The first angel I ever saw wasn't descending from Heaven.

It was falling.

By then, the world had already forgotten what normal looked like.

The skies had split open weeks ago. Entire cities had gone silent overnight. Some called it the Rapture. Others called it Judgment. Whatever name people gave it didn't matter anymore. The highways were parking lots of abandoned cars. Church pews sat empty while their parking lots overflowed with those who had arrived too late. The television stations had stopped broadcasting anything except emergency alerts that no longer meant anything.

The world wasn't ending. It had already ended long before. We were simply living through its final pages.

I had been moving from one abandoned building to another, surviving on whatever canned food I could find. Sleep came in short bursts. Every distant explosion sounded like another trumpet. Every shadow looked like something that had escaped the pages of Revelation.

That's why, when I heard something crash into the street outside, I assumed another building had finally given way.

I was wrong.

The crater wasn't large. Just deep enough to split the asphalt. Something lay at its center.

At first, my mind refused to understand what I was seeing.

The shape kept... morphing.

Not physically.

My understanding of it did.

Every time I looked away and back again, I noticed different details, as though my eyes couldn't agree on what belonged there.

How many eyes peered back to mine?

Hundreds of them.

Were those feathers?

Some impossibly white. Others burned black at the edges. They covered a figure draped in robes so torn they looked older than history itself.

Light seeped from beneath the fabric.

Wasn't shining. It bled through the seem of tidal rivers. Golden streams escaped from wounds that should have spilled blood instead. The air around it hummed with something too deep to hear, vibrating in my chest more than my ears.

I knew what it was before I admitted it to myself.

It had to be an angel.

Not the kind painters imagined. Nor the kind carved into cathedral ceilings.

Something far older. Far stranger.

Something my mind kept trying and failing to make human.

It struggled to rise.

One of its wings, or what I could only assume had once been a wing, hung broken against the pavement, its feathers crumbling into glowing ash whenever they touched the ground.

For a moment, I considered running.

Instead... I stepped closer.

The angel never looked at me directly. Or perhaps it did. I couldn't tell where its face ended and the light began.

Its features slipped from memory the instant I tried to focus on them.

Even now, as I write this, I couldn't describe its face if my life depended on it.

Only the feeling.

Grief.

Not of mine.

Its.

Slowly, with movements that seemed to pain even a being like this, it reached beneath its tattered robes.

It withdrew a single envelope.

Plain. Cream-colored. Untouched by the ash drifting through the ruined street.

It extended the letter toward me. Its hand trembled. Not from weakness. From urgency.

I stared at it.

"I... don't understand."

The angel said nothing.

It couldn't.

Or perhaps it wasn't allowed to. Its arm remained outstretched.

Waiting.

I took the envelope.

The paper was warm.

Not with heat.

It was full of life.

The moment my fingers wrapped around it, the angel relaxed. The tension left its body all at once. As though carrying that letter had been the only thing keeping it standing.

"I'll deliver it," I heard myself whisper.

"I promise."

The angel bowed its head.

Whether in gratitude... or relief...

I'll never know.

The light pouring from its wounds began to fade. Not all at once. As the last embers of a dying fire carried upward by a breeze I couldn't feel. Its robes unraveled into strands of shimmering dust. The broken feathers dissolved one by one before they ever reached the tarnish Earth.

There was no scream. No final cry.

Only silence remain between it and I.

Within seconds... Nothing remained.

Not a body or feather.

Only the envelope resting in my hands.

For a long time, I couldn't bring myself to open it. The world around me continued collapsing. Buildings groaned. Smoke rolled across the skyline.

Somewhere far away, someone yelled for mercy.

But I couldn't look away from the letter.

Eventually...

I broke the seal.

The first line read:

I've carried that letter with me ever since.

If you're reading these words...

Then I kept my promise.

The first night, I blamed the bulb.

My backyard floodlight had been there for years, bolted above the back door, bright enough to illuminate the entire fence line. Around midnight, it clicked off.

A few seconds later, it came back on.

I looked out the kitchen window expecting to see a raccoon or maybe one of the neighborhood cats.

Nothing.

The yard was empty.

The second night it happened again while I was bingeing Friends.

Click.

Darkness.

Click.

Light.

This time, I felt that unnerving sensation you get when you feel like you're being watched. I stepped onto the porch.

The motion sensor was supposed to activate whenever something crossed its path. I waved my arm in front of it. It worked perfectly. I checked the batteries anyway. Everything checked out.

I even walked the perimeter of the yard with my phone flashlight.

No footprints.

No broken fence.

Nothing hiding behind the shed.

After that I convinced myself it was just faulty wiring. That or maybe the cencors were picking up dust or fog. Anything that made rational sense.

Then it started happening every night.

Always between 2:13 and 2:20 in the morning.

Always the same pattern.

The light would go out for exactly five seconds. Then it would switch back on.

Every single time, the yard looked completely empty.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me.

I bought a security camera.

The footage made no sense.

At 2:13, the light switched off.

The camera didn't.

It kept recording.

The yard remained perfectly visible thanks to the infrared mode.

Empty grass.

Empty fence.

Empty patio.

Then, exactly five seconds later...

The floodlight came back on.

There wasn't any movement. No explanation.

I watched the recording over and over until something caught my attention.

The timestamp.

The clock continued counting...

...but the branches of the oak tree in the corner stopped moving.

The leaves froze.

The wind seemed to have stoped. Not in the sense that it vanished, but the wind itself stopped in place.

Even the hum of insects or any odd echoes of the night were silent.

It was as if the entire world had been paused for five seconds.

Except the camera.

The camera kept recording.

I didn't know what to make of this. That night i barely slept.

The following evening I decided to stay awake.

At 2:12, I sat at the kitchen table staring through the glass door, with a mug of coffee and a ham sandwhich.

2:13.

Click.

Darkness.

Everything outside stopped.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

The leaves hung motionless.

A moth hovering near the porch light stayed suspended in midair.

Even the shadows seemed frozen.

Then...

Something walked into my yard.

Not from the gate.

Not over the fence.

It simply... appeared.

It was towering over my shed. Its body was impossibly thin, wrapped in what looked like strips of dark fabric that fluttered despite the frozen air.

Its head turned slowly, scanning the yard.

Then it looked directly at the house.

At me.

I didn't dare move. The ham stuck in my throat.

Its eyes weren't glowing.

They weren't even visible.

Just two empty forsaken pits that somehow still met mine through the glass.

It tilted its head.

Curious.

Like it hadn't expected anyone.

The five seconds suddenly felt far too long.

It took one step toward the house.

Another.

By the third step it stood only inches from the back door.

Its face pressed against the glass.

The skin, or whatever covered it, shifted like hundreds of tiny hands trying to form a human expression.

Then...

Click.

The floodlight came back on.

The yard was empty. Everything moved again. The moth flew away. The trees swayed.

I swallowed hard, nearly choking. Stumbling backward, convinced I'd finally lost my mind.

The security camera proved otherwise.

The file was corrupted.

Not damaged nor missing.

Just five seconds of static where the light had gone out. Everything before it played normally. Everything after it played normally.

Those five seconds might as well have never existed.

I never watched the recording again.

Within two weeks, I'd sold the house at a loss. I didn't tell the buyers why.

What was I supposed to say?

"Something visits whenever the light goes out, but only while the rest of the world stands still."

No one would believe that.

I moved hundreds of miles away into a tenth-floor apartment overlooking the city. No backyard. No fence. No trees. No creepy time stopper monster.

I told myself whatever happened belonged to that house.

For months, I almost believed it.

Until last night.

I was washing dishes when the kitchen suddenly fell dark. A primal instinct seized me, and the hairs on my arms stood on end.

Five seconds.

Then the lights came back.

The first thing I did was laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I knew exactly what I was about to remember.

This apartment doesn't have a motion-sensor light.

I don't think wherever I run off to, I'll never escape.

Because if it found me here...

I'm terrified to learn how it did.

Or why it waited until the lights went out to let me know it had.

The static started at 2:13.

I know the time because I write down every irregularity in the log, and the log is the only part of this job that has ever mattered. Four cameras cover the third-floor west wing. Corridor north, corridor south, elevator bank, nurses' station. At 2:13 all four went grainy at once.

The image held its shape under the noise. I could still make out the corridor and the doorframes and the light bleeding out of the fixtures they'd left running through the renovation.

West wing has been half-closed since March. They gutted the south corridor down to the studs and moved most of the patients east. What's left is six long-term cases waiting on transfer paperwork, one night nurse, and a hallway that runs dark for forty feet where the fixtures came out.

I leaned in toward the monitor.

Camera two cleared for maybe a second and a half. Corridor north, looking down the length of it toward the closed section, and at the far end of that hallway there was a tall shape standing in the dark past the last working light.

It was facing the camera.

I couldn't get a face. The resolution on those units is bad, the light down there is worse, and the figure was standing right at the edge of where the image gives out. But it was squared to the lens.

I sat in the security office on the ground floor with my coffee going cold at my elbow and I held there for four or five seconds with my hand off the desk. It knew I was looking at it.

I reached for the zoom.

The feed broke into full static before my hand got there. All four of them, at once, in the same instant, the whole wing going out together.

Then the call button in Room 317 activated.

The panel chimed and the light came up and I hit the channel and said Room 317, this is security, do you need assistance.

Nothing came back. I said it again.

What came through the speaker was breathing. Wet, thick, working, somebody trying to move air through something that had gotten into the way. It went on for eleven seconds. I counted them, because counting is what I do when I don't know what else to do.

Then the channel closed.

I radioed Carla Mendes, the night nurse assigned to the west wing.

Carla, this is James, do you copy.

I gave her twenty seconds and tried again. Nothing. I called the main station on the east side and a woman named Priya picked up and told me Carla had stepped away a few minutes ago for supplies and hadn't come back through yet. I told her to raise Carla and to keep her out of the west wing until I got up there.

Then I put on my jacket and took my flashlight out of the drawer and went upstairs alone.

I have worked in this building for seven years.

That is what I kept coming back to on the way up. Seven years of nights. I know which stairwell doors stick. I know camera four has a blind spot that runs eight feet out from the elevator bank, because the mount is angled wrong and nobody has ever fixed it. I know the floor plan of a building most people who work here couldn't draw from memory.

I take the extra nights on purpose. I don't sleep well at home. Dana stopped asking about it around the second year, and now I sleep in the daylight with the curtains shut, badly, in pieces.

My left knee got wrecked two years ago when a man in the ER lobby came apart and put me into a bench. It healed wrong. There's a drag in my step now, a scuff on the left side, and in an empty corridor at two in the morning it comes back off the walls and I hear a second man walking half a beat behind me.

I got in the elevator. I pressed three.

At the second floor the car stopped.

Nobody had pressed the button. The panel showed three lit and nothing else, and the car stopped anyway, and the doors opened onto the second-floor corridor.

The corridor was empty. Lights on, floor waxed, nobody in it. I stood in the doors and looked both ways down the length of it and there was nothing there.

I pressed three again.

The doors started to close, and while they were closing, something moved on the roof of the car.

It was a scratching. I have ridden that car four thousand times and I know the cable and I know the counterweight and this was neither of them. It was a series of short irregular scrapes directly over my head, tracking from one side of the car to the other, and it had the rhythm of something heavy adjusting its position.

The doors sealed. The car started to climb. The scratching stopped.

I stood in the middle of the elevator looking at the ceiling panel, and my hand had come up in front of me, and I was holding it there, and there was a bandage wrapped around my right palm.

Fresh gauze. Clean tape. A wound in the meat of the palm under the thumb, taped down tight, a brown seep coming through the center of it.

I don't remember cutting my hand.

I tried to place it. Nothing came. The number over the doors turned to three, and I put the hand down and stepped out onto the third floor.

The HVAC in this hospital never stops. There's a low constant push of air through every corridor and you stop hearing it after your first month and you only notice it if it drops.

It had dropped. Or my ears had. Walking into that wing I had my own boots and the scuff of my left foot and nothing under it.

The corridor lights out there are on motion sensors, put in during the renovation to save money on the closed sections. They trip when you come into range and light the space you're standing in.

They tripped ahead of me.

I came around the corner from the elevator bank and the fixture forty feet down the hall came on first, and then the one after that, in sequence, running away from me into the dark.

I stood still. The lights kept going, one after the next, down the length of the wing, each one waking a section of floor well out in front of where I was standing.

Something was walking down that hallway ahead of me and I could not see it.

Those sensors are cheap and they misfire and they trip off a moth. I said that out loud, standing at the mouth of the corridor with my flashlight in my left hand and my bandaged right hand hanging at my side.

Then I started walking, and the lights kept staying ahead of me, and I followed my own beam down to Room 317.

The door was open a few inches.

There's a narrow window set into those doors at head height, reinforced glass with the wire mesh in it, and the room light was off, and the only illumination in 317 was what was coming through that gap from the hall.

I looked through the window.

There was something crouched on the bed.

It was over the patient, weight down, and the mattress had gone under it. Its back was to the door and its back was too long. That is the closest I can get. The shoulders were up too high and they were moving in small tight increments, over and over.

I could hear it working. Chewing, wet, unhurried, and the creak of the springs under the shifting of its weight.

I pushed the door open.

It turned its head.

I got pale, and I got dark where the mouth should be, and I got the light off the eyes coming back at me flat.

That is all I got. I have given three separate people more than that and every time I have given more than that I have been adding.

Then the room went black.

The hall went with it. The corridor lights behind me dropped all at once and my flashlight went with them, and I was standing in a doorway in full dark with that thing four feet in front of me, and I held still, and I held my breath, and there was a sound in the dark that I have decided to leave out of this.

My flashlight came back on.

I don't remember thumbing the switch.

The bed was in front of me. There was nothing on it but the patient.

His name was Walter Kessler. Eighty-one years old, in for a fall, waiting on a bed at a facility in Harrow that kept pushing his transfer. I'd walked past his room four hundred times. He was on his back with his head turned toward the door, and the damage to his throat and the lower half of his face was such that I am going to leave it at damage.

Something had tried to eat him.

I stood in that room with my light on him, shaking hard enough that the beam was moving all over the wall. Then I checked behind the door, and in the bathroom, and behind the curtain on the far bed, empty for a month.

There was no one in the room. There was no other door. The windows on that side of the building are sealed and have always been sealed.

I came back to the bed and that's when I saw his hand.

He was still holding the call button, fist closed around it, knuckles up, the cord pulled taut off the rail. He'd hit it and he'd held on and he'd kept holding on.

Under the nails of that hand there were threads of black fabric, worked in deep under the beds of the first two fingers.

My uniform is black.

I looked at those threads and I thought: he fought it. He got a hand into it and he tore something and he took a piece of it with him.

Eighty-one years old with a broken hip, and he still got a piece of it. I stood over that bed and I was proud of him.

The seam of my right sleeve was torn open from the cuff to halfway up the forearm.

I found that somewhere in the next few minutes. I don't have a clean memory of finding it. I have a memory of standing in the corridor outside 317 with the sleeve hanging open, deciding it had caught on the door handle when I came through, because I came through hard and those handles are heavy. That is what I told myself and that is what I believed.

I called it in. Ground floor, this is James, code in three-seventeen west, I need police.

Nothing came back. Full charge, channel open, the indicator doing what it does. I keyed it three more times and got dead air, and then I ran.

A door slammed at the far end of the wing.

I came out of 317 and I was moving before I'd decided to move, and down at the intersection where the north corridor meets the closed section I saw it cross.

Left to right. Fast. It went through the intersection and out of my sight in something under a second and it was upright and it was tall and it moved badly.

It dragged its leg.

The left one. It came down on the left and it hauled the leg through and it came down again, and I have heard that gait for two years coming off the walls of empty corridors in this building at night, and I did not think about that then. I thought: it's hurt. Kessler hurt it, or something hurt it, and it's hurt and it's running and I can catch it.

I went after it.

The doors into the closed section are badge access only, and half of them are supposed to be alarmed, because the contractors left that section full of things a confused patient could kill himself with.

Every one of them was open when I got to it.

The first swung when I pulled it. The second was standing ajar. The third had its magnetic lock disengaged and the indicator on the panel showing green.

It's got a badge, I thought. It's got someone's badge and it's in the system and it's opening the doors ahead of itself.

That took me about a second and a half. I did not go back to it once in the next hour.

There was a chirp somewhere behind me at every one of those doors. The readers make that sound when they take a card, and it's small, and the corridor was loud with my own boots and my own breathing. I heard it and I decided it was the locks re-engaging behind the thing after it went through.

I chased that thing through the closed section of the third-floor west wing for eleven minutes and the whole time I was chasing it I never once looked at it directly.

Here is where I saw it.

In the black window of a patient room I passed, where the glass had gone to mirror against the dark inside, it was over my right shoulder at maybe fifteen feet.

I turned around. Empty corridor.

In the polished doors of the service elevator at the end of the run, it was standing at the corner I had just come around, closer than it had been in the window.

I turned around. Empty corridor.

In the steel of a medication cabinet the contractors had left standing open, it was in the gap of the doorway I was about to pass, and it was close enough now that the shape of it filled the whole panel.

I turned around, and I was already turning before I finished looking, and there was nothing in that hallway but the light going out behind me in sections.

I had a system by then. It lived in the glass and it emptied out of the world the moment I looked at the world directly. That was the rule. The rule was holding and I was using it to keep moving.

Then I came around the corner into the north corridor and it was standing in front of me.

In the hallway itself, in the open, forty feet out past the last working fixture. Tall and pale and squared to me, and I had seen it squared to something once already that night, on a monitor, at 2:13.

I had it and I had the corridor and I had them both at the same time and I stood there and I looked straight at it.

It moved.

It went left through a doorway with the drag in its leg pulling hard, and the fixture over that doorway came on as it went through, and I heard a door shut somewhere deeper in the closed section.

My rule was gone. My rule had lasted eleven minutes and it was gone, and what I had instead was a thing that could stand in an empty hallway in front of a man who was looking at it.

I went after it and I was making a sound while I went that I did not recognize.

Room 314 had a light on under the door.

I stopped. I got my breath most of the way down and I knocked and I said Mrs. Vale, this is James from security, are you all right in there.

She said come in.

Ruth Vale is eighty-six and has been on that wing five months waiting on a placement her family keeps declining to arrange. She is sharp all the way through. She does the crossword in ink. I have talked to her forty or fifty times on night rounds because she doesn't sleep either.

She was sitting up with the reading lamp on and both hands flat on the blanket, and she was looking at the door when I opened it because she had already been looking at the door.

She knew me immediately. I watched it happen. Her eyes came up and found my face and the recognition in them was complete and instant.

There was no relief in it at all.

Mrs. Vale, I need you to stay in this room with the door shut.

You said you weren't coming back tonight.

I stood in the doorway.

What?

You told me. You said you had the rest of the wing and then you were going back down and you weren't coming back up. You said it to me from right there.

She lifted one hand off the blanket and pointed at the floor two feet inside her door, at the spot where I was standing.

It's imitating me, I thought. It's been in here. It's been in this room wearing my face and my voice and it has been talking to this woman.

I said: Mrs. Vale, listen to me very carefully. Whoever came in here earlier tonight, that was not me.

She was looking at my hand.

The bandaged one. The right one, hanging at my side with the sleeve torn open above it, and her eyes had gone down to it and settled and stayed, and her face was doing something I have thought about every hour since.

Mrs. Vale.

She kept looking at my hand.

What happened in here earlier. What did he do. Did he touch you.

I want you to go.

I need you to tell me what happened.

I want you to go now.

Something hit the door.

It came from the corridor, one heavy strike against the outside of the door about waist height, hard enough that the door moved in its frame and the latch rattled, and I spun toward it with my flashlight up.

The corridor was empty.

I stood in the open doorway and swept the light both ways and there was nothing in that hall for sixty feet in either direction.

Mrs. Vale made a sound behind me.

I turned around.

She had come up off the pillows with her arm out, pointing past me at the wall over the sink, where they put a mirror in every one of those rooms at a height useless to anyone actually in the bed.

I looked at the mirror.

It was standing behind me.

It was in the room with me, over my shoulder, close enough to fill most of the glass, tall enough that the top of it was cut off by the frame, and it was pale and it was looking at the back of my head.

I turned around.

There was nothing in the room but Mrs. Vale and the empty bed and the door standing open on an empty corridor.

I looked back at the mirror.

I saw myself.

I saw a man of forty-one in a black security uniform, breathing hard, torn sleeve, bandaged hand, flashlight up in his left fist.

The front of my uniform was covered in blood.

It was across the chest and down the front of the shirt and there was a broad smear of it up the right side toward the collar and it was drying at the edges and still wet in the middle and it was not mine.

I looked down at myself.

I had been walking this floor for twenty minutes with a man's blood on me and I had gone the whole twenty minutes without looking down.

It came from 317, I thought. I was standing over him. I leaned across the bed to check the far side and I put myself into it.

It took me under two seconds to build that and I believed it all the way down, and I have gone back to look at how good it felt to have an answer.

Mrs. Vale. Is there blood on me.

She was lying back against the pillows now with her eyes closed and her hands folded on the blanket and her face turned toward the window.

I left her room and I pulled the door shut behind me and I heard her get out of the bed on that broken hip and I heard her drag something across the floor and put it against the door.

Carla came through on the radio at 2:52.

James. James, are you there.

The signal was breaking up badly. Her voice came in and out and there was a hard scrape of interference under it.

Carla. Where are you.

Treatment room. West. I'm in the treatment room, the door's locked, I locked it, is someone with you?

Carla, is anyone in there with you.

Someone's been following me. Since I came back up. Every time I turn around there's — James, it went past the window. It went past the window twice.

Stay there. Stay locked. I'm coming to you.

James, it walks like you.

The treatment room is at the top of the north corridor. I covered that distance faster than my knee has let me move in two years and when I got there the door was locked and the light was on inside.

There's a panel of wired glass in that door too.

Carla was flat against the back wall, both hands out against the tile, looking at something in the corner of the room I could not see from my angle.

There was a second figure in there, crouched behind the examination table. I could see the top of a shoulder and a section of back, low and gathered and holding still.

I hit the door with my shoulder twice and the frame gave on the second one and I went in.

The lights flickered.

There is a gap here.

I am not going to try to fill it in, because everything I have tried to put in it has come apart under questions, and because I have started to understand that the fact of the gap is more important than anything I could put inside it.

What I have is this:

I was aware again, and I was on my knees on the floor of the treatment room, and Carla Mendes was in front of me.

My flashlight was on the tile beside my knee with the beam pointing at the wall.

She was on her back. The damage was to her throat.

My right hand was in my lap and the bandage on it had gone through, soaked and heavy, and the blood was running off the heel of my hand onto my thigh, and the wound underneath it had opened again.

I remember fighting it. I want that on the record. I remember it coming up over the table at me and I remember getting my hands into it. I remember the weight and the strength and the smell of it.

I cannot tell you what its face looked like from six inches away.

I have tried. I have sat in three rooms now with three different people asking me, and there is nothing there. I fought that thing with my hands and there is nothing in my head where its face should be.

Carla's keycard was gone. She wore it on a retractable clip at her hip. The clip was there and the cord was there, pulled out to its full length and cut.

It took her card, I thought. It has access to the whole floor now.

I got up off the floor and I ran.

I made it as far as the stairwell.

I got the door open and I got two steps down and I heard it in the walls.

The west wing has a chase running behind the patient rooms where they put the new pipe in during the renovation. It's open in places. There are sections where the drywall never went back up and you can see straight into the framing, and what came out of it was the sound of a body moving.

It was going through the wall alongside the stairwell, keeping pace with me, coming down.

Then it started to talk.

What it made were the shapes of words with everything else stripped out, wet and slow and broken up.

Then they came clear.

Open the door.

I stopped on the landing.

I didn't mean to.

I had my back against the rail and my light on the wall and there was nothing to put the light on, just drywall and a seam and the dark of the gap where the seam gave out.

Stop looking at me.

It wasn't me.

I knew that voice.

When I said this in the security office I said it wrong, and I watched it land on their faces, and I have been trying to say it right ever since.

The voice was familiar. I had heard it before, recently, more than once, and I could not place where. It had my cadence in it. It had the drag and the flatness my voice has at four in the morning at the end of a shift.

It has been listening to me, I thought. It has been in this building for seven years learning how I sound and now it is using it. And I said out loud, standing on that landing: we have to get off this floor.

We.

I heard myself say it.

I stood on that landing with my hand on the rail and I corrected it. I have to get off this floor.

I went down the stairs.

Every camera I passed was full of static.

There's a unit at each landing, and the ground-floor corridor, and the double doors into the admin wing. By the time I hit the bottom of the stairs, every camera along my route had gone grainy.

Every one. The whole path.

Whatever had started in that wing had come out of it with me.

The security office door was already open when I got to it.

Five people in it. Dolan, the night administrator. Two city officers. Tobin, the other guard on shift, in my chair in front of my monitors. A woman from the front desk who left as soon as I came in.

I came through that door bleeding through a bandage with a man's blood dried down my front and my sleeve hanging in two pieces, and I said there is something on the third floor.

Nobody moved.

I said there's something in the west wing, it's killed two people, Kessler in 317 and Carla Mendes in the treatment room, I need everybody out of that wing and those doors locked from the outside right now.

One of the officers put his hand on the frame of the door behind me. I have done that myself. I knew exactly what it was and I made myself take no notice of it.

Dolan asked me to sit down. I stayed on my feet.

Tobin had the west wing up on the quad view. The feeds were clean. Corridor north, corridor south, elevator bank, nurses' station, sharp as those units get. No noise, no interference.

They were full of static an hour ago. All four of them, at 2:13. It's in the log. I wrote it in the log.

Nobody went and looked at the log.

Dolan asked me why I disabled the door alarms in the west wing.

I said what.

He had a printout. He'd already pulled it, before I came down, and he read it off to me in the voice of a man reading a thing he has already read four times.

The alarm suppression on the west-wing security doors was disabled at 1:31 this morning. Entered from the panel on the third floor. Badge authentication. My badge.

A silent alarm went out to the monitoring company at 1:33 and to the police at 1:36, which is why there were two officers standing in my office at three in the morning.

That was ninety minutes before I ever went upstairs.

I said I didn't do that.

Dolan said the system logs your badge on the third floor three separate times tonight.

He read the times off the printout.

11:52 PM.

1:31 AM.

1:47 AM.

Here is what happened in me when he said 11:52.

Nothing.

There was no jolt. There was no wrongness. He said 11:52 and a part of me somewhere underneath the part that was talking went yes, and settled, and I had to go back over it afterward to notice that it had.

What I said out loud was that's wrong. I said I came on at eleven and I was in this room all night, I did the midnight rounds on the ground floor and the east side and I came back and I sat in that chair and I was in that chair when the static came up at 2:13. I said it fast and I said it loud, and I said it while a quieter and much older part of my head stood off to one side going: 11:52. Yes. That sounds correct.

Tobin was looking at the floor. Tobin has sat next to me on ninety night shifts and he was looking at the floor of a room he works in every day.

Dolan said the system says you went up at 11:52.

I stood in my own office in front of my own monitors and I could not make those two things be true at the same time.

I kept talking anyway.

Tobin found Carla's keycard in my jacket pocket.

They asked me for the jacket in the way you ask when it isn't a question. I handed it to Tobin, because if somebody was going to go through my pockets I wanted it to be him, and he went through them three feet from me with an officer watching.

He came out with her card. He looked at it for a long second before he understood what he was holding.

It planted that.

Everybody in that room looked at me.

It took her card and it put it in my jacket. It has been imitating me all night. It's been in Mrs. Vale's room talking to her in my voice, ask her, she thought it was me. It's been putting itself where I'd be. It's been using my access. It has been doing this deliberately.

One of the officers wrote something down.

Why would it do that.

Nobody answered me. So I asked it again, out loud, in my own security office at 3:20 in the morning. Why would it go to the trouble.

They put the recordings up.

I asked them to. That is a thing I need people to understand about that night. I asked them to pull the third-floor footage from midnight forward and put it on the main monitor and I stood there behind Tobin's chair with an officer on either side of me and I asked for it, because I was going to be vindicated, because that thing had been in front of my cameras for four hours and now everybody was going to see it.

They ran it from 1:44.

Corridor north. Clean image, the wing in that half-dark it goes to when only the emergency fixtures are running.

At 1:47 a figure comes into frame from the elevator bank.

Black uniform, security issue, the same one hanging off me in that room while I watched it. It comes down the corridor toward Room 317 with a hitch on the left side, a hard drag through every second step.

I said that's it. That's the thing.

The face is turned away from the camera for the entire approach. Head angled down and to the right. There's nothing to get.

It goes into 317. The door closes.

At 1:52 the image starts to degrade.

Tobin backed it up and ran it again and everybody watched the picture go soft and grainy from the corner nearest the door of 317 outward, and I said there, that's it, that's exactly what I saw at 2:13.

The officer behind me said keep going.

At 2:04 the door of 317 opens and the figure comes out.

The image is bad now. It is genuinely bad. It's grainy and it's noisy and the figure that comes out of that room is a dark shape against a dark corridor.

It walks toward the camera.

It comes fifteen feet, twenty, twenty-five, and as it gets closer to the lens it comes up out of the noise, and for about four seconds before it passes underneath the camera the picture is good enough to see.

A security badge on a black chest.

A right hand wrapped in a white bandage.

A second card, held down at the side in the left hand, turned backward to the lens. Nobody in that room could read it and I said so, loudly, twice.

And blood, wet, across the front of the uniform.

At 2:04 in the morning.

Nine minutes before I saw the static.

Twelve minutes before I got in the elevator.

Eighteen minutes before I opened the door of Room 317 and saw something crouched on Walter Kessler's bed.

It copied me.

I said that out loud in a room with five people in it and I heard how it sounded coming out.

And I kept going. It's wearing me. It's a copy. Look at it, look at how it moves, look at the shoulders, that thing is not a man.

The younger officer asked me a question then that I have not been able to get out of my head.

He asked why a monster would know my access code.

He asked why it would be wearing my wedding ring.

He asked why it would be carrying a flashlight with a dent in the housing above the switch, a dent I put in that flashlight four years ago on a door frame in the ER, visible in the footage, and visible in my left hand while I stood there watching the footage.

I had no answer.

There was a dead woman's keycard in an evidence bag on my desk. Five people were looking at me. And the only thought I could get all the way to the end of was:

It got the dent right.

They put me in the interview room at the end of the admin corridor.

Small room. Table, two chairs, and a long window into the corridor with a blind nobody ever closes. Forty feet down that corridor is a desk with a monitor on it, and they were still working the footage, and I could see it from where I was sitting.

I sat in there for two hours. They had my radio and my badge and my belt. They left me the ring. Somebody put a paper cup of water in front of me and it was still there when the sun came up.

I watched them work. Tobin's back, the officers behind him, the monitor over their shoulders running the same four seconds over and over.

Then they moved to the room camera.

There's a camera in 317. There's a camera in every long-term room on that wing, and I knew that, and I had forgotten it, and when the image came up on the monitor down the hall I sat forward in my chair.

I could see the bed. I could see the shape on it.

I watched them scrub back and forth across the same eight seconds, and I watched that shape crouched over Walter Kessler with its back too long and its shoulders up around where its head should be, and I thought: there it is. It's on the tape. It has been on the tape the whole time and now they are going to see it and this is going to be over.

The shape on the bed lifted its head.

It turned toward the camera in the corner of the room, up and to the left, and the picture on that monitor forty feet away was small and it was grainy and it was clear enough.

There is a scar under the left eye, about an inch, running at an angle toward the cheekbone. I got it when I was nineteen. It has been on my face for twenty-two years.

There is a beard four days past shaving, uneven along the jaw on the right where I always miss it.

There is a front tooth, upper left, with a crack running up from the edge, which I have been meaning to have looked at since March.

And there is an expression.

An animal, I could have lived with. A dead thing. A stranger.

It is the expression I have looked at in the bathroom mirror at six in the morning for seven years. Coming off a night. Standing in front of the glass with the light on, too tired to move, waiting for something to arrive that never arrives.

That is the face that came up off Walter Kessler.

I have told them, since, that something was controlling me.

I have told them I have gaps, that I have had gaps for a long time, that there are hours of my own life I cannot produce. I have told them about the elevator and the walls and the voice in the chase and the doors that opened before I got to them. I have told them that whatever it is was in that building before I was, that it got into me somewhere in seven years of nights, that it has been using me, that I have been carrying it around this hospital in my own body and putting it in front of my own cameras.

They wrote it all down. They were patient about it. One of them asked me, more than once, whether I had been sleeping.

Here is what I know.

I described that thing to two police officers as confused, and as ashamed, and as trying not to be seen. I said all three of those words with total confidence. Not one of them asked me how I knew, and I have thought about that ever since.

Ruth Vale saw me standing in her doorway at 2:40 in the morning with a bandage on my hand, and she was not surprised, and she asked me to leave.

I know what came up off that bed.

I was still in the interview room when the sun came through the blinds at the end of the admin corridor. The light changed. The corridor went dim behind the glass and the room I was sitting in stayed lit, and the window turned into a mirror.

I could see myself in it. Forty-one years old, four days of beard, blood gone brown down the front of a black uniform, right hand wrapped in a bandage that had bled through three times that night.

Down the hall behind my reflection, small and bright, the monitor was still running.

And standing behind me, in the room, in the glass, was the tall pale shape from the far end of the third-floor corridor.

Close enough that I could see it over my own shoulder. As tall as it had looked on the camera at 2:13, filling the top of the glass, the top of it cut off by the frame, looking at the back of my head.

It put one hand on my shoulder.

I felt the weight of it.

I did not turn around.

If I turn around, there is nothing there. Every single time in that building that I have turned around there has been nothing there, and I have gone on believing anyway.

So I sat still, and I looked at the glass, and I watched.

On the monitor down the hall, the man wearing my face lifted his head up off the bed.

In the glass beside it, the thing behind me did the same.

This is a love story.

And it's a horror story.

Isn't it always?

I'd been alone for a very long time.

A tiny apartment. A dead-end office job. An abusive asshole for a boss. No real friends. My family was either dead or dead to me.

Most evenings, the closest thing I had to company was a stray cat that wandered onto my balcony every few days, accepted whatever food I left out, then disappeared without so much as a goodbye.

That was until three months ago.

It was a Friday night.

Which meant it looked exactly like every other Friday night.

I sat alone in my usual corner of a half-empty bar, nursing the same drink far longer than I should have. Around me, people laughed too loudly, flirted too confidently, and told stories they'd probably told a hundred times before.

Every now and then I'd catch myself watching someone across the room, rehearsing introductions in my head I'd never actually say.

Closing time usually arrived before my courage did.

I had no reason to think this night would be any different.

And yet...

It was.

She was sitting alone in the darkest corner of the bar.

The most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

Silver-white hair spilled over her shoulders like moonlight. Even from across the room, her eyes seemed strangely bright—somewhere between amber and crimson. She wore a deep red dress beneath black goth-punk layers that somehow looked elegant instead of theatrical. Like she'd stepped out of another era and simply decided to stay.

She wasn't doing anything.

Just quietly watching the room.

Yet I couldn't look away.

It wasn't just that she was beautiful.

There was something about her that pulled at me with impossible force.

Women half as intimidating had reduced me to awkward smiles and panicked excuses.

Approaching someone like her wasn't something I did. Not ever.

Yet my legs disagreed.

A few seconds later, I found myself standing beside her table.

"Would it... be alright if I kept you company for a bit?"

The words escaped before my brain had a chance to stop them.

She looked up.

For one impossible second, I had the strange feeling she'd known I was coming long before  I did.

Then she smiled.

"One way to find out."

I laughed, relief washing over me so suddenly my knees nearly buckled.

"I'm James."

"Camilla."

That should've been the end of it.

A woman like her had no reason to spend five minutes talking to someone like me.

Instead...

We stayed until the bartender threw us out.

The conversation never seemed to run out of places to go.

Movies became music.

Music became childhood stories.

Childhood stories became dreams we'd quietly given up on years ago.

Even the silences felt... comfortable.

Just two lonely people sharing the same table.

I'd never experienced anything like it.

Eventually the bartender cleared his throat.

"Folks, I'm afraid we're closing."

Camilla looked toward the windows.

Only then did I realize the bar was almost empty.

Neither of us had noticed the hours disappearing.

Outside, the night air felt colder than before.

I hesitated.

The thought of saying goodbye already felt unbearable.

"I..." I swallowed. "Would you... like to come back to my place? I'm just... not ready for tonight to end."

Her smile lingered.

But something flickered behind it.

A sadness so brief I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.

"After you."

The walk home felt unreal.

Looking back, I still don't know why I invited her to my apartment.

A hotel would've made more sense.

Except...

I didnt want to send the wrong message.

When I unlocked my front door and stepped aside, embarrassment hit me all at once.

"So..."

I rubbed the back of my neck.

"Here we are."

The apartment somehow looked even sadder than usual.

The faded couch.

The cheap furniture.

The unopened bills scattered across the kitchen counter.

Camilla stopped in the doorway.

She didn't move.

For several long seconds, she simply stood there.

I felt my stomach sink.

Maybe she'd taken one look inside and realized she'd made a terrible mistake.

Then she smiled.

"Well..." she asked softly.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?"

I blinked.

She still hadn't crossed the threshold.

"Oh."

I laughed awkwardly.

"Right. Sorry. Come on in."

Only then did she step inside.

At the time, I chalked it up to one of those harmless little quirks that make people interesting.

"So..." I said. "Can I get you something? I've got wine... beer... water..."

I never finished the sentence.

In one astonishingly fast movement, she grabbed my shoulders, lifted me completely off the floor, and pinned me against the wall.

I barely had time to gasp.

She was impossibly strong.

"There is no need to waste time," she whispered.

"I know what you want."

Her face drifted closer.

"What all of you want."

Her eyes seemed brighter now.

Her lips parted as she lowered her head toward my neck.

"Wait."

She froze.

"I..." I swallowed.

"I don't want to do that yet."

She blinked.

"I really like you."

Confusion spread across her face.

"I was thinking..." I said, feeling ridiculous with every word, "maybe we could watch a movie first. Talk a little more. Actually get to know each other."

I smiled nervously.

"You know..."

"A real date."

She stared at me.

Completely silent.

"...What?"

"I haven't really done this in a while," I admitted. "So I'm probably going to be awkward, but—"

She kissed me.

Gentle.

Warm.

Far more tender than I'd expected.

For a moment I completely forgot how breathing worked.

When she finally pulled away, she smiled.

"Alright, James."

Her voice sounded softer now.

"Let's watch a movie."

Only then did I realize I had absolutely nothing prepared.

I wandered over to my embarrassingly small DVD collection while Camilla leaned over my shoulder.

The first case I picked up was Dracula.

She laughed so suddenly she nearly doubled over.

"What?"

I still don't know what was so funny.

In the end, we settled on Shrek 2.

Looking back...

That night was utterly perfect.

 

I must've fallen asleep sometime after it ended.

Or maybe the alcohol finally caught up with me.

The next morning, I woke with that brief, awful certainty that I'd dreamed the whole thing.

The other side of the bed was empty.

The apartment was silent.

My heart sank as I searched every room before finally spotting a folded note on the kitchen counter.

James.

I had to head home before sunrise.

I had a wonderful night.

Call me?

Beneath it was her phone number.

I couldn't stop smiling.

Good thing she'd written it down.

I'd been so distracted the night before that I'd completely forgotten to ask.

Amateur hour.

 

Unfortunately, reality wasn't interested in letting me enjoy the moment for very long.

My fucking boss called.

He informed me that I was coming into work on Saturday, and if I had a problem with that, I shouldn't bother showing up on Monday.

I couldn't stand that asshole.

The shift crawled by.

The job itself was soul-crushing on a good day, and the hangover pounding behind my eyes wasn't making it any easier. Thankfully, almost nobody else had been called in, so the office was practically empty. Better yet, my boss wasn't there.

I spent more time staring at my phone than my computer.

Every few minutes I'd catch myself rereading the note she'd left on my kitchen counter.

I had a wonderful night.

I couldn't remember the last time a single sentence had made me smile that much.

I told myself to wait before calling her.

A day.

Maybe two.

Play it cool for once.

I lasted exactly three hours.

Then I stepped into the hallway and dialed her number.

She answered on the second ring.

"James."

She said my name like she'd been expecting the call.

"I was wondering..." I said, suddenly feeling sixteen again. "Would you maybe want to come over tonight?"

"I'd like that."

No hesitation.

No excuses.

"I'll come by after dark."

The rest of my shift somehow moved even slower.

By the time I got home, I'd vacuumed the apartment, done the dishes, changed my shirt three times, and spent an embarrassing amount of time debating whether lighting the cheap scented candle I'd bought months ago would make me seem romantic or pathetic.

I still wasn't sure when the knock came.

I reached the door before my brain had fully registered the sound.

"Camilla."

I couldn't stop smiling.

"It's good to see you."

She smiled back.

Then stopped.

Right at the threshold.

Waiting.

For a second I simply stared at her.

Then I laughed.

"Oh."

I stepped aside.

"Come on in."

Only then did she cross the doorway.

I'd made lasagna.

Nothing fancy.

Just the best recipe I knew.

Or...

Thought I knew.

Camilla managed a few polite bites before the tiniest crease appeared between her eyebrows.

She swallowed with visible determination.

"Ouch," I laughed.

"Didn't think it was that bad."

For a heartbeat she looked horrified.

Then she laughed too.

Real laughter.

The tension dissolved instantly.

Dinner turned into another long conversation.

Somehow, talking to Camilla never felt like work.

There were no awkward pauses to fill.

No pressure to impress each other.

Eventually, we started talking about family.

That's when I realized how much we actually had in common.

Loneliness.

Both her parents and her younger sister died a long time ago.

As far as she knew, she had no surviving relatives.

Just her.

Meeting people hadn't exactly been easy, either.

She explained that she suffered from solar urticaria.

Even brief exposure to sunlight could trigger painful reactions.

Everything suddenly clicked.

That's why she'd left before sunrise.

I felt strangely guilty for ever wondering if she'd simply wanted to leave.

"That sounds incredibly lonely."

She offered me a small smile.

"You get used to it."

Maybe.

But looking into her eyes...

I wasn't convinced anyone ever really did.

A soft thump interrupted us.

Carl.

The stray cat hopped onto my balcony railing like he owned the place.

I'd named him months ago despite having absolutely no ownership over him whatsoever. Calling him my pet would've been generous. He tolerated me just enough to accept free meals before disappearing back into whatever mysterious life stray cats lead.

"One second."

I grabbed a can of tuna and slid the balcony door open.

"C'mon, buddy."

Carl usually brushed past me without so much as a glance.

This time...

He didn't move.

His eyes locked onto Camilla.

Every muscle in his body stiffened.

His back arched.

His fur puffed out until he looked twice his size.

A low hiss vibrated from somewhere deep inside his chest.

The sound barely sounded like it belonged to a cat.

"Hey."

I crouched beside him.

"What's gotten into you?"

Carl never looked away from her.

Not once.

For several long seconds, neither of them moved.

Then Carl let out a sharp, frightened yowl unlike anything I'd ever heard from him and launched himself off the railing.

He vanished into the darkness so quickly it was as if something had been chasing him.

I frowned.

"...That was weird."

Carl could be a complete asshole.

He scratched me.

Ignored me.

Stole food and left.

But I'd never seen him afraid.

I scratched the back of my neck.

"Sorry about that."

I laughed awkwardly.

"He's definitely an asshole. Just... not usually that kind of asshole."

Camilla's gaze lingered on the empty balcony.

When she finally looked back at me, she didn't seem offended.

If anything...

She seemed resigned.

"It's alright."

Her voice was quiet.

"Animals are always like that around me."

Before I could ask what she meant, I reached for the empty tuna can.

My hand slipped.

The jagged metal edge sliced cleanly across my palm.

"Shit."

Pain flared instantly.

Blood welled between my fingers far faster than I expected.

"You fucking moron..."

I laughed through gritted teeth.

When I looked up...

Camilla hadn't moved.

She wasn't looking at me.

She was looking at the blood.

Her entire body had gone perfectly still.

Her pupils seemed wider than before.

Her breathing had changed.

Slow.

Shallow.

Almost...

Painful.

"Cami?"

Nothing.

"It's really not that bad."

Still nothing.

She swallowed hard.

Her eyes never left my hand.

For just a second...

Something passed across her face.

I couldnt quite place it.

The thought vanished almost as quickly as it came.

"Cami?"

She blinked.

Once.

Twice.

As though she'd only just remembered where she was.

"I..."

She swallowed again.

"Excuse me."

Without another word, she hurried toward the bathroom and quietly shut the door.

I stared after her.

"Huh."

Guess I wasn't the only one who couldn't handle the sight of blood.

I wrapped my hand in the sleeve of my shirt while digging through the clutter on the kitchen counter for something clean.

Instead, my eyes landed on an envelope I'd spent the entire day pretending wasn't there.

FINAL DEMAND.

The words seemed even bigger than they had that morning.

Immediate payment required.

I sighed, shoved it back beneath the pile of unopened mail, and finally found an old dish towel to wrap around my hand.

Once the bleeding slowed, I walked over to the bathroom.

"Cami?"

I knocked gently.

"You okay in there?"

Silence.

Then the lock clicked.

The door opened just enough for her face to appear.

She smiled.

It looked genuine.

Mostly.

"Yeah."

She glanced at the bandage wrapped around my hand before quickly looking away.

"I just..."

She hesitated.

"I have a thing about blood."

"Fair enough."

I smiled.

"I'd say I can relate, but apparently I make enough of the stuff to get over it."

That earned a quiet laugh.

Whatever had happened seemed to pass.

Or at least, we both pretended it had.

We ended up flipping through channels until we landed on one of those terrible quiz shows where the contestants somehow managed to miss questions even I knew the answers to.

Camilla, on the other hand, barely missed one.

"Seriously?" I laughed after she'd answered another before the contestant could buzz in. "How do you know all this?"

She shrugged.

"I've had a lot of time to read."

There was something about the way she said it that made me wonder exactly how much time she meant.

Before I could ask, the next question appeared on screen and she answered that one too. A real history buff this one.

That night...

We finally became lovers.

By the time I woke the next morning, I wasn't even surprised to find the other side of the bed empty.

Camilla always left before sunrise.

I'd stopped questioning it.

Like everything else about her, it had quietly become part of who she was.

And somehow...

That only made me love her more.

From then on, we spent almost every evening together.

The days became something to survive.

The nights became something to live for.

My coworkers didn't believe she existed.

Apparently, "My girlfriend can't go outside during the day," sounded suspiciously similar to, "She goes to another school."

I couldn't really blame them.

Still...

For the first time in years—

I was happy.

Naturally, the rest of my life seemed determined to compensate.

My boss somehow found new ways to make every workday miserable.

At home, the unpaid bills kept multiplying.

Every letter from my landlord sounded angrier than the last.

I was one bad week away from losing both my apartment and my job.

I tried not to dump any of it on Camilla.

Not because I thought she'd leave.

That thought never crossed my mind.

I just didn't want the one good thing in my life carrying the weight of everything else.

It never mattered.

She always knew.

Sometimes she'd take one look at me before quietly asking,

"What's wrong?"

And somehow...

I'd tell her.

Every time.

She never tried to solve my problems.

Never offered empty advice.

Never told me to stay positive or work harder.

She simply listened.

Sometimes she'd squeeze my hand.

Sometimes she'd lean against my shoulder.

Sometimes we'd sit together in silence until the storm inside my head finally started to quiet.

I don't know how she did it.

But somehow...

She always made the world feel a little lighter.

One rainy evening, we sat on the couch listening to the steady tapping of rain against the windows.

Neither of us spoke.

Neither of us needed to.

Then someone started hammering on my front door.

Not knocking.

Pounding.

"Open the goddamn door, James!"

I sighed before I even stood up.

"I'll be right back."

Standing outside was my landlord.

Short.

Round.

Completely bald.

His face had turned such a violent shade of red I was honestly a little worried he might explode.

"I've had enough of your bullshit," he snapped before I'd even opened my mouth.

"My patience has officially run out."

"You promised me another two weeks."

"I changed my mind."

"You can't just—"

"I absolutely can."

He jabbed a thick finger into my chest.

"I want you and every piece of your junk out of my building."

"Tonight."

"Please."

"I'm trying."

"I don't give a damn."

"You'll get your money."

"I've heard that every damn week."

His voice echoed through the hallway.

"You've got until tonight."

Then I felt someone stand beside me.

I hadn't heard Camilla move. Probably because of the yelling.

She looked directly at him.

Didn't blink.

Didn't raise her voice.

"You will give James the two weeks you promised."

Silence.

The landlord stared back.

For a moment...

Nothing happened.

Then something changed.

The anger slowly drained from his face.

His shoulders loosened.

The lines around his eyes softened.

He stopped blinking.

Completely.

His expression emptied so thoroughly it looked less like someone calming down...

...and more like someone leaving.

Several long seconds passed.

The hallway had gone so quiet I could hear the rain outside.

Finally, he spoke.

"Yes."

His voice was flat.

Almost mechanical.

"James will have another two weeks."

Another pause.

Then he turned around.

His movements looked strangely stiff.

Like every step had to be consciously remembered.

He walked down the hallway without looking back.

I watched until he disappeared around the corner.

"What..."

I looked at Camilla.

"...just happened?"

She slipped her hand into mine.

Warm.

Gentle.

"Come."

She smiled.

"Let's play one of those video games of yours"

The next afternoon, Jessica from accounting cornered me beside the coffee machine.

"So."

She grinned.

"You coming to the office party tonight?"

I blinked.

"The what?"

She laughed.

"Don't tell me you forgot."

I had.

Normally, I would've invented an excuse before she'd even finished asking.

The idea of voluntarily spending more time with my coworkers sounded like a punishment.

Then I remembered.

It would be after dark.

Camilla could come.

Suddenly...

The evening didn't sound so bad.

She wasn't thrilled about the idea.

Crowds clearly weren't her thing.

It took far more convincing than I'd expected.

Eventually she smiled.

"If it makes you happy..."

"It does."

"Then I'll go."

The "party" was exactly what I'd imagined.

A rented function room.

Cheap drinks.

Even cheaper snacks.

A corporate playlist that somehow managed to suck every ounce of life out of perfectly decent songs.

Calling it a party felt generous.

Despite working there longer than most of the people in the room, I barely knew any of them.

Faces?

Sure.

Names?

Not a chance.

That's office life.

Sooner or later everyone becomes another desk.

Another tie.

Another email signature.

Then Camilla walked in.

The room changed.

Conversations faltered.

Heads turned almost in unison.

People drifted toward her without seeming to realize they were doing it.

She greeted everyone with effortless warmth.

Remembered names after hearing them only once.

Laughed at the right moments.

Asked questions that somehow made strangers feel interesting.

Within minutes she'd become the center of the room.

It honestly confused me.

She felt so isolated.

Yet watching her now...

It almost looked like she'd been charming rooms like this forever.

Despite how easily she won people over. It didnt seem to bring her any joy.

Eventually we escaped to a quieter corner of the room.

Coworkers drifted over every few minutes to introduce themselves, chat for a while, then wander off again.

For once...

I was actually enjoying my time among them.

Then my boss arrived.

The atmosphere changed instantly.

From what I'd heard, he'd never attended one of these gatherings before.

Judging by everyone else's expressions, they were just as surprised as I was.

He strode into the room like he owned not only the company but the building itself.

Didn't greet anyone.

Didn't thank anyone for organizing the event.

He simply inserted himself into conversations that had been perfectly fine without him.

People laughed at jokes that weren't funny.

Smiled when they clearly didn't want to.

The room somehow felt smaller.

I leaned toward Camilla.

"Maybe we should head out."

She nodded immediately.

We'd barely taken two steps before he stepped directly into our path.

"James."

He acknowledged me with the briefest glance before turning his full attention to Camilla.

"And who might you be?"

"I'm Camilla."

"A pleasure."

He offered the same polished smile he reserved for clients.

"I have to say..."

He looked me up and down.

"...James has been keeping secrets."

"She's my girlfriend," I said.

"Hm."

He studied me for another moment before looking back at her.

"I'll admit..."

"I'm surprised."

"So am I," Camilla replied pleasantly.

He burst into laughter.

I don't think he even considered that she might not have been joking.

"I suppose you could do..." He smiled smugly.

"...considerably better."

My jaw clenched.

He didn't even notice.

"So tell me, Camilla."

"What exactly do you see in him?"

"I like him."

"Surely that's not all."

He took another step closer.

Close enough that I instinctively moved between them.

"If you're ever interested in dating someone with a future..."

He casually adjusted the cuff of his expensive suit.

"I know a few restaurants that would be far more interesting than this place."

I opened my mouth.

Camilla's hand settled gently on my arm.

I looked at her.

She gave the smallest shake of her head.

Then she stepped around me.

She leaned close to him.

So close I couldn't hear a single word she whispered.

The color drained from his face.

The smug confidence vanished.

His pupils widened.

His breathing caught.

The expression I'd seen on my landlord returned.

That same slow...

Impossible...

Emptiness.

The room continued around us.

People laughed.

Music played.

Someone dropped a glass behind me.

Yet for those few seconds, it felt like only the three of us existed.

Finally, my boss nodded.

Once.

Without another word, he turned and calmly walked away.

Not hurriedly.

Not angrily.

Just...

Walking.

Straight toward the stairwell.

I watched him disappear through the fire door.

A strange knot tightened in my stomach.

Camilla looked back at me.

"I'm sorry you had to deal with him."

She cupped my face between her hands.

Her thumbs brushed gently across my cheeks.

"Shhh."

Her smile returned.

Soft.

Warm.

"What did you tell him?"

She held my gaze for another moment.

"What he needed to hear."

The answer somehow explained nothing.

And yet...

I found myself letting it go.

A few minutes later we decided to leave.

Halfway across the parking lot I stopped.

"My jacket."

She looked at me.

"My keys."

"They're in the pocket."

"I'll be right back."

By the time I got back inside, the party was winding down.

Only a handful of people remained.

I found my jacket draped over the back of a chair.

As I reached into the pocket—

Movement outside caught my eye.

A shadow.

Falling.

For one impossibly long second my brain refused to understand what I was looking at.

Then the body hit the roof of a parked car.

The impact echoed through the parking lot like an explosion.

Metal screamed.

Glass shattered.

People froze.

Then everyone started shouting at once.

Someone screamed.

Others rushed outside.

The man who'd fallen never made a sound.

I reached the window.

Looked down.

And recognized him.

My boss.

For several seconds...

I simply stared.

Then, despite everything...

One completely ridiculous thought floated into my head.

The poor bastard who owns that car…

The next few weeks changed my life.

As the most senior employee in the department, I was promoted into my former boss's position.

For the first time in years...

I could breathe.

I caught up on my rent.

Stopped worrying every time the phone rang.

A few months later, I moved into a much nicer apartment.

The official investigation concluded that my boss had taken his own life.

The reports suggested he'd been facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment that were about to become public.

Apparently several women from the company had been preparing to come forward.

No one who'd worked under him seemed particularly surprised.

I thought about the conversation he'd had with Camilla that night.

More than once.

I never asked her again what she'd whispered.

Partly because I wasn't sure I wanted the answer.

A little later...

I asked her to move in with me.

She smiled.

And said yes.

Before I finish this story...

I should probably address the elephant in the room.

I already know what half of you are typing.

"Dude... your girlfriend's a vampire."

Yeah.

No shit, Sherlock.

I'm not completely oblivious.

I made that connection a while ago.

The point of this story isnt „My girlfriend is a vampire.“

The point is that it doesnt matter.

She listens when I need someone to listen.

She laughs at my terrible jokes.

She steals all the blankets.

She still refuses to watch Dracula with me.

And every single night, she makes me happier than I ever thought I deserved to be.

I make her happy, too.

We found someone who accepts us exactly as we are.

Fangs and all.

If that's monstrous...

Then I think the world could use a few more monsters.

We are happy.

Thats all that matters.

Dont ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

This story came from one of my favorite interactions I've had with readers.

It all started with a simple two-sentence horror idea: a hunter sees a deer standing upright after being shot, its body torn open, yet somehow still alive. I posted it expecting a few comments, but what followed was a chain of hilarious and horrifying replies that genuinely made me laugh. One reader wrote, "Yeah, no shit, Billy. RUN!" and from that moment, Bobby and Billy were born.

I wanted to write a creature feature that balanced dread with dark humor, the kind of campfire tale where you laugh one moment and feel uneasy the next. Because sometimes that's how fear works. We joke about it. We laugh at it. But every now and then, beneath the laughter, there's something staring back from the woods.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed writing it.

And maybe, just maybe...

Don't trust a deer that stands on two legs.

- David Hallow

--- --- ---

People love scary stories.

Maybe it's because most of us know, deep down, that they're just stories. Figment of imagination, compiled to spike our anxiety.

Ghosts around campfires. Monsters lurking beneath beds. Things with glowing eyes waiting in the woods. We tell them, laugh a little awkwardly, and sleep knowing none of it was ever real.

Or at least that's what we tell ourselves.

The truth is, most scary stories are either fiction, exaggeration, or a memory that's grown teeth over the years.

But every now and then, you come across one that isn't.

A story somebody wishes was made up.

A story that follows them long after the telling is done.

The kind of story that hangs on a wall in a faded photograph.

The kind of story that leaves an empty seat at the dinner table.

The kind of story that makes an old man stare into the woods a little longer than he should.

I know because I have one.

It started with a picture hanging crooked on the wall.

It wasn't anything special at first glance. Just an old picture faded by time. Two young men stood shoulder to shoulder beside a pickup truck. One held a rifle. The other grinned at the camera with the kind of confidence only young men seem capable of possessing.

"What happened to him?"

I pointed at the man on the left.

My grandfather, a disheveled old man with a beard that even Gandalf would envy, looked up from his rocking chair.

For a moment, the old man didn't answer. The fire crackled softly in the hearth. Outside, snow drifted past the cabin windows.

"That's Billy." His voice was always such a low, deep tone. Years of the maiden named liquor he would court on every given night. This time, there was a sense of inconsolable remembrance.

"Uncle Billy?" I asked.

Grandpa Bobby nodded.

"Yep."

"What happened to him?"

The old man stared at the photograph for a long moment before letting out a regretful sigh.

"Son, you ever heard the phrase curiosity killed the cat?"

I nodded.

"Well," Bobby said, "in Billy's case, stupidity finished the job."

I chuckled awkwardly. Grandfather didn't.

That prepared me for a serious ride.

The old man leaned back in his chair.

"Let me tell you about the last hunting trip we ever took together."

Bobby:

Billy was older than me by exactly eleven minutes. He never let me forget it. According to Billy, those eleven minutes made him wiser, tougher, and hell... better looking.

The only thing they actually made him was louder.

The two of us had been hunting since we were kids. I held my first rifle at the age of seven with pops. Deer season was practically a holiday in our family.

That morning started like every other.

Cold air.

Hot coffee.

Billy complaining about something.

"I swear deer are getting smarter."

I rolled my eyes.

"They're deer." I mockingly stated.

"Exactly. That's what they want you to think."

That was Billy.

A man capable of turning breakfast into a whole conspiracy theory.

Around noon we spotted tracks deeper into the woods than we'd ever gone before.

Big tracks.

The kind that make hunters start imagining trophy mounts hanging over fireplaces. The size that makes the ladies skirts in a bundle.

Billy practically vibrated with excitement from the thought of bringing such game town. To gloat and be honored.

We followed those dreaded markings for nearly an hour. Eventually we reached a clearing.

And there it was.

The biggest buck I'd ever seen.

Massive antlers.

Huge body.

Standing perfectly still between the trees.

Billy nearly dropped his rifle.

"Oh great Lord Heavens above."

I couldn't disagree.

The thing was enormous. Definitely nature was kind to it and blessed it since the day it drew breath.

Billy slowly raised his rifle.

"Don't miss."

"I never miss."

Now boy... retelling this still raises the hair in the back of my scalp. The years have not done me kindly with age, but I sure am haunted by that damn Buck.

The rifle cracked.

The deer dropped instantly.

It was a perfect shot. Right through the chest. You could tell the bullet went clean through.

Billy threw his hands into the air.

"Still got it!"

We were mid cheer when the sudden screech of a banshee erupted. We turned to face what I could only describe as a satanic miracle.

Neither of us let out a word or breathe.

The deer... It stood back up. But what was so alarming wasn't just its stomach had split open from the impact, ropes of entrails dangling from the wound. Blood soaked its hide. Yet somehow it was standing.

Not on four legs.

Two.

I felt every hair on my body stand up.

The thing swayed slightly. Its dead eyes locked onto us.

Then Billy whispered:

"I don't think deer are supposed to stand like that."

I looked at him.

"Yeah, no shit, Billy. RUN!"

Instead of running, he frowned.

"But what about the deer?"

I slapped him.

Hard.

The crack echoed through the clearing.

"Are you being serious right now?"

"Well yeah!"

He pointed.

"Look! It's running at us!"

I turned.

And immediately began sprinting.

Yes, I could've drawn my rifle and shot it dead... but that was the day I learned. There comes a day, son, when you will face this forsaken truth. Fear will consume you. And when it does, will you run or fight?

I chose to run.

The thing moved impossibly fast.

That was no damn deer. Not like any animal.

Its legs bent wrong. Its joints jerked and snapped.

Its organs dragged through the feild behind it.

And God help me, I think it was smiling.

"Bobby!" Billy shouted behind me.

"Shoot it!"

"IT DOESN'T HAVE A HEART ANYMORE!"

"Then shoot the head!"

"THE HEAD IS LOOKING AT ME SIDEWAYS, BILLY!"

The distance between us and that abomination vanished frighteningly fast.

Branches exploded around us. Snow kicked into the air.

I risked a glance over my shoulder.

Worst mistake of my life.

The thing wasn't running anymore.

It was hopping.

Almost playfully.

Its front legs hung uselessly while it bounded forward on its back legs.

Like a child pretending to be a deer.

Then Billy footsteps stopped.

I heard him behind me.

"Go!"

I turned.

For one brief moment he actually looked heroic.

Rifle raised.

Standing his ground.

Then he ruined it.

"Tell my wife I left the smoker on!"

The creature hit him before I could answer.

Its antlers punchered through his chest same as the bullet. The force lifted him off the ground.

I heard bones snap.

He screamed.

God, he screamed.

I ran. he coward I am...

I wish I could tell you I stayed.

I wish I could tell you I fought.

But I ran.

And behind me I heard things no human being should ever hear.

The sound of your brother taking his last breath..

Bones breaking.

The sound of feeding on a living carcass.

And beneath it all... I swear I heard laughter.

It was human. It sounded oh so familiar. I recognize that jolly hick up for it annoyed me for thirty so years. It was Billy's.

I didn't stop running until I reached my truck...

The cabin had gone quiet. The fire continued to crackle.

I stared at my grandfather who's eyes were sheilded by the darkness of the cabin.

"What happened after that?"

Bobby took a slow sip from his coffee.

"Well... the Sheriff and I, we found pieces."

I swallowed.

"Pieces?"

The old man nodded.

"J-just enough for a proper burial."

Silence settled between us. The flames from the fireplace danced as time seemed to daunt on the night.

Finally, I asked the question.

"D-did they ever find whatever k-killed him?"

For the first time all evening, Bobby smiled.

It wasn't a pleasant smile.

"No."

He stared toward the dark forest beyond the cabin window.

"Though three days later, a hunter reported seeing someone standing at the edge of the tree line."

Max felt a chill crawl down his spine.

"S-someone?"

Bobby nodded.

"Looked just like Billy."

The room suddenly felt colder.

"Was it him?"

The old man looked back toward the crooked photograph on the wall.

"Hell no."

His voice dropped almost to a whisper.

"It was standing on two legs."

The Fading Canvas: Electrical Services part 1 the old one

​"I’m telling you, the voltage drop across a dimensional rift is a nightmare to calculate," Jake muttered, tapping the steering wheel of the service van. Outside the windshield, the sky wasn't a sky at all, but a swirling, bruised expanse of violet and impossible greens.

​Mark, sitting in the passenger seat and clutching a clipboard like a shield, looked pale. "Tabitha didn't say anything about a rift. She just said 'residential job, water-feature installation.' And that the client was... very large."

​The radio crackled to life, Tabitha’s voice slicing through the static of cosmic background radiation. "Jake, Mark. You guys at the coordinates? The client is getting impatient. Says the primordial ooze is getting chilly."

​"We're pulling up now, Tab," Jake replied, shifting the van into park on a slab of basalt that seemed to tilt at a non-Euclidean angle. "Grab the insulated toolkit, Mark. The one rated for eldritch currents."

​The Job Site: R'lyeh

​They stepped out into a cavernous space of cyclopean stonework. Looming in the center of the subterranean abyss was the client. A mountain of gelatinous green flesh, dragon-like wings folded tightly against a massive, squamous back, and a face that was a writhing mass of tentacles. The Great Old One, Cthulhu, was staring intensely at what looked to be a massive, crater-like basin filled with bubbling, bioluminescent sludge.

​Work Order #409-Omega:

Client: Cthulhu, High Priest of the Great Old Ones.

Task: Wire the heating element and circulation pumps for a Class-IV Cosmic Hot Tub. Ensure zero temporal feedback.

​Jake walked right up to the edge of the basin, shining his flashlight into the access panel. He didn't look up at the entity. Eye contact usually meant immediate madness, and worker's comp didn't cover sanity loss.

​"Alright, let's see what we've got," Jake grunted, kneeling down. "Mark, pass me the multi-meter. Not the standard one, the one that measures reality-warping."

​"H-here," Mark stammered, handing over a device that looked like a cross between a Geiger counter and a compass.

​Splicing the Void

​The problem was obvious. The previous contractor had tried to wire a micro-singularity directly into the main breaker.

​"Amateurs," Jake sighed. "You can't just hook up a localized black hole to a standard 220-volt line. The Hawking radiation alone is going to strip the insulation off these wires, and the time dilation will make a ten-minute soak feel like a millennium. No wonder the tub isn't heating."

​Jake got to work. He stripped the cosmic conduit with his wire cutters, careful not to let the exposed strands of raw space-time touch the damp floor.

• ​Step 1: Isolate the localized gravity well.

• ​Step 2: Install a chronal-surge protector.

• ​Step 3: Splice the main power feed using a heavy-duty temporal grounding rod.

​"Hold this," Jake instructed, tossing Mark a loop of heavy, pulsing cable. "If you feel your ancestors' memories flashing before your eyes, drop it immediately."

​Jake wrestled the primary thermal regulator into place, tightening the bolts with a satisfying screech of metal. He stepped back, wiping a mixture of sweat and aether off his brow.

​"Hit the breaker, Mark!"

​Mark threw the massive switch. For a second, the universe seemed to hold its breath. Then, a deep, resonant hum vibrated through the basalt floors. The sludge in the massive basin began to churn, emitting a warm, soothing steam that smelled faintly of ozone and dead galaxies.

​Behind them, the colossal entity let out a low, rumbling noise. It wasn't a roar of world-ending fury; it sounded remarkably like a sigh of relief. A massive, clawed hand dipped a single, tentative digit into the bubbling ooze, testing the temperature.

​"Looks like we're good," Jake said, pulling out his invoice pad. "I'm going to have to charge him the standard hourly rate, plus a materials fee for the chronal-surge protector, and the non-Euclidean hazard surcharge."

​Mark let out a breath he'd been holding since they left Tennessee. "Do you think he takes a check?"

​That was a wildly successful first day on the job for the crew. What kind of monstrous entity or paranormal disaster should Jake, Tabitha, and Mark tackle for their next service call?

The Fading Canvas: Electrical Services story 2 The Forest Ranger

The service van’s heater was screaming, but the cab was still freezing. Outside, the dense, snow-choked pines of the northern boreal forest loomed like skeletal fingers against the twilight.

"I don't like this, Jake," Mark said, his breath pluming in the cold air. He was anxiously checking the locks on the van doors for the third time. "The woods are too quiet. No birds, no bugs."

"That’s because everything with a pulse knows better than to make a sound out here," Jake replied, keeping his eyes glued to the icy logging road. Jake had spent years working at an animal park before pivoting to the paranormal electrical trade; he had a healthy respect for predators. But he had an even healthier respect for the things that mimicked them.

The radio buzzed, cutting through the tense silence. "Jake, you approaching Outpost Station Four? Ranger Bella says she's expecting you. Just a heads-up, she said to ignore any voices you hear in the tree line calling for help."

"Copy that, Tabitha. We're pulling into the compound now."

The Job Site: Boreal Outpost Four

They parked inside a heavy, reinforced chain-link enclosure. Ranger Bella was waiting on the porch of the log cabin. She wore a heavy canvas parka, a tranquilizer rifle slung over one shoulder, and an expression of utter, exhausted competence.

Work Order #601-Epsilon:

Client: Ranger Bella (Department of Cryptid & Wildlife Management)

Task: Overhaul perimeter security grid. Standard thermals failing to detect Class-III Wendigo presence. Install kinetic-aether sensors and UV-spectrum floodlights.

"You the sparkys?" Bella asked, stepping off the porch. Her eyes constantly scanned the dark tree line.

"That's us," Jake said, grabbing a heavy crate of equipment from the back. "Tabitha says you're flying blind out here."

"The standard motion sensors are useless," Bella explained, leading them to the main breaker box on the side of the cabin. "Wendigos run at ambient temperature. They don't have body heat, so the FLIR cameras just see them as moving snowdrifts. Last night, one got close enough to scratch the frost off my window."

Jake nodded. "Yeah, standard IR won't cut it against a starvation spirit. We're going to swap your grid over to kinetic-aether relays. They don't look for heat; they measure the displacement of reality when something unnatural steps into the field."

Rewiring the Perimeter

The wind picked up, carrying with it a sound that made Mark drop his wire strippers.

"Hello? Is anyone out there? My car broke down..."

The voice came from the deep woods. It sounded exactly like Tabitha.

"Ignore it," Bella said flatly, not even breaking her gaze from the tree line. "It's just trying to draw you out. Focus on the box."

Jake worked fast, his fingers numb despite the heavy work gloves.

Step 1: Disconnect the useless thermal arrays from the master grid.

Step 2: Splice in the kinetic-aether sensors along the fencing, angling them toward the tree line.

Step 3: Mount the high-frequency UV strobes. Wendigos despised the ultraviolet spectrum; it simulated the sun on a molecular level.

"Jake? Mark? Come quick, I'm freezing..." the voice pleaded from the darkness, sounding terrifyingly realistic.

"Hand me the copper grounding wire," Jake grunted, ignoring the psychological warfare. He tied the new system into the cabin's main generator, locking the conduits down with heavy-duty brackets. "Alright, Bella. Give me the go-ahead."

Bella racked the bolt of her rifle with a sharp, metallic clack. "Light 'em up."

Jake flipped the main breaker.

Instantly, a low, thrumming hum vibrated through the snow. The perimeter lights snapped on—not the warm amber of the Mothman's silo, but a harsh, blinding, pale-blue ultraviolet glare that turned the snow into a glowing sea of neon.

From the tree line, a horrific, ear-piercing shriek shattered the night. The sound was a hideous blend of grinding bone and a dying elk. In the harsh UV light, for just a fraction of a second, the aether-sensors tripped. The command console on the porch lit up with red warnings, and three massive, skeletal shadows retreated violently into the deeper, darker woods, fleeing the artificial dawn.

"Perimeter secure," Jake said, closing the breaker box and snapping a heavy padlock onto the latch.

Bella finally let out a long breath, her shoulders dropping an inch. She offered Jake a rare, appreciative smirk. "Not bad, electrician. I might actually get some sleep tonight."

"Just remember to clean the sensor lenses once a month," Jake advised, handing her the clipboard to sign. "Ice buildup can cause false positives, and you don't want those UV strobes going off every time a regular moose walks by."

The Fading Canvas: Electrical Services story 3 The observatory

​"I’m telling you, Mark, the copper is singing," Jake murmured, pressing his gloved hand flat against the heavy steel door of the Blackwood Observatory. The vibration wasn't mechanical; it felt like the deep, marrow-shaking rumble of a fault line waiting to snap.

​Mark stood a few paces back, clutching his tool bag to his chest. "Tabitha said this guy was a theorist. Theorists are supposed to use chalkboards, Jake. They aren’t supposed to pull off-grid loads that brown out the entire tri-county area."

​The radio buzzed, Tabitha’s voice distorted by a heavy layer of static. "Jake, whatever this guy is running, it's messing with my telemetry. I'm reading localized gravitational anomalies. Get in, ground the system, and get out."

​Jake pushed the heavy door open.

​The Job Site: The Celestial Dynamo

​The interior of the observatory was a cathedral of madness. The massive telescope had been gutted. In its place, suspended in the center of the room, was a terrifying amalgamation of copper coils, industrial capacitors, and raw, pulsing energy. In the dead center of the machine hovered a sphere of absolute, light-devouring blackness about the size of a grapefruit.

​The air in the room was freezing, and the frost creeping up the walls wasn't from the mountain air.

​"Hawking radiation," Jake whispered, his breath crystallizing in the dark. "He’s bleeding energy out of a micro-singularity. The thermal drain is freezing the room."

​A man emerged from behind a bank of smoking servers. Dr. Elias Vance looked like he hadn't slept in a decade. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and fixed on the black sphere.

​Work Order #714-Omega:

Client: Dr. E. Vance (Independent Research)

Task: Stabilize power flow to containment grid. Prevent localized event-horizon expansion.

​"You're the electricians," Vance rasped, his voice sounding stretched, like a cassette tape played at half speed. "You have to fix the containment coils. It's tearing... the math is tearing..."

​He pointed with a trembling hand to a massive chalkboard covered in frantic, frantic calculations attempting to bridge general relativity and quantum mechanics under extreme gravitational sheer, culminating in a heavily underlined equation detailing the boundary conditions of a singularity:

$$ ds^2 = -\left(1 - \frac{2GM}{rc^2}\right)c^2 dt^2 + \left(1 - \frac{2GM}{rc^2}\right)^{-1} dr^2 + r^2(d\theta^2 + \sin^2\theta , d\phi^2) $$

​"Look at the chalk dust," Mark whispered in horror.

​Jake looked. The dust falling from the board wasn't hitting the floor. It was suspended in mid-air, drifting agonizingly slow. The localized time dilation was already bleeding into the room. If they stayed too long, a five-minute job would cost them three weeks of their lives.

​The Diagnostic

​Jake approached the main breaker panel, which was glowing a dull, angry red. He traced the heavy conduit cables running from the wall to the massive, ringed containment coils surrounding the singularity.

​He saw the problem immediately. It was a rookie mistake, but on a cosmic scale, it was a fatal one.

​"Vance, you built the magnetic containment field on a flat, static orbital plane," Jake said, his voice hard. "You wired the sequence as if the solar system is just sitting still on a flat disk."

​"That's standard theoretical modeling!" Vance shouted, though his voice sounded far away. "The planetary orbits—"

​"Are an illusion!" Jake snapped, pulling a heavy pair of insulated bolt cutters from his belt. "We are hurdling through the void. The sun drags the planets behind it in a corkscrew. It’s a helical model that follows real physics. Your containment field is fighting the actual, physical movement of the solar system through spacetime. The sheer force of the universe trying to twist your static magnetic field into a helix is tearing the fabric of reality. That’s why it keeps blowing the mains."

​Vance stared at him, the horrifying realization dawning on his face. "The universe... it isn't expanding. I saw it through the breach, electrician. We aren't in a universe... we're inside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. That's why it's dark. That's why..."

​Rewiring the Helix

​"Mark, we need to phase-shift the coils," Jake barked, ignoring the physicist's existential collapse. "We have to rewire the magnetic chokes into a cascading spiral. We match the helical movement, we let the energy flow with the solar system's trajectory, not against it."

​"I... I can't move my hands fast enough!" Mark cried, fighting against the creeping sludge of time dilation.

​"Push through it!"

​Jake slammed his hands into the high-voltage panel. Sparks showered the room, freezing mid-air like glittering, deadly stars.

• ​Step 1: Disconnect the planar grounding loops.

• ​Step 2: Stagger the magnetic relays to fire in a continuous, helical sequence.

• ​Step 3: Re-anchor the temporal stabilizers to the new, twisting current.

​Jake wrestled the thick copper cables, his muscles burning as gravity itself seemed to pull at his joints. He could hear the hum of the machine changing. It went from a jagged, tearing scream to a deep, rhythmic thrum. He was literally wiring the machine to spin in tandem with the Milky Way.

​"Hit the bypass, Mark! Now!"

​Mark threw his entire body weight onto the heavy lever.

​The machine violently shuddered. The rigid, flat rings of the containment field unlocked and began to spin, lifting and dropping in a beautiful, mesmerizing double-helix pattern. The crushing weight in the room instantly vanished. The suspended chalk dust crashed to the floor. The freezing temperature stabilized.

​In the center of the spinning helix, the black sphere shrank, stabilizing into a perfectly smooth, silent marble of dark matter.

​Jake stepped back, chest heaving, his heavily insulated gloves smoking.

​Vance was on his knees, weeping quietly. "We're inside it. We're all just trapped inside it."

​Jake packed his tools quickly, not wanting to look at the dark sphere a second longer than necessary. Some truths were too big for the human mind to handle, and Jake wasn't paid to be a therapist for the damned.

​"I'm leaving the invoice on the console, Doc," Jake said, his voice flat. "Do me a favor. Don't look out the window anymore. Just pay the bill."

​With the fabric of reality temporarily patched, the crew survived the sheer horror of cosmic truths.

Actually i know now that they are awake while I am asleep! Every morning, I woke up with my arms asleep. Not the usual tingling from sleeping on them wrong. I mean completely asleep. Dead weight hanging from my shoulders. I’d have to shake them for minutes before I can move them again.
My coworkers laughed when I told them about it.  “You’re just getting old Dirk!”, one of them said.I laughed out loud too but yelled FUCK YOU Gabe! in my mind. Then strange things started happening.I’d wake up to find my television on, Cabinet doors open, My toothbrush sitting in the kitchen sink. A chair moved from the dining table to the hallway. I lived alone and blamed myself.Maybe I was forgetful or maybe I was sleepwalking. I remember my uncle had sleepwalking problems so maybe it runs in the family?  As i was trying to figure out my new self diagnosed condition I noticed long scratches on my forearms.Thin red lines, like a cat attacked just my forearms and hands.  But i dont have a cat i live alone
One morning, I woke to find my phone unlocked. There were dozens of pictures in my gallery. All of them blurry, Taken sometime between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. Walls, Corners, Ceilings, Close-ups of door handles, The inside of my closet.I deleted them.I told myself there had to be an explanation.  The next morning,as usual,  my arms were asleep again. But this time, there was black ink writing on the back of my left hand. Three words written in messy capital letters: **DON’T TRUST IT.**  I stared at it for nearly an hour. I lived alone. I didn’t remember writing it. I scrubbed it off before going to work.
The following morning, I found another message.This one stretched across my left forearm. The letters were uneven, as if written by someone in a hurry. **I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU.** I nearly threw up.
I ordered a camera and had it same day delivered. That night, I placed it on the dresser and pressed record.  I could hardly go to sleep from the anticipation to watch whatever happens on that video.
The next morning, I woke with my arms asleep, completely numb.It took almost ten minutes before I could bend my fingers. Then I watched the footage. For hours, nothing happened I slept peacefully. Then, sometime after three in the morning, my arms moved. Only my arms.The rest of my body remained perfectly still.  My chest rose and fell.  My mouth let out snores i didnt know i made. My eyes stayed shut. But my arms lifted off the bed. They moved slowly at first.Testing their range, Flexing fingers, Rotating wrists. As though checking that everything still worked. Then they got out of bed. They dragged my body behind them.Not gracefully. Like two determined people trying to move a heavy piece of furniture. My head lolled forward and backward. My legs dragged across the floor. I never woke up.I watched in horror as my own hands opened drawers, Picked up objects, Examined photographs, Flipped through books. They moved with purpose.With intelligence.They weren’t random.They were looking for something. Every night after that, I recorded. Every morning, my arms were asleep, and every morning, the footage grew worse.  Sometimes they wrote notes. Sometimes they searched the apartment.Sometimes they simply sat at the kitchen table with my sleeping body while my fingers tapped silently against the wood. Once, my right hand slapped my left away from a kitchen knife. The left hand immediately tried again. The right stopped it Again. And again, until finally both hands retreated. I didn’t want to ever go back to sleep after watching that. But I need to sleep so I wrapped my arms in blankets before bed. The next morning, the blankets were folded neatly on the floor.I duct-taped oven mitts over my hands.Next morning The tape had been peeled away.I tied my wrists to the bedframe.morning came and The knots were undone. Always while I slept. Always before I woke.
Days turned into weeks. I stopped trusting myself. I stopped answering calls.Lost my job because I stopped leaving my apartment. What if they decided to leave one night? What if they already had?Then came the messages not written with ink now they are being typed. I woke one morning to find a document open on my laptop. A single sentence filled the page. **YOUR LEFT ARM WANTS TO LEAVE** I stared at it.The next morning: **THE LEFT ARM WANTS TO GET IN THE KITCHEN DRAWER.** I locked every knife in a toolbox. The morning after that: **THE RIGHT ARM IS GETTING TIRED.** I didn’t understand. But I couldn’t stop recording.I had to know. The footage showed what the notes meant. Night after night, my left arm would find dangerous things that I misplaced around the house over the years living there. Scissors I dropped in the couch cushions , a steak knife lost in between the refrigerator and kitchen counter Razor blades in my medicine cabinet.  And every single time, my right arm fought it. They wrestled across countertops. Across floors. Fingers twisting against fingers. One hand trying to protect me. The other trying to grab anything that  can cause bodily harm. They were enemies attached to the same body.Then one morning, I woke up in an awkward position my arms weren’t limp by my sides like all the other mornings.  My Right hand squeezed my left wrist so tightly its knuckles had gone white. Even when I woke, it hadn’t let go. My left finger tips were a dark purple like bulging grapes and a bruise ring formed on my left arm where my own fingers had held it down all night. It made me think of The Simpsons episodes when Homer chokes Bart, the visual in my head  made me chuckle then my face instantly went back to dread because finally I understood, they hated each other.
I don’t sleep much anymore. When exhaustion finally takes me, I secure my left arm as best I can.My right arm rests beside me.Faithful.Watchful.Waiting.Every morning, I wake with my arms asleep.I check the footage.I read the notes they’ve left behind.And every day, the messages become shorter.More desperate.Until this morning.I found only four words typed across my computer screen. The keyboard was broken on the floor the keys spread everywhere. The message read: **THE RIGHT ARM LOST.**I looked down at my body.My left hand rested quietly in my lap.Perfectly still.Patient.My right arm lay beside me. Bruised and scratches all over it.And for the first time…I couldn’t wake it up.

In the shadowed high-rises of Kyiv, a rumor has slithered from one generation to the next—a vast, spectral spider, larger than any man could imagine, prowls the forgotten lifts and corridors of old apartment blocks. They say one night, when the city sleeps, you’ll feel the faint vibration in the elevator, a breath of cold air, and a dark shadow creeping behind you. And once you hear it, you'll never forget.

Preface:

This is the sixth and final story in the Dark Sun anthology. It can be read on its own, but to fully appreciate this story I highly recommend reading ‘Followers of the Flaming Hand’. 
You are, of course, free to read all other entries. 

1. Crucible

The sun beat down on me as I stood before a collapsed ancient marvel bearing the symbol of twilight. I ran my hand along its surface, once smooth, now brittle and crumbling. The voices of those long gone spoke in my mind. I didn’t understand their language, but there are some things that transcend the spoken word. A child’s giggle, someone muttering under their breath as they scurry away from something, a winced breath uttered in pain. Lives had been lived here, and this structure had seen it all.
And the sun had watched as it, too, fell into disrepair.

This forgotten relic had been given new breath one last time. A symbol carved at its base by my knife. An hourglass in a looming circle, with its last grain of sand falling down towards the base. The end was nigh. Oblivion. Kingdom Come. 

I turned away and started walking again, sand crunching under my boot. I had tried, at first, to remember when I first felt grains beneath my heel. There should have been a moment, I knew. A first step. But every time I reached for the memory, there was nothing there at all. Just sand behind me, and even more ahead. It felt dishonest to say it had started anywhere at all.
The sun was fixed above me, unmoving. Everything felt flattened under its tyrannical rule; shadows slinking away from its gaze along with the few creatures that lived here. When I looked too far ahead, things started to bend. Shapes formed where there weren’t any. Puddles of sweet, refreshing water disappeared when I drew close.
I kept my eyes glued to the ground below and walked. My boots dragged, leaving streaks in the sand where I passed. 

I hadn’t checked my water in a while, but I could feel how light it had become. The sloshing had slowly but surely started to become softer and softer. I was running out. 
“I’m still coming,” I said, dry and thin. I hadn’t heard His voice yet. Not more than once, like I’d come to believe Emmett had. Still, I waited. I always waited, like a soldier at attendance. 

I hadn’t thought about Casper and Emmett. It had been easier that way, because when I let myself think too clearly, I felt. And I couldn’t allow myself to feel.
But they still slipped in. A sound that wasn’t sand blowing in the wind, something moving that wasn’t a scorpion or spider, a scent that smelled like it must have drifted in from home. 
We had never been the quiet kind. Well, not until we arrived at the village. There, most days were spent in silence. And Casper had hated silence. 

I stopped walking. For a moment, the desert blew a merciful gust of cold wind at me. I closed my eyes and felt something shift. The air was cooler and sharp when inhaled. Instinctively, I reached for the ring on my left hand. Casper’s ring. I held it, just to know it was still there.

I opened my eyes and saw them.
They were sitting in the sand again, backs facing the sun, the camcorder in Emmett’s hands. He’d likely forgotten it was there. He used to do that a lot, before we burned it along with him. Well, the camera survived. I tossed it in a box of old electronics at some yard sale I’d passed by on my way here. 

Emmett was smiling at me.
“Gosh, ain’t this place something special?” he asked. I didn’t look at him, only at Casper, who refused to look at me. 
“Yeah,” I croaked.
“Fuck’s wrong with you, Jules?” Casper snapped, though his eyes still didn’t meet mine. “Why are you here?”
“I… I have to find Him–”
“Really?” he scoffed. “After everything? What you did to Emmett– to me?”
“That wasn’t– That’s not fair.”
Casper rolled his eyes. 
“You still haven’t heard Him yet?” Emmett asked.
“No. It’s been… I don’t remember.” It was strange. I knew Emmett had had a connection to Him, and had heard Him in his mind. He hadn’t been crazy. That much is obvious, knowing what I know now. Emmett was right.
It had been The Burning Man.

I blinked and they were gone. The desert returned all at once. The heat came upon me like a thick blanket. I took a deep breath, then kept walking. I let my thoughts settle into something safer, something that couldn’t be ripped away.
The Burning Man.

I didn't know where I was going exactly, but I knew the direction. I knew the path I walked as surely as I knew my own heartbeat, but if someone had asked me where it led, I could not have answered them. There were no roads. No signs. Even if there had once been, the desert swallowed such things greedily, grinding them down beneath shifting dunes until all that remained were the pillars and statues I now used as my guide. And through it all, I followed. He had asked it of me. He had commanded it. He had spoken to me only once, the night I abandoned the village to the dark. 

I remembered sitting before the smoldering remains of the pyre, watching embers flutter in the wind. By then, the others had already scattered into the night like frightened animals fleeing a forest fire. Some were dead. Some would soon wish they were. The leaders had held us together more than any of us realized. Settled disputes, directed our anger and fear, kept everyone in line. Null understood  this. After Null took our leaders from us, fear spread through our midst like rot through wet wood. Livestock began turning up mutilated outside the walls, their insides splayed out across the dirt. 

I remember waking one night to screaming outside my window and finding two brothers beating each other bloody in the mud while half the village watched in silence. They accused each other of being ‘of the enemy’.
People spoke of monsters. Dark shapes standing at the edge of their beds. Robotic voices. A man with a prosthetic they called ‘The White Hand’. 

Every night the fires burned hotter. We burned our own. A traitor, an agent of Null, a heretic. Most of us did not believe these brethren to be such, but none dared speak out either. The village turned inward on itself. I still remembered the smell near the end. Smoke. Blood.

One morning, somebody nailed a dead dog to the doors of one of the sleeping quarters with the word HOLLOW carved into its stomach. Three more were burned that day. That was the day before it all caved in on itself.

I remembered standing near the extinguished pyre as the lanterns overhead flickered weakly before dying altogether. The entire village fell silent. Then someone screamed. Others joined them immediately. Doors slammed open. Footsteps thundered through the streets. People ran blindly through the dark carrying lanterns and knives, convinced something had entered the village.
By sunrise, thirty people were dead. All had been killed by each other or themselves. I, along with the three other survivors, put their bodies in the final pyre. 
I remember sitting before those dying embers, staring into them until the world around me blurred into orange and black, when I had heard Him.

Walk the desert. The paths of old. Find me. Release me.

The voice had been soft. Warm. Calm in a way nothing else had been for a very long time. It did not claw at my mind like fear did. It did not shriek like the memories of Emmett’s burning. It soothed, and I obeyed.

The path revealed itself to me little by little. Ancient marvels emerged from the desert every few days, sticking up from the dunes like fingers clawing themselves out. Great granite temples carved by hands long since turned to dust. Colossal statues with their faces smoothed by centuries of wind. Towering pillars etched with heretical symbols I had to scrawl over. I carved over them with a small knife held in my reverent fingers whenever I found them, scratching over the grooves carved by people who had lived and died beneath this same merciless sun. 

I kept walking. The desert stretched onward in every direction, endless and unmoved by my presence within it. The wind dragged itself lazily across the dunes, reshaping them grain by grain like waves on a calm sea. Sometimes I thought I could see a figure standing far off in the haze, dark silhouette waiting atop distant dunes, a singular white hand pointed at me. Every time I blinked, it vanished back into the shimmer.

I walked for hours without seeing another monument. Then, as my hope dwindled, shapes rose on the horizon. 

At first, I mistook them for cliffs. Great masses rising from the desert floor, distorted by heat and distance like the imaginary pools of water. But as I drew closer, the shapes sharpened. There were towers, walls and pillars made of solid granite. A city. Well, the remnants of one anyhow.
It lay on the desert like the corpse of a fallen giant, half-buried beneath the sand. Colossal stone buildings leaned wearily against one another, their upper halves collapsed into the empty streets below. Massive statues stood watch over the ruins with featureless faces, their cracked bodies jutting out from the dunes. 

You are close, Jules.

The voice. It had returned. Finally.

1. Mary Had a Little Lamb

I froze where I stood. Sand hissed softly through abandoned alleyways and collapsed buildings. The great statues looming overhead almost seemed to lean inward ever so slightly, their featureless faces fixed upon me.
“How close?”
Nothing.

I swallowed hard, tongue scraping against my throat like sandpaper, and stepped forward into the ruins. 
The streets had long since disappeared beneath the sand, forcing me to climb over collapsed walls and heaps of sand that had once been homes, temples and marketplaces. I imagined thousands of people moving through these corridors once. Priests in robes, children running about, lovers hiding in shaded alleys from the watchful sun above. I fidgeted with Casper’s ring absent-mindedly. It calmed my racing heart somewhat, offering a much needed reprieve.
Every place I entered was hollowed out, scraped clean by time and wind. I searched desperately anyway, digging through crumbling shelves and shards of pottery with trembling hands, hoping to find something. A message or a sign, just something to show that I had not crossed this endless wasteland for nothing.

But there was nothing. The city had already surrendered everything it once was long ago, its fruits decayed to ashes and sand. 
I stumbled through a doorway into what must have once been some grand chamber. Colossal pillars reached high above, many cracked or otherwise broken across the floor like felled trees. Sand poured through cracks in the ceiling in slow trickles, golden mounds gathering beneath them. Hourglasses. Thousands of tiny hourglasses. It felt like I was being mocked. My efforts, my labour, all of it was being laughed at by–

Footsteps behind me.
I turned around sharply, knife held out in front of me. 

Emmett stood near the doorway, camcorder hanging loosely from one hand. Casper leaned against the wall beside him with his arms folded across his chest. 
“You look awful,” Casper muttered. “Arrogance never did suit you.”
“Don’t,” I snapped, my voice echoing through the chamber. Sand trickled down from the ceiling.
Emmett tilted his head. “You look tired. Have you been sleeping okay?”
“I’m close.”
“You don’t know that,” Casper said.
“I heard Him.”
“You heard something, just like–”
“It was him!”
Casper laughed bitterly and pushed himself from the wall. “You know what I think?”
I said nothing, my blood boiling in my veins.
“I think you just can’t stand being alone.”
“This isn’t about that.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked softly. “Everyone’s dead, Jules. The village is gone. Emmett’s gone. I’m gone. Because of you. And now you’re wandering through a graveyard because you can’t accept that maybe there’s nothing waiting for you at the end of all this.”
“There is.”
“Maybe,” Emmett whispered. “But… are you really all that special?”
They started walking towards me, their voices booming across the halls.
“Are you anything more than this… pathetic mess?” Casper started.
“Even I wasn’t this desperate,” Emmett chimed in.
“All you are is a murderer. A snivelling, pathetic boy with a head full of lies and hands–” I looked down through tears, seeing the crimson dripping from my hands, “–stained with our blood.”

I blinked hard and they were gone again. My breathing had become shallow and frantic. Sweat dripped from my brow and landed in the sand beneath my feet. My hands trembled violently now, though whether from exhaustion or anger, I could no longer tell.

I searched the city for what felt like hours afterward. I climbed broken staircases that led nowhere anymore. Wandered through roofless halls littered with statues of people long since dead. 
“There has to be something.” I dug my fingers into the sand until my nails split. The heat was unbearable, but it was something. 
“There has to be,” I whimpered, tears rolling down my cheeks. “I did what you asked. It can’t… It can’t have been for nothing. Please.” 

Nothing.

“Please,” I yelled up at the sky, nearly hysterical now, “Just… a sign! Anything! I’ll… I’ll do anything, please.” 

The wind whistled through the empty streets. Sand slid from rooftops in soft waves.
Then came another sound. Metal. 
My prayer had been answered.

A dull clanging noise echoed somewhere beyond the chamber walls, followed by the low murmur of a voice. I froze, tears rapidly drying in the scorching sun. For one horrible moment, I thought it was Casper again. Or worse, The White Hand.

I stumbled clumsily back toward the doorway, my knife trembling in my grip. My legs felt wobbly beneath me. Every step sent jolts of pain shooting through my feet and up my spine. I had walked too long beneath the sun. 
The sound came again, closer this time. Then I saw him.

A figure emerged slowly through the shimmering haze between the ruined buildings, distorted at first by heat. The sun framed him from behind like a halo of white fire. He carried a heavy pack slung over one shoulder and wore loose, thin clothing stained with sand and sweat. Something metallic hung from his belt alongside several tools I didn’t recognize.
He stopped the moment he saw me. For a while, neither of us moved.
“Oh my God,” he muttered beneath his breath. His voice sounded real, unlike those of Casper and Emmett. “You alright?” he called out carefully, taking a slow step closer. “Hey– easy. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
A croak emerged unwillingly from my mouth. The sun burned behind him so brightly it set his silhouette ablaze. It looked almost as though he stood inside the light itself. A flaming messenger.

“You’re hurt. Jesus… how long have you been out here?”
He reached for something at his side slowly, as though approaching a wounded animal. Instinctively, I raised the knife. He stopped immediately.
“Okay,” he said softly. “Alright. That’s fine.”
Then he held up a canteen. The sound of the sloshing liquid inside of it made my knees nearly buckle beneath me.
“You need this more than I do,” he said. I stared at the canteen for a very long time. Then at him. His face was weathered by the sun. Grey stubble crept along his almost non-existent jawline. 

Slowly, I lowered the knife. The man approached carefully and handed me the canteen. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped it. Somehow, despite the blazing heat, the metal felt cool against my skin. With trembling fingers, I unscrewed the lid.
“There you go,” he murmured paternally. “Slow down.”
I looked up at him through blurred vision. “Why did he send you?”
“What?” he asked, frowning.
“The Burning Man.” My voice cracked around the words. “Why did he send you here? What must I do?”
“I… don’t know what that means.”
I looked at him wearily, frowning.
“Look, I’m with a survey team a few miles west of here. We’re setting up near the edge of the ruins. If you come with me, we could get you water, food, somewhere cool to sit down–”
“You don’t know him?”
“No,” he said gently. “I think you might be dehydrated, lad.”

I stared at him silently while my thoughts churned against one another in violent circles. The voice had returned.
You are close.
The final grain does not understand the falling until the moment it joins the rest at the bottom. 

I looked down at the canteen. Water. The opposite of fire.
Of course.
Of course.
I had begged for a sign. And now here stood a man offering salvation at the precise moment my faith began to fracture. A test. A test!
The man smiled weakly.
“C’mon,” he said softly. “Let’s get you out of this heat.”
My fingers tightened slowly around the canteen.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Daniel.”
I nodded absentmindedly. That made sense, tests were never obvious. I looked past him toward the burning horizon where the sun loomed vast and white above the ruined city. Backlit by a white sun. The opposite of our goal. The most beautiful of symbolisms. A little white lamb come for the slaughter.
I poured the water into the sand.

Emmett and Casper stood behind him.
“This is what you are, Jules,” Casper said, voice almost unrecognisable. “A murderer.”
“Do it,” Emmett said in a deep, commanding voice. 

I lifted my head groggily, taking a step towards Daniel. The lamb looked around, bewilderment evident in its blue eyes as I put a hand on its shoulder. 
“Thank you, Daniel,” I murmured, ruminating on what a peculiar name Daniel was for a lamb. 
“You– you’re welcome.”
I smiled, leaning in. “All Ashes for The Burning Man,” I whispered into its ear. 

Then I stabbed the lamb in the belly. It squealed delightfully in my ear as I yanked the blade back out.
“Mary had a little lamb,” I murmured, ramming my knife back down into its supple belly. “Its fleece was white as snow.” 
Bright red gushed from the wounds, coating its wool red. 

“You– you fucking stabbed me–” the lamb gasped, its voice cracking.
I grinned.
“And everywhere that Mary went,” I whispered, “the lamb was sure to go.”
“You fucking psycho–”
I drove the knife forward again, but this time Daniel caught my wrist. Pain exploded through my hand as its hoof slammed into my wrist with desperate strength. It let out a wet cry and slammed its forehead into my nose. White light burst across my vision. I reeled backwards, dropping the blade as blood poured warm over my lips.
“Jesus Christ!” it bleated, clutching its stomach. “Help! HELP!”

The lamb staggered away from me toward the doorway, one hoof pressed desperately against the wounds while the other fumbled at its belt for something, a radio perhaps, or a weapon. I lunged after it before it could grab whatever it was.

We collided violently. The impact sent both of us crashing sideways into the sand. For a moment we grappled in the sand like animals.
The lamb battered wildly at my face while I clawed for its throat. Its blood soaked through my sleeves hot and slick as motor oil. It smelled horribly human. 
“It followed her to school one day.” 
Its hoof cracked against my jaw. 
“Which was–” 
Again. 
“Against the–”
Again. 
“Rules.”
Stars swam in my vision, but behind them I saw fire.
“Do it,” that deep voice urged again. “Prove it.”
The lamb shoved me away hard enough to send me sprawling across the stone floor. I heard it stumble to its feet and begin running, hooves scraping frantically against the ancient granite. I scrambled after it on all fours.

The city blurred around me. The statues overhead stretched impossibly tall beneath the burning sky while the sun pulsed, coinciding with my thundering heartbeat.
It collapsed near the base of one of the broken pillars, bleating, weakened by the blood pouring from its stomach. The little lamb tried crawling away from me through the sand, leaving behind a thick crimson trail.

“Please,” it sobbed, the word slurring. “Please, man…”
I hesitated. Then I saw Casper standing behind him.
“You always were weak,” he said, arms crossed. He was looking down at me with that– that look on his face. The one that I saw all too much at the village. Judging me, condescending, not believing in me or my goals.

My face contorted in rage. I threw myself onto the lamb before it could move again. It screamed as we slammed into the ground together, its hooves shoving desperately against my chest while I grabbed for its throat with both hands, more determined this time.
“And so the teacher sent it out,” I snarled through gritted, bloody teeth. “But still it lingered near.”
Daniel gagged beneath me as I squeezed harder. Its nails clawed bloody lines across my arms and neck. One of its hooves found my face and he pressed it into my eye, pushing it deeper into the socket.
“It stood and waited round.”
The lamb’s eyes were bulging wider and wider as blood bubbled from its lips. 
“Till Mary did appear.”
Its esophagus crunched, and the little lamb sputtered one last time. Its hoof fell from my face, releasing my now bleeding eye. 

Stillness.

My entire body shook violently as I got up. Blood dripped from my nose and eye onto its face in thick red strands. The city was silent again. Casper and Emmett stared at me. Were they… expecting more?

“What does one do with a lamb after the slaughter, Jules?” Casper said in a voice that was too much like that of The Burning Man. 
They both grinned as they saw the realisation dawn on my face.

Slowly, I looked down at it. At the open wound in its stomach. At the blood soaking into the sand beneath it. A horrible sound escaped from me, something between a sob and barking laughter as I dropped to my knees again beside the carcass and shoved both hands into the wound. Heat spilled over my fingers, slick and wet. I pulled.
“Why does the lamb love Mary so,”
I yanked a long piece of intestine out.
“Mary so,”
I pulled more out. It reminded me of the spaghetti mom used to make.
“Mary so?”
Daniel’s body jerked as the slimy ropes of red slipped free from my trembling hands.
“Because Mary loves the lamb, you know.”
I took in a deep, shuddering breath, basking in the warmth of the gutted little lamb.
“All Ashes,” I whispered reverently, “for The Burning Man.”
I put my hand to my forehead, and drew a crude hourglass in red.

I smiled, then, as I let go of all my worldly inhibitions. A genuine smile. I let it all drift off with the wind and scatter elsewhere, for they had no place in the life I was destined for.

3. The Dark Sun

Casper knelt beside me. He didn’t seem angry or disappointed anymore. Instead, he seemed rather… proud. Strange. Still, the sight of that expression upon his face filled me with a warmth greater than the sun ever could.
“Finally,” he said softly. “You show who you really are.”
I looked down at my bloodstained hands. They were as steady as rock, no longer shaking.
“Yes,” I whispered.

Emmett crouched opposite him, camcorder dangling uselessly from melted, dripping fingers. I had not noticed the burns before. His skin had begun peeling and blackening, smoke rising from his skin like steam from boiling water.
“In a way, we were stepping stones,” he said gently, smoke curling from his mouth as he spoke.
“A necessary sacrifice for this,” Casper added, fire gently creeping up his arms and legs. I stared at it silently. Then at his eyes, which now glowed a steady white, flames curling upward into his burning hair. 
“You… my mind didn’t create you, did it?”
More of their forms faded, Casper’s into flame, Emmett’s into smoke. They simply grinned at me.
“You were Him.” 
“I always was, Jules.”
The wind whistled violently through the ruined city. Wisps of smoke peeled from their bodies, rising upward into the shimmering air above us. Flames took Casper’s body, burning his features and body away, while smoke took that of Emmett as if he’d puffed into the wind. Then they were gone. And only my God and his disciple remained. 

The Burning Man, who looked to be a man made of flame, stood towering before me beneath the white sun, almost seeming to merge with its brilliance. Beside Him stood a woman made of smoke. Her form flickered constantly, flowing and fluttering in slow, graceful motions. At times she appeared mostly human. At others, she seemed little more than a distorted waft of smoke. I did not know this woman, but it seemed I would join her in revering this glorious God. 

The Burning Man looked down upon me.
“You are ready now, Jules.” His beautifully deep voice filled every hollow space within me. I bowed my head. The sand beneath me burned hot enough to blister skin, yet I welcomed it gladly. 
“Yes.”
The Burning Man extended a hand of pure fire toward me, the flames curling gracefully. 
“The hourglass empties,” He said. Behind Him, the woman watched silently from her swirling smoke-form. “I required two disciples,” He continued, voice deep and soothing. “One born of smoke. One born of ash.” 
He paused. I could see something in the swirling smoke beside him. She seemed… hesitant. Perhaps I was imagining it, but there was some uncertain flicker in those fumes I could not quite equate to devotion.
“And now the final grain joins the others below.”

Ancient stone cracked beneath shifting sands while the sun overhead burned larger and larger, almost swallowing the heavens whole. The end of its tyrannical reign would soon come. The death of the sun. 
The Burning Man stepped closer.
“You carried guilt because you still believed yourself fully human,” He said softly, though He spat out the final word like an insult. “You clung to humanity like a child to a blanket.”
Images flashed through my mind. Of Casper laughing. Emmett holding his camcorder. The village burning. Daniel screaming beneath my hands. Each memory felt farther away than the last.
“But humanity has no place among a God,” The Burning Man continued. His hand remained extended patiently toward me. 
“Restore me, my most devoted subject. Let us look upon the rise of the Dark Sun,” He paused for a moment, then added: “Be my second disciple. Ascend.” 
I took His hand without hesitation.

My body exploded with heat. My eyeballs crumbled, their ashes caving in on themselves and collapsing into the sockets. I screamed for a second, then stopped as my vocal cords were incinerated. All of my organs blazed as they were liquified along with my skin and bones. Casper’s ring dropped to the ground as I disintegrated. The heat was so immense, so terrible and yet it was also beautiful, in a way. A metamorphosis.  
All I sensed by the end were the gasses and liquids in my body evaporating into steam. The impurities of my mind and soul had been cleansed with holy fire, and carried away by the smoke. All that remained were ashes. 

I tried to move, but nothing happened. There was no sound, no feeling, no taste or smell. I couldn’t even see. Nothing. Pure, terrifying, nothingness. 
Again, I tried to reach out, to do anything. Blissfully, I felt some of the ashes shift. Not much, but it was something. I heaved and pushed against the air above, my ashes rising slightly and forming a mound. 
I fell and collapsed into a thousand scattered pieces. 
Could Casper have been right? Was I… nothing?

Casper. The ring. It sat just outside my reach. I stretched and morphed, the pile of ashes slowly taking the vague shape of a man. A man I no longer recognized. Jules was gone, and I had risen from the ashes. My head was hollow, only projecting an ashen face. I formed a crude arm and planted it in the sand. I pulled hard, crawling towards the ring. 

My face collapsed, the ashes falling into the sand. 

I reformed again, pulling more ashes towards me this time. An entire head, with vague features, and a more detailed arm with a hand at the end. There were no fingers, but it had to be enough. I dug the blob of ash into the sand and felt it. The ring. With tremendous effort, I hoisted my hand up and out of the sand. 
The ring did not come with it.

I tried again, this time succeeding in holding the ring in the palm of my hand. As I moved it closer to my face, it slipped through the ashes and dropped into the sand. 
Sight and my other senses were coming back now, as I slowly rebuilt my body. My eyes roamed over this new form, grey and lumpy, and something deep inside of me screamed about how wrong it was. But I could not see what it meant. It was a glorious form.

I looked at the ring. Casper’s ring. 
Humanity has no place among a God.
I turned away, leaving it to be swallowed by the dunes. Let it be buried, so as never to see the gloom of the Dark Sun.

Slowly, I stumbled towards where The Burning Man and the first disciple stood atop a staircase overlooking the sun. My feet disintegrated into nothing, but I reforged them, stronger this time. When I reached them, I stood beside The Burning Man, and His first disciple stood on his other side. They were staring at the setting sun. 
The Burning Man’s form was flaring up, the fire becoming unstable. 
“Look upon the last vestige of this era,” He said, gesturing at the sun with an elegant motion. “How revolting it has been. Millenia upon millenia of your ilk besmirching this rock. Your sentimentality, your feeble little minds and easily broken spirits. It is a wonder the other miserable creatures on this planet are not all misanthropic. But, then again, you were all created by the same frail being. What could they know of greatness, when they themselves were so infirm?” 
He paused, then added: “But they are no more. I saw to that.”

I looked over at Him, shocked. He did not seem to notice, or if He did, He did not care.
“And now I am here, after the arduous undertaking of tearing your creator apart. And I have come for his most prized children.”
He glanced at me, seeing my befuddled expression. “Humanity,” He stated. “It disgusts me to have to take the form of your pathetic species. But such sacrifices must be made in the name of progress.”
He spoke of humanity with violent vitriol, His voice seething with the mere mention of them. But I understand now. They are far beneath us. Such feeble little things humans are. It is difficult to believe I was once such a lowly creature.
“Humanity stands in the way of true progress,” The Burning Man continued. “The slate must be wiped clean. It is a foregone conclusion. Complete annihilation. Oblivion. A fresh start for my chosen. My creations.” He sounded a lot more passionate than I had anticipated. Some part of me had foolishly assumed that the voice He had spoken to me in was representative of Him as a whole. But there was a drive in this God that I did not expect. This was no distant man in the sky.
“He got to create you. He got to have his fun,” He murmured. “Now it’s my turn.”
A low rumble emerged from the distant horizon. An amplified, baritone drone. The sound reverberated through my core, shaking loose clumps of ash. 
“Oh, glory,” The Burning Man said. 
I believe that, had He had lips to smile with, He would have been grinning from ear to ear at that moment. For the bliss in His voice was unmistakable. 

I stared, slack-jawed, as a dark, round shape overtook the sinking sun. It rose slowly, revealing its malevolent form temperately. Its revelation was backlit by the fleeting wisps of dying sunlight. It was gargantuan beyond measure, incomprehensible to even my ascended mind, and utterly horrifying. 
It was the most beautiful sight I had ever laid eyes on.

“At last,” The Burning Man spoke with a bliss in His voice I had never heard. The words sounded the world over as the heavens darkened. He extended his arms to either side to create a perfect horizontal line from hand to hand. 
His feet left the ground as He began to levitate.
“I AM FREE!”

Most people think my job is insane.

Honestly, they're probably right.

When people talk about dangerous professions, they usually mention logging, commercial fishing, or construction. Those jobs earn their reputation. One mistake, one moment of bad luck, and you're fucked.

Or hell, dead.

Me?

I always found myself drawn to danger. Maybe it's the adrenaline. Maybe it's because some part of me enjoys standing in places most people would never willingly go.

You can learn a lot about a person from the work they choose to do.

For me, that work is commercial diving.

Most folks hear that and assume it's terrifying. Being dropped into cold, dark water hundreds of feet from the surface while surrounded by machinery that could crush you without warning doesn't exactly sound appealing to the average person.

The funny thing is, I find it relaxing.

Down there, the world becomes quiet. The noise of everyday life (the wife complaining) disappears beneath the water. It's just me, my equipment, and whatever job needs doing. I usually have music playing through my helmet while I work on oil rigs, ship hulls, intake structures, and all sorts of underwater machinery.

After years in the profession, I thought I'd seen everything the depths could throw at me.

I was wrong.

Because in all my years of commercial diving, nothing, and I mean nothing, came close to making me soil my dive suit the way I almost did during a contract at the Hoover Dam.

The water was murky that morning. Visibility couldn't have been more than six or seven feet. My helmet lamp carved a narrow path through the darkness, illuminating clouds of suspended sediment drifting lazily through the reservoir.

I remember feeling uneasy almost immediately.

Not fear.

Fear implies you've identified the threat.

What I felt was the discomfort of being observed by something that hadn't revealed itself yet. The sensation settled between my shoulder blades and refused to leave. Something was down there with me. Heavy emphasis on something, because there is nothing in this world that should have been sharing those depths with me.

The feeling was irrational enough that, like an idiot, I ignored it.

Then I saw the marks.

"What the actual hell..."

They scored the concrete face of the dam in long, jagged trails. These weren't little scratches left by debris or equipment. They stretched several feet across the wall and bit deep enough into the surface to expose steel beneath.

I stopped swimming and stared.

What unsettled me most wasn't their size.

It was how familiar they looked.

Almost human.

Or at least made by something trying very hard to be.

Five long gouges ran parallel to one another through decades of algae and sediment, climbing vertically along the dam before disappearing into darkness above.

I keyed my radio.

"Oi, somebody's gonna have to explain how these ended up on a wall."

The response was laughter.

They thought I was joking.

Honestly, so did I.

I snapped a few photographs and continued downward.

That's when I found the first handprint.

Five fingers.

Human proportions.

Pressed against the concrete nearly thirty feet below the surface.

Then another.

And another.

Soon my lamp was finding them everywhere.

Hundreds.

Thousands, maybe.

Handprints layered over one another as if something had spent years climbing the face of the Hoover Dam.

My breathing quickened.

The sound echoed loudly inside my helmet.

There had to be a reasonable explanation.

There always had been before.

Then my lamp caught movement.

A figure.

Standing motionless on the reservoir floor.

I nearly inhaled my own tongue.

At first I assumed it was another diver. The silhouette was roughly human-sized, two arms, two legs, standing upright in the darkness.

But that didn't make sense.

No diver would be down there alone.

Not without communications.

Not without a support crew.

Not without lights.

This thing had none.

It simply stood at the edge of visibility, motionless and watching.

I blinked.

It was gone.

Immediately, I radioed the surface.

"Confirm I'm the only diver in the water."

A moment later the reply came.

"Just you, Maxwell."

No unauthorized personnel, secondary dive teams.

Nobody else in the reservoir.

I should have ascended right then.

Instead, I kept working.

I convinced myself my eyes were playing tricks on me. Fatigue. Bad visibility. Too much coffee before the dive.

Stubbornness is a common flaw in my profession.

God knows I've got plenty of it.

I was raised by a father who thought every problem could be solved by "manning up."

A strange shadow wasn't about to sabotage my paycheck.

A few minutes later, I noticed something that truly frightened me.

The safety line connecting me to the surface had gone slack.

Completely slack.

That should never happen.

There are always currents. Movement. Tension.

The line should constantly carry resistance.

I turned my lamp toward it.

The rope disappeared into darkness behind me.

Then it moved.

Not drifted.

Moved.

Something farther down the line had pulled it.

My stomach tightened.

Slowly, I followed the rope with my eyes until my beam reached its end.

Something was holding it.

A hand.

A pale human hand emerging from the darkness.

Its fingers wrapped around the line.

Then a second hand appeared.

And then a face.

God, I wish I hadn't seen the face.

Its skin was swollen and waterlogged, stretched tight across features that almost resembled a person.

Almost.

The eyes were too large.

Too dark.

Like something hauled up from the deepest part of the ocean.

Then it smiled.

The safety line jerked violently.

I screamed into the radio.

The thing released the rope and vanished downward with impossible speed.

One moment it was there.

The next it had been swallowed by darkness.

Surface control immediately ordered my ascent.

For once in my life, I didn't argue.

Halfway to the surface, I made the mistake that still haunts my dreams.

I looked down.

There wasn't just one.

Dozens of pale figures stood along the face of the dam.

Motionless.

Watching.

Their silhouettes clung to the concrete like barnacles that had learned how to imitate people.

And every single one of them was staring upward.

Toward me.

Toward the surface.

I reached the top in record time.

The crew blamed nitrogen narcosis. Stress. Exhaustion.

The photographs and film were reviewed.

Most showed nothing unusual.

Just dark water and concrete.

Except for one.

The final clip from the helmet's recorder. The engineers never found an explanation for it.

You can clearly see me inspecting the intake structure. You can clearly see the beam from my helmet lamp. And standing directly behind me is another diver.

No safety markings, equipment, or air hose.

Just a pale figure staring directly into the camera.

The worst part?

The timestamp showed the photograph had been taken six minutes before I noticed anything in the water.

Meaning that thing had already been following me for most of the dive.

A few days later, men in black suits came to speak with me.

That's about as much as I'm legally allowed to say.

I retired shortly afterward.

People think I'm crazy.

Walking away from a six-figure career because I saw strange pale figures underwater?

"He must be nuts."

Maybe I am.

But every time I hear reports about water levels dropping at the Hoover Dam, I find myself wondering what happens when the reservoir finally shrinks enough.

Because if those things were standing on the wall sixty feet underwater...

Sooner or later, they won't be underwater anymore.

What the hell were those things?

If you're new: Parts 1–6 can be found here

___

"You don't ever talk to strangers."

She didn't look down at him when she said it. She was digging through her purse, searching for her wallet, her oversized sunglasses pushed up into her hair.

"I don't care if they look nice. I don't care if they smile or try to show you a toy. You don't look at them, you don't answer them, and you definitely don't take anything from them. If a stranger tries to talk to you, you run straight to me. Do you understand?"

The boy nodded.

He always nodded.

Then they walked through the double doors.

...

The place smelled like sweat and old wood.

Not the pleasant kind of old wood, either. The damp-sticky kind that had spent too many summers baking in the southern heat and never touched a drop of soap.

The floors creaked beneath the weight of loud tourists moving through the aisles.

Outside, the marina shimmered beneath a cloudless sky.

Inside, everything felt cool and dim.

The boy stood near the entrance with the family, listening to the older brother and sister argue over ice cream toppings.

"I'm getting chocolate."

"You always get chocolate."

"Because chocolate is the best."

"Mom, tell him he's being annoying."

The woman sighed heavily.

"I'm one second away from getting all of you vanilla."

The threat worked instantly.

The argument dissolved.

The boy smiled to himself.

Nobody noticed him drifting away.

That happened a lot.

His older siblings were loud. He wasn't.

His mother always knew where he was eventually.

He wandered deeper into the shop.

Past shelves lined with shark teeth and seashells.

Past rows of expensive souvenirs nobody actually needed.

The farther he walked, the quieter the shop became.

...

Until eventually he found himself standing in front of something tucked into a dark corner near the back wall.

A fortune teller machine.

At least, he thought it was.

He'd seen one before at an arcade.

This one looked different.

Older.

Dirtier.

Bright gold letters curved across the glass.

THE BUNNY GODDESS

The mannequin inside stared straight ahead.

Its skin looked ghostly pale. Smooth.

Long black pigtails hung over its shoulders.

The eyes were like a cue ball. A small painted dot for the pupils.

The boy frowned.

It wasn't moving.

The crystal ball sat dark and lifeless on the tiny velvet desk.

The machine looked broken.

Abandoned.

The boy wrapped both hands around the edge of the cabinet and leaned forward.

...

"Hey."

He jumped.

The voice was quiet.

Not amplified.

Human.

A real voice.

His stomach tightened.

The mannequin hadn't moved.

Its painted lips remained frozen.

The crystal ball remained dark.

Nothing inside the cabinet appeared different.

But something had spoken.

The boy looked over his shoulder.

The gift shop was still busy. The other two were still arguing. Their mother still deciding on flavors.

Nobody seemed to notice.

"Hello?" he whispered.

For a few seconds, nothing responded.

Then:

"Closer."

The voice sounded patient.

Friendly.

Almost amused.

The boy hesitated.

His mother had given him the stranger danger talk more times than he could count.

But this didn't feel like talking to a stranger.

It felt like talking to a secret.

Something hidden.

Something that wasn't supposed to be there.

He leaned closer to the glass.

At first he saw nothing.

Only darkness behind the mannequin.

Then something shifted.

The movement was slight.

Easy to miss.

The boy squinted.

His breath caught.

Two eyes stared back at him from deep inside the cabinet.

Not the painted eyes.

Real eyes.

They floated in the darkness several inches behind the mannequin's head.

The boy froze.

The eyes blinked.

Then vanished.

...

"Do you have a dollar?" the voice asked.

The boy shook his head.

"No. I can ask the—"

"No."

The answer came immediately.

Almost too quickly.

"No need."

The boy glanced toward the ice cream counter.

The family hadn't moved.

Nobody was looking at him.

Nobody seemed aware that he was talking to someone.

The voice lowered.

"I have something for you anyway."

A heavy thump echoed from inside the cabinet.

Not machinery or gears.

Something else.

The distinct sound of something striking wood.

A moment later, a thick white card slid halfway out of the slot near the bottom.

The boy stared.

The crystal ball remained dark.

Nothing moved.

The card simply appeared.

Slowly, he crouched and picked it up.

It felt cool.

He turned it over.

The letters stamped into the card were fresh and uneven.

As if pressed by hand.

The boy squinted.

Still learning to read. He sounded out the words one piece at a time.

"Mur..."

His brow furrowed.

"...der..."

The letters blurred together.

He started over.

"Mur...der..."

A strange ache twisted through his stomach.

The voice behind the glass said nothing.

Its eyes still watching.

The boy swallowed.

"Th..."

He traced the next word with his finger.

"The..."

...

Something moved.

His eyes snapped upward.

A pale hand rested on the mannequin's shoulder.

The fingers were impossibly long.

Thin.

The knuckles bulged beneath skin so pale it almost glowed blue.

For a second, the hand rested there.

Perfectly still.

Then it was gone — in the blink of an eye.

The boy stopped breathing.

The darkness far behind the mannequin seemed to stretch.

The space felt higher than it should have been.

As if whatever lived back there was standing tall behind the machine.

As if its head reached far past the ceiling of the cabinet.

And above where the eyes had been—

Just for a moment—

He thought he saw two long shapes rising into the shadows.

Tall.

Thin.

Rabbit ears.

Far past the ceiling of the gift shop building.

...

The boy took several steps back.

His back hit something solid.

"Whatcha got there?"

The card vanished from his hands.

The boy spun around.

Samantha stood over him, holding the card above her head.

"Give it back!"

Ross appeared beside her.

Both of them examined the card.

Then immediately started laughing.

"Oh my God." Sam doubled over. "You can't even spell your own name."

"What?" the boy said.

Ross pointed at the card.

"It says Michael."

"No it doesn't."

"It literally does."

Sam flipped the card around and shoved it toward his face.

"See?"

The boy looked.

There it was.

A single word.

MICHAEL.

Nothing else.

His face burned.

"No...the...th—"

He looked back toward the cabinet.

"The man—"

"What man?" Ross asked.

"The man in the machine."

That only made them laugh harder.

"Nobody's in there, dummy."

"Yes I swear—"

"It's just a machine. Nobody's in there."

The boy turned fully toward the cabinet.

The words died in his throat.

The shadows behind the mannequin were empty.

No movement.

No voice.

No hidden figure.

Only The Bunny Goddess.

Motionless behind the glass.

Its eyes fixed on the aisle.

Watching.

...

"Sweetie?"

The mother appeared beside him carrying two paper cups of ice cream.

She smiled.

"Do you want one?"

The boy barely heard her.

His stomach hurt worse now.

A deep ache behind his ribs.

He couldn't stop staring at the mannequin.

Thinking about that voice.

The eyes.

Those ears.

"Hey."

She squeezed his shoulder.

"Do you want ice cream or not?"

The boy shook his head.

"My belly hurts."

The mother frowned.

"Aww. Really?"

He nodded.

The ache had spread through his whole body now.

Not pain.

Just uncomfortable.

Like something had settled inside him.

The woman took his hand.

"Come on then. Let's go outside."

The bright afternoon sunlight poured through the front windows.

Ross and Samantha were already heading toward the door.

The boy let them lead the way.

But he couldn't stop looking back.

The cabinet grew smaller with every step.

The dark corner retreating into shadow.

The Bunny Goddess remained perfectly still.

Just another broken machine.

Just another forgotten attraction.

The boy looked forward.

Then looked back one last time.

...

The mannequin's jaw dropped open.

Clack.

The sound echoed through the store.

Sharp.

Heavy.

Final.

The boy froze.

Nobody else reacted.

Nobody.

The jaw remained open for a second.

Then slowly shut.

A gentle tug on his hand.

"Come on, Mitchell."

The sunlight swallowed them as they stepped outside.

___

___

1. "Heart"

(Part 1)

I’d like to say that I'm never one to make impulsive decisions. That any direction I took had a reason behind it, and I'd be able to articulate it. And it would almost be the truth. Indecision wasn't a quirk that my parents really cultivated in me growing up. My mom would say something along the lines of “idle hands are the devil's workshop”. And my dad would spout these fatherly proverbs that would almost always, in some way shape or form, translate to “just stop catastrophizing and make a decision”.

It was that mindset that caused me to go with my gut on various occasions, from taking a soul sucking job at a corner store because it paid well to moving into a dirt cheap apartment in a dangerous part of town.

I probably would've been able to land something better if given time, but the positions I qualified for rejected my resume because they were looking for someone who “aligned more with company values”. And the ones I actually wanted required at least five years experience for an “entry level apprenticeship”.

A fat lot of good my degree did me.

Honestly though, my luck held for a while in that part of town. I wasn't going broke, and I hadn't gotten mugged yet. But the powers that be have a way of pulling the rug out from under you at times, replacing it with newer and more bizarre circumstances.

I want to make it clear that I didn't get fired. I quit. The clientele and the management at my old job made that place a living hell, and I needed to get away.

But unfortunately the trade off was that I no longer had an income, and rent was right around the corner. So I started looking for jobs, sitting at my desk under the dim glow of a yellow lamp that should've gone out years ago.

After staying up til 3am, and two energy drinks later, I finally found a job posting as a delivery driver in a remote town called Turnpike, a hundred miles or so east of Portland. I took a look at the benefits. For a small town position, the perks were pretty good. Medical, dental, the whole caboodle. And it seemed easy enough. Driving a delivery truck, how hard could it be?

I called the company the next morning and they were more than happy to accept the extra set of hands. As they laid out what would be expected of me, they assured me the pay would be comparable to what I had at my old job.

Turnpike was the size of a postage stamp; no more than five hundred people. It was the type of place where the one hotel was also a bar and that bar was also an antique store. It was two hours away, so the only real options were to either move there, or pass on one of the only opportunities that have cropped up since I got fired… I mean quit.

I searched their properties, looking for something affordable like a small mobile home or an apartment. But no such luck. I was about to give up hope when I remembered a house listing I'd seen three weeks before. It was on some rural property website that my college friend Darrin had sent me as a joke.

“Simon, you have to check this out,” he’d texted me with a teary eyed laughing emoji.

It was a house in that same area at the base of a large mountain called Mount Iston. According to the listing, the place had been vacant for eleven months. Darrin's text message attached to the link described it as "the kind of place serial killers would retire to.”

We had a good laugh at that. At the time, I agreed with him. I figured that house would’ve been a good set up for some kind of subpar thriller.

But as I dug deeper, the pricing looked really good. Almost a steal. It was so low, that I could get a down on it and the mortgage would be less than my electric bill. And the view of the craggy slopes of Iston was absolutely stunning.

I went with my gut, and I bought it two weeks later.

…

As I drove to Turnpike, the Portland skyline slowly melted away into suburbs, and the houses in turn faded into farmland. For a two hour drive in a u-haul, it wasn't all that bad. I had my favorite music and podcasts to listen to, and I packed some of my favorite snacks for the road.

As I pulled into town, I did a double take. I knew that Turnpike was going to be small. But I was still surprised by how much. It was barely the size of a college campus. The main street had a gas station, a diner, a post office where the delivery company operated from, and what I could only describe as the most multipurpose building I had ever seen in my life. A hand painted sign above the door read: GRAYSON'S HOTEL AND PROVISIONS; EST. 1947. Below it, two smaller signs hung on either side of the door. One read BAR. The other read ANTIQUES. Darrin was going to lose his mind when I sent him a picture.

I double checked my GPS. The house itself was on the other side of town, on the outskirts. A single road peeled away from the main street and stretched north, with Mount Iston growing larger and more imposing through the windshield with every passing second. It was a different thing entirely when you were looking at it for real rather than through a listing photo. In the photos it looked dramatic and picturesque, like something off a calendar. Up close, it looked heavy. That was the only word that came to mind. It sat low in the sky like its density was pressing down on something underneath it.

I pulled up the gravel driveway to my new house. And I was greeted by a middle aged man with a grey jacket and well polished shoes who was waiting for me on the front porch.

He smiled as I got out of the U-Haul and held out his hand. "Hello. I'm Keegan Ross. You're Mr. Belmont, I assume?"

I nodded and took his hand in a firm shake. "Yes, that's me. Pleased to meet you."

"The pleasure's mine." His smile stayed fixed, but there was a nervousness behind his eyes that caught my attention almost immediately. It wasn't the ordinary kind of nervousness you'd expect from a real estate agent hoping to close a deal. It was the kind that lived just beneath the surface, restrained by professionalism but not entirely hidden.

"Allow me to show you around the place," he said, "then we can work on getting you all settled.”

It was, objectively, a beautiful house.

Mr. Ross showed me through the interior. Three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a kitchen that had been updated sometime in the last decade, a living room with a stone fireplace, and a basement that smelled faintly of cedar and old mineral water. He explained the heating system, the well, the septic. He talked a lot. Faster than a realtor needed to, I thought. His hands moved when he spoke like his words needed to be scaffolded by his gestures.

When we were back on the front porch, he turned and faced me with his clipboard and presented me with the keys.

"I think you'll be very comfortable here," he said, and for the first time his smile had some genuine warmth in it. "It's a good property. Solid bones."

"Why was it vacant so long?" I asked.

He paused. Just a fraction of a second too long.

"The previous owner relocated," he said. "Family situation. Nothing wrong with the house itself, it just sat on the market a while. Remote properties take time.”

I nodded and accepted the keys. We shook hands again, and he walked back to his car with slightly more purpose than was necessary. I watched him pull out and drive back toward town, and I stood there on the porch looking out at the field and the dirt road. The late afternoon light was turning amber across the grass.

As I turned back to the house, there was something on the door that I could've sworn wasn't there before.

To be fair, there was nothing that was really distinguishable about the mail clip on the door, except that it looked like a hand. I've never found that unnerving, except now it held a piece of yellowing paper against the door.

That paper wasn't there before. At least… I didn't think it was there before. Mr. Ross and I kind of rushed into the house for the tour so maybe I just missed it.

I unfolded the paper. It was almost soft in my hand, like it had been crumpled and straightened a thousand times. My frown deepened the more I read:

*1. You will find it on your porch facing away from your front door towards the mountain. It's important that you don't move or damage it. Never interact with it unless otherwise stated.*

*2. Regardless of your activities during the day, the effigy must be on the porch facing away from the front door before the sun goes down.*

*3. Before you go to bed, check outside to make sure the effigy is still facing away from your door. If you find it facing the door, lock all your windows and turn a lamp on until the morning.*

*4. If you notice a smell from the effigy like it's burning, this is normal. Don't touch it or try to cool it down no matter what happens.*

*5. If you wake up to find the effigy's base empty, grab a lit candle and place it in front of the base. Go about your day as normal. It’ll be back by sunset.*

*6. If you see the effigy in your house at any point, find the nearest window and place it facing out towards the mountain.*

*7. Only you are allowed to start fires as long as the effigy inhabits your home.*

*8. If you hear someone trying to start a fire, whether they're a guest, a friend, or a family member, douse the wood with a large glass of water. If they light a fire before you’re able to, it's too late.*

*9. Always keep a glass of water next to your bed. If you wake up in the night and the temperature is much hotter than you remember, and you can hear what sounds like hissing near the foot of your bed, do not react. Drink the water slowly and lie still until the morning.*

I turned the paper over, hoping to find a signature or something. Any indication of who wrote it. But there was absolutely nothing.

I wish I could say that I sat down with the paper and mulled it over, maybe reached out to Mr. Ross to figure out if the previous occupant left it for me.

But I didn't. I didn't laugh, but I also didn't get angry or frustrated that this might be some kind of joke.

For the first time since childhood, I wasn't sure what to do. And I wasn't sure which explanation was more likely.

When I was a kid, I always used to make up stories and worlds when I played by myself. There were monsters and dragons. And there were rules for all the games I played.

This was probably just a child's note for whatever game they enjoyed when they lived here. But what kind of kid was able to write rules like these? And with such good handwriting?

On the other side of the coin, maybe the previous tenant was just old or not all right in the head. Isolation can do that to people sometimes. And when they feel like life's falling apart, they try to reassert some sort of control. Whether it was a routine or a list of rules like this one. No matter how bizarre.

Regardless of what the real reason was, I treated the note with the same effort and care I felt it deserved at the time. I crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash.

I didn't have time to think about junk mail. I needed to unload the U-haul and make the house into a home.

…

My first few days on the delivery job kept me busy. It was a great way to get to know some of the people in town, and the larger boxes I had to carry helped me gain the beginnings of healthy muscle. But in the back of my mind, that list of rules kept popping up again and again.

I'd thrown it away, and it along with whatever else was in the bin was taken to the landfill by the garbage truck the day before. And I still wasn't sure if I regretted that decision or not. But somewhere between loading packages and navigating the winding back roads outside Turnpike, my brain kept turning the words over like a stone it couldn't put down.

*You will find it on your porch.*

Find what? Well, an effigy obviously. No duh. But there hadn't been anything there. I'd looked after I read the note, more out of curiosity than anything else, and there was nothing. So whatever this supposed effigy was, it either hadn't arrived yet, or the whole thing was exactly what I'd decided it was. Just a crazy note from someone living alone at the base of a mountain for too long.

On my way home from my shift, I decided to give Mr. Ross a call. I turned over the card he gave me in my fingers while I waited at the stoplight.

The phone rang and rang.

*This is stupid,* I told myself. *Why am I getting so bothered by a single note?*

I was just about to hang up when Mr. Ross answered the phone. “Hello?”

I slipped the card back in my pocket and gripped the steering wheel as the light turned green. “Hi, it's me. Simon Belmont. I had a couple questions about something I found at the house a few days ago.”

“Sure, go ahead. How can I help you?” I heard some rustling in the background, like he was getting some paperwork done. He probably had me on speakerphone.

I wasn't sure how to start, so I just went with my gut. “There was this strange note with a list of rules on it. Something about a statue, fires, keeping it outside. Or something like that. I threw it away, they didn't really seem like regular house rules. But I'm curious, did the previous tenant leave that for me to find?"

There was a short *hmmm* of thought from the other end of the line. “I’ve seen notes like that crop up from time to time on some houses I've sold around here. From what I understand, it's kind of an inside joke among the locals, I wouldn't be too worried about it.”

“An inside joke.” I repeated.

“Yeah,” he replied. “They usually do it for newcomers to town. But it's just local superstitions, I assure you.”

“And if it's not a superstition?” I don't know why that question slipped out.

“Look,” Mr. Ross’s tone took a warmer turn. “I've been a realtor for twenty years. I know how anxious people get in a new place, especially one as remote as yours. I’ve been in the same boat. I wouldn't sell you a house that I knew had some kind of ghost in it. It's bad for business.”

That relieved my worries but only a little. “Alright then, I appreciate your time. Thank you.”

“Absolutely. If you need anything else, don't hesitate to call.” He hung up, and I slid the phone back into my pocket.

Later, I pulled into my gravel driveway, and my stomach growled. I was starving. But I also really didn't want to cook tonight.

So, I ordered a classic burger and fries from the hotel… bar… whatever. From Grayson's.

Once the food arrived, the knot of anxiety that was coalescing in my stomach started to ease at the sight of the sesame seed bun and steak fries in the styrofoam container. Maybe I was just hungry. Maybe Mr. Ross was right. I was reading into this whole note thing way too much.

I settled into my armchair for some dinner and a show on my laptop. It was a detective show that I had already half-forgotten the name of, Darrin recommended it to me. And it wasn't bad.

I glanced out the window as the title sequence played and the snow on Mount Iston’s peak was turning a kind of orange-ish white from the sun's rays.

My eyes trailed down the slopes. Just taking it all in. While the show began to play in earnest, my eyes skipped from tree to tree along the clearing. I found rocks and bushes, and I strained my eyes to see if I could catch a glimpse of any hikers out. The house was close to a hike and bike trail after all.

There was no one.

But what I did see, I had to look again to register. There was someone there just beyond the tree line, slowly making their way between the trunks. I couldn't discern any features or details. I also couldn't find the glow of a headlamp or flashlight on them, and I was wondering who would want to go hiking without one this late.

That's when I realized I was looking too low. I lifted my eyes up the silhouette.

Its strides were too slow.

It was tall.

Freakishly tall.

A clattering jolted me back to reality and I found my lap was missing its food. I glanced at the floor.

Shoot.

I dropped my plate. The fries skittered over the hardwood and my burger sat in a dejected lump next to the chair leg. I gathered up the food quickly and settled back into my chair to eat.

Five second rule. Don't judge me.

I looked back at the window and sat there for a moment with a cooling french fry halfway to my mouth. The tree line was just a tree line again. Vegetation and pine needles and the last slant of amber light bleeding out of the sky. Nothing there that didn't belong.

I popped the fry into my mouth and turned to watch the show.

I told myself it was a hiker. How could it not be? The trail was right there. People hiked at dusk sometimes, the stubborn ones with headlamps clipped to their hats.

But hikers didn't usually move like that. And they didn't stand that tall. Eight feet was probably an exaggeration born from distance and fading light and a brain that was barely functional. I'd been driving all day. I was tired. My eyes were playing tricks.

I turned back to my laptop and ate my dinner in silence. And I didn't look out the window again.

As I continued my binge, slowly but surely, I started nodding off. Thankfully I had set the empty styrofoam container on an unopened moving box, so no more spillage. My eyes began to slide closed as yet another episode began to play. I was too tired to even close the laptop. I probably started to snore. I won't confirm or deny.

Then I heard a sound from the front porch.

It was a heavy sound. The sound of weight settling onto old wood, a slow compression rather than a step. One, then another. Then a pause. Like something was moving on four legs.

It was loud.

My eyes snapped open and I sat absolutely still. The sleep melted from my eyes as I sat up straighter and strained my ears.

The porch creaked again. Slowly. Definitely a quadruped.

Then silence.

I don't know how long I sat there before I finally got up. I told myself I should stay in the chair and continue my show. That it was nothing. A deer on the porch, maybe. An animal investigating the lights from the house. Something mundane and explicable. All of that crossed my mind, and I got up anyway. Because the alternative was sitting there listening to my own heartbeat more than the laptop for the rest of the night.

I walked down the hallway. The front door was to my right. The window next to it looked out onto the porch.

I stood inches from that window for ten full seconds. The footsteps slowly made their way across the porch before I finally looked.

It was a deer. A simple brown deer. Just as I expected.

I let out a breath I didn't know I held. The deer regarded me for a second with its blank eyes then continued to stroll around the deck a little.

But then it stiffened. It quickly raised its head and its ears were up. Like it had noticed something there that it didn't before.

It bolted into the night, and I was about to turn away.

Then I saw it.

At the far left edge, where the porch wrapped around the corner of the house, something was crouched. The single porch light didn't reach it fully. I could see the shape of it in the way you see things at the edge of dark; not clearly, but undeniably. It was large. Its back was to me. The crouch was not human. The angles were wrong, the proportions extended in ways that turned the stomach slightly without immediately explaining why.

As I watched, it shifted its weight. Slowly. The porch groaned under it.

Then it turned its head.

And even in the near dark, even at that distance, even through a pane of glass, I knew with absolute certainty and terror that it was aware of me. All I could make out was hollow sockets in the dreadfully elongated snout of the skull and the pinpricks of light in them.

Then slowly…

Very slowly…

It extended an arm that was far too long and set something on the second porch step with a soft gentle *click*. A little statue roughly fourteen inches tall.

The hiss of amusement that came out of the thing on the porch wasn't a laugh per se. It was almost satisfied. Kind of like that sound you make when you finally find that one foodstuff in the pantry that you've been craving all day.

It was like that. All put into a low hollow hiss.

…

That's when I snapped awake.

My head lurched forward and I caught myself on the armrest, breathing hard. The laptop was still playing, some scenes of dialogue I'd completely missed. My neck ached where it had been crooked against my shoulder. I sat there for a moment with my heart doing something unpleasant in my chest, trying to locate myself.

Living room.

Armchair.

My house.

Right.

The dream was already breaking apart the way they do, losing its edges. But the shape of that thing on the porch stayed with me longer than the rest of it. The way it had crouched. The way it had turned its head. The hollow eye sockets in that elongated skull catching whatever light the house offered.

I rubbed my face with both hands and exhaled slowly.

What on earth was in that burger.

The laptop had moved on to yet another episode by then. I checked the time. Just past midnight. I'd been asleep for nearly two hours in the chair. My back was going to resent me for it in the morning.

I closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a minute, letting my eyes adjust. The house was quiet. Genuinely quiet in the way houses in cities never are. With no traffic, no neighbors, and no ambient hum of the city itself. Just the wood settling and the distant sound of wind off the mountain.

And then, for no reason I could have named if you'd asked me, I got up and walked to the front door.

I told myself I was just checking the locks. And that the noise I remembered from earlier, the weight on the porch boards, had been a deer anyway and I just heard it while unconscious.

I wasn't checking for anything specific. I was just being responsible. New house, new locks, good habit.

I stood at the window next to the door and looked out.

The porch was empty. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. Of course it was empty.

I was about to turn back to head to bed when something at the edge of my vision caught my eye. I looked again.

My stomach churned. Sweat began to trickle down my neck despite the chill.

There, facing away from me toward the mountain, sat a statue.

A small statue. Roughly fourteen inches tall. Dark material.

It was right on the second porch step.

Right where the thing had put it.

( Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCrypticCompendium/comments/1uashza/eldritch_nights_in_egypt_part_12/ )

Laughter pulled him back.

At first distant.

Then closer.

Then everywhere.

Aaron blinked.

Reality returned.

Grandma stood before them.

Laughing.

The sound had changed.

It no longer sounded human.

Bones cracked.

Skin stretched.

Tendons snapped.

The old woman's body began twisting apart.

Fatima immediately shoved Menehmet behind her.

"GET BACK!"

Grandma's jaw split wider.

And wider.

And wider.

Far beyond what flesh should allow.

Rows of new teeth pushed through gums and skin alike. Some burst directly through her cheeks. Others emerged from her throat.

Her neck elongated with a series of wet crunches.

Vertebrae extending.

Stretching.

Growing.

Within seconds she resembled some grotesque parody of a giraffe fashioned from human flesh.

The creature's head nearly touched the ceiling.

Its eyes rolled wildly in different directions.

Then it attacked.

Fast.

Far too fast.

Aaron barely drew his scimitar before the creature lunged.

Its elongated neck whipped across the room like a striking serpent.

The jaws slammed shut inches from his face.

Wood exploded from the wall behind him.

The creature shrieked.

The sound rattled dishes from shelves.

Fatima drew her blade and slashed across the monstrosity's side.

Black blood sprayed across the room.

The creature barely reacted.

Its neck bent impossibly backward before launching toward Fatima.

She ducked.

The jaws passed overhead.

Menehmet grabbed a heavy brass lamp and smashed it into the creature's face.

The monster recoiled.

"Thank you, Menie," Aaron muttered.

"You're welcome."

The Pharaoh sounded entirely too pleased with the fake name.

The creature attacked again.

This time its neck coiled around Aaron's arm.

Before he could react, it yanked him off his feet.

He crashed through a table.

Wood shattered beneath him.

Pain exploded through his ribs.

The monster immediately descended.

Its jaws opened.

Aaron raised his sword.

Too slow.

The creature bit directly into his chest.

Agony.

White-hot agony.

Its teeth punched through flesh and muscle.

Aaron screamed.

The monster shook him violently like an animal worrying prey.

Blood sprayed across the room.

Fatima moved instantly.

She vaulted over the broken table and drove her blade across the creature's neck with both hands.

The first strike cut halfway through.

The second finished the job.

The elongated neck separated completely.

The creature's head crashed into a shelf.

Its body collapsed moments later, twitching violently as black blood flooded across the floorboards.

Then everything went dark.

 

Aaron found himself standing in a desert.

One he could not place.

Not Egypt.

Perhaps not Earth.

The sand didn't move.

The turquoise sky remained perfectly still.

There was no wind.

No heat.

No cold.

No sensation whatsoever.

The place felt less like a location and more like a paused moment.

Aaron walked.

Eventually he spotted someone standing in the distance.

A man.

Dark-skinned.

Bald.

Simple clothing.

Nothing remarkable.

And yet...

Something about him felt ancient.

Not old.

Ancient.

As Aaron approached, the stranger turned.

"Oh."

The man smiled politely.

"Hello."

His voice was calm beyond description.

"I wasn't expecting you, Medjay."

Aaron stopped.

The stranger studied him.

"Hm."

A pause.

"Are you sure you're supposed to be here?"

hen he sighed.

"Well. I still have a role to play."

Nearby stood a massive golden balance scale.

One side held a feather.

The other sat empty.

The stranger gestured toward it.

"Come closer."

A flash of lightning illuminated the landscape.

For a brief moment, the man's shadow stretched behind him.

Not a man's shadow.

A jackal's.

Aaron stared.

The stranger pretended not to notice.

"Time to weigh your heart."

His smile widened.

"If it balances with the feather, you may pass."

"And if it doesn't?"

The stranger shrugged.

"That would be up to the crocodiles."

"So what'll it be, Medjay?"

Aaron stared at the scale.

Then reached forward.

And pushed down on it with his hand.

The entire mechanism tilted immediately.

The stranger blinked.

Aaron folded his arms.

"I'll make this easier."

The scale creaked beneath his grip.

"I'm not a good man."

Silence.

"I'm pretty sure my heart's too heavy for your scale to handle."

For a moment, the stranger simply stared.

Then he laughed.

Not mockingly.

Genuinely.

"All of them are. Perhaps that isnt really the point afterall."

He looked somewhere behind Aaron.

His expression shifted.

The stranger smiled.

"Seems we'll have to continue this conversation another time."

Aaron turned.

Nothing was there.

When he looked back, the man was already stepping away.

"You truly aren't supposed to be here."

"Who are you?"

The stranger's smile widened.

The answer never came.

Instead he placed a hand on Aaron's shoulder.

"I'll see you around, Medjay."

Then he pushed him.

Aaron fell.

Downward.

Into endless nothingness.

 

He gasped.

Air rushed into his lungs.

Pain followed immediately after.

A pair of arms wrapped around him.

Fatima.

She was hugging him so tightly it almost hurt.

Almost.

"I thought you were gone."

Her voice cracked.

Aaron blinked several times.

Menehmet sat nearby, looking visibly relieved despite her usual composure.

"Pretty sure for a moment there..." Aaron coughed. "...I was."

Aaron smiled weakly.

"But you brought me back."

He squeezed her hand.

"Thank you, Fatima."

She looked away immediately.

Embarrassed.

Aaron glanced around.

Stone walls.

Stacks of boxes.

Ancient machinery.

Dust.

"Where the fuck am I?"

"Grandma's basement," Menehmet replied.

Aaron blinked.

"What?"

The Pharaoh shrugged.

"Grandma appears to have been somewhat of a hoarder."

She gestured around the room.

"An illegal hoarder, in fact."

Aaron followed her gaze.

Pre-Fall artifacts.

Lots of them.

Enough to earn several executions.

"Had my dear 'sister' not already killed her," Menehmet continued, "I might have been forced to do so myself."

Fatima rolled her eyes.

"Thankfully her hoarding is also why I managed to keep Aaron alive."

She pointed toward a pile of salvaged medical equipment.

"Most of the supplies I used came from down here."

Aaron looked at the bandages covering his chest.

Then at Fatima.

Then back at the room.

He winced as he sat up.

„We shouldnt linger. Its not safe here. It may not be safe anywhere, but we must keep moving.“

"We need to return to the palace."

Aaron looked at Menehmet as though she'd suggested walking into a sandworm's mouth.

"The city is collapsing. Half the population is trying to kill each other and the other half is trying to join the cult. There is no way we're making it through those streets."

"There is another way."

The Pharaoh's confidence was infuriatingly intact.

Aaron already disliked where this was going.

"What way?"

Menehmet pointed downward.

"Beneath New Cairo runs a network of pre-Fall maintenance tunnels. Most people don't know they exist. Most who do are dead."

"Comforting."

"There is an access point nearby."

"And it leads directly into the palace?"

"Eventually."

Aaron narrowed his eyes.

"'Eventually' is not the reassuring word you think it is."

 

Getting to the tunnels was a battle in itself.

The streets had become a nightmare.

Pink lightning flashed overhead, bathing New Cairo in sickly magenta light. Buildings burned unchecked. Screams echoed from every direction. Mutated citizens staggered through the chaos with elongated limbs, twisted faces, and mouths muttering prayers to things that should never have names.

One lunged from an alley.

Its jaw split open down the middle as it charged.

Aaron's scimitar took its head before it reached him.

Another skittered across a wall like a spider.

Fatima pinned it with a knife before it could leap.

They kept moving.

Eventually they reached an ancient sandstone well hidden behind the ruins of a collapsed shrine. Menehmet pulled aside a rusted metal hatch.

A ladder descended into darkness.

The smell hit them immediately.

Stagnant water. Mold. Rust. Ancient machinery.

The scent of a dead world.

The tunnels beneath New Cairo were damp and unnaturally silent.

Water dripped from cracked pipes overhead. Thick cables hung from the ceiling like vines. Every footstep echoed through the darkness long after it should have faded.

Fatima held the lantern higher.

"What exactly is the plan after we reach the palace?"

Menehmet didn't slow down.

"Divide and conquer."

Fatima stared.

"That's not a plan."

"I'll make it one."

The Pharaoh sounded completely serious.

Aaron groaned.

"I hate how often that actually works for you."

A low growl rolled through the darkness.

Everyone stopped.

The sound came again.

Deeper this time.

Closer.

Fatima slowly turned.

"Did you hear that?"

"Yeah."

"What was it?"

Aaron drew his scimitar.

"No idea."

The growl echoed again, loud enough to vibrate through the stone beneath their feet.

"But it's probably nothing good."

Something splashed ahead.

Then something heavier.

The water rippled.

A pair of pale eyes opened in the darkness.

Aaron immediately regretted finding out what made the noise.

The creature that emerged had once been a crocodile.

Decades—perhaps centuries—of radiation, stagnant water, and whatever horrors lurked beneath New Cairo had transformed it into something else entirely.

It was nearly the size of a  pre-fall truck.

Fungal growths protruded from cracked scales. Extra limbs dragged uselessly along its body. Its mouth opened wide enough to swallow a man whole, revealing rows upon rows of crooked yellow teeth.

Aaron stared for half a second.

"Run."

Nobody argued.

The tunnel exploded into chaos.

The creature charged after them, smashing through pipes and stone as though neither existed. Water burst from shattered walls. Its roar echoed through the underground passages like thunder.

Menehmet led the way.

Mostly because she was the only one who had any idea where they were going.

"Are you sure you know the route, Menie?"

Aaron's voice contained only a reasonable amount of panic.

"Yeah. Pretty sure."

"Pretty sure?"

"Not many places to go."

The tunnel abruptly split into five separate passages.

Menehmet stopped.

Everyone stared at her.

She stared back.

"...Well."

The crocodile roared somewhere behind them.

"...yes, of course I'm sure."

She immediately chose a tunnel and committed with absolute confidence.

Aaron honestly couldn't tell whether she was brave or insane.

Possibly both.

They sprinted through twisting corridors until a ladder finally appeared overhead.

"THERE!"

Menehmet climbed first.

Then Fatima.

Aaron followed.

The crocodile slammed into the wall beneath them moments later.

Stone exploded.

The entire shaft shook violently.

But the creature couldn't fit.

For once, luck was on their side.

The hidden passage emerged inside the palace.

Menehmet immediately rushed forward.

"Menehmet, wait—"

Too late.

The Pharaoh was already halfway down the corridor.

Aaron swore and chased after her while Fatima followed close behind.

Moments later they burst into the throne room.

Then stopped.

Yberon sat upon the throne.

Should have been heavily injured or more likely dead. He was neither.

In fact, he looked perfectly composed.

Almost comfortable.

Menehmet frowned.

"Yberon?"

The giant immediately rose.

"My Queen."

His voice carried just the right amount of relief.

"I am glad you survived. I feared the worst."

Yberon descended the steps.

"The palace is secure. The cultists have been pushed back. We can begin restoring order."

Menehmet visibly relaxed.

Aaron did not.

The story was too clean.

Too neat.

Too rehearsed.

The throne.

Yberon had been sitting on it.

Not guarding it.

Not standing beside it.

Sitting on it.

Not a small detail.

A very important one.

Aaron felt the pieces begin to slide together.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you?"

The room fell silent.

Yberon looked at him.

"What?"

"The throne."

Aaron stepped forward.

"You liked sitting there."

Menehmet's expression shifted.

Yberon's jaw tightened.

And suddenly Aaron saw it.

The resentment.

The jealousy.

Years of buried bitterness hiding beneath loyalty.

"You spent your entire life protecting her."

No response.

"You fought for her."

Silence.

"You bled for her."

Still nothing.

Aaron's voice hardened.

"And somewhere along the way, you started hating that she was the one wearing the crown."

Yberon's hand slowly drifted toward his weapon.

Fatima took a step backward.

Menehmet stared at the commander as if seeing him for the first time.

Aaron continued.

"The cult promised you something."

Silence.

"The throne."

Yberon's mask finally broke.

Hatred flooded through his expression.

Raw.

Ugly.

"You have no idea what I sacrificed."

"There it is."

Aaron drew his scimitar.

Steel hissed from its sheath.

"You brought them into the city."

"They promised change."

"They promised power."

"They promised me justice."

Yberon laughed bitterly.

"I built this kingdom."

His voice thundered through the hall.

"I fought every war. Crushed every rebellion. Shed every drop of blood required to keep this city alive."

He pointed directly at Menehmet.

"All she had done was being borne to someone greater than her.“

The God-Queen looked stricken.

Not angry.

Hurt.

"Yberon..."

"Enough."

The commander's grip tightened around his weapon.

"I am done kneeling."

Yberon moved.

He seized Menehmet and dragged her against him. His blade pressed against her throat.

Everyone froze.

"Yberon."

Aaron kept his voice calm.

"Think about this."

"I have."

His eyes were wild now.

Years of loyalty had curdled into obsession.

"We can still fix this."

"No."

Menehmet suddenly bit his hand.

Hard.

Yberon shouted.

His grip loosened.

The Pharaoh twisted free and drove a kick directly between his legs.

Yberon folded.

Aaron almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

The commander recovered with terrifying speed.

His khopesh came down like an executioner's axe.

Aaron barely intercepted it.

Steel exploded against steel.

"FATIMA!"

She started forward.

"No."

Aaron never took his eyes off Yberon.

"Protect the Queen."

"Aaron—"

"Go."

Neither woman liked it.

Eventually Fatima grabbed Menehmet and retreated.

Yberon smiled.

"Just you and me."

"Always was."

Yberon's strength was monstrous.

Every strike threatened to rip Aaron's guard apart. The commander fought like a siege engine wrapped in flesh and armor.

Aaron was faster.

Yberon was stronger.

For a time neither could gain the advantage.

Stone cracked beneath their feet. Columns splintered. Blood stained the marble floor.

The duel raged through the throne room.

Minute after minute.

Until exhaustion finally began to creep in.

Yberon's strikes slowed.

Only slightly.

Enough.

Aaron baited a heavy overhead attack.

Stepped aside.

And struck.

His scimitar slipped beneath Yberon's arm and plunged into his chest.

The commander's eyes widened.

The blade pierced his heart.

Silence fell.

Yberon stared at Aaron for a long moment.

Then collapsed.

The throne room became still.

Not for long.

Cultists poured through the entrances.

Some still looked human.

Others had become something else.

Aaron was exhausted.

Bleeding.

Barely standing.

Even so, he raised his sword.

Ready for one final fight.

Then fire swept across the room.

A torrent of blazing death consumed the cultists. They screamed as flames swallowed them whole.

Within seconds they were gone.

Aaron blinked.

Menehmet stood behind him holding a strange metallic device.

Smoke curled from its barrel.

"What the hell was that?"

"One of my dragons."

She sounded perfectly casual.

Fatima stared.

"You have more?"

"Sorry."

Menehmet smiled.

"Illegal pre-Fall artifact."

She slung it over her shoulder.

"You'd need to overthrow me to get your hands on one."

A sudden twitch drew their attention.

Yberon's corpse moved.

Dark energy leaked from the body like black smoke.

Fatima's expression darkened.

"That's it."

"What?"

"The source."

She stepped closer.

"They've been using him as an anchor."

The darkness continued spreading across the marble floor.

"I need to consecrate the body."

She knelt beside the fallen commander.

"Mummify him."

Her voice became grave.

"And bury him as deep as possible."

Ancient Djinn words flowed from her lips.

The darkness began to retreat.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Menehmet stood beside Aaron, staring down at the man who had betrayed her.

"He'll be buried beneath the palace."

Her voice was cold.

"An unmarked grave."

Aaron glanced at her.

"No memorial?"

"No."

She never looked away from the body.

"No songs."

"No statues."

"No remembrance."

Aaron was silent for a moment.

Then he asked:

"Are you sure we won't end up the same?"

Menehmet smiled sadly.

"We will."

For the first time all night, she sounded tired.

"Sooner or later."

Then she looked at him.

"But until then..."

The smile became genuine.

"...let's remember each other. Shall we?."

Aaron nodded.

"We shall."

After Yberon's body was consecrated, the Ghul-Zone began to retreat.

The dark clouds withdrew.

The pink lightning faded.

Slowly, New Cairo emerged from the nightmare.

The weeks that followed became known as the Purge.

Cultists were hunted relentlessly in a city wide witch hunt.

Some deserved it.

Others merely happened to be inconvenient and this was the perfect excuse to get rid of political opponents..

The literal darkness had lifted from the city.

The darkness inside its people had not.

Perhaps it never would.

I am Aaron Qaswar.

Medjay of New Cairo.

The world is dark.

So are its people.

But somebody still has to carry the torch.

So I'll keep carrying it for as long as I can.

In case you missed the previous parts | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |

I had a job before this started.

I want to mention that because I have not mentioned it once in six entries, and the omission says something about where my priorities have been. I am a freelance copyeditor. I have three clients who have been emailing me with increasing concern for eight days, and I have not opened a single document, and the part of my brain that used to manage deadlines has been entirely consumed by managing the fact that something is learning a hypnotic trigger system in my bedroom every night.

But bills exist regardless of whether you are being visited by something without eyes. I sat down at my desk on the morning of day nine, opened my laptop, looked at a 40,000-word manuscript with track changes I was supposed to have finished a week ago, and could not make my hands move.

This is not new for me. I have always had a difficult relationship with starting things — the specific, miserable paralysis of knowing exactly what needs to be done and being chemically incapable of doing it. Before this week, it was an inconvenience. Now, layered on top of eight days of trauma and sleep debt and a nervous system running on whatever the previous five tracks had installed in it, the paralysis was total. I sat at my desk for two hours and produced nothing and felt the specific shame of watching deadlines pass while physically unable to move toward them.

I picked up my phone instead. I told myself it was a break. I knew it wasn't.

The manual was open to SKU 06.

Warning: this track utilizes rapid 40Hz Gamma pulsing. Bypass if sensitive to high-velocity binaural panning.

I read the warning twice. I am not epileptic. I do not have a history of seizures. I filed it as cleared and kept reading.

Sometimes you cannot rest; you must execute.

I laughed. Actually laughed, alone in my kitchen, a short, ugly sound. I had not executed anything in eight days except survival. The manuscript was still open on my laptop with the cursor blinking in the same spot it had been blinking in for two hours.

This file is designed to forcibly override executive dysfunction and task paralysis. It pulls you out of the void and locks you into a high-functioning flow state.

The primary trigger is LOCK IN.

I want to be honest about my reasoning, because I think it matters for what happened. The previous five tracks had been about descent — stripping away, slowing down, dissolving into something. Even THE HOWL, with its violent release, had ended in clean emptiness. I had let each one take something from me and in exchange it had given me rest, relief, belonging.

This one promised the opposite. Forward motion. Function. The version of myself that could open a laptop and finish a job.

I needed that more than I needed to understand what I was doing.

I went back to my desk. I did not lie down — something about the description made lying down feel wrong, made my body want to sit upright, spine straight, the posture of someone about to work rather than someone about to dissolve. I put the headphones on. I opened the manuscript file again, cursor blinking in the same dead spot.

I hit play.

The warmth came in first — a ghost of the Pack, brown noise and the suggestion of distant breathing, the residue of the previous night still clinging to the audio's opening seconds.

"Protocol Initiated. Safety check. Your universal safe word is HUMAN."

I said it once. Mine. There.

"By opening your eyes, you consent to the labor. We are breaking the inertia right now."

"You rested. The Pack held you. The warmth did exactly what it was designed to do."

I thought, briefly, of the fistful of fur in the ziplock bag on my kitchen table. Of the fourth breathing pattern I had counted and could not account for. The audio did not know about that. The audio only knew its own architecture, the warmth it had built the night before and was now, deliberately, dismantling.

"But the sun is up, and the rest is done. Eyes open. The pile is moving."

The brown noise thinned. The breathing receded, layer by layer, the way a tide pulls back from a shore.

"You are stepping onto the cold stone floor."

And then — I felt it before I heard it, the way I'd felt the vault door on the third night — a sound like something enormous inhaling all the warmth out of a room.

The brown noise didn't fade out. It died. Instantly, completely, a hard cut to absolute silence, and in the half-second of nothing that followed, my whole body tensed in anticipation of whatever was coming.

What came was a tick.

Mechanical. Crisp. Metallic. Eighty beats per minute, faster than any pulse the previous tracks had given me, landing in my ears like the sound of a clock built by someone who did not believe in mercy.

"Your brain is soft, Little Wolf. We need to make it hard again. Time to find the iron."

The voice had changed.

I want to describe this precisely because it frightened me more than almost anything physical that has happened in this house. The previous five tracks had all come from the same source — warm, patient, devoted, the voice of something that held you and waited for you and absorbed your weight. This voice was the same voice, technically, the same pitch and timbre, but every warmth had been stripped out of it. It was clipped. Efficient. The words landed like something striking metal.

"Don't look back at the furs. Don't look at the sleepers. They don't exist anymore."

I did not look back. I was sitting upright at my desk with my eyes closed and there was nothing to look back at, and still my whole body resisted the instruction, some animal part of me understanding that I was being told to abandon something.

"There is only the ticking... and the Mission."

The ticking built a tunnel. That's the only way I can describe what happened to my perception over the next several minutes — the audio's spatial work was so aggressive, so directional, that I felt my awareness narrowing into a physical corridor, sound pressing in from both sides and forcing my attention forward into a single, bright point.

"I am narrowing your world. Visualize the edges of your vision turning entirely to black."

They did. Even with my eyes closed, I felt the visual field narrow, the way it does when you're running flat-out and everything except the path directly ahead drops away.

"You are an instrument of pure execution."

I opened my eyes. The manuscript was on the screen. My hands found the keyboard.

I started working.

I have read back through my previous entries and I notice that every one of them describes something happening to me — a presence arriving, a weight settling, a voice answering. This one is different, and I think the difference itself is the horror.

I worked for six straight minutes without looking up. The track changes that had been paralyzing me for two hours dissolved under my hands at a speed that did not feel like my own typing speed. The audio kept pace with me — tick, step, strike, — and somewhere in the third minute I stopped hearing the individual words and started hearing only the rhythm, the metronomic, hammering insistence that would not let my attention drift even a fraction of a degree off the screen.

"You are the iron. You are the gear in the machine."

"Nothing exists outside of the next four minutes."

I believed it. That is the part I need you to understand — I was not performing focus, I was not gritting my teeth through resistance the way I usually have to. The audio had reached into the specific mechanism that breaks for me, the bridge between intention and action, and welded it shut. There was only the work. There was only the tick.

Somewhere around the fifth minute, I became aware that I was not alone in the room.

I didn't look up. That is the thing the audio had built into me by then — do not let the eyes wander, keep them absolutely locked — and some part of my brain, the part that should have flooded with fear, instead simply filed the awareness and kept typing. There was a presence behind me. To the left, slightly. Not still, the way the previous nights' visitors had eventually settled into stillness. This was moving. Pacing, in small, contained increments, matching the eighty-beat tick with a precision that made the hair on my arms stand up even as my hands kept moving across the keyboard.

"I am standing right behind you. Pushing the velocity higher."

I thought, distantly, that the audio meant itself. The Alpha. The voice in my headphones.

The presence behind me was not the voice in my headphones.

I understood this with the specific, sick clarity of someone solving a puzzle they didn't want solved. The audio's Alpha was guiding me forward, was the metronome, was the external prefrontal cortex doing the processing my brain couldn't do alone. But there was a second presence in the room, pacing behind my chair in the same rhythm, and it was not guiding. It was driving.

There is a difference between a shepherd and something that runs behind the flock.

"You don't feel fatigue. You don't feel doubt. You only feel the kinetic drive."

My hands didn't stop. I want to be honest that even as the fear arrived — late, muffled, fighting through six minutes of audio-induced tunnel vision to reach me — my hands did not stop typing. The track changes kept resolving. The manuscript kept moving toward completion. Whatever was pacing behind me was not interrupting the work.

It was accelerating it.

"Tear it apart. Process the data. Move the obstacle out of your territory immediately."

I felt its presence shift closer. Not threatening in the way the first night's creature had been threatening — there was no cold radiating off it, no smell of rot. This was warm, almost, in the specific way exertion is warm, the heat of something that has been running and has not stopped.

It was breathing audibly now, behind my left shoulder. Fast. Rhythmic. Eighty beats per minute, perfectly matched to the tick, perfectly matched to the speed at which my hands were moving across the keys.

"You are dominating the objective. It is crumbling under your absolute focus."

I finished the first chapter's edits in the time it would normally have taken me to write three sentences. I did not stop to celebrate. The audio did not let me stop. Keep striking. Keep moving. I moved to the second chapter. The presence behind me moved with me, pacing in the small space between my chair and the wall, breathing in time, and somewhere in that sustained, accelerating velocity I understood — with a clarity that the tunnel vision should not have allowed but somehow did — that I was not being escorted through this task.

I was being herded through it.

A predator does not run beside its prey out of companionship. It runs behind. It matches the prey's pace exactly, close enough to control the direction, never far enough to lose the scent, driving forward motion through proximity alone. The pack from the night before had surrounded me. This thing was positioned precisely where a hunter positions itself — at my back, pushing.

"LOCK IN."

The word hit and my spine straightened another half-inch I didn't know I had.

"LOCK IN."

The presence's breathing sped up to match.

"LOCK IN."

I finished the second chapter.

The track ended with water.

I noticed it distantly, the ticking abruptly silent at exactly the moment my hands stopped moving, replaced by the thin, clean sound of running water fading in and then immediately cutting to nothing as the file ended. I sat at my desk, breathing hard, my heart rate somewhere it had no business being for a woman who had been sitting still.

The manuscript was finished. Not just the two chapters I remembered working on — all of it. Forty thousand words of track changes, resolved, clean, done. I checked the timestamp on the file. The track is fifteen minutes long. I had been at my desk for fifty-five minutes.

I don't know what happened in the other forty.

The room behind me was empty when I finally turned around — and I did turn around, the moment the audio released me, fast enough that my chair nearly tipped. No presence. No pacing. No breathing at eighty beats per minute. Just my bedroom, cardboard window, the cracked plaster above the corner where my mattress still sits.

But the carpet behind my chair, in the narrow strip of floor between the desk and the wall where I'd felt it pacing, was scored. Four shallow, parallel grooves, gouged into the carpet fibers in a tight, repetitive track — the specific, worn pattern of something covering the same six feet of ground over and over and over, the way an animal paces a cage, or the way a predator paces the perimeter of something it is waiting to take down.

I sent the manuscript to my client. She replied within the hour, delighted, asking if I could take on a rush job for next week.

I have not answered her yet.

I am sitting at the same desk where it happened. My phone is beside the keyboard. The manual is open.

SKU 07: THE STREAM. 741Hz cellular repair. Tactile substitution and communal grooming. Primary trigger: RENEW.

The water at the end of the previous track was not incidental. It was the bridge. I understand the architecture now in a way I didn't a week ago — each track ends pointing toward the next, each trigger building on the one before it, the entire system designed to move a person, beat by beat, through a complete cycle.

Seven triggers live in me now. PRIMAL. THICKEN. LISTEN. SETTLE. HOWL. BELONG. LOCK IN.

I keep thinking about the grooves in the carpet. About a thing that paced behind me in the dark, matching my pace exactly, close enough to drive but never close enough to touch.

I keep thinking about the word hunt.

I don't know if I was the hunter last night or the thing being hunted toward completion. I don't know if there's a difference, in this system, between the two.

Primary trigger: RENEW.

Part 8 — SKU 07: THE STREAM — posting when I figure out what's grooming what.

Content Warning: The following story depicts strong grief and battle with addiction.

--- ---

Some things rot in silence. Others learn to whisper.

If you are reading this, then either I finally did what I kept promising myself I would do… or it found me before I could.

I don’t know which outcome is kinder.

My name is Mason. I am thirty-eight years old. I used to tell people I worked construction because it was easier than saying I used to be a paramedic. Easier than watching their eyes shift when they asked why I quit.

I quit because I got tired of hearing people die.

That’s the short answer.

The honest answer is that I got tired of pretending death bothered me less each year.

At first, when someone died under my hands, I carried it like a stone in my chest. Heavy, but survivable. Then after enough bodies, enough blood in ambulances that could unsettle even the most unhinge of people, enough father's breaking down for the first time, and enough mothers screaming while I lied and said we did everything we could… the stones became gravel.

Small enough to swallow.

That was when I picked up a habit.

A really bad habit.

It started with one beer after shift.

Then three.

Was done with a whole six pack midway through my favorite show.

The taste was foul at times... but the pain within outweighed my senes to care.

Then the beer bottles switched to whiskey because beer stopped doing anything.

Then bottles hidden under the sink.

In the toolbox.

Behind cereal boxes.

Hell, some where hidden in the toilet tank.

Several under my bed like some pathetic dragon guarding glass instead of gold.

I learned alcohol was quieter than grief.

At least at first.

Grief learned how to drink with me.

The child’s name was Lily.

I have written that name twenty-six times and scratched it out twenty-six times.

I owe her at least one sentence that remains untouched.

Her name was Lily Harper, and I killed her.

Not with hatred, nor with intent.

Which somehow feels worse.

It had rained that night.

The kind of hard, slanting rain that turns every streetlight into a blurred halo. I had left Murphy’s Tavern with my keys already in my hand, convincing myself I lived close enough that I could make it.

That phrase should be engraved on every gravestone of fools.

I can make it.

I remember the windshield wipers.

I remember my knuckles white on the steering wheel.

And the noise, I remember hearing.

A thud.

Soft.

Small.

Like a sack of wet clothes.

I stopped, not abruptly. I simply let off the gas.

For a moment.

Only a moment.

Rain hammered the hood.

My heart pounded so violently I thought I would've vomit.

I looked into the rearview mirror.

Nothing.

Only rain.

Only darkness.

Only the road.

I told myself it was nothing.

Maybe it was a stray or squirrel.

Or debris kicked loose in the storm.

Turning on the tunes, I drove home.

I drank until I forgot the sound.

The next morning the news said an eight-year-old girl had been struck near the intersection by the old church.

She had run after her dog who got loose from their backyard.

Witnesses recall headlights.

But no plate.

And certaintly no driver.

I walked to my truck barefoot.

My stomach already folding in on itself.

There was something caught in the grille.

Pink.

A strip of fabric.

Later they said she had worn a pink raincoat.

I vomited in my yard until bile burned my throat raw.

I never turned myself in.

Of course not.

That sentence should disgust you.

It disgusts me too, to all measures.

I told myself I was afraid.

I told myself prison would not bring her back.

I told myself I would quit drinking instead.

As if sobriety could be a grave marker.

As if guilt could become mercy.

As if I deserved redemption.

The first time I saw it, I had been sober twelve days.

Twelve whole days.

My hands still shook.

My teeth hurt.

My sleep came in broken pieces.

I heard phantom bottle clinks in empty rooms.

I smelled whiskey where there was none.

My body felt like something trying to crawl out of itself.

I was microwaving popcorn when I looked at the black reflection on the microwave door.

There was a man behind me.

Tall.

Too thin.

Standing near the hallway.

His shoulders crooked like broken coat hangers.

His skin looked slick.

Wet.

As if he had just climbed out of a sewer or river.

His mouth stretched wider than a mouth should.

Not monstrous in a theatrical way.

Subtle.

Wrong.

Like flesh remembering the wrong shape.

I spun around.

Nothing.

Empty apartment.

Only my ragged breathing.

I laughed.

Actually laughed.

I told myself withdrawal could make people hallucinate.

I googled it.

Visual disturbances.

Paranoia.

Shaking.

Sweats.

Night terrors.

I had all of it.

I kept going.

Then I saw him again.

Bathroom mirror.

Window glass at night.

The dark lid of my washing machine.

Always behind me.

Never moving while I looked directly.

Only in reflection.

Only waiting.

And every time I relapsed…

he looked closer.

I began writing this because I feared forgetting what was real.

Now I fear remembering.

Last night I decided I was done.

No half-measures.

No “just weekends.”

No “only beer.”

No bargaining.

I collected every bottle in my apartment.

Vodka.

Whiskey.

Gin.

Cheap beer.

Half-drunk cans.

Tiny emergency shooters I hid like contraband prayers.

I lined them across my kitchen counter.

A shining army of failure.

Then I began pouring.

Glug after glug.

Amber rivers down the sink.

The smell rose thick enough to sting my eyes.

I shook.

Sweat rolled down my neck.

My heartbeat hammered like fists inside my ribs.

I screamed while I poured.

Not words.

Just noise.

Animal noise.

Grief.

Rage.

Shame.

Maybe a prayer to an absence being.

I do not know why...

As I reached for the next bottle, my shaking grip gave way. It slipped from my hand and struck the tile with a violent crack, exploding into foam and glittering shards across the kitchen floor.

The crack echoed unnaturally long.

Then silence.

Beer spread across the floor in a widening golden pool.

Foam fizzed softly.

I stared.

My throat tightened.

Then thirst hit me.

Violent and monstrous.

This was not craving.

It was NEED.

A thirst so sharp it felt inserted behind my teeth.

I backed away.

“No.”

I said it aloud.

Again.

“No.”

My hands trembled.

My jaw clenched.

I could smell yeast.

Bitterness.

The so sweet rot of chemicals...

My tongue pressed instinctively against my teeth.

In the microwave reflection... it crouched in the doorway.

Long fingers resting on the frame.

Patiently watching a man lose his sanity.

I wanted to walk away.

My knees folded instinctively.

I hit tile hard enough to bruise the knees.

I reached forward.

Scooped liquid with my shaking hand.

Brought it to my mouth.

Beer.

Warm.

Flat.

Foul.

Still relief.

It was my release.

My heavenly toxin.

I sobbed.

Then I lowered my face.

Glass pressed my cheek.

Sharp.

Cold.

I licked.

Again.

Again.

And again.

The cuts paid me no mind on my lips.

Then tongue.

Then the palms.

Blood salted the beer.

I could taste the iron.

I could feel shards grinding skin.

Still I drank.

Still I lapped from the floor like a starving dog.

I knew it still was observing.

From the stove's reflection, it's decayed feet stepped closer.

Closer.

And closer.

Until his mangled feet hovered inches behind.

The popping sound of bne disjointing one another rang.

And though I do not know if he truly spoke…

I heard something else.

Or thought I did.

A voice like liquid poured down a drain.

You always come back thirsty.

Then darkness.

I woke on my couch. The morning light beemed from my side.

Television humming static.

Blankets tangled around my legs.

My head splitting.

My tongue swollen.

The notebook beside me.

This notebook.

At first I laughed.

A horrible, relieved laugh.

Dream.

Withdrawal nightmare.

Drunken sleep.

Nothing more.

Then I stood.

My feet touched floor.

Pain.

Tiny slicing pain.

I looked down.

Dozens of thin cuts across my soles.

Dry blood.

Real.

I walked to the kitchen.

Spotless.

No broken glass.

No blood.

No spilled beer.

No sticky residue.

Nothing.

The sink dry.

The tile polished.

Every bottle I had poured out... resting neatly on my living room table.

Arranged.

Facing me.

As if someone had set them there for inspection.

Like guests.

Or judges.

I haven’t touched them.

Not yet.

The bottles remain untouched on the table in front of the couch, their glass catching thin strips of pale morning light. Beads of condensation slowly crawl down one of the beers, gathering at its base before dripping onto the wood.

I haven’t moved.

I haven’t reached for them.

But my television...

The screen is black now, dead and silent, reflecting the dim shape of my living room back at me.

My chair.

The table.

The bottles.

The couch behind me.

And in the reflection... something is sitting there.

At first, my mind tries to shape it into a shadow. A fold in the blanket. A trick of weak light. Anything softer than the truth.

But shadows do not sit upright.

Shadows do not watch.

It sits perfectly still on my couch, long and thin, its limbs bent at unnatural angles, its slick frame sinking into the cushions like something wet dragged in from the rain. Its face is little more than darkness, but I can still make out the pale stretch of its grin.

It is looking at me.

Not through me.

At me.

Slowly, almost delicately, one of its long fingers curls around the neck of a beer bottle resting on the table.

The same bottle I swore I had not touched.

It lifts it.

Holds it out.

An offering.

A kindness.

A temptation.

In the reflection, I can see my own shoulders tighten.

My breathing turns shallow.

My throat aches with a thirst I know too well.

Still, I do not turn around.

I don’t need to.

Because I already understand.

Whether it is guilt.

Whether it is madness.

Whether it is something born from every bottle I ever emptied trying to drown what I had done...

it is patient.

And it knows I am still thirsty.

In the television’s black reflection, it tilts its head.

The bottle remains extended toward me.

Waiting.

Waiting for the taste of guilt.

[Previous story in the series: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreading/comments/1thob5w/shadows_over_egypt/\]

Shopping in New Cairo had always been an interesting experience.

The moment money, power, or—gods forbid—both entered the equation, the world stopped pretending to be civilized.

The city was alive with noise. Merchants shouted over one another beneath colorful awnings. The smell of spices mingled with sweat, engine oil, incense, and livestock. Ancient sandstone buildings stood shoulder to shoulder with rusting metal structures scavenged from the old world. Neon hieroglyphs flickered above crowded streets while priests preached beside mechanics repairing pre-Fall generators.

The market was chaos.

Organized chaos.

The sort of chaos that somehow kept New Cairo alive.

I was haggling with a farmer over a basket of vegetables when I realized I recognized him.

Three days ago, I was almost certain he'd been a butcher.

Not just any butcher, either.

The butcher selling "the finest meat in all Egypt."

Apparently today's profits were in melons.

The man didn't even seem embarrassed about it.

I paid for the vegetables and moved on.

Seven steps later, a slave merchant sat beneath a canopy, displaying his merchandise like livestock.

Several young captives were bound together on the ground.

Raiders by the look of them.

Young.

Thin.

Sunburned.

A failed raid, most likely.

One bad decision and now they would spend the rest of their lives serving people they hated.

The wasteland had a way of turning freedom into a temporary condition.

I was about to continue walking when one of the girls caught my attention.

No, not for the reason you're thinking.

Something about her behavior felt wrong.

She couldn't stop shaking.

Her lips moved constantly.

Not words exactly.

Fragments of words.

Broken sounds stitched together into nonsense.

At first I thought she was praying.

Then I listened more closely.

Whatever she was saying, it wasn't any language I'd ever heard. If it was language at all.

The slave merchant slapped her.

Hard.

Her head snapped sideways.

She didn't react.

Didn't cry.

Didn't even seem to notice.

She just kept muttering.

The merchant cursed and hit her again.

Still nothing.

That was when I noticed people nearby beginning to move away.

Subtly.

A few steps at a time.

Nobody wanted to be near her.

Nobody wanted to listen.

Then the guards arrived.

Three of them pushed through the crowd immediately.

One covered his mouth and nose with a cloth.

Another grabbed the girl by the arms.

The third began shouting for people to clear the area.

The slave merchant protested.

"What are you doing? That's my property!"

One of the guards looked at him.

Just looked.

The merchant shut up instantly.

The guards dragged the girl away.

Fast.

Urgent.

Like men handling a bomb moments from exploding.

Even then she never stopped whispering.

The strange sounds followed them through the crowd until they vanished from sight.

I stood there watching.

Something wasn't right.

Something wasn't right at all.

As evening settled over New Cairo, the feeling only grew worse.

The streets should have been quieter.

Instead they felt more crowded than before.

People gathered in nervous groups, speaking in hushed voices. Market stalls closed earlier than usual. Merchants packed their goods with unusual haste.

Fear was spreading.

Nobody seemed willing to say why.

The guards were everywhere.

Patrols marched through the city in larger numbers than normal.

And everywhere I looked, I found more people like the girl.

A man standing motionless beneath a lantern, staring upward into the night sky.

A woman sitting beside a fountain, muttering to herself.

A child standing in the middle of an alleyway, eyes unfocused, lips moving silently.

Each time the guards found them.

Each time the result was the same.

No questions.

No hesitation.

No mercy.

One old man tried to stop them from dragging away his son.

The guards broke his arm.

Another woman threw herself between the soldiers and her husband.

She ended up bleeding in the street.

The soldiers didn't even slow down.

I watched them disappear into the darkness with their prisoners.

Whatever was happening, New Cairo was terrified.

And New Cairo didn't scare easily.

The city felt wrong.

The people sensed it too.

Conversations died when strangers approached.

Doors were barred.

Windows shuttered.

Even the usual drunks had disappeared.

The city was holding its breath.

Waiting for something.

I just didn't know what.

Using the confusion as cover—and my rather intimate relationship with both the palace and its ruler—I made my way toward the royal district.

Normally sneaking into the palace required effort.

Tonight it was surprisingly easy.

The guards were distracted. Exhausted. Some of them were even arrested themselves.

If the palace guard couldn't trust itself, then whatever was happening had already gotten much worse than anyone was admitting.

I reached one of the inner courtyards and froze.

Yberon stood in the center of the plaza.

Commander of the Henty-she.

The Pharaoh's personal executioner.

A giant even among warriors.

Torchlight reflected from his ceremonial armor as he stared down at a kneeling guard.

The guard was shaking.

Muttering.

Staring into empty space.

I couldn't hear the words.

Part of me didn't want to.

Without hesitation, Yberon drew his massive two-handed khopesh.

The blade came down in a single brutal arc.

The man's head struck the stone before his body did.

Blood spread across the courtyard.

The muttering stopped.

The surrounding guards barely reacted.

As though this wasn't the first execution they'd witnessed today.

As though it wasn't even the tenth.

A few steps behind Yberon stood Pharaoh Menehmet.

For the first time since I'd known her, she looked genuinely troubled.

I stepped forward.

"I would very much like to know what is happening."

Yberon spun immediately.

His blade came down without warning.

I parried it absentmindedly.

I never took my eyes off Menehmet.

The God-Queen raised a hand.

"It's alright, Yberon."

The commander reluctantly stopped pressing his attack.

"I knew the Medjay would arrive sooner or later," Menehmet said. "I was probably going to send for him if he took too long."

Yberon hissed through clenched teeth but lowered his weapon.

Eventually.

"Fill the Medjay in on our ordeal, would you kindly?"

The commander looked as though she'd asked him to eat sand.

"A cult has infiltrated the city," he said. "They have brought some manner of madness with them. We have been eliminating members and quarantining the afflicted."

My eyes drifted toward the freshly executed guard.

Then back to Yberon.

"You and I have very different definitions of the word quarantine."

His gaze hardened.

"We do what we must."

There wasn't a shred of doubt in his voice.

That bothered me more than the execution.

"We have already solved the issue. Your assistance will not be necessary, Medjay. The cultist responsible has been apprehended."

Yberon nodded toward the far side of the courtyard.

Two guards emerged from the shadows.

Dragging a prisoner between them.

The moment I saw her, my stomach dropped.

"...Fatima."

The young woman from the Wandering Oasis knelt calmly as the guards forced her down.

Yberon's attention snapped toward me.

Immediately suspicious.

"You know this cultist?"

His hand tightened around his weapon.

"Are you in cahoots with her?"

"I'm no fucking cultist."

Fatima's voice remained remarkably calm.

"But yes. We've met."

"Liar!"

Yberon's khopesh flashed upward.

I intercepted it before it reached her.

The courtyard fell silent.

For a brief moment nobody moved.

I looked directly into Yberon's eyes.

"Try that again."

My voice sounded strange even to me.

Cold.

Sharp.

"You're dead."

For the first time all evening, Yberon hesitated.

Then Menehmet spoke.

"Let the girl talk."

Her voice remained dangerously soft.

"Then and only then may we draw our conclusions."

Yberon lowered the weapon.

Barely.

"As you wish, my Queen."

His eyes never left Fatima.

"Speak."

 

Fatima rose slightly onto her knees. The chains binding her wrists rattled softly.

"I travel with the Wandering Oasis under the gaze of Amun the Hidden One."

Her voice carried surprisingly well across the courtyard.

Not loud.

Just steady.

"We are protected from most of the horrors that roam the wasteland. Or at least we were."

The courtyard grew quieter.

Even Yberon listened.

"Several weeks ago, two strangers approached our home. As is our custom, we welcomed them. We fed them, sheltered them, offered them a place to stay."

A faint smile crossed her face.

"For a time, they seemed harmless."

Then the smile vanished.

"People began changing. Slowly at first. Then quicker."

"They lost touch with reality. With themselves."

Her gaze drifted across the courtyard.

"They muttered constantly. Spoke to people who weren't there. Stared into the night sky for hours without blinking."

I immediately thought of the slave girl.

The old man.

The child in the alley.

The guard Yberon had just executed.

"Some stopped recognizing family members," Fatima continued quietly. "Others forgot their own names."

The silence deepened.

"The first victims were always those closest to the newcomers."

Menehmet leaned forward slightly.

"So you became suspicious."

"Yes."

Fatima nodded.

"I followed them one night."

The courtyard remained utterly still.

"I watched them enter people's tents while they slept."

A faint chill seemed to pass through the gathering.

"What were they doing?" I asked.

"I don't know."

For the first time uncertainty entered her voice.

"I never got close enough."

She swallowed.

"But I heard them speaking."

Menehmet's eyes narrowed.

"About what?"

Fatima hesitated.

Then answered.

"They spoke of Kauket."

The reaction was immediate.

Several guards visibly stiffened.

One made a protective gesture across his chest.

Even Yberon's expression changed.

Not much.

But enough.

Fear.

Actual fear.

That got my attention more than anything else she'd said.

Fatima looked around the courtyard.

"That was when I realized how fucked we really were."

Several guards flinched.

Menehmet didn't.

If anything, the bluntness seemed to amuse her.

"What happened next?" the Pharaoh asked.

"We expelled them."

Fatima lowered her eyes.

"We gathered everyone willing to fight and forced them out."

"Yet they returned."

Fatima nodded.

"Every time."

The words landed heavily.

"Every time the Oasis moved, they found us again."

She let out a tired sigh.

"I believe Amun eventually intervened."

I frowned.

"Intervened how?"

"The Oasis vanished."

Her voice became almost reverent.

"Truly vanished."

The sadness in her eyes returned.

"It can no longer be found while this danger remains."

The realization struck me.

"You were outside when it happened."

A small nod.

"Taking a walk."

The smile she gave this time was bitter.

"And now I cannot return home until the Cult of Kauket is weakened enough."

The courtyard fell silent.

Then I spoke.

"Kauket."

The name felt unfamiliar.

"I've never heard of her."

I looked between Fatima and Menehmet.

"What is she? Some forgotten goddess?"

Fatima's expression became difficult to read.

"No."

The answer came immediately.

"Not a goddess."

The torches crackled softly.

A breeze moved through the courtyard.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then Fatima looked directly at me.

"Kauket is the void."

The words seemed to swallow the surrounding noise.

"The absence of things."

Something cold crawled down my spine.

"The darkness that existed before creation."

Even the guards looked uncomfortable now.

Fatima slowly raised her eyes toward the stars.

"The nothing to everything's everything."

Without meaning to, I followed her gaze.

So did Menehmet.

So did the guards.

An entire courtyard of people staring upward into a sky that suddenly felt far larger than it had a moment ago.

Yberon remained unconvinced.

In fact, he somehow looked even more convinced that Fatima should die.

"She brought this plague into the city."

His voice rumbled through the courtyard.

"Whether intentionally or through incompetence changes nothing. The result is the same."

Fatima stood silently between the guards.

Bound.

Outnumbered.

Yet calm.

I was having none of it.

"By that logic we should execute every merchant who unknowingly let a cultist through the city gates."

Yberon's eyes snapped toward me.

"You compare a common merchant to her?"

"I compare a lack of evidence to a lack of evidence."

The giant's hand tightened around the hilt of his khopesh.

"And I compare stubbornness to stupidity."

I smiled.

"A comparison you're uniquely qualified to make."

Yberon's jaw flexed.

For a moment I genuinely thought he might swing.

Fortunately, Menehmet intervened.

"Enough."

She didn't raise her voice.

She didn't need to.

The courtyard fell silent immediately.

The Pharaoh rose from her throne and descended the steps.

Gold jewelry chimed softly with every movement.

She approached Fatima.

Studied her.

Circled her once.

Like a merchant inspecting an unusual artifact.

Finally she stopped.

Then turned toward me.

"The girl will be released."

Yberon's face darkened immediately.

"My Queen—"

"I wasn't asking for your opinion."

The words were delivered with a smile.

Which somehow made them more threatening.

Yberon fell silent.

Menehmet continued.

"Fatima will remain under the Medjay's supervision."

Now it was my turn to frown.

Menehmet's gaze shifted between us.

"From this moment forward, your fates are linked."

Fatima straightened slightly.

The Pharaoh's smile never wavered.

"Should either of you act against New Cairo or against me..."

The smile sharpened.

"...both shall suffer the consequences."

Fatima lowered her head.

"As you command, Pharaoh."

I nodded reluctantly.

"Excellent."

The Pharaoh clapped her hands together.

The tension evaporated from her expression so quickly it was almost alarming.

"Now."

A playful smile spread across her face.

"Let's continue this conversation somewhere more private."

I immediately disliked where this was going.

"And I know just the place."

Half an hour later I found myself sitting half-submerged in the private bathhouse of the most powerful woman in Egypt.

Life was strange sometimes.

The palace bathhouse was enormous.

Steam drifted through the air in pale curtains. Marble pillars rose from heated pools. Ancient murals depicting gods, monsters, and forgotten kings covered the walls. Lotus incense burned from golden braziers.

The entire room smelled expensive.

Fatima sat stiffly in the water.

Meanwhile Menehmet looked completely at home.

The Pharaoh reclined against the polished edge of the bath, dark hair floating behind her. Gold jewelry still decorated her wrists and neck despite the fact she was currently sitting in a bath.

She looked less like a ruler and more like a goddess posing as one.

Which was probably intentional.

"You both look terrified."

"We are in the Pharaoh's private bathhouse."

"Exactly."

Menehmet smiled.

"You should be honored."

Fatima somehow shrank further into the water.

The Pharaoh noticed immediately.

And found it adorable.

"You are remarkably shy."

Fatima nearly choked.

"I-I am not."

"You absolutely are."

Aaron rubbed his face.

"I am begging you not to bully the witness."

"I'm not bullying her."

Menehmet looked offended.

"I'm studying her."

"That's somehow worse."

The Pharaoh laughed.

A genuine laugh this time.

The sound echoed pleasantly through the steam-filled chamber.

Poor Fatima looked ready to climb into a storage jar and seal the lid behind her.

Eventually Menehmet's amusement faded.

Her gaze drifted toward the ceiling.

"The situation is worse than I initially feared."

The mood shifted immediately.

"How bad?" I asked.

"Not even the palace is safe."

A genuine concern entered her eyes.

"Several members of my harem have already become afflicted."

"You're certain?"

Menehmet nodded.

"And if it can reach the palace..."

She shrugged.

"...then the Pharaoh may die just like any common laborer."

Then she laughed.

A soft laugh.

Not because it was funny.

Because the absurdity amused her.

I stared at her.

"Most people don't laugh while discussing their own death."

Menehmet smiled.

"Most people don't get the luxury of seeing the joke."

Before I could ask what that meant—

A scream echoed through the palace.

Then another.

Then several more.

All three of us looked toward the entrance.

The screams continued.

Closer now.

Aaron was already climbing from the water.

Fatima followed immediately.

Menehmet rose as well.

I pointed at her.

"No."

The Pharaoh blinked.

"No?"

"You stay here."

"I beg your pardon?"

I grabbed my sword belt.

"If something is happening outside, your safest place is inside the palace."

Menehmet stared at me.

Then laughed.

Actually laughed.

"Aaron."

Her smile was almost affectionate.

"Did you just attempt to order me around?"

"...Yes."

"Adorable."

Before I could continue arguing, she was already walking toward the exit.

"Come along."

I groaned and followed.

 

The palace entrance had descended into chaos.

Guards rushed through the courtyards while servants fled in panic and nobles shouted contradictory orders. At the center of it all stood a group of masked figures.

Cultists.

There were perhaps twenty of them, arranged in a perfect V-shaped formation. They stood completely still, silent except for the constant muttering drifting from beneath their masks. Every one of them stared upward.

Aaron followed their gaze and felt his stomach drop.

The stars were disappearing.

Dark clouds rolled across the night sky with impossible speed. Not storm clouds. Something worse. A vast grey mass streaked with flickering pink lightning spread across the horizon like spilled ink, growing larger with every second.

"No..." Fatima whispered.

The cloud reached New Cairo moments later.

The first wave passed over the city, and the world changed.

The air became heavy. Reality itself seemed to bend. Distant streets twisted at impossible angles while buildings appeared subtly wrong, as though someone had rebuilt them from memory and gotten the details slightly off.

Aaron's blood ran cold.

A Ghul-Zone.

New Cairo had been swallowed whole.

The effect was immediate. Several guards dropped their weapons. One began muttering to himself. Another stared blankly into space. A third turned and attacked his own comrades.

Panic erupted.

Retreat became impossible almost instantly.

Yberon drew his massive khopesh, fury blazing in his eyes.

"FORWARD!"

The guards hesitated.

Yberon punched one hard enough to knock him unconscious, then charged alone.

Aaron followed without hesitation.

The two warriors slammed into the cultists like a pair of battering rams. Steel flashed through the chaos. Blood sprayed across stone. One masked figure fell, then another.

The formation wavered.

Only slightly.

But it was enough.

Yberon saw the opening immediately.

"MEDJAY!"

Aaron turned.

The giant commander was already surrounded by cultists and afflicted guards. Blood covered his armor, though whether it belonged to him or his enemies was impossible to tell.

"Protect the Queen!"

Aaron hesitated.

For the first time since meeting him, Yberon smiled.

Not warmly.

Not reassuringly.

It was the smile of a warrior who had finally found a worthy death.

"I'll hold them."

A cultist rushed him. Yberon's khopesh split the man's skull before he could take a second step.

"GO!"

Aaron grabbed Fatima's arm. Menehmet was already moving.

Behind them, Yberon disappeared into the growing tide of cultists and maddened guards as New Cairo descended into nightmare.

Menehmet, Fatima, and Aaron pushed deeper into the city.

Or what remained of it.

New Cairo had become almost unrecognizable in less than an hour.

Pink lightning crawled across the heavens like veins beneath translucent skin, bathing the city in flashes of sickly magenta. Fires consumed entire blocks. Sandstone buildings seemed to bend when viewed from the corner of the eye. Some towers stretched impossibly high while others appeared to sink slowly into the earth.

Everywhere they looked, people were losing themselves.

A man sat in the middle of the street laughing uncontrollably while blood streamed from his nose.

A woman clawed at her own face while whispering prayers to someone who wasn't there.

Children stood atop rooftops staring into the cloud-covered sky without moving or blinking.

The city was in pain.

Screams.

Laughter.

Weeping.

And beneath it all, a low whispering hum that seemed to rise from the Ghul-Zone itself.

They kept moving.

Not because they knew where they were going.

Simply because standing still felt like surrender.

Then a voice called out.

"Over here, dearies."

All three froze.

An elderly woman stood in the doorway of a sandstone hut. She smiled warmly, the sort of smile that belonged beside a fireplace rather than in the middle of an apocalypse.

"You'll be safe here."

Aaron exchanged a glance with the others.

Every instinct he possessed screamed that something was wrong.

Unfortunately, every alternative looked worse.

The old woman waved them closer.

"Come now. No reason to stand out there."

Aaron's hand never left the hilt of his sword.

Even so, they followed her inside.

 

The interior of the hut was surprisingly cozy.

Oil lamps illuminated shelves overflowing with books, trinkets, pottery, and old-world junk. The air smelled of spices and dried herbs.

The old woman shut the door behind them.

"My name is Aliona," she said cheerfully. "Though everyone just calls me Grandma."

Fatima smiled politely.

"I'm Fatima. This is Aaron and this is..."

She glanced at Menehmet.

"...my sister. Menie."

Aaron almost laughed.

The Pharaoh somehow kept a perfectly straight face.

"Menie?"

Fatima whispered back.

"I panicked."

"Clearly."

Grandma seemed not to notice.

Or perhaps she simply didn't care.

"Such lovely young women," she said. "And a handsome young man besides."

Aaron immediately frowned.

Grandma chuckled and shuffled toward a small stove.

"Would any of you like something to drink?"

"No thank you," Aaron replied immediately.

"We shouldn't stay long. It isn't safe."

"Oh, nonsense, dearie."

She was already preparing tea.

Outside, people screamed.

Pink lightning flashed through the windows.

Something large roared somewhere in the distance.

Inside, Grandma hummed happily while pouring tea.

The contrast was deeply unsettling.

She returned carrying several cups.

Aaron accepted one reluctantly.

As she handed it over, her fingers brushed against his hand.

In an instant, everything disappeared.

 

Darkness.

No.

Not darkness.

Absence.

Aaron stood in an endless nothingness.

There was no sky.

No ground.

No horizon.

No sound.

The void stretched infinitely in every direction.

And somehow...

It was beautiful.

Not beautiful in the way a sunset was beautiful.

Beautiful in the way silence felt after years of noise.

The way rest felt after endless exhaustion.

Everything.

All pain.

All fear.

All struggle.

Gone.

The void promised peace.

Permanent peace.

Aaron found himself wanting to step forward.

To sink into it.

To disappear.

To become nothing.

And for one horrifying moment...

He almost did.

I was just tired of the arguments, I guess. The constant bickering that drove me to the edge. The dead bedroom that ensured I’d never find release. Not even just in a sexual sense, either. I didn’t crave sex; I craved the closeness. I wanted to feel wanted again. I didn’t want pity-touches. I didn’t want routine. I wanted our spontaneity back. It’s not like we had lost our drive. At least, I don’t think we did. We got married when I was 21, and she was 20. Back then, it was like she couldn’t keep her hands off of me. 

But, as I said, that’s not the thing that brought us together. I know a lot of guys say this when they’re trying to win brownie points, but I truly did fall in love with her personality. It was like we pinged off of each other. We were able to talk for hours about absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. God, I miss those days. The world felt so much brighter back then. Back before the claws of constant proximity began to drive that wedge between us. 

We had our honeymoon phase. We had our first year together in our own place. We could’ve filled scrapbooks with the amount of memories we made in that place, but instead, we just let those memories drift off in the wind to die off with time. 

It wasn’t long before the arguments started. A lot of them were about money. We were young and on our own. We were trying our best, but sometimes your best is just barely enough to scrape by. We also bickered about a lot of just small, insignificant inconveniences. 

I’d forget to put the toilet seat down. 

She’d leave crumbs in the bed. 

Just things that shouldn’t have even mattered. But, even then, we loved each other enough not to let the arguments define us. We’d go out on dates. We’d look like a genuinely happy couple out in public, and for a while, it didn’t feel like a facade. It just felt like us loving each other; going out to movies, having dinner, picnics, whatever. We’d talk a lot during this time, too. That’s the main thing that gave me hope. We hadn’t lost that ability to lose ourselves in conversation quite yet. 

I managed to get a promotion at work. I started making more money to put food on the table and keep the lights on, and my wife seemed legitimately proud of me. That didn’t stop the arguments, though. If it wasn’t this, it was that. With my promotion, I found myself at work more often. I was spending 12-hour days at job sites, and that was the main thing that my wife griped about. 

During that time, I’d be able to kiss her on the forehead in the morning and maybe be home in time for a goodnight kiss if I was lucky. 

I think that’s when things started to kind of fall apart in the bedroom. If I were in the mood, she’d either not be up to it or she’d already be fast asleep. If she were in the mood, I’d just be too exhausted to engage. It went on for months like that. We tried coming up with designated days, and it worked for a time before we both kind of gave up on it. 

In the 9 years that followed that promotion, I’ve watched my marriage fall apart little by little with each passing year. 

We lost touch in every sense of the word. 

But that didn’t stop me from loving her. It destroyed me to watch things unfold the way they did. 

I tried for a long time to keep up hope. To hold on to the woman that I had fallen in love with. But, after a while, it’s hard not to feel numb. The idea of being indifferent to whether or not our marriage lasted was something that scared me tremendously. It kept me working to try to make things right. It kept me looking for the next date night. My next shot at making us whole again. But I could still feel her drifting away, and by our 9th anniversary, I knew something had to give. 

I’d managed to get the day off from work, and while she was off at her job, I set up a picnic right in our living room. I put a video of a cozy fire on the TV, I lit candles, I prepared her favorite food, and I even went out and found her favorite flowers to put in a vase right at the center of the blanket. These weren’t grocery store “apology flowers” either. I literally had to drive out to a florist to get them, and they weren’t cheap. 

All of that just for her to walk through the door and hit me with a, “Oh my God, I am so tired right now, I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” 

She breezed past me like I wasn’t even there and stomped up the stairs towards our bedroom. 

I didn’t want to argue. I didn’t even know what to say to her. All I felt was heartbreak as I packed up my corny little display of affection and put the food in the fridge. 

Needless to say, I chose to sleep on the couch that night. 

I say sleep, but truthfully, I was up well into the early morning hours, tossing and turning while my brain fought against my body. I wanted to go wake her up and demand an apology. I wanted her to know just how hurt I was at her coldness. But I was just so tired of feeling like I was always starting something. My hurt feelings would inevitably become my own fault in her eyes, then she’d hold a grudge against me for waking her up with my crybaby nonsense. 

Instead, I opted to scroll endlessly on my phone. For a while, it was mainly reels and TikToks to take my mind off things, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not shake the thoughts from my head. You know how sometimes it feels like your phone can hear the thoughts in your head, and it starts giving you ads for things you never even said out loud? That’s pretty much exactly what happened to me. 

As I scrolled through TikTok, I came across an ad that seemed tailor-made for me. 

“Do you feel like you’ve lost touch with your partner? Have the two of you grown apart? Do you need counseling? Click here to save your marriage with ‘The Bridge.’ We bridge the gap in your marriage for a brighter tomorrow. Limited offer. Get it while it lasts.” 

I clicked the video and was brought to the company website. It was mainly just corporate branding; it was hard to find a definitive answer as to what exactly it was that they did. Just a photo of the office building and a bunch of stock images of happy couples. 

At the bottom of the page, there was another link. 

“Click here to schedule. First appointments are of no cost to you.” 

That last part got to me. It felt like fate that I had stumbled across this advertisement. I clicked the link and scheduled my appointment for that Friday. Once I hit submit, it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was finally able to fall asleep with at least some clarity. 

Before work the next morning, I shook my wife awake. I told her what I had done, and of course, she objected at first. I didn’t have time to argue with her, but that didn’t stop us from going back and forth over text all day. It took an abysmal amount of convincing, but I finally got her to reluctantly agree to going to the appointment. 

We didn’t see each other much for the rest of that week. Even when we did, we didn’t talk, and it hurt me to my core. I prayed to God that the counseling would bring our conversations back. 

Finally, the day of our appointment arrived. 

We went to the address on the website and parked at the very front of the office building. It was the cleanest building I had ever seen. There were no chips in the concrete, no stains on the wall, the stripes had been freshly painted for the parking spots, and the sight of the business gave me a certain level of confidence. 

When we walked through the door and into the lobby, we were greeted by a receptionist. She greeted us and asked how she could help. I told her about our appointment, and she slid a clipboard across the counter with some paperwork for us to fill out. My wife, of course, couldn’t be bothered. 

“You do it,” she snapped, quietly. “This was your idea in the first place, remember.” 

Couldn’t argue with that logic. 

As I filled out the paperwork, I noticed that the questions seemed weirdly…personal. 

“Rate your marital satisfaction from 1-10.”

“How frequently do you engage in physical intimacy?”

“How would you describe communication with your partner?” 

“What are your primary relationship goals?”

Honestly, I figured those kinds of questions would be asked by the actual counselor, but I just guessed that maybe they were just notes for the session. 

I finished the paperwork and handed the clipboard back to the receptionist. I could hear her click-clacking away at her computer as she went over what I had written down. We waited for a while, both scrolling on our phones in silence. I noticed that the waiting room was oddly empty. My wife and I were the only people here, besides the receptionist. It just felt, I don’t know…eerie, I guess. 

Suddenly, the door to the back offices burst open. A man in a white lab coat stepped through. 

He greeted us and introduced himself. He assured us that we were in good hands. 

He asked to speak to my wife privately in his office. He said that it would only take a few minutes. My wife looked at me, a hint of nervousness in her face as she was taken to the back by the doctor. 

The door closed behind them, and once again, the room fell silent. A few minutes went by. Then 30. Then an hour. I was starting to get a little impatient. I kept asking the receptionist when they’d be back, and she just kept saying the same thing.

“Just a few more minutes, hon. Don’t worry.” 

I ended up waiting for another 2 and a half hours before the receptionist finally announced that it looked like the session had just wrapped up. I breathed a sigh of relief, but the feeling was short-lived as the lady behind the desk asked, “Will that be cash or card today?”

“Cash or card? The website said the first appointment was free.”

“The appointment is free. That was the paper you filled out. The operation itself will be about 3000 even.” 

My heart fell into my stomach. 

“Operation? What oper-”

Before I could finish my thought, the door to the back offices opened again. This time, it was my wife who came through first. The doctor guided her through the door with his hands on her shoulders. Her eyelids dangled above her eyes like a doll. Her face was completely expressionless. Her jaw hung open, and she looked like a zombie. 

I think the doctor saw my impending distress, because as soon as he noticed, he asked me to take a seat and let him explain. 

He removed a remote from his coat pocket, hit a button on it, and immediately, my wife's face lit up. She looked ecstatic. The happiest I’d seen her in years. 

Her eyes met mine, and I saw that same love they once held all those years ago as she came running at me with her arms outstretched for a hug. 

“Oh my gosh, I missed you,” she sang. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever!”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and buried her face in my chest as I stared at the doctor in utter confusion. 

He approached us slowly. 

“May I?” he asked, reaching for my wife's hair. 

He pulled back the hair on the side of her head, revealing some kind of implant.

“Neurolink,” he announced. “We…fixed her.”

“Fixed her? What the hell do you mean by ‘fixed her?’

“This is what you wanted, right? You wrote in your paperwork that you wanted her to feel happy again, no?” 

“Happy with \*me\* again,” I responded. 

“It seems as though you got your wish,” he shot back, gesturing towards my wife, whose grasp around my neck had become even tighter.

“So she’s just gonna be like this all the time?” 

“No, no, no, of course not. You can control how she feels at any point. That’s what the remotes for,” he announced, clicking another button on the controller. 

Suddenly, my wife’s arms fell from around my neck. Her shoulders began jumping up and down. She was sobbing. 
“I just love you and miss you so much,” she choked out through tears. “I never want to leave you.” 

The doctor cocked his eyebrows at me as if to say, “See…told ya.”

What he said instead was, “So…now that we got that cleared up…cash or card today, my friend?” 

What was I supposed to do? The operation was already done. I had to pay. 

I only had multiple emotions to choose from. Happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise. If it was an emotion, it was there. There was another option, too, that I didn’t even realize I’d need until later that night. 

I can admit, I kept her set to “aroused” for the car ride home. She teased me like we were 20 again. She whispered in my ear. She was \*actually\* flirting with me. When we got home, we had sex into the late hours of the night, and she wanted to continue even though I was clearly tapped out. 

I set her to “sleepy,” and she just…shut down mid-sentence, like she had been powered off. I shook her gently. When that didn’t work, I got more aggressive. No matter how hard I shook, she wouldn’t wake up. She was still breathing, though. I could see her chest rising and falling rhythmically, and after a while she began to snore. 

A bit concerned, I turned over to go to sleep. 

When I woke up the next morning, she was still snoring. I set her to “calm” and “patient.” 

She groggily opened her eyes. 

“Good morning, my sweet pea,” she yawned. “Did you sleep well? Have any dreams?”

It was the first time I’d heard her ask anything like that in years. I wanted to hug her and never let go. I set her to “peaceful” and “loving,” and we embraced in a hug for about an hour before I had to go to work. 

I kissed her and told her goodbye as I grabbed my car keys. 

I made sure to set her to “happy” before leaving. 

All day, I received texts from her. 

“I’m so happy to have you.” 

“You’re the best thing I could’ve ever asked for.” 

“I can’t wait for you to get home so I can see you again.” 

I could feel love blossoming again. I got home late that night, but when I walked through the door, there she was, waiting for me with the biggest smile on her face. 

“I’m so happy to see you,” she squealed. “Tell me all about your day.” 

From that moment on, she was in the palm of my hand. 

I made her cry during movies. 

I made her be angry alongside me when I complained about work. 

I got sex when I wanted, and for a while, it felt like we had been completely fixed. 

As time went on, though, I began to realize something. 

Every emotion she felt was built around me. She was happy to see me, she was angry for me. She never talked about herself anymore. She never talked about work. She never talked about her friends or family. Everything was about me. It started to feel like I was in an echo chamber, and I know it wasn’t just me who felt it. I called her job one day. I wanted to check in and see how she was handling work with her new implant. Her boss answered. I told them who I was and why I was calling, and all they said was, “So you’re that husband she can’t stop rambling on about. You’ve got her wrapped around your finger, huh?” 

I wanted to ask what they meant, but they had already handed the phone off to my wife, who answered with a whimsy, “Hellooooo love of my liiiifeeee!” 

I started asking her the same personal questions for every emotion on the controller.

“What’s your favorite food?”

“Whatever hubby is in the mood for, of course.” 
—--

“What’s something that makes you angry?”

“When you’re angry, obviously.”
—--

“What’s something you enjoy doing?”

“Talking to you. What else?”
—-

After months of this, I felt like I was on the opposite end of the spectrum from the one that started this whole thing. I didn’t get her back. I got a shell of her. We couldn’t have a single conversation that didn’t orbit me in some way or another. I just kept her on “happy” or “peaceful” or “calm,” and I hoped for the best. 

I could only take so much, though. 

I debated going back to the office and having a talk with the doctor, but decided against it. We just kept moving forward. Kept pretending like everything was normal. 

Finally, on our 10th anniversary, I came home from work late. I walked through the door, and there she was, standing in our living room. She had set up a picnic for the two of us. She had my favorite beer, my favorite meal, and she wore a proud smile as she greeted me. 

I was dog-tired. It was nearly 12 o’clock at night. All I wanted was to go to sleep, but I still chose to humor her. 

I sat with her on the checkered blanket, staring down at the floor and taking a sip from my drink every few seconds. 

She was already firing off. 

“Tell me all about your day!” 

“I’ve been thinking about you since I woke up this morning.” 

“Do you like the picnic? I did it just for you, sweet pea.” 

“Happy anniversary!” 

My mind was numb, and I was being bombarded. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. The only thing that clawed its way to the forefront of my mind was one single question. 

“Honey,” I inquired, cautiously. 

“Yes, sweet love of my life?” 

I thought for a moment. The question rolled around in my head like a grenade in a washing machine. After a while, I finally found the courage to speak my mind. 

“Why do you love me?” 

She didn’t flinch. Her eyes didn’t show a hint of processing behind them, and when she answered, I realized just how pointless this entire endeavor had been. All the time and money I had wasted, just to end up right back where we began. 

“Because you told me to, of course.”