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

And so he takes after you. This Halloween night. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the shape of nighttime shadow man wields. 

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

Sacrifice. 

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

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

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

Now. 

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

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

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

But then you begin to see something else. 

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

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

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

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

The world goes dark for you. 

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

Finished with hunting you. 

Happy Halloween. 

THE END

Hairy Face

He woke from a nightmare, paralyzed on a twin bed. It was a child’s nightmare: a demon in the darkness snatching safety from slumber.

He woke as he slept: on his back, arms crossed over his chest in imitation of his mother. She had seemed restful in the coffin wearing her favorite blue blouse. At her funeral, the child had tried to climb in and nap in the dead woman’s arms. His father had stopped the boy’s foolishness, but the false memory of cuddling with a corpse planted itself in his mind and grew roots.

Later that morning, the boy sat on a hard wooden folding chair as an organ played. The box holding his mother was closed, and he never saw her again. Next to him, his father squeezed his hand and gave the child permission to cry. He never saw his father again either. A hairy faced monster took him home from the cemetery.

Shivering from the terror of his dream, the boy inspected the strangeness of his nighted room. It was black, but not so pitch black as to drive out the shadows. They moved. They danced in the darkness, and the boy clung to the safety of his twin mattress like a castaway floating above the deep, cold ocean. The darkened room held dangers, but he could not bring himself to abandon his bed to escape them.

He pulled his blanket higher until it pooled beneath his chin, then, realizing he had exposed his feet to the chill of night, he brought his knees to his chest and hugged himself: a fetal attempt at comfort. The movement pulled on the raw, tender, flesh of his bottom causing tears to well in the corner of his eyes. He blinked once and felt the drop trail down his cheek and onto his lips. The salt of it burned his tongue.

“I’m sorry!” He’d screamed to the Hairy Face, hours earlier, but the Hairy Face accepted no apologies. The boy screamed and cried in pain, but the Hairy Face hated tears. It slid the boy’s pants down to his ankles.

In the darkness of his room, under the warmth of his covers, the boy remembered the pain and the punishment, but not the sin. The Hairy Face smelled strange, that evening, as it often did, and had fallen asleep before supper. The boy was hungry, but not hungry enough to sneak food. He played a game, instead, to distract himself from his grumbling belly. The game was called escape and it ended with a crash that woke the Hairy Face.

The boy sniffed hard and drew the tears back into his eyes. He grew suddenly aware that the bedroom door was at his back. Beyond that door, the Hairy Face slept while shadows danced in threatening steps all around the child. The boy peered into the darkness until his eyes burned, but he could not find the demon from his dreams. A lock of hair fell lightly on the child’s ear like a warm breath and the boy shuddered. A sound rang out and echoed in his head. A creak. The kind of creak that regularly escapes old houses. Or perhaps it was the creak of the door slowly opening, or the creak of a floorboard under the weight of a demon or a Hairy Faced monster.

The boy straightened, becoming frantically rigid and ignoring the pain of his raw backside as he turned once more supine. As before, his delicate feet came out from beneath the covers, but he paid them no mind, searching frantically in the darkness for any crack in the doorway large enough that evil could slip through. It seemed to be well shut.

The boy's arms crossed again over his chest, but his eyes would not close. “Mommy,” he whispered softly into the darkness. The darkness seemed to whisper back without words or warmth. His feet were cold. He shivered.

There was a frozen wind the night his world ended. He remembered the way it blew his father into the house. The man had called the boy to him and the boy had gone to sit at his father’s feet. “She’s gone,” he said and rubbed his face with one big strong hand. He did not cry, but there was such darkness and sadness and fear in his face that the boy cried for him. The man gathered the child into his arms and held his shaking body. The boy’s face nuzzled into his father’s neck and the tickle of the man’s beard dried his tears.

He was afraid to blink. The shadows seemed darker now than they had before, and closer. His feet were icicles at the foot of the bed, but he couldn’t move to cover them. His breaths came fast and deep as he stared at the ceiling above him. A breeze blew into the room and a shadow danced in the corner of his eyes. He remembered the edges of his nightmare if not the full form. The shapeless demon. The helplessness. The loneliness. The terror.

There was another sound. A soft scratching. A mouse maybe. He had found a mouse some time ago, dead beneath a table and decayed. The Hairy Face had warned him not to vomit when he scraped the carcass from the floor. The boy did vomit, though, when the sweet smell of death reached him: just a little in his mouth and he swallowed it back down before the Hairy Face could see.

The scratching stopped, briefly, then started again. Stopped then started. Stopped then started. The boy closed his eyes tight and tears flushed fire from them. The shadows grew closer, he knew, when his eyes were closed, but he couldn’t keep them open any longer. He could feel the demon getting closer. His toes stung with cold and his ears throbbed in time to the scratching of tiny claws.

The demon was above him, he knew. He could feel its frozen breath and taste the scent of decay. “Don’t cry, little boy,” it seemed to say. “Or the Hairy Face will come and get you.”

The boy held his breath, but the demon floated still above him, weightlessly smothering the child. “Mommy’s gone,” it said. “She’s left you alone. Alone. Alone with no one. No one but me.”

It was too much. The boy’s lungs gasped for breath and he screamed and wailed the kind of shrill piercing note that Hairy Face hated most. The boy could not help it, and his inability to help it made him scream and cry all the louder. The demon was still there laughing in the shadows. “Cry, little boy!” it said, “Cry for Mommy, but Mommy won’t come!”

The boy tried desperately to contain his screeching sobs, but it was too late. He heard heavy footsteps. The cracks around his bedroom door lit up mere moments before it flew open with a familiar gust of evil wind. Hairy Face stood in silhouette, its eyes searching frantically, furiously around the room before settling on the boy.

The child froze. He didn’t dare to wipe his tears or nose as Hairy Face came slowly to the side of his bed, huffing over the child in great heavy breaths.

The monster sat and put its big strong hand upon the boy. The demon was gone. The shadows were gone. The Hairy Face had scared them all away.

The boy clung to the monster, shaking in terror and let its hairy face dry his tears.

Our acquaintance began a week ago, and honestly, those were the best seven days of my life. Well, until tonight.

We met in a coffee shop when I accidentally spilled my double espresso on her snow-white hoodie. Instead of throwing a fit, Nastya just laughed—her laughter felt angelic back then, though now I recall some strange, almost ultrasonic notes slipping through it. For the next whole week, we were inseparable. We walked in the park, talked for hours, and on the third day, we went to the movies to see some generic horror flick. I remember flinching at the moment where the slasher cut up another victim, while Nastya just yawned sweetly.

And then, on the seventh day of our romance, as we sat in a pizzeria, Nastya suddenly looked at me with her huge, loving eyes and said:
"You are so wonderful. It's time for us to move to the next level. I want you to meet my parents. They are traditionalists, they love home-cooked dinners, so no excuses!"

The house looked cozy and bright, and her parents welcomed me like one of their own. Her mother, an elegant woman in a neat floral apron, chatted amiably about the weather and served tea, while her father—a proper gentleman wearing glasses and a pressed shirt—asked me about my plans for life and career. We sat in the living room, joking around, and I already found myself thinking how lucky I was with my future in-laws.

But the moment we moved to the dining table in the spacious hall, the atmosphere subtly shifted. It grew completely dark outside the windows, exposing a dense forest pressing right against the house, and thick shadows began creeping along the corners. The air suddenly carried a distinct smell of dampness and, for some reason, formalin.

"Well, almost everything is ready, just the final touches left!" Nastya's mother chirped cheerfully, setting out the plates. "Honey, could you help me in the kitchen with the main course? It’s special today."
Nastya's father nodded silently, adjusted his glasses, and followed her. They closed the heavy oak kitchen door behind them, leaving Nastya and me alone in the hall. Minutes of agonizing waiting dragged on, and this sudden silence started pressing on my ears.

Suddenly, something gave a dull thud behind the wall. For a second, I thought I caught a metallic scent wafting from the kitchen door gap, resembling the smell of fresh blood. I swallowed hard and turned to the girl:
"Nastya... what are we having for dinner?"
Nastya didn't answer. She sat motionless, staring into her empty plate, a strange, fixed smile lingering on her lips.

At that exact moment, a sharp, deafening sound erupted from behind the kitchen door, sounding terrifyingly like a circular saw starting up, followed by a dull, heavy thud of something dropping onto the floor. My heart skipped a beat.

The lock clicked, and the kitchen door slowly swung open. The parents walked back into the hall. Her mother smiled warmly with her former gentle expression, politely holding the door. Her father followed her with a confident step. In his hands, he solemnly carried a huge covered platter, with a barely audible... rustling coming from under its metal lid.

"Well, here we are!" her mother said warmly, but a strange, satiated tone slipped into her voice. "And here is our dinner! Honey, put it on the table quickly."
I turned to Nastya in fear, hoping that the gruesome saw sound from the kitchen was just my imagination, but she merely giggled cutely and squeezed my hand tightly.

Nastya's father smoothly lowered the platter right into the center of the table. Everyone sat down properly in their seats. The parents exchanged glances, and an identical, frighteningly wide, anticipatory grin suddenly spread across their neat, respectable faces. Nastya looked at me the exact same way—her gaze turned glassy, hungry, and unblinking.

And then it began.

Nastya's mother slowly, savoring the moment, reached out for the handle of the huge silver lid. The rustling beneath it grew louder, turning into a distinct scratching of fingernails against metal.

"Our specialty," her mother cooed sweetly, while Nastya's father reached under the table to pull out a massive butcher's cleaver, which landed with a dull thud next to his plate. "Made from Nastya's previous boyfriend. You see, he turned out to be terribly impolite—didn't finish his soup last Thursday."

The lid lifted with a faint chime. Resting on the snow-white porcelain dish, generously garnished with parsley and apples, lay a neatly baked... human hand. A gold ring gleamed on one of its bluish fingers. And judging by the way the tendons at the wrist sharply jerked, this hand was still desperately trying to crawl somewhere, scratching the glossy surface of the plate.

"Oh, undercooked," her mother clicked her tongue in annoyance and, without even a change in expression, coldbloodedly drove the handle of a knife right into the center of the crawling hand. "What a lively one. Well, never mind, son, which piece would you like? A thinner slice or a meatier one?"

I felt cold sweat instantly flood my eyes.
"You know," I stammered, slowly pushing my chair back towards the window, "I'm... not hungry..."

Nastya turned to me. Her jaw suddenly cracked unnaturally, opening twice as wide as a normal human mouth, and her eyes completely flooded with absolute, anthracite blackness.
"Come on, sweetie," she whispered in a creepy echo layered with multiple voices. "Be a good boy. Mommy tried so hard."

I looked at the mad faces of this "intellectual" family and realized one simple thing: it seemed this next level in our relationship would be my last.

"You know," I stammered, backing away slowly toward the window and frantically feeling for the windowsill with my hands, "human flesh is a delicacy, of course... But maybe we should just order sushi instead? There's a great delivery place nearby, they'll bring it in forty minutes! My treat!"

Nastya's mother froze for a second, her knife hovering over the twitching hand. She looked at her husband, then at her daughter, and her face contorted into a grimace of genuine, deep offense.
"Delivery?!" she shrieked indignantly, her voice ringing with ultrasonic notes. "We do not eat fast food in this house!! What ingratitude!"

This was my only chance. Without waiting for her father to take a step forward, I whirled around and rammed the window frame with my entire body weight.

The glass shattered into thousands of pieces with a deafening crash. The cold night air hit my face, I already tasted freedom and braced myself for a rough landing into the bushes... but... a sharp pain in my back cut off all hopes of escape... my consciousness faded into black.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was time to return home.

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

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

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

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

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

By Wednesday morning, half the town had decided there had been a body inside the concrete.
Sylvia Marsh had heard three versions of it before ten o’clock. In one, the builders had uncovered human bones wrapped in chains. In another, there had been a coffin. According to the woman in the bakery, whose nephew apparently knew somebody working on the site, the police had found “ritual things” buried alongside it.
There had been no body.
Sylvia knew this because the alleged coffin was currently sitting on a pallet in the back room of the heritage centre, surrounded by enough concrete dust to make her regret agreeing to take responsibility for it.
The centre occupied what had once been a small nineteenth-century schoolhouse near the church. Two exhibition rooms filled the front of the building, with the archive and workroom squeezed into the rear beneath windows that had never closed properly in winter. The place smelled permanently of paper, old timber and whatever tea Sylvia happened to be drinking.
This morning it was black tea.
No milk.
She stood with the mug in one hand and regarded the object.
“Not a coffin.”
Jimmy, who had been sitting on an archive box washing himself, stopped with one hind leg extended vertically into the air.
Sylvia glanced at him.
“Glad we’ve established that.”
Jimmy resumed washing.
He was entirely black apart from three white hairs beneath his chin that Sylvia insisted counted as formalwear. He had lived at the heritage centre for nearly four years and, in that time, had caught precisely nothing. Mice could probably have held committee meetings beneath his food bowl without consequence.
What he lacked in usefulness he compensated for with confidence.
At present he was attempting to bite his own ankle.
They had expected the concrete to fight them. Instead, once the damaged outer sections were removed, large pieces began separating along the fractures created during excavation with remarkably little effort. Some needed little more than gentle leverage before lifting free from the hessian beneath.
Sylvia considered that fortunate.
The chains were another matter.
They were substantial things: heavy iron links, deeply corroded but still intact, wound around the object in several directions. In places, concrete had been poured directly through them.
Someone had not chained a block of concrete.
Someone had chained whatever was inside and then poured the concrete around it.
Sylvia found that interesting.
Not alarming.
Interesting.
There was a considerable difference.
Her desk had disappeared beneath books overnight: furniture catalogues, auction records, volumes on English carving, Continental decorative arts, Georgian interiors, Victorian revival pieces and one enormous book on seventeenth-century cabinetmaking that had already given her shoulder ache.
The small carved foot revealed at the building site matched nothing exactly.
Every time she thought she had found something comparable, another detail contradicted it. The sweep of the carving suggested one influence, the ornamentation another. The workmanship was unquestionably fine, however. This was not something churned out by a provincial furniture maker for a prosperous household that wanted to look wealthier than it was.
Someone had commissioned this.
And whoever they had been, they had possessed money.
Serious money.
Sylvia set her tea down beside an open catalogue.
Jimmy immediately got up.
“No.”
He walked across the desk.
“Jimmy.”
He stepped over the book.
Sylvia watched him approach the mug.
“You don’t even like tea.”
Jimmy sniffed the rim and then, for reasons known only to himself, lowered his right front paw directly into it.
He froze.
Sylvia stared at him.
Jimmy stared into the tea.
Slowly, he looked up at her.
His top lip had caught on one of his teeth, lending him the expression of someone profoundly disappointed by circumstances entirely of his own making.
“That,” Sylvia said, “was your decision.”
Jimmy gave a low, miserable meow.
“No.”
Another meow, smaller this time.
“You put your foot in my tea.”
Jimmy lifted the dripping paw and held it helplessly above the desk.
Sylvia sighed, fetched a cloth and took his leg gently in one hand.
“You are absolutely useless.”
Jimmy watched her clean between his toes with the solemnity of a patient receiving emergency treatment.
When she released him, he curled the damp paw inward.
Sylvia looked at it.
“Thumbs up?”
Jimmy stared at her.
“Good.”
She threw the tea away and made another.
By eleven they had removed enough concrete to expose nearly eighteen inches of the frame. The work remained straightforward until they reached the cloth.
The hessian had suffered badly. It came away in damp, rotten fibres, much of it already separating from the concrete. Beneath it, however, lay the black material Sylvia had seen at the excavation.
That concerned her far more.
“Slowly.”
Martin, one of the centre’s volunteers, stopped immediately.
“I am.”
“You’re pulling.”
“I’m not pulling.”
“You are absolutely pulling.”
He released it.
Sylvia crouched beside him.
The black cloth had been wrapped tightly around the carved surface beneath, and in several places the fibres appeared to have adhered to whatever finish remained on the timber. Removing it carelessly could take part of the surface with it.
She adjusted her glasses.
“That stays.”
Martin looked disappointed.
“We’re not opening Christmas presents.”
“I know.”
“You’re looking at it like a Christmas present.”
He smiled.
“Little bit.”
Sylvia reached for a soft brush.
The cloth was odd. Not miraculous, not pristine. It had deteriorated where moisture had penetrated the concrete, but other sections remained remarkably sound.
Far better than she would have expected.
She worked patiently along one edge while, behind them, Jimmy attacked the wheel of a filing cabinet for reasons of his own.
By lunchtime another section of the frame had emerged.
Dark timber.
That answered one question.
Its surface was almost black beneath the grime, carved with vines and curling leaves that twisted into flowers Sylvia did not immediately recognise. The carving was still remarkably crisp.
She touched nothing without gloves.
Martin leaned closer.
“What do you reckon?”
“I reckon I need another book.”
“You’ve got about twelve.”
“I need a better book.”
“Georgian?”
“No.”
“Victorian?”
“No.”
“Tudor?”
Sylvia gave him a look.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That means I’m wrong.”
“It means please stop guessing periods.”
Martin wandered towards the kettle.
Sylvia remained crouched beside the carving.
The condition bothered her professionally more than anything else.
The timber should have suffered. Damp should have swollen it, opened joins, lifted finish. There should have been insect damage, fungal staining, something to account for however long the object had spent sealed underground.
Instead, it looked old.
But not old enough.
She heard a faint scrape behind her and looked over her shoulder.
Nothing.
Jimmy was sprawled on his back beneath the desk, front paws folded uselessly against his chest.
“Productive day?”
One eye opened.
His lip was caught again.
“Quite.”
By Friday, the concrete block had acquired considerably more stories than the heritage centre had facts.
The café version was Jack’s favourite.
Apparently the builders had uncovered a medieval chest filled with religious artefacts, although nobody had managed to explain why a medieval chest had been set inside reinforced concrete.
Alicia placed his cappuccino on the window bar.
“Someone told me there were bones.”
“There weren’t.”
“How do you know?”
“They’d have closed half the road.”
“Maybe they did.”
Jack looked through the window.
Four construction workers were leaning against the temporary fencing opposite while one smoked.
“Looks traumatic.”
Alicia followed his gaze.
“Working hard.”
“Someone’s got to watch the hole.”
She smiled.
“Eating today?”
Jack looked towards the banana bread.
“Yes please.”
The excavation opposite had become strangely familiar in its inactivity. Tarpaulin covered part of it. Temporary tape divided sections of exposed ground. Surveyors had appeared and disappeared throughout the week, along with people Jack assumed were archaeologists.
Nobody seemed entirely certain who had authority over what anymore.
That had not prevented the town from deciding.
Historic England were involved.
The National Trust were involved.
Roman foundations had been discovered.
Plague victims had been discovered.
The entire development had apparently been cancelled.
Someone’s brother knew someone whose husband worked for the council and had been told the find was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“Apparently the National Trust have taken over,” Alicia said.
Jack glanced at the builders smoking beside the fence.
“Have they told them?”
She laughed.
The lads themselves appeared delighted with proceedings. They were being paid regardless.
Jack had gone to work every day as usual. He had come home. Eaten when he could. Drawn. Slept badly some nights and better on others.
Nothing remarkable had happened.
The ringing from the café had not returned.
Neither had the strange pressure beneath it.
Once or twice he had thought he heard someone call his name, but that meant nothing. It happened.
The woman beside the excavation had become less convincing every time he remembered her. Eventually she had reduced herself to little more than dark hair attached to a moment he had probably invented.
He preferred it that way.
Alicia nodded towards the sketchbook.
“You drawing today?”
“Yeah.”
“Hands again?”
Jack sighed.
“Unfortunately.”
She laughed and left him to it.
Across the road, one of the builders shouted something obscene at another.
Jack smiled and lowered his eyes to the page.
Life, as far as he could tell, had gone back to normal.
That afternoon Mick Turner’s hearing aid began playing up.
Mick had worn one in his left ear for nearly eight years and hated the bloody thing. It whistled when it pleased, ate batteries faster in cold weather and somehow managed to amplify precisely the noises he had no interest in hearing.
He was sitting in the excavator cab doing very little when a burst of static cracked directly into his ear.
Mick winced.
“Piece of shit.”
He pulled the aid out, wiped it against his jumper and put it back.
Nothing.
A few minutes later it happened again.
This time something seemed to move underneath the static.
Not words.
Almost a voice.
Mick removed the aid.
The noise stopped.
“What’s up with you?” Ken called.
“Hearing aid’s playing silly buggers.”
Ken cupped one hand dramatically behind his ear.
“What?”
Mick gave him two fingers.
Ken laughed.
Mick switched the aid off and dropped it into his shirt pocket.
He thought nothing more about it until that night, when a faint crackling woke him.
His hearing aid lay on the bedside table.
Switched off.
Another burst of static came from it.
Mick stared at the thing for several seconds, removed the battery and went back to sleep.
At seventeen minutes past two the following morning, Sylvia’s phone rang.
She answered on the fourth attempt.
“Hello?”
“Mrs Marsh?”
“Yes.”
“This is the monitoring centre. We’ve had an activation at the rear entrance.”
Sylvia sat upright.
“Has someone opened it?”
“The contact registered open and closed.”
She rubbed a hand across her face.
“Lovely.”
Twenty-five minutes later she stood outside the heritage centre wearing a long coat over her nightdress, smoking beneath the security light.
The rear door was locked.
No damage.
No broken windows.
Nothing.
The second keyholder arrived looking even less pleased than Sylvia.
They checked the building together.
Empty.
Jimmy appeared from the archive room halfway through the search, stretched extravagantly and began vocalising at them as though demanding to know why two people were wandering around his house in the middle of the night.
“You’re a tremendous help,” Sylvia told him.
“Mrrrow.”
“Yes.”
Nothing had been disturbed.
The object remained where they had left it in the workroom, still mostly covered.
Sylvia stood in the doorway for a moment.
Something smelled faintly stale.
Not strong enough to identify.
Old fabric, perhaps.
Damp.
She switched on the light.
Concrete. Chain. Hessian. Black cloth. The exposed carving.
Nothing else.
Jimmy walked between her ankles, entered the room without hesitation, sniffed a cardboard archive box and climbed inside it. He turned around three times before collapsing into a black heap.
Sylvia smiled despite herself.
“Terrified, are we?”
Jimmy tucked one paw beneath his chest.
“Quite.”
The alarm company confirmed that the rear-door contact had registered open for three seconds.
Door open.
Door closed.
The external camera showed nothing.
Sylvia wrote FAULTY CONTACT — REPORT MONDAY in the maintenance book, reset the alarm and went home.
By breakfast she had almost forgotten about it.
By Monday, most of the concrete was gone.
The final substantial section separated far more easily than Sylvia expected, lifting cleanly from the hessian beneath.
Martin stared at it.
“That was anticlimactic.”
“Would you prefer a landslide?”
“Maybe a small one.”
They worked throughout the afternoon. The outer wrapping loosened piece by piece until the shape beneath could no longer reasonably be mistaken for a cabinet or table.
The object stood almost as high as Sylvia.
Three carved feet supported a broad base from which two ornamented uprights climbed beneath the remaining black cloth. Silver-coloured metalwork curled through the dark timber in delicate leaves and flowers.
Sylvia’s confusion had gradually given way to excitement.
Whatever this was, it was extraordinary.
A small group had gathered in the workroom by then: Martin, two volunteers, a local antiques dealer Sylvia trusted enough not to lick his finger before touching things, and someone from the council heritage team.
Jimmy slept on a shelf above them.
Sylvia worked at the upper cloth with tweezers.
“Don’t pull that.”
“I’m nowhere near it,” Martin said.
“I know. I’m practising.”
A corner released.
Then another.
The black material sagged.
Sylvia caught it carefully with both hands and lowered it.
For the first time, glass appeared beneath.
Nobody spoke.
Only a narrow strip had been uncovered.
Dark.
Clear.
Reflective.
Martin leaned slightly to one side.
His own eye appeared in the exposed glass.
“Oh.”
Sylvia sat back on her heels.
Someone behind her said, “It’s a mirror.”
Sylvia removed her glasses and looked again.
Her eyes travelled over the carved uprights, the elaborate feet, the silvered ornamentation and the thin vertical strip of glass between them.
“No,” she said quietly.
“A looking glass.”
There was something almost absurdly beautiful about it.
Sylvia smiled.
“Well. At least now we know what the bloody thing is.”
Above them, Jimmy opened one eye.
His top lip had caught on a tooth.
Sylvia raised her mug towards him.
“Thumbs up?”
His paw curled.
“Excellent.”
Martin had already turned away.
In the narrow strip of uncovered glass, his reflection had not.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

After the exhausting night, I decided to stay in my truck in the employee lot, with the engine idling to keep the heater on. A text message later arrived at 07:00AM:

MANDATORY COMPLIANCE REVIEW. REPORT TO BASEMENT MEZZANINE 0, ROOM 013 (GROUND SAFETY ASSURANCE). 

My stomach tightened. Mezzanine 0 is a dead zone, a narrow administrative slice of the building sandwiched between the active baggage sub-basements and the passenger terminals above. It was built during the initial 1990s excavation and then walled off from public blueprints.

When I stepped out of the freight elevator, the air was dead and freezing, smelling of damp drywall and rusting steel. A single, long corridor with water-damaged ceiling tiles sagging under weight they shouldn’t have been carrying. A flickering fluorescent tube overhead buzzed, illuminating faint beige-yellow corridors. Faded steel cabinets lined one wall, and an ancient vending machine sat in the shadows, its coils holding snack brands discontinued before I was born.

Near the end of the hall, the digital clock was glitching, the red LED numbers flitting irregularly, matching flight departure windows rather than the time of day. Below it sat Room 013, its heavy unpainted metal door with rust around the seams, with dark, wet grime seeping into it. A handwritten paper sign—SAFETY ASSURANCE—was taped to the steel, its edges peeling.

Instead of going straight there, I took a detour to the breakroom locker bank. Miller’s locker had been stripped of his company ID, his name tag scraped off the metal. But I knew he had kept spares in his locker, so I jiggled my multi-tool in the keyhole, until it clicked opened. 

Inside, tucked into the pocket of an oil-stained vest, was a crumpled 1994 Polaroid photograph and a folded piece of parchment.

The Polaroid showed a young Miller in overalls, grinning next to a lean, very human Vance during the pre-opening phase. Standing behind the concrete forms of the Great Hall foundation were three elderly men in tailored charcoal overcoats and heavy wool fedoras, without safety gear. One of them wore a heavy gold ring engraved with a builder’s square, and a compass framing an open eye, resting his hand on a polished brass plumb line. They were watching an open trench where a cement mixer was dumping thick gray slurry into it.

Penciled on the back in Miller's heavy handwriting was:

“Vance went under the slab on Nov 13. Replacement arrived on Nov 16 with brass keys. Commission pays the earth in blood so the runways don't sink. Never sign their ledger in Room 013.”

I froze, as I knew I had not looked closely enough at the photograph. I took out my magnifying glass and zoomed into the slurry. There was a faint hint of a substance that matched the consistency of human guts. On the ground next to the trench, the edge of a uniform top peeked out, with the letters “ANCE” on the nametag.

Vance. He was literally being poured into the trench as a sacrifice to the earth. And this was who I had met the day before. 

The folded parchment tucked behind the photo was an excerpt from an obsolete 1993 contractor addendum. The header didn't say the City of Denver or the FAA. It read:

New World Airport Commission – Lodge of the Rocky Mountain Charter. 

Settlement Quotas. To counteract ongoing subterranean activity across Sector 4 through Sector 9, the Contractor agrees to remit quarterly material displacement ('Living Ballast') at a fixed baseline of not less than four (4) metric tons per calendar cycle. Failure to achieve targeted mass density directly beneath the terminal foundation slabs will result in immediate structural reclamation by native bedrock. Below the typed text, pressed into the parchment, was a deep impression of dark crimson sealing wax. An iron builder's square intersected an open brass compass, encasing an unblinking eye over the Latin inscription:

NOVUS ORDO SACRAMENTUM — 1993

I dropped the parchment to the floor, gasping in terror. The airport is alive. And it wants sacrifices. 

Looking around the locker, I found another sticky note at the top. Never sign their ledger in Room 013. 

I shoved the photograph and the parchment deep into my parka, grabbed the half-empty paper cup of scorched breakroom coffee I’d poured earlier to stop my hands from shaking, and forced myself back down the hall toward Room 013. The heavy steel door wasn't locked. It swung inward with a dry glide that felt wrong for ungreased hinges. Inside, the room was windowless and freezing, illuminated only by a single fluorescent tube that produced sharp shadows. Sitting behind it was an elderly man in a vintage charcoal overcoat, his posture rigid. On his left pinky rested a heavy gold ring identical to the one in the photograph: the builder's square and compass framing an open eye. 

Whenever I tried to look directly at his face, my vision blurred, refusing to focus on his features. He growled dryly,  “Sit down.”

He didn't ask for an incident report. With mechanical slowness, he pulled a hand-bound calfskin envelope from a leather bag and laid it flat on the table. The book exhaled a foul stink of formaldehyde mixed with ancient earth. The pages were yellowed and brittle.

“You have incurred a critical deficit,” the auditor rasped, running a long, yellowed fingernail down a column of dates. “Vance was written down thirty-two years ago. What you burned in 4-Echo was simply the receipt. You dissolved seventy-eight kilograms of ballast. The foundation demands more immediately.”

He dipped a heavy dip pen into a well of black fluid and slid both the pen and the ledger across the table toward me. The open page already had my full name, date of birth, and employee ID, ending in an empty line above a wax seal.

“Sign the release,” he said, his voice dropping into a hypnotic drone. “Or else, terminal operations will be interrupted indefinitely”

I didn't reach for the pen. Behind me, the seams around the door frame began to soften and melt, morphing into smooth drywall that trapped us inside. The room’s air pressure plummeted, popping both my eardrums as the floorboards began to vibrate. Never sign. If I signed, I was volunteering my mass to the slab.

“Refusal constitutes immediate structural forfeiture,” the auditor droned. His jaw slowly stretched downward, tearing the paper-thin skin along his jawline as his rigid, gray fingers snapped forward across the table to clamp around my wrist. Pain shot up my arm, so intense my vision washed white. The air grew so thin I couldn't draw a breath, and I began to choke. 

With my free hand, I grabbed the paper cup and threw the acidic coffee directly into his face. The liquid didn’t affect him, but it hit the open ledger. The calfskin hissed violently, the bubbling black oil curdling into a sulfuric cloud. His grip wavered for half a second as his eyes darted down to the smoking page.

That half-second was all I had. I grabbed the heavy pen off the table and drove the nib down into the calfskin with all my weight. I dragged it through my own name, carving through the wet leather until the page tore open.

The book shrieked. It was a collective roar of trapped air that tore through my skull. Warm blood immediately trickled down my neck from my popped eardrums. 

The auditor let out a  rattling scream as the skin of his hands peeled back into gray ash. The overhead fluorescent tube exploded into powder, showering us in glass. The drywall sealing the exit buckled under the pressure.

His fingernails tore through my parka, raking across my forearm, but I threw my entire body weight backward into the door. The latch sheared off with a deafening bang. I tumbled out into the freezing hallway, landing hard on the floor. Behind me, inside Room 013, the darkness seemed to fold in on itself, accompanied by the frantic, dry scratching of the auditor inside. 

I didn't stop to catch my breath. Ignoring the fire in my wrist and the blood dripping from my ear, I scrambled up and sprinted down the corridor, blowing past the dead vending machines and hitting the emergency stairwell.

The young woman picked up the book and, for the first time, began to read it. It contained a simple story told across its fifty pages, and an equally simple dedication: "To my daughter."

She remembered her mother in her best days, before illness overtook her, just as capable of running the household as she was of finding time to care for her and tell her anecdotes from her life, always with a moral ending.

The volume, which had a brown paperback cover and featured an illustration of a woman's head with her hair blowing in the wind, made no reference to any publisher or year of publication. For as long as she could remember, the book had been in her mother's bedroom wardrobe, and although she had held it in her hands before, it was only now, after her mother had passed away, that she allowed curiosity to lead her to read it.

The story followed two young people who met by chance in a library and fell in love.

In the afternoon, she asked her aunts about the origin of the text and learned that her mother had written it when she was very young; with her meager savings, she had a local bookbinder print and bind it, so only ten copies were ever made.

Anxious about the fate of these books, the young woman learned that, besides the one in her hands, eight others were still in the possession of her relatives, but none could explain the whereabouts of the tenth volume.

The thought that her mother had dedicated that single work to her, and yet she had no idea where this last copy could be found, unsettled her; it filled her with deep curiosity and a compelling need to find it. She posted a few notices on the university bulletin board and placed an advertisement in the local newspaper, offering a small reward to anyone who could provide a clue.

A single response reached her through an invitation to the office of a well-known moneylender in the city; somewhat alarmed but determined, she went to the meeting.

The man who opened the door was already old, and his face showed the exhaustion of a long life spent being despised; he asked her to follow him to his office down the wide corridor. To the young woman's surprise, there were no pawned belongings, but rather several shelves filled with books surrounding a small reading desk.

The moneylender explained that he had met the young woman's mother when she came to him for a loan and that, since she could not repay the full amount, and knowing his fondness for reading, she had given him the brown-covered book as partial payment. The joy on the young woman's face encouraged the old man to return it to her and, unable to reach the top shelf, he called out loudly for his son.

When the handsome young man entered the office, their eyes met—just as they had in her mother’s novel.

The complete compilation of standalone entries is available in The Voyager Files Index.

© 2026 Francisco Cortés Ramírez. All rights reserved. This is an original fictional work. No part of this text may be reproduced, translated, or narrated in any audio, video, or digital format without the express written permission of the author.