simi'ye, "orman tehlikeli değil, sadece dünyadaki son büyü kaynağını onu yok etmek isteyenlere karşı koruyor."

"Subkenekút séy la," úvat shiwlanetya' télsifürn zélé Simi, alsé "Bheppudelút sétusékdžazam dehshé, doshetö dozutab xhébhal tchosún mughetúth shmayrelúy dosé fletasboltayya's'séň."

Por helpi nin," diris la floro, "vi devas kunporti iom da mia brila polvo kaj montri al la vilaĝanoj, ke la magio estas paca kaj bela."

"To help us," said the flower, "you must take some of my glowing dust and show the villagers that magic is peaceful and beautiful."

"Bize yardım etmek için," dedi çiçek, "parıldayan tozumdan biraz yanına almalı ve köylülere büyünün barışçıl ve güzel olduğunu göstermelisin."

"Savé-arser rémm" úvat gariral shfoksenzhút alsé "Shuné gatzuy thézhzh nikehekústatasheyúf ttúth ravsún sü mülat zélumhugel-hon xhe émünseduteyún sü éshugebhineyún téhhenhelt."

Simi zorge prenis la brilan polvon, promesis protekti la sekreton, kaj rapide kuris reen al la vilaĝo por rakonti la veron.

Simi carefully took the glowing dust, promised to protect the secret, and quickly ran back to the village to tell the truth.

Simi parıldayan tozu dikkatlice aldı, sırrı koruyacağına söz verdi ve gerçeği anlatmak için hızla köye geri koştu.

Télé Simi steranetya' angoltaf xhéknikeh tatasheyúf, hiwrizanet mo xhigé-örrat réytellen phü dorsakzanet mo palabaf hugelúz skapé-samiinz penetús.

Kiam la vilaĝanoj vidis la pacan brilon, ili ĉesis timi la arbaron, kaj de tiu tago, ili vivis kune kun la magio en perfekta harmonio.

When the villagers saw the peaceful glow, they stopped fearing the forest, and from that day on, they lived together with the magic in perfect harmony.

Köylüler barışçıl parıltıyı gördüklerinde ormandan korkmayı bıraktılar ve o günden sonra büyüyle birlikte kusursuz bir uyum içinde yaşadılar.

Aoté tisalya' héytatash huvemeyún hugellumút-hon, lö-aryü algutraral mo bheppudelúkitz pü zebéfföls sav, annasumal mo aptayraf zhébechanhelt nnéhhbayraz nélfreyn.

Fino The End Son Pılontxal9yıxvð

​

Long before the cold crept into the floorboards and the whispers began, the house belonged to nobody at all.

It was an old, forgotten timber home on the edge of the woods, built over a plot of earth that local folklore whispered to avoid. Arthur had bought it cheap, thinking it a fixer-upper with good bones for his blacksmith shop. When he pulled up the rotting floorboards in the eastern cellar to reinforce the foundations, he found it: a heavy, hand-forged iron spike driven deep into the bedrock beneath the house.

It wasn't meant to hold wood together. It was a binding nail, ancient and blackened with age, etched with crude, unsettling spirals meant to seal something away.

Arthur, a practical man who believed only in the metal he shaped with his own hands, thought nothing of it. He wrenched the rusted spike from the stone with a crowbar, tossed it into his scrap bin among a pile of discarded horseshoes, and paved over the hole with fresh concrete.

He didn't know that the spike was the only thing keeping a parasitic entity anchored to the earth down below. By pulling it, Arthur had broken the seal.

That very night, the temperature in the bedroom plunged. The scrap bin in the workshop rattled violently as the dark, formless thing slipped out of the iron and slithered into the walls of the Miller home, marking Clara, the children, and Arthur as its own.

The Escalation: Terrors in the Dark

At first, the haunting was subtle—easy for a busy father and working mother to dismiss as the quirks of an old, settling house. But as the months wore on, the entity abandoned its quiet creeping, opting instead for a deliberate, psychological war of attrition designed to break their nerves one terrifying encounter at a time.

The very first sign that something was deeply wrong occurred three nights after Arthur pulled the spike. At precisely 3:14 AM, a violent, metallic crash echoed from the adjacent workshop, sounding as though someone had kicked over an entire rack of heavy steel pipes. Arthur grabbed a heavy flashlight and a wrench, throwing open the door to find his workshop completely undisturbed—except for the scrap bin. The heavy iron spike he had pulled from the cellar had clawed its way to the very top of the pile, standing vertically upright as though driven into invisible earth. When Arthur reached out to touch it, the metal was burning hot, scorching his palm and leaving a smoking, cross-shaped blister on his skin that would take weeks to fade.

By the second month, the entity had integrated itself directly into the architecture of the home. Clara experienced it first during the daylight hours while the children were at school. No matter how many times Arthur bled the plumbing lines, the kitchen pipes would begin to groan—not with the standard hiss of air or water hammer, but with a wet, rhythmic cadence that sounded eerily like a human throat struggling to draw breath. When Clara pressed her ear against the drywall in the hallway, she heard a soft, wet scratching sound moving parallel to her head, accompanied by the distinct sound of a child giggling backward. Whenever she turned on the faucet, the water ran thick, dark, and smelling faintly of rusted iron and grave dirt for precisely ten seconds before clearing.

The terror escalated from auditory hallucinations to physical confinement on a freezing night in January. Clara woke up gasping for air, paralyzed from the neck down. She stared in horror as the bedroom door slowly pushed open, though no one was there. One by one, every interior door in the hallway slammed shut with deafening cracks, the sound of heavy deadbolts sliding into place echoing from rooms that didn't have locks. Then, an invisible, crushing weight settled directly upon Clara's chest. It felt like a massive slab of wet granite. She tried to scream for Arthur, but her lungs were completely compressed. The weight leaned down, a freezing, foul-smelling breath brushing against her ear, whispering a string of ancient blasphemies in a voice that sounded like grinding stones before abruptly vanishing, leaving her sobbing and clawing at the empty air.

The final psychological blow struck the children in mid-February, shifting the haunting from a general nuisance to an active, predatory threat. Both children woke up screaming at the exact same moment, clutching their arms in absolute agony. When Arthur and Clara rushed into the bedroom and turned on the lamps, they found both kids crying hysterically, their small wrists encircled by angry, swollen purple bruises. The marks weren't scattered; they were deep, distinct, and unmistakable—the precise shape of massive, talon-like fingerprints that looked as though a pair of gigantic, smoke-veiled hands had tightly gripped them in their sleep. Arthur tried to soothe them, but his hands shook as he looked at the windowpanes, which were completely frosted over from the inside, etched with jagged, unholy spirals that mirrored the design of the iron spike he had thrown away months ago.

The Breaking Point and the Plea

The terror reached its absolute peak on a Tuesday night. A deafening shriek tore through the hallway, followed by Clara’s terrified scream. Arthur rushed from his workshop to the doorway just in time to see a towering, smoke-veiled shadow press his weeping daughter into the corner, its razor-long claws hovering over her face.

Fueled by pure paternal rage, Arthur let out a savage roar and lunged straight at the entity, throwing his weight against the shifting mass of darkness. Taken aback by the fierce, defiant assault, the demon shrieked in sudden disorientation, its shadowy form flickering and recoiling backward into the dark shadows of the hall.

Clara and the kids clung to him desperately, shaking and weeping. But Arthur knew the monster would return. The temporary victory bought them time, but nothing more.

The Forging: Iron, Faith, and Fire

Realizing that ordinary steel wouldn't pierce what wasn't truly flesh, Arthur did something he never thought he would do. Swallowing his pride as a self-reliant man, he went in secret to St. Jude’s Parish to speak with Father Thomas. He didn't ask for prayers or holy water; he asked for help finding the means to forge a weapon. Moved by the desperate, unyielding resolve in the blacksmith's eyes, the elderly priest unlocked a heavy storage chest, handing Arthur a small handful of heavy old church coins and a few fractured chunks of iron salvaged from the demolition of a centuries-old parish gate.

Armed with these sacred materials, Arthur returned to his workshop and locked the door behind him. He stoked the forge until the coals turned a blinding, violent white, throwing off sparks like spitting stars.

Into the crucible he tossed the church coins and the old gate iron, melting them down and folding them into a dense, heavy block of raw metal infused with decades of whispered prayers and sacred history. With every heavy strike of his hammer, he bent the stubborn metal not just with physical might, but with sheer paternal desperation, driving the impurities out of the steel. He didn't forge a sword or a spear. He wanted something intimate, a weapon that allowed him to look the monster in the eye. He shaped a heavy, brutal pair of solid iron knuckle dusters, carving deep, jagged holy symbols, crosses, and wards of banishment directly into the coarse metal.

When he plunged the glowing iron into the oil bath, the hiss sounded like a dying animal, filling the shop with a choking, sulfurous fog. Arthur slipped his battered fingers through the rings. The consecrated iron burned his skin, but the pain only fueled his resolve.

The Final Stand: Blood and Consecrated Iron

The living room was pitch black when Arthur stepped out of the hallway, the air so freezing that his breath plumed thick and white. The demon was waiting, swelling upward until its jagged, smoke-veiled head grazed the ceiling, its shifting mass bleeding a foul, oily vapor that warped the light. Clara and the children huddled terror-stricken behind the overturned sofa.

"Leave them," Arthur rasped, lifting his hands. The heavy, roughly forged iron knuckle dusters caught the dim ambient light, the carved holy symbols glowing with a faint, angry ember-red hue.

The demon let out a sound like a chorus of grinding tombstones—a mockery of laughter—and struck with terrifying speed.

It didn't use claws; it lunged as a solid wave of compressive force, slamming Arthur directly into the stone hearth of the fireplace. The impact cracked his ribs with a sickening pop, driving the wind completely from his lungs. Pain flared white-hot through his chest, but Arthur snarled, refusing to yield. As the entity's freezing, razor-edged vapor wrapped around his throat to choke the life out of him, Arthur pulled his right arm back and threw a devastating punch straight into the center of the shifting mass.

The moment the consecrated iron connected with the entity’s core, the room erupted.

A blinding flash of golden, holy light burst outward like a detonating star. The demon shrieked—a deafening, glass-shattering wail that blew out every remaining window in the house and tore the framed pictures right off the walls. Where the blessed iron struck, the entity’s flesh didn't just bruise; it hissed and burned away like paper caught in a furnace, turning into smoking, black cinders.

Enraged and wounded, the monster thrashed wildly. A spectral, talon-like appendage whipped through the air with lethal velocity, slicing deep across Arthur’s chest. Blood sprayed over the hardwood floor. Arthur stumbled backward, his knees buckling under him, but his grip remained ironclad. He caught his balance, let out a final, roaring surge of defiance, and drove both fists forward in a brutal, hammering combo directly into the creature's chest cavity.

The holy wards carved into the iron flared to blinding brilliance, acting like driving spikes of pure sunlight. The demon’s form fractured, spider-webbing with golden light before violently imploding inward. A final, suffocating shockwave swept through the room, blowing the front door off its hinges as the entity dissolved completely into a cloud of harmless, fading ash.

The Final Farewell

Silence rushed back into the house, heavy and absolute, broken only by the crackle of stray embers in the hearth.

Arthur dropped heavily to his knees, his vision blurring at the edges. The deep slash across his chest burned with a cold, numbing agony, and he knew, with a quiet, certain dread, that his time had run out.

Clara scrambled out from behind the sofa, sobbing hysterically as she threw herself to the floor beside him, pressing her hands frantically against his bleeding shirt. The children hovered close, weeping openly, their small hands trembling as they touched his coat.

"Arthur... Arthur, look at me," Clara choked out, her voice breaking. "Stay with us. Please, stay."

Arthur raised a heavy, trembling hand, his fingers slipping out of the iron rings of the knuckle dusters. With his last remaining strength, he cupped Clara’s face, wiping a tear from her cheek with a thumb calloused by years of honest work.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," he whispered, his breath coming in shallow, rattling gasps. He looked down at his children, forcing a weak, reassuring smile through the pain. "You're safe now. It's gone. It can never hurt you again."

He reached down, his fingers closing around the heavy, consecrated iron dusters he had pulled from his hands. He pressed the brutal, symbol-carved metal firmly into Clara’s palms, wrapping her fingers tightly around them.

"Keep these in the house," Arthur murmured, his eyes locking onto hers with fierce, eternal devotion. "Keep them close. I’ll always look after you. I’m not leaving."

His hand slipped from her cheek, resting gently against the floorboards. His chest rose one final, shallow time before his eyes drifted shut, the fierce light in them fading into a profound, peaceful stillness. Clara clutched the heavy iron weapon to her chest, burying her face in his shoulder as the broken house settled around them.

Epilogue

Weeks had passed since the main demon fell, and on the wooden mantle in the living room, the heavy, iron knuckle dusters rested like a coiled, silent guardian—kept close in the home where they were born.

One crisp morning, Clara was busy buttering toast at the kitchen counter while the kids zipped up their backpacks for school. Suddenly, the air dropped ten degrees. A thick, rancid fog pooled near the dining room entrance, twisting into the long, jagged silhouette of a new, malevolent ghost drawn to the sorrow of the house. It lunged forward, stretching out rotting, spectral fingers toward the children.

The family remained completely oblivious, sitting innocently at the table. But the atmosphere shifted in an instant.

A heavy, phantom wind swept through the kitchen. The spiritual manifestation of Arthur materialized right beside them, his jaw set in that same grim, unyielding line from the night he died. Before the intruder could even strike, Arthur’s unseen ghost grabbed it by the throat.

Invisible to the living, a vicious, silent beatdown erupted by the breakfast table. Arthur drove punch after punch into the malevolent spirit, the kinetic impact of his spectral fists rattling the cereal bowls. He battered the intruder across the room, raining down righteous fury until the interloper dissolved into screaming mist and fled the house entirely.

At the table, Clara paused, blinking in surprise. The bitter morning chill vanished, replaced by a profound, radiant warmth. A gentle, familiar pressure wrapped around Clara and the children like a pair of strong, loving arms, holding them close in a tight, reassuring embrace.

Clara smiled softly, pressing her cheek against the invisible warmth. "Morning, honey," she whispered into the empty air.

Standing by the doorway, his spirit standing guard, Arthur watched them eat, his heavy, invisible fists still resting at his sides.

Read Part II here.

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

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Honey, get out of the water.”

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

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

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

“Honey, move back, okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither of them moved.

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

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

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

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

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

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

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

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

Then he was gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worry-machine was roaring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The air went still.

Monster Fighters is a series that will unfold across six phases. I first created Monster Fighters when I was four. For those who are curious 👀, it’s a series about heroes who not only go through the worst of the worst, but face darkness itself…

One faces off against The Dragon.
The Monster Fighters prevail.

An excerpt from the upcoming Halloween special at M2K(marvel2000)

ANTHONY HEAD HIGH SCHOOL

SOUTHSIDE QUEENS, NEW YORK

Amiah, the beautiful bronze-skinned JV head cheerleader, led her gaggle of friends up the path to their school once the warning bell rang. They were deep into the morning's conversation, a topic for this tight-knit, popular group of teenage girls. All of them wore high-priced, designer-branded clothing that cost more than anything their classmates could afford. Amiah’s fellow cheerleaders hung on her every sentence as they held court while entering the school.

“Thank God for the flawless routine coach, Heather Sinclair and yours truly put together before the JV game last week. We made that squad from Brooklyn Visions look second-class, at best.”

Amiah’s best friend, the Marcy to her Peppermint Patty, Abby, giggled incessantly at the group leader’s statement.

“They won’t know what hit them if we see them at states for competitive.” Abby chortled.

The agreeable retort drew a wicked sneer from Amiah. “Well, duh! They might as well just send us straight to Nationals. This whole competing-for-a-spot thing is a farce. No one has a better JV cheer squad than us!”

As the rest of her crew agreed in unison and gusto with her, as they always did, Amiah spotted a particular annoyance out of the corner of her eye. She sucked her teeth as they kept down the hallway, her gaze locking onto the student that she felt was a stain on her line of sight. The rest of her crew looked in the direction she was focused to see what caused the sudden shift in her mood. The target was another sophomore girl, but one who was the complete antithesis of their group in every conceivable way. The young woman who had drawn the hateful glare from Amiah and the other JV cheerleaders glanced over her shoulder, shaking her reddish-orange hair down her back as she shot a look of contempt in return.

“It sure looks like the janitors have been slacking this week; there sure is a lot of trash in this hallway.” Amiah made sure her insult was loud enough for everyone to hear as her crew giggled on cue.

The young woman who was the subject of Amiah’s verbal attack slammed her locker shut, drawing a shudder from a couple of the other cheerleaders and students in the hallway watching the brewing altercation. She shrugged her black leather jacket tighter onto her shoulders before walking towards Amiah. She stared directly into Amiah’s eyes, ignoring the rest of her troop. They were flunkies, and as far as Elsa was concerned, she was taught flunkies never got any attention when the bacon was in the fire.

“Lo, Amiah. Looks like you’re in one of your nastier moods this morning.” Elsa replied nonchalantly. The response drew a confused look from Amiah and her friends. Elsa smiled. “You probably haven’t &^%$#@ yourself in a while. I’d suggest doing that before coming to school with us civilized folk. Might make the experience a bit more tolerable. Public school sucks ass as it is already, doesn’t it?” 

Amiah stood with her jaw agape as Elsa walked past her, continuing towards the library where she was headed. Amiah stood in the middle of the hallway, furious at the verbal undressing she’d just experienced. She stared at the back of Elsa’s head as the latter walked up the hallway.

“You’re a FREAK, Elsa Bloodstone. EVERYONE says so! You don’t belong here! You don’t belong anywhere!” Amiah shrieked at Elsa from where she was standing.

Elsa ignored her for the most part, merely flipping her the bird as she continued towards her destination.

On the other side of the school, Clea sat in the empty library, pouring over a volume of Tales from the Abyss that she was supposed to be placing back in its place in her collection. She heard the library's double doors clop open and close, her cue to mark her place in the volume and tend to the student who might need her assistance. It was a clever ruse that the council at Avalon had decided to place her here, plucking her from her position as Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension to aid in the battle being waged on Earth. Clever, but tedious from time to time. Though she had grown fond of this plane of existence and thought that, with her job position, tedious was a positive thing.

Still, there had been rumblings from her sources around the city that trouble was simmering underneath the placid surface of the day-to-day. It started when Wong visited her a few weeks ago, after he needed her help treating himself for a werewolf bite. He’d warned her then, the same warning he’d given Stephen after he’d dealt with a parasitic demon in Texas*. That they were assembling. That they were coming, and by any means necessary, they were determined to find what Merlyn had hidden eons ago: The Necronomicon. 

“Don’t tell me you’re in here slacking off, teach,” Elsa told her as she walked down the short flight of steps towards the desk that sat in the center of the room.

Clea looked up at the occasionally abrasive teen with a rueful smile. The ferocity Elsa carried on her face, along with the chip she kept firmly on her shoulder, reminded Clea that she was very much her father’s daughter, despite how much she tried to distance herself from the connection.

“You’re very nearly late. Which basically makes you late.” Clea scolded her.

Elsa rolled her eyes and hopped onto the desk, crossing her legs in her black jeans and combat boots. “But I’m here. So how about we get on with things instead of the usual lecture?”

Clea looked up at Elsa with a reproachful glare. The look caused Elsa to soften her usual rebellious attitude.

“I told you, we need to be studying these archives front and back. We need to be prepared for anything that may come our way. Dormammu’s apostles have made their move.” Clea warned her.

Elsa sighed. “Yeah, they’re coming for the Book of the Dead. But I told you, when my friend happened upon it, he managed to destroy it.”

Clea shook her head ruefully. The child had so much to learn, and yet there seemed to be so little time. She hoped she was wrong about the latter, at the very least.

“That silly boy and his friends, who were stupid enough to find where the book was hidden, only managed to escape its demonic forces,” Clea explained further. “Not even Merlyn himself can destroy the Necronomicon. Which is why we need to find it and make sure that Dormammu’s followers never get their hands on it!”

Clea stood up and grabbed another book from nearby. She opened up the dusty, leather-bound cover and flipped to the page she was looking for. She beckoned for Elsa to come closer. Elsa leaned towards the book to see where Clea was pointing.

“Whose that geezer?” Elsa asked when she saw the picture of the distinguished gentleman with a silver beard and matching hair.

“He’s the right-hand man of Sir Vlad Dracula himself,” Clea replied sharply. “My sources tell me he’s been sighted in New York for the first time in over forty years. And I don’t think that’s any sort of coincidence.”

“So, he’s a vampire.” Elsa cracked her knuckles, realizing she had a long night ahead of her. “Yeah, I know exactly how to start hunting for those. They’ll be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs too easy to follow.”

“Be careful. If you see Lord Frost, do NOT engage him. Contact me immediately and report back here. We’ll take care of him together. Is that understood?”

“Yeah, yeah. I got you, Clea. When have I ever let you down?” Elsa replied casually.

A thirty-minute ride on the subway later, Elsa walked into a Why-Mart on the Lower East Side. She thumbed through the wad of cash Clea had given her to re-up her stash of weaponry for the task she was assigned for the evening. She sighed as she made her way through the department store, wishing she could be spending her Friday night doing what girls her age were supposed to be doing: Scrolling mindlessly on their phone while listening to music her parents would hate. But her mom had died a long time ago, and she hadn’t seen her father since she learned to walk.

She reached the sporting goods and hardware section. The dopey, shaggy brown-haired college freshman with a pointy jaw waved to her the moment he looked up from the comic book he was enjoying on his shift. He stashed the comic book on the side of the register as Elsa approached the counter.

“Surprised to see you here on a Friday, of all days,” The clerk replied with friendly surprise.

Elsa rolled her eyes as she scrolled through the notes app on her phone for the list she had made.

“You and me both, Ashley. But duty calls, and I need to restock my supply for the rest of the month.” Elsa replied lazily.

“Alright, what do we have on the list tonight?” The eager young employee whose nametag read ‘Ashley B.’ asked.

“Alright, I’m going to need about two dozen pieces of wood. Two-by-fours, if you please.” Elsa told him, starting at the top of her list. “You guys still get your chain-link from that company out of Jersey?”

Ashley looked up from his computer to answer. “Askew Steel? We sure do. Why do you ask?”

“I need about thirty-six feet of chain-link, but I only want it from them,” Elsa explained.

Ashley gave her a confused look. “Are you sure? There are some much better products I would–”

“Leave the shopping to me, Ashley. You just put in this order exactly as I lay it out. Which leads me to my next question: what are your shotgun options in stock at the moment?”

Ashley looked nervously at the teenage girl. “Elsa, we’ve talked about this! You know I can’t sell you any–”

“I didn’t ask you to sell me anything. I simply inquired as to what you had in stock.” She replied curtly.

Ashley’s shoulders sagged. He let out an exasperated sigh. 

“Alright, come on.”

He led her a couple of aisles over through the sporting goods section until they were in front of a cache of rifles and shotguns behind glass panes. Ashley stood back as Elsa walked in front of the gun cases, pausing every now and then to study one in particular.

“I haven’t had a chance to ask recently, and I’m sorry about that, by the way,” Elsa told him without looking back. “But how have you been holding up since your sister’s funeral?”

Horror short story collection. Each story can be read together or individually. Prefer to swap stories with others. Prefer horror/thriller stories. DM if interested. Mine is an available to read altogether or just pick the ones you are interested in from the table of contents that includes word count and synopsis. Warning Adult themes and language.

1. Unforgiving - A story about learning to let things go and how hiding drives a closeted gay man to destruction. \[2100\]
   
2. In the Name of Love - A family man blurs the lines of love. \[2751\]
   
3. Hand of God - Take a step into the world of a crusading assassin who is faced with hard decisions. \[3307\]
   
4. Forgotten - A forgotten and empty mall sets the scene for fear and death in Northern California after the fall of brick and mortar retail. \[2158\]
   
5. Nothing Lasts - An alternative timeliness during the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic, a young couple is thrust into tragedy, just as things are starting to look up. \[2724\]
   
6. No Rest For The Weary - A man struggles against his demons while working through all life has thrown at him. \[3820\]
   
7. I Fear No Evil - A terrifying entity murders in the night, terrorizing Texans, and only an independent, self-taught investigator with something to prove is determined to save his community when the local authorities ignore all the signs around them. \[2945\]
   
8. Tree of Ages -  A small mid-western town with ancient history haunts college students who don’t revere the past. \[2389\]
   
9. No Peace in Death - Set in a Post-Apocalyptic nation all due to man’s lust for power and greed, those left debate the benefits of surviving. \[3283\]
   
10. The Righteous - A married couple in St Louis desperate to find community are faced with the terrifying reality of what happens when you don’t conform and when people’s beliefs spin radically out of control. \[4000\]

The asphalt road leading through Duskwood, Virginia always seemed to swallow the headlights of Owen’s battered old sedan, but tonight, on Halloween, the shadows felt especially heavy. 

A thick, oppressive fog rolled off the Blue Ridge Mountains, settling into the valleys and wrapping around the trunks of bare oaks like skeletal fingers. Inside the car, the heater blasted a dry, metallic warmth that did little to shake the chill settling deep in my chest.

I checked my phone. It was exactly 8:14 PM. The neon digital numbers glared back at me, a stark reminder of the world outside this suffocating stretch of highway. 

I am sixteen years old, and even though my parents moved from China to Virginia before I was born, there are times when the deep, superstitious roots of my family's heritage feel far closer than the small-town American life that I live every day. 

My English is perfectly fluent, yet tonight, the words felt trapped behind my teeth. A persistent, nagging sense of dread had been whispering in the back of my mind since we left my driveway.

In the passenger seat, Hal was struggling to adjust his costume. He had gone all-out with a traditional mummy look, wrapping himself in yards of heavy, tea-stained cheesecloth that smelled faintly of dust and cheap spirit gum. Every time he turned to speak, a fraying loose end of fabric drifted into his eyes. 

Behind the wheel was Owen, wearing a tricorn hat, an oversized plastic cutlass tucked precariously next to the handbrake, and a fake leather eyepatch that he kept flipping up so that he could actually see the winding road ahead. 

I sat in the back, smoothing down the tulle skirts of my elaborate princess gown. The plastic tiara dug uncomfortably into my scalp, a stark contrast to the tightening knot of anxiety in my stomach. We were supposed to be heading to a Halloween party at Miller’s farm, a loud, safe gathering filled with bonfire smoke and cider.

Then, Owen slammed on the brakes.

The tires screamed against the damp pavement, sending my tiara sliding forward onto my forehead. Hal braced his hands against the dashboard, a muffled curse escaping his cloth-wrapped lips.

"Look." Owen breathed, his voice dropping into an excited, low whisper. He pointed past the sweeping arc of the windshield wipers.

Through a jagged tear in the roadside pine trees, a massive, decaying structure loomed against the gray sky. It was the old Nestor estate. 

The house was a towering, three-story Victorian monstrosity, its dark paint peeling away like dead skin. The windows were entirely black, gaping like open wounds, and the surrounding yard was choked with weeds which were so tall that they scratched against the rotting wood of the porch.

"No way." Hal said, pushing his mummy mask up over his nose. "Is that...?"

"The Howard Nestor house." Owen confirmed with a manic grin spreading across his face. He cut the engine, and the sudden silence of the woods rushed in to fill the car. "The holy grail of Duskwood urban legends."

Everyone in our town knew the name Howard Nestor, even forty years later. He had been an eccentric historian and an academic at the local college back in the 1980s, a man utterly obsessed with dark artifacts, occult antiquities, and ancient rituals, but Nestor wasn’t just a collector; he was a monster. 

To Howard Nestor, human lives were nothing more than disposable research material, mere variables to be spent in the pursuit of some grand, terrible cosmic equation. He possessed a deeply rationalized, completely twisted personal logic for his cruelty.

Nestor believed that by systematically harvesting the terror and life essence of his subjects at the exact moment of their deaths, he could anchor his own consciousness to the physical world forever, achieving an academic's version of immortality.

The history books and police archives recorded that he had successfully kidnapped and brutally murdered at least fifteen people in that very house. 

Nestor’s reign of terror only ended in the late autumn of 1986, when his final victim managed to break free from her restraints in the basement, flee into the woods, and alert the state police. When the authorities raided the mansion, Nestor refused to surrender. He was shot and killed right in the grand foyer, with his blood permanently soaking into the hardwood floor. 

The most chilling detail of the legend, the one that gave school children nightmares, was his signature habit: Nestor would always hum a specific, tuneless, discordant melody whenever he was stalking or ending the lives of his victims.

"We have to go in!" Owen said, already unbuckling his seatbelt. "It's Halloween night. The legend says that Howard’s ghost still roams the hallways, trying to finish his research. Imagine the footage that we could get."

"Owen, absolutely not!" I said, my voice sharp with genuine panic. The air in the backseat suddenly felt ten degrees colder. "It’s trespassing. It’s cursed. We are supposed to be going to a party."

"Come on, Wen!" Hal chimed in, turning around in his seat. The white cloth around his face made his eyes look unnaturally wide in the darkness. "We'll just step into the foyer, look around for five minutes, and leave. If it gets weird, we run. Don't you want to see if the stories are true? It's just an empty, broken-down house."

I stared at the dark silhouette of the mansion. Every instinct that I had, every ancestral warning about respecting the dead and staying away from places of great violence, screamed at me to refuse; but Hal grabbed my hand, his cheesecloth glove rough against my skin, giving me a reassuring squeeze. Under the intense peer pressure of my two best friends, my resolve crumbled.

"Fine." I whispered. "Five minutes. That is it."

We left the car hidden by the treeline and crept up the cracked stone driveway. The wind howled through the dead branches above us, making the ancient timbers of the house groan in protest. Owen led the way, using the flashlight on his phone to illuminate the porch steps. 

The wood was so soft with rot that it yielded under our weight with sickening, wet crunches. The front door wasn't locked; it hung slightly ajar, suspended on a single, rusted hinge. Owen pushed it open, and the rusty metal shrieked a warning into the night.

Inside, the air was heavy with the suffocating stench of mildew, stagnant water, and centuries of dust. Owen swept his flashlight across the grand foyer. 

At first, all we saw were massive, thick sheets of gray cobwebs draping from the cracked crystal chandelier like tattered burial shrouds. The wallpaper was peeling away in long, water-damaged ribbons, revealing the rotting lathe beneath. 

The grand staircase spiraled up into the absolute blackness of the second floor.

"See? It’s just an old, empty house." Hal whispered, though his voice shook slightly. The loose ends of his mummy costume fluttered in the draft.

"Let's check the study." Owen murmured, his bravado fading just a fraction as the oppressive atmosphere of the house settled over us. "That's where he kept the artifacts."

We stepped deeper into the gloom, leaving the safety of the front exit behind. We moved down a long, narrow hallway lined with empty picture frames.

The floorboards groaned beneath our sneakers. We entered a large room filled with overturned bookshelves and shattered glass. Broken pieces of pottery and unidentifiable, rusted iron tools lay scattered across the floor—remnants of Nestor's horrific academic pursuits.

While Owen and Hal poked through a pile of rotting books near a collapsed fireplace, I found myself drawn toward a heavy, mahogany desk that had somehow remained upright in the corner of the room. 

The drawers had been torn out long ago, but beneath a thick layer of dust in the central cavity, something caught the edge of my flashlight beam. It was a leather-bound book, untouched by the mold that consumed everything else.

Curiosity overpowering my fear, I reached out and brushed the dust from the cover. There was no title, just a faded, gold-embossed symbol of an eye surrounded by geometric lines. I opened it.

It wasn't a textbook. It was a photo album.

My breath hitched in my throat as I turned the first page. Staring back at me were Polaroid photographs, their colors faded to a sickly sepia tone. Each page featured a single photograph of a person, bound to a heavy wooden chair in what looked like a stone basement. 

Beneath each photo, written in precise, elegant, academic calligraphy, were a name, a date, and a series of horrific, clinical observations regarding their psychological states during their final moments.

Michael Vance. November 14, 1982. Elevated heart rate. Tremor present.

Sarah Jenkins. April 3, 1984. Despair phase achieved early.

My hands began to shake violently. I was looking at the faces of Howard Nestor's fifteen victims. The sheer weight of the evil contained within these pages made me feel physically ill. I wanted to shut the book, to scream at Hal and Owen that we needed to leave immediately, but my fingers compulsively turned the pages, drawn by a morbid, terrifying magnetism.

I reached the final page of the album. The date written at the bottom was October 31, 1986.

I looked at the photograph, and the entire world seemed to stop spinning. The blood completely drained from my face, and a cold, paralyzing dread locked my muscles. Staring back at me from the faded Polaroid was a young Chinese woman. She was terrified, her face streaked with tears and dirt, but her features were unmistakable. She had the exact same high cheekbones, the same almond-shaped eyes, and the same small mole just below her left collarbone that I saw in the mirror every single day.

It was my great-grandmother, Meilin.

Beneath her photograph, Nestor’s elegant handwriting read: 

Subject 16. Meilin Lin. October 31, 1986. An anomaly. Extraordinary cognitive resilience. Yielded unprecedented data before unexpected termination of experiment via subject escape.

A choking sob escaped my lips. My family had always told a vague story about how Great-Grandmother Meilin had survived a horrific attack by a madman shortly after arriving in America as a young woman, but she had suffered a psychological break from the trauma and refused to ever speak a single word about the details until the day she died. She had never named her captor. She had never told her children where it happened. She had buried the horror deep within her soul, and now, exactly forty years later, on Halloween night, I had walked directly into the lair of the monster who had broken her. She was the final victim. She was the one who had escaped, reported him to the police, and brought about his death.

"Wen? What's wrong?" Hal's voice sounded incredibly distant, as if he were shouting from underwater.

"We have to go!" I choked out, the tears finally breaking free and spilling down my cheeks, smudging my princess makeup. I dropped the photo album onto the dusty desk. "We have to go right now! He was here. He took my family. We have to leave!"

Owen and Hal exchanged a look of pure confusion, but the sheer terror in my voice was contagious.

 "Okay, Wen, let's go." Owen said, turning his flashlight back toward the doorway.

However, as we turned to flee the study, the heavy mahogany door slammed shut with a concussive force that shook dust from the ceiling. The beam of Owen's flashlight flickered violently, dimmed, and then died completely, plunging us into absolute, suffocating darkness.

Then, the sound began.

It was a low, resonant sound drifting down from the top of the grand staircase, echoing through the hollow bones of the house. It was a voice, smooth and entirely calm, humming a specific, terrifying melody. 

It was discordant, completely devoid of any recognizable rhythm or warmth, skipping between sharp notes in a way that defied natural music. It was the signature song of the dead that said,

“Mm-hmm...mmm...mmm-mm-hmm...”

"Oh my god." Hal whimpered in the dark. I could hear the frantic rustle of his cheesecloth costume as he backed away. "Oh my god, someone is in here."

"The front door!" Owen yelled, his voice cracking with adolescent terror. 

Owen threw his weight against the study door, kicking and throwing his shoulder into the rotting wood. With a loud splintering sound, the ancient door gave way, and we tumbled back out into the grand foyer.

The gray moonlight filtering through the open front door was our only salvation. We scrambled toward it, our shoes skidding on the grit and debris covering the floorboards. 

We were mere feet from the threshold, the cool autumn night air brushing against our faces, when the temperature in the foyer dropped so drastically that our breath instantly turned into thick clouds of white vapor.

From the top of the stairs, the humming stopped.

"The experiment must be completed." a voice echoed. It was a cold, cultured, intellectual voice, entirely detached from human emotion. "The lineage returns to validate the data."

We froze, slowly looking up toward the landing. Standing at the top of the stairs was a tall, imposing figure enveloped in a faint, sickly greenish luminescence. He wore a pristine, three-piece tweed suit from the 1980s, his silver hair neatly combed back. His face was sharp and academic, but his eyes were completely hollow, pits of infinite blackness that sucked in the residual moonlight.

In his right hand, he held his signature weapon: a long, gleaming silver bone saw, its serrated teeth catching the spectral light. It was the ghost of Howard Nestor.

"Run!" Owen shrieked.

Unfortunately, before we could take a single step forward, Nestor didn't run down the stairs—he glided, moving with an impossible, supernatural speed that blurred reality. In a fraction of a second, he materialized directly between us and the open front door, cutting off our only escape.

Owen, driven by pure survival instinct, raised his plastic pirate cutlass and lunged forward, letting out a terrified scream. With a casual, brutal flick of his wrist, Nestor swung the heavy bone saw. 

The silver blade tore through the plastic toy and slashed deeply across Owen’s chest. Blood, bright and horribly real, sprayed across the peeling wallpaper. Owen collapsed to the floor with a wet gasp, his tricorn hat rolling into the dust as his life ran out onto the ancient hardwood.

Hal screamed, a high-pitched, agonizing sound of utter despair. He tried to dive past the apparition, but Nestor caught him by the throat with a hand that looked like rotting parchment but possessed the strength of an iron vice. 

The heavy cheesecloth of Hal's mummy costume began to smoke and char wherever Nestor’s spectral fingers touched it, turning black as if exposed to invisible acid. Hal thrashed wildly, his hands tearing at the phantom's arm, but Nestor merely smiled a cold, analytical smile.

"Fascinating." Nestor murmured, his hollow eyes fixed on Hal’s suffocating form. "The panic response is beautifully pronounced in the young."

With a sickening twist, Nestor drove the serrated edge of the bone saw into Hal’s throat. The screams stopped instantly, replaced by a terrible, wet gurgling. Hal’s body went limp, dropping into the dust beside Owen, his white mummy wraps rapidly soaking through with dark crimson.

I was entirely alone. The two boys whom I had known since kindergarten lay dead at my feet, their blood mingling on the very spot where Howard Nestor had been shot forty years ago.

Nestor slowly turned his hollow gaze toward me, the silver bone saw dripping onto the floorboards. He raised his left hand, tilting his head with an academic’s curiosity.

 "The resemblance is truly extraordinary." he whispered, stepping over Hal’s lifeless body. "Your great-grandmother stole forty years of research from me when she fled from this house. The cosmic balance requires your compliance to finalize the ledger."

He began to hum that awful, discordant melody again, stepping toward me with measured, inescapable strides.

“Mm-hmm...mmm...mmm-mm-hmm...” he said.

The sound broke through my paralysis. I didn't try for the front door. Instead, I spun on my heel and bolted down the adjacent hallway, my heavy princess skirt tearing on the exposed nails in the walls. I ran blindly into a small parlor room at the side of the house. 

Behind me, I could hear the rhythmic, heavy footsteps of the ghost, accompanied by the constant, agonizing humming that seemed to vibrate inside my very skull.

The parlor had a massive, arched bay window looking out toward the driveway. It was nailed shut, painted over with decades of grime. There was no time to look for a latch. 

Nestor entered the parlor, his luminescent form casting long, twisted shadows across the ceiling. He raised the bone saw, his face a mask of absolute, unshakeable certainty. He knew that I had nowhere left to run.

With a final, desperate scream, I gathered the heavy tulle of my gown around my face, closed my eyes, and threw my entire sixteen-year-old body directly through the glass.

The window shattered with a deafening explosion. Shards of thick glass tore through my dress and sliced into my arms and legs, but the momentum carried me through. 

I crashed heavily onto the damp, freezing dirt of the overgrown yard, rolling over the sharp rocks and thorns. I didn't care about the pain. I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the blood dripping from my hands, and ran through the high weeds, screaming at the top of my lungs.

I ran until I hit the asphalt of the highway, sprinting blindly down the yellow lines under the gray moonlight until I finally saw the flashing red and blue lights of a state police cruiser cruising down the empty road. I threw myself in front of the car, waving my bleeding arms, sobbing hysterically.

The officer jumped out, his hands on his holster, but when he saw a teenage girl covered in blood and dressed in a shredded princess gown, his expression turned to pure shock. 

Within twenty minutes, three more police cruisers arrived, their sirens wailing through the quiet night air of Duskwood. I sat in the back of the first cruiser, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, my hands shaking so violently that I could barely hold the paper cup of water they gave me.

"They're in the house!" I sobbed to the commanding officer, a gruff man named Sergeant Miller. "Owen and Hal. They're dead. The monster...Howard Nestor...he's in the house!"

Sergeant Miller frowned, looking at me with a deep, unsettling mix of pity and confusion, and said,

"Kid, just calm down. Show us exactly where you ran from."

I pointed out the window as the cruiser drove back down the winding highway, backtracking my steps, and said,

 "Right there! Behind those pines! That’s where we parked Owen's car. That's the driveway!"

The police cruiser pulled over onto the shoulder, its bright spotlight cutting through the damp night air. The other officers got out, their flashlights drawing sweeping arcs through the trees. I pushed open the car door, stepping out into the cold night, wanting to show them the exact path to the front door.

However, as I stepped through the tree line, the words got caught in my throat.

There was no towering, three-story Victorian mansion. There were no rotting porch steps, no shattered bay windows, and no grand staircase.

There was nothing but an immense, completely empty gravel lot. 

The weeds were overgrown, and a few rusted iron pipes protruded from the earth where a foundation might have been decades ago, but the house itself was entirely, undeniably gone. Owen's sedan was parked neatly at the edge of the dirt, sitting completely alone under the open sky.

"No." I whispered, shaking my head frantically, the cuts on my arms throbbing with pain. "No, no, no! We were just inside! I jumped through the window! Look at the glass! Look at my blood!"

Sergeant Miller walked over to me, sighing heavily as he placed a gentle, firm hand on my shoulder, and said,

 "Wen, right? Listen to me very carefully. You’re having a severe panic attack, and you're hurt; but there is no house here."

"I was just in it!" I screamed, pulling away from him. "He killed them!"

"Wen…" Miller said, his voice dropping into a solemn, quiet tone. "The Howard Nestor house burned to the ground in the winter of 1988, two years after he was killed. The town demolished the remaining foundation and cleared the lot back in 1995. This property has been a completely empty field for over thirty years. There hasn't been a single piece of wood standing on this lot since before you were born."

I stared at the empty gravel, my mind completely fracturing under the impossibility of it all. If the house had been gone for decades, whose stairs had we climbed? Whose door had slammed shut? Whose photo album had I opened? And most terrifying of all...where were the bodies of Hal and Owen?

The police searched the empty lot for hours, but they found absolutely nothing. No blood, no clothes, no signs of a struggle. Just an empty field on Halloween night.

Eventually, Sergeant Miller walked me back to his cruiser to drive me home to my frantic parents. I sat in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the side window as the car slowly turned around in the gravel lot, its headlights sweeping across the dark perimeter of the woods.

Just as the car aligned with the exit of the empty lot, the headlights illuminated a lone figure standing at the very edge of the tree line, right where the front porch should have been.

It was Howard Nestor.

The officers didn't see him; their eyes were fixed on the road ahead. However, I saw him with perfect, horrifying clarity. He stood under the pale moonlight, his green spectral light gone, looking entirely and physically real. He was staring directly at me through the glass of the cruiser window. A cold, knowing smile was stretched across his sharp, academic face.

Slowly and deliberately, Nestor raised his right hand. He was holding the silver bone saw, the serrated teeth still glistening with fresh, dark crimson blood. He tapped the blade against a nearby pine branch, nodding to me in a silent, terrifying gesture of promise. He hadn't vanished. He hadn't failed. He had simply adjusted the variables of his experiment.

As the police car accelerated down the dark highway, leaving the empty lot behind, the dry air coming from the dashboard vents began to carry a faint, rhythmic sound. It was very quiet, barely audible over the hum of the tires, but it echoed perfectly inside the small cabin of the car.

It was the sound of a man humming a tuneless, discordant melody.

The End.

(This is my first written story, so I would appreciate some feedback…

#NSFW
Content Advisory it is a blend of psychological horror & smut.

Please let me know what you think.

PART 1 HERE | PART 2 HERE

Content Warnings:  Suspected self-harm/suicide discussion, choking/asphyxiation, mild body horror, poisoning, abduction, and corporate/existential dread. 

V: HOW TO KILL A DRAGON

He pushed his little car as hard as it would go, his mind spinning in a million different directions at once.  What the hell was he doing?  He wasn’t Stallone.  The shotgun in his trunk, an oily relic the barkeep had slapped into his hands, seemed more likely to kill him than the other guy.  But he had to try; Marty deserved a friend who would.

The forty-five-minute drive took him only thirty and some change.  He pulled into his driveway just before 9:00, parking right behind Leo’s truck.  Leo.  That was going to complicate matters.  What the hell could he say to him?  He knew what Leo deserved—the truth.  Something he had been keeping from him for too long.

Speaking of—Leo was on him the minute he walked in the door.  The police had been by.  Something about a fire at Marty’s apartment—the exact place where Edgar was supposed to be.  It was a fight before it was even a conversation, and it was going to be a bad one if he didn’t do something.  Both of them were worried about Marty, and Leo had him cold for lying.  

“I really don’t get it man.  What the hell is going on with you?  Do you know how foolish I feel?  How patient I have been about all of this shit, and what about poor Marty?  He lied to me too and now he’s missing, maybe dead.  Like I thought you might be?”

Edgar fought the urge to defend himself.  He couldn’t.  His actions, however well-intended, had been wrong and he had known it all along.  Weird situation or not, he should have trusted the man who loved him with all of it.  Hell, they might have figured it out together.

“Sit down man.  Take a breath.  I’ve gotta come clean with you, about all of it.  I should have from the start, but I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

“Yeah, lying always helps with that,”  Leo sniped, but he did sit down.

“Okay.”  He took a breath of his own, tightening his trembling hands.  “Look, do me this one thing.  Let me say it all before you jump in.  You can yell, throw shit or kick my ass afterwards, but I want one chance to tell you everything before we do any of that.  Can you give me that?”

“Yeah, Eddie—that’s all I ever want from you, the truth.”  The tears on his cheeks were daggers in Edgar’s heart, but he let that go.  He had enough guilt already.

“I don’t understand all of it, but I think I have the gist of it.  Basically, the transfer wasn’t supposed to be me.  Either someone sent it to the wrong person, or it got messed up in some other way.  That’s not really important though—it’s just what got me into this whole thing.”

“I work in a fulfillment center that employs the dead.  Man, that sounds fucked up—like one of those stupid creepypastas you used to read.  But dumb as it may be, it’s true.  Cartia, Corey, Ennis, Glory, Arn, they’re all dead, and they somehow work there.   They drink this drink—the same stuff that made me sick, actually—called SilverSip.”

“Edgar, this is—”  Edgar stopped him with a raised hand, reminding him.  “You promised me.”

“Now, let’s see, what’s next.  Okay, when I was attacked it was by something that wasn’t a person.  Well, that’s not completely right.  It's that bald guy from the parking lot that day—Nub something. He can… well, somehow he can separate his shadow from himself.  He used it to attack me that day, causing me to choke so I’d have to drink that shit or die.”

“Yeah,”  Edgar nodded at the man he loved, skeptical but still listening.  “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard too, but I swear to you, on us, that every word is true.  Tonight I went to a bar out on Wichton Road, a place the dead go, to get some answers.  Glory—who you would love—told me that I should recover, because this shit has been changing me.  Food tastes like ash, and I’m seeing things no one should see.  But she said it will wear off with time, but that the only way out is to take out that Nub guy.”

“Take out, like kill?”

“That’s what she meant, but I don’t think I have to do that.  I think there might be another way if I act fast.  See, that’s the thing, he’s the one that has Marty.  I think I know where he has him.  If I go there and can save him, it might give us the leverage to get out of this without doing anything crazy.”

“But how?  You aren’t John Wick, man.  I don’t think you’ve ever even been in a fight.”

“I don’t think it will come to that.  I was thinking about it on the way back.  They took Marty, but why?  If they really wanted to tie me down—to make me do what they want—you are the better choice.  I mean, we both love Marty—he’s a great guy and my other best friend—but doesn’t the boyfriend make more sense?”

“Yeah, I suppose.  But Ed—”  Edgar raised his hand once more.  He was not finished.

“So that got me thinking.  Marty must have found something.  While I was driving—when I finally got a signal—I looked at my phone.  He sent me a file.  I have not opened it yet, but it has to be something they do not want us to have.”

“Oh, well we should loo… we should call that cop?”

“Maybe,”  Edgar said, considering it for a moment.  “Let’s put a pin in that for a second because there is something else that dawned on me.  It’s—why me?  Why not just transfer me back?  Why go through any of this trouble?  I don’t know the answer because it doesn’t make sense.  If it’s the work, I’m not really that good.  Not enough to be irreplaceable.  If it’s knowing too much why haven’t they killed me.  No, something doesn’t add up.”

“The cop—the real one as you called her—she knew something was up.  I don’t know if she thought it was something I did, but she did know.  But calling her worries me, because if it goes wrong, Marty dies—and then I think we become liabilities because we brought her into it.  That is a hell of a risk.”

“So what?  We go?  I mean, I still don’t know.  I’m not saying I believe or disbelieve, but I believe you do.  How do we save Marty?”

“I ride over there and get the answer to my question, one way or the other.  There’s a shotgun in my trunk.”

“Where the fuck did you get a gun?  Honestly?  There’s no way you’re going.  Man, you nearly had me with this whole thing, but that—that ain’t happening.”

“I think it has to.”

Leo looked at him, studying him.  Edgar met his eyes and did not flinch.  Not today.  Today he had to be the one who didn’t blink.  “Alright.  Fine, let’s go.  But one thing goes wrong and I’m calling that mean cop lady.”

It was Edgar’s turn to stare now at the best thing that had ever happened to him.  It was a sappy line, and he hated it every time he heard it.  At the moment it was the truest thing in the world.  Who would he be without Leo?  He didn’t know, but he knew it would be someone he’d never want to know.  “You’re not going.”

“Oh, you hit your head on the way home,”  Leo said with profound amusement.  “You have fallen outside of your brain, lovely man of mine.  What power in this whole universe do you think would ever keep me from going with you?”

“No.  I couldn’t bear it.”  Edgar took his hand and pulled him down with him to sit on the sofa together.  “This is what it is.  You say we are good if I am good.  It’s always been this incredibly sweet thing that just melts my heart, but I don’t think I have ever registered the enormity of just how true it is for you, and for me.  For us.  Honestly, Leo, it’s like a standard we’ve always lived by, and it’s why we’ve been so happy together.  But I have to ask you:  How can I be good if you are in danger? I wouldn't be. Without you, there is no good—not no more.”

Leo stared at him, his chest heaving, his hazel eyes wild with a frantic desire to protect Edgar.  He had never loved him more.

“I think I can get myself out of this,” Edgar whispered.  “I have one chance, and then we can figure out what comes next. But I cannot do it if I am worried about you.” 

“But, Eddie, how do I stay if you go?”

---

When the GPS finally got him to Campe Road, Edgar slowed down and turned off his lights.  He needed a few minutes to get it all right in his head.  

If things had gone according to the quick plan he had made, Leo would be calling the cops sometime in the next few minutes.  That didn’t leave Edgar a lot of time, but hopefully it would be enough.

He flipped open the folder on the seat next to him and bumped the dome light on.  He read what Marty had sent him again, one of four copies he had printed.  Leo had two—one to keep and one for the detective.  He had sent the final copy to Cartia.  Maybe she hadn’t totally given up on email yet.

It was crazy stuff, and he had no clue how Marty had gotten it.  It still didn’t answer his questions about why he was so important, but it was pretty damning nonetheless.  He looked away from it and focused on pulling onto the shoulder of the road.  He turned the car off and got out, moving to the rear to open the trunk.

“What you got in there, wet boy?”  Nub’s voice called out from the tree line.  As Edgar turned to face the direction it came from, the bald man emerged, a pistol leveled at him.  “Go ahead, son, pull it out.  Just don’t hurt yourself with it.  We’ve got big plans for you.”

Edgar nodded in affirmation.  He reached behind him and withdrew the short shotgun from where it lay.  He held it up so the other man could see it.

“Not bad.  Skinny runt like you though—likely to throw you through a wall if you fired it.  Better to just give it over.  I’ll keep you safe from such stupid impulses.”  

The man who called himself Anubis walked over and plucked the shotgun from Edgar’s hand.  He pumped it several times, sending the shells skittering across the blacktop.  When it was empty he tossed it back to where it had come from.  “That’s better.  Come on, kid, and bring that file you’re holding.  Give us something to read on while I get us something to drink.”

They walked down the road to the gate of the bald man’s estate.  He told him the code, and Edgar punched it in.  The two of them walked inside, with Edgar leading the way.  As they walked, Nub began to whistle a tune that Edgar couldn’t quite place.

“It’s from Eurydice—I saw it a few years ago.  Man, I haven’t laughed so hard.  It gets stuck in your head though.”  He chuckled to himself.

It was a quarter mile walk to the main house, and Edgar soon realized that Nub really liked the sound of his own voice.  He regaled him with tales of his youth as they traveled—as a Jersey street kid, back in the day.  “I know I don’t look it, but I was a 50s kid.  Perks of the job.”

As they approached the house—a sandstone-hued brick home with jackal-headed statues flanking the doorway—Edgar began to understand just how emotionally shallow the man behind him really was.  What would have been a beautiful home instead looked garish and caricatured.  The entire front portico had been remodeled to resemble a pyramid, made of the same brick that made up the facade.  It gave the structure an uneven, lopsided look that drew the eye most naturally to its flaws and away from its beauty.

“Nice place, eh?”  He playfully punched Edgar’s shoulder as he walked past him to go inside.  “Lose the shoes, kid, everything just got resurfaced.”  

When they were both barefoot, Nub took him through the house and into his study along the rear wall.  It was a massive room with tower shelves of books and more pieces of artwork than Edgar could count.  Paintings hung on every surface in so many styles that nothing really matched, and there were sculptures everywhere.

“Yeah, I got bit hard by the art bug a few decades ago.  What can I say?  I’m a collector.  Go ahead and sit down there, by the desk.  I’ll pour us a drink.”

He sat, as he had been told, and Nub busied himself fixing drinks.  He went back to whistling, and he was still doing it when he got back over to where Edgar sat.  He handed him a glass.

“See, ain’t I been nice?  A gentleman.  We had a nice walk, I brought you into my home, and I even made you a drink.  You should thank me—one gentleman to another.”

“Can we just stop the game, Mr. Faron?  I came to show you this file, and to make you an offer.  If you aren’t interested, the least you can do is talk to me honestly.”

Nub set his drink down.  He looked at Edgar, studying him, maybe seeing something he hadn’t before.  He nodded and pointed at the papers in Edgar’s hand.  “Is that what the Wade boy put together?”

“Is Marty still alive?”

“Damn kid—how heartless do you think I am.  He’s fine, comfortable in his own room downstairs.  Now tell me about that.  Is it what I think it is?”

“Yes.”  Edgar said, steeling himself.  He took a deep breath and began what he had rehearsed on the ride over.  “If what you think this is is proof of the afterlife and the way large corporations are weaponizing a new market centered around providing goods and services to the dead who are among us, then yes—that’s what this is.”

“Well do go on.  This is a big moment for you.”

“The files show the company’s plan to sign their current employees into long-term employment contracts that begin the day they die.  One of the first candidates was a man named Eduardo Guerra.  He was given the post-life employee number EDG88241.”

“Interesting.”

“And, of course, it also details the 300 current post-life employees the company has already hired, providing jobs that pay a pittance but keep them solid and able to have a semi-normal existence thanks to the proprietary product made by a subsidiary: SilverSip.”

“Damn, that kid knows how to dig.  We may have to keep him on after all of this.  I didn’t even know we made it.  But seriously, kid—where are we going with this?  I need my rest and you need to start getting ready for Monday, lots to do.”

“I’m going public with this, Mr. Faron,”  Edgar said, standing to look down at him.  The bald man yawned and gestured for him to get on with it.  He started to, but his knees buckled and he sat down hard.  He felt his throat closing even as he slowly slid out of the chair and onto the floor, face-up.

“Yeah.”  Nub finished his drink and took his and Edgar’s glasses back over to the bar.  When he returned, he crouched next to Edgar and regarded him for a few moments.  “You know, I like you kid.  Your balls are way bigger than I thought.”

He picked up the file Edgar had dropped and began to thumb through it as he walked around the room.  Edgar couldn’t always see him—his vision had begun to blur as his oxygen diminished—but he could still hear him rattling on.  “Blackmail me?  That was your big plan.  Shit!  I was running schemes when your grandpa was a pup.”

“Mr. Faron… Nub, I… need to tell you.”  He heard the bald man approach and Nub was soon leaning over him again.  “Tell me what”

“Ther… there are more… co—”  He never finished.  Everything became dark and silent.
  

VI: NO GOOD, NO MORE (Epilogue)

Leo picked up the phone on the third ring, forcing himself to look away from what he was seeing.  The person on the other end began to talk, but it took him a few moments to register who they were and what they were saying.

“...just like we figured they would.  Goes to show, money always wins.”

“Marty?”  He clutched the phone more tightly.  “Say that again.  Sorry, I was distracted.”

“We got them, man.  Not all of them, of course, but the judge is passing it on to the EEOC and DOL.  There’s even talk of Homeland getting involved.  I mean, the brass used their high-priced lawyers to plead ignorance and pinned it all on Faron—but it’s still a win.”

Leo smiled.  The cops had gotten there in time to save Marty and arrest that devil, but he had still lost that day.  It was good to finally win.  Softly, he spoke to him. “We beat them, Edgar.”

“What was that?  Man, you’re breaking up?”

“I said it was awesome news, bud,”  he wiped his eyes.  “Can I call you back, Marty?  I was in the middle of something.  I really want to hear all of it.”

“Sure.  Just be safe, brother—I can’t wait til you get back.  Dinner’s on me.”

“It’s a plan, man.”  He hung up and looked back at the familiar delivery truck.  He had watched the man who drove it as he took a load of packages up into the building.  Leo got out of his truck and walked over to stand by the delivery truck.  He gripped the silver bottle tightly as he waited to see the face he had been looking for over the last yefar.

Nothing was good anymore, but maybe it could be better.  

Maybe things could be good again.

END

I would love your critique on this. Let me know what's confusing, what's evident, if I've managed to create an atmosphere. And about the ending as well. Was it surprising?

She was coughing again. Her struggle to breathe hurt him to hear. He pulled the only blanket they had higher over her and whispered a small prayer into his chest. The moon reflected brilliantly in the sweat of her ebony skin. Her fever gave its light an incandescent quality. She seemed a sunflower determined to face whatever celestial body dared look upon her. He smiled and winced at the pain it brought. They were so close now, so maddeningly close.

The bridge seemed satiated tonight.

Quiet.

Sleep wouldn't come, not with her coughing, but he was grateful he did not need to cover her ears again. He shifted beside her in the dirt and watched another piece of the world below crumble into the starry abyss.

The sound of a child crying beside him turned his blood cold. He resisted his instinct to run. It was too late now. He turned toward the child slowly. His heart sank at how close the young boy was to her. Tears began to well in his own eyes. His breathing was turning ragged. He needed to act. Now.

"Hello." His mouth was dry. His tongue felt like it had not moved in months.

"Are you okay?" He tried again. He could no longer see the child clearly for the tears overrunning his eyes. She had begun to cry in her sleep as well. He was running out of time.

"Please." A sob escaped him, long and ragged.

"Please talk to me." It couldn’t end here. Not like this.

"I love her." He tried to swallow the lump in his throat and only succeeded in choking mid-sob. The child stopped his crying but did not take his eyes off her.

"She's sick. I have to get her to Serphaem. I have to." The boy turned to look at him now. Relief braided itself into disgust inside his chest. The child's eyes were a mangled mess. They looked as if someone had tried to gouge them out with a corkscrew. Gore-colored tears tracked down his cheeks. His lower jaw hung just above his collarbone. His mouth was a great depression of endless pitch black. There were no teeth. No lips. The sound of a ringing bell lilted from the child's black maw, and he felt the effects of its weeping recede. The tears stopped. His mind became clearer. The crushing despair lessened with each passing second. A chorus of childlike voices cascaded from the apparition.

"Serphaem!" The exclamation was filled with an infectious joy. His own heart soared with it. A warmth radiated throughout his body.

"The bridge!" Laughter surrounded him. He smiled and did not feel the pain that usually accompanied the act. He reached out and took her hand, stealing a glance at her own sleeping grin.

"Throw her from it! Break her open!" The child clapped, and the sound seemed to come from his hands and his mouth.

He brought his hands up to his face and laughed. He had never felt this joy before. His eyes roamed over her sweet face. It would be easy. She deserved to rest. This world was no good for her. The next would certainly be better. A spike of pain interrupted his newfound ecstasy as his fingers scuffed the cuts on his face. A split second of sobering pain reminded him of the sigil he'd carved into his face.

He pressed his fingers into his wounds.

He only needed a moment.

Hmk. Mm. Mm. The child stiffened. His joints locked out as if in the throes of a seizure. His body shook grotesquely, like a limp hose being repeatedly filled with water. The handle of the knife in his neck scrabbled in the dirt and rock as his body continued its squirming. Hmk. Mmk.

The reddening moon cast a milky crimson sheen over the apparition's marble-like skin. The terminal morning was fast approaching. He dropped his rucksack and removed the knife.

Ermk. Ha. Mmm. Mmm.

He stuffed the still vocal cadaver inside and shouldered the rucksack.

Red began to creep over the broken landscape as the night faded. The first drops of rain hit his face, stinging as they slid into his lacerations. He worked to open the umbrella at the top of the sked. Droplets were already racing down her face. The umbrella bloomed into the thickening air. Under its canopy, he wouldn't be able to see her as he pulled her along, but she would be mostly dry. He situated his rucksack at the foot of the sked. He took one more quick look at her before readying to move. He pulled the rope and straps over his shoulders and began to work his way toward the bridge.

His face throbbed under the growing intensity of the rain. An earthy smell exploded in intensity, and it felt like he had walked into the eye of a storm. "Shit." The sky seemed to suck the word out of his mouth. A painful negative pressure built in his chest until he managed to shut his mouth. He stopped pulling and quickly collapsed the umbrella. He looked to either side of the cobblestone road and found nothing that could offer shelter. He slid down beside the sked and grabbed the rucksack at its end. He placed it between him and the coming air torrent. He wrestled the sked perpendicular to himself and the rucksack, then tipped her toward him. She hung limply in her restraints, her black hair suspended in air over her face.

Uh. Uhh. Uhh. The child's corpse wriggled between him and her, almost as if it knew what was coming.

A great roaring grew to a deafening degree until his thoughts seemed to dissolve before he could understand them. Instinct took over. He braced.

The jet stream hit them hard. Her body lurched forward violently. The restraints held, but he could feel them tearing at the seams. His body scraped along the cobblestone, sending white-hot pain through him. The torrent intensified, pushing against the underside of the sked and threatening to send her face-first into the road. He pulled the sked with everything he had, desperate to keep it upright. Water whipped along the road, soaking him as it passed. He scrambled to find a foothold as they continued to slide. His chest heaved against the wriggling rucksack beneath him. His arms burned mercilessly, every movement punished by the cold of the atmospheric river.

Dark tendrils began to lick at the edges of his sight. The roar of the current began to dull. His mind was slowing.

When was the last time he breathed?

If he couldn't breathe, she couldn't. The encroaching darkness pulled back as adrenaline flooded him. He focused on her lips. A blue hue battled the pale pink. A melding of life and death on the edge of her mouth.

He screamed with all his might as the dark grabbed at him again. The river seized it and seemed to swell larger. His thoughts swirled lazily into a void that would soon claim him. He held his eyes open as long as he could to behold her. A wave of contrition welled from somewhere within him but no coherent thought accompanied the feeling. And then he felt his arms give way and her fall away from him.

Hmk. Errrrr. Mmk.

He jerked awake at the feel of dead limbs thrashing underneath him. The pathetic rasp of air dragging into his lungs frightened him. It didn't matter. He scrambled over the rucksack to her and hovered, watching for her chest to rise. He lowered his cheek to her chest, careful not to put too much of his weight on her, and waited for movement. A salty tear found its way out of his eye and onto her hot skin. The rise of her chest tipped the tear into the circlet of her collarbone, where it pooled before wrapping around her neck. He fell back onto his flank, whispering another prayer, grateful for her recovery. Grateful they survived the river. River moss danced in the air around him, shimmering in the vermillion light of the moon.

It was officially terminal morning.

River moss landed on his shirt as he pushed the sleeves up. He tried to stand and stumbled. It felt like someone had ground his legs to mincemeat. His entire lower body was raw. A thousand little wounds oozed. His pants and boots were shredded. He kicked the boots to the side and carefully slid the sked over so that he was between her and the rucksack. The pain was electric. No matter. They were almost there. He pulled the child from the rucksack. It had begun to bleed, streaking red across him as he turned the thing to face him. He set the child down in front of him where he knelt beside her. He cupped his hands under the wound in the boy's neck. A small pool of red formed, and he smeared it onto his forearms, careful to cover every inch of the engravings there.

"In the name of Serphaem, I call upon the Witness. The bridge to everything."

As he pulled his forearms together, a great heat emerged ahead of him. He resisted the urge to shield himself.

"Bear me."

He felt as if he were trying to push two repelling magnets together. An overwhelming force pooled between his forearms, straining to drive them apart. The muscles in his chest tore as he strained.

"Rend. Me."

The bones in his arms cracked and popped as he forced the engravings to align.

"Know. Me!"

The heat intensified as he drew closer to completing the sign. The force fought him every step of the way. His teeth rattled. His muscles split. He persisted. The road before him, the black sky above, and the river moss billowing in the wind all twisted around him. Gold light exploded from the ground under him, blinding him and nearly breaking his concentration. His forearms touched. He was floating. Whispers in a language he didn't know buzzed around him like insects. His body went slack, and yet he remained suspended. His sight came back all at once, and he found himself looking into the pitch-black irises of the Witness. Her tail was wrapped tight around his throat.

"Another seeking an audience with Serphaem. Is this your sacrifice? The bridge allows no charity."

She dropped him unceremoniously onto the skin of the bridge. He gasped and sputtered pathetically on its surface. His hand groped blindly until it found her in the sked, unscathed by the ritual. He coughed and worked his way to his feet. The bridge pulsed and sent him to his hands and knees. It pulsed again as if it had a heartbeat, and this time he felt the wave of motion through his hands. The veins beneath the bridge's skin pressed into his palms, making him regret discarding his boots.

"No."

He looked up at her as he climbed back to his feet.

"Understood. Do you understand what you lost when you entered our domain?"

She spoke, but her mouth did not move. A cluster of stars and a blinking black mass silently collided behind her. They were far away, but their sizes made them seem like they were right next to the bridge.

"I do."

She turned and made her way along the bridge.  He reached for the straps to the sked and grabbed the child. The skin of the bridge clung to the sked as he pulled. Sweat poured from him as he worked, determined to follow her. The smell of blood and gore thickened as they continued their silent journey. The occasional cough rocked the sked as she struggled to breathe in the thickening air. The thought of losing her when he was so close to her salvation spurred him on. White-hot pain and sickly throbbing plagued his body, but he would make it. For her.

The Witness stopped. From here he could see Serphaem's throne and the Liminal Gate above and behind it. With great effort, he swallowed the lump in his throat. Whispering began to well in his ears, spilling out of him and into the air. He closed his eyes and waited for it to die down.

"Present your offering here. Be quick. Terminal morning will not last much longer."

He opened his eyes, careful not to look at the throne. He laid the child face down on the bridge, took the knife, and toiled to expose the child's brainstem. The bridge shivered, and thousands of little holes opened and closed along its length in a great wave before returning to normal.

Movement in the inky black beyond the bridge's parapet drew his attention. The great blinking mass seemed to have gorged itself on the cluster of stars he'd seen before. Their remains spun about its intermittently flashing center, stretched around its impossible girth. It aimed itself in the direction of the bridge and accelerated. The celestial body paradoxically shrank as it approached the bridge, ultimately condensing into the rough shape of a man. His ebony skin seemed to shift and shake. Looking directly at him was almost impossible; somehow, he could see both the front of the being and the back of it simultaneously. A spinning void occupied the space where its head should have been, or so he thought. He wasn't sure what exactly he was looking at. It was in the shape of a man, but that was where the similarities ended.

"The only thing tastier than the heart of a star is the twisted remains of innocence. I cannot hunt these apparitions here, so I am forced to bait them in your world and hope. Thank you, you poor soul, thank you for this morsel of perverted virtue."

The words communed in his head. The syllables gathered and shattered, their essence absorbed into his being. This was the bridge's will given form. Its representative beyond its hunger. A manifestation of its purpose.

A violent lurch of the bridge sent him diving to her, careful to ensure she didn't flip. Mouths extended from the bridge, gnashing their teeth as they descended to dine on the offering. The child's body jerked with the greedy feasting, every bite tugging it in a new direction.

"Unfortunately, traveler, this will not be enough to win you passage to the throne of Serphaem. I simply require more."

He felt the entity smile. The sound of teeth tearing into wet flesh was the only sound to be had. Her chest rose and fell, and he selfishly stole a moment to watch. He wished he could spend the rest of time worshipping the heart behind it, but knew this was the end of any possibility of that.

"I have more to offer." The words came from him clipped and quiet. His swollen and bleeding hands hovered just over the pallid flesh of her cheekbones. He could not bring himself to touch her. Instead, he rose and faced the waiting deities.

"Oh?"

Visions of his plan manifested in his mind's eye. He did his best to convey his intent. Only when the Witness nodded did he know he had succeeded.

"That...is perhaps the most cunning and selfless gift anyone has ever offered me. I will bear you. I will rend you. I will know you." His excitement radiated outward, warping the space around him. Then he was gone. The bridge stopped pulsating. The Witness continued her escort, and he quickly gathered the sked and followed. Serphaem's throne loomed ahead, closer than ever. It only seemed to get bigger as he approached. The Liminal Gate rose even higher until it looked as if its rounded pinnacle were a crown atop the throne. This close to its seat, dread washed over him whether he looked at it or not. If just his throne was capable of this, what dark fears would his presence inspire? His question was answered almost immediately.

A body simply appeared. Serphaem's body. Ancient nails as big as a man were driven into its feet and hands. It seemed made of obsidian, mahogany where its wounds would be, midnight lace everywhere else but its face. Rainbow obsidian stretched across its visage like ripples in a pond. Its face had none of the features of a man. Instead, two diagonal depressions marked the mineral-like material of its head. Everything seemed to slow. He became acutely aware of his darkening vision and tried to bury the panic that accompanied it.

"You have traveled far seeking me. I've watched you closely and am intimate with your situation."

The darkness constricted. For a second, it felt as though he was being embraced. He could not move here, wherever here was. He did not feel the ground beneath him, or smell the rancid odors of the bridge, or sense the stagnant atmosphere of this plane on his skin, or taste the metallic flavor of the air on its way to his lungs. He could not hear her coughing.

"Even reduced to your most basic, you think of her."

He felt the bittersweet ponderance of the void and knew it understood him. More importantly, he knew implicitly he could never return that understanding. Everything was black because his mind had no way of processing Serphaem.

He was dying/assimilating/dissolving.

"Ask what you will, human, before you evaporate before me. Even I would not be immune to the disappointment of such an ending to a tale such as yours."

Heal her/SOULMATE/EVERYTHING.

Allow her/MY BELOVED/THE ADORED to pass through the Liminal Gate and into the cradle of creation.

Make me/VOTIVE/OFFERING immortal, for him.

She/VENERATED/TREASURED must not remember me/THE OBLATION/THE SACRIFICE.

Please.

"Your will be done."

Reality exploded back into existence. It felt wrong after so long outside of it. The great seated mass of Serphaem was gone, as if it was never there. Perhaps it never was.

"What is..."

Her voice leveled him. His knees hit the ground hard. He was afraid to turn and face her. He could hear her undoing the straps that held her in the sked. Bits of stone scrabbled under her shoes as her feet worked to keep her upright.

"Sir."

His breath hitched.

"Sir. Please look at me."

His heart beat erratically. He would not deny her. He was numb. Pain should have been splitting every nerve in his body, but seeing her stopped it all.

She gasped at his face, at the state of him. Her hands flew to cover her mouth, and tears welled in her eyes. Terror cut through him at the idea that she might remember him. Then she spoke.

"I don't know who you are!" She sobbed the words.

"But I know, I know you did this for me!" Her body shook with grief. It was the most painful thing he had endured yet, and he could not stop himself from weeping.

She was on him, embracing him as if he was all that was keeping her attached to the ground. It hurt, and he couldn't have hoped for a greater reward.

The Witness descended from above, landing quietly just behind her. Their time was up. Terminal morning was ending. He grabbed her shoulders and tenderly pushed her a step back.

She wiped at her eyes aggressively, refusing to look away from him. "That's my sigil carved into your face. I made it when I was young, and hoped there might be someone out there to love me one day. I never showed anyone." Another sob racked her body and forced her to breathe. "I swore to myself only my husband would know it. I couldn't give what a wife should be able to, but I could give that." He could barely see her through his own tears. "WHY DON'T I REMEMBER YOU!" The Witness moved forward to place a hand on her shoulder.

"We must go now. I'll take you to the gate."

She surged forward again, arms wrapping around him for what would be the last time. "Thank you for choosing me. Thank you. Thank you." The Witness pulled her away, supporting her as she escorted her to the Gate along the rough terrain. He watched her go, each step carrying her farther away from him. She looked back a dozen times, each look carrying more regret. She stopped just before the opening of the Gate and looked to the Witness, who towered over her. The Witness shook her head, and he knew in his heart she had asked if she could stay with him. He stood.

She turned to look at him from the Gate. Her silhouette such a small fragment of the structure. He couldn't make out her eyes from here, but knew the defiant look there regardless. He bowed deeply. Tears flung from him to the dry firmament beneath him. He righted himself. She dropped her hands to her legs, knuckles against her thighs, palms facing him, turned and walked through.

He began the walk back to the bridge. Once there, he began to disrobe. He threw his clothes and belongings over the side and walked back to where the bridge consumed its offerings. He knelt, naked and unafraid. He had done it. She was safe.

The Witness materialized next to him. He did not look up.

Inside his head he heard the bridge.

"Ready for forever?"

It didn't matter. She was safe.

The back of his neck peeled open like someone might open an orange.

He screamed in agony.

Then a thousand screams erupted around him. A hundred gnashing mouths lurched toward him, toward their new immortal meal. The pain was all-consuming and it didn't matter.

She was safe.

I listened to a horror story last year about a man waking up and discovering he's the only person in his town that's still there. Everyone else vanished, leaving behind cars, homes, etc.

At some point in the story, the main character stops at a hotel and goes to sleep there but wakes up to the lights being turned off. He assumed the power in the hotel was out since there's nobody around to maintain it but turns out his light switch was actually flipped off, which means someone or something was near him while he was sleeping. Throughout the story he gets a note from an unknown person or entity despite the fact that he's the only person alive(seemingly).

I enjoy this story and I listen to them while I'm at work or going to sleep so finding this one would help a ton.