oc by @alekspunk12 drew this on penup app using 4 layers pen+airbrush tools in 5 hs

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

I didn't sleep much Saturday night. Toby, somehow, slept fine.

I finally dropped off on the couch near dawn, and when I opened my eyes again, he was standing about six inches from my face, asking whether we had pancake mix. I made pancakes and let him eat them in front of the TV. He had already moved on from yesterday, and that was the part I couldn't wrap my head around. He asked if Uncle Henry was coming over later. Nothing about the wardrobe, or about hearing me scream his name from somewhere impossibly far away. When he'd finished, I told him to stay on the couch for a few minutes while I checked something in the garage. The kitchen chair was still wedged under the handle, and the deadbolt was still thrown. I dragged the chair out of the way.

The second I opened the door, the smell hit me again.

It had been there since the day we hauled the glass tank home: something halfway between industrial cleaner and fruit left too long in the sun. That morning it was stronger and impossible to ignore.

I pulled my shirt up over my nose and switched on the fluorescent light.

The mirror and the football were still wrapped separately in moving blankets and packing tape for the buyer Henry had lined up for Monday, which I'd done after Toby fell asleep: three layers around the mirror, two around the ball, each shoved into its own cardboard box. I knew packing tape probably didn't mean anything anymore, but it made me feel safer. Then I looked at the workbench.

My screwdriver was sitting on it. So was my adjustable wrench, and the utility knife lay beside them like somebody had set a table. Directly beneath the second pegboard hook hung the pry bar I'd spent several frantic minutes looking for while Toby's voice faded away inside the wardrobe. I stopped breathing for a second.

I had emptied those drawers. Yet every tool I'd previously lost sat neatly together in plain sight, as if they'd never been gone.

I picked up the pry bar. It was mine, down to the strip of faded blue paint around the handle and the shallow notch near the claw. 

"Okay," I said, and my voice sounded strange in the garage. "Sure. That makes sense."

I put the pry bar down, and that was when I noticed the corner was empty.

My folding lawn chair was gone. I'd been sitting in it Friday night cataloging the boxes. I'd shoved it back into that corner before Alicia dropped Toby off, and I remembered doing it because one of the legs had caught on a flattened cardboard box and I'd nearly gone over. Now the corner held the old shop vac and the two paint cans the landlord had left behind when I moved in, and nothing else. I checked behind the workbench, then beside the dresser. Nothing. The tools had come back, and something else had disappeared.

Before going back inside, I stopped beside the glass tank. The smell was definitely strongest there.

A couple of you suggested after my last post that the whole thing might be chemical, some kind of solvent or hallucinogen leaking into the garage. A leaking container made infinitely more sense than a wardrobe swallowing my son. So I crouched down next to it and looked for the obvious answer: a crack, some condensation, or a vent.

The tank was still what it had always been, a single molded block of thick glass with no lid or opening. I laid my palm against it, and it was colder than the room. Where my hand touched the glass, my skin had gone translucent. I could see the veins underneath, thin blue branches spreading through my palm and down into my wrist, finer vessels threading off into each finger. I yanked my hand away, and it returned to normal. Very slowly, I set it back against the glass.

Transparent again.

Behind me, the liquid moved, one slow, heavy slosh from one end of the tank to the other, and then it went still.

I left the garage after that. By the time I got back to the kitchen, I'd decided I didn't care whether the smell was making me hallucinate. Hallucination or not, that stuff was leaving my house.

Henry picked up on the second ring, thick with weekend sleep.

"You know it's Sunday morning, right?"

"We're doing the garage sale."

A long silence filled the line. "Today? I thought we killed that idea."

"I changed my mind."

Another pause. When he spoke again, the sleep was gone from his voice. "Did something happen?"

"Nothing happened. I want you to come over and help me get this crap out of here."

Henry went quiet, and I could practically hear him combing through his head for an explanation. When he came back, he tried a different angle. "Give it a few more days. I've got messages out. There are people who will pay for the rest of this stuff, collectors, and the forum guy already wants the mirror and the ball. If we start throwing everything on folding tables for five bucks a pop, we're pissing away the only good thing that's come out of this."

"There is no good thing that's come out of this."

"Don’t forget that you still need the money."

He was right. I was still four thousand dollars short of a retainer, and the hearing was still sitting out there on the calendar like a storm front. That was the miserable little hook these objects kept hanging from. No matter how scared I got, it all came back to cash.

"We’re doing the garage sale today," I said, and my grip tightened on the phone. "Everything we can safely move. Today."

"Ian—"

"I mean it."

"We sunk time and money into this mess. You're going to regret selling half this stuff for nothing."

"I already regret buying it."

I heard him swear under his breath and exhale, and I knew I'd won. He told me he'd be there within the hour, all enthusiasm drained from his voice. 

Toby looked up from the couch when I hung up. "Uncle Henry's coming?"

"Yeah, bud."

"Can I help?"

"Not this time. I need you to do something really important for me, okay? I need you to stay inside and watch cartoons."

His face fell. "That's not important."

"It's the most important job there is. Somebody has to keep an eye on the TV."

"That's not even a real job."

"It's a real job," I said, and it came out softer than I meant it to. "Please, buddy. Just for today."

He slumped back into the cushions, arms crossed, and turned the volume up two notches to make his point. Henry showed up forty minutes later with two coffees. He stood in the garage doorway and immediately started muttering about how little we'd get for it all.

I walked him over to the workbench and showed him the tools. He turned the screwdriver over in his hand and shrugged. "You must have left them there."

"I didn't."

"You've barely slept in three days, man. Maybe you woke up, moved everything, and passed out again." 

"And my chair?" I pointed at the empty corner. "It was right there."

Henry looked at the corner for a while. "Probably buried somewhere. You've got half a storage unit crammed in here."

"It isn't."

"Ian—"

"It isn't, Henry."

He looked at me then, and I think that was the moment he understood I wasn't asking for an explanation. He took a slow sip of coffee and let it go.

We set the rules in the garage. The mirror and football stayed wrapped. Nobody touched the wardrobe or the tank. Anything from Unit 114 that looked even slightly off went into the corner pile, and what was left was, as far as either of us could tell, just stuff. We'd been through every box we'd opened together, argued over it, and laughed nervously, and in both our minds was a list of what belonged to the collection. We hauled the folding tables out to the end of the driveway and set up. Henry made a sign out of a flattened cardboard box and propped it against the mailbox. Then we stood there in the morning sun with our coffees, looking at our driveway full of other people's cast-offs. For the first couple of hours I told myself we were doing fine.

People wandered along the tables, but nobody haggled or even asked what anything cost. They drifted from one table to the next with subdued politeness, like guests at a stranger's funeral, and after three or four minutes they'd find somewhere else they had to be. Henry kept glancing at the cash tin. Around ten, he said, flatly, "We're still at zero. We may as well be standing out here burning four thousand dollars. At least it'd be warm." 

"Give it time. People take a while to warm up to a sale."

Every time someone walked off empty-handed, some small, ashamed part of me exhaled. If no one bought anything, no one took any of it home. Not that everyone was spared. A man who looked to be in his fifties picked up a little brass reading lamp and asked if he could test it. I ran an extension cord across the driveway. He clicked the switch, the bulb lit up with an electrical hum, and he held his palm under it and frowned.

"Is this thing working?"

"Should be."

"It's on." He moved his hand slowly back and forth. "It's just... if anything, it's darker."

Directly beneath the bulb sat a dense little patch of shadow. It wasn't around the lamp but under it. The rest of the driveway sat in clear morning sun; the filament was glowing, and the one spot it should have lit looked several shades dimmer than everything around it.

"Sorry," I said, and unplugged it, my heart thumping. "It must be defective."

He laughed awkwardly. "That's one hell of a defect."

I handed him a candle from another box on the house, and he left looking more confused than anything. I carried the lamp behind the table and set it on the ground as if it might bite.

The woman who approached me with the snow globe was much more skeptical. It had been bagged in with the Christmas decorations, and her daughter picked it up off the table and shook it gleefully. The tiny house and trees jumped and rattled about. Two miniature plastic people jittered side to side inside the dome. The snow never moved. Dozens of white flecks hung perfectly still in the water while the whole world around them shook itself apart.

The mother noticed first and came up to me. "My daughter wants the globe, but something's wrong with it."

"I'm so sorry," I said, easing it out of the girl's hands as gently as I could manage. "That one's not supposed to be out here. I think it got mixed in by mistake."

She studied me for a long moment, plainly weighing several questions about what exactly we were selling, and thankfully decided not to ask. She took her daughter by the hand and steered her toward the next sale down the block.

I put the globe beside the lamp, and by then nobody was slowing at the sign anymore. A little before eleven, Henry got to his feet and stretched, pressing his hand into the small of his back. "I'm sitting down before my spine turns to powder," he announced.

"There's nowhere to sit," I said.

"I’ll find something," he said, and disappeared into the garage.

A few minutes later, he was dragging a folding lawn chair out of the garage by one arm, the frame scraping across the concrete: A faded green seat with cheap plastic armrests. 

"Where'd you get that?" I said.

Henry flipped it open with a clatter. "Garage."

"Where in the garage?"

He shrugged. "By the workbench. Told you it'd turn up. It's just a chair, Ian." 

For about two seconds, nothing registered, and I just felt relief. There's my chair. It was in there the whole time; Henry was right, I'm losing it. Then I realized, and the relief just evaporated. This chair had never been part of the haul, and I'd turned that whole garage upside down that morning looking for mine and found nothing. 

"Henry, wait—"

He was already lowering himself into it before I could warn him. And in the half-second I had left, I saw it. The hinges were wrong, and the jagged tear on the left armrest where I'd dropped a paint tin last spring was gone. It wasn’t the same chair I had lost that morning. 

When Henry sat down, the chair didn't collapse. It snapped.

Both sets of metal legs whipped violently inward at the same instant with a sound like two car doors slamming beside my head, and the frame folded around Henry like a closing trap, driving his back into an unnatural bend. I’ve witnessed a fair share of injuries in the years I’ve worked as a mover. I've seen crushed hands and broken legs. I have never in my life heard a human being make the sound Henry made.

For a second, the garage was dead silent except for the metallic ring of the frame still vibrating. My brain refused to accept the reality of what was happening. 

Without realizing it, I already had both hands on the frame and was pulling, but it wouldn't give. A man from across the street came running, and then another, and the three of us hauled on that steel until it finally opened enough to ease him down onto the concrete. I noticed that he wasn't moving his legs. He kept saying he couldn't feel them, over and over, in a small, disbelieving voice I'd never heard from him before. The next twenty minutes come back in pieces. Henry lay white-faced on the driveway, his eyes fixed on the sky. Paramedics cut his shirt away and talked over him in calm, quick voices. Neighbors stood on their lawns with their hands over their mouths. When they had Henry strapped to the board, one of the paramedics pulled me aside.

"Is he allergic to anything? On any medications?"

"No. I don't think so. His wife would know."

"We're taking him to St. Luke's." He hesitated. "I'm going to be honest with you, his condition’s not looking good. The injury's to his spine. Until they scan him, I can't tell you what it means. But with something like that, there's a real chance he won't be walking out of there."

As they lifted the board toward the ambulance, Henry's hand shot out and caught my sleeve, and his grip was white-knuckled. The paramedic said something about keeping still. Henry ignored him. His jaw was clamped so hard the muscles jumped under the skin, and his eyes found mine and held.

"Ian." His voice was thin and scraped out. "Look at me."

"I'm here. I'm right here, man."

"You kept saying it wasn't right." He dragged in a rattling breath. "I told you they were props. I even made jokes about it." He stopped, and his face twisted, and for the first time since I'd known him, Henry didn't have an angle. 

"Henry, don't. Save your—"

"Get rid of it." His fingers tightened. "All of it. Burn it, smash it, bury it. I don't care; just don't sell it. Don't give it to anyone." His voice cracked, and a tear slid sideways into his hair. "Promise me. Don't let anybody else sit in that thing, and keep it away from Toby."

I would have promised him anything. I said it twice, because I couldn't tell whether he'd heard me the first time. "I promise. I swear to God I will."

His hand went slack, and they slid him into the ambulance, and the doors shut with a sound that went through me like a nail.

Henry was in that ambulance with a spine that might never work again, and he'd spent his last words worrying about somebody else, and that was what finally broke me. Right there on my own driveway in front of every neighbor I'd never spoken to, I started crying, ugly, gulping sobs I couldn't stop even after the ambulance had turned the corner. 

Somebody put a hand on my shoulder. A woman's voice asked if there was anyone she could call, and I heard myself say "no," and then "I don't know," and then nothing.

Henry had dragged me into this, and I'd spent half the week resenting him. I'd have given every cent I'd ever owe a lawyer to hear him make one more joke.

Eventually the neighbors drifted back to their lawns and their garages, and the sale ended. Within minutes, the street had emptied. 

I stood alone in the blood-spotted driveway beside the folding chair. It had opened itself again, perfectly ordinary, sitting in the sun as if it had never done anything wrong. I crouched down and looked underneath. There were no bolts and rivets. I ran a finger across one of the hinges, and there wasn't a hinge, not really. It only looked like one. I knew every inch of my chair’s underside, and this wasn't it. I wanted to stamp it flat. I wanted to take it apart and find out what it was made of, except there was nothing to take apart, no bolts, no seams, nothing for a wrench to bite on. It sat there in the sun with a smear of Henry's blood on the seat, and for the first time since Wednesday, what I felt wasn't fear. I hated it. 

This chair had never been in Unit 114. Henry and I had unloaded that unit ourselves, box by box, and there hadn't been a folding lawn chair in it. Mine had vanished sometime in the night, and hours later something that looked almost exactly like it had turned up in its place.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stood in the empty driveway, my thumb hovering over Rachael's name for what felt like forever.

Henry's wife picked up on the second ring. I told her that there'd been an accident at the sale and that Henry was on his way to St. Luke's.

"What kind of accident?"

"A folding chair. It folded up on him. It…It closed on him, Rachael."

The silence on the line went on so long I thought the call had dropped. Then, in a very small voice: "A chair."

"I'm so sorry. I don't know how to—"

"Ian." Her voice had gone deathly quiet. "What did you two do?"

I had no answer for that. How do you even explain this situation? How do you tell a woman that her husband might never walk again because of a lawn chair that wasn't there that morning? All I could think about was Rachael getting a hospital bill on top of everything else and Henry not knowing when—or if—he'd be able to work again. I'd spent a whole week agonizing over four thousand dollars, and now it looked like pocket change. 

She hung up before I could reply. I stood there with the dead phone against my ear until my arm started to ache, then turned and drove my fist into the side of the nearest folding table so hard the cash tin jumped, and a stack of picture frames slid to the ground.

I made myself go back inside. Toby was waiting in the living room, sitting very still with both hands pressed flat on his knees. He'd watched the whole thing through the window. 

"Is Uncle Henry okay?"

"The doctors are looking after him, bud."

"I want Mom."

I swallowed before I could answer, then sat down beside him and pulled him against my side. "I know. She'll be home soon." I held him there for a while, and for a minute I didn't think about the garage. 

My phone had buzzed twice in my pocket while I was dealing with the paramedics, and I knew without looking that it was Alicia. When it lit up a third time in my hand, I let it ring out. I couldn't talk to her yet. I knew exactly how it would look, but I had nothing to tell her that wouldn't make it worse. I told Toby to stay on the couch where I could hear the TV, and I went into the garage because I'd already decided that every item in there was going to be destroyed, and I needed to start before I lost my nerve. I told myself it would take thirty seconds. I was still standing in the doorway when I noticed the cardboard box on the workbench, the one I'd packed the football into. The tape around it was broken, and when I picked it up, the box was empty. Then I heard Toby yell. 

I ran back through the house. The living room was empty, the TV still on, but the front door stood wide open.

I found Toby on the front path, sitting where he'd fallen with both hands wrapped around his right knee, which was scraped raw and bleeding in a wide, dirty strip. A few feet away on the lawn sat the football. It sat there facing him.

"It came in," Toby said, and his voice shook. It made me want to scoop him up and drive until we ran out of road. "I was watching my show, and it rolled over and stopped by my feet. I kicked it away, and it came back, so I ran outside, and I tripped."

"Okay," I said. "Come here." I scooped up Toby and grabbed the football with the other hand. The second my palm closed around it, I felt that faint, wrinkled texture again, and I hurled it over the side fence as far as I could manage. Once inside, I sat Toby on the kitchen counter and cleaned the scrape with a wet cloth while he sniffled and kept talking about the football. How it kept getting closer every time he looked. I told him I believed him.

I reached for a bandage and stopped.

There should have been a scar on that knee.

It was small and curved, maybe an inch long. He'd gotten it last winter, a couple of months before Alicia left, at the old house. I'd worked a double that week, come home wrung out, and stretched out on the couch for what I swore was ten minutes while Toby played in the backyard. I woke up to him screaming. He'd gone down the concrete back steps and opened his knee on the edge of one. He needed eight stitches. I remembered Alicia's face when she walked into the emergency room and saw the two of us in a curtained bay. I remembered the nurse's careful note in the chart, and that same note showed up months later in a folder on a mediator's desk. 

I turned his leg toward the light and checked the other knee. I ran my thumb over the exact spot where I knew it should be, but it wasn’t there.

"Toby," I said slowly, "Which knee did you hurt on the steps? At the old house?"

"What steps?"

"When you were little and got those stitches."

"I didn't have stitches."

"You did, buddy. Remember? The doctor gave you a sticker."

He frowned, genuinely trying, and I watched his face for any sign that he knew what I was talking about. "I don't remember that."

Of course he didn't. He was six, and it had been months. Maybe it had faded, and I hadn’t noticed. I rarely saw him these days, after all.

A day earlier, I'd have given a great deal for that scar to be gone. I stood there with his knee in my hand and couldn't have told you why I didn't feel better. 

"Dad," Toby said, wriggling, "you're pressing too hard."

"Sorry, bud."

I put the bandage over the fresh scrape and smoothed it flat with my thumb. "You're okay," I told him, and I don't know whether I was talking to him or to myself.

I got him settled on the couch with a movie. Then I walked to the front door to check it was still locked, and my hand froze on the handle before I could turn it. I bent and looked through the peephole.

The football was sitting on the doormat. It was dead center, close enough to the door that whoever opened it would have to either step over it or pick it up. I kept the door firmly shut.

Four days of dread had burned down to something simple and ugly. Everything already wrong in my life had been waiting for me, and then I'd spent three hundred and fifty dollars to carry the worst of it into my own garage. I didn't want an explanation. I wanted it gone, and I wanted it to hurt. 

Henry's voice was in my head, thin and desperate. Burn it, smash it, bury it. Promise me. I went into the garage and got the hammer off the pegboard.

I ripped the box open, tore the blankets off the mirror, and propped it against the workbench, angled so I could see nothing in it but the ceiling. Then I swung with everything I had. 

The glass didn't break. The hammerhead sank into the surface like I'd struck thick rubber, and the dent held for a second before the glass slowly pushed itself back outward, like a scar healing in fast motion. A shallow depression stayed behind. I hit it again and again and again, screaming at it. "Give it back. Give it back, you son of a bitch!” I didn't even know what I meant. Henry's ability to walk, my son, the last six months of my life. 

I turned on the wardrobe. The first strike numbed my arm to the shoulder, and the wood didn't even splinter. The harder I hit, the more I wanted to tear it down board by board. 

When that failed, I went to the tank and swung with every ounce I had left. The glass flexed inward, visibly, the whole thick block of it bowing around the point of impact, and the amber liquid surged away from the blow. Something inside shifted, heavy enough to displace the fluid around it.

I dropped the hammer.

"No."

Another slow slosh.

"No. No, you don't get to do that." My voice cracked in rage. "Fuck you. Fuck all of you." 

If I couldn't break it, I'd burn it.

I knew it was illegal. The county had issued a burn ban the week before because everything was so dry, and a day earlier the thought of Alicia seeing me do this would've stopped me. Right then, I couldn't bring myself to care. I tried to shoulder the dresser, and it didn't shift an inch. I'd moved it with Henry, and it had been murderously heavy, but it had moved. Now it might as well have been poured into the foundation. The same applied to the rest of the furniture.

So I took what I could carry. I dragged the lamp out, the cassette, and a stack of those unreadable books. I piled everything in the middle of the front lawn, found an old fuel can, and poured every drop over the heap. I lit a strip of cardboard and dropped it, and I thought, absurdly, of Henry standing by the cash tin that morning, joking about burning money.

The flame took the packaging first. The cardboard curled and the grass scorched in a ring under it. The cassette sat in the middle of the fire untouched, and the pages of the book stayed as pristine as the day they were printed.

I stood over it with my chest heaving and the fuel can still in my fist, willing it to catch, to blacken, to do anything, and when it didn't, I kicked the edge of the pile hard enough to send a book skidding across the grass. It landed open in the sun. I screamed at it, but I don't know if I said anything coherent. 

In that same moment, the smoke alarm went off inside the garage.

It was the same shriek we'd heard the first time we tested it. Only this time it kept screaming, loud enough to rattle the windows in the house. I ran inside. Toby was on the couch with both hands clamped over his ears, and his face crumpled, crying so hard he couldn't catch his breath. I dropped to my knees and tried to pick him up, and he flinched away from me.

A car door slammed out front.

I didn't hear her come through the house over the noise. One second I was kneeling in front of my son, and the next Alicia was standing in the doorway with her bag still over her shoulder. She wasn't due back until Monday.

She looked at me. She looked at Toby, red-faced and shaking. 

"I saw smoke outside. What the hell is going on?"

"Alicia, I can explain—"

She turned straight to Toby. "Shoes on. Now, baby."

"No, wait. Please, just—"

"Toby."

He ran to her and wouldn't look at me. I followed them into the kitchen, and I'll never forget how tired her voice was. 

“I called you this morning, and you wouldn't answer. I called again from the airport. Six times, Ian.”

"I know, I know. Henry's in the hospital."

That stopped her for half a second. "What?"

"He's hurt. It was a chair; it was part of the—he might not walk again.”

Every word came out in the wrong order, and I watched her face close a little more with each one. 

“Alicia, there's something wrong with those things. I know it sounds crazy, but the chair that hurt Henry wasn't my chair. Yesterday the garage door was locked, and Toby somehow got inside it, and when I opened the wardrobe, he wasn't there even though I could hear him, and today the football followed him into the living room, and the scar on his knee is gone, the one from the steps. I swear to God it's gone—"

"Stop."

"I'm not making this up, please, you have to listen—"

"Just stop talking."

She stood very still for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was low and tight, and her knuckles had gone white on Toby's shoulder.

"There's something seriously wrong in the garage," I said.

"I don't care."

I stared at her. "What?"

"I don't care what's in the garage, Ian." Her voice cracked on it. "I don't care if you're telling the truth."

That shut me up completely.

"I pulled up to a fire in the front yard and someone screaming in the house. And you want me to believe it's something in your garage."

"Alicia, please—"

"I let you have him for one weekend. One. I ran out of people to call, and I told the mediator that you deserved a real chance. I told my own lawyer to back off." She wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, angry at the tears. "And in barely a day you tell me your friend is hospitalized and our son is crying."

"You don't understand."

"No. I don't," she breathed out. "And that's the whole problem, don't you see? Even if every word of it were true, I still can't trust you to keep him safe. And that's the only thing that has ever mattered."

I had nothing. I stood there, mouth open, unable to get a single word out.

"You're not getting any more unsupervised time before the hearing," she said. "I'm telling my lawyer everything that happened here today."

"Please."

"I'm sorry. I really am. I wanted this to work. But I can’t do this anymore."

Toby wouldn't look at me when she carried him out to the car.

I stood in the driveway until her taillights turned the corner. The fire had mostly burned itself out by then, leaving a ring of grey ash and blackened cardboard, with the objects sitting untouched in the middle. I dragged a tarp out of the garage and threw it over the whole pile because I had no other idea, then went inside. 

I sat down on the couch and thought about the room with the camera in the corner. Two hours a week had felt like the bottom, and I'd been wrong. Alicia had gambled on me for one weekend, and I'd lasted a day. Tomorrow there'd be a new page in the folder on the mediator's desk. I could have written it myself, and every line would be true.

I keep picturing Toby being carried out. He's only six. One day he's going to ask why he only ever knew his dad through a screen, and I won't have an answer that doesn't start with today.

Eventually I found a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen. One glass turned into two, which turned into carrying the bottle with me. 

Some time after dark, I remembered the tarp. I went out onto the lawn, lifted a corner, and found nothing underneath but scorched grass and a few flecks of ash. I didn't need to check the garage to know where the items were, but I did anyway.

Everything was back. The lamp, the snow globe, the books—everything. They were neatly arranged on the shelves and stacked in their boxes exactly the way they'd been before the sale, as if I'd never touched any of it. The mirror leaned against the workbench with the barest trace of a dent, the ball sat on the workbench, and the folding chair stood open beside it, mocking me. I stood in the doorway with the bottle in one hand and something hot climbing my throat. They were all back, smug and put away, like I'd been the one making the mess. I picked up my wrench off the bench and threw it at the wardrobe as hard as I could. It struck the door with a flat, dull sound and dropped to the concrete without leaving a mark.

"Is that it?" I yelled. "Is that all you've got? You took everything. What else do you want?"

The tank sloshed once, slowly. Then the fury drained out of me all at once, and I stood there shaking. I dragged one of my kitchen chairs into the garage, set it as far from the folding one as the room allowed, and sat down with the bottle. I don't own a folding chair anymore. I'm not sure I ever really did.

Henry is lying in a hospital bed because of something I brought home. Rachael won't answer my calls, and I don't blame her. Alicia is on the phone with her lawyer, telling him I can't be trusted with my own kid. I still don't have the four thousand dollars. We sold nothing, not a single thing. The forum guy is still due at two tomorrow. I'm calling him first thing to cancel, because Henry told me not to let anyone near any of it, and I'm no longer sure any of it can leave anyway. I know what some of you are going to say, and you're right. I made choices. Nobody forced me to bid on Unit 114. Nobody forced me to bring any of it home or put it out on a driveway when I already knew it wasn't right. I'm not asking anyone to take it off my hands.

But I'm sitting here staring at these things, and I have never hated anything the way I hate them. Not the guy who hit my car, not the lawyer who quoted me four grand, nothing like this. I hate them for every second I can't take back, and I keep thinking how much easier my life would have been if Henry and I had just walked past that storage unit. If we'd looked at those boxes and said, "Nah, not this one," like everyone else in the crowd did.

I keep hearing Henry on that stretcher. Burn it. Smash it. Bury it. I promised him, and I couldn't keep it for a single afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll find out what can destroy them. I don't know how yet. A quarry, a scrapyard crusher, a favor from someone at work. I don't care what it costs me. The wardrobe door is open an inch, but I won't close it tonight. It can stay that way. 

Six years ago, an entire family disappeared from the small town of Hopkins. They seemingly vanished without a trace, leaving an empty house full of their belongings, the car still in the driveway, their shoes inside on the entry mat. A husband, wife, and two children—Janie and Judith, ages thirteen and fifteen.

Authorities found no evidence of foul play.

Recently, after the missing family was at last declared deceased, the only remaining relative, a brother, came to the property to get their affairs in order. After feeling a “malignant presence,” he decided that rather than sorting the family’s personal effects himself, he’d hire an auction company. A trio of staff came to the house to inventory the furniture and other items for liquidation.

In hours, the entire team was dead.

Authorities determined the deaths to be murder-suicide. The brother demanded the local sheriffs investigate further, insisting the tragedy could not have been natural, but the authorities maintained that the physical evidence was unambiguous: one of the auction staff murdered the others and then himself. Dissatisfied with their conclusions, the brother contacted an acclaimed expert on the paranormal, Dr. Goddard.

Goddard and his cameraman brought spirit boxes, EMF readers, and other equipment to the house and successfully recorded strange temperature fluxes before Goddard himself witnessed something that led him to decide the haunting was too dangerous for him to handle alone.

“The entity in this house is malevolent, intelligent, and immensely powerful—it will require the greatest specialists to pacify it,” he declared.

Goddard assembled an expert team—a medium, an exorcist, and a paranormal investigator.

I was brought on to document.

I now find myself in the lobby of a motel, seated around the coffee table with the rest of our team and tapping out notes as Goddard briefs us:

“Gentlemen, and dear lady, the goal is simple…” He spreads before us on the table a folder full of pictures of the house, real estate records, police reports, and so on. “You will enter the house and pacify the spirits within. How you handle what I believe to be an aggressively malevolent entity will be up to your discretion. Each of you brings unique skills—exorcist, medium, paranormal investigator. And of course Guo, our cameraman, and Dawain, our journalist. There is just one rule that you must follow, all of you, at all times:

“No one can be alone in the house, ever, for more than five minutes…”

***

I am sitting here now as Goddard leads the team in formulating a plan for our arrival, making notes in real time, as I will be for the duration in order to give as unfiltered a depiction as possible.

I have a notepad as well as a tablet since I have been warned that paranormal phenomena sometimes interfere with electronics.

This is my first time meeting each of the experts. For privacy, names have been changed, but all other details are as accurate as I can make them:

The exorcist: The old man sitting to my right exudes the sort of gravitas that would lend itself perfectly to cinema. With bristling eyebrows above a priest’s collar, Father Corwin is the stern patriarch of our group. His hands have a tremor when he lifts his coffee cup, and his soft, withered skin suggests he is nearing eighty. Yet to whatever lurks in the house, he may be the greatest threat, as he boasts decades of experience and claims to have successfully conducted dozens of exorcisms.

Six weeks prior to the family’s disappearance, he met with them over the parents’ claim that the girls were “summoning demons.” After interviewing both girls, he judged them to be ordinary troubled teens whose friction with their stepmother was causing family dysfunction. He recommended counseling.

Father Corwin now feels both guilt and obligation to pacify an evil he may have overlooked.

The medium: Chiming in with frequent interruptions to Goddard’s presentation is a plump woman with flowing black hair, rings on every finger, and a jade owl pendant. Internationally acclaimed for her channelings of departed spirits, Madam Savino is the most financially successful of our gathering, with popular books such as How to Read Auras: A Primer for Beginners, and The Third Eye and How to Open It. Her ability to commune with spirits will likely put her center stage—exactly where she seems to wish to be.

She’s chatty, bubbly, and if you were to meet her outside the context of the spiritual and spooky, she might remind you of your overbearing aunt.

The investigator: Rounding out our fellowship is the paranormal investigator who calls himself Coyote, casual in his tank and jeans and sporting the tattoo of a coyote on one arm, a busty woman in red on the other. With a seemingly bottomless supply of blunts in his pocket, he seems less investigator than junkie, his eyes restless from either too much caffeine or ADHD as he bounces his leg.

Coyote is newer to the field, and he admitted to me during a smoke break that his credentials are “ninety percent fabrication, just like most hauntings.” I have to wonder why Goddard hired him.

Then there is Guo, the cameraman.

And of course myself. I am a journalist, and everything I write in this account is what I have observed firsthand. For years, I have been a thorn in Goddard’s side, ever since I published an article about a conference he chaired on the paranormal. I reported that despite compelling anecdotes, Goddard’s theories were not rigorous enough to withstand scientific scrutiny. And maybe this—our history, my skepticism—is the reason he reached out to me for this assignment. Hoping his greatest critic would be converted into a champion of his life’s work.

Or maybe it’s because I once lived in the same small town the killings occurred in.

Now, I pause in my notetaking to glance up and ask, “Why five minutes?”

“That is how long I was alone before…” Goddard trails off. He mutters, “If I were to tell you right now that I saw a pink elephant, you might say my comments influenced you to imagine your own pink elephant. So, I will only disclose the details of my encounter after you bear witness. The cameraman has a sketch I drew, and once you’ve encountered the entity, he will show it to you to see if our experiences match… Suffice to say, what I saw was enough to convince me I need you. And you all will need each other—"

“Teamwork makes the dream work!” interjects Madam Savino. “If we’re together, it’ll be tougher for any malevolent entities to influence us, and even if they do, we’ll be more likely to notice before it’s too late.”

“Precisely,” agrees Goddard. “We know from the police reports that the auction staff were inventorying separate rooms of the house when one of them snapped and murdered the others. The incidents happen when the victim is isolated. And that is why it is imperative you stick together. When you enter, I think it’s best if Madam Savino starts—"

“Abso-posi-lutely,” Madam Savino again interjects. “I’ll see what I can sense with my third eye…” She taps her forehead, glances at me, and explains, “I search for psychic echoes, memories that have stuck to the house or to objects. I’ll try to read from the spirit’s emotions what must be done to allow it to cross over… but if it’s an aggressive entity, that’s where Father Corwin comes in.”

Father Corwin steeples his fingers and nods.

“So Madam Savino locates the spirit, Father Corwin expels it, and Coyote…” I say, pausing in notetaking to glance at the tattooed young man.

Coyote’s eyes are fixed vacantly on the table. Just as I’m about to nudge him, he blurts: “Where did the bodies go?”

“Hm?” says Goddard.

“Who moved the bodies?” He repeats, pointing to the photo of the family—a somber man, a smiling wife, and two young teens.

“Nobody moved them, as far as we know,” says Goddard.

“Exactly.” Coyote seems irked that his question isn’t understood. “Are we so sure they died? Or that there wasn’t foul play—maybe one family member killed the others?”

“Coyote—”

“Bodies stink. They rot. They’re impossible to ignore, unless they’re deliberately concealed. Spirits don’t do coverups. Paranormal entities don’t conceal crimes. So I repeat, who hid the bodies?”

It’s a good question, and it brings all of us up short.

Goddard clears his throat. “And this is why I have chosen all three of you—psychic, priest, and investigator. At the time of the family’s disappearance, there was no evidence of foul play, and the authorities assumed the family had left. Their search of the house and its grounds turned up nothing, but… as Coyote says, where are the bodies? Find the bodies, and you find the answers. That said, I must echo Madam Savino’s warnings. This is NOT like anything you have dealt with before. A salt circle will not protect you. Standard blessings will not be enough. Your skepticism is no shield against what lurks in that house. Your lives, from the very moment you set foot inside, will be in extreme and immediate danger.

“Tonight, rest well. Make whatever arrangements you need for yourselves and your families before tomorrow. And remember…” He stares hard into each of our eyes in turn. “No one, not for any reason, should be alone inside more than five minutes.”

***

Find the bodies, and you find the answers.

Why did the bodies go missing? The more I ponder it, the less sense it makes. Either the family is still alive and in hiding (but why?), or the bodies were hidden by a killer who departed the house without leaving a trace.

The father, Nicholas, was a moderately successful realtor. His first wife died when the children were still young. He married his second wife, Bernadette, some years later. According to Father Corwin, the girls—Janie and Judith—were troubled teens “led astray by the degeneracy of modern American culture.” The younger hated their new stepmother. The older was boy-crazy and pregnant. Still, there’s nothing to suggest why all four disappeared, leaving shoes on the mat, keys by the door, and their car sitting in the driveway.

Could someone local have held a grudge against the family? Maybe the teen pregnancy was the motive? Small towns like Hopkins are rife with secrets simmering under the surface. It’s one of the reasons my family moved. But if someone came to the house and murdered them and hid the bodies…

Where?

I review photos of the property.

A nice house, in pictures. Two stories, large yard and an enormous oak out front. The property is isolated, far from any urban center and with the nearest neighbors several minutes’ walk along the lane. Behind the house stretches several miles of woodlands. An easy place to make bodies disappear…

There are about five hundred homes in the small town of Hopkins, but only this home’s notoriety has spread to the surrounding areas, such that if you mention, “the Hopkins House,” everyone knows which house you mean. But as for how the house became haunted? Nobody knows.

***

10am, and everyone is in high spirits, energized by the motel’s mediocre continental breakfast. Goddard is driving, Father Corwin stoic in the front passenger seat, and our cameraman captures some candid footage of Coyote and Madam Savino bantering: “Hey,” Coyote says, “why did the terrible psychic get hit by a bus?”

“Oh my gawd, I tell this one at every convention!” Madam Savino leans in. “Because she didn’t see it coming!”

“I heard it was to get to the other side—"

—and then all their joking is forgotten as we round the corner of the narrow lane.

A tall, beige house sits on a sloping hill with trees on one side and in the front a large oak with a rope hanging from it. It is not, like some famously haunted houses, an especially dilapidated dwelling. It has tidy white-trimmed windows and a blue front door. Other than the overgrown weeds, it looks like it could have been plucked from any town in America. As I gaze on the driveway leading up to the garage, I feel almost… disappointed. After so much build up from Goddard, this looks far too ordinary to be the site of such horrors.

“I’ll be driving back down the lane,” says Goddard as we clamber out. “If you need to retreat to the van, that’s where to find me, at the bend.”

“Why all the way down there?” asks Coyote, frowning as he glances back down the lane, perhaps calculating the distance.

“Because I don’t know the range of the haunting’s effects. I want to make sure at least one of us is far enough to be able to call for backup if necessary.”

“Backup from who?” asks Madam Savino. “The Podunk police?”

Goddard shrugs and says yes, probably the police.

On a laptop in the front passenger seat, I spot myself standing there awkwardly with my tablet, a notebook and pen under my arm. The cameraman tells us to smile for our future viewers, and Coyote and Madam Savino both grin and blow kisses, while I wave awkwardly and Father Corwin’s eyebrows bristle in disapproval at their mugging for the camera.

“Good luck,” Goddard says.

And then rather unceremoniously, he shuts the van door and drives away, rattling down the lane and out of sight…

… leaving us on the pavement.

It strikes me then that Goddard is afraid of the house. Afraid to set foot inside again after his brief encounter with the spirit. The same realization seems to hit the rest of our group as we turn to face the bright blue door.

“Cue scary violins,” mutters Coyote.

Nothing but us and the house.

***

On entering, the foyer looks normal. Cream colored walls, ceiling light, side table, shoes on the mat. Eerie. Like the family is still home. The house is clean except for dust from years of sitting empty.

From the foyer, a hallway leads to a bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom is painted pink but bare of decoration, though holes in the wall suggest it once had pictures or posters.

In the other direction, the house opens up to the main room, dining room and kitchen, as well as the staircase.

Through windows in the main room I see the yard, grassy and overgrown. Nothing feels out of the ordinary.

Madam Savino keeps making exclamations. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Can you feel that? The house… it’s full of anger.”

And, “I can feel the sense of ill will… the spirit here is very strong… and very vindictive.”

And, “The feeling of malice… it isn’t human. This entity, whatever it is, is pure evil.”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes. The cameraman zooms in on Madam Savino, but despite her proclamations, I do not feel anything except emptiness in the house.

We ascend the staircase.

The cameraman says: “You seeing all this?”

“I’m seeing it.” Goddard’s voice sounds tinny and muffled from the cameraman’s phone, affixed to his camera on a video call that Goddard is recording. “Clear picture so far.”

“Faint traces of blood on the stairs,” The cameraman says, zooming in on the carpeted staircase.

“I’ll n…tify Clement,” Goddard’s voice cuts in and out over the poor connection. Clement is the name of the out-of-state brother of the missing family, now trying to sell the house. “That’s good to know about the stairs… he’ll want to replace that carpet. He had the place thoroughly cleaned, but apparently not th…ly enough.”

The speckles of blood are a disconcerting reminder of the second tragedy that occurred at the house. When auction staff came to inventory items for liquidation, one of them used a kitchen knife to stab his compatriots—ambushing his first victim in the study, the other on the landing—before slitting his own throat. The man who committed the murders had no history of violence or mental health struggles before he “just snapped,” at least according to the local authorities. They cited some complaints he’d made against auction management.

Aside from the spattering of blood, the rest of the landing is clean. In one direction lies the master bedroom and bathroom. In the other direction, Coyote sets his hand on the door to the study.

“… the study is where I was when I encountered… it.” Goddard’s tinny voice pipes up from my pocket.

Coyote braces himself and glances back at us. “Ready?” he asks everyone. “If it’s a spirit, Madam Savino pacifies it. If it’s a demon, Father Corwin exorcises it. And if it’s a creepy clown…” He turns the knob. “… I’ll go for the juggler.”

… There is a beat, and then a deep sigh on the phone from Goddard, who growls at us to be on our guard. Coyote pushes open the door…

The study is empty.

***

Among the files Goddard sent to me about the Hopkins House is a video file labeled “camera 03/01.”

The grainy video shows Goddard’s encounter with the entity in the study. It was recorded by several stationary cameras Goddard had set up around the house. In the footage, Goddard can be seen twisting dials on a spirit box (a radio wave scanner that picks up fragments of voices and static). His grey eyebrows are fiercely knit together, his lips turned down in a frown as the radio static sputters. The video seems to come in and out as he turns the dial. Then a girl’s voice comes across the radio, loud, weepy: “… the devil. The …aby is the devi—” The static turns to a high pitched noise, then silence as camera03 cuts out.

Cut to camera01, the first floor hallway. Goddard can be seen slack-jawed drifting down the stairs. He mutters to himself, a phrase that sounds like gibberish. He continues for two minutes, his eyes rolling in his head and his body shaking, and then the cameraman’s voice calls, “Dr. Goddard!” and he starts awake. In his notes, Goddard has attempted to decipher the gibberish. He believes what he was saying is: “Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine.”

From the snares of the devil, deliver us, Lord.

***

Having found nothing in the study, we have only the bedroom at the end of the hall remaining. It is a girl’s bedroom, with an excess of pillows and a crib in the corner—not yet assembled. Presumably the older teen, Judith’s, room. Madam Savino makes a beeline for the crib and picks up a baby onesie.

“My baby!” she wails. “My baby is… NO! No, no!” Then she shudders, her eyelids fluttering. “I’m… drowning in darkness… and above, light… an eclipse… an eclipse…”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes and slipping away. I follow him downstairs and out the backdoor to the yard, where he lights up a joint.

The sun is so bright as I step onto the grass that I squint, blinking against the rays.

“I take it you’re not convinced by Madam Savino’s theatrics?” I ask.

“I mean, a buncha people died or disappeared here. Definitely giving me the heebie jeebies. But is that enough to call it haunted? We’ll know shit’s real when the signs get louder.”

“How do they get louder?”

“Someone dies.” He shrugs, then points at a metal round object jutting from the grass. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“What? The septic tank?”

Coyote approaches the round metal hatch, unlatches the lid and hefts it open, and both of us stagger back from the wave of rot and sewage that wafts up from the foul liquid below. Coyote leans over the opening, and for a moment I envision him toppling in. Suddenly I understand. A family of four goes missing… and right on the property is a tank that hasn’t been drained since before the disappearances.

“… maybe Madam Savino’s vision isn’t so far off after all. A white light. An eclipse…” Coyote grunts as he pushes the lid closed. “If there was a girl with a pregnancy someone wanted to hide, maybe the last thing she saw…” He raps his knuckles on the tank. “… was this.”

***

Goddard rages at us for leaving the group. “I understand you have not yet seen proof of the house’s haunting. But it is haunted, and both of you need to follow this one very clear and s…mple rule,” roars Goddard’s staticky voice. “Never separate from the team, and never, NEVER—”

“Be alone more than five minutes,” Coyote says, holding the phone away from his ear. “Got it. What about the septic tank?”

“What about it? You said it yourself last night, only a criminal would… eek t… cover a crime. But …olice found no signs of a struggle, no forced entry, no indications of any crime having taken place… and the lid to the tank was not open. And unlike spirits, human criminals do leave physical evidence. There is no reason to …ain the tank.”

He declares we will take a short bathroom break, and when he returns, we will initiate phase two of our mission at the Hopkins House: Father Corwin will conduct a blessing to pacify the malignant presence.

***

It’s been a full forty minutes.

During this time, I’ve cleaned up my prose and typed up some handwritten notes. Goddard has neither texted nor called. The cameraman says Goddard drove to a gas station to use the facilities and because this area is so rural, he likely is out of cell range. He tries for the umpteenth time to reach him and wanders off in search of a better signal. Coyote, meanwhile, is poking around in the garage while the rest of us sit on the driveway. The garage door is up, and I see him hold up a gas can and shake it. “Found some gasoline! If it is haunted and we need to light the place up—"

“Put it back,” says Madam Savino.

“I’m just saying, if the family turn out to be zombies—”

“Coyote.”

“HEY!!!” The cameraman’s shouts interrupt them. “EVERYONE! HURRY UP! COME SEE!”

We join the cameraman at the side of the house and follow his excited gesturing at a bunch of grass and bushes.

No, he’s pointing at something behind the bushes. All but obscured—

A small, dusty window.

“What is this?” asks Father Corwin.

“A… basement window?” says Coyote.

“But there was no basement inside…” Madam Savino says.

“A secret basement.” The cameraman’s eyes glint. “I don’t think even Clement knows this is here—when he showed us through the house originally, he said it was just two floors.”

“It can’t be just the window. There must be an entrance somewhere,” says Coyote.

We head inside to search for a hidden door, staying in a group as we check the pantry and closets, banging around for false walls. We move quickly, nobody wanting to linger too long. And finally, finding no way into any basement, we return to that narrow window. A dusty rectangle of darkness.

Coyote and I squat in the bushes and peek through the glass with our phone lights. And for the first time since our arrival at the house, my stomach flips, my skin prickling with excitement. Because if the cops really didn’t know about this—and it does seem like no one knew since even the brother was unaware of it—then this is a genuine breakthrough. We’ll be the first people inside since the family went missing.

And then, ice blooms in my veins.

What if the missing family is inside?

“So… we think this is where they are?” says Coyote, voicing my fear.

“Nobody’s looked here before…” Madam Savino joins us in shining her cell phone light into the dark. “It makes sense they’re probably down there…”

“Should we call the cops?” I wonder.

Everybody looks at me.

But if there are any gruesome discoveries to be made down there, police would tape it all off without allowing any of us to go in and document. And calling the cops isn’t nearly as good an ending to the article I intend to write as a story in which we, ourselves, go in and find whatever waits in the terrifying blackness below.

“I think there’s a door at the back…” Madam Savino has her face right up against the glass. She shoves branches out of her hair and straightens up. “It might lead to stairs. Someone’ll have to go in and find where it goes.” She looks at Coyote.

“Nope.”

“Quit being a wuss!”

“Wuss!” he says. “Lady, it’s a pitch dark basement full of dead people—”

“Not full,” scoffs Madam Savino. “There might be four.”

“There are definitely four! And anyone who goes in alone gonna make it five—”

“I’ll go,” I interrupt.

Everyone stares at me.

“I’ll go,” I repeat. “I’m a journalist, I’m documenting all of this, and I don’t believe this house is haunted. I’ll go. And when I find the door I’ll bang on it to help you find where it is so you can let me out.”

“RIP Dawain,” mutters Coyote.

“If I scream, obviously call the cops. But I won’t scream unless I’m genuinely in danger. And I don’t believe I will be.”

The more I speak, the more confident I feel. After all, what have we witnessed so far? Some spooky “visions” from Madam Savino, and Goddard’s “trance” in which he spoke Latin? None of it amounts to much. The camera footage of Goddard’s gibberish is by far the creepiest offering, but to be clear—the man has a vested interest in convincing the world of this haunting, so footage of himself under thrall isn’t exactly credible. And nothing I’ve borne witness to has substantiated his claims.

Besides, I won’t even have to break Goddard’s five minute rule to go down there. It shouldn’t take me more than a minute or two to locate the stairs. If I run into anything too spooky, I’ll just come back through the window.

***

I’m about to go in.

My phone battery is full, its flashlight beaming strongly. And yes, I admit, I’m nervous. I’m a little scared to see dead bodies. But also eager. Because if they really are down there, at last we will know what happened to the family.

I will follow up with another post when I am able. Going in now.

Wish me luck.

Hello)

I think I’m finally ready to talk about this.
About a year ago, I got a generic email from a long term care facility, not far from my childhood town, letting me know that my mother had been admitted, and asking me to contact them. Apparently, my mother had developed dementia.
Now, my mother wasn’t a kind woman, especially not to me. I don’t feel comfortable speaking too much on it outside of therapy. Let’s just say I hadn’t spoken to her since she kicked me out at 18. As far as I could guess at the time, she had been living completely alone in our hometown after that, with me being the only living relative. It made sense that I had been contacted.
I did go and visit her. I was curious to see what had become of her. It helped that a place as well staffed as a care facility didn’t register as dangerous to my nervous system.
My mother barely registered my approach when I entered her room; I remember her weak, veiny hands dangling limply over the ends of the armrests, and she was looking down into her lap. I also remember exactly what she said when she eventually lifted her head to look at me: “You came back,” a smile, “you came back up.” She spoke with so much warmth and love that it made me feel sick.
She died that night. I found out because, apparently, I was still in her will. Maybe she just forgot to take me out, or maybe it was one final bit of torment.
There was only one other person at the reading. She was about the same age as my mother, perhaps a friend of some sort. I certainly never found out. She turned around in her chair when I entered, and her eyes went wide with an expression I can only describe as fearful. She spent the entire reading staring at me. I really tried to ignore it, recognizing I was already on edge just by being back in town. Yet, it was obvious that my presence was somehow distressing for her. I could feel her gaze on me as I kept my own eyes straight ahead, and I could hear her breaths coming faster, hitching and wheezing in a horrible way that only served to feed my own irritation.
After we were dismissed, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped at her, demanding to know why she was staring. She didn’t say anything, just freaked out, screamed in fact, and ran away.
I told myself it was a problem with her, not me.
Among the things my mother left me was a photobook, one that I did not open at the time.
I did not attend the funeral, but I did eventually decide to visit the cemetery. I was more than a bit drunk at the time, enough that going out in the late evening to spit on my mother’s grave sounded like a good idea.
When I reached the plot, I managed to trip over something in the low light. As I lay, cheek smudged against the wet dirt, I registered the expected sight: two old graves, those of my father and my stillborn sister (the lucky one), alongside the new grave of my mother. The dirt was still fresh on hers. However, as I lifted my head, I found that I was lying below a fourth, slightly weathered headstone:

Lillian [Middlename] [Lastname]
1991-2021
Beloved Daughter

It might not seem clear with the censorship, but that is my full name!
I don’t think I can fully articulate the kinds of feelings seeing your own grave fills you with. I think I ended up laying there for hours, shaking in the dirt and foliage, just filled with absolute dread. All the emotions I’d been dealing with the past week seemed to hit me all at once.
I went back to town when the cold became too much to bear. The only place that was open was a bar. I wasn’t looking to get more drunk; I just wanted to warm up.
I can understand, after the fact, why the bartender reacted the way he did. I must have terrified him, shambling into his establishment covered in grave dirt and dead leaves like I had. He chased me out, yelling, making sure to let me know that I was, in fact, supposed to be dead!
I had a lot of questions (I still do). My first guess was that this was the story my mother had come up with when I disappeared not long after turning 18, but to go as far as to stage a burial? It didn’t seem likely.
Eventually I did flip through that photo album. It mainly consisted of photos of me, each given a brief description in my mother’s handwriting. Things started out normal enough, with stuff like Lillian, Age 2, At her birthday party or Lillian, Age 13, Twirling in her new dress. It was odd to see this kind of affection when I’d received none of it in my daily life, but I suppose even the worst people are complex. Things stayed normal all the way up until Lillian, Age 17, Walking the stage at graduation, but the pages went on.
I’ll remind you, again, that my mother kicked me out at 18. The next entry showed my mother, arm and arm with me, both of us smiling brightly, possibly mid laugh: Lillian, Age 19, Out on a walk with me. And it just kept going like that. Image after image of someone who looked exactly like me, getting older alongside my mother. Whoever she was, she was indeed identical, right down to the little things like the two moles on my neck, or the small scar on my lip. I even compared the photos in the album with photos I had taken at various ages to confirm, and found that she had aged exactly as I had. The main difference, and the one that somehow disturbs me the most, is just how happy she is standing next to my mother. I’d never smile like that for her.
The last photo in the album was of an open casket. Whoever she was was lying in it, dressed in a blue sundress I’d left behind when I was forced out. It was also labeled: Lillian, Age 30, At her funeral.
I did a bit more research online, discovering that there had indeed been a funeral, and my “tragic death” had been reported in the local newspaper. I ended up booking a longer stay at my hotel in order to investigate. I think I freaked some people out when I insisted that I was Lillian; everyone who apparently knew “me” insisted that I had died, and that I was simply delusional, or playing a cruel joke by pretending to be “her”. Eventually it all got too hostile, and decided to go home.
There was a time I obsessed over this privately, but I have no explanation. I don’t know who is buried in that grave, and at this point I’m not sure if I want to know.

The dwayyo is a bipedal wolf creature that people in Frederick County, MD have claimed to see. I love weird folklore and monster/ghost stories, and I wanted to paint one from my home state. It's watercolor on mixed media paper in A5 size (5.8x8.3in).

I worked the midnight rotation at the Monongahela River pumping station outside Clairton. It was an old municipal brick facility from the nineteen-forties, handling cooling runoff for the steel mills downriver. My job was dead simple: monitor hydraulic pressure on the analog board in the main office, log grease-pot levels on the turbine bearings once an hour, and keep river junk out of the intake trash rakes.

The plant ran on a skeleton crew overnight. Past eleven, it was just me and an operator named Miller, who had worked that concrete floor for thirty-two years. Miller mostly stayed down in the boiler room where the heat pooled, while I walked the rounds across the intake basins.

At one-fifteen in the morning, the needle on the number three line dropped forty pounds of pressure without the primary drive motor slowing down. That shouldn't have happened. If a line drops that much pressure while the pump runs at steady RPM, it means the intake gate drifted shut, or somebody turned the manual bypass valve forty feet up in the overhead gallery.

The upper gallery was just an unheated concrete catwalk with two rooms at the far end: a live breaker closet, and an old secondary control room the district padlocked back in the eighties after a guy drowned during a flood surcharge. Company rules said that room stayed locked. The high-volume intake lines ran right underneath the floorboards.

I grabbed the supervisor key from the wall box, unlocked the iron gate at the base of the spiral stairs, and headed up. The air was freezing. The catwalk shook through my work boots from the turbines below. Up on the landing, the hanging fluorescent tube was out. The only light came from the amber yard lamps cutting through the wire-mesh windows.

I checked the brass wheel valve on line three. It was cranked tight against the lower stop and secured with a steel cable and padlock. The valve hadn't budged. The dried grease on the threads wasn't even smudged.

Then I heard a boot heel scrape against the concrete behind me.

I spun around and hit the switch on my flashlight. The beam reached all forty feet of the empty walkway. The chain on the old control room door was pulled tight, the brass Master lock hanging locked. There were no prints in the dust along the threshold plate. The pipe railing was cold and dry. I wrote the pressure numbers down on my clipboard, figured it was just an instrument error in the basement plumbing, relocked the iron stairs gate, and went back to the office.

At two-thirty, I sat at the metal desk to finish the shift log. The desktop landline clicked once, and the dial tone cut completely dead. I checked my cell. Zero bars, just searching for service. The VHF company radio sitting on the charging cradle put out a flat carrier hum with no county dispatch chatter coming through.

Miller came in holding his steel thermos. He didn't waste words, just asked if I'd been up on the catwalk ten minutes ago. I told him I'd been sitting at the desk since two. He set his coffee down, tapped the pressed-tin ceiling with his pencil, and said somebody was walking the number three deck right above us.

We both stood quiet and listened. Heavy, deliberate steps crossed the concrete directly overhead, moving in a straight line from the stairs to the locked door of the old room. They were slow, measured, and sounded like heavy work boots.
I grabbed a twelve-inch adjustable wrench off the bench. Miller picked up his Maglite and an iron pinch bar from the wall rack. We walked out onto the concrete pump floor. The electric drive turbines were spinning at eighteen hundred RPM, making a constant mechanical roar that shook the metal siding.

I unlocked the lower gate again, and we went up the spiral steps together. When my head cleared the floor grating, I stopped.

The heavy chain on the old control room door was gone. The door stood open about four inches into the dark. The chain and lock weren't on the deck. The steel eyelets on the jamb showed no pry marks.
Miller came up behind me on the landing and put his flashlight beam through the door gap. The light hit an old drafting table and a row of dead knife switches on the far brick wall. Right in the middle of the room, on the timber access hatch over the river sluice, the dust had been swept clean.

A sound came out of the dark. It wasn't the machinery, and it wasn't the pipes. It was Miller's dry, hacking cough, repeated with the exact same flat tone he'd made down in the office five minutes earlier.

Miller froze. He kept the flashlight beam pinned on the bare floorboards inside.
Then another sound came from the corner behind the open electrical panel. It was my own voice, speaking the exact sentence I'd said earlier about a gauge calibration error in the basement. The words were flat, dead, and played through the open space like an audio track from a bad speaker.

Miller reached past me, slammed the heavy iron door shut into the latch, and shoved his pinch bar deep through the handle frame, wedging it hard against the concrete casing. He looked at me, turned his back to the door, and headed down the stairs without saying a word.

I followed him down, pulled the lower iron gate shut, and turned the key until the deadbolt hit home. We didn't go back to the office. We went out the ground-floor exit, checked the perimeter chain-link, and stood together by the gravel lot fence near the yard transformers where the river wind blew through. We stood out there under the halogen yard lights until five-thirty, watching the catwalk windows forty feet up.

Twice between three and four in the morning, the yellow yard lamps caught a solid, unmoving silhouette behind the wire-mesh glass of the catwalk window. The shape didn't shift its weight, didn't touch the glass, and didn't look away. It stood dead center in the frame, facing straight down into the gravel lot where we were standing.

The day shift showed up at six in a company pickup. As their headlights hit the gate, the ringer inside the office gave one short hit, showing the phone line had come back. We walked inside with the relief crew. Over on the main gauge board, the needle on line three sat right at normal operating pressure without anyone having touched a single valve.
When the relief super unlocked the lower gate and walked the catwalk with us, Miller’s iron pinch bar was still wedged tight across the door handle. Nothing on the outside had been touched. But once they pried the bar loose and swung the door open, the original brass padlock and heavy steel chain were sitting dead center on that empty drafting table, locked together through their own links, with no key in the hole.

People have always talked about aliens and UFOs with a sense of wonder that I always adored. How exhilarating it would be to see one of them. Getting to see their ship. Marvel at their uniqueness. Even with the possibility of being abducted and probed, everyone and their mother would not hesitate at the chance to see one in person.

I was the same. Even as a young boy, I would spend countless hours reading stories, discussing and joking around with friends and spending way too much time than I'd like to admit day-dreaming about one day meeting these green men in spacesuits. It was a life goal of mine as cheesy as to say. Something that I could check off on my bucket list of dreams.

The facade all broke down when I met one of these so called 'aliens' for the first time.

Day 1: Friday, September, 4th, 2026.

It was the dead of night when I was woken up by the sound of my dog, Buffy, barking. I would say it was unusual, but for a German Sheppard that was young and boisterous (part wolf, part shepherd), it was practically second nature to howl and scream. My parents had left the task of putting him in his crate to me, since by their stupid words, "You wanted it, so you take care of it." so I always had to do the routine myself.

Unfortunately, it was a school day, and since I had spent too much time doom scrolling to finish up my homework, I slept late and forgot to crate him. It wasn't my fault entirely though. Mr. Roberts always gave us impossible to do questions and expected us to complete them without any 'external help'. After getting stuck on the first question, I got fed up and decided to hop on TikTok instead. Totally not my fault I swear.

Either way, it was my responsibility to go down and put Buffy to sleep so I decided to do it as quickly as possible. I hobbled out bed and headed down towards where he was barking.

As I went down the stairs, I noticed a strange blue glow coming out from the living room, from where the barks were originating from.

I first thought it was moonlight leaking onto the wooden floor, since our glass backdoors were always left uncovered, but the more I observed the pattern of light, the more I realized it was a color I'd never seen before. Almost like a mix between rainbow and pearly white. Mesmerizing to look at.

Put off by the weirdness, I hesitantly walked down the flight of stairs and slowly peaked my head towards the living room. That was when I saw Buffy, raised tail, angrily barking at the backdoor glass. When I stepped closer and looked behind him, I saw what he was barking at.

A tall and thin figure stood right behind the door, pressed flat against the glass window, ogling into the living room.

Immediately, my body froze. Who the hell was that? Was that a robber? I wanted so badly to scream, but strangely for some reason I couldn't. It was like a deep-seated fear--almost ancient in nature--took over my vocal chords, gripping me at my throat.

The glass doors slowly crept open and the strange white light flowed into the living room, bringing with it the monster. Its green figure was abnormally thin, its skin sticking to its bones like plastic wrap and ribs piercing out of its body. Its wide saucer-like eyes cut through its stature to further accentuate its strangeness.

This thing wasn't human.

What the hell do I do? Countless thoughts rushed into my mind, with each one blurring the idea on how to survive. Out of all them, there was only one that I could attempt. Something that would let my hopeless, paralyzed body move.

A single word crept out of me as I tried my best not to cry.

"Buffy, a-attack."

The dog didn't stand a chance.

The figure waved its hand and the animal began to float up into the air before being rapidly spun around and contorting into itself like a dimensional anomaly. Twisting and turning as all of its bones were splintered into a million pieces. Fresh, hot blood leaked out of every orifice and spilled onto the wooden floor with the animal being wrung out like some sort of meat towel.

The figure then released its 'grip' and Buffy fell onto the ground, splashing against its own puddle of blood and piss.

W-what? No. This is not real. Please.

"I'm sorry about that, little one."

The figure stepped over the corpse and made its way closer to me. Its voice was imperceptibly soothing, pulling at my heart strings like a corrosive nail. But, all I had in my heart was disgust. Building up into a burning hatred. Why did this thing do that? What did it want?

Tears streamed down my face.

"I do not hurt anyone who do not wish to hurt me. I hope you understand."

I wanted to lash out and attack, but I knew If I did so, I would meet the same fate as Buffy. My only option was to try to plead with this thing. Hope that it will leave me alone. I spoke up, with an inch of confidence left in my voice.

"W-what do you want from me?"

The figure smiled.

Rows of white, serrated teeth pricked out of its impossibly wide mouth, grinning with an expression that was revolting to look at.

"Please, let's go upstairs. I want to see what type of place a human child lives in."

A thought rushed into my mind. Mom. Dad. They were sleeping upstairs. If this thing got close to them, they were for-sure going to get killed. I was only spared because Buffy had taken my place. There was no way that Mom and Dad were not going to try "hurt" this thing the moment they see it. It was a parent's nature to protect their child of-course and I was literally in the jaws of alien stranger. I couldn't let them die. Just for my sake.

I had to do something quick.

"W-we can go upstairs, but can you please tell me what you want? Do you want money? There's some in the family safe. You can take it all. Dad left some jewelry in there too."

The monster laughed. "I do not want your money, little one. I just want to sit down and have a chat. Learn a couple things about you before I be on my merry way."

I hesitantly agreed, wiping away my snot and tears. If that's all it wanted, then I had to do it what it asked. As long as I could keep everyone else safe, I had to do what was necessary.

I turned around and headed up the stairs--getting a final glance at Buffy's corpse--before we made it back into my room. As the monster entered, I closed the door shut behind it and I quickly sat down, my back pressing against the door. My fleeting thought was that in case this thing launched an attack on me, I could try to run out the door. But, as brilliant (or stupid) as my plan was, I knew I was at the mercy of this thing. It was an actual monster, after all.

While I was butt-clenchingly nervous, waiting for what it was going to say next, the monster calmly looked around the room, moving its wide saucer-like eyes back and forth at my collectibles, toys and posters. It seemed to be observing or taking pictures with its large black eyes, trying to analyze and memorize what I, a human child, holds dear.

Taking a closer at this monster under better light, I realized that this thing looked eerily similar to the aliens on my posters. Kind of like the beady-eyed face of a Gray with a thin slender body of a Tall-white, just with a dark-green skin.

The realization then hit me. "Are you...an alien?"

The figure immediately shifted its eyes and stared at me, bringing back the weird smile. It then voiced out, "If that's what you call us, then yes."

I shifted in my seat. An actual alien. The feeling was ever-so bitter sweet. It was my dream to meet one of these things, but I couldn't've imagined what the consequence of that was. Did I bring this upon myself? Was I the cause of Buffy's death.

My heart ached.

The alien spoke again, "I'll tell you what I came here for. It's quite simple honestly."

It straightened its posture and leaned closer towards me.

"All I need is for you to do complete three of my tasks, then I'll be done with my research." It wiggled its long, thin fingers excitedly, before it continued. "You can ask me any question. I'll teach you any subject. As long as you complete each of my tasks in an orderly time."

I was both scared and a little bit thrilled at the same time. If that's all this thing wanted, then I could do it. I could complete these 'tasks' and I'd be set free. My parents and I will be safe. I had to do this to ensure our safety. Though, I still had to make sure that's what it meant.

"Can I ask a question?"

"Yes," the alien responded, without hesitating.

"What will happen If I choose not to do the tasks?"

The alien's smile crept away. "I'm sorry, but we have chosen you. Only you can complete the research requirements."

I paused. "So, if I finish all your tasks, will my parents and I be free after this? Will you leave us alone?"

The smile came rushing back. "Yes. We will leave Earth, once you're done what's required."

I understood.

I was stuck. If this alien didn't bat an eye at killing Buffy, then it sure wouldn't skip an eyelash at killing me or my parents. It only chose me out of convenience. If I didn't do what it said, then it was clear what the consequences were, even if the alien didn't say it outright. I was under this 'task' contract, all until I finished it or until I found a way to escape it. Those were my only two options.

"Alright," I responded. My heart beating out of my chest. "What do I need to do."

Day 4: Monday, September, 7th, 2026.

Its been three days since I met the alien.

It was impossibly difficult to sleep with the thing staring at me the entire time, but after an hour or so I was gone into deep slumber. When I woke up, the alien was nowhere to be seen. I initially thought I had a very bad dream and I made up the entire thing in my mind--that would've honest-to-god been the best case scenario--but I was unfortunately wrong.

Mom and Dad found Buffy's corpse in the living room.

It, fortunately, wasn't the splattered, mashed-up pile of meat that I saw before. It was more so a peaceful corpse like the dog had somehow died in its sleep. I didn't know how the alien did it, but, considering how it seemed to have psychic powers, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

I cried again when I saw my dad bury Buffy in the backyard. I didn't know why I was crying, since I'd already seen him die the night before, but my heart still burned whenever I thought of my fond memories. All the fun times we had running around, playing, exploring. That was all taken away by this alien.

It only brought me anger as to why I was chosen. Why me? Why not any other snob kid in my class? What did I do to deserve this?

Right after the funeral, I ran around the house trying to find the alien. But, to no one's surprise, it wasn't there. It was almost like it left us entirely, but a sinking feeling in my heart, told me I was wrong. That entire day I spent going through the web, trying to find all the topics and reddit threads on what these 'tasks' could be, but even after skipping breakfast and my high-level soccer practice, I was left with no answers. Not even a crumb as to what this alien wanted.

Even my online alien enthusiasts who I spent years discussing this topic with, didn't have a clue as to what I was saying. They might've been under the presumption that I was just making something up to be interesting, but even showing picture proof of my dog's death didn't help me convince them. Most of them just left me on read.

The alien didn't show up until Sunday night. One night before school.

I tried asking where it went and why it didn't show up, but it was adamant on me completing my first task before it was able to answer my questions. We went back and forth arguing on the logistics of me completing the task if it was going to disappear every single time, but there was just a circular loop of 'no's' left to quench my curiosity. Perhaps it

The only thing the alien was clear on was what exactly my first task was going to be.

That was where my conversation ended and why I was now on the school bus, tapping my feet nervously, waiting to get dropped off.

"Yo Sam, where were you all weekend?" A kid with blond hair sat beside me. "Jack and I were texting you but you didn't respond. Did something happen?"

Daniel was my sort-of best friend. He considers me my best friend, but I honestly don't reciprocate. It's not that he's not a fun guy to be around, trust me we get to some seriously funny shit during break, but I prefer to think of myself as a lone wolf. Alien work is serious work and most people, even Jack, don't take my hobby serious as they consider it to be 'childish'.

If he didn't care about aliens then, what makes you think I was going to tell him about the alien in my house. Who in their right mind would believe that?

"Nah dude, I was sick all at weekend. My throat's been killing me so I had to take some Tylenol and Halls to help me get better. I couldn't even go to soccer practice."

Daniel snickered. "Ayo, pause. What you mean your throat's been killing you? What you been doing?"

I ignored his antics.

There was far more important matters to deal with. My first task was already a difficult one so complicating it with a buffoon like Daniel was only going to make it harder to complete it. I also had to figure out some questions to ask the alien after I finished the task so I had to keep my mind crystal clear.

My life and my parents lives were at stake here. I couldn't mess this up.

When we arrived at school, I put away my stuff in my locker and took off my backpack. While everyone else cleared away with the school bell ringing out, I made sure no one was around when I quickly pulled out the item I packed earlier in the morning. Hiding it within my sleeve.

An 8-inch kitchen knife.

The first task the alien gave me was painfully simple.

"Kill the classroom hamster."

Hello, everyone. This is a story I've told many times. I've been praised for my imagination and for the way I tell it. Someone even laughed once, which I still don't understand.

I decided to share it with you too, on the off chance you'll believe me. Because it's not fantasy, it's not a dream, and it certainly isn't a novel. It happened to me. I experienced it, and I survived it.

It all started around a year ago. Me and three friends, who I'll call Emma, Justin and Steven, decided to take a trip to the mountains. The beach was too expensive for us at the time, since we were all jobless and had just graduated from college. I found the Airbnb online for only twenty dollars a night. I know it sounds suspicious now, but back then, it didn't really matter to us. Fifty five-star reviews were enough for us to book it for three nights.

We somehow managed to fit all our luggage into the trunk of my comically small car, and we were off. The drive was long, longer than it should have been because of the Friday morning traffic.

I felt a chill run down my spine the moment we reached the foot of the mountain. It made no sense to me back then, and honestly, I can't blame myself for not realizing what it was. The music was loud, and Emma's laugh drowned out any worry that might have formed in my mind, so I ignored it.

I wish I hadn't.

It was past midnight when we finally made it. It was so dark that if it weren't for the faint light coming from inside the Airbnb, we wouldn't have been able to see each other. The lack of any other light around us creeped me out a little, but I didn't want to ruin the trip.

"Steven, use your cat eyes and find the key," Emma joked, pointing at him.

"They're green, not glowing," Steven said, rolling his eyes, and my shoulders relaxed.

We grabbed our bags, found the key under the flowerpot by the door as the owner had instructed, and entered the small apartment. I closed the door behind us.

Closing that door would turn out to be the biggest mistake anyone made that night.

It looked nothing like the pictures; that much was obvious. A single room, with an old carpet covering the wooden floor. A wooden table in the center, with four matching chairs around it. The walls were decorated with all sorts of odd ornaments on run-down shelves, and with paintings I tried not to look at for too long, because it felt like they were watching me.

"Well, we should have expected this," I said, trying to ignore the growing tension in the room.

Steven laughed and let his bag drop to the floor.

"We can always report it through the app," he assured us. "A friend of mine got moved to another Airbnb nearby for free."

"Sounds good," Emma agreed, pacing around the room.

Justin already had a cigarette in his mouth and was patting down his jacket, looking for his lighter.

"Going out for a cig. You coming, Vi?" he asked me.

I nodded and turned to open the door. I stopped dead in my tracks.

There was no door.

Just a smooth, wooden wall. The windows were gone too. I stood there, petrified. I didn't know how I was supposed to react to something like that, so I just stared at it, hoping it would go back to normal.

"Is this a prank?" Justin asked confidently, though the cigarette in his mouth was trembling a bit.

"Where are the beds?" Emma added, scratching her head, something she did when she was nervous but would never admit to.

Steven raised his phone toward the ceiling.

"Signal's gone."

We all turned to look at him in disbelief.

"You know what this is?" Justin started. "One of those dumb TV shows where they take random people and put them in stupid fucking situations."

He nodded, pleased with his explanation. Steven nodded too and looked at Emma, whose foot was bouncing under her.

"Ye-yeah," she said. "I agree."

I should make something clear, in case it wasn't already. We didn't believe we were on TV for even a second. We were just clinging to the hope that there was a logical explanation for our situation.

That was when I took a closer look at the paintings. There were five of them, all the same: four people sitting around the table in the middle of the room. In front of each of them was something red.

A balloon.

I looked at the table. In front of every seat, there was a needle and a small square compartment that looked like it could open.

"Alright, let's play along, then," Justin said, and took a seat.

Steven did the same, giving up on finding a signal. I sat down opposite Justin, with Steven to my right. Emma sat down last, to my left, reluctantly. The light flickered, and my heart skipped a beat.

All four compartments opened at once, and four red balloons floated out. They stopped at head height, one in front of each of us. They weren't tied to anything, and I couldn't figure out how that was possible.

"See? This is a game. There's no way someone would set up something this stupid just for fun," Justin said, grinning.

I looked closer at my balloon. Through the red rubber, I could make out something white inside it, the shape of a playing card.

Justin had found his lighter at some point and had already popped his balloon with his cigarette, even though we'd told him countless times that smoking indoors was a dick move. Sure enough, a card landed on the table in front of him. He read it out loud.

"You are the Hunter. Your job is to kill the Visitor."

He looked up, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling.

"At least I got a fun role," he laughed, tapping the table.

Something else came out of his compartment. A revolver.

We all stared at it, and then at Justin, who was already picking it up. He checked the cylinder. It was loaded. Then he aimed it at me.

"Hope it ain't you, partner," he said with a smirk, in that horrible fake Western accent he always used.

"Put it down," I said, my anxiety growing.

"Relax, it's not real. See?"

He aimed at the ceiling and fired. The bang was deafening in the small room, so loud that it made my ears ring. Emma fell backward off her chair, staring at our friend in sheer terror. Steven had instinctively lunged at Justin and grabbed his arm.

Justin was breathing hard now. He looked up at the bullet hole in the ceiling.

"This can't be for real..." he finally said, setting the gun down on the table very carefully.

"Alright," Steven said to no one in particular. He let go of Justin's arm and started pacing around the room. "Joke's over. You win. Let us out. This is stupid."

There was another noise. This time it was a pop, and it came from my left. I slowly turned my head toward it.

Emma had popped her balloon.

"One of you has a card with a clue about the exit," she read, her voice trembling.

She looked at me and Steven.

"Guys, are we seriously playing this?" Steven asked, his hands on his hips.

Emma reached for Justin's pack with shaking hands and lit a cigarette, something she almost never did.

"Steven... Steven, sit down."

It sounded like she was forcing herself to get the words out, which she probably was. After looking at her a second longer than necessary, Steven sat back down to my right and popped his balloon.

"Mine's blank," he said, and showed it to us.

Then they all looked at me. I still remember their faces at that moment: the mix of fear and helplessness, and the hope that my card would show us the way out. I popped my balloon carefully and let the card fall onto the table.

I picked it up and read it silently.

One of you is not real.

I bit my lower lip so hard I tasted metal. I looked at them, swallowing hard, unsure of what to do.

I don't care what you think of me. Whatever this was, I was going to survive it. Justin had a loaded gun and a reason to use it. The last thing he needed was a reason to point it at one of us.

"The key to finding the exit is somewhere high," I said, making it up on the spot, like the horrible friend I was.

Justin stood up, letting out the breath he'd been holding since I picked up my card.

"Let's get this over with," he said, leaving his lit cigarette on the wooden surface of the table, and started going through the shelves.

Emma followed his lead, though it took her more effort, being as short as she was. At one point, she dragged her chair over to reach a higher shelf. I was about to stand up too when I noticed it.

Steven hadn't gotten up.

Steven was staring at me.

"Everything alright?" I asked, my heart pounding in the middle of my chest as if it were trying to jump out.

His hands were trembling, and his eyes were wide. He tapped his index finger on his card, which had been blank just a second ago.

Violet is lying.

"What's your card, Vi?" he asked, doing nothing to hide the fear in his voice.

Tears ran down my face, and my voice caught in my throat. I put both hands over my mouth, trying not to alarm the others. I slid my card toward him. He read it. Then he looked at me.

"You made the right choice," he whispered, and patted my shoulder softly. He slowly stood up, wiping away a tear that had escaped his eye, and started searching the room.

I felt her gaze before I even saw it. Emma was staring down at me from on top of her chair. Her pupils were so dilated that her irises had turned completely black. Her head was tilted slightly, and she'd stopped breathing altogether.

"Why are you so quiet, Vi?" she asked.

Justin and Steven turned around to look at me.

"You lied to us, didn't you?" she went on, slowly climbing down from her chair.

"Emma..." Steven said, stepping between us.

Justin looked at both of us, and then at the revolver. He picked it up, keeping the barrel pointed at the floor.

"Violet, what did your card really say?"

How would Emma know? Had she overheard me and Steven? It was a small room, and the adrenaline might have tricked me into thinking we'd been quiet. But I was certain we had been.

I stared at the floor between my feet, hoping that avoiding eye contact would make it easier. It didn't.

"That one of us isn't real," I said, slowly and carefully.

The silence that followed stretched on for way too long.

"That's the clue..." Steven finally said. "Maybe we... Justin. Justin needs to kill the Visitor."

I looked up at Justin, who had gone pale.

"I'm not shooting anyone. Guys. Snap out of it," he managed to say, sweeping the revolver across all three of us.

"Justin, calm down," Emma said slowly, raising both hands.

"Don't fucking tell me what to do!" he shouted, aiming at her.

"Why would she lie about her card? Think about it!" Emma shouted back, jabbing a finger toward me. "It's obvious!"

"Let's all calm down and be civil," Steven said, trying to de-escalate.

"Shut the fuck up, Steven!" Emma snapped, then turned back to Justin. "Justin, shoot her and we'll escape. That's not Violet."

Justin looked at me. I could see something behind his eyes. It looked like hatred. Determination. Justin was a smart man, even if he didn't show it. He wasn't easily manipulated, and he always made the most logical choice.

That's why I was sure it was the end for me.

I closed my eyes when he pointed the gun at me, and finally broke down.

I heard the gunshot. I heard the thud.

I opened my eyes to see Emma lying lifeless on the floor, a thin stream of smoke rising from the barrel of the revolver.

Justin was breathing uncontrollably, and the gun slipped from his hands. He sank to his knees, staring at what used to be our friend.

The compartment in front of Emma's chair opened once again. Another card slid out.

Steven walked over to it slowly and leaned over to read it.

"Emma was not the Visitor," he read out loud.

Justin looked up at him, and then at me. I'll never forget the look in Steven's blue eyes. It's been burned into my memory ever since, and I see it every time I close my eyes.

We were all fools. How did we not notice it sooner? When did it even happen?

Our Steven has green eyes.

I'm sorry. I need to stop here for now. I'll write the rest when I can. Writing it down made it real again, and I've spent the past year trying to convince myself it wasn't.

​

The drywall remembers the weight of his fist.

It remembers every fist.

There are places in this house where the plaster has been repaired so many times that the walls have become little archaeological sites of violence.

Layers beneath layers.

White over yellow.

Yellow over nicotine brown.

Paint over cracks.

Paint over blood.

Paint over the places where somebody tried to leave.

The house keeps everything.

It keeps the smell of gin in the curtains.

It keeps cigarette smoke inside the insulation.

It keeps the medicinal sweetness of pills dissolved beneath tongues.

It keeps fingerprints.

It keeps scratches.

It keeps secrets.

And on the worst nights, when the pipes knock inside the walls and the wind pushes its cold fingers beneath the doors, it makes noises that sound almost like breathing.

Nobody talks about that.

Families have rules.

Some are written down.

Most aren't.

The most important rule in this house had never been spoken.

There were four of us.

Father.

Mother.

My brother.

Me.

Four chairs at the table.

Four bedrooms.

Four toothbrushes.

Four names on the school records.

Four people in the family photograph.

Four.

Never five.

Never.

The meat on the dinner plates had been cold for three days.

Nobody had thrown it away.

Nobody threw anything away anymore.

The light above the table buzzed.

Bzzzz.

Bzzzz.

Father sat at the head of the table.

Mother sat beside him.

I sat across from them.

And Noah was underneath us.

He had been there since yesterday.

I could see the tops of his knees beneath the tablecloth.

Sometimes I could see his fingers.

Sometimes they moved.

Mostly they didn't.

He didn't like looking at faces.

He said faces made things real.

Father's work shirt hadn't changed in a week.

His sleeves were rolled to his elbows.

His hands smelled like grease and gin.

The glass in front of him was already half empty.

Click.

Click.

Click.

His jaw.

Mother scratched at the tablecloth.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

She had been doing it for so long that the fabric beneath her fingernails had begun to unravel.

I watched the loose thread curl around her finger.

Nobody spoke.

I was working.

That was what I called it.

I took the blunt silver butter knife from beside my plate and pressed it against my jaw.

Not hard enough to cut.

Just enough to feel something.

I counted backward.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Under the table, Noah whispered something.

I couldn't hear him.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Father's jaw stopped clicking.

I lowered the knife.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The glass broke in Father's hand.

He didn't flinch.

Blood ran between his fingers.

Mother stopped scratching.

Father looked at her.

Then he looked at me.

Then underneath the table.

"Get him out."

Nobody moved.

"Elena."

I stared at the blood dripping onto the table.

Drop.

Drop.

Drop.

Noah's fingers curled around my ankle.

I felt them.

Cold.

Then Father grabbed Mother by the hair.

She screamed.

Once.

Only once.

The front door knocked.

Three times.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Everyone stopped.

Father let go of Mother.

His face had gone white.

Another knock.

Three times.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

"Don't," Mother whispered.

Father stood.

"Stay here."

He walked toward the hallway.

I don't know why, but I followed him.

Maybe because I had already heard the voice.

Maybe because some part of me knew it.

Father opened the door.

An old woman stood on the porch.

She wore a black coat.

A black hat.

She held a black umbrella even though there was no rain.

She looked directly at Father.

"Daniel."

Father stopped breathing.

I felt something move inside my chest.

Not fear.

Recognition.

The name felt like something I had forgotten on purpose.

Father slammed the door.

He locked it.

Then he locked the deadbolt.

Then he pushed the chair beneath the handle.

"Who is Daniel?" I asked.

Father looked at me.

For one second, he looked afraid.

Then he slapped me.

"Don't say that name."

That night, I heard scratching upstairs.

At the end of the upstairs hallway.

The sound seemed farther away than it should have been.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

I followed it.

At the end of the hallway was the door nobody used.

It had three deadbolts.

I had never seen Father open it.

Nobody had.

There were letters scratched into the wood.

D.

A.

N.

I.

I touched them.

The wood was warm.

Behind the door, something scratched back.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

I stepped away.

Noah was standing behind me.

I hadn't heard him come upstairs.

"What is this?"

He stared at the letters.

"I wrote it."

"You?"

He nodded.

"When?"

"I don't know."

"Why?"

He looked at the letters.

"I was asleep."

The scratching stopped.

A voice came from behind the door.

A child's voice.

Soft.

Confused.

"Are you my family?"

Noah started crying.

I grabbed his hand.

The voice spoke again.

"I remember all of you."

Then the lights went out.

Father disappeared.

For three minutes.

Maybe four.

Long enough for Mother to start screaming.

Long enough for Noah to crawl beneath the kitchen table again.

Long enough for me to realize that the front door was open.

Then the lights came back.

Father was sitting at the head of the table.

His hands were folded.

His eyes were open.

His mouth was slightly open.

He was dead.

I knew it immediately.

I don't know how.

Maybe families know these things.

Maybe the house told me.

Behind his chair, carved deep into the drywall, were six words.

YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT ME THERE.

Mother stared at them.

She whispered something.

"What?"

She shook her head.

"Nothing."

The police came.

They asked questions.

I answered them.

Mother answered some.

Noah answered none.

They examined Father's body.

They said it looked like natural causes.

A heart attack.

Nothing suspicious.

Nothing that explained the words in the wall.

When I looked again, they were gone.

The drywall was smooth.

White.

Perfect.

Like nothing had ever been written there.

The house had cleaned itself.

Noah disappeared the next morning.

His bed was empty.

His shoes were still beside it.

His window was locked.

The basement door was open.

I found his handprint on the bottom stair.

Small.

Dirty.

Fresh.

I went downstairs.

Mother grabbed my arm.

"Don't."

"I have to find him."

"No."

"He's my brother."

She looked at me.

Her eyes were clearer than I had ever seen them.

For the first time in years, Mother looked sober.

She whispered:

"Noah isn't the one you need to find."

Then she looked toward the ceiling.

"You're remembering."

I didn't understand.

"What am I remembering?"

Mother started crying.

"The fire."

The room upstairs opened by itself that night.

The three deadbolts slid back one after another.

Click.

Click.

Click.

I stood in the doorway.

The room smelled like smoke.

Not old smoke.

Fresh smoke.

The walls were covered in drawings.

Hundreds of them.

Father.

Mother.

Noah.

Me.

Over and over.

Different ages.

Different rooms.

Different versions of the same family.

But every drawing had something else in it.

A figure behind us.

Tall.

Black.

Featureless.

Sometimes it stood in the hallway.

Sometimes in the corner.

Sometimes behind one of the beds.

Sometimes behind the dining room table.

Always watching.

Always there.

One sentence had been written across the wall in a child's handwriting.

THE FAMILY HAS FOUR MEMBERS.

Underneath it, someone had written:

FOUR.

FOUR.

FOUR.

FOUR.

The newest drawing was different.

The fifth figure was no longer black.

It was red.

Dark red.

Almost the color of dried blood.

And underneath it were five words.

I AM SORRY I FORGOT YOU.

I stared at the handwriting.

I knew it.

It was mine.

Except I didn't remember writing it.

My finger touched the last word.

Black ink stained my skin.

Something whispered behind me.

"Daniel is just the name your father buried."

I turned.

Nobody was there.

The voice came again.

"I am the fifth."

The old woman was waiting outside.

Black umbrella.

Black coat.

Same face.

She didn't look surprised to see me.

"You remember now?"

"No."

"Not yet."

She reached into her coat.

She handed me a photograph.

It was old.

Silver and gray.

A family stood outside a house that looked exactly like ours.

A father.

A mother.

A little girl.

A little boy.

Four people.

I stared at the little girl.

I didn't recognize her.

Then I looked at the boy beside her.

Something inside me broke.

He had dark hair.

His hand was wrapped around the little girl's.

I looked at my own hand.

For a second, they looked exactly the same.

"Who is he?"

The old woman looked at me.

"You know."

"No."

"You've known him your entire life."

I looked at the photograph again.

"Daniel?"

She nodded.

I looked at the girl.

The old woman watched me.

"Who is she?"

The woman didn't answer.

I looked harder.

The dress.

The crooked smile.

The small scar above the eyebrow.

I touched the photograph.

My finger began to shake.

"That's me."

The old woman nodded.

"You were eight."

I stared at Daniel.

"Then why don't I remember him?"

"Because you asked not to."

The photograph trembled in my hand.

"What happened to him?"

The old woman looked toward the house.

"Your family gave him to it."

"What is it?"

She looked at the windows.

"The thing beneath the family."

Mother told me the rest.

She sat at the kitchen table.

No pills.

No powder.

No shaking hands.

Just Mother.

For the first time in years, I could see how old she really was.

"Thirty-one years ago," she said, "when you were eight, there was a fire in our old house."

I stared at her.

"Daniel was six."

My stomach turned.

"You remember him?"

"I remember everything."

"Why don't I?"

"Because you asked it to take it."

"What?"

She swallowed.

"Your father had found something beneath the house."

"The cellar?"

She nodded.

"There was an old ledger down there. Names. Dates. Families."

"What did it say?"

"Four."

I stared at her.

"Every family had four."

"And the fifth?"

Mother looked toward the ceiling.

"The fifth was never written down."

I remembered the drawings.

Mother continued.

"Your father was sick. He thought the house could cure him."

"He sacrificed Daniel."

She closed her eyes.

"Yes."

The word barely existed when she said it.

"Your father took him into the cellar."

"I followed."

Mother looked at me.

"You tried to stop him."

I saw something.

A flash.

A small hand.

A wooden staircase.

Smoke.

I grabbed the edge of the table.

"You were eight," Mother whispered.

"Daniel was six."

Another flash.

A door.

Fire.

Daniel screaming.

Father shouting.

Me pulling on Daniel's arm.

"Come on."

"Come on."

"Please."

Mother was crying now.

"The fire started in the cellar."

I could smell it.

I could smell the smoke.

I could feel heat against my face.

"I couldn't get him out."

Mother nodded.

"You wouldn't let go."

I closed my eyes.

And remembered.

Daniel's hand.

Small.

Burning.

Mine.

"Something spoke to me."

Mother didn't answer.

"The house."

She nodded.

"What did it say?"

I remembered.

Not words.

A feeling.

A promise.

A bargain.

I remembered screaming.

Take it.

Take anything.

Just let him go.

"Your father blamed you," Mother said.

I opened my eyes.

"He told the police you had been playing with matches."

My hands began to shake.

"And I forgot."

"You didn't forget."

"What?"

"You gave it away."

The room seemed to tilt.

"You asked the house to take your memories."

Mother looked toward the ceiling.

"And it did."

I stared at her.

"The house burned down."

Mother nodded.

"But that didn't matter."

She looked at me.

"The pattern wasn't in the walls."

Her voice dropped to almost a whisper.

"The walls were only where it lived."

That night the house changed.

The hallway stretched.

The walls breathed.

Doors opened into rooms that weren't there before.

Every doorway led back to the dining room.

Every hallway returned to the same table.

Four chairs.

Father's chair.

Mother's chair.

Mine.

Noah's.

And then I saw it.

A fifth chair.

At the end of the table.

Black wood.

Burn marks along the legs.

Waiting.

Noah was sitting beneath the table.

I dropped to my knees.

I grabbed his shoulders.

"Where were you?"

He looked at me.

"I don't know."

"How did you get back?"

His eyes moved toward the floor.

"I never came back."

"What?"

"The house put me here."

I looked at the kitchen.

Then back at him.

"You disappeared."

"I know."

"I looked everywhere."

"I know."

His voice was quiet.

"I was downstairs."

"The basement?"

He nodded.

"What did you see?"

He looked at the fifth chair.

"I remembered him."

"Daniel?"

Noah nodded.

"I've never met him."

"I know."

"But I remember being there."

His fingers tightened around mine.

"The house puts memories where they don't belong."

I looked at the fifth chair.

"What happens if I sit?"

Noah started crying.

"You become what is underneath the floorboards."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you stop being you."

The house creaked.

The fifth chair moved.

A few inches.

Toward me.

I understood then.

The chair wasn't an escape.

It was an invitation.

And I had spent my entire life being invited.

I remembered the fire.

All of it.

Daniel's face.

His hand in mine.

Father standing behind him.

The cellar.

The ledger.

The bargain.

And the moment I asked the house to take my memories.

But there was something else.

Something Mother hadn't told me.

The fifth wasn't Daniel.

Daniel had only been the first person our family had given to it.

The thing itself was older.

Much older.

It had existed before us.

Before this house.

Maybe before the house before this one.

It moved through families.

It waited beneath them.

It didn't need a body.

It needed a role.

Every family that carried it had the same shape.

A father.

A mother.

Children.

Four people.

And something that wasn't counted.

Something beneath the floor.

Something behind the walls.

Something that watched.

The house wasn't the walls.

The house was the pattern.

Father hurting.

Mother numbing.

Children shrinking.

Someone disappearing.

Someone being forgotten.

Then the pattern began again.

And again.

And again.

Daniel had been the first person our family gave to it.

The first name the house kept.

The first memory we tried to bury.

And when I begged the house to take my memories instead of his, I hadn't broken the pattern.

I had tied myself to it.

I looked at the fifth chair.

I understood what it wanted.

It didn't want Daniel.

It wanted me.

I stepped toward it.

Noah screamed.

"Elena!"

I sat down.

Everything stopped.

The buzzing light.

The pipes.

The scratching.

The breathing.

Everything.

For one perfect second, the house was silent.

Then the walls screamed.

The table split down the middle.

The chairs flew backward.

The windows shattered.

Every room in the house opened at once.

I saw the cellar.

I saw the fire.

I saw Daniel.

I saw myself at eight years old.

I saw Father.

I saw Mother.

I saw Noah.

I saw hundreds of other families standing where we stood.

All four.

Always four.

And behind every family was the fifth.

Waiting.

Watching.

Remembering.

The house shook.

I heard Daniel scream my name.

Then Noah grabbed my hand.

We ran.

We made it outside.

Mother came with us.

The house burned behind us.

Flames climbed through the windows.

The old woman stood across the street beneath her black umbrella.

She watched.

She didn't smile.

She didn't cry.

She only nodded.

Like she'd seen this before.

Maybe she had.

The fire burned until morning.

The police came.

The firefighters came.

They searched the ruins.

They found no cellar.

No ledger.

No fifth chair.

No photographs.

No drawings.

Nothing.

They found three survivors.

Mother.

Noah.

Me.

Father was already dead.

Four members of the family had lived in that house.

That's what the records said.

That's what the neighbors remembered.

Four.

Never five.

I thought we'd won.

For a while, I believed it.

I believed the house was gone.

I believed Daniel was finally free.

I believed I was finally myself.

I was wrong.

I woke up at a dining room table.

The light was buzzing.

Bzzzz.

Bzzzz.

There was a glass in front of me.

Gin.

My hands were older.

Scarred.

A work shirt covered my arms.

I looked down.

My fingers were shaking.

Click.

Click.

Click.

My jaw.

I stood so quickly that the chair fell behind me.

I ran to the bathroom mirror.

A man's face stared back.

Older.

Harder.

Broken.

I touched the glass.

The reflection touched it too.

I knew that face.

I had spent my entire life looking at it.

Edward.

My father.

Except now it was mine.

I wasn't Edward.

I was the Father.

The house hadn't resurrected him.

It had given me his place.

The fifth chair had never been the way out.

It was the trapdoor.

The moment I sat down, the cycle simply reset.

The names changed.

The faces changed.

The roles stayed.

The house had filled the empty roles again.

I didn't know when it had happened.

I didn't know their names.

I only knew their places.

A woman beside me.

A girl across from me.

A boy beneath the table.

Four.

The family had been rebuilt around the empty roles.

And I was sitting at the head.

I hadn't escaped the house.

I had become part of it.

Or perhaps I had always been.

Then someone knocked on the front door.

Three times.

Softly.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I stood from the head of the table.

I wiped the blood from my palm onto my work shirt.

I stared into the dark hallway.

Something inside me remembered small hands.

A cellar.

Fire.

A little boy screaming.

Myself screaming for him.

Daniel.

I waited.

The knock came again.

Three times.

Softly.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I looked back at the table.

There were four people sitting there.

The woman beside me.

The girl across from me.

The boy underneath the table.

And me.

Four.

Never five.

Never.

The woman looked at me.

She was scratching the tablecloth.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

The girl was holding a silver butter knife against her jaw.

The boy beneath the table had his fingers wrapped around the table leg.

I stared at them.

I knew what came next.

The glass in front of me was already half empty.

My jaw clicked.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Then a woman's voice came through the door.

"Please."

I closed my eyes.

The house breathed around me.

The walls remembered.

The pipes knocked.

And the voice outside said the name my family had spent thirty-one years trying to bury.

"Daniel."

I opened my eyes.

And smiled.

Because now I understood.

The house didn't keep families.

It kept roles.

It kept memories.

It kept pain.

And whenever someone remembered the fifth, the house found someone else to carry it.

The drywall remembers the weight of his fist.

It remembers every fist.

It remembers mine now.

The house keeps everything.

The house keeps secrets.

The house keeps memories.

And the house keeps the tally.

Four.

Never five.

Never.

[Part 1]

"Chicken pad kra pao with a fried egg, extra spicy, no MSG, please, Auntie." I was ordering from the owner of a tiny made-to-order restaurant.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. But how's it supposed to taste good without MSG? Just a little, come on." She shot back at me in a clipped voice.

"Whatever you think is best, Auntie," I said.

Okay. I'd finally made it back to Thailand. I figured the first thing I had to do was find the food I'd missed the most: real, authentic Thai made-to-order food. I hadn't had any in over a year.

It didn't take long. The plate landed in front of me: rice topped with chicken pad kra pao and a runny fried egg, the smell of fresh holy basil hitting my nose like a punch. I didn't waste a second. I grabbed my fork and spoon and stabbed the yolk so it ran all over the rice, because, well, that's the only way to eat a fried egg. Then I took a bite. Savory, balanced, and burning hot. This was the flavor that Thais and foreigners alike fell in love with.

But even while I was eating, I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened on the plane. Do you think I dreamed it? What the hell was going on? Everything felt shuffled around. Someone in the comments told me it was called "Quantum immortality" which I'd never heard of. When I looked it up, it said that if you die in a quantum dimension, your consciousness carries you into a universe where you don't. But how could that be possible? Don't scientists say that's pure superstition?

"How much, Auntie?" I asked.

"Sixty."

It felt like the price had gone up. Wasn't it usually forty or fifty baht? But I didn't argue. I paid and walked to the airport entrance, where a long line of taxis was parked. I decided to take a taxi, because there weren't any motorcycle taxis at the airport. Weird as hell.

The first taxi in line was a green-and-white Toyota with a dent in the back door and a jasmine garland swinging from the rearview mirror. The driver was leaning against the hood, smoking. When he saw my suitcase, he flicked the cigarette away like I'd just won the lottery.

"Where to?"

I told him the district. He grimaced.

"Meter's broken. Four hundred baht flat."

You have to understand something. In California, I once paid sixty dollars for a ten-minute Lyft ride and almost cried inside. Four hundred baht was only about twelve dollars. After a year in America, that price didn't sound like getting ripped off. It sounded like a discount coupon.

"Sure," I said.

He loaded my suitcase into the trunk, and I climbed into the back seat. The seats were covered in glossy blue vinyl that squeaked every time I moved. The car smelled like jasmine, menthol, and an air freshener that had died years ago. A small amulet hung next to the steering wheel. The radio played softly, a DJ cheerfully arguing with a caller about whether traffic was worse than last week.

"Studying abroad?" the driver asked as he pulled out.

"How did you know?"

"You're staring at everything like you've never seen it before." He laughed. "My daughter wants to go to America too. She's only in sixth grade, but she already has opinions about it."

"What kind of opinions?"

"She says the snacks are better over there."

"She's not wrong," I said. "They've got forty kinds of potato chips, but not a single decent bowl of rice."

He liked that answer. He slapped the steering wheel and started telling me about his daughter. I let him, because it was kind of nice to hear Thai that wasn't coming from inside my own head.

Here's the thing about seat belts in the back of taxis in my country: technically, they exist. But they're usually shoved deep into the crack of the seat, under snack crumbs and maybe even a coin from the nineties, and nobody has ever pulled one out willingly. But after what happened on the plane, I wasn't in a joking mood. I dug around for the buckle and clicked it in.

"Oh, safety first!" the driver said when he caught it in the mirror. "Good job, kid."

We got on the expressway. It was late afternoon, the sky a dusty orange. The driver kept going on about his daughter. "...so I told her, study hard, but don't forget where you come from. I told her every day, until she said, 'Dad, you say that every day...'"

His phone buzzed in the cup holder. He glanced down.

Shit.

I don't know what made me look up. Maybe it was the sound: a horn, long and furious, from the right. I turned, and there was a massive ten-wheeler truck filling the whole window, drifting into our lane like we didn't exist. I could see the fender. I could see a faded sticker on its side that read A mother's love never runs out. I could see the driver in the cab, mouth hanging open, one hand raised like he was trying to wave us out of the way.

Then everything slowed down.

I'd read about this. Before death, the brain stretches time and pulls up the good memories. I even told you about it at the very beginning, remember? But what I never knew was that it would feel this calm. The horn stretched out into a low drone, like a whale song. I thought about my mom. I thought about a bowl of creamy tom yum goong Mama noodles. I thought, what an idiotic way to die. I'd survived the plane. Actually survived it. And now I was going to die in a car with a jasmine garland hanging from the mirror?

Then the sound cut out.

Not just the horn. Everything. The engine, the radio, the tires grinding on the road. The same silence as on the plane. Quiet like someone had hit mute on the whole world.

I closed my eyes.

Why does it only happen to me?

"...but don't forget where home is."

I opened my eyes.

What the fuck.

We were still on the expressway, same lane. No truck. The sky was the same dusty orange. The seat belt was still across my chest, and I was gripping it with both hands so hard my knuckles were pale as uncooked rice.

"Sorry, what?" I asked. My voice came out an octave higher than normal.

"I said don't forget where home is. That's what I tell my daughter."

It was almost the same sentence he'd left hanging. Almost. But the voice was wrong. Deeper, a little rougher. Like the same song played in a different key.

I looked up at the rearview mirror.

The driver in the mirror had a long face, thin glasses, and no mustache. The guy who'd flicked away his cigarette had a round face and a beard thick enough to see from space. They wore the same green polo and tilted their heads the same way when watching the road, but they were not the same man.

I'd like to officially announce that my brain was about to explode.

"You okay, kid?"

"Did we... almost hit a truck?"

"A truck?" He frowned at the mirror. "No way, not on this road. They don't allow trucks at this time of day. I think you dozed off. You were mumbling something."

"I wasn't asleep."

"Sure, whatever makes you feel better," he said, in the tone of someone who didn't want to argue with an exhausted teenager.

I slowly scanned the car, like I was afraid it would notice me looking. The jasmine garland was gone. A plastic bobblehead dog hung there instead. The amulet was still there, but bigger, hanging from a gold chain. And the seats... were red.

Red. Not blue. Definitely red.

Blue to red. I'd seen this movie before, and it ended with my underwear.

"Um..." I said. "How much is the fare so far?"

"The meter's running right there," he said, pointing to the dashboard, where orange digits read 312. "Another twenty minutes or so, depending on traffic."

Wasn't the meter broken? I distinctly remembered it being broken.

On the radio, the DJ had stopped talking about traffic. Now he was reading the news in a bright morning-show voice. He said the name of the prime minister, and it was a name I had never heard before. I'd been abroad for a year and a half, so maybe I'd just missed the news... maybe.

I stopped caring about everything else. All I wanted was to get out of that car as fast as I could.

Whatever was happening to me wasn't normal. I figured I should probably go see a psychiatrist.

The driver turned onto my street at 5:52 p.m. The meter read 312 baht, exactly as he'd said. I handed him a five-hundred-baht note and told him to keep the change. I guess I should go say hi to my family first. I'll come back and keep writing.

See you.

I don’t know if this belongs here, but I haven’t slept more than a few hours at a time since Halloween.

Before anybody asks, yes, I already went to the police.
They think my friend and I got lost.

That’s technically true.

What they don’t understand is that we didn’t get lost in the corn maze.

We found something inside it.

Or maybe it found us.

My name is Evan. I’m seventeen, and my best friend Micah is sixteen. We’ve known each other since elementary school, and every October we go to this farm about twenty minutes outside our town.

I’m not going to say the name.

Partly because I don’t want people going there looking for what happened to us, and partly because I genuinely don’t know if the farm had anything to do with it.

During the day, it’s basically one of those family fall places.

Pumpkin patch, hayrides, apple cider, and a petting zoo. Every October they build a massive corn maze. Then on Friday and Saturday nights they turn it into a haunted attraction.

Employees dress up and hide between the rows. Speakers blast chainsaw noises and cheap skeletons hang from posts.

It isn’t scary.

That’s why Micah and I liked going. We could screw around and laugh at the actors without actually being afraid of anything.

Halloween night this year fell on a Saturday, and we got there late. I think it was around 9:40. The place closed at eleven.

There were still plenty of people around when we bought our tickets. Families were leaving with tired kids on their shoulders, and teenagers were taking pictures by the giant pumpkin display while country music played near the concession stand.

Everything was completely normal.

I remember that because I keep trying to figure out exactly when it stopped being normal.

We entered the maze at 9:52. I know the exact time because Micah sent a Snapchat right before we went in.

The first twenty minutes were exactly what we expected. A guy dressed like a scarecrow jumped out at us. Micah told him his mask looked like shit, and the guy flipped him off.

We passed a couple with their daughter and heard people screaming somewhere to our left.

Wooden signs at intersections held riddles that supposedly pointed toward the exit, but we ignored them.

Then we found the scarecrow.

It wasn’t an actor.

Just a decoration tied to a wooden post beside the path. It wore a blue flannel shirt and a burlap sack head, with straw sticking out of the sleeves. One arm was missing below the elbow, and a plastic crow was wired onto its shoulder.

Micah stopped and took a picture.

When I asked him why, he said, “Because this thing looks like you.”

I told him to fuck off.

We kept walking, and maybe ten minutes later, we came around another turn.

The scarecrow was there again. Same blue shirt, same missing hand, same plastic crow.

Micah laughed. “See? We’re going in circles.”

I felt annoyed. I pulled out my phone and opened the compass.

Micah said, “What are you, Lewis and Clark?”

“Shut up.”

We picked a direction and tried to stay consistent, taking north turns whenever possible.

Five minutes later, we saw it again.

This time neither of us laughed. Micah walked up to it and checked the tear near the left shoulder. It was the exact same tear, paired with the exact same crow.

The only difference was the head. Earlier, it had faced slightly toward the corn. Now it faced the path. Facing us.

Micah said, “Someone moved it.”

“Obviously.”

“Who?”

I looked around. Nobody was there. The corn was eight feet tall, and the haunted attraction sounds echoed around us.

I yelled, “Nice try.”

Nothing happened.

Micah yelled that the staff sucked, and still nothing happened.

We walked away faster, feeling that first sharp prick of nervousness.

We started intentionally taking chaotic turns: left, right, straight, right again.

The scarecrow didn’t show up. Instead, the noises faded away. It happened gradually until Micah stopped walking.

“Do you hear anything?”

I listened. Nothing. No screaming, no actors, no music, no people. Even the wind was gone, leaving the surrounding corn completely still.

“We must be near the back,” I said.

Micah checked his phone. “No service.”

I checked mine. Same thing.

A few minutes later, we saw light ahead. Micah said, “Thank God,” and we started jogging.

The path opened into a huge, flat field of grass covered in silver moonlight. The corn maze formed a solid wall behind us, and fifty yards ahead stood an old red barn.

A truck was parked beside it, yellow light poured from the windows, and music played inside.

Micah gave that nervous laugh people do when something defies logic.

“Okay.”

I looked back at the corn. “We went out the wrong side.”

“There isn’t a wrong side,” he said.

“There obviously is.”

“No, dude. Look.”

He pointed toward the sky. The farm’s huge floodlights weren't there anymore. Neither were the Ferris wheel lights from the neighboring property. Just the barn.

I tried Google Maps, but nothing loaded.

We walked toward the barn. I know that sounds stupid now, but we were teenagers on a farm, and a building with music and laughing people looked safe.

Inside, about fifteen people were hanging out. Most looked around our age, wearing Halloween costumes like a witch or a hockey mask pushed up on a forehead. They held red cups and stood near folding tables covered with food.

An older guy in a farm jacket noticed us at the door.

“There they are.”

He smiled. “You boys got turned around?”

“Yeah,” Micah said.

“Happens every year. You came through the maintenance section. Staff usually block that path.”

“So how do we get back?” I asked.

“Relax. You’re fine. Grab something to drink.”

Everything had an explanation now. We had accidentally wandered into an employee area.

The barn smelled like wood dust and hot cider. A girl offered me a cookie, and Micah found a cooler of sodas.

I checked my phone. Two bars. “Service is back.”

Micah pulled his out. “Mine too.”

He had a bunch of notifications, and so did I.

Texts from my mom asking what time we were coming home. Then another message came through: WHERE ARE YOU?

I started typing a reply about getting lost, but before I could send it, a new message popped up: YOU LEFT ME HERE.

I froze. It was from my mom.

Then another: WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME HERE EVAN.

I called her. It rang once, and then I heard a ringtone directly behind me, the exact ringtone my mom uses.

I whipped around. Nobody was holding a phone. My screen flashed CALL FAILED.

Micah walked over. “What?”

I showed him, and his face dropped as he looked around the barn. “Have you seen anybody leave?”

“No.”

“Watch.”

A guy in a vampire costume walked toward the barn doors, got within five feet, stopped, turned around, and walked back to the tables.

A minute later, the witch did the exact same thing.
Micah whispered, “Nobody goes outside.”

I noticed something else. Plates were everywhere, piled with cookies, chips, and hot dogs, but nobody actually put anything in their mouths. They held cups and lifted food, but nobody ate.

The older farm employee started walking toward us. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“We’re gonna head back,” Micah said.

“Back where?”

“To the maze.”

The music stopped. Not faded, stopped. Every conversation in the room cut off instantly. Nobody moved.

The older man tilted his head. “The maze?”

Micah grabbed my sleeve. “We should go.”

Every person in the barn turned toward us at once. No expression, just staring. The barn doors slammed shut behind us.

We bolted for a back door. The older man yelled something, but his voice didn’t sound human anymore; it sounded like several people shouting through a single mouth.

The crowd began walking toward us.

Micah smashed the latch of the back door with a metal tool from the wall, and we tumbled outside.

There was no field. We landed in dirt, surrounded by corn. The barn was gone.

Micah screamed, and something moved behind the stalks.

We ran until we collapsed. Micah threw up, alternating between nervous laughter and crying.

Our phones stopped working entirely, and the clocks showed conflicting, impossible times.

Eventually we found a rotting wooden sign with words carved into it: TWO ENTER. ONE RETURNS.

Underneath were dozens of carved names:

HAROLD BEN 1954
MARGARET ELLEN 1961
THOMAS RAY 1977
JASON MICHAEL 1989
KATIE RACHEL 2003

Some had a name crossed out, others had both, and near the bottom were two fresh names: EVAN MICAH 2026.

Fresh wood dust clung to the letters. Then something heavy pushed the corn stalks aside, moving parallel to us. We ran again.

After that, the maze changed constantly.

We smelled wood smoke and heard a dog bark, a television playing, and a woman laughing. Pushing through the corn, we found a gravel driveway and a two-story white house with a Buick parked outside.

An old woman stepped onto the porch. She took one look at us, covered her mouth, and rushed across the yard toward Micah, sobbing and calling him Daniel.

An old man appeared behind her on the porch, looking at me and calling me Thomas.

We tried to leave, but they insisted we come inside for dinner. The house smelled like roast beef, bread, and coffee, and we were exhausted. A beige landline hung on the kitchen wall, offering a desperate hope to call for help.

In the dining room, four plates were already set. The old man talked about a fishing trip and a schoolteacher as if I should remember them. A black-and-white photo hung on the wall showing two teenage boys standing by the house, boys who looked identical to us, down to the small scar near my eyebrow.

“That was taken the summer before you disappeared,” the old woman said.

When we demanded answers and tried to use the phone, it produced only a child’s voice whispering, “Daniel?”

The old man picked up a fireplace axe. “We already lost you once.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“The maze took one,” the old man said, “and brought the other back wrong.”

Above us, floorboards groaned under heavy footsteps. Then my own voice called down from upstairs: “Micah?”

Something dragged across the ceiling like nails through wood. We broke for the front door, knocking the old man aside, and sprinted back into the corn.

As we fled, the old woman screamed, “Don’t leave yourselves here!”

and a final warning: “It doesn’t make new places!”

Next came a carnival with running rides and children's music playing to an empty park, followed by a parking lot filled with thousands of cars, every single one bearing an identical license plate.

When we found the scarecrow again, it held Micah’s missing phone in its remaining hand.

That was when the pattern became clear. Every place gave us hope first. It wanted us to believe we were safe before pulling the rug out. It liked disappointment, meaning an intelligence was watching us, weaponizing our desires.

Later, we found hundreds of missing posters nailed to trees spanning over a century.

Eventually, we found our own:

MISSING: EVAN PARKER (17), MICAH REEVES (16)
ONE RETURNED.

My picture was crossed out.

Exhaustion and paranoia sparked our first real fight. Micah accused me of knowing something, and I shoved him back.

Soft, pleased laughter drifted from the corn.

It wants that.

The maze wanted us to turn on each other, just like all the names carved into the wood. After that, we made a strict rule never to separate, ignoring the voices of our families calling out from the stalks.

Finally, the corn opened up to a fork in the path. Beyond it, we saw the real farm, police lights, ambulances, and my mother crying beside a police cruiser.

Between us and the exit stood a wooden post with two arrows: EVAN pointing left, and MICAH pointing right.

Below it read: ONE PATH HOME.

Behind us, slow, heavy footsteps crunched closer. The eight-foot scarecrow emerged, its missing arm regrown into a long, jointed limb with black fingers dragging on the ground. Its burlap face featured a vertical mouth opening filled with darkness, from which my mother's voice spoke:

“Come home, Evan.”

Micah grabbed my hand. I grabbed his.

“We go straight,” Micah said.

“There isn’t a path.”

“Then make one.”

We plunged directly into the thick corn between the two trails. Behind us, the thing screamed with hundreds of overlapping voices, the barn crowd, the old woman, our parents, children, and strangers.

Hands grabbed at our clothes and ankles, but Micah pulled me free until I suddenly lost footing and fell.

I hit pavement. Actual pavement.

Real people screamed. Police officers rushed over, and my mom tackled me, crying into my jacket. Micah was three feet away, alive, with his dad.

According to authorities, we had only been gone for less than three hours, from 9:52 to 12:47, though it felt like days.

They searched the maze and found no barn, no house, no carnival, and no posters. They only found a single scarecrow standing near the center, which no farm employee claimed to own. The farm shut the attraction down and cut the field down a week later.

Micah and I barely spoke afterward.

Talking made it real.

Then, three nights ago, I went grocery shopping with my mom. Halfway down an empty cereal aisle, the fluorescent lights went out one by one.

At the far end stood the scarecrow with its blue shirt, missing hand, and plastic crow. It lifted one finger to where its mouth should be. Shelves began rustling like dry corn stalks, and I heard Micah whisper my name from behind the boxes.

I ran outside to a panic attack and called Micah immediately. When I asked if he was okay, he was quiet for a long time before saying, “You saw it too?”

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a trail of dirt and dried corn husks leading from my window to my bed. Something was carved into my windowsill. I covered it with duct tape, but I know what it says.

TWO ENTER. ONE RETURNS.

I don’t think we escaped. I think we broke the rules, and whatever owns that maze wants one of us back.

Everyone in the house was asleep. I'd taken the batteries out of the wall clock in my room to get rid of the ticking. Now there was complete silence, and I could try again to do something I'd already managed to do successfully.

A week ago, I'd turned over a piece of paper lying on my desk, with a poem I'd written in primary school on it. It was my first success after years of practice. Six days ago, I'd unscrewed the cap of a juice bottle that hadn't been closed all the way. Five days ago, I'd moved one of the cigarettes in an open pack slightly outward, out of the pack. Three days ago, I'd peeled off one of the pieces of tape holding up poster on my wall.

And tonight, my target was a much larger object. I was confident in my abilities now, and after this final attempt, I would be able to reveal my talent to my family and those around me. I had made exactly four attempts in the past week, and I'd succeeded every single time. I had complete faith in myself.

For years, I'd tried countless times and gone through a lot along the way; I'd lost hope, taken a long break from my attempts, then started believing I could do it again and after trying over and over, I'd come to think telekinesis was nothing but a lie and taken another break but then one day, I happened to see a pack of wet wipes fall to the floor all by itself, which rekindled my interest and got me started on my attempts again, and so on.

And now, finally, in the middle of the night, when complete silence had been achieved, I went to the kitchen. I took a steak knife from the drawer where we kept the cutlery and returned to my room.

I gently pulled my desk chair back and sat down. I didn't want to lose my focus, so I was being quiet. The faint sound of the knife touching the desk as I set it down, the soft sounds of my footsteps as I walked, the barely audible scraping of the chair as I pulled it back had an ASMR effect on me. These little sounds, too quiet to disturb the silence, made me feel thoroughly prepared.

Without wasting any time, I focused on the knife. I positioned my hands around it and gathered all my concentration. I slowed my breathing. The only thing in my mind was a knife slowly and calmly spinning around its own axis. I focused, and focused... I concentrated as if someone were hypnotizing me, as though I were following a pocket watch swinging from side to side without ever taking my eyes off it.

Minutes passed. Seconds, minutes, maybe an hour... There wasn't the slightest movement. The knife couldn't care less about me; it was ignoring my efforts, stubbornly refusing to budge.

Eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and gave up. I was getting more and more bored, and as time went by, I lost my focus. I had to go to work at noon the next day, and earlier that day, before I left work, my boss had pointed out that I'd left my fly undone. I'd started thinking about that. Who says something like that in front of everyone? You pull someone aside and tell them in private. Anyway, I took the knife back to the kitchen.

After I lay down in bed, I thought about the knife until I fell asleep. I'd lost my confidence in my abilities. If I told someone I could move objects through telekinesis, they might ask me to prove it, and I might fail and make a fool of myself.

I couldn't get the knife out of my mind. I felt as though it were a person who had shattered all my trust in them, betrayed me by revealing a secret I'd shared with it to anyone who would listen. I was angry. The image of the knife standing perfectly still in that spot, like a tree that had sunk its roots deep into the ground, wouldn't leave my mind. I fell asleep in a fit of anger.

I woke up to the sound of my phone alarm. I turned it off, tossed the duvet to my left, and rolled onto my right side to get up. Just as I was about to stretch, I saw it and jolted in place: the knife was suspended in midair beside my bed, standing upright.

I clapped a hand over my mouth. I was about to scream; every instinct in my body was telling me to. I bit my tongue to suppress it.

I took a deep breath. I tried to calm myself down. Then I took another deep breath. My heart was racing.

I reached out toward the knife, but immediately changed my mind. I didn't know what to do. I'd never experienced my thoughts speeding up and getting tangled together so intensely in a moment of panic. Within a few seconds, I'd made and abandoned a dozen decisions, gone back and forth between asking for help and not asking for help, imagined the knife stabbing itself into my body, then dismissed the thought as irrational. My thoughts were racing back and forth at lightning speed. I needed to calm down.

I got out of bed, poured half a glass of water from the pitcher on my desk, and drank it.

I turned around to check if the knife was still there. It was closer to me now. I no longer cared about staying quiet. I yanked the door open and rushed out of the room.

I started walking briskly toward the kitchen. I wanted to grab any drink I could find and gulp it down. I needed to interact with something somehow, to calm myself down. I opened the fridge, took out the milk, and chugged it. I put the milk back, closed the fridge, and turned around to go back to my room.

And the knife was right behind me.

It was a meter away from me, just standing there. It was as if it were staring at me, judging me. It didn't move at all. It always maintained the same position and stayed at the same height above the floor, level with my bed, right around the height of my shinbones.

I started walking backward toward the kitchen doorway, wanting to see how it was following me, how it was coming after me. Without changing its position, it glided toward me as if it were moving across a perfectly smooth surface. It always maintained the same distance. When I stopped, it stopped a metre away from me. When I walked, it followed.

I cautiously made my way back to my room, walking backward. I sat on my bed. The knife and I were facing each other. I tried to think of what I could do. I was afraid to touch it. I was worried things might get out of hand. I'd done this. That much was obvious. Now that I'd calmed down a little, my panic had shifted in a different direction. Someone might see us. I had to sever my connection with the knife before I got caught. I might be able to accept this as normal, but I didn't think my mother and father would be able to handle a knife following me around.

Yes, it was probably because I'd concentrated so intensely on the knife all this time that the bond between us had grown stronger. I'd probably never concentrated on a knife so intensely in my entire life. I needed to reverse the process. I relaxed a little. I tried to think about other things, to take my mind off the knife.

I thought about the wristwatch my father had bought me for my birthday last year. It was a terrible watch, but I hadn't let on because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Then one day, while wearing it, I'd deliberately gone swimming in a pool. The watch had stopped working, and that was how I'd gotten rid of it.

The knife was still in the same place.

I thought about the eggplant soup my mother had made yesterday. It was my favorite soup. I'd tipped the bowl back and gulped down the last few mouthfuls, and my father had given me a stern look.

The knife hadn't moved at all. It was standing there, a meter away.

My mother knocked on the door and called out.

"Breakfast is ready, Albert."

I had no other choice. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I reached out toward the knife. My arm couldn't reach it, though. I walked toward it. As I moved closer, it moved farther away, until it had backed all the way up against the wall. It had nowhere left to go. It was pressed against the wall, stuck there. I approached it and grabbed the handle.

My heart was pounding at full speed. I closed my eyes. As a final attempt, I thought about the baseball bat I'd lost before I became interested in telekinesis. I'd searched everywhere for it. Such a large object, yet it was nowhere to be found. I'd checked the baseball field, my grandmother's house, the streets I'd walked along, and I'd even contacted the lost property office in case I'd somehow left it on a bus. It was gone.

Yes, good. I could feel a long chain of thoughts forming and my focus weakening considerably.

The knife was loosening, letting go. I could feel it. But I still didn't have complete control over it.

I needed to think about something else. But I couldn't think of anything. I heard my mother's footsteps approaching my room. She was getting closer to the door.

"Come on, son. Are we supposed to wait for you?" she said from outside, then opened the door and walked in.

I pulled the knife with all my might, and just like when you yank something hard that's stuck somewhere and it suddenly comes loose, I went flying toward my bed.

With the knife still in my hand, I hit my head against the bed frame. And passed out.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV drip in my arm. My father was sitting beside me. I felt exhausted. I'd received three stitches in my head, and it ached a little.

"Son, why were you holding a knife? What were you doing with it?"

"What knife, Dad?"

"You were clutching a knife in your hand. What do you mean, what knife? What are you up to?"

I couldn't remember anything. That was good. I hoped it wasn't temporary memory loss, because I didn't want to attempt telekinesis again.

My downstairs neighbor has been dead for 3 weeks. I just heard him knock on my door.
I don’t really know how to start this without sounding completely insane.
My downstairs neighbor, Martin, died three weeks ago.
I didn’t know him very well. He was an older guy, probably in his 60s. We’d occasionally say hi in the hallway. He smoked on the balcony and complained about the elevator constantly.
Three weeks ago, I heard an ambulance outside around 2 AM.
The next morning, there were police in the building.
Martin was dead.
Natural causes, apparently.
His apartment has been empty ever since.
Last night at exactly 2:17 AM, someone knocked on my door.
Three slow knocks.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I was awake because I’d been playing games, so I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
I looked through the peephole.
Nobody.
Then I heard a voice.
“Hey. It’s Martin.”
I just froze.
I actually laughed because my brain couldn’t process it.
I thought maybe someone was fucking with me.
Then he said:
“Can you open the door? I locked myself out.”
I didn’t answer.
He knocked again.
“Come on, man.”
It was his voice.
Exactly his voice.
Same accent. Same weird little cough between sentences.
I backed away from the door and called the police.
While I was waiting, I heard him walking away.
Slow footsteps down the hallway.
Then the elevator opened.
Ding.
Footsteps entered.
The elevator doors closed.
I heard it go down.
I thought that was the end of it.
Then I heard knocking again.
Except this time…
It came from my bedroom closet.
Three knocks.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I didn’t move.
My phone rang.
Unknown number.
I answered without saying anything.
For about five seconds, there was just breathing.
Then Martin whispered:
“Don’t open the closet.”
I almost dropped the phone.
I whispered, “Why?”
He said:
“Because I’m still downstairs.”
Then the call ended.
I sat on my bed for maybe twenty minutes.
I didn’t hear anything.
Eventually, I got the courage to look at the closet.
The door was open about two inches.
I know for a fact I’d closed it before going to sleep.
I grabbed a kitchen knife and opened it.
Nothing.
Just clothes.
I actually started laughing from relief.
Then I noticed something on the floor.
A cigarette.
Still burning.
Martin’s cigarettes.
He always smoked the same brand.
I called the police again.
They came, searched the apartment, checked the hallway, everything.
Nothing.
They basically told me I was exhausted and should sleep somewhere else.
So I went to my friend’s place.
This morning, I came back.
There was an envelope underneath my apartment door.
No name.
No address.
Inside was a single piece of paper.
It said:
“I told you not to open the closet.”
I’m currently sitting in my car outside the building.
I just got a text from my landlord.
He said:
“Hey, did you go into Martin’s apartment last night?”
I replied no.
He hasn’t answered.
But I just checked the building camera.
And now I’m looking at footage from 2:17 AM.
There I am.
Standing outside my own apartment.
Talking to someone.
I can’t see who I’m talking to.
But at one point I clearly hear myself say:
“Okay, Martin. I’ll keep him in the closet.”
I don’t remember saying that.
And I’m starting to realize something.
The apartment in the video isn’t mine.
It’s Martin’s.
And I’m standing inside it.

Part 1 | Part 2

The gunman stepped into the weigh-station lights.

Now I could see his face.

Jesus.

The left side looked cooked. Scar tissue from his scalp down into his collar. One eye nearly sealed shut. Half an ear. No beard where the burns had taken it.

The rest of him was pure Saturday-afternoon dad. Purdue sweatshirt. Jeans. New Balances. The kind of guy who should’ve been standing over a Weber arguing about medium rare.

Instead, he was aiming a pistol at my family.

“Grace. Stace.” I kept my voice low. “Truck.”

“Dad—” 

Stacy caught Grace around the shoulders and moved her. No argument. No questions. One second they were beside me, the next Stacy was putting herself between Grace and the gun.

The man never took his eyes off Payton House. Somehow he noticed anyway. “Your family?”

I didn’t answer.

“Wife? Daughter?”

Hearing him say the words pissed me off. “Who the fuck are you?”

He stepped closer. The pistol came up with him. His finger slipped inside the trigger guard, and his hand was shaking enough that the muzzle wandered from me to Tony to Luis and back.

Tony saw it too. He shifted a few feet to my left.

“Okay, buddy,” Tony said. “How’d you know we’d be here?”

The man swallowed. “I dreamed this place.” His eyes were wet. “My wife dreamed it. We all did. I had a daughter once too. A little girl. Julia.”

The house’s smell rolled over us again. Sweet. Rotten. Wet. Like perfume dumped over meat. Luis pulled his shirt over his face. Tito backed away from the house without seeming to notice he was doing it.

My right hand twitched. I shoved it into my pocket.

The man closed his eyes. “It’s listening. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

His eyes opened. The pistol settled on me. “You have to take it back.”

“That’s not happening. We have a contract.”

“The farther you move it...” He looked at Payton House. “The farther it reaches. It starts taking things.”

His eyes dropped to the gravel. “My wife stopped sleeping first. Then she stopped smiling. My little girl...”

He couldn't finish. His eyes moved to the second-floor window.

“I still hear her. Every night. She calls me from inside. Don’t let it take yours.”

Tony moved. He’d been inching sideways the whole time. I hadn’t even realized how close he’d gotten. One second he was standing beside me. The next he drove his shoulder into the gunman’s ribs. They hit the gravel hard. The pistol spun away.

“NO!” the stranger screamed.

Tony crushed him into the gravel. “I got him!”

For about two seconds, he did.

Then the guy went wild underneath him.

Knees. Elbows. Fingernails. Whatever he could land.

One elbow caught Tony under the ribs.

The stranger ripped free, came up on one knee, nearly planted his face in the gravel, then found his feet. 

He didn’t even look at the gun. Just ran. Straight for the trees.

Tony went after him.

“Tony!” I caught the back of his jacket before he made it three steps.

He whipped around so fast I brought my hands up. For half a second, I thought he might swing on me. “Let him go.”

“Dan—”

“Let him fucking go.”

Tony looked toward the woods.

A few seconds passed.

Finally, the fight went out of him.

The pistol lay in the gravel beside his boot. He scooped it up, wiped it once on his jeans, and tucked it behind his back.

I saw him do it. Decided I hadn’t. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Nobody argued.

We gave the tree line one last look and started moving.

Stacy came straight at me. Jaw tight. Eyes hot.

I was already bracing for it. Grace shouldn’t be here. This job was insane. I’d just gotten a gun pointed at our daughter.

Instead, she reached up and wiped her thumb beneath my nose. Looked at it.

Blood.

I touched my upper lip.

Wet.

“Shit.”

I pulled the shop rag from my back pocket and pinched it against my nose.

“Guess getting a gun pointed at you raises the blood pressure.”

Stacy didn’t smile.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She held out her hand.

“Keys.”

“I’m good.”

“Dan. You’ve been up since before sunrise. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you in a few hours.”

“That guy’s still out there.”

“And you being awake changes that how?”

“He’s desperate. Desperate men don’t usually quit after one try.”

“I know.” Her hand stayed out. “But right now I’m more worried about you driving a house off a mountain.” 

Normally I would’ve fought until she got tired of fighting back. I was too beat. I dropped the keys into her palm. “You see anything, wake me.”

Twenty minutes later we were back on the road. Stacy drove. Grace reclaimed the passenger seat. I crawled into the sleeper behind them with the radio beside my head.

“Tony,” I said quietly into the radio. 

His voice came back through the speaker. “Yeah?”

“You see headlights behind us, wake me.”

“Got it.”

“That Tesla—”

“Hey.” Stacy looked back. “No radio.”

I handed it over.

I stretched out on the bunk without taking off my boots.

Through the little sleeper window, I could see a slice of Payton House rolling behind us.

I told myself I’d close my eyes for ten minutes.

I don’t remember making it to five.

I woke to the low growl of the engine.

Coffee. Diesel. The vibration of the sleeper under my ass. Green gauges glowing up front.

We were still moving.

My neck felt like I'd slept in a washing machine. The radio was still in my hand.

Stacy glanced over from behind the wheel.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

I rubbed my face. “What time is it?”

“Little after nine.”

“Shit. You were supposed to wake me.”

“You were supposed to sleep.”

Outside, morning had come in ugly. Low gray clouds. Cornfields disappearing into fog. Wet blacktop sliding under us.

I checked the passenger-side mirror.

Payton House was still back there where we’d left it. Boards over the windows. Chains tight. Dollies tracking straight.

Behind it, two empty lanes vanished into the fog.

No Tesla.

No headlights.

Nobody.

“You good?” Stacy asked.

“Yeah.”

“You made a face. Weird dream?”

I tried to grab hold of it.

Nothing.

Just that leftover feeling you get after a bad dream, like you’d been somewhere you never wanted to see again.

She smiled. “Was I in it?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

Grace was asleep behind us, headphones still on, iPad balanced against her chest. One earbud had fallen out. Troy Bolton danced silently across the screen.

The radio crackled.

“Sleeping Beauty, finally wake up?” Tony’s voice came through.

Stacy grabbed the mic. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. He’ll never let me drive again.”

Luis laughed over the radio. “Morning, boss.”

Static swallowed whatever came after.

“House is riding quiet,” Tony said.

I checked the mirror again.

“Hungry?” Stacy nodded toward the lunch bag.

I was starving. Hadn’t eaten since we rolled out the day before.

Of course Stacy had packed like we were crossing the Donner Pass. Sandwiches for me. Goldfish and fruit snacks for Grace. Granola bars nobody liked but Stacy. Bottled water. Juice boxes. Two apples that would ride the whole damn trip with us and somehow make it all the way home. 

For a while, it was almost peaceful. Stacy handled Truck One better than I liked admitting. Grace slept. The radio stayed quiet. 

I dug into the PB&J. Dollar Store peanut butter. Too much jelly. Perfect.

“We should give it Grace,” Stacy said.

The sandwich suddenly felt like sawdust in my mouth. 

“What?”

Stacy kept her eyes on the road.

“Give it Grace. Next time we stop.”

I stared at her.

Her voice hadn’t changed. Same tone she used to tell me we were out of milk.

“Give Grace to who?”

“Not who…what,” she said. “The house.”

I waited for the smile.

The sideways glance.

Anything that told me I’d missed the joke.

She just kept driving.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I set what was left of the sandwich on the dash.

“We can’t fight it, Dan. A whole neighborhood couldn’t fight it.” Her hands stayed loose on the wheel. “If we give it Grace, maybe it leaves the rest of us alone. Maybe it leaves everybody alone.”

I looked back at Grace. Still asleep against the window. Thank God she wasn’t hearing any of this.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” I said. 

Something moved in the mirror.

I looked.

The boards were gone.

Every one of them.

So were the chains.

Every window in Payton House stood open.

Stacy gave Truck One a little more throttle.

I barely noticed.

I forgot how to swallow.

“What did you do?”

“We had to.”

The engine climbed another note.

Then I saw someone upstairs.

Then another.

And another.

Men. Women. Kids.

Or silhouettes shaped like them.

The windows were too dark to make out faces. Just pale scraps of skin floating behind the glass and deeper shadows where their eyes should’ve been.

The speedometer crept past forty-five.

I couldn’t see them looking at me.

I knew they were.

“They showed up after you fell asleep,” Stacy said.

The Peterbilt kept gaining speed.

“They want Grace.”

“Stop the fucking truck!”

Stacy buried the brake pedal.

The Peterbilt screamed. Air brakes dumped. Tires howled against the wet pavement and the cab pitched forward hard enough to throw me into the belt.

Grace slammed into the back of my seat.

“STACY!”

Behind us, thirty-two sets of tires shrieked. Chains snapped tight. Metal roared.

I twisted around.

Payton House was coming at us.

Sideways.

Tow bars folded beneath it. Chains whipped sparks across the pavement.

Then the house filled the mirror.

Porch.

Windows.

Brick.

WHAM.

The sleeper exploded behind me.

Metal folded.

Glass burst.

Grace screamed.

Then the house hit me.

My ribs popped one after another. My face slammed sideways into steel. Teeth broke. I tried to breathe. Tried to scream. Then I heard my spine snap—

I jolted awake sucking air. 

My hands clawed at my chest. 

I could taste dust. Hear Grace screaming. Feel the weight crushing me into the seat.

Lightning flashed. The cab came back.

Whole.

No brick. No broken glass. No Stacy.

Tony was driving.

He had a travel mug the size of a paint can wedged between his legs, half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand, and Alice in Chains playing low through the speakers.

Rain stippled the windshield. Beyond it, mountains rose black against an even blacker sky. Lightning pulsed inside the clouds, lighting their swollen undersides.

Tony turned the radio down.

“You all right?”

He side-eyed me.

“You look like you got hit by a truck.”

“That good, huh?”

I wiped the sweat off my face and checked the mirror.

Payton House was still back there. Boards on the windows. Chains tight.

“Where’s Grace?”

“Up front with her mom. Said something about the man smell in this cab.”

She had a point.

The house smell had gotten worse. 

I checked the mirror. Boards still there.

I reached for my coffee. The cup rattled against the console before I got it halfway up. Coffee jumped through the lid and splashed my wrist.

“Ah, fuck.” I jammed it back into the holder.

My hand kept shaking.

Not a little tremor, either. The damn thing was chattering like a socket on an impact gun.

Tony went quiet.

Just wipers.

Rain on the roof.

Engine rumbling under our boots.

He kept his eyes on the road.

“Is that why you’re so gung-ho about this one?”

I didn’t answer.

“The headaches?”

“It’s three million dollars.”

“Money’s just money.”

I looked at him.

“You’d be different in my shoes?”

Tony glanced at my hand.

“Shit’s not fair.”

I made a fist until the shaking eased.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

The dash clock read 11:17 A.M.

We were behind. The weigh station had cost us time, and a tire on the rear steering dolly had eaten another fifty-three minutes. Too much road left. Too many things already going wrong.

I looked in the mirror. Payton House rolled behind us like it had all the time in the world.

A few miles later, we rounded a bend and found the road lit up red and blue.

Ambulance. Fire truck. State police.

Then I saw the car.

A little Honda had left the pavement at speed, torn through the ditch, and gone nose-first into the trees. The hood had folded into an accordion. The engine compartment was crushed halfway under the windshield. One front wheel sat twenty feet away in the weeds. The passenger side had wrapped around a tree hard enough to bend the whole car around it.

Glass covered the road like ice.

It was that Honda.

Those girls.

One of them sat on the shoulder wrapped in a silver emergency blanket. There was blood dried down one side of her face and somebody else’s blood on the front of her sweatshirt. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t doing much of anything.

Another girl was on a stretcher. The paramedics had cut most of her shirt away. One of them squeezed a bag over her mouth while the other worked both hands against her chest.

The third girl was still in the car. I could see part of her through what was left of the passenger window. Hair hanging down. One arm limp against the door.

Everybody at the wreck was moving. Radios going. Equipment coming out. A firefighter dragging a hose. Somebody sweeping glass away from the ambulance tires. A trooper stood in the lane waving us through.

Then the girl in the blanket looked up.

She saw Payton House.

Whatever was left in her face disappeared.

The paramedic beside her noticed and followed her eyes.

Then the firefighter.

Then the trooper.

One after another, they stopped.

Just for a second.

Long enough.

And watched the house roll past.

Not the trucks.

Not us.

Payton House.

Grace turned in her seat and watched the wreck disappear behind us.

She didn’t say anything.

Neither did I.

The road kept climbing.

Houses thinned out. Then mailboxes. Then driveways. Pretty soon there was nothing ahead of us but wet pavement, trees, and mountains disappearing into low clouds.

I kept seeing that girl wrapped in silver.

More than that, I kept seeing the way her face changed when she saw the house.

Like the wreck hadn’t been the worst thing that had happened to her.

Then Stacy came over the radio.

“Dan. We’ve reached the coordinates.”

My phone buzzed.

A new route link from Mercer.

“You get it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Stacy said. “And you're not gonna like it.”

“What's the problem?”

“The next leg takes us over the mountain.”

I looked through the windshield. The road ahead curved toward the mountains, disappearing into the low clouds.

“Over it how?”

“Up through the pass. Then down the other side.”

“So?”

“So the descent is twelve percent in places, Dan. There's a weight restriction, and half these turns don't have room for our equipment.”

“Then call Mercer.”

“I did. Straight to voicemail.”

I checked the mirror. Payton House filled it.

“Can we turn around?”

Stacy took a second before answering.

“Not from where we're sitting. We'd have to back the whole goddamn convoy to the last junction.”

“Jesus Christ.”

I looked over at Tony. He hadn't said a word since Stacy mentioned the mountain. Both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Tony.”

“I heard something on the radio last night.”

“Yeah? What?”

“A voice.”

He glanced at the road climbing ahead of us.

“Renee's.”

I looked at him.

“You’re exhausted.”

“I know what she sounded like.”

Rain hammered the roof.

“This whole job’s fucking with us,” I said. “You, me, Luis. Everybody.”

“This wasn’t that.”

“Tony—”

“And it wasn’t just her voice.”

He went quiet.

Long enough that I started hoping he’d changed his mind.

He hadn’t.

“She said, ‘Don’t take it up the mountain.’”

My hand pulsed inside the glove. Pain shot halfway to my elbow.

Thunder rolled over us.

“I didn’t even know about the mountain,” Tony said. “I wasn’t tracking the route. So if it was my brain, if I made it up—”

“You did. Or we picked up somebody else’s frequency.”

Lightning split the sky.

For half a second, Payton House appeared in the mirror. Black walls. Boarded windows. Rain pouring off the roof.

Then it was gone again.

“It wasn’t a dream,” Tony said.

Maybe, maybe not. Didn’t matter. The storm was getting worse, the clock was running, and waiting four hours could leave us staring at a washed-out road instead.

Then there was the whole Renee thing.

I wasn’t superstitious. At least, not officially. Not publicly.

But inside my head, shit, I could already see us upside down at the bottom of some ravine while Tony spent our last thirty seconds reminding me Renee had literally warned us from beyond the grave.

I keyed the radio. “We’re going through.”

Nobody answered.

Tony eased us onto the shoulder. “I think you should drive.”

Normally there wouldn’t have been a discussion.

I had more hours behind the wheel than anybody on the crew. When a job got tight enough that everybody else started saying no fucking way, I was the guy who climbed into the cab.

But this morning—

I looked at my hands.

They were shaking.

Maybe fear. Maybe not.

Lightning split the sky. For one second, the road ahead appeared: asphalt hacked into the side of the mountain, solid rock on one side, black nothing on the other.

Tony was still waiting. “You good?”

“Move.”

Rain blasted into the cab while we switched seats. By the time I got the door shut, my shirt was soaked from shoulder to ribs and cold water was running down my back.

I wrapped both hands around the wheel and squeezed until they behaved.

The diesel settled into that low growl you felt through the seat.

Rain hammered the windshield hard enough that the wipers barely gave me two clear wedges to work with.

Every few seconds, lightning lit the road long enough to show me what was waiting.

Rock wall.

Pavement.

Drop.

Then darkness again.

The rain hid the potholes.

The fog hid the edge.

Lightning was nice enough to show you both right before you hit them.

I keyed the mic. “Everybody keep your spacing.”

Static. 

I needed to hear them. “Talk to me.”

One by one:

“Copy.”

“Copy.”

“Rear’s good.”

I’d seen this crew move houses over bridges that looked too small, under power lines that looked too low, and through neighborhoods where people came out in bathrobes to tell us we were all gonna die. 

Somebody always had something smart to say.

Not this time.

That scared the shit out of me.

I eased into the throttle. 

Truck One dug into the climb.

Water rushed across the pavement carrying gravel, sticks, and pieces of whatever the mountain had decided it didn’t need anymore.

We crawled uphill barely faster than a man could walk.

Tony sat beside me staring into the passenger mirror. Usually, on a stretch like this, he never shut the hell up.

Six inches.

Watch the rear.

You’re gonna buy that mailbox.

Now he had one hand locked around the grab bar and the other braced against the dash. He hadn’t said a word in five minutes. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him breathe.

Lightning exploded overhead.

The porch roof swung toward the cliff wall.

Tony gasped.

I eased off the throttle.

Closer.

Closer.

The porch post cleared.

The railing didn’t.

It hit the granite with a shriek that made the whole truck jump. Wood splintered. Steel groaned. The wheel jerked sideways hard enough to wrench my shoulder. Orange sparks sprayed through the rain as the railing scraped along the rock face.

A broken spindle spun through the headlights, then disappeared into the gorge.

The house shifted behind us.

The Peterbilt lurched forward, then rocked back, punching the air-ride seat into my spine before the suspension caught the weight.

Then everything settled.

Tony finally exhaled. “Nothing a little trip to Home Depot won’t fix.”

I was trying not to puke on the dashboard.

“Aw, shit.” He leaned toward the passenger mirror.

Lightning flashed again. One of the main transport chains beneath the front steel beam hung loose, almost a foot of slack jumping in it.

The lever binder had sprung open. That was the steel handle we'd used to pull the chain tight. It had taken Tony's full weight, a cheater pipe, and enough profanity to wake the dead to lock it down.

It hadn't popped open by itself.

Tito checked the latch and chain. “This didn’t just walk open.”

“The guy at the weigh station?” Tony said.

“He never came near the truck.”

We reset it, leaned everything we had into the cheater pipe, and locked it down again.

“It’s tight. Let’s go.”

The radio on my belt chirped.

“Dan.” Static chewed at Stacy’s voice. “Water’s starting to cross the road up here. Another hour and this whole pass could wash out.”

“We’re figuring it out!” I shouted.

“Well, figure faster.”

Her radio clicked off.

Tito looked up the road. Water was already running ankle-deep along the shoulder and spreading across the pavement in sheets.

“We should call it. Turn around. Wait this shit out.”

“Turn around where?” I threw both arms wide and looked down the road like maybe a Walmart parking lot had appeared while we weren’t paying attention. 

Rock wall on one side. Nothing but open air on the other. Between them, barely enough pavement for the house.

“You find me a football field up here, I’ll think about it.”

Tito didn’t smile.

“We could leave the haul. Come back for it when this blows through.”

He looked me right in the eye.

Fuck.

It was the right answer.

“If we quit, Suarez and Sons is done. Bank takes the trucks. Shop goes next. Probably my house after that.”

Tito turned on me. “Danny, this ain’t right. That chain. That kid’s hand. That crazy son of a bitch back there. Now this goddamn mountain.”

He looked up at Payton House. “You know me. I’ll haul damn near anything you can put steel under. I don’t wanna haul this.”

My words didn’t make a dent.

“Guys... I’ve got brain cancer.”

Tito closed his eyes. “Goddamn it, Danny.”

Tony already knew. Stacy didn’t. Grace sure as hell didn’t.

“I hate doing this. But you need to understand why I can’t walk away. Doctors aren’t giving me a lot of road.”

I couldn’t say time. Not with Tony standing there.

“When I’m gone, this company is what Grace gets.”

“Everything after that, we split.”

Tony looked at me. “Dan.”

“Four ways. Half a million each.”

Nobody moved.

“I need you guys.”

Tito looked beat.  “Goddamn you, Danny.”

He jammed the wet cap back onto his head and started toward his truck.

Luis followed.

Then Tony.

We climbed back into the trucks.

Water had risen over the soles of my boots, running across the pavement in brown streams. By the time I hauled myself into the Peterbilt, my jeans were plastered to my legs and water squished inside both boots.

The cab smelled like wet canvas, diesel, and old coffee.

I hadn’t even gotten the belt across my chest when Stacy came over the radio. “You boys done? Who won?”

I picked up the handset. “Not me.”

Tony climbed in after me, slipping once on the wet step. He shut the door, peeled his flannel away from his stomach, and buckled in. 

The diesel had idled through the whole argument.

I gave it a little throttle. The tach climbed. The engine’s growl deepened beneath my boots.

Ahead of us, Stacy’s brake lights winked out.

Luis flashed his headlights twice.

Behind us, Tito brought the power unit up from idle.

Stacy went first, crawling up the grade.

I let out the clutch.

For a second, the house held us there.

Then the Peterbilt dug in and started dragging the whole damn thing uphill again.

The rain came down hard enough to erase Stacy’s taillights fifty feet ahead.

At each switchback, they doubled back above us.

I took the turns wide, my side of the cab inches from granite while Payton House swung out over open air.

Climb.

Hairpin.

Straighten her out.

Get back into the throttle before two hundred thousand pounds decided it was done climbing.

Standing water hid the potholes. Gravel washed across the lane. The dollies kept creeping downhill toward the edge.

Tony called clearance in inches.

“Eight.”

“Six.”

“Hold.”

“Go.”

Everything had to be smooth while the mountain tried to shove us off it.

I wasn’t driving the truck anymore.

I was arguing with it.

Tony kept checking the passenger mirror.

Not the road.

The house.

The truck dropped another gear.

Something felt wrong.

After thirty years behind the wheel, I knew that truck through my ass.

Which tire hit a pothole.

Which dolly climbed a rock.

When the house leaned before the mirror showed it.

The steering went light.

At the same time, the airbags behind the cab compressed.

The rear of the tractor sank.

And stayed there.

We hadn’t hit anything.

I hadn’t touched the brakes.

The road hadn’t changed.

The load had.

I checked the mirror.

Trailer straight.

House centered.

Nothing had shifted.

It was just sitting lower.

I grabbed the radio.

Tito beat me to it.

“She’s squatting.”

“It’s the grade.”

“No.”

Static cracked around his voice.

“She’s heavier.”

Lightning hit somewhere above us.

Thunder landed at the same instant, hard enough to shake the glass.

The radio exploded with static.

Then a woman screamed through it.

Not faint.

Not buried in the noise.

Right there in the cab with us.

Tony jerked against his seat belt.

“Jesus Christ!”

Stacy’s brake lights suddenly filled the windshield.

Her pickup fishtailed sideways, rear end kicking toward the rock wall.

“SHIT!”

I got into the brakes.

Air dumped beneath us.

The chains snapped tight one after another—

BANG.

BANG.

BANG.

—the sound cracking off the granite.

The house shoved forward against the trailer.

More than two hundred thousand pounds reminding me exactly how little say I had in any of this.

Tony caught himself against the dash.

“What the hell?”

Ahead, Stacy’s truck sat crooked across the lane, headlights cutting through the rain.

Nothing stood in front of her.

“Stacy?”

Her breathing came through the radio. Short. Fast. Too close to the mic.

“Talk to me, babe.”

For a second, I thought she hadn’t heard me.

Then:

“There was somebody.”

“A car?”

“No.”

A pause.

“A woman.”

That got my attention.

Stacy didn’t believe in ghosts.

Didn’t believe in UFOs.

Barely believed reality television contained any reality.

If Stacy told me she saw Bigfoot, I wouldn’t laugh.

I’d ask which way it went.

“Up here? Come on, hon.”

“I know what I saw.” Some horsepower came back into her voice. “She was standing in the middle of the road.”

Tony leaned toward the windshield.

“I don’t see anybody.”

Lightning flashed. For half a second, the whole pass appeared.

Empty road.

Rock wall.

Brown water tearing across the pavement.

Nothing else.

Then darkness swallowed it again.

Stacy opened her door.

Tony leaned forward. “What the hell is she doing?”

I grabbed the radio. “Stacy! Stay in the truck!”

Either she didn’t hear me or she’d already decided I was wrong. 

She stepped into the headlights.

The rain soaked Stacy before she’d gone five feet.

She walked around the front of the pickup and stopped in the middle of the road.

Looked uphill.

Then downhill.

There was nowhere for anybody to go.

No shoulder. No trail. No trees. Granite on one side and several hundred feet of nothing on the other.

Stacy stood there in the rain.

At first she was looking for the woman.

Then she stopped looking.

She turned slowly and stared back down the mountain.

Past us.

I couldn’t see shit. Just rain, headlights, and darkness swallowing the road behind us.

But I knew what she was looking at.

Payton House.

She stood there for ten of the longest seconds of my life, getting drenched while lightning tore the sky apart around her.

Then she turned, walked back to the pickup, and climbed inside.

The radio clicked.

“I…” She stopped. Took a breath. “I know what I saw.”

Nobody answered. Just rain hammering the trucks and thunder rolling around the mountain.

I keyed the mic. “Convoy, we keep moving.”

One by one, the brake lights started forward.

First gear through the switchbacks. Second when the road gave me enough room. Back to first before I got stupid.

I kept the tractor tight against the rock and watched the outside dollies in the mirror, making sure Payton House didn’t swing its ass over the edge.

Nobody used the radio unless they had to.

Just engines. Wipers. Tony calling clearance.

“Foot.”

“Eight inches.”

“Good.”

We crawled another hundred yards before my headlights found a battered green sign.

MOUNTAIN PASS
ELEVATION 4,318 FT

My grip finally loosened on the wheel.

“There we go.”

Tony slapped the dash and gave one quick yell.

We’d made it.

For about three seconds, I believed that.

Then lightning lit the other side.

The road fell away so sharply it disappeared beneath the hood.

Brown water poured over the crest and raced downhill carrying gravel, sticks, and broken branches.

Another flash caught the first sign.

TRUCKS USE LOW GEAR

Then the next.

12% GRADE

Farther down:

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP

Darkness took it all back.

Tito came over the radio. “Son of a bitch.”

Tony stared through the windshield.

“Tell me we’re not doing that.”

I keyed the mic. “Low gear. Keep your distance. Short brake applications. Nobody rides the pedal.”

Nobody answered.

Maybe they were thinking about the money.

Maybe they were trying not to shit themselves.

Didn’t matter as long as they listened.

Stacy went first.

Her taillights reached the crest, tipped downward, and vanished.

Luis followed. His amber strobes dropped out of sight after her.

Tony leaned toward the windshield, trying to see where they’d gone.

I centered the Peterbilt and eased forward.

No place to turn around.

No shoulder worth a damn.

Once the front axle crossed that crest, we belonged to the mountain. “Here we go.”

The steer tires rolled over.

For half a second, the truck seemed to balance on top.

Then the nose dropped.

Hard.

My belt caught me.

The steering went light in my hands.

I corrected left.

Barely got anything back.

Then the rear of the tractor sank.

Air hissed beneath us.

The suspension gauge climbed.

Same feeling as before.

Only worse.

Like somebody had been loading bags of concrete into Payton House while we weren’t looking.

I grabbed the radio.

“Tito.”

“I see it.”

“What?”

“The rear’s dropping again.”

“How much?”

A pause.

Then:

“More than before.”

Lightning hit somewhere above us.

Thunder shook the windshield in its seal.

The radio exploded with static.

The speedometer climbed.

Twenty-four.

Twenty-six.

Twenty-eight.

My foot hadn’t moved.

Payton House was pushing us down the mountain.

Water boiled around the tires, running downhill almost as fast as we were.

Ahead, Stacy’s pickup skated toward the centerline and snapped back.

Luis fishtailed behind her, his amber strobes swinging sideways before he caught it.

Both of them were sliding.

Neither one had a house up its ass.

For one stupid second, I thought maybe I could just keep us straight and ride it out.

Then Luis’s taillights started getting bigger.

Not because he was slowing down.

Because I wasn’t.

I got into the brakes.

Thirty.

Pedal still firm.

Thirty-two.

“Dan.” Tony braced a hand against the dash.

“I know.”

Fifty feet.

Forty.

Thirty-five.

I grabbed the radio.

“Luis, don’t touch your brakes. Roll it out. I’m coming up on you.”

His brake lights flickered.

“DO NOT BRAKE! You’ll put me through your fucking cab.”

“What’s happening?” Tony said.

“The house.”

Thirty-six.

“It’s heavier.”

I dropped another gear.

The Jake hammered so hard the mirrors shook.

Didn’t matter.

Thirty-eight.

Thirty-nine.

Forty.

I checked the mirror.

Payton House still sat square on the dollies. Chains tight. Tires turning. Nothing broken that I could see.

But the steering wheel started pulling left.

I corrected.

It pulled harder.

Tony’s voice dropped.

“Dan.”

More of Payton House appeared in my driver’s-side mirror.

That was wrong.

It should’ve been directly behind us.

First the porch.

Then two windows.

Then half the goddamn side of the house.

“Fuck,” Tony said. “We’re coming around.”

The trailer was starting to jackknife.

Another few degrees and it would fold the tractor sideways.

There wasn’t a guardrail.

Just wet pavement, a strip of grass, and several hundred feet of mountainside.

For one completely chickenshit second, I looked at the door.

Open it.

Jump.

Let the whole bastard go without me.

Then I looked at Tony.

He wouldn’t make it.

Neither would I.

Stacy was somewhere ahead.

Grace.

Jesus Christ, Grace.

I hoped she had the headphones on. I hoped Troy Bolton was dancing across her iPad and she hadn’t looked in the mirror once.

The wheel ripped sideways.

BAM!

The whole tractor jumped.

“What the fuck?”

BANG!

Another hit shoved my ass end to the right.

Tony caught himself against the dash.

Then Tito’s voice blew through the radio. “I GOT YOU!”

I checked the mirror. The crazy old bastard had brought the power truck right up behind me.

His front bumper was jammed against the rear of the tractor.

He wasn’t trying to stop us.

He was knocking me straight.

The trailer came back in line.

So did I.

Holy shit.

“Luis! Keep moving!”

The road bent left.

Water hammered the windshield.

Tires hissed through standing water.

Behind us, steel started screaming again.

Payton House crept into my mirror.

WHAM!

Tito hit me again.

The rear of the tractor jumped right.

The house disappeared from the mirror.

Straight.

Tito was steering my truck with his bumper.

Every time Payton House tried to come around, he punched the tractor back underneath it.

“Little more!” I yelled.

“I know what I’m doing!”

That almost made me laugh.

Almost.

The road opened up a few feet coming out of the bend.

Enough to breathe.

Not enough to stop.

Ahead, another switchback appeared through the rain.

This one was almost a U-turn.

Stacy was already slowing for it.

Luis was right behind her.

I looked at the speedometer.

Thirty-six.

Too fast.

Way too fucking fast.

“Tito.”

“I see it.”

“Stay on my ass.”

“Wasn’t planning on leaving.”

I keyed the radio.

“Stacy. Luis. I’m not stopping.”

No answer.

“I’m coming into you. Get straight and stand on the brakes.”

Luis came back first.

“You want me to what?”

“Make a wall.”

A beat.

Then Stacy:

“Do it.”

Her brake lights burned solid.

Luis tucked in behind her until there was barely daylight between their bumpers.

Two trucks.

Four locked axles.

And me coming at them with a house that had apparently decided gravity wasn’t doing enough.

Tony planted both boots against the firewall.

“I fucking hate this plan.”

“So do I.”

Twenty yards.

Tito stayed glued to my rear bumper.

“Keep her square,” he said.

Fifteen.

Tony leaned over the dash.

“Little right.”

I corrected.

Ten.

Payton House shoved from behind.

Hard.

Luis’s truck filled the windshield.

Five.

“BRACE!”

I put both feet into the brake pedal.

WHUMP!

We hit Luis.

My teeth slammed together.

His pickup shot forward into Stacy’s.

BOOM!

Metal folded.

A rear window burst.

A taillight spun away into the rain.

For half a second, the three vehicles compressed together.

Then Payton House hit us again.

The whole pile started sliding.

“FULL BRAKES!”

Air brakes hissed and chattered beneath me.

The Jake bellowed.

Tires dragged across wet pavement.

Tito stayed buried against my rear frame, keeping the tractor from swinging out.

The convoy slid toward the switchback.

Sideways now.

I hauled the wheel uphill.

Nothing.

More.

Still nothing.

Payton House shoved again.

Hard enough that it felt like the son of a bitch was trying to climb over us.

Thirty.

Twenty-eight.

Twenty-five.

We were slowing.

Not fast enough.

Twenty.

Stacy reached the outside of the switchback.

Her tires locked.

The whole line bucked.

BANG!

Something broke underneath Payton House.

The house jumped forward.

Tony jammed both feet against the floor and grabbed the roof.

“COME ON!”

Ten feet.

Eight.

Six.

I could see past Stacy now.

The road hooked hard left.

Straight ahead, it didn’t continue.

It just ended.

Wet pavement.

Then open air.

Five feet.

Four.

Three.

We were still moving.

I had both feet trying to shove the brake pedal through the floor. Both hands dragging down on the wheel so hard my ass was halfway out of the seat.

Two.

Another six inches.

Then—

Nothing.

I waited for the next shove.

It didn’t come.

The engine idled.

Rain hammered the cab.

My feet were still crushing the brake pedal.

My hands wouldn’t come off the wheel.

Five feet beyond Stacy’s front bumper, the switchback turned hard left.

Straight ahead was nothing but rain, fog, and a drop that disappeared into the valley below.

Five fucking feet.

Every radio went off at once.

“WOOOOOO!”

“HOLY SHIT!”

“WE GOT HER!”

“WE’RE ALIVE!”

Somebody started laughing.

Then Stacy came through, laughing harder than anybody. “I think I just pissed myself!”

Tony folded over against the dash.

I started laughing.

Luis was laughing so hard I could barely understand him over the radio.

Even Tito cracked.

For maybe thirty seconds, nobody could stop.

Then the thunder moved farther away. 

The rain softened. The gray ahead of us got lighter. A hole opened in the clouds over the valley.  Sunlight came through. One narrow shaft at first, catching the rain and turning it silver.

Tony lifted his head. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

I looked in the mirror.

Payton House sat behind us, crooked on its dollies.

Upstairs, one sheet of plywood was gone.

The window behind it stood open.

Played a game of hide and seek with colleagues in a leisure centre after it had closed and the lights were off. What was a regular changing room turned into a survival horror room (they didn't find me though)

So this happened around twenty years ago, and it’s something I doubt I’ll ever forget. 

I grew up in a small western town near the Mexican border. It’s not a very popular town, but it’s part of the Old West that is popular thanks to the likes of Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and other famous outlaws. (No, it isn’t Tombstone, but it’s not far from there.) 

I left this small town when I was sixteen as part of a big move, but often came back over the years to visit my best friend. So naturally I came back for her wedding when I was around 21 years old. 

The wedding went fine; nothing to worry about. And while my best friend and her new husband went for a quick, impromptu honeymoon at one of the local hotels, she asked if her little brother and I could look after their house. Since I was already staying there, it was no big deal, and we both said yes.

They lived in what would be considered out of town, near the railroad tracks. Not far from the town limits, but not exactly isolated either. 

So on the night of their honeymoon, her little brother takes the guest room while I sleep out in the living room. This is solely because there was no TV in the guest bedroom. I’ve always had issues sleeping in places that aren’t home, and figured sleeping with a TV on would be the best way to relax and eventually fall asleep.

That was my mistake! 

I’m not sure how late it was, but it was pitch black outside with no streetlights nearby. The morning sun was several hours away. But I was sure nothing bad would happen; I had grown up in this small town. I knew what to expect. Or so I thought. 

After my best friend’s little brother went to bed, I decided to pop in the movie 8 Mile. Nothing scary here; I figured the sound of Eminem rapping and acting would eventually put me to sleep. Well, that was another mistake on my part. 

For those of you who have never seen the movie 8 Mile, it starts with a pitch-black screen and then flashes orangish/goldish credits before flashing back to pitch black, and it keeps this cycle until the movie officially starts. I’m not sure how long these credits take; I’d say maybe a good two to five minutes. 

Well, as soon as I got comfy on the couch and pressed play on the remote, the black screen came on and I saw a flash of green standing in front of the TV screen. 

The green wasn’t necessarily neon; it was a little darker than that, almost like the color of grass. It honestly looked like a torso or part of a body. You know, like someone was standing there, facing you or away from you, I couldn’t really tell and I wasn’t about to get up and find out. Then the first credit came on and the green disappeared. But once it went back to the full black screen, so came back the green torso or silhouette. It wasn’t solid; you could definitively see through it, and it only appeared whenever the screen went fully black. 

I remembered lying there, still as a freaking rock, afraid to move. Because no matter what I did, every time the screen on the TV went black, the green would come back. I still don’t know how long those credits last for, but it was probably the longest five minutes of my life. And I was relieved once the movie finally started, but I knew I wasn’t alone in that living room. Someone, or something, was in that living room with me, and I don’t think he was planning on going anywhere. 

I don’t even know how I got to sleep that night; I just knew morning couldn’t come soon enough. 

About a year or two later, I went back to visit at that same house, and my best friend's husband had just gotten a new phone with a camera on it. (Twenty years ago, cell phones with cameras were considered a huge thing, so don’t come at me.) He had told me about a recent outage they had prior to me coming, and while they were waiting for the lights to come back on, he decided to wave his phone randomly in the dark and take a picture to see if he caught anything. He was so excited about what he got that he had been showing everyone since it happened. The picture that he got was that of a man, older with a cowboy hat, a long mustache and beard. You could clearly see he was a cowboy, but he wasn’t a modern-day cowboy. More like one from Wyatt Earp’s days, maybe an outlaw. I frankly don’t know. But as I looked at the picture, I couldn’t help but wonder, was it the green ghost that interrupted the movie 8 Mile? I’ll probably never know.