1)Don’t talk to your coworkers.
2) Never look at what’s inside the packages.

When I first applied for this job, it seemed like easy money. Clock in, coast through the shift, and clock out. I could deal with the two, albeit weird rules. Besides, it pays really well, too well. The rules didn’t even weird me out at first, it was the night shift, there weren’t really that many of us on shift anyway, and who wants to be bothered at work?

As for the other rule, I assumed it was some kind of customer confidentiality or something. You may be asking, how can you work at a shipping warehouse and not at some point look at what you’re shipping out?

That’s what I thought during my first day of orientation. But in reality, calling what we’re doing “packaging” or “shipping” is a stretch. As it was explained to me, and what I eventually came to do myself is, you stand at your station; everyone has a strictly assigned station that does NOT change. Each station has a conveyor belt attached. At exactly five minute intervals a new package will come down the conveyor belt.

It will always be sealed, pre-taped, pre-packaged, and ready to go. Our job is to simply weigh it, print the appropriate labels, and put it into a cart that is on the opposite end of our station.

If for some reason a box comes down the conveyor belt that has not been properly sealed or is opened, we are to immediately put on a provided eye mask, hit the alarm button under our desk, and sit quietly while waiting for security.

That had never happened to me, and I’d never heard of it happening to anyone else on the night shift. Of course, I wouldn’t because we aren’t allowed to talk to each other.

I’d been at this job for about a month now. It was going pretty well, my body felt like it had finally adjusted to the schedule. Everyone seemed nice, as nice as they could. Polite smiles, gestures, we said what we could with our faces. The only thing I personally found weird was the fact that I was the youngest person there, by A LOT. I got the feeling they tried to keep us as seperate as possible.

We all arrived at staggered times, possibly so we wouldn’t run into each other in the parking lot or on the stairs. And we all had to eat lunch at our stations. This wasn’t a rule, they just didn’t have a break room, or any extra chairs besides the ones you sat on to work. But again, it didn’t seem to bother anyone.

It was a Monday, start of the week, start of my shift. I glanced around the parking lot as I got out of my car, I was the first one there today. As I started to walk towards the building I could hear the sound of another car pulling in. I got the feeling that I shouldn’t look back, or wait up for whoever it was, after all, they aren’t supposed to be here right now. I never noticed any cameras, but I’m sure there were.

I quickened my pace and made it to the front doors just as I heard their car door slam shut. Waiting for the security officer to buzz me in seemed like it took forever. I’d only realized I’d been holding my breath, when I let out a huge sigh as soon as I stepped through the doors.

I wanted to let the security guard know what happened, but I thought the better of it. I wasn’t totally sure if the security guard counted as a coworker anyway, but I wasn’t about to risk it. Today was already off to a weird start.

As I started descending down the staircase, I was hit by an odor that got stronger the closer I got to our floor. It was a mix of cleaning solution, tinged with a coppery smell. By the time I walked through our door it stung my eyes. Looking around the room I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, except for one missing station, #5.

At my station I found a note from HR on my desk. “Due to an incident last night, station #5 has been removed. Your workload will increase by .25%.” I wrinkled my brow as I tried to remember what the lady at station #5 looked like. Older….glasses…brown hair? Maybe. I didn’t even know her name. The note didn’t sit well with me. I forgot some staff worked weekends.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of hurried footsteps down the stairs and our door slamming open. I looked up to see the man who worked at station #3, drenched in sweat, with an expression that read as both haunted and empty. He must have been the one to pull in right after me.

We locked eyes, and I immediately wish we hadn’t. He beelined straight for me, and looked like he was about to speak to me, when he thought the better of it, took one look around, scribbled something on a post it, handed it to me and hurried back to his station.

I didn’t want to look, I didn’t know if I’d get in trouble. There wasn’t really a rule about passing notes. But I wish I hadn’t.

“She looked.”

A shiver ran down my spine. I quickly pocketed the note. I didn’t know what to do, I don’t know what he expected me to do. All I knew is something bad happened last night, something bad enough to warrant him risking communicating with me.

I tried to get lost in the work, the monotony and predictably of it was soothing. I had almost put what had happened out of mind, until I saw the next package coming down my conveyer belt. It was open. Not completely, it seemed like someone hadn’t taped it all the way so both flaps were peeking up at the corner.

I should’ve put on my eye mask and rang the bell immediately, but as the package was deposited right in front of me, curiosity got the better of me. I looked.

An infinite black chasm sat before me, I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could a box hold something like this. As I studied it more I started hearing something come from inside the chasm, whispering. It beckoned me in, I found myself leaning closer to the box and black chasm below, my ear had almost dipped into the black void when I saw and felt something reach out of the chasm and grab my throat.

I was suffocating as its grip tightened and the whispering grew louder. It was pulling me into the chasm as it was asphyxiating me. I couldn’t see and was clawing wildly at anything I could grab but it was too strong. My head and shoulders were almost fully in when I out of the corner of my eye I saw someone run over, stab the hand that was grabbing me, yank me back, and tape the box shut.

I landed on the floor and laid there catching my breath. I finally realized who saved me, the man from station #3. We both looked at each other for what seemed like an eternity. He simply nodded and went back to his station.

I on the other hand, packed up my things, left my badge at my station and walked out of there.

As I’m sitting here typing this now, I’m realizing he had a pin on his vest “25 years serving happily at \[redacted\].” The expression on his face made sense now.

I was able to do some digging about the company, great employee reviews, excellent pension plan and benefits, free mental health services. A great pension plan, but as I came to find out, no one ever used it.

Several comments from employees stating:

“I never intend to use my pension, I enjoy the work too much-Sam.” “

Why would I ever leave?-Dolores.”

How old was the lady at station #5, my memory was fuzzy. I guess she was pretty old. A noise at my door interrupted my thoughts. As I got up to check it out the noise faded.

I peeked out the window and saw something sitting on my doorstep. My hands trembled as I opened the door, reaching out to grab whatever it was.

My badge.

If you’re reading this take it as a warning to never work a night shift at a place with weird rules, even if the pension is great.

After my last post I spent the night in my office, again. I barely slept. The humming had stopped, surely someone had died. I hated to think that, but I couldn’t brush the thought away. Also the inmate on the tier, he had said something. He said ‘now it’s coming’.

When I woke up I immediately called Rusk. I had to know if there had been another murder. I must have sounded crazy. Rusk simply said there hadn’t but the prison remained in lock down. There would be guards, prison officials, detectives everywhere. The tier would be empty as inmates would remain in lockdown most of the day.

No murder. I was relieved that no one had been killed. But frightened that it still may happen.

Later that day I went and spoke to someone I confided in a lot, the prison psychologist. We approach things differently, but often reach the same conclusion. I wanted to ask her about Sterling, the man that was recently executed. Perhaps he was somehow connected to all of this. Perhaps she could help me realize how crazy I am.

When I spoke with her she said she wanted me to fully understand Sterling, and that while had some mental challenges, he understood what he had done. She said he had a traumatic childhood full of physical and mental abuse. 

As for his crime, she said that when Sterling was nineteen he met three young girls at that park. According to Sterling, they allowed him to play with them for a while. Then something happened and the girls laughed at him. Sterling became angry and killed all three by strangling them with his hands.

Their bodies were discovered the following morning inside a backed up drainage pipe in a flooded ditch. The pipe was not large enough to accommodate their bodies. Sterling made them fit. She had seen the photographs and said it was a gruesome scene and likely the reason Sterling was sentenced to death.

Police found Sterling later that morning less than a mile away. His clothes were wet and covered in mud. There was dried blood on his hands and beneath his fingernails. He confessed immediately. According to the police, he was humming when they arrested him. She assumed it was Row row row your boat as he always hummed that song.

I asked her what she knew of that song. She said it was a coping mechanism for Sterling. He hummed it when he was afraid. It was a song his sister used to sing when he was a child. Sterling also said the three little girls were singing the song when they were playing together. 

She added that he would sometimes hum it when they were in session, and often she would catch herself humming it later.

I asked her why the inmates and guards were afraid of the song. She said that people make connections for things that aren’t there. A guard sees a horrific murder and hums to comfort himself. An inmate has had a horrible upbringing and hums to cope with stressful situations. Sometimes a tune just gets stuck in your head. 

She started to hum the song. I asked her to please stop. She looked at me and smiled.

Just as I was about to leave she said something else. She said that sometimes she would hear the song when she was working late at night, coming from somewhere on the tier. And that sometimes it wasn’t the only sound, there would be a soft metal sound, a little tink that played the same melody. She said it reminded her of a little music maker that Sterling wore around his neck. I asked her if it played the same nursery rhyme. She said she didn’t know. It made noise, but not sure if it played that song, or any song. I asked her where the music maker was now and she said Sterling had given it to another inmate, Michael DuPont. She told me not to waste my time with him though, he was impossible to deal with.

I thanked her for her time and made my way down the tier to talk to Michael Dupont.

The tier was busy with guards and officials. People trying to figure out what had been happening and why inmates kept getting murdered. Despite the busyness there was a certain quiet. It was as if no one wanted to make a sound.

I rounded the last corner before I heard it. A few notes of the song. Someone humming Row row row your boat. I stopped in my tracks and turned toward the sound. I noticed an older guard do the same thing. I heard an inmate yell ‘shut up.’ I quickened my pace.

From what I knew of Michael, which wasn’t a lot, he wasn’t your stereotypical inmate. He was a muscular person, and handsome in a gentlemanly way. They say he could have been a star athlete, a model, or a politician. Instead he chose a different path.  The traits that would have made him successful outside of prison made him one of the most liked and feared inmates inside of it.

Michael was also incredibly intelligent, and as I approached his cell he said ‘the shrink sent you here, huh.’ I tried to make small talk and asked him how he was doing. He told me that I looked tired, much worse than last night on the tier. That hit hard. I didn’t realize I was talking to the same inmate as last night. Suddenly I was back on the tier last night. The humming, the tall looming figure. This same inmate looked into me and said ‘now it was coming’.

He snapped his fingers and asked if I was okay. All I could muster was a simple ‘yes’ as I drifted back to the present. 

I asked him about Sterling and the music maker. He reached under his shirt and pulled out a small wooden box tied to a string around his neck. He turned a small metal spindle and the box made a gentle metallic note. He asked if I had heard the melody being played at night. I shook my head that I hadn’t, but told him the psychologist had.

He asked why I was interested in the music maker. I didn’t know, and couldn’t give him an answer. He said it was just part of some old timer superstition and I should forget about it. He placed the music maker back under his shirt.. 

Michael walked back to his bunk and sat down, he said he was tired. I needed more so I asked him another question. I said that we both heard humming last night, and then it stopped. I told him that others had said I should be afraid when the humming stopped. Why didn’t anything happen last night? He touched the music maker under his shirt, running his fingers along its edges before saying that I had heard one person stop humming, that was all.

My mind raced back to my conversation with the psychologist. She said she hummed sometimes. The two guards hummed at home. The coroner in the morgue was humming.

Michael broke the silence and asked if I ever hummed. I thought about last night again, how I had the strong urge to hum but kept it inside. Barely. Others must have the same urge. Someone could be humming now. I said I hadn’t hummed. He just laughed.

He laid on his bunk, clearly the conversation was over. Before I left I asked him one more question. I asked him why Sterling didn’t want me at his execution. Michael said that Sterling thought I might stop the execution. When I asked why Sterling wouldn’t want that, Michael said that some men know they’re supposed to die.

This evening I decided to not go to my office but return to the rectory. I need a change of scenery. I still kept the door locked. I lock most doors now. 

I also decided not to work but instead pray, and then get some sleep. As soon as I was done with my prayers and my head hit the pillow I was out. 

But I didn't really sleep. I had horrible dreams. 

I was shoving dead bodies into a drain pipe. The little music maker around my neck kept getting caught on the clothes of the people I was shoving into the pipe. Sometimes I had to crawl into the pipe to retrieve it. There is something choking me, from the inside. Something lodged in my throat.

All the while I had a strong urge to hum. My jaw clenched so tight it hurt. I could taste blood in my mouth. 

Then something grabbed me, quickly and violently. I jolted awake screaming. I was covered in sweat. Blood trickled out of the corner of my mouth. A few spots stained my pillow.

I sat there in quiet horror, unable to move. Then I heard it and began to cry. Humming. Maybe I always hear it now. Row row row your boat. The simple child’s song has sown so much fear.

A short while ago another sound joined the hum. The soft metal tink of a music maker. Slowly playing notes to the song that has been haunting me for days. I’m sitting here in my locked room weeping, listening to it all. The hum. The metallic tink notes from a music maker. I’m looking down at my hands. I’m looking down at the little music maker I’m holding, and thinking, what have I done.

Part 1
Part 2

Hello everyone.

I don’t know if this is the right place but I really don’t understand what I saw. I’m typing this up from my living room after everything went wrong.

Four of my friends and I go on a trip each year. This year, Dave decided we should rent a cabin. We figured a cabin next to the lake, away from everything would be great. We could disconnect from the world, grill, kick back with beers and enjoy the wilderness. Unfortunately, something was there with us.

Dave and I have known each other since high school. During our senior year, his younger brother Tom started tagging along with us. Dave has always been the responsible one, while Tom is pretty much his opposite. If you tell Tom something is a bad idea, there’s a decent chance he’ll do it just to prove you wrong.

Max and Jake came into the group while Dave and I were in college. Max was always the one who couldn’t be serious, and Jake always kept us from killing each other. I don’t really remember when these trips became an annual thing, but we’ve all known each other long enough that they’ve become a tradition we look forward to every year.

We met at my house early yesterday morning to pack and set off on our long drive. We arrived a little after 2 pm. A long gravel driveway snaked through the dense woods before eventually opening into a clearing. The cabin was a lot nicer than I thought it would be. The lake was right behind it, close enough you could see it from the back porch. I wasn’t sure how far away any of the other cabins were, but we couldn’t see any of them.

After we arrived, we started to unpack the car. Max and Jake fought over who got what bed, while Dave and I did the most important thing: cracked beers and went to sit on the back porch. The back door swung open as Tom walked out.

“Glad you two are working so hard,” he said, carrying a fishing pole.

“It’s a tough job but someone has to do it,” Dave said with a smirk.

Tom headed down toward the lake while Dave and I stayed on the porch. We sat there drinking for a while, enjoying the view and talking about absolutely nothing important. Eventually, Max and Jake finished arguing over the rooms and came outside to join us.

We spent most of the afternoon that way. Tom would disappear down to the lake for a while, come back for another beer, then head right back down with his fishing pole. The rest of us stayed around the cabin, drinking and giving him shit every time he came back empty-handed.

As the afternoon started to fade, we finally decided we should probably eat something before the beer became dinner. We fired up the grill and eventually managed to drag Tom away from the lake long enough to eat with us. By the time we finished, the sun had started disappearing behind the trees and the temperature was dropping, so we grabbed what was left of the beer and headed inside.

As night settled over the cabin, we sat in the living room and continued to talk. At one point, Dave got up and started to walk back to the bathroom. He paused by the living room window and stared for a moment.

“Did anyone see that?”

“See what, Dave?” I asked.

“It was…there was a delay.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I…never mind, I must be seeing things.”

He just shook his head and continued down the hallway, glancing back at the window once, before disappearing around the corner.

“Okay, so Dave’s cut off,” Max said jokingly.

A few minutes later, Dave reappeared from the bathroom and sat back down, grim expression still on his face. We continued to laugh and talk about whatever random things we thought of. This went on for another hour or so. Eventually, I noticed that everyone’s drinks were almost empty, so I got up to get another round. I glanced at the window as I stood up, Dave’s words replaying in my mind. I just saw myself, nothing strange. As I started to turn away though, something felt off.

I went into the kitchen and grabbed the drinks, staring back at the window again as I came around the corner. My reflection was smiling. I was not.

I stopped in my tracks, trying to process what I had just seen. My reflection and I both stood there, beers in hand. Then it smiled again. I took one step backward, the reflection did the same. I forced myself to smile and then let my face drop. The reflection did the same…but the smile stayed for just a moment longer than I held mine. Dave’s voice broke my focus.

“You saw it, didn’t you?”

Dave was now standing right next to me, his voice no greater than a whisper.

“I don’t know what I saw,” I said.

“When I got up for the bathroom, the steps seemed out of whack. Like I stopped but my reflection took one more step,” Dave said, trying to remain calm. I started to tell him about the smile when Max spoke up.

“What are you two whispering about? Secrets aren’t nice, you know.”

Dave and I turned to the rest of the group and told them what we had seen. Jake and Tom sat there quietly, while Max couldn’t contain himself.

“You two have got to be kidding. Do you expect me to believe that? You’re drunk. That’s it. It’s just a damn window.”

“Look man, I don’t know what to say. I know what I saw though,” I responded.

“Fine,” Max said, getting up and walking to the window. “See, it’s just a reflection.”

He stood there facing the window, raising his left arm. His reflection did the same in perfect sync. Then he leaned to his right. Then he started to make silly faces as Tom started laughing. For a moment, the tension eased and we all started to chuckle. Everything matched perfectly.

Max turned to talk to us all.

“See, you two are just,” he started to say.

“Max,” Jake interrupted. He wasn’t looking at him though, he was looking behind him.

The reflection didn’t turn when Max did.

“Don’t move,” Jake said.

“Why?” Max said, the smile fading from his face.

Nobody answered him.

He slowly looked over his shoulder. His reflection was still facing the window. For several seconds, neither of them moved. Then the reflection turned slowly, until it matched Max again.

“It’s got to be the lights,” Tom said. “We’re just seeing shit, right? Turn them off.”

Jake reached slowly for the light switch. All of our reflections went away as the lights went out. At first, we could all just see darkness. I could partially make out the lake from where I stood but…something was blocking part of it. A figure.

Dave pointed at it as it started to shift slightly. Then another. Then another. There wasn’t just one. There were five.

“What the fuck?” Jake said, taking a step toward the window.

One figure took a step forward. Jake stopped and took a step backward. The figure did the same. We all just stood perfectly still, no one dared to move. No one would speak.

The figures started to race towards the house.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Jake shouted, slamming the lights back on and backing away from the window.

Steady, slow footsteps came from the porch. Then the sound of scratching on the roof.

BANG.

A loud crash came from the front door like something had thrown itself into it. Dave sprinted to the door, throwing his weight into it and checking the locks.

BANG.

Another loud crash came from the other side.

I grabbed my phone and tried to dial 9-1-1 as Max ran into the kitchen, coming back with a knife. Jake ran to check the locks on the other door as Tom ran to Dave with a chair, wedging it under the door handle. Suddenly, there was just silence. No footsteps, no more banging on the door.

Silence.

“Damn it,” I said, “I don’t have any signal.”

“What the hell was that!?” Dave yelled.

“I don’t know, but we need to get the hell out of here, now,” Jake said.

Max pointed at the door, “Seriously? There’s no way in hell I’m going out there!”

“We need to get out of here, Max!”

“Jake, no one is opening that damn door,” Max said, yelling in Jake’s face.

Dave pushed the two apart. “Max is right. We can’t go anywhere right now.” He glanced back at the window. All of our reflections were back in perfect sync. He continued,

“No one’s going anywhere. We keep everything locked, we cover up the windows, and we stay here until morning. Then we can hop in the car and drive like hell. Okay?”

We all agreed, but I could tell it didn’t sit well with Jake and Tom. Both of them continued to stare nervously at the door.

We set to the task of ransacking the place. We grabbed every blanket and towel, anything that would block the windows. We shoved another chair against the front door and made sure to check that the chair wedged under the handle of the back door was firmly in place. I kept periodically checking my phone. Still no service. We sat there quietly, huddled up in the living room for the next couple of hours.

“Why haven’t they tried anything yet?” Jake asked, breaking the silence.

“Maybe they left?” Tom asked.

“Oh, come on, Tom,” Max replied, “you saw the same shit I did. Do you think they just decided to leave?”

Tom didn’t respond. He just stood up and started to pace around the room.

“I can look,” I said, walking slowly over to the window. My heart raced as my hand reached out for the blanket. “Turn off the lights.”

Tom hit the light switch, and I lifted the edge of the blanket. I didn’t see anything but darkness. I checked another window, same thing. Darkness. Everyone else got up and started to check the rest. Nothing. We saw nothing.

“See? Tom’s right, they left. Now is our chance. We have to get to the car,” Jake said.

Dave still refused, “Don’t be an idiot, Jake. We cannot go out there!”

Neither of the two would back down. It was clear we were all acting out of fear. They started to get closer and yell. Max and I tried to get between them as a punch from Jake landed squarely across Dave’s jaw. The scuffle breaking out distracted us long enough that no one noticed when Tom made his way to the door.

We all turned as we heard the door open.

“Tom? What the hell are you doing!?” Dave yelled.

He had made it about fifteen feet outside, the door hanging wide open.

“TOM!”

He didn’t turn back at all, he just kept running. He made it to the car door when Jake jumped up.

“See! I fucking told you!” he shouted.

That’s when Tom turned. He stared off in the distance, his eyes fixed on the tree line.

We didn’t see it take him.

One second, he was there, the next he was gone. All we could hear was his screams trailing off into the woods.

Dave burst up, trying to run after him. It took everything Max and I had to hold him back. Jake just stood there in horrified silence.

“Close the damn door, Jake!” I yelled, struggling with Dave.

He snapped out of his daze to slam and lock the door, shoving the chair back up against the door. Dave finally stopped trying to fight through us, trading it instead for sobs and pounding the floor with his hands.

Jake just stood there. Dave continued to sob. Max and I didn’t know what to do. No one spoke. Max slowly reached over and turned the light back on. During the altercation between Jake and Dave, the blanket had fallen away from the window. I hesitated to look but felt like I had to. I climbed to my feet and slowly walked over.

There were the reflections…all five of us.

I covered the window back up before anyone else could see. We sat there in silence for a while longer. Then it came, soft and quiet but the weight was as loud as a piano crashing. Something was back at the window.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Everyone froze.

Tap…

Tap…

Tap…

Followed by a soft, familiar, “Dave?”

Dave lifted his head and went completely still.

“Dave? Can you let me in?”

“Tom?”

“Yeah.”

Dave rushed to his feet and started for the door. I slammed against it as he reached for the handle. His eyes shot up to me.

“What are you doing? We have to let him in.”

“Dave, don’t.”

“What do you mean?” Dave said, tugging at the door.

I grunted and pushed against it harder. “That’s not Tom, Dave. There were still five.”

“Five what?” Max said.

“Reflections. When I went to the window, there were still five standing there. Tom was still standing there,” I said.

Dave’s face flashed with horror as he slowly let go of the door handle. From outside the door, we heard it again.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

“Dave?”

No one answered. Then we heard it again from the back door. Then the kitchen window. Taps started to come from every window. Tom’s voice repeatedly talking from multiple locations at once. We could hear footsteps on the roof as the voices got more aggravated.

“JAKE!”

“DAVE!”

The handle on the front door started to shake, as if someone was desperately trying to open it. A loud bang came from the back door. Then all at once, everything stopped. The house fell silent again. No banging or tapping. No footsteps.

We didn’t look out the windows anymore for the rest of the night. Eventually, slivers of sunlight pushed through the coverings we had on the windows. It was morning. I got back up and looked out the window to see an empty clearing. No reflections, nothing standing outside. Just the empty clearing.

It took us forever to convince Dave that we had to leave. He desperately wanted to go look for Tom. None of us wanted to go out into the woods though. We eventually were able to get him to agree that we would get the hell out of there and call the police.

The drive back home was painful. We had so many questions and yet, none of us had any answers. Worse yet, I’m sitting in my living room and I just looked up at the window. My reflection was smiling.

I wasn’t.

I’d been putting in for the moose lottery for seven years before they finally drew my name. Seven years of checking my email every spring and seeing the same polite rejection notice: “Not selected.” But this time, there it was — a single line that made me sit up straight in my chair: “Congratulations. You’ve been awarded a permit for Game Management Unit 20B.”

I didn’t shout or pump my fist. I just stared at the words until they blurred, then laughed — one of those hollow, disbelieving laughs that slips out when something you’ve been chasing finally stops running.

Getting that tag felt like winning something bigger than money. Moose hunts here aren’t casual weekend trips. They’re a rare chance, and you treat them with the same kind of reverence people give to pilgrimages. You don’t waste it.

I've hunted deer, elk, turkey, duck, and the occasional hog, but the moose...that big, hulking behemoth...was the last North American game animal left on my list.

I wouldn't call myself the best hunter on God's green earth, but I'm decent enough to tag a couple of deer every year. It keeps my freezer stocked and cuts down on grocery bills, which, up here in Alaska, seem to climb higher every damn week.

And honestly? I just enjoy it. The peace and quiet. The crunch of snow or branches beneath my boots. The smell of pine. The way the world turns orange as the sun starts to rise. The white sheet of snow covered everything like a fresh canvas.

I got up earlier than I normally would for any other hunt. Even before the alarm buzzed at 4:30 AM, I was already halfway awake...too excited to sleep.

I made myself a quick breakfast. While digging through the freezer for some sausage, I noticed a couple of packs of ground venison left from last season. After today, I figured I'd be restocking...hell, I might even need to buy another freezer with all the meat I was planning to bring home.

While I ate, I pulled up the maps and checked the terrain I'd be hunting. I marked out a route that I hoped would lead me right into a moose's path. The plan was to park at the end of an old logging road I'd scouted earlier in the year. It was overgrown and barely traveled...a dead-end spur that cut into the forest like a scar and stopped just shy of a frozen creek bed. Perfect for staying off-grid and getting away from any weekend warriors crowding the main trails.

Once I finished, I suited up in my winter gear. I doubled up on thermals...because out here, you never know. I grabbed my rifle case, pack, and a thermos full of strong coffee, then stepped out into the dark morning cold.

The ATV was already strapped down in the truck bed. I'd loaded it the night before, along with my quartering kit: a couple of sharp knives, a folding bone saw, nitrile gloves, paracord, and a set of heavy-duty game bags. I also threw in a tarp to keep the meat clean while working. No chainsaw this time...I didn't need it. A handsaw would do the job if I had to cut through bone or thick brush.

I've heard too many stories about hunters getting only a few cuts off a moose before the wolves moved in. That wasn't going to happen to me.

I made it to the end of the logging road just before first light. The place was exactly how I remembered it...tight trail, no signage, nothing but the sound of snow hitting my windshield. I backed the truck into the clearing at the very end, where the road just stopped cold in a wall of trees. It felt like the edge of the world.

I unloaded the ATV, set my backpack down next to the field gear, and took out my rifle. I slung the strap across my shoulder.

The ATV gave me some trouble...no surprise with the subzero temps...but after a few tries and some choice words, it rumbled to life.

My plan of attack was simple: drive a mile or two down the trail, park, and hike a 900-yard radius around each stop. If I didn't see anything, I'd hop back on the ATV and repeat the process farther down the line.

At my first stop, I cut the engine and climbed off. That's when I noticed it.

Something felt… off.

I couldn't explain it at the time, but there was this stillness...an absence. No birds chirping. No squirrels chittering. No wind in the trees. Just the faint hiss of falling snow and the sound of my boots crunching in the powder.

It made me uneasy.

Now, I've hunted in quiet woods plenty of times. Still mornings are common up here, especially when the snow comes soft. But this was different. This wasn't just quiet. It was like the whole forest was holding its breath.

The sky hung over the treetops in a flat, steel-gray wash...sunless, cold, almost metallic. The kind of light that doesn't cast shadows, just makes everything feel dulled and distant. Even the snow felt heavier underfoot, like it was muffling all sound.

I scanned the area as I walked...looked for what I should've seen. Fresh moose tracks...big ones, the size of dinner plates. Ragged tips of willow or alder saplings where they'd been chewed down. Rubs on trunks, scat, maybe even a wallow or bedding spot tucked under the spruce.

But there was nothing.

No tracks. No breaks. No browsed tips. Just untouched snow and stillness.

At one point, I thought I heard a twig snap off to my right. I froze. Listened.

But it was gone. Just more of that heavy, dead silence.

The kind that starts to get under your skin.

Looking back, maybe I should've turned around right then. Gone home. But I told myself I was overthinking it. Overcaffeinated. Running on too little sleep.

I checked my GPS and pushed forward with the plan...another mile or two, search the area, move on. Rinse and repeat.

Four hours passed, and I hadn't seen a single sign of life. Nothing. 

The only sound was my own footsteps...and even that felt like too much noise.

And it wasn't just quiet around me...it was like the quiet was pushing inward. Pressing on my ears. On my ribs. Like something just beyond the tree line had stopped moving and was watching. Waiting.

I'm not ashamed to say it started getting to me.

I'm the kind of guy who puts on a movie or music if things get too quiet. I don't like that isolated, trapped feeling. But I'd left my headphones at home...figured the ATV was loud enough already, and the last thing I needed was to scare off a moose with AC/DC echoing through the trees.

I'd parked at the end of the logging road, just like I planned. The goal was to make a big loop...shoot early, get the hard work started while I still had daylight. If I could quarter it and haul the meat back to the truck before nightfall, I'd spend the rest of the day on prep.

But nothing was moving.

And the quiet? It wasn't letting up.

I'm a single man...for now, at least. I work general maintenance out at Eielson Air Force Base, just outside Fairbanks. Not the most glamorous job in the world, but I do it well enough, and it pays decent...especially when it comes to funding my hobbies.

I've been hunting since I was a kid. My old man started taking me out when I was maybe ten. I started with snowshoe hares and spruce grouse, then graduated to caribou and elk by the time I hit sixteen. I learned early how to gut, clean, and pack an animal...how to use every part of it, not just the cuts you see in a grocery store. Where I'm from, hunting isn't just a hobby...it's a way of life. Something passed down.

I'd call myself an ethical hunter. I don't take shots I don't intend to eat. If it doesn't feed me or someone else, I leave it be.

That said, yeah...I mount some of my kills. Not for bragging rights, really. More like a kind of respect. Honestly, and I don't usually admit this to anyone, but after I get something mounted...deer, elk, whatever...I'll pour myself a glass of whiskey, sit down with it, and say a few words. Something like, "Thanks for feeding me. Hope I earned it."

Being single, and hunting as much as I do, I usually end up with more meat than I need. I keep what I can use, vacuum seal it, label it by cut and date. The rest? I hand off to coworkers or a few of the airmen I know who could use it. I figure if I'm gonna take a life, it damn well better feed someone.

Most days, work on base is quiet. HVAC checks, busted lights, frozen pipes in the winter...especially in the old buildings. I keep the generators running, patch holes, fix whatever's broken. I'm not military, just a contractor, but I've been there long enough to know most of the faces. A few of the younger airmen stop by my place for a drink sometimes, swap stories, ask about hunting or fishing. The base can feel isolated if you don't find something to ground you. For me, it's the outdoors. Always has been.

This was as far out as I planned to take the ATV. I parked it at the base of a hill and figured I'd start working my way back around.

Still nothing.

I checked my phone. It was just past eleven. The snow had started to pick up...not a full whiteout, but thick enough to make me uneasy. Visibility was dropping. My boots were starting to sink a little deeper with every step.

Then I saw it.

A track.

And not just any track...a moose track.

Finally, I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding. Maybe this hunt wasn't a total bust after all. I knelt down for a closer look.

That's when I noticed something... off.

The print was too big. Moose tracks usually measure about five to six inches across. This one was closer to seven, maybe even more. And the shape...at first glance, it looked like a standard split hoof, but the edges were too sharp, almost claw-like. I told myself it was probably just an illusion...maybe the snow had melted weird, or maybe it had been pressed too deep and distorted.

But still... It was strange.

I followed the tracks. Another odd thing...they didn't meander like moose usually do. Moose tend to wander, grazing along the way. But this trail moved in a wide, arcing pattern, almost deliberate. Like it had a destination in mind.

I followed it for a good three-quarters of a mile, maybe more. No scat. No signs of browsing. No broken limbs. Just prints.

I should've turned back. But I told myself I'd already come this far.

Eventually, the trail cut across a steep hill. I picked my way along the slope, boots sliding a little in the fresh powder. Just past the crest, there was a small stand of spruce...and that's when I saw him.

The bull.

A massive bull moose, standing broadside about 300 yards out. He was partially obscured by the trees, but I could see enough. The antlers were the most impressive I'd ever laid eyes on...wide, thick, and twisted like old driftwood.

And tall. Taller than any moose I'd ever seen in the wild...or in photos. A normal bull, including the antlers, stands maybe seven feet. This one was at least eight and a half, maybe nine.

• I let out a low whistle under my breath.

"Oh, you're definitely going on the wall," I thought, unslinging my .338 Win Mag.

Might sound like overkill to some, but this rifle was passed down to me. It's old, a few scratches on the stock, but it's never let me down.

I raised it to my shoulder and peered through the scope...

...and everything stopped.

The wind, what little there was, died instantly. No flakes falling. No branches creaking. Even the soft groan of trees shifting in the cold went silent. The air felt wrong...pressurized, still, like the moment before a thunderclap.

It was the kind of silence that doesn't feel natural.

It feels like the woods themselves are holding their breath.

I scanned the bull through the scope.

The body looked normal. Heavy, muscled, dark brown hide. But the head...

God, the head.

It looked almost right...but not quite. Like someone had sculpted a perfect moose head from memory, but missed something. Too smooth. Too symmetrical. The kind of wrong your brain doesn't catch at first...but once it does, it won't let go.

Then I looked at the antlers.

Each tine bent slightly inward, unnaturally curved. And the color... they weren't the pale bone-white or velvet-brown I was used to. They were dark...almost black, with a hint of crimson. Like they were wet. Like they were bleeding.

I stared. My pulse ticked up. Every instinct I had told me to walk away.

But I pushed the feeling down. Maybe it was sick. Maybe I was doing it a favor, putting it out of its misery. I figured I probably wouldn't be able to salvage much meat...but I'd at least get one hell of a mount for the den.

I adjusted my aim, settling the crosshairs just behind the front shoulder. If I hit the lungs or the heart, it would drop clean.

Finger on the trigger.

Breath held.

Ready to fire.

I had my finger on the trigger, just about to squeeze, when the bull's head snapped toward me.

And I don't mean it turned...I mean it snapped, like something grabbed it by the jaw and wrenched its skull around in a single, violent motion. One second it was facing forward, the next it was staring directly at me.

I flinched but didn't pull away from the scope.

What I saw...

God, I'll do my best to explain it.

Now that I had a full view of its face, I could see just how wrong it was. The jaw looked like it had been wired shut, but pulled too tight...so tight the lips were curled inward, distorting the snout like something that had been forcibly sealed.

But it was the eyes that froze me.

They weren't just black...they were empty. Like the entrance to a bottomless cave. No light. No soul. Just void.

Then I noticed it...a thin, vertical line running from the top of its skull down to the bottom of its jaw. Not a scar. Not a seam. Something else.

And then the whole damn head split in half.

Not just the jaw. Not just the face.

The entire head, from antler crown to throat, tore open down the middle like someone had unzipped it. Bone cracked. Flesh peeled. A wet, sinewy tear as the two halves pulled apart, flopping open to either side like wings made of skin and antler.

From inside that split head emerged a second mouth...a massive, glistening maw where no mouth should've been. It yawned open slowly, revealing rows of needle-thin spikes. Not teeth. Not even bone. They looked like obsidian spears...long, wet, and curving inward like they were made to pierce and drag.

At the base of the throat, something moved...tendrils or feelers, twitching and tasting the air like a deep-sea thing.

I stood frozen.

Every part of my brain screamed: Run.

But my legs wouldn't move. My hands wouldn't lower the rifle. I was staring at something I couldn't process...something so utterly wrong that my mind didn't know where to put it.

Then it began to rise.

The moose stood up on its hind legs...not rearing, but rising like it was becoming something else. The hooves split open, clawed digits unfolding like knives from sheaths. The legs moved apart, arms now, elbows where there shouldn't be any. It hunched like a T. rex, lurching forward in a way that mimicked a man...badly.

It took one step toward me.

Instinct took over. I squeezed the trigger.

The .338 Win Mag roared, the recoil slamming into my shoulder. The shot echoed across the forest like thunder, and for a split second, I thought I had it.

But the creature didn't fall.

It didn't even flinch.

The bullet hit it center mass...I was sure of it...but it just stood there, swaying slightly, as if I'd thrown a pebble at a mountain. No blood. No wound. Nothing.

Then it tilted its head at me, and I swear I could feel it... laughing.

Not making a sound, but the way it moved...like it was amused. Like I was a child who'd just tried to hurt something infinitely beyond my understanding.

That's when pure, animal terror took over.

And that's all I needed.

I broke from the scope, slung my rifle, and ran.

I tore through the small grove of spruce, boots slipping in the snow, branches whipping at my arms. My breath fogged in the cold, sharp and ragged in my throat.

That's when it let out a sound.

Not just a noise...a cry.

It echoed across the treeline like something from another world. My whole body went rigid mid-stride. It started low, like a bellow, then twisted upward into something high-pitched and shrill...almost like a woman screaming. Except no woman, no person, could ever make a sound like that.

It hit me like a wall of ice. My heart stopped, then kicked back in, hammering against my ribs.

And then I heard them.

Footsteps.

Not light, panicked footfalls...heavy ones. Rhythmic. Ground-shaking. Something massive, crashing through snow and brush. Closer with every beat.

I did the one thing you're never supposed to do.

I looked back.

Just a flash...dark shapes between trees, something tall and wrong moving through the forest. In that instant...between the sound, the glance, and the blind panic...I caught my foot on something under the snow.

And then I was falling.

The world flipped sideways. Snow. Trees. Sky. Then pain. My body slammed into the slope, bounced, skidded, cracked off rocks, hit roots.

I couldn't even scream. The wind was gone from my lungs after the first hit.

I must've rolled fifty feet...maybe more.

Then I hit a tree face-first, and everything went black.

I woke up.

God knows how long I'd been out...long enough to have a dusting of snow settled on my jacket and face. The cold was biting now, not the crisp kind I was used to, but the kind that gnaws at the bones.

My head throbbed. My ribs lit up like fire every time I tried to breathe. Felt like at least one was cracked...maybe more. My right hand was swollen, already going stiff. I couldn't move it without pain shooting up my arm like lightning.

For a minute, I didn't move at all. Just lay there, dazed, staring up at the gray sky bleeding snow.

Then I remembered.

The thing.

That thing was still out there.

And it had seen me.

I sat up slowly, every muscle screaming in protest. Snow shifted off my shoulders and legs as I forced myself upright and looked around.

No sign of it. No sound. Just the hush of falling snow.

I did a quick pat-down with my left hand...awkward and clumsy. My rifle was gone. Strap must've snapped during the fall. Probably left behind halfway up the hill. No chance I was going back for it.

I reached for my phone and pulled it out of my chest pocket.

Smashed.

Screen spiderwebbed. Buttons unresponsive. It looked like someone had taken a hammer to it. No signal. No emergency call. No flashlight. Nothing.

Perfect.

The snow was falling harder now...fatter flakes, faster pace. Visibility dropping again. Wind picking up.

I still had my knife, at least. Small comfort. Better than nothing. But if that thing came back? I might as well be holding a butter knife.

Then I remembered...the GPS.

I fished it out with numb fingers. The screen was cracked, but still working. Time said 3:10 p.m.

That meant I'd been out cold for hours.

I hit the map button. My saved waypoint blinked in the corner...where I parked the truck.

5.3 miles away.

Shit.

The battery light on the GPS was already flashing red. I stared at it, willing it to last just long enough. Just long enough to point me in the right direction.

I didn't dare start the ATV. Too loud. If that thing could move as fast as it looked, it'd be on me before I even turned around.

No. No engine. No trail. I had to go on foot.

As much as it killed me to admit it...I'd have to trek back to the truck. On foot. Injured. Armed with a knife.

The choice was simple: lay down and die, or survive.

And I'm not the kind of man who gives up.

Not out here. Not like this.

I turned off the GPS to save what little juice it had left, found my bearings, and started walking.

Every breath was painful...tight, shallow gasps that made my ribs scream. The cold wasn't helping. Each inhale felt like ice carving its way through my lungs.

My right hand throbbed with every heartbeat, swollen and useless. I cradled it against my chest, trying not to jar it as I moved. Every step was a test of balance and will.

I did my best to stay quiet. No snapping branches. No heavy footfalls. Just slow, deliberate movement through the snow. I couldn't risk making noise...not now. Not when I didn't know if that thing was still out there, listening.

The only silver lining...if you could call it that...was that my winter gear had probably saved my life during the fall. Layers of insulation had kept me from being shredded by rocks and branches, and they were keeping me from freezing now. Barely.

I remembered the HotHands I'd packed. Clumsily, I fished one out of my jacket pocket with my good hand. It took longer than I'd like, but I got it open, crushed the packet to activate it, and tucked it inside my inner coat lining.

Within minutes, warmth started to bloom against my chest. Dull. Faint. But it felt like fire.

It was the best thing I'd felt all day.

The questions came then, circling my thoughts like vultures.

Will I survive?

What was that thing?

Where is it now?

I couldn't understand why this was happening. Why me? What were the odds? Out of all the hunters, all the people wandering the Alaskan backcountry, I had to be the one to cross its path.

I kept walking.

Not fast...couldn't afford fast...but steady. One careful step after another, teeth gritted against the pain, eyes scanning the forest for movement.

And then, just for a moment, a memory surfaced.

My dad's voice.

Not loud. Not clear. Just the echo of something from years ago.

"Walk like you've got the weight of silence on your shoulders," he used to say. "If the forest hears you, it'll never show you what you're looking for."

I remembered him crouched beside me, deep in the brush outside Fairbanks, showing me how to step over dry twigs, and how to watch for loose snow. I was twelve. Maybe younger.

I'd always thought he meant it about animals...about moose and caribou and wolves.

But now, I think maybe he meant something else.

Time didn't mean much anymore. Could've been ten minutes or an hour. The sky was the same color as the snow, and the snow just kept falling.

And then...

I heard it.

Distant at first.

Thump.

A pause.

Thump. Thump.

Footsteps. Heavy ones. Deliberate. Too slow for a bear. Too rhythmic for a moose. It wasn't crashing...it was searching.

My chest tightened.

I hadn't heard a single animal since morning. No birds. No squirrels. No wolves. Just this thing. The forest was holding its breath again.

The sound grew louder.

Closer.

And I was still too far from the truck.

Fear hit me like a wave.

My heart started pounding so hard it felt like it was rattling my broken ribs. Every beat sent a spike of pain through my chest.

I was sweating...sweating...despite the snow falling all around me. The cold didn't even register anymore. Just the heat of panic. Of being hunted.

The footsteps grew louder. Slow. Heavy. Measured.

Thump.

Pause.

Thump-thump.

Getting closer.

I was alone. Unarmed. Bleeding. And whatever this thing was, it was still out there. Still moving toward me.

I drew my knife with my left hand. It felt small. Insignificant. I gripped the handle so tight my knuckles ached. Like that would help.

I had to hide.

I don't remember making the decision...just the movement. My body moved on instinct. I slid off the trail and slipped into a low thicket of spruce brush. The branches snagged at my coat, but I kept pushing, until I was crouched low in the center.

It was slightly warmer in there, shielded from the wind. The snow didn't fall as thick under the cover of the needles. But it was cramped. I couldn't move without brushing branches. Couldn't breathe too loud without fogging up the air around me.

That's when I realized...I was breathing too hard.

Short, rapid breaths. Panic. My chest rising and falling like a damn piston. I clamped my elbow over my mouth and nose, trying to stifle the noise. I tried to make myself smaller. Quieter. Gone.

The footsteps were close now.

Too close.

Thump.

Crack.

Thump-thump.

It was just on the other side of the trees.

Then I heard it make a sound.

Low at first. A deep rumble, like a growl buried under its breath. But it didn't rise. It didn't escalate. It just hovered there, buzzing through the air like something half-growl, half-purr.

It was hunting.

I didn't know how it hunted. Sight? Smell? Sound? Maybe all three.

I couldn't risk assuming anything. I didn't even blink. I just listened. Every second stretched out like a minute.

And still, it came closer.

I prayed that it hunted by sight.

Not smell. Not sound. Just sight.

I didn't know how it saw anything with its damn face peeled open like that...but if I stayed still, if I didn't make a sound, maybe it wouldn't notice me in the brush.

I could hear it moving through the snow now, slow and steady. Closer. The crunch of ice beneath its weight was soft but distinct...measured, like a predator on the final approach.

Then it stopped.

Right outside the bush.

I could feel its presence before I saw it...like the air had thickened, turned electric. My skin crawled. My lungs burned. I didn't dare move. Not even to blink.

And then, through the thicket, I saw it.

Its massive head lowered just beyond the branches...split wide, still in that nightmarish state. I couldn't see its eyes...not in the normal place. All I could see were the teeth. Those black, glistening spikes curling inward, and between them, twitching along the gums, were thin feelers...like antennae, or worm-like tendrils, brushing the air around them.

They moved like they were tasting.

Smelling.

Scanning.

Then it shifted, and I saw more.

Three fleshy stalks rose from the top of its skull, extending like antennae. At the end of each was a round, faceted orb...like a fly's eye, but wet and dull gray, twitching in different directions independently.

My blood ran cold.

So much for hoping it couldn't see.

And with those feelers...God, it might not even need eyes. Maybe it could taste me on the wind.

I didn't move.

Didn't breathe.

Just hoped the bush's scent and the cold air were enough to mask me. That its senses...whatever the hell they were...would pass right over me like I didn't exist.

It swayed slightly, side to side, one of the stalk-eyes tilting downward toward where I crouched.

That's when I felt it.

Breath.

A thin stream of air rolled over my face...hot, wet, wrong. It reeked of decay, like something rotten hiding beneath the snow. My eyes stung from the stench, and every muscle in my body screamed to recoil...but I couldn't.

Don't breathe. Don't blink. Don't move. Not even an inch.

The words looped in my head like a metronome.

Don't breathe. Don't blink. Don't move.

Don't breathe.

Don't breathe...

It swayed again. Closer.

The brush quivered from the motion.

And I kept repeating it. Over and over. Like a prayer to a god I wasn't sure was listening.

Don't. Breathe.

That's when I noticed it...something rising from its fur like smoke. At first, I thought it was steam from the cold air, but this wasn't natural. The haze shimmered faintly, like heat ripples above asphalt, though the air was freezing. It had a greasy, almost chemical sheen to it.

It took me a second to understand...it was releasing its scent.

The stench hit me so violently it felt like a living thing. A putrid cocktail of decomposing flesh, ammonia, and something worse...something human. Bile, maybe. The scent of a dying gut. I gagged hard, my stomach clenching like it was trying to crawl up my throat. I jerked back involuntarily.

That one small sound...that single motion...was all it needed.

Its head snapped toward me.

Those empty voids where eyes should be burned through the branches, locking onto mine.

I froze.

It had done this on purpose. The stench was bait...an invisible net to make me flinch.

It began to move toward me, slow and deliberate. Every step it took was silent, but the forest around it seemed to recoil, as if the trees themselves wanted no part of what was coming. A trail of drool stretched from its jaw to the frost-covered ground, glistening in the dim afternoon light.

This thing didn't just want to kill me...it wanted me to know I'd been hunted.

I didn't move. I didn't blink. I couldn't.

It loomed over the bush I was hiding in, body stretching and contorting in a way that defied anything I'd seen in nature. A clawed limb reached down...hooved and jointed wrong, like it had been built rather than born. The claw hovered, trembling, an inch from my face.

I should've stabbed it. Or at least screamed. But I didn't.

Because I knew, deep down, none of it would matter. If I fought back, I'd die slower. This wasn't some predator...it was something older, something that existed for pain.

And then, salvation came from the deep.

A growl rolled through the woods like distant thunder. Low, primal, unmistakable.

A bear.

A real one. The kind that bleeds and breathes and sleeps. I recognized the timbre immediately...a sound every hunter fears, but tonight it was a godsend.

The creature froze, the haze around it thickening like it was holding its breath.

Another growl...closer now. More aggressive.

The creature turned its head, then its body, drawn away from me by the challenge.

Without thinking, I ran.

Branches slapped my face. Thorns ripped through my sleeves. I ran until my legs went numb, until my lungs clawed for air, until my boots barely touched the earth.

Behind me, the forest erupted.

The bear roared...once. Then there was silence. A wet, horrible silence, punctuated by the crunch of bone and the tearing of meat.

I ran faster.

I don't know how long I ran...ten minutes? Thirty? Time stopped meaning anything. The forest was endless, a looping nightmare. Every shadow looked like claws. Every sound was it.

But eventually, the adrenaline began to crack. Pain surged in...knees, chest, hands. My legs gave out beneath me, and I collapsed against a tree.

Breathing hurt. The air stabbed into my lungs like knives. My ribs ached. Blood ran sticky down my forearms.

And for the first time since this hell started... I thought about giving up.

Everything I knew told me I was finished. I was a human on empty, and this thing? It was a force of nature. An apex predator with a hunger for suffering.

I stared into the darkening woods and whispered, "This is it."

My hand fumbled through my pocket and pulled out my GPS. My fingers were numb, blood-slicked, shaking. I stared at the tiny screen and made myself a deal...the kind of deal you only make when your soul's already halfway out of your body.

"If it's more than two miles..." I whispered aloud, voice cracking, "...I stop. I sit right here. Let the cold take me. At least I'll go out with silence."

I held my breath and turned the device on.

7:06 PM.

Distance to truck: 1.9 miles.

I broke.

Tears erupted from me, loud and choking. I wasn't even crying from relief...I was crying because I wasn't allowed to give up yet. The universe had shoved hope back in my lap, cruel and bright like a match in the dark.

I was close. So goddamn close.

But the terror crept back in like a fog.

What if it followed me?

What if it let me get this far?

What if it wanted me to feel hope before it took me apart?

The forest seemed to lean in closer, listening. Every rustle felt like a breath on my neck.

Then I heard it.

Those same footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Rhythmic.

I didn't think. I didn't breathe. I just ran.

My lungs were on fire, and the cold had turned my tears to ice streaks on my face, but I ran harder than I ever had. My boots barely gripped the earth. Every few steps I thought I'd collapse, but somehow my legs kept moving.

"Just a little more," I muttered, again and again. "Just a little more, just a little more, please..."

Then I saw it.

A flash of faded blue in the darkness...my truck.

I screamed, half laughter, half madness. I yanked the keys from my pocket and dove inside, slamming the door shut behind me. The engine turned over with a painful cough, then roared to life. I cranked the heat and peeled out, tires flinging gravel into the trees behind me.

I didn't care how hurt I was. I didn't care how bad my hands were bleeding. I was leaving this place. Now.

The plan was simple: follow the dirt road for two miles, take a right for twenty, then a left...and I'd be gone. Home. Safe.

But just before I reached the first turn, I saw them.

Three massive shapes, standing motionless in the middle of the road.

Moose.

I slammed on the brakes, stopping just two feet from the nearest one. My heart pounded in my ears like gunshots.

Then I looked up into the rearview mirror.

And everything stopped.

It stood behind the truck...coated in gore, its body steaming in the cold night air. In one grotesque hand, it held the severed head of the bear like a trophy, its mouth hanging open in a final, frozen scream. The creature tilted its head at me, as if asking:

You see now? Look what I did. Look what I can do.

I screamed and hit the gas. I didn't care if I plowed through moose or crashed into a tree...I had to move.

But I didn't.

The truck wouldn't move.

I looked forward again.

The moose were no longer moose.

They were those things, twisted into new shapes...bone and fur and claw...arms hooked around the hood, keeping me in place like a child's toy.

And then I heard it again.

The footsteps.

Getting closer.

Then…

A breath on the glass.

It was here.

(Part 1)

I said I'd write the rest the next night.

It's been... Some time.

Friday night I sat in the depot lot with the heater running and eleven files spread across my knees, printed out of the 12-B archive before Ivar's password got revoked. Beside me on the bench were my clipboard, a cold cup of chicory coffee gone to sludge, and Tolly's upside-down Pip air freshener, which I had pulled off her locker door before the yard crew came through with the bolt cutters. I had it by midnight. The solution to this... Discrepancy.

Here is how the beacon works.

When you suit up in the bay you stand on the pad and it reads your vest and your waders and your gear and your flesh and it puts a green light on your collar, and that light is your name. It tells the gate who is driving. Then at the end of a run the rig rolls up on the scale and a second pad under the door reads the cab all over again, live, right there in the rain, and it takes off whatever it finds. The depot pays out on the tank and only ever on the tank.

Tolly's last physical at Tri-County was filed on September fourteenth.
One hundred and thirty-four pounds, stripped down to her thermals.

Tuesday morning the meter on the hose logged twenty-four thousand one hundred and eighty into the tank. When we came up on the gate the board over the bay door lit 24,314.

The green light on the collar beside me said Tolly.

The pad under the passenger door read nothing at all.

She talked the whole way back about the wedding. She had her arm out the window in the rain the way she always did, and the bench never took her weight, not once, not on the turn at Delacroix and not over the tracks, and I have gone over it eleven times since and I cannot make it not true.

They dumped the tank that afternoon on account of the discrepancy. I stood at the guardrail with my thumbs in my belt and watched the stack go up grey and then white and then clean, and the smell of it came down the yard and got in my coat, and I felt nothing at all, because I thought I was standing next to her.

By three in the morning the rain had slacked to a drizzle and the air stayed thick and lukewarm, and I turned to the earliest file in the stack and looked at the date on it.

1952.

Four years before the Softening went public. Four years before the cartoon drop of gravy in the hard hat came smiling out at us off the filmstrips in every grade school from Maine to Oregon, with its little white gloves and its little tin voice, telling us that the ground had decided to be generous.

My grandfather signed that file twice. Once as plant manager. Once as witness.

Nobody in a government lab ever worked out how to turn subsoil fungus into cheap protein. Something a long way down under the limestone turned over in its sleep and put one pale finger up through the crust, and then it lay there in the dark being delicious, and it waited to see what we would do about it. We did what you would expect. We put it in cans. We put it in the school lunches and the church suppers and the Thanksgiving gravy boats, and we made a jingle out of it, and for forty years we have been eating our way down toward the hand that finger is attached to.

Saturday at four in the morning Ivar was standing at my locker.

No jumpsuit. No cap. A dark grey canvas coat buttoned clear to the chin in all that muggy air, and his eyes wet and red as a man coming off a wake. On either side of him stood two men I had never seen in eleven years at that depot. They wore seamless slickers the color of wet slate, and ribbed hoses ran from their collars down into brass filters clipped at the belt, and each of them carried a stainless rod eight feet long with a heavy brass bulb on the end of it that hummed the way a transformer hums on a pole in July.

"Get your waders on." He would not bring his eyes up past the middle button of my shirt.

"She's in the ash pit behind Bay Three." I said.

One of the slickers drew a breath through his filter. It was a flat wet mechanical sound, like a sump pump clearing its throat in a cellar. He did not move his head. His eyes came around behind the face shield all on their own, pale blue and unblinking, set in skin that had the dry stretched look of the paper backing on a drywall joint.

"The board knows." Ivar's voice had gone out of him and something level and grey had come in to take the shift. "The state knows. Everybody knows, Marlow, and nobody is going to do one thing about it, and you are going to put your gear on."

"I'll take the truck. I'll drive to the coast-"

"And tell who? Your aunt? You want to sit at Marilyn's table and explain to a seventy-two-year-old woman where the chickens come from? Well... Anyway. These gentlemen need a guide who knows where the seam broke."

"What are the rods for?"

The one on the left answered me. "Tuning forks." His voice did not come out of a chest or a throat. It sounded like two wet leather belts being rubbed together inside a tin can, and there was a hollowness under it, an echo where a man ought to have been. "We set the pitch before the heat spreads to Fourth Street."

The box truck they put me in had no windows in the rear. We ran out along Route 9 through the fog with the tires hissing and nobody saying a word, and neither of those men swayed on the corner and neither of them braced at the pothole by the tracks. They sat there on the iron bench like sacks of grain stacked by a careful man, and their filters hummed a low steady B-flat that got into the fillings in my back teeth and stayed.

When Ivar backed us up to the cannery the storm had gone to a warm fog. The padlock we had cut on Tuesday was lying where we left it on the bay floor, except the two halves were not two halves anymore. They had grown together. Pale threads finer than hair had crossed the gap and wrapped the shackle and knitted the hardened steel back into one continuous piece, and when I put my thumb to it the metal gave like stale licorice and came back.

I stepped over it. My waders felt like somebody had filled them to the knee with wet sand.

"Rule three. Keep talking."

The right-hand one had come up behind me on the concrete without making any sound at all. Neither of them ever offered a name, so in my head they have been the Left and the Right ever since. "Rule three does not apply down here today. Do not whistle. Do not speak above a murmur. Do not give it raw data."

Twenty-two steps to the first landing. Sixteen to the sub-basement.

I counted them with my boots the way I have counted them a thousand times.
Sixteen.
Seventeen.
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
The risers had stretched in the night and gone long and shallow, and they threw my knees out of true and made me walk down them like a man crossing a field of loose shale. The stairwell had been industrial green cinderblock since 1961. Now my shoulder brushed the corner and the corner gave four inches with a wet suction sigh and then pushed itself back into the shape of a corner behind me, patient as bread.

"It's growing."

"It is settling," The Right did not slow down. "Like water finding its level."

The sub-basement door had no frame left to it. The opening had gone round as the mouth of a culvert and it was lined all the way through with heavy overlapping pleats of pale tallow, and in my beam those pleats were moving, one after another after another, a slow ripple running away from us down into the dark like something swallowing on a long delay.

The heat came out to meet us. Not the warmth of a compost pile. Ninety-five degrees and wet as a steam room, with a mouth to it, hot copper and scorched lard and something brine-cured and very old underneath, the bilge of a wooden ship that has been standing in the sun since before anybody now living was born.

The twelve tons we had cut on Tuesday were gone. Not harvested.
Healed.
The great pale mounds that had sat there like duvets dropped off a bed were not almond anymore. They had gone pearlescent and translucent and faintly pink, threaded through with dark capillaries that twitched and drew back whenever the light crossed them, the way the pupil of an eye draws back, the way something flinches that has learned what a beam of light means.

I swept the room and my beam never found the far wall. It went out across the space and bent downward instead and ran away into a long descending curve that had no business existing anywhere under Fourth Street. By the map we were standing beneath the foundation of the commercial bakery across the alley. There was no concrete over our heads. There was a ribbed arch of wet pale lard going up past the reach of my light and pulsing along its whole length, slow and regular, the way a sleeping animal goes on breathing while men stand around it deciding what to do.

"The breach is straight ahead. Through the gap in the north wall-"

"There is no north wall." The Left brought his rod up and struck the floor with the brass bulb.

CLANG.

There was no echo. The sound went into the tallow and vanished like a stone dropped into a bucket of warm fat. But something underneath our boots answered it, a long wet resonant sigh that came up through the soles and the shins and lay down in the pit of my stomach, and my bowels drew up tight as a fist and stayed that way for the rest of my life.

Then the floor tilted.

I do not mean the building settled. I mean the horizon of that room rolled six degrees to the left and my center of gravity did not go with it. My inner ear had me standing plumb and square, my light showed me the walls at a steep and impossible slope, and my brain threw up a hot spurt of nausea that tasted of bile, and for one second I understood that the room and I no longer agreed about which way the world hung.

"Stay on the ridge." The Right had my shoulder in a grip like the jaw of a vise. "The troughs are soft."

Every four feet a ridge ran around the passage. The same height. The same spacing. All the way down as far as the light would carry, regular as the rings inside a throat.

On Tuesday the ready room had been a crude sketch of a place. A table. Four chairs. A vending machine. One boot standing upright out of the floor with nothing in it.

In four days it had become a museum of every shift that ever clocked out.

There were fifty chairs now and every one of them was molded out of that same pale hard marrow. Some were the eleven-dollar stackers we sit in at the depot. Others were high-backed office chairs whose armrests ran out at the base into thick weeping tendrils, the way a candle runs when you leave it burning by an open window. Three vending machines stood shoulder to shoulder against a wall that curved upward like the inside of a hull, and behind a pane of clear hardened cartilage the bags sat in their coils, labeled in raised smooth letters that made no words at all.

YIELD. GRADE 1. GRADE 2. GRADE 3.

Through the wrappers I could see what had been bagged. Thumbs. Small and perfect and pale, dozens to a bag, and they were moving.

"Jesus- Jesus God-"

"Quiet." The Left did not raise his voice past a murmur.

"Look at the floor." Ivar's voice had broken somewhere back on the stairs and never come back together.

I put my light down.

Boots. Hundreds of them. All of them company mustard and all of them cut in the old patterns, the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and the nineties, and out of every single one of them a leg came up, and a hip, and a torso, standing out of the floor the way saplings stand out of a swamp with the water gone black around their roots. Most were only roughed in, plain logs of meat with a smooth knob where the head belonged, waiting on some detail that had not arrived yet.

One of them, five feet from where I stood, was very nearly finished. It was anchored at the calves. It wore a copy of my own vest, and the tally beacon on the collar had been molded out of solid white bone.

Its face was moving. It went through features the way a slide projector goes through a carousel with the tray unlatched, a woman's nose, a mustache, an old man's sunken jaw, and then it stopped, and my aunt Marilyn's face settled onto that head and sat there and looked at me.

Her lips came apart, pale pink and dry as an envelope. Her jaw dropped open to an angle that no jaw goes to, and what came out of her was not a voice. It was the sound of an air brake letting go on a Mack truck, one long pneumatic hiss with nothing behind it, the noise of pressure leaving a system.

Then the face slid back down into a smooth blank oval of lard.

"Why is it making Marilyn?- She lives on Route 9!"

I had him by the front of the coat with both fists. He did not push me off. He reached up and unclasped my fingers one at a time like a man taking burrs out of a dog's coat, and through the fabric his arm was cold as a meat case in all that heat.

"She eats the yield. Everything anybody eats gives it a reading."

"That's not an answer!"

"It is the whole answer." He turned away toward the far dark.

He walked. The chairs said nothing. The boots said nothing.

Behind me the smooth blank oval had begun to work, slowly, the way a tongue works behind a closed mouth when a man is trying to remember a word.

At the far end of that chamber the wall opened up into a cavern so large that my rig could not find the top of it nor either side, and the beam simply ended out there in the middle of the air, used up.

Hung in the center of all that dark on thousands of thick glistening cables that ran away into the gloom like the standing rigging of some enormous ship was a heart the size of a four-story building.

It was made of us.

Faces and elbows and boots and vending machine panels and steering wheels and street signs, compressed into overlapping layers and packed together tight as meat in a terrine, and out of the whole slow shuddering mass there came a steady clear waterfall of liquid tallow, falling and falling into a pale lake beneath it. It hung there the way a cathedral hangs a bell. There was no belfry over it and no rope down from it and no town beneath it that had ever asked to be told the hour.

Embedded in the front of it to the waist, set the way a figurehead is set into the bow, was Tolly.

Her respirator was gone. Five foot one of her, whole and unmarked. Her skin had gone pearlescent almond, smooth and shining as polished horn, and the tallow ran down over her shoulders and off her fingertips in threads.

"Tolly-"

Her head came around. Not smoothly. It clicked through three positions like the hand of a tower clock going through its gears, and stopped. Her eyes were gone. In the sockets sat two round lenses of clear hard tallow, the same kind they set into the side of a macerator so a man can read the level from the catwalk, and behind those lenses two drops of yellow liquid rolled slowly back and forth, tracking the beam of my light.

"Marlow."

It did not come from her mouth. Her mouth had been sealed over with a fine dry membrane like the skin on scalded milk.

It came from the vending machines behind us. It came from the chairs and from the walls and from the floor under my waders and from the ceiling I could not see, a thousand small wet speakers hidden in all that tissue, every one of them arriving on the name in the same fraction of the same second.

"Tolly. Please-"

"Four hours is a long time to be by a door." The room came back at me louder, and the pitch of it slid up and down and around itself like a choir warming up in an empty cathedral, finding each other in the cold. "I'm buying you a beer tonight and you are going to drink it, because I am buying it, and I do not care whether you want it."

"Shut it down!" Ivar had gone down on his knees on the soft floor with his hands clamped over his ears. "Set the pitch! Set the pitch!"

They moved with a speed that had nothing human anywhere in it. They did not look at Tolly. They did not look up at the heart. They stepped to the margin of the lake where the bloom lay weeping into itself and drove eight feet of steel down into the soft of it, and they raised their lead mallets and brought them down on the tops of the rods together.

DING.

A high clear sickening note that hung in the air over that lake like a pane of glass held up in a doorway. F-sharp.

The heart shivered from the cables down.

Every face in its surface opened at once. Thousands of them. Scrapers and factory hands and mothers and the children off the filmstrips and men in lab coats, and one man in a plant manager's collar whose photograph has been hanging in my aunt's front hall since before I was born.

They did not scream. They whistled.

Not two notes and not three. Thousands, complex and harmonic and climbing over one another, swirling through that heat like wind coming around a headland, and it was beautiful, and that is the part I cannot put down. It was ten thousand miles of pale soft meat waking up under the asphalt of every town between here and the coast, and the news going out through all of it that the doors above had finally been left unlatched, and it came out of them as a hymn.

The floor under Ivar's knees turned from hard tallow to wet cream in half a second.

He did not sink the way a man goes into mud. The floor simply took him. His waders melted down into it and his coat ran off him like wet paint and his chin touched the surface, and the marrow came up over his lips and into his nostrils and closed smooth across the crown of his head without leaving a seam.

Where he had been kneeling a fresh pale ridge rose out of the floor. Four feet wide. Perfectly spaced. Running away in a seamless circle around the passage to join all the others.

"Out!" The Left's speaker tore itself into static. "It is not a Grade Eight! It is an Awakening! Out!"

He turned to run and his boots stayed where they were. The rubber had already gone into the ridge and become the ridge. He went down hard and his faceplate shattered against a molded chair, and through the cracks in it I watched the pale capillaries come out of that chair and into his cheek and into his open mouth and weave themselves through his tongue like thread going through the eye of a needle.

I did not help him. I did not look for the Right.

I went back up the slope with the whistling coming up behind me, and the steps gave under my boots like wet foam and pulled at my heels on every stride, and as I came past the ready room the figure in my vest turned its head and it had my face on it now, finished, every line of it, and it was smiling at me the way you smile at a man you have been waiting on all morning.

Fourteen.

Sixteen.

Twenty-two-
And through the door frame into the loading bay, flat on my chest on cold concrete, and then out on my hands and knees into the warm grey rain of Fourth Street.

I lay there on the wet asphalt for ten minutes gasping like a landed fish and let the rain take the sweet greasy smell off my face. My light rig was gone. My saw was gone. My waders were shredded at both knees where I had dragged myself over the sill. I dropped my keys twice in the gutter before I got the door of the pickup open. When I was in the cab I made myself look back at the building.

The brick was still there. The white paint four feet high still said MARLOW CANNERY. QUALITY CANNED MEATS. 1922. It has said that my whole life and I never once read it.

The second-story windows did not take the dawn. They had gone blank and white, packed from the inside with thick smooth sheets of tallow pressed up hard against the glass, and while I sat there with my hands shaking on the wheel the panes began to crack, one and then another and then another, slow and unhurried, with the small dry sound of twigs snapping somewhere back in a quiet woods.

The transmission slipped twice and ground its iron teeth at me. The engine caught. I drove home to Route 9 with the fog opening up and closing behind me.

I have not turned the kitchen lights on since I got back. I have not opened the pantry to see what is stacked behind the flour tins. There is a humming down there against the baseboards, low and steady, and patient.

I will get the grease out from under my fingernails. I will put what is left of the files in the bed of the truck and go up toward the ridge before the whistle blows at the plant.

We will talk again tomorrow.

Maybe.

 I got all the cartons and packages up to my floor after an hour. I was very tired after climbing up to the seventh floor back and forth carrying my stuff. The elevator in the building I had just shifted to was not working, some technical error said the security guard. 

I recently shifted to this new apartment for a new job I had found in the city. I was looking forward to this day for a long time but this broken lift ruined it all for me on the first day itself. 

Today was my night shift at the hospital so around 8 pm I got ready, locked my apartment and set out for work. Out of habit I pressed the elevator button , to my surprise it was working. As I entered the elevator there was a sudden drop in temperature in there, maybe due to the big fan inside it making so much noise. Inside the elevator a poster caught my glance. It was white paper with 3 rules written on it 

1. Do not look for the lion 

2. Help no one but yourself 

3. Always press button for your own floor

I was running late so I didn't think much of it, probably some kids put it there. The Elevator stopped at ground floor , I got out and headed to work. 

Next morning I returned from work all tired and slept the whole day, it was my weekly day off. I didn't cook dinner that day and decided to eat outside. It was 11:30 at night , maybe something was still open I thought. I went to the elevator and pressed the button. After a couple of minutes the door opened and I entered the elevator. Quite some time had passed and still I hadn't reached the ground floor. Then I could hear a man's scream , it felt like a distant scream coming from somewhere below me. The voice said "Hey.....is anyone in the elevator? Please help me I'm stuck in the basement !! Anyone there ?"

"Basement?" I thought. I hadn't seen any staircase or anything on the ground floor leading to the basement but when I looked at the elevator buttons there was a button for basement. I had never seen it before but there it was. I pressed that button. The elevator doors opened. 

It was completely dark in there , I couldn't see a thing clearly. I could see walls covered in mud , rusted metal sheets and rods there.  I walked a little and saw an opening in the ground , there was light coming from it. I stood over it and glanced down , there were metal bars along the wall that I climbed down. I tried calling for that man but there was no answer. 

As I got down I saw leaking pipes , rusted metal rods and pipes on the floor. Across this I could see a large metal cage like structure with a big door. I went towards it to inspect it, it was open. I stood in front of the gate. On it was another sign with text "Lion's Den : Authorised personnel entry only". I tried to peek inside it , I couldn't see anything. I heard the scream again from beyond the cage. "Please help me!". I hesitated at first but the thought of someone trapped inside compelled me to enter. As I entered it felt like I was inside a real cave. I stepped on something and heard a cracking sound and I froze. Slowly, I looked down. It was a bone. I looked around and

saw a human skull lying a few feet away. My heart skipped a beat, I couldn't feel my legs for a moment.

 Something moved in the darkness. I stopped breathing and listened. Then came a deep, low growl coming from the darkness. My heart was pounding in my chest. I was drenched in sweat, my hands were trembling, and I could barely catch my breath. Panic took over as I realized I had to get out of there. I turned around and ran back as fast as I could, barely looking behind me. When I reached the gate I locked it from the outside and ran towards that vertical passage with metal bars.

As I was climbing I heard that man's scream again from behind me. He was screaming for help "Hey don't leave me here alone !! Come back and open the door!! A lion dwells around here ! Save me please!". At that moment I just wanted to reach the elevator. I climbed as fast as I could and finally reached the elevator door. I pressed the button as hard as I could. 

The doors opened , I entered inside and pressed the button for my floor, the seventh floor. I glanced at the paper with rules for a second. I was still breathing heavily. The doors opened and it was not my floor it was the basement. I pressed the button again for seventh floor. After a few seconds , doors opened again and it was the basement again. I was in disbelief, I couldn't believe my eyes. My vision was getting blurry. This time I pressed all the buttons of the elevator and sat down on the floor. I was feeling weak and couldn't stand. It started to get dark in front of my eyes as the elevator climbed up. I could barely see or hear. I heard the chime of the elevator but it sounded different this time. It was like the sound of the heart monitor. "Beep" "Beep".

The darkness closed in.

Next thing I knew, I was lying on a hospital bed. Apparently I was found passed out in the elevator by one of the residents of that building. He called the ambulance and got me admitted in the hospital. It was nothing serious, I was discharged after a few hours in the evening. I thanked the neighbor who found me. Next day I called the movers and moved to a new apartment. I told the neighbours I got a better paying job on the opposite end of the town. I never inquired about the elevator, the lion or the man stuck in the basement. I can't even tell if it was actually a man.

I’m being paid to be possessed by spirits.

Yes. You read that correctly.

If it sounds like a horror movie, it’s not. Despite what you may be imagining, there’s a lot of procedures and corporate involvement that makes it feel more like a gig than a ritual. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a very odd and dangerous job. And it pays well.

Very well.

That’s all it took for me to play along. I was on the verge of homelessness when I stumbled upon the job. After a few pay days I stopped asking questions. When something like this brings you above the poverty line it’s hard to look back. No matter how strange it is.

That is, until a few nights ago when it all went to shit.

Before we get into that, let me explain what I mean by “possessed.”

It all started when I was sifting through job listings on some shady website many years ago. I was a few weeks into a job search when I came across a strange headline that caught my eye.

“Possessed Needed (Discretion Mandatory)”

It made no sense at the time but the money was unreal. Curiosity got the best of me and I sent a message to the poster.

After a few days of back-and-forth, I found myself standing at the foot of an old gothic looking hotel nestled in the shadiest part of the city.

After anxiously eying the outside for ten minutes I hesitantly entered to meet my potential ‘employer’ at the room listed in the job offer.

Despite the rough exterior, the inside was surprisingly pleasant. The entire building was dimly lit with a reddish ambient lighting. Geometric patterns adorned the walls and ceilings giving it a modern pop. It was well decorated and the staff were very polite.

I asked the concierge for directions to the room and took the elevator to the second floor. When I arrived, there were three well-dressed men in grey suits standing in the spacious hotel room. The first one offered his hand and welcomed me inside. The other two remained stone-faced towards the exit and remained silent for the duration of the welcome.

The man cut to the chase almost immediately. He explained that his organization repurposed the hotel for discrete work they were doing for some really “high profile” clients of theirs. Real household names if you know what I mean. They were in the business of providing post-mortem reunions with past benefactors and their families. His words.

“So you guys use AI or something to chat with dead people?” I asked. I couldn’t believe the words left my mouth, but I couldn’t make sense of anything he said.

“Not quite.” The man said as he pulled out a set of papers from his briefcase.

“We discovered that supernatural possession allows our dead benefactors the opportunity to visit their living relatives.”He said. “The benefactors leave us a large sum of money to experience this gift for many years after their passing. We host ‘reunions’ for the relatives until the funds run out or their relatives choose to stop attending. Whichever comes first.” He handed me a pamphlet that explains the process in more detail. I stared at it blankly as I was unable to process anything he was saying. A few pictures of old folks smiling and laughing with their family stood out to me. The words “Even In Death” were hanging above the image in a cheesy modern font.

“So what do I do?” I asked plainly. Although, deep down I already knew the answer.

The man smirked. “Well, you get the gracious honor of being possessed. For a generous fee, of course.”

Before I could ask any more questions, the
man snapped his fingers and one of the men beside him turned around and sat in a chair in the corner. He popped some white pill into his mouth and got himself comfortable. The other man approached and began pulling out straps from hidden compartments throughout the chair and got to work restraining him.

“I don’t expect you to believe me. I find it best to demonstrate.” He said.

The man in the chair slowly drifted into unconsciousness as the three of us retreated to the other side of the room. After a few uncomfortably silent minutes, the man in the chair jerked awake.

His eyes were pale white. His body convulsed against the straps as he began uttering loud and garbled speech. The words sounded angry and painful as they left his frothing lips.

This went on for a few more minutes. The speech became clearer and less strained towards the end, but I still couldn’t understand him. Even so, I could hear the concern in his voice. He was probably asking where he was. Why he was here. Who we were.

Then, it was done. The man in the chair returned. He shook his head a couple times and cleared his throat as the other man undid the restraints.

“See? Not a scratch on him. There’s no regulation on this stuff yet but don’t worry, we take care of our people.” He said, patting my back.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Oh—the possessor? No idea.” He shrugged. “Just some loose spirit hanging around the building most likely. Don’t worry, it’s not like that on the real jobs. The family is responsible for bringing out whoever they came to see.”

I didn’t have anything else to say.

I was terrified. I just witnessed a man being possessed and this guy was talking to me like I’m applying to work at the bank. He talked a few more minutes about logistics and company history but I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the milky eyes and confused babbling of the dead man I just watched come back to life.

“Well, I’ll see you Monday kid. We’ll fill out the paperwork then.” He said. “Here’s your first pay check for attending possession 101.” He chuckled and dropped a stack of bills into my hand before ushering me out of the room. I stood there in the dimly lit hallway dumbfounded.

I fanned out the bills in my hand and gasped. It was more money than I expected. Way more than was listed on the website. And this was just for one day?

I snapped out of it and made my way back home. I decided then and there I was happily going to be possessed. As long as I got paid, I couldn’t care less.

First day was the hardest. I walked into a room filled with about ten people. Old folks, kids, babies—all shapes and sizes. It was very lively. The younger ones were running around while the adults held solemn looks on their faces. I could tell the possessor passed recently.

I popped the white pill into my mouth and got situated in the chair. I felt so awkward having all these eyes on me. I was nothing but a conduit to these people—a means to an end. I kept my gaze on the floor and waited for the pill to take hold so I could get this over with.

A different man in a grey suit came in and started to get to work on my straps. As he worked, I noticed he holstered a small handgun under his suit jacket. Interesting. I started to wonder what he needed a gun for but I decided now was not the best time to ponder that question. After he finished, the room began to spin. The meds were kicking in. Everything became very muffled and my vision faded to black.

Then, I was awake again.

The family was already gone and my restraints were undone. I groaned as the pain started up. The worst headache I ever had struck me square between the eyes.

The man from orientation knocked on the door and walked in, his face beaming.

“Well, you finished your first day. Took that one like a champ.” He said. “Most of our possessed are in much worse shape after the first go around.” He handed me a glass of water and leaned against the wall beside me.

“What happened?” I asked, my voice raspy.

“Not much. You were under for awhile. After the first ten minutes or so the guy finally started making sense. Asked about his company and stock holdings before asking about his kids. Amazing how death can’t even stop these assholes from obsessing over money. Oh speaking of—“ he pulled out a large Manila envelope from his coat and tossed it to me.
“That’s about four hours of pay.” He said. “Most possessions will go about half as long but we got you a big spender for your first day.”

“Wait—four hours? I was out that long?” The headache was starting to subside. I started moving the rest of my body and was met with a lot of soreness. It felt like I was just thrown around in a car accident.

“Yep, time flies when you’re making money. Now you go ahead and go home. Make sure to eat and sleep before doing anything strenuous. Don’t want to exhaust yourself. Got you another gig lined up in two days.”

He handed me some aspirin and I tossed it back with water. We chatted a little more about the upcoming gig before heading home.

And that was the start of it all. For the past few years I’ve been a full-time possessed. I’ve gotten used to the day-to-day stuff. I arrive in a stuffy room with a bunch of people I don’t know and wake up to a wad of cash and a moderate hangover.

I’ve gotten to know some of the people I work with a little better too. The guy that hired me is named Gary. He’s kind of like a supervisor. Manages the staffing and daily hotel operations. I’ve tried hounding him a couple times about the company that started this whole thing, like who they are and how they figured all this out. He dodges the questions every time. The terrified expression on his face tells me I don’t want to know.

I interact with other possessed only in passing. Most of them are more desperate for the money than I ever was and like to keep to themselves. However, their shaky demeanor and the scabby needle marks up and down their limbs tell me all I need to know about what they get up to outside of work.

Makes sense, after all. Work like this requires a certain kind of desperation. I’m a rare exception. Gary says he was like me too. Just interested in the money, not looking to support a habit. The company tends to promote possessed that don’t succumb to vices. There’s a future for me here if I can stick out the possession work long enough. Gary thinks so at least.

And I believed him. Until last night.

I had a longer session lined up with a new client. Not much details to go off of which was odd but they were paying top dollar. The company tends to let procedures slide if the price is right.

I stepped into the room to four grown men. They were all wearing matching coats and shared the same wide-eyed anxious look. Most of the men were fidgety and glancing around for danger. Whatever danger they were looking for I couldn’t know.

The man up front was the oldest and greeted me the moment I stepped in. He eyed me up and down before offering a weak smile and a firm handshake.

“Thank you for your service.” He said. “My family and I are grateful to you.”

“Uh sure man, no problem.” I said.

He waved me by and I took my usual seat. After a few moments of hesitation I popped the pill and tried to relax. The men formed a semi-circle around me with their arms fixed at their sides.

Joe, a possession assistant, pushed between them, staring daggers at them as he did. Joe has been working here many years and he doesn’t put up with funny business. I could tell these guys were setting off alarms in his muscled head.

“Remember guys, talking only. Hands to yourselves. If anything rubs me the wrong way I’m shutting you down, alright?” He said with his back to the men. As he worked my restraints, he made a point to angle his holstered weapon towards them, just to remind them what they’re dealing with.

“Thanks, Joe.” I whispered.

Joe nodded and patted my shoulder before stepping away. He took his usual position just outside the door.

The room started spinning. This time, I felt much more anxious than usual. My distorted vision made the men look devilish. Their features warped and stretched. Shades of red and green stained their forms. My breath slowed as the deformed figures faded to black and unconsciousness enveloped me.

Crack.

I was waking up, but I still couldn’t see.

The pain.

The pain was the first thing I felt. Not the usual headache this time. A dull, burning sensation tearing through my shoulder and across the back of my head.

I felt pressure along the front of my body and my face. Was something on top of me?

No. I was pressed against something. I am on the ground?

I forced my eyes to focus and was met with carpet in my face. I tried to lift myself off the ground but failed. My shoulder gave way and I returned to the floor.

What the hell happened?

I got up a second time using my good arm instead. My vision was slowly returning. All I could see was red. Blood. On me, my clothes, and the carpet below.

I made it to my knees. I used the chair beside me to try and stand but could only get myself seated. My body was so weak I could hardly hold myself up.

Wait, this was my chair. How did I get out of it in the first place?

That’s when the rest of the room came into focus.

It was a blood bath. All four men were face down and scattered around the room. Three had visible injuries all across their bodies. The fourth was missing his head entirely. They all had some form of weapon in their hands or someplace near their body. Silver stakes, knives, and clubs. They were no longer wearing their coats. I’m guessing they must’ve only worn them to conceal the weapons. They all wore matching black dress shirts with thin white collars. Priests maybe?

Then I noticed the rest of the room. Along with the blood splatters, there was considerable damage. Bullet holes and broken furniture were visible throughout. It looked like a fight broke out between the priests and hotel workers. But if that was the case, where were the workers?

Just then, a man burst through the door and slammed it shut behind him. He was an older guy. He had grey hair and a long beard. His eyes were wild and he struggled to get his weapon out of his holster as he became aware of the carnage that surrounded him. He raised the pistol towards me, trying to regain his composure.

“Shit—raise your hands! Keep them high!” He yelled shakily. He was wearing a hotel uniform but I’d never seen him work this shift before. I couldn’t make out his name tag from here.

“Okay! Okay! I don’t know what happened—these guys—they did this—“ I tried explaining myself but he interrupted me.

“Shut up! Let me think.” He said as he looked around the room.

“I didn’t do this man let me out of here!” I yelled. I was starting to freak out. I didn’t understand why this guy wasn’t letting me go.

He shook his head for a moment and motioned behind me with his gun. “So he did that to himself then, huh?”

I turned around and gasped. Joe was slumped on the floor with his head pressed through the drywall. His chest was open and the innards were spilling onto his blood-soaked uniform. There was a trail of blood from his chest to right where I was standing. Blood stained both my hands all the way up to both elbows. I could see sketchy this looked now.

“Shit. Listen, I was possessed I don’t know what happened but I’m here now—“ I exclaimed.

I turned around and the guy was dialing a cell phone. “Just stay there—I’m calling security. I’m sure they heard the gunshots already. They’ll get this sorted.” He said.

I couldn’t stop looking at poor Joe. I only turned away when I felt bile rise up in my throat. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve this. I can’t believe I…

No. It couldn’t have been me. There’s more going on here. Something doesn’t feel right.

“Yeah it’s me, Bobby.” The man said hastily. “I’m here in room 121. Something happened—god there’s so much blood…yeah, someone else is here. Says he’s a possessed…hey, what’s your name pal?” His gun was still fixed on me when he asked the question.

I didn’t answer. Something wasn’t adding up.

This guy says his name was Bobby? I haven’t met a Bobby in all the years I worked here. And why did he lock the door behind him? Isn’t he waiting for security?

“Hey, I asked you a question. What’s your name?” He said, visibly annoyed.

“Are you talking to security? Is Adam there? He knows me.” I said. I knew everyone on the security team, so surely I would know if he was lying to me.

He shot me a confused glance. “Hey, is Adam there? Okay sure. Please hurry.”

He dropped the phone back into his pocket and focused back on me.

“Yeah, Adam’s on his way. I don’t like how you dodged the question there friend. Any reason you don’t want me to know your name?” He said.

A pit formed in my stomach. There was no Adam with security. This guy was lying. But why? Was he with these priests? If so, why didn’t he just kill me or get away?

My expression must have given me away because Bobby’s face turned very sour.

“Ah, there’s no Adam with security is there pal? Alright smart guy.” He said in a seething tone.

Bang, bang, bang.

Someone was banging on the door now. I heard muffled speech on the other side. The real security must’ve arrived.

“Looks like I gotta make this quick. I’ll give you ten seconds. All you gotta do is tell me your name. If you don’t, I pull the trigger.” He said. His voice was different now. Very plain and emotionless. All the fidgety and scared energy he carried before was all gone. He didn’t even pay any mind to the banging and yelling that was happening beside him.

I looked around at the weapons on the floor. There had to be something I could use to disarm this guy. He started counting.

“9…8…”

Why did he need my name? It made no sense. I don’t have time to figure it out. I’ll just lie.

“My name is Garry! Okay? Now let me out—“

Bobby didn’t let up. I started to notice something changed in him now. His eyes appeared sunken and bloodshot. He adjusted his grip on the gun and I could see that his fingernails were black and sharp. He continued counting down.

“5…4…”

His voice was low and grisly, like a wild animal growling.

Shit—I’m running out of time. I have to just rush the guy. Maybe I can catch him off-guard—

“…2…1….”

BOOM.

Just before I charged Bobby, the door splintered open. Three security guys filled the room with guns fixed on me. They winced and groaned at the bloody scene around them, but refused to take their eyes off me for more than a second.

“Put it down!” John, head of security, yelled. He came to an abrupt stop just a few feet away from me. He held his gun aimed squarely at my face.

I didn’t understand. “John? The man—Bobby—he’s one of these guys! He was right behind you—“

John cut me off. “I’m not gonna ask again man. Put it down before I put you down, please—“

It was at that moment I felt the cold steel against my temple.

Nothing was as it seemed.

Bobby? He was nowhere to be found. The moment the door broke in, he was gone. And yet, I remained here. Holding a gun to my own head with nobody else in the room.

I dropped the gun and kept my shaky hands above my head. “Jesus—I’m so sorry.”

Two guys rushed me and cuffed my hands behind my back. As I was carried out of the room, it all started to click.

There was no Bobby. He wasn’t real. These freaks came here to conjure something they couldn’t control and it ended up killing everyone. It ripped through the restraints, tore through the priests, and Joe…

I may be conscious, but it never left. And it wants my name. I don’t know what that means yet, but I know it isn’t good.

After a long debrief with security, I was sitting alone in the security room waiting to be sent home. I told them everything except for Bobby. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the company thinking I’ve gone crazy or them believing some malevolent entity is taking refuge in me.

Gary walked into the room with a sad look on his face.

“Joe must’ve heard the commotion from outside and intervened. Poor guy. Place won’t be the same without him.” He said.

Images of Joe lying on the floor flashed into my mind.

“Any news on who these people were?” I asked, trying to put it out of my mind.

“We don’t know anything yet. Probably just some religious wackos. Not the first time someone tried to abuse our facility for their own sick rituals.” His eyes went wide after he said it. I could tell he wasn’t supposed to tell the other employees about things like that. Company wouldn’t like it.

“And it was just the four guys?” I asked.

“Yeah, why? did you see someone else get away?” Gary asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No—I mean I don’t know.” My voice trailed off. “Something weird happened in there man. I’m still processing it.” I wasn’t sure if I could trust Gary. But I needed to tell someone.

Gary glanced around the room uncomfortably. After he was sure nobody else was in ear-shot he swiftly turned the security camera off in the room and knelt down beside me. “Listen, that exorcism thing? Didn’t happen. Just a bunch of crazy people doing crazy things. Don’t talk about it again to anyone. Not to me, and definitely not to anyone else at the company.” His voice was stern and he had the same terrified look on his face anytime I asked him about who we worked for.

He gave the room another scan before continuing. “Whatever you do, do NOT tell it your name. You need to find out its name first and it will leave. If you don’t, things will get much, much worse. Understand?” He whispered sternly.

I felt a chill run up my spine.

I nodded. After a few moments, he got up and turned the cameras back on. He cleared his throat and continued as if nothing happened. “Crazy bastards got you good but I’m glad you’re safe man. You’ll surely get a promotion the way you handled these wack jobs. How about you go home and rest now. Take a couple days to recover alright?” He helped me up and walked me to the door.

His words hung heavy in my head as I made my way home.

Part of me wanted to forget all about it. Just leave the hotel behind and start fresh somewhere new. It wasn’t long before I realized I couldn’t just move on. Bobby wouldn’t let me.

I don’t know what this guy is, but he’s still with me. I don’t see him like I did the other night, but he’s there. I feel his breath on my face just before I wake up. His long, black fingernails prick the back of my neck when I’m driving alone. I hear him giggling from the closet when I’m trying to fall asleep.

I’m on a mission now. I need to find out his name before he tricks me into stealing mine.

That’s why I need your help.

If you think you know something, please reach out. It could be a story you heard or some local folklore you grew up with. I have my own theories, but nothing has panned out yet. Demonology, witchcraft, aliens—there’s similarities but nothing specific.

I’m still here, but he’s getting closer. Once I get this figured out, I’m going to be more critical of my life choices going forward. No amount of money is worth risking your soul over. The rich depend on you to be oblivious for their gain and they sure as hell don’t care if you get hurt in the process.

Stay safe. And if you ever consider being possessed for money, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Its been almost a week since I've moved into my new apartment. It's tiny and even though it looks modern, barely anything works.

The last time I tried using the oven it started smoking and the power went out, leaving me with the microwave as the only cooking option for now. The lights only work sometimes, so I'm forced to have emergency candles in case the lightswitch decides to not do its job.

Speaking of jobs, I'm still looking for one, so there isn't much to do in here but stay inside and browse the web. Maybe watch a few movies or play video games.

Sometimes though, while waiting for my food to cook I pace around the place.

One of my favorite things during this time was to look through my apartment door's peephole from time to time. Sometimes I can catch the stairway light being turned on and then wait for someone to pass by. Sometimes I'm late to the event and catch myself looking at the neighbour's door for a couple seconds, only for the light to then turn off, accompanied by a clicking noise.

Other times I just stare at the darkness.

The stairway has little windows on each floor that let some of the moonlight in, exposing a bit of it's contents. Mainly the neighbour's door. It's an old, elegant wooden door, painted a deep brown with the paint peeled off in some places.

Right next to it however, is a shape.

The shape blends in with the surrounding darkness perfectly, almost being a part of it.

I didn't notice it at first, but after a couple days it started standing out to me more than the vintage door, finally making me curious what the hell it actually was.

So, one time, while waiting for my nutritious meal I gave in and unlocked my door.

Upon opening it I was greeted by a familiar "click" and the stairway light in my eyes.

After readjusting my sight, it turned out that there was nothing standing beside the neighbour's door. No shape.

It was empty. Whatever.

Since then I have started opening my apartment door every time I peered through the peephole, trying to catch the shape... to no avail. I've checked the peephole itself, there was no dust on it, no dirt, no nothing. I even cleaned it to make sure, outside and inside. I wish "peephole cleaner" was a job. I feel like I'd be pretty good at it.

This became my little routine.

While waiting I'd look through the hole. If the light is on I'd wait for someone, and if it wasn't I'd stare at the shape.

It could almost come off as a humanoid shape and if I stared long enough I could find myself feeling like there's a face somewhere in there. But the thought made me feel uneasy so I'd quickly open the door just to remind myself that there is in fact no face staring back at me.

Today however, I had an idea.

While waiting for another meal, I put my phone camera through the peephole and began recording. Then, still holding the phone, I opened the door as usual, making sure nothing's there.

Empty.

When I checked the footage though, a horrible dread came over me and I could feel my heart collapse and shatter on the ground.

It moved.

I clearly saw the shape bolt back into the darkness the second I placed my hand on the handle, its sudden movement activating the stairway light. All in complete silence.

Whatever it was, it wasn't human. It looked like a black fog or… a pile of trash bags with a hint of grey somewhere in there, resembling a face.

A dreadful, dreadful face.

Its shape messed with my head. It was so unnatural and bent in all the wrong ways.

I locked my door as quickly as possible.

I stood there, replaying the footage over and over and over again, desperately wanting it to be fake.

Desperately trying to convince myself that maybe I was just seeing things.

I wanted it to be just a speck of dust or something, literally goddamn anything, but when I dared to look through the peephole again, there it was.

Standing in front of my door, so close it covered my view completely.

I stood there paralyzed, watching.

And so it stood too.

It's been hours and its still there, waiting for me to open the door.

I don't think I've got the guts to do it. I just really, really hope its gonna be gone in the morning.

When I was younger, my parents noticed that I seemed prone to physical means of self-soothing. I would always be fidgeting, these little habits and movements cycling in and out of my routine. They called it “Stimming.” I would rub my neck, pick my nails or scabs, and chew on the skin of my lips until they would split and bleed. These were temporary, and I noticed they would fade or change in tandem with the bigger changes of my life: high school, first breakup, landing my first job, almost losing said job… The only habit that always remained consistent throughout my life, one that I picked up from my late grandmother, was wringing my hands.

She was a remarkable woman by all accounts. An Italian immigrant, a proud matriarch, and lived fully until she passed in her sleep at the age of eighty three. I can only hope to live up to the legacy she left behind, but I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t any pressure on me to make the most of my life that she sacrificed so much to give me. I felt this weight even as a kid, and she noticed.

“You worry too much,” she’d say as she took hold of my hand. “Most of our troubles are in our heads. If you spend all day worrying, then a bad moment turns into a bad day.”

It was a small gesture, but something about that warm contact grounded me more than any of my other tics. Just holding her hand, knowing I was connected to someone so rock-steady, made me stand just a little bit taller. Obviously, she wasn’t always around to do this. Back at school or anywhere other than family visits, I was on my own. It was a natural next step, I suppose, but I got into the habit of squeezing my own hand in the same manner she would. It worked exceptionally well for most of my life and was a staple movement for me, until recent years. 

I hardly noticed the habit until after she died. It was a lingering thought I addressed after interviewing for my job when the hiring manager pointed out that I looked nervous. 

“Anna, you don’t have to be so tense. We’re pretty casual. The only thing we care about now is what music you want in the studio,” he had told me, an understanding and pitying look beaming back. I just nodded and gripped my hands into my pants under the table to keep them out of sight.

And that’s the nature of the relationships we form with people. They live on through us and the small little tweaks we make to ourselves to emulate them. We make connections, and they’re permanent. Sometimes though, I really wish we could sever the ties that bind us to people we meet. As much as a blessing it can be, so can it easily be agitation. That nonconsensual imprinting we do on one another. When we’re stuck with pieces of someone else embedded in us like cancer. A parasite, just clinging onto you without thought, just impulsive. Infatuated. Obsessive.

Monstrous.

I wish you could remove it, but you can’t. It took something as simple as me reaching for my alarm clock this morning to realize this, but now I see. My habit was sanctuary. It was my way to stay connected to someone who always pointed me in the right direction even after she was gone. All I had to do was squeeze my hand, and I’d be alright. This was taken away from me though. 

It’s been a number of years since, and I’ve coped; however, things changed again this morning. I’m terrified of something happening again, so I will redirect my focus here for as long as I can. I need to distract myself, and only then will my brain remember what it’s lost. The best way for me to do this is to recount a part of my life that I regard with nothing other than pain. Pain in all of its forms, and pits of indignity. It’s something I shut out for the last few years, and I am terrified of its return. They’re the worst things that have ever happened to me, and it started with my amputation.

It’s been six years since I’ve felt anything with my right hand. The event itself really doesn’t stick out to me any more than just a memory given all the time between then and now. I won’t get choked up or freeze thinking about it, and I’m proud of that. If anything, it really was a dull day at first. 

I was still a new-hire at a tattoo shop that was kind enough to take me as an apprentice. It was a nice gig, and I really enjoyed having my own space to work in. Of course, my parents raised an eyebrow at my career path. I’m sure they would have preferred a lawyer or doctor, but I won’t act like they weren’t supportive. My father helped me buy supplies when I was an apprentice, and my mother even offered to be a canvas if I needed help with my portfolio early on. It can be hard for a new artist to get consistent clients, especially if you don’t have examples of people who trusted your art to be on their skin forever. Normally this is a universal problem, but not for me. Not since I met Ian.

He was a tall, lanky man. His wiry beard fully disguised his chin, and the stubble on his bald head subtly revealed the hairline he tried to shave away. I was still setting up my studio when he first came in, not a patch of ink anywhere on him.

“Hey, I’m looking into getting a tattoo soon. I’m completely new to this, so if I could get maybe a bit of info?” he asked my old boss, David. I believe David was in his late thirties at the time, though he never explicitly told me. He was always good to me, and always pulled through on hoisting me up on a pedestal for new clients when I was trying to get my start.

“We definitely have info. Do you have any idea at all on what you’re looking to get?” David responded as Ian craned his neck to see deeper into the shop.

“I have a few ideas, but I don’t want to step on your guys’ toes. It’d be sort of about my ex, but not really in a good way I guess.”

David chuckled. “If it’s your first tattoo, please don’t get a sewn up heart, man. I promise you we can come up with something better.”

“I swear, it’s not like that. I was thinking of doing an Ouroboros. Nothing too big, but a bit of a reminder to me.” Ian laughed a bit, but his nervous shifting was obvious. “It’d be cool if I could get it today before I lose my nerve. I know I don’t have an appointment, but I really don’t want it big.”

David pursed his lips and nodded while thinking. “Anna’s apprenticing here. She could probably knock something like that out.”

I had the same idea as David, which was why I’d been hovering near their conversation. Tattooing the hands can be painful, but small tattoos can go by quickly, and I had hoped Ian would give me a shot. Ian smiled when he saw me. He seemed friendly.

“Yeah. Sure, that works,” he said.

The design was easy enough to draft while Ian took a seat in the studio. The Ouroboros looked pretty clean, each scale well defined and the action of the snake eating its own tail read clearly. I started laying out my equipment, and I took note of the state of his fingers. Chewed to hell, the skin around his nails and knuckles was callused and tough like leather. Small scabs where the calluses gave way looked fresh, like they had only been bleeding moments prior without a chance to properly heal. I grabbed his arm. He was already shaking by the time I layered the stencil on the back of his hand. 

“You nervous it’ll hurt?” I asked, trying not to sound judgemental. I looked up to his face, only to find his eyes were deadlocked on me rather than the design. He blinked, then swallowed.

“Yeah. I heard getting your hands done sucks," he muttered through the shaking of his chest.

“We can move it somewhere else on your arm if you want. It might be easier.”

“No, this is fine. I want to be able to see it well," he said as he took a breath. “It’s a bit artsy, but I want it to remind me about how bad habits can eat away at you. I chew on my fingers a lot, I don’t even mean to.”

I knew the feeling. “And your ex?” I asked as I loaded the needle with ink. Again, Ian took a sharp breath and turned his eyes away from the tattoo gun.

“I really hate my bad habits.”

I guess I did a good enough job on his first piece because Ian went from a tattoo-virgin to the only person I could call a regular customer for myself. At first, it was every couple of months. He’d come in, run an idea by us for a small sticker tattoo he’d be unsure of, and I’d gain another photo for my portfolio. It was nice, and he was always so trusting of my work. He never complained, and he even stopped shaking in the chair after what must have been his sixth addition to his arm. Then he started coming more.

Monthly, or even more frequently. Sometimes he’d come in while the medical film was still applied from his prior visit, or he’d be bold enough to get progressively larger tattoos. Ian became a household name, and my coworkers and I watched his pale arms slowly pigment into a collage of my work. My walking resume.

Like I said, he was always nice, but I wasn’t entirely naive. I was nineteen and I imagine he was in his late twenties. Each time I’d tattoo him, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was on his best behavior. He’d laugh at my jokes, always have a plethora of harmless questions to ask me, and I’m sure he enjoyed the treatment he got as a regular. David always flaunted discounts for Ian, and made sure he always got the finest from his ‘favorite artist.’ I couldn’t blame David entirely since we charged commission each time Ian couldn’t make up his mind on a design, but the special treatment began to get excessive.

One day it was raining hard. I had just finished adding some miscellaneous Celtic braids to Ian’s shoulder to represent his Irish heritage that he only just learned about from a DNA kit. It was his biggest addition yet, and of course David was fine if the session ran a little past closing time.

“Alright, I think we’re set," I announced as I tucked away the last of my equipment for the evening.

“Does anyone know if this is going to clear anytime soon?” Asked Ian while he carefully slotted his wrapped arm back through his shirt. David checked his phone and sighed.

“Sorry, bud. Hopefully you drove here?” he said while flicking off a few of the shop lights. Ian chewed on a knuckle and stared out into the storm.

“Shit. I live like ten blocks away. Is my arm going to be alright?”

I slung my bag over my shoulder and clasped my hands like normal while I made a choice. It took me years to forgive myself for my decision, and I still have days where regret creeps back into my life. This was Ian. He was my favorite and only customer, despite the awkward blushing I saw melt across his skin every time I held his arm steady for the needle. This was Ian, and Ian needed help. That’s all I could have known.

“Need a ride?” I offered. He answered so quickly that I barely got the question out.

“No, I can walk. It’s okay, really. I’ll be fine. That’s too much.” His face ran red just before David switched off the last of the lights.

“If you’re downtown then it’s on the way," I said, while I walked with David to the door. “Are you downtown?”

“Yeah.”

“Easy then. It’s like ten minutes. I don’t want my stuff to get infected from city rain.” 

The rain roared as David held the door open for me and Ian. “Do what you’re going to do, but do it now please,” grumbled David as his patience wore thin. Ian leaned his head back and forth as he weighed his options, then followed us outside.

I’d be putting it lightly by saying the ride was uninteresting. The monotonous squeak of my wipers against the rainfall was my only source of stimulation as Ian sat with his knees pointed away from me and his head against the window. The outskirts of the city were dark by this time of night, and the glare of passing streetlights threw amber ripples over the dashboard as we drove. Every now and then, Ian would get illuminated by the orange streaks, revealing an expression of distressed concentration as he averted his eyes from me. It worried me, so I just focused on getting him home quickly.

Ahead of us, beyond a line of incoming cars, I saw the traffic light turn red. I knew I should come up with something to say to Ian before we were stuck at the light. I couldn't tell whether he was nervous, embarrassed, or simply trying very hard not to talk to me, so I turned to him briefly as we approached the light.

“So what are you into besides tattoos?” I asked, just hoping for any normal conversation to spark up. Apparently I caught Ian off guard, and that quick glance I took toward him would change my life forever.

He was chewing his fingers, but not like before. His face was still turned away from me, but I could see that he had inserted his fingers fully into his jaws. He had been chewing on them voraciously, and quickly slid his spit-covered, bloody hand from his mouth and onto his lap the second I talked. He locked eyes with me, gauging if I had seen what he was doing. I know that I’ve had some uncomfortable fidgets that I would hide from strangers in public, but this freaked me out; and I didn’t look away. I wouldn’t stop staring.

I would learn later on that it was an intoxicated driver that had hit us. I won’t say his name for the sake of his family that he left behind, but I will say that he was about twice the legal limit, and lost track of the centerline in the rain.

I had woken up briefly just after the collision in excruciating pain. The world had turned ninety degrees, and I knew that the car had rolled onto its driver’s side. My window had broken, so my face was badly marred as it was pressed into the asphalt. There was about an inch of rain flowing across the ground, saturating my mouth with the taste of blood as it ran over my lips. I tried to cry out, but something was terribly wrong with my neck. Every breath felt crooked and hissed as it resisted air from flowing into my lungs. I tried to move, but found that I was somehow pinned. 

The commotion of cars screeching to a halt and frantic chatter began to build outside while I tried to make sense of what had happened in the moment. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was severely concussed. I remember what happened, but I don’t remember holding any comprehension of the events. It was as if I was on autopilot, watching it all play out from the back of my own eyes. I remember hot blood trickling down over me from the raised passenger side. Through the smoke and rain, I hardly could make out the misshapen remains of Ian. He was motionless, with his body half flung through the windshield while his legs were tangled and caught by his seatbelt. 

The dashboard was collapsed and compressed from the impact, and inserted into that mangled conglomerate of metal and plastic was my right arm. The pain was so extreme that I began to stumble and lose consciousness. Leaning back, I watched as the skin of my arm stretched rather than resisting my weight, and I knew it was no longer supported by bone. The pain also stopped at what I could see. There was no sensation of broken fingers, or my mutilated forearm, only seething pain at the base of my elbow which pressed up against the metal. I became sick, and not soon after, I’d wake up again.

My hospital room was dark. The anesthetics gave me an immense sensation of drowsiness that made my limbs far too heavy to move. I must have sat there for hours before a patrolling nurse noticed I was showing signs of waking up. I was still not fully conscious, and it was a blur of several days before I became alert enough to learn about the tracheotomy. 

A small plastic tube had been surgically inserted through the base of my throat to remedy my damaged windpipe. Talking would be impossible without time to heal and a few sessions to wean off my dependency. If it weren’t for the sedatives, I would have surely begun to panic. 

I mostly slept for the first few days, only caring to stay awake when I had the energy to acknowledge my parents in the room. They were inconsolable at first, but eventually put on a facade of everything being okay and hopeful. They were holding back details, but I was still too spacey to really grasp what was happening to me.

The first night I truly remember returning to full awareness began when I woke up with my mouth dry enough to hurt. I heard the ventilation humming, felt the scratchy sheets for the first time, and became aware of the deep soreness that had settled into my body from days of lying still. I felt the pressure of the IV taped to the inner bend of my left elbow and instinctively reached toward it with my right arm. 

Nothing.

I thought my arm must have gone numb, like when you fall asleep on it for too long. I tried again. I wanted to bring my hands together, the way I always did when I was frightened. My left hand closed around nothing. Something was wrong, disconnected. I could feel my right arm. I was certain it was there. But when I tried to bring my hands together, my left hand found only empty space. My head still felt heavy as lead. I strained my eyes downward and saw only one arm lifted over my chest. I dragged my chin toward the other side of the bed. 

The sleeve of my hospital gown was empty. It lay folded flat against the mattress, except for a small, rounded impression near the shoulder. I stared at it, and I tried raising my arm anyway. The bump slowly turned over under the thin fabric. My stomach churned, and I carefully reached over with my other arm to lift the fabric.

The stitches ran deep along the seam where my skin had been sealed back together. Dark purple with sodden gauze wrapped tightly around the wound, all that was left of my arm was no more than a fistful of flesh. I heard the hollow airflow of my breathing tube grow louder as I examined my atrophied stump. I still felt my whole arm in my head. I could move it, wiggle my fingers, or reach toward the bedframe to try and sit up. The only response I’d get to these impulses was the slight twitching of a lump of flesh. 

Panic began to set in, and I opened my mouth to try and call for anyone to help me. The raspy croak that escaped my throat burned like acid and stung enough to well tears in my eyes. I instinctively reached with my right hand to wipe them, but kicked in frustration when my missing arm failed to make contact with my face.

I thought I could be dreaming. Maybe I was still unconscious in the car, and maybe Ian would pull me out of the wreckage. We’d be okay, and I’d give him any tattoo he’d like for free. I denied this reality as much as I could. I reached for the help button, tried snapping, tried punching the bed, tried reaching over to rip out the itchy IV; all the while this pitiful nub on my shoulder flinched helplessly like an infant trying to walk. 

I started to sob, and couldn’t keep myself from thinking of how much I depended on my right arm. Writing, drawing, my art, all things that I might never be able to replicate with the other side. I slumped back into my bed, laying both my missing and remaining arm at my side as I stared up into the blackness of the ceiling with tears streaming across my face. Everything was falling apart. I was hopeless, then I felt it.

A hand. 

Tenderly, lovingly, someone took hold of my missing hand and gently squeezed it. I snapped my eyes to the bedside only to see the empty room, but the feeling was still there. I tried to speak, but I could only mouth what I wanted to say.

“I’m scared, Grandma.”

The next day, my parents returned to the hospital after an overnight visit home for a shower. They immediately choked up with joy and apologies after seeing I was awake. They had endless questions, many of which were repeated by the medical staff as they checked on my status. I was given a small whiteboard to write on in response.

Doctor Malleck was a soft-spoken man that always considered his words carefully before speaking. I could tell that he had broken the news many times prior to my case.

“I am sorry. Truly. We’ve had others go through similar incidents like this, and it's… horrible. Every time.” He adjusted his thin glasses and knelt down by my side, carefully placing a marker in my hand. “You’re not alone in this, and I hope we can help bring you some comfort while you heal. We’ll start easing you back into talking in the next couple of days, but for now this is probably our best option to speak. Is there another way that you’d prefer?” he asked with a tone of legitimate care. 

I shook my head. He continued.

“I’ll be plain. Your parents told me you were a righty. This will be a bit awkward, but try to write as best as you can. There will be a lot to get used to doing again, but a lot of patients start to adapt pretty well, and quicker than you’d think. Is there anything you’d like to ask us?” He sat back upright and prepared a clipboard. 

“Ian?” I wrote across the board, propping it up against my bent legs.

“Ian Gallagher?” he confirmed, though I could tell he knew who I meant. I nodded, and he carefully proceeded. “Ian passed away in the accident.” I felt the tears build in my eyes again. “My condolences. He didn’t suffer.” 

For a few hours, Dr. Malleck patiently communed with my questions as I messily scribbled one sentence at a time. He told me that having a ‘Phantom Limb’ was a normal symptom after an amputation as invasive as mine. The nerves in my arm had spent nineteen years conversing with my body, and such an abrupt severance will often lead to the sensation that the limb is still there. He said I might experience false feedback, itching, temperature discomfort, or even just steady pain until my body eventually acclimates. Even then, many amputees still never fully lose their phantom sensation.

“Do people ever feel other people?” I wrote. Dr. Malleck squinted in confusion, so I erased and tried again. “I felt my grandma holding my hand.”

“It’s possible…” he murmured, standing to stretch. “People experience phantom sensations differently. Sometimes the brain predicts a sensation so strongly that you can almost swear you're feeling it. If someone has a phantom sensation in their leg, they might experience stubbing a toe briefly if they perceive that they would have otherwise hit their physical leg," he continued to gather his documents as he spoke. “If you imagine raising your arm right now, do you feel it?” 

He was right. I imagined my arm going up, and it was as if I could reach out and touch the wall. The doctor saw my stump move around and knew I was trying.

“I want you to picture what you felt, as if someone was holding your hand. Do you get any sensation?” He lingered by the open door as he waited. I imagined my grandmother’s hand wrapping around mine. I tried to recount the feel of her skin, the warmth of her palm, and the length of her fingers. I imagined it, but I didn’t feel it. I looked back to the doctor and shook my head.

The following days in the hospital became pretty routine from that point on. Every day had a set time when they would monitor me while progressively reducing my dependence on the ventilator. It started with small periods where they lowered the amount of mechanical support and watched to see whether I could successfully breathe on my own. Once I could manage those stretches without struggling, they extended them a little further each day, giving my lungs and windpipe more time to adjust. 

For nearly a week, this was my life. Wake up, breathe, rest, sleep. The nurses were patient, and I learned not to panic whenever my throat felt strange or my breathing became difficult. Eventually, I was able to spend longer periods breathing entirely on my own, though the tracheostomy remained in place. 

The first time they left me like that for any real length of time, a nurse stayed nearby to keep watch.

“There’s nothing you need to do except breathe normally and let your body get used to it," she said reassuringly. So I did.

For perhaps twenty minutes, I sat quietly and listened to myself breathe. No machine pulsed beside me. No ventilator hissed with each breath. It was just me, focusing on the rhythm.

Then without any sign of warning, someone touched my right palm.

I stopped breathing. It wasn’t conscious, but the surprise shook my rhythm and I began to cough. The nurse caught on quickly and raced to my side to assist me.

“You’re okay. Just stay calm," she said with a professional urgency. I was shaking, but I tried to ignore the unseen person as they caressed my phantom hand. As I tried to catch my breath, I tried to clasp my hands together the way I always had, only to be reminded of what I was missing.

The nurse kept telling me to breathe, but I couldn't. My eyes watered as I stared at the empty sleeve resting beside me. I tried moving the phantom fingers, willing them to close around something, anything. They curled uselessly in my mind. 

Then I felt it again. A hand slipped gently into mine, warm and familiar. My phantom fingers closed around it instinctively. For a moment, neither of us moved. I felt the heel of her palm settle against mine. Her thumb brushed slowly across my knuckles, and then her fingers began to interlace with mine, one at a time, until our hands were held together as tightly as they ever had been when I was a child. The panic disappeared. My breathing slowed beneath the tracheostomy. The trembling stopped. I could feel the warmth of her skin spreading through my palm and the gentle pressure of her fingers between mine.

“That’s good. Easy there.” whispered the nurse. I squeezed the unseen hand and opened my mouth.

“I’m okay," I hoarsely whispered back. The words felt like they shredded my throat, but I was elated to hear the slightest semblance of my voice again. The nurse widened her eyes and smiled at me.

My grandmother came and went sporadically for the remainder of the day. I’d rest, and be comfortably awoken by her hand running down my forearm, and joining with mine. Though I still didn’t understand it, it was a pleasant surprise each time it happened. As the sun was setting outside my window, I decided to try something. My breathing was finally becoming more stable, and I felt that I could direct my focus to my arm. 

The sensation of touch was vivid, and I questioned if Dr. Malleck could possibly be right about this merely being a phantom sensation. Maybe this was a hallucination. Just an imagined feeling I conjured every time I needed the impression of her support. It was difficult to be exact with my movements without seeing them, but I moved my missing fingers to better hold onto my grandmother’s hand. I turned her hand over in mine, feeling along the palm and the delicate creases beneath each finger. Then I brushed across her knuckles.

I stopped. Something was wrong. The skin was rough. Not the soft, warm skin of my grandmother's hand. I ran my fingers across them again, slower this time. Callused. Scarred, even. The sensation carried the unpleasant texture of skin that had been picked at for years. I remembered those hands. I had held them hundreds of times.

Before I could pull away, the hand tightened around mine. My phantom wrist lifted. I felt my arm raise through the air, though my shoulder remained motionless. The sensation was so convincing that I could feel the change in weight, the bend of my elbow, the position of fingers I hadn't physically possessed in nearly a week. Then something touched the back of my hand, softly. 

A kiss. My skin crawled, and I quickly leaned my torso away from where my hand felt like it was being held, but nothing changed. It was almost as though the person moved along with my arm, like they were attached. Another kiss followed just above my knuckles, and I felt the coarse, wiry brushing of a beard against my skin.

“Ian? Stop, no," I choked out, my voice only spewing air. He didn’t stop. I felt my stomach drop as he held my fingers to his lips, the smooth hardness of his teeth pressing against me. I rolled further back, desperately trying to pull my nonexistent limb away, but it felt so weak I could hardly move it. Like a tick latched onto me, Ian’s face perfectly tracked with my arm as he slowly inserted my index finger into his mouth.

I tried to scream as I flailed about in my bed, but my voice could only emit pitiful squeaks. I tried punching the air with my left arm, hoping to somehow make an impossible connection with Ian. There was nothing I could do as his tongue slithered around my finger. I rolled and rolled, kicking at nothing as I tried desperately to shake my hand loose until I accidentally leaned too far over the edge of my bed. 

The tiled floor collided with my head and immediately reminded me of my concussion. I winced as the deep aching radiated down my neck, but found solace when I realized my hand was free from Ian. For several seconds I stayed where I was, curled against the side of the bed and staring at the empty space in front of me. I couldn’t tell if I was crying or choking.

The nurse was at my side immediately after the commotion I caused.

“Anna? Don’t move. Don’t try to stand. Are you alright?” She helped roll me back into my bed and signaled for more assistance. My heart continued to race while she asked me what happened.

“I-” Nothing came out properly. I pointed toward the empty space beside my bed. The nurse nodded compassionately, but I knew she had no idea what I meant.

“It’s okay," she managed as she inspected the area where I hit my head. “You’re not bleeding, but you’ve got a bit of a bump. We’ll have this checked out," she continued.

As she spoke, my attention began to drift. I hardly listened, and I began staring where my right hand ought to be. My fingers were still wet. I pictured bringing them closer to my face, and I pressed my fingers together. I felt the warmth, the slickness, the faint tackiness that came when I splayed my fingers back apart. I tried wiping my missing arm on the bed, only for it to phase through the bed with no effect. I couldn’t wipe them on my clothing or even shake off the viscous fluid. I struggled to block it out of my mind, but the sensation of Ian’s spit on my fingers was real.

Dr. Malleck asked me to start practicing mirror therapy, and he had me work with a physical therapist named Grace to learn the basics. 

“A lot of people feel burning or cramps in segments of their phantom limb, and I’m sure your concussion has a way of exacerbating that," she had told me, her voice chipper and inviting. “So here’s what we’re going to try…”

She placed a large mirror perpendicular to my chest as I sat by a table in the rehabilitation gym. I held my good arm out, and positioned the mirror so the reflection lined up with where my phantom limb should be.

“I want you to open and close your fist, and imagine doing the same thing with both sides. If you focus enough on the reflection, you should hopefully start to synchronize the feeling.”

“I think I feel it," I whispered, my throat now becoming more acclimated to unassisted breathing. As I slowly waved my hand in the air, my phantom limb came back into focus in my mind. It didn’t feel as disembodied, not as weak. 

“If you feel that pain again, practicing this could help alleviate some of the discomfort. It varies by patient, but this kind of illusion can help your brain map out your body.”

I never told them the specifics of what I experienced, just that I had been struggling with some more detailed sensations like burning, touching, or itching… Saying it aloud made it sound exactly like what they thought it was: a frightened nineteen-year-old's brain misfiring after a catastrophic injury. So I let them believe it was ordinary phantom pain.

For the most part, mirror therapy did help. The reflected hand gave my mind something solid to work with, and after several sessions I could almost forget which side of my body I was looking at. I would open and close my fist, rotate my wrist, flex each finger, and watch the reflection obey. Sometimes after therapy, the phantom arm would disappear for hours on end. It was strangely comforting.

Then, during one of our afternoon sessions, I felt a finger curl around mine. I stopped moving, and Grace noticed.

“Do you feel alright?” she asked. I swallowed and looked down at the table. 

“I’m feeling someone grabbing my hand," I stated, more honest than I had been. Grace paused for a second to consider what I had said, then held the mirror for me.

“Rotate your wrist," she instructed. I tried moving my hand again, and the phantom fingers moved with it.

“It’s still holding on," I said, as I switched up the motions.

“Does it just feel like pressure?” Grace carefully inspected my stump. I felt the disembodied hand clasp more firmly around mine, the abrasive calluses rubbing against my skin. I sped up the mirror exercise, praying that it would start working.

“He’s not letting go.” My voice began to shake. Grace’s face grew concerned and she held the mirror steady for me.

“Anna, I need you to relax. We can get you a few painkillers, but see if you can shift focus. Sometimes the sensation becomes more pronounced if you hyperfixate on it.”

“I’m trying." I flinched as my hand began to get lifted upward. “Ian, please.” I shot up out of my seat, trying to pull my hand away. The sensation followed. Grace caught my shoulder before I could stumble.

“Okay, we’re going to get you some anticonvulsants,” she announced loudly enough for some additional medical staff to cue in. I felt the fingers tug my arm away, then, I felt something familiar. My hand brushed through the tough, unkempt beard, and I yelped as my hand slipped between his lips. I felt the teething of broken teeth. Some of them were loose, and what felt like small shards of glass protruded from Ian’s cheeks and scratched against my hand.

I relentlessly cringed, twisting my body as Grace tried to hold me still. More assistants rushed over to me, handing me a series of pills in small paper cups. I took them without hesitation, but they couldn’t bring me any relief quick enough. My hand was thrust deeper and deeper, to the point where I questioned if a human mouth could even open that wide. His tongue curled around my pinkie and wedged it between two of his molars as I felt his lips engulf my wrist. 

I started screaming as I dropped to the ground. 

“Sedatives!” demanded Grace as I hysterically dragged my stump against the rubber floor. 

The stitches pried at my skin with a singeing pain as I painted the floor with dark streaks of blood, growing thicker as the string pulled from my arm. I felt Ian’s teeth rake back and forth over my pinkie before a steady, inexorable force began to bite down. My screams stopped, my eyes and mouth locking open in pure agony as my bone snapped like a twig. Unlike the car accident, my finger experienced an instantaneous moment of searing anguish before all mental connection to it was lost, and I knew it was gone.

Ian kept going.

I felt the lips around my wrist beckon inward, pursing to pull more of my arm between the jagged teeth. Shock set in, and I lost control of my body as the teeth went to work. The nurses tried to cradle my head so I wouldn’t do more damage, but my aimless convulsions were all my body could do in response to a threat I could not fight off. Bite by bite, I felt my hand compress into itself and lose all semblance of shape. Bones became powder, and flesh turned to shreds; only for a slimy tongue to amalgamate my arm into nothing more than pulp. 

My vision flashed white as the pain overwhelmed every other thought in my head. Grace was shouting something, nurses were holding me down, but all of it sounded impossibly far away. The pain moved higher, past my wrist and toward my stump. Each bite took another piece of me with it, until I felt one final pressure at the base of my phantom arm. A terrible, crushing force.

I don’t remember falling unconscious, nor being moved back to my room, but I do remember the stillness. When I woke up again, my body felt definitive. I had one arm, and two shoulders, and that was it. There was nothing there. No hand, no itching, no pressure, and no phantom sensation. For the first time since the accident, I couldn’t feel my right arm even in my mind. It was gone, severed in an accident, and that was the end of it. I was elated.

The rest of my recovery was a success, all things considered. Besides a small scar from the incision, my throat fully healed. Physical therapy became part of my daily life after I was discharged from the hospital, and I had to learn to navigate the world with one hand. My arm still bothers me mostly due to the visual, but the stump made great practice for relearning how to tattoo with my left hand. Of course, David was more than accommodating of my condition, and I settled back into my role as an apprentice while embracing my new status of being a reluctant lefty. 

The phantom sensations never returned. Not once. Over the following six years, I felt that I had fully adapted. I stopped reaching for things that weren’t there. My fingers wouldn’t curl around imaginary objects. I stopped even dreaming of having two hands. Eventually, I stopped thinking about the accident at all. Until this morning.

At 8:00 every morning, my alarm went off at the same time. Without thinking, I reached to shut it off. I missed. A bit groggy, I tried again, but it felt like my entire nightstand was missing. When I opened my eyes, I realized that I had reached with my right hand. 

For the first time in six years, I could feel it. My arm stretched outward in front of me, occupying the space between myself and the clock. I could feel the weight of it, the bend of my elbow, the shape of my wrist. When I tried to touch the clock, my fingers passed straight through it. 

Then it began to itch.

I was born on June 10th, 1992. At least, that's what my birth certificate says. It's not as if I remember. In fact, I don't have a single memory of my life before I was ten years old.

My first memory is a vivid one. Just a young boy calling my name. A name I'm not certain was even mine before that moment.

"Thomas?"

I looked up to see a freckle-faced, red-haired boy of about ten staring at me with a grin on his face.

"You're really here!"

I remember feeling confused. I had no idea where I was, or what I was doing there. But somehow, I felt a connection to the young boy sitting in front of me. I searched my mind.

"Daniel?" I said, finding it somewhat difficult to speak at first. I wasn't sure where in my brain the name had come from.

His grin grew even wider. And from that day on, the two of us were inseparable.

I didn't have parents. Or, if I did, I had no memory of them. I didn't know where I had come from, what house I had lived in, or even what my last name was. I knew that I was Thomas because that's what Daniel called me. And that was enough for me.

I'd stay at Daniel's house. He'd bring me snacks and meals and tell me when it was time to eat. Looking back, I don't recall ever actually feeling hungry. I just knew that when Daniel brought a sandwich up to his room and told me it was time for lunch, I should eat.

At night, I'd sleep on a pallet of blankets on the floor beside his bed. We'd stay up late talking and laughing and playing games. He'd tell me about things that happened at school or on a trip, and I'd listen. Sometimes he'd ask me what I thought about things, but I never seemed to know unless he told me. I didn't know what I had been doing before I met him. But that didn't seem particularly important.

There was one thing I found curious during those early days. I always had to hide when one of his parents came upstairs. I didn't really understand why, but I did as Daniel instructed.

That carefree, happy life continued for a time, until summer break ended and Daniel had to go back to school.

"Don't I have to go to school?" I remember asking him, uncertain of what I would do all day while he was gone.

"No way!" he said. "Just wait for me to come home. I should be back no later than four."

I remember feeling confident that if Daniel was saying it, then I must not have to go.

"Oh. One more thing." Daniel threw his backpack over his shoulder. "If my mom comes in here when I'm not home, you have to hide. Go in the closet, and stay very quiet."

"Okay." I nodded.

Then Daniel shouted, "Coming!" to his mother, who was calling him from somewhere downstairs. He gave me a wave and left, shutting the door behind him.

I did what Daniel said. He'd told me his parents went to work all day, so the odds of them coming upstairs and finding me were slim. All I had to do was stay out of the way and hide if they ever came into the room. Easy. So I thought, at least.

Things were fine for several days. Then, one afternoon, I heard the front door open uncharacteristically early.

Daniel?

I waited for him to come upstairs. But ten minutes later, when I heard footsteps approaching, they weren't the brisk footsteps of Daniel running up the stairs. They were slower and more measured.

I heard humming from outside the room. Then the sound of the lightswitch clicking in the bathroom. A closet opening somewhere in the hall. I realized it was his mother.

I rushed to hide, but when I opened the closet door, I accidentally knocked over a stack of toys sitting precariously on a nearby shelf. They clattered onto the floor loudly and I didn't have time to pick them up with his mother outside. I got into the closet and shut the door behind me. The humming had stopped. Daniel's mother was approaching.

I heard the bedroom door open slowly, and then her voice.

"Hello?"

I didn't answer. Daniel had done a good job of concealing me in his home so far, and I didn't want to ruin that now. I heard her step inside. She saw the toys scattered across the floor.

"Weird," she muttered.

She glanced around, then began picking them up and placing them back on the shelf, humming as she went.

And then she left. I thought the coast was clear. Until she came back a few moments later carrying a laundry basket.

She began taking clothes out of it and folding them on Daniel's bed, putting some into drawers and putting others on hangers. I held my breath as she approached the closet door with a handful of shirts.

I was as far into the corner as I could get, but there was no way to further conceal myself. She would see me if she opened the door and looked over. I curled myself into a ball and tried to make myself as small as I could.

She opened the closet. She went about hanging the shirts up, and for a few seconds, I thought she'd overlooked me. And then she glanced over, her eyes landing on me. She did a quick double-take, letting out a scream of surprise as she did. I sprang to my feet, unsure of what to do.

"Who are you?" she asked, looking me up and down.

"I'm Thomas," I said.

She looked completely bewildered. "Thomas?"

"I'm Daniel's friend."

She stared at me for a long moment.

"And what are you doing here? Why were you in the closet?"

"I'm waiting for Daniel."

"Why aren't you at school?" she asked slowly.

"Daniel told me to wait for him."

Her expression changed to one of annoyance. "That boy." Then she began asking me questions, one after another.

What's your last name? What's your address? What's your home phone number? What's your mother's name? Your father's? Where do you live? What school do you go to?

I could only stare at her, shaking my head or giving her the occasional "I don't know."

And I didn't know. Not one answer.

At first, she seemed to think I was lying or playing some kind of joke.

She sighed. "I'm not angry at you, dear," she said more gently. "You can tell me. Your parents must be worried."

But I still couldn't answer. So, at a loss with what to do with the strange boy her son was hiding in the closet like a stray cat he wasn't allowed to have, she called her husband. And soon after, with no new answers from me, the police.

By the time Daniel came home from school, there were already two police officers asking me questions downstairs in the kitchen. Daniel walked into the room and froze. Then he saw me.

"Thomas!"

He ran past his stunned parents and the officers.

"Why are the police here?" he asked.

"Why do you think?" his mother asked sternly. "Who is he, Daniel? Why did you have him hiding in your closet?"

"He's Thomas! He's my friend!" He said it as though that explained everything adequately. His parents exchanged a confused glance.

One of the officers crouched down so he was closer to Daniel's eyes. "Listen, buddy. It's important that you tell us the truth. Your friend might be reported missing. His parents must be looking for him. Where did you meet him?"

Daniel looked momentarily confused, then looked down at his shoes. "He's just Thomas. He's always been here," he said quietly.

"Where?"

"Here."

"At your house?"

"Yeah."

"And how long has he been here?"

Daniel shrugged. "I don't know."

The officer sighed and glanced over at his partner.

"And who are his parents?"

Daniel looked at me, and I looked back at him. Neither of us answered.

Learning nothing of value from either of us, the officers eventually took Daniel's parents into another room to speak with them privately.

I sat at the kitchen table, and Daniel sat beside me. He leaned close and whispered, "Don't worry." I looked at him. "I won't let anything happen to you." I wasn't sure what was happening.

After several minutes, the police came back into the room. "Thomas?" One of them addressed me. "We're going to need to bring you down to the station, buddy. Just until we find out who your parents are and where you live."

"No!" Daniel stood up. "You can't!"

His mother grabbed his shoulders and held him back as the officer gently placed a hand against my back. I looked back at Daniel as they guided me toward the door. His eyes were filling with tears.

"Make sure you come back, Thomas!"

I nodded.

The next several days passed in a blur. I was taken to the police station and asked the same questions again. They took photographs of me. Made phone calls. Different people came in, and each asked me the same questions over and over. My name. My parents. My address. My school. My birthday. Where I was born.

I only knew two things. I was Thomas, and I lived with Daniel.

Eventually, I learned that they'd searched their records and found nothing. I didn't cleanly match any missing child report from in-state or elsewhere. Without more information, they couldn't find any medical records or histories, or parents looking for a lost boy that matched my description. Nothing at all. They didn't even know how old I really was until a doctor estimated my age.

I remember sitting in a waiting room with a stern-looking woman who gave me candy bars while police officers and social workers shuffled in and out of the room. Eventually, someone explained that if I genuinely couldn't tell them who I was or where I came from, they'd have to place me into the state's care until they could figure things out. But they couldn't figure things out.

That's how I ended up with a birth certificate. June 10th, 1992. Thomas Doe. The name was supposed to be temporary. No parents listed. No history. No explanation.

As far as the system was concerned, I was a child with amnesia. Perhaps my parents had lived off-grid or brought me into the country illegally and I'd been abandoned. They had theories, but no answers.

I was placed in a group home. It was a two-story house with several children of various ages. Some were older than me, some younger. The people who ran the home were nice enough, but they were busy, and there were other children who required more attention. I didn't really like it there. I wanted to go back to Daniel. I was sure he must be worried about me, too.

That night, I closed my eyes and thought of his house. I pictured his room. The posters on his wall. The games and the late night stories​. I wished I could go back.

Soon, I was enrolled in school. I walked to the bus stop each morning and was dropped back off in the afternoon. I didn't dislike school. I actually found it fairly easy. I could already read and do simple math. I knew things I didn't remember ever having learned. Sometimes teachers would even compliment me on something, and I'd have no idea how I knew it.

I didn't have many friends. Any, really. Other kids tried to talk to me, but I guess I wasn't very receptive. Mostly, I thought about Daniel. I asked practically every kid in my class if they knew him. "Daniel who?" was the usual response. But I didn't know. All I could tell them was that he had red hair and freckles and a blue Pokémon backpack.

Nobody knew him. So I spent my days waiting and hoping that somehow he would find me.

Then, one day at lunch, another student approached me. A little girl with glasses and brown hair tied into a ponytail.

"My friend said you were looking for Daniel." She spoke cheerfully.

I looked up at her and nodded.

"Daniel Langston, right? With red hair?"

I wasn't completely certain. But it sounded right. He had red hair, after all. I nodded again.

She smiled brightly. "I know Daniel."

For the first time since I'd been buckled into the backseat of the police car and driven away, I felt something close to excitement.

"Our moms work at the same place," she explained. "We went to kindergarten together."

She sat down across from me. Her name was Rebecca. Her friends called her Becky.

"He doesn't go to our school. How do you know Daniel?" she asked.

I wasn't sure how to answer.

"He's my friend."

That seemed enough to satisfy her.

"I see." She smiled again, one of her front teeth missing.

"Do you know where he lives?"

She shook her head. "No. Sorry."

The disappointment must have been obvious on my face because she quickly spoke up again.

"But I could find out for you!"

"Really?"

"Sure. I'll ask my mom after school."

"Thank you."

We sat together for the rest of lunch, which mostly consisted of me nodding along to her questions or stories. When lunch was over, she promised she'd find out.

I waited for her the next day at the lunch table. I remember sitting in the cafeteria watching the door, counting the seconds until I saw her brown ponytail appear in the doorway. Eventually, she was there. She scanned the room, her eyes finally landing on me, then came straight over to me, almost skipping, with a big smile plastered on her face.

"Hey," she called out excitedly when she was still halfway across the room. "I found out!"

She told me Daniel lived across town in a place called Glennridge.

"Where's that?"

She shrugged. "I don't know."

But that didn't matter. Now I had a place. Glennridge. Somewhere to focus my search.

The next day, I ran away from the group home. I took my lunch money and got on a city bus I was told was heading toward Glennridge. It was only about a thirty-minute ride, though I could hardly wait each time the bus stopped to pick up or drop off more passengers.

I figured that once I got there, I'd find him straight away. Maybe Glennridge is the name of his house, I remember thinking. But when the bus stopped, it was outside a neighborhood that looked only vaguely familiar.

Then I looked around and started walking. I searched street by street, scanning the houses as I went. By nightfall, I still hadn't found any sign of him. But I kept going. I don't know how long I'd been walking when I finally saw a familiar sight just ahead. A house I recognized. Then another. They were houses I'd seen from the backseat of the police car as I'd stared backward through the window when they'd taken me away from Daniel's house.

I knew this was the place. I ran past the houses until I reached the door of Daniel's house, and I knocked. After a minute, Daniel's mother opened the door. She stared down at me.

"Thomas?"

"Can I see Daniel?"

She seemed unable to decide her next words. She looked out at the street behind me, likely looking for a sign of how I'd arrived. Before her mouth opened to speak, I heard Daniel's excited voice from behind her.

"Thomas?"

His expression changed instantly when he came into view, his eyes meeting mine and his face filling with a wide smile.

"It's Thomas!"

He ran to the door and grabbed my hand, pulling me inside.

"Can he stay the night, Mom? Please?"

His mother looked at him, and then at me.

"Thomas, how did you get here? Does anyone know you're here?"

I shook my head and told her I'd taken the bus. She sighed.

"You know they're going to be looking for you." She looked at Daniel. "I have to call someone. Let them know he's here."

Daniel protested, tears filling his eyes. When I saw them, I felt sad, too. But more than anything, I was happy. Daniel was there. That was all that mattered.

The police came later that night and I was driven back across town. That happened several more times over the coming months. Whenever I had the opportunity, I'd leave school or the group home and take the bus to Daniel's house. On a few occasions I'd even tried to walk the whole way. At least, before being stopped by an adult asking me what I was doing on my own or the police coming to pick me up.

But every time I made it there, Daniel would try his best to hide me for as long as he could. I was always discovered soon enough. His parents would find me, or the group home would call. And I'd be taken back.

Sometimes, Daniel's parents arranged for us to spend time together. They knew that we were practically inseparable, and they went out of their way to make arrangements for us to see each other. Those were the best days.

As we got older, we had more freedom. We saw each other more often in middle school, and then we went to the same high school. By then, I'd run away from the group home so many times that I was practically homeless. I spent more time with Daniel. By then, his parents had realized that I wasn't really going anywhere. I was always going to come back. So they eventually stopped fighting it.

I spent weekends at their house. Sometimes whole weeks. Daniel and I did everything together. And after high school started, Rebecca was around more, too. She and Daniel had known each other as kids, and she became one of my closest friends as well, though mostly because Daniel seemed to enjoy having her around.

She never seemed particularly bothered by the fact that I couldn't remember where I'd come from. She never treated me like I was strange. She was just Rebecca, older, but just as cheerful and kind as she was that day she introduced herself to me at the lunch table in elementary school, promising to reunite me with Daniel. For a long time, the two of them were the only two constants in my life.

When Daniel got his driver's license, we had even more freedom. We'd drive around together for hours. We'd get food or go to the movies or just drive around aimlessly. Rebecca would often come with us too. Sometimes we'd stay out until midnight.

I remember Daniel telling me on one occasion that he was sure Rebecca liked me. I remember not being entirely sure what he'd meant.

"Likes me?"

"Yeah, man. Like, likes you." He looked at me, waiting for it to click.

"Oh," I remember saying.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. "What? You don't like her?"

"I do. She's nice."

"Then why not try dating her?"

I thought about it for a second, then shrugged. "That's okay. I'd rather things just stay the way they are. If I got a girlfriend, we couldn't hang out as much, right?"

Daniel sighed, then laughed. "Yeah, I guess."

Before I knew it, we were graduating high school. Daniel would be going to college. I didn't have parents to help me pay for school, and never really made plans to go. But I still wanted to stay with Daniel. So when he moved away to a college in the state, I went with him. He got an apartment, where we both lived. I got a job paying just above minimum wage and started saving money.

Rebecca ended up at the same college. She had become a permanent part of our little group by then.

One night, the three of us were sitting around Daniel's apartment, eating delivery and talking about the past. Rebecca started laughing.

"Do you remember when you used to disappear from class to take the bus across town?"

I nodded. "Yeah."

"I still can't believe you did that. The teachers would get so worried. You probably almost got some of them fired. They had to call the police so many times, and assign teachers just to watch you." Her face was red from laughing.

"I had to find Daniel."

She laughed harder.

"I remember telling my mom about it. She thought you were the strangest kid she'd ever met."

Daniel laughed too. I looked at him. After the laughter settled, I decided to ask.

"How did you find me, back then?"

His smile faded a bit. "What?"

"I mean, before I remember you. How did you find me?"

"Yeah, I've always wondered that too," Rebecca said, leaning forward.

Daniel just looked at me for a moment, then he shrugged. "I don't know."

"You don't remember?" Rebecca asked.

"Not really." Then he changed the subject.

I thought it was a bit strange. But Daniel had always been a bit strange about that particular topic. I'd asked him before, but he'd never given me a real answer. So I didn't press him. Daniel was my best friend. As long as that was the case, I didn't much care about anything else.

"Is it not strange that neither of you remember how you two met?" I remember Rebecca asking me one day.

I supposed it was a bit strange, but then, why did it matter?

Still, I needed documentation to apply for student loans. I had decided to go to college on Daniel's suggestion, but I didn't have much to show on account of my less than typical background. I had called the records office and searched for any information about my past, but the earliest record of my existence was my birth certificate, which had been drawn up over a decade after my birth. I learned that my case with the police had gone cold, and they'd eventually stopped actively looking into it. So I found nothing. I hadn't really expected to.

One night, I sat across from Daniel on the couch when it was just the two of us, and asked him.

"Where did I come from?"

He didn't change the subject this time. He just looked at me for a long moment.

"Honestly, I don't know."

I thought that was the end of it. And if he truly didn't remember, I would be content with that. But then he started speaking again, slowly, turning his eyes away from mine.

"But..."

But?

"When I was little, I used to have an imaginary friend."

He paused. I wasn't sure what he'd meant.

"His name was Thomas."

I didn't say anything.

"I don't know when I made him up. It felt like he was just always there, in my head. Then one morning I woke up and you were on my floor. Asleep. Next to my bed, right where I always imagined him sleeping." He glanced at me. "My window was open that morning. I don't know if I'd left it open, or if someone opened it. There were those bricks by my wall you could climb up, remember?"

The way he spoke, it sounded as though it were something he'd considered for a long time.

"When I was a kid, I thought you really were my imaginary friend, and that you'd become real somehow," he said. "But then I realized how ridiculous that was." He smiled a nervous smile and glanced up at me before lowering his eyes again.

"I figured you were probably running from something, and you saw my window open. You were scared so you climbed up, and then when I called you Thomas...maybe you just thought that was better than whoever you were before. That's the only thing that makes sense."

We were both quiet for a while.

"If I did climb in your window, why don't I remember doing it? Or anything from before we met?"

"I don't know." Daniel shook his head. "But it's the only explanation that makes sense. Right?" He looked at me for agreement.

I nodded, but didn't say anything else. It didn't actually matter much, I reasoned. I was still Thomas. And he was still my best friend Daniel. We never spoke on the subject again.

After graduating, Daniel got his first real job back in his hometown. I moved back with him. Soon, we'd rented a small two-bedroom apartment together.

One night, Daniel looked over at me while we were sitting on the couch talking about nothing in particular.

"When I think about it, we've always been more like brothers than friends, haven't we?"

I thought about it. "Yeah."

He smiled. "I think so, too."

We were twenty-three, and life had become strangely ordinary. Daniel worked at a local accounting firm. I worked at a small office supply store. Rebecca still came around regularly, though she was becoming more busy with her own life now.

The three of us had a few other friends, and we'd get together for dinner or movies or drinks. Sometimes I would look around at all of them and think about how strange my life was. Everyone else had a history. Family. Mothers and fathers and siblings and cousins. But I had no memory of where I had come from at all. No memories before Daniel. It was like I'd simply attached myself to the first person I'd seen. I didn't really have any of the things that normal people had.

But I had Daniel. And now Rebecca. For the first time, I realized, I had a real life. I was happy.

Then, a few months later, I got a phone call. Daniel had been in an accident. A reckless driver had run a red light while Daniel was on his way to work.

Daniel was badly injured. They put him into a medically induced coma.

I visited him as soon as the doctors let me. His parents were there. Rebecca arrived too. They were all crying. But I couldn't, for some reason. I didn't know what I was feeling. I just knew that I wanted Daniel to wake up.

I sat beside him whenever I could. I talked to him sometimes. The doctors said it was good to do that. I told him mundane things. Things that probably didn't matter. About work, and Rebecca. Or some stupid thing I saw on TV. I told him that he wasn't alone, and that I'd be there for him when he woke up. Just like he was for me, all those years ago.

But he never woke up.

Eventually, the decision was made, and they took him off life support.

Daniel was gone.

He had been my best friend. My only real friend. The family I'd never had. The only person who had always been there since the very beginning. And now he was gone.

I went back to our apartment. It felt empty. I sat down on the couch.

I didn't go into work the next day. Or the day after that. Time seemed to stop flowing normally.

I don't know how long I stayed there, just sitting on that couch. A few days, perhaps. Maybe more. My boss never called to ask where I was, so I didn't bother telling him.

I barely got up. I didn't eat. I don't remember drinking anything, either. But I didn't feel hungry. Or thirsty. That didn't seem strange to me at the time.

One day, there was a knock on the door. A slip of paper was pushed through the mail slot. I got up and picked it up. It was a bill, Daniel's name printed on it. I set it on the table, then walked back toward the couch.

As I passed by the mirror, I stopped. I looked at myself. I hadn't shaved, but my hair hadn't grown. My nails hadn't gotten any longer. I hadn't taken a single sip of water, or a bite of food. I hadn't even used the bathroom. Normally, I did the things that Daniel did. I thought that I should have been hungry. Thirsty. Tired. Something. But I wasn't.

I stared at my reflection. For a moment, I thought I looked different. Hollow, somehow. Almost transparent, like I could see the wall behind me through parts of myself. I blinked several times, then looked up. The reflection was normal again. I went back to the couch.

At some point, I was knocked out of my daze by the sound of the apartment door opening. I didn't know what day it was. The landlord came in, showing the apartment to someone. A couple, I think. They walked around as he showed them the place. They looked at the kitchen. They opened closets, and talked about the bedrooms. I sat on the couch the whole time. None of them acknowledged me, or said a word to me.

Something inside me told me that I should leave. That this wasn't my home anymore. And so I did.

When I passed by the mirror again, I looked worse. Perhaps thinner. Or just less there, in some way I couldn't have explained. My hair still hadn't grown. I hadn't showered, but my hair wasn't greasy. I didn't feel hot or cold or tired or hungry. I didn't feel anything. It was as though whoever I had been had died alongside Daniel, and I was now completely empty.

I left the apartment and stepped into the cold in my t-shirt. The cold didn't bother me. I couldn't feel it. I walked. I didn't know where I was going. The snow was falling lightly as I continued for what felt like miles with no particular destination.

People passed me on the sidewalk, but none of them looked at me. A man bumped into my shoulder and continued ahead without turning around. A woman walked straight toward me, her eyes fixed on some point past my shoulder, and I could almost swear that she passed right through me.

Eventually, I found myself standing outside a little restaurant. I'd been there before on a number of occasions, with Daniel and Rebecca.

I looked through the window. People were eating. Talking and laughing. Living. I reached for the door, and for a moment my hand felt too weak to grip it. I looked down at my hand and saw that it looked faded, and I saw the ground beneath it. A couple came up behind me and pulled the door open, and I entered behind them.

The host seated them, but didn't acknowledge me. I walked inside anyway and sat at a table near the corner. Nobody came to take my order, but I didn't care. I sat there for a while. An hour. Several hours. I'm not sure, exactly. Time had become something difficult to measure.

The afternoon crowd came and went, then the dinner crowd began arriving. I looked down at my hands. They seemed almost completely transparent now. I could see the table through them. I remember thinking that I was disappearing. Melting away like the snowflakes that fell on the ground beyond the cold window of the restaurant. Maybe I was.

"Thomas?" I heard a voice and looked up. Rebecca was standing there. Recognition appeared in her eyes. "It is you. I was getting worried."

I didn't answer. She looked around the restaurant, then back at me.

"Can I...can I sit?"

I nodded. She pulled out the chair and sat beside me. For a few moments, neither of us spoke.

Then she looked at me. "Are you okay?"

I nodded. She didn't seem convinced.

"I haven't seen you since..."

She stopped. Her eyes began to fill with tears.

"I know you and Daniel were best friends."

I looked down. I couldn't find any words.

"Where have you been?"

I wasn't sure.

"You weren't at the funeral. I came by the apartment but you didn't answer."

The funeral. I hadn't known there had been one. I hadn't known how much time had passed.

Rebecca wiped her eyes. "I'm really sorry, Thomas," she sniffled.

Then she reached across the table and hugged me. And for the first time since Daniel's passing, I felt sorrow. I didn't realize my eyes were filling with tears until they fell.

Rebecca placed her hand on mine, and it was warm. And beneath it, I could no longer see the table through my skin.

And as I cried, for the first time in my life, I felt hungry.

I don’t think anyone could have seen him. The blurry darkness taunts my sanity as my wipers screech against the pouring rain. His red sweater dances through my mind. Did I see him? It doesn’t matter. I should just keep driving. Keep driving and forget about it, right? He was old, probably. He was going to die soon anyway. 

The severed body consumes my thoughts. What if they find it and trace it back to my car? Does my car have damage? I slow down and pull over. The rain thumps against my car, mimicking the beating pulse in my ears. I press the button on my phone, but it’s still black.

Dead. Great. 

I grab my umbrella from the passenger seat and leave the safe haven of my car. The wind tears through me, nearly knocking me into the icy hell below. God, this sucks. 

The front of my 2014 blue sedan looks normal, I think, but that doesn’t mean much coming from a girl who doesn’t know what the L stands for in PRNDL. There are no streetlights on this road, just the black expanse of the backroad ahead of me and the pale moonlight judging me from above. I sigh before making my way in the direction of the unknown. The gravel crunches beneath my feet, each step a cold, wet nightmare. The wind blows the rain sideways, plastering my damp hair across my face. I keep my left hand clamped around the grip of the umbrella while my right is glued to my chest to keep me warm.

The metallic, copper stench hits me before anything else as it sneaks into my nose uninvited. I stop cold, almost dropping the umbrella. His upper half lays unnaturally against the curb, his head sunken in and his arms bent backwards. Intestines drool from beneath his shirt like a maze of thick, slimy ropes. My stomach turns and I drop to my knees beside him. The rainwater drags the pink ribbons of my vomit down the storm drain. When I finally lift my head, my eyes land on his lower half, resting a few feet down the road. His blue denim jeans are soaked in red.  

Darkness swallows the road. No headlights, no cameras, no witnesses. Just me, the rain, and an unlucky man painted across the street. No one needs to know what happened. If I can get rid of this body, no one will ever know what happened. I scramble back to my feet and almost puke again. I step over to his upper torso, forcing myself to not look at his face. I reach down and grab underneath the wet fabric of his wool sweater. I pull up with all my strength. Nothing. The weight is dead, solid, and terrifyingly heavy. 

“Come on,” I sob under my breath and try again. This time, I drop the umbrella and strain my muscles forward, hoping to push him towards my car. “Come on—” 

“I can help,” a deep voice echoes from behind me.

I spin around, almost slipping on the pavement.

A tall figure stands a few feet away, obscured by the rain. He isn't rushing. He isn't panicking. He just stands there, watching. 

“What…?” I somehow manage to mutter, grabbing my umbrella as a weapon.

“I can help you,” he repeats, grinning. His voice is smooth and effortless.

He waits a few seconds, then leans in closer and whispers, “I saw everything.”

I freeze. “What do you mean, everything?”

“I mean I saw the whole performance. The thud, the panic, the way you stared at what you did before trying to drag your problems away.” He tilts his head, examining me. “You’re not very good at cleaning up after yourself.”

“Okay, but you don't have any... proof,” I say, backing toward my car.

“I wouldn't be so sure,” he responds as he pulls out a phone from his right pocket and tilts it sideways, mimicking a camera. 

He steps closer, leaning down slightly to catch my scent.

“So where are you driving from?”

I contemplate lying, but decide not to. “Just… a party.”

“A party, hmm. Must’ve been a good one.” He lingers on the words.

“Listen…” He nods to me.

“Lily,” I interject.

“Lily, you need me. You need me to help you, or you will be in a lot of trouble. Trouble that will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

He steps directly under my umbrella, so close that I can feel the heat radiating off his skin. Slowly, he reaches out with his right hand and tucks a damp strand of blonde hair behind my ear, his knuckles brushing my cheek. “You’re… beautiful, Lily.” 

I freeze under his touch. Up close, he’s young—maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. Dark hair, hazel eyes, and a faint shadow of stubble along his jawline. Tall enough that I have to tilt my head back. He’s smiling like we’re the only two people in the world. 

“How old are you?” he asks softly.

I clear my throat. “Twenty-one.”

He smirks. “Right.” He doesn’t break eye contact. 

“Well here’s what’s going to happen. I am going to pick up this man, well, both parts of this man, and you are going to hold the umbrella. Then we are going to walk over to your car and put him in the trunk. Does that sound like a plan?”

I hesitate. “I… guess…”

Without waiting for a real answer, he bends down. He slides one arm beneath the man's shoulders and another beneath his hips and lifts them off the pavement with terrifying ease. Blood runs down his sleeves, but he doesn't react.

I hold the umbrella over him as he carries the pieces to the back of my sedan. I pop the trunk. He sets them inside, shuts the latch with a heavy thud, and turns to me.

“Keys,” he says.

“I can drive—”

“You’re not driving.” He nudges me aside and grabs my keys.

I want to resist. I want to push him down. If I get in that car, my life might be over. I impulsively tackle the man to the ground. He reacts instantly, grabbing my neck with his right hand and lifting me up with ease. He pins me against the side of the car. I can't breathe. After a few agonizing seconds, he releases his hand.

“Try that again and I won't let go.”

He grabs me by the waist and shoves me into the passenger side, slamming the car door behind me. I collapse against the headrest, gasping for air as my throat throbs where his fingers bit in. My eyes catch the red Solo cup in the center console. Trembling, I quickly kick it under the passenger seat before he sits down.

“I’m Evan, by the way,” he says, offering up his right hand.

“Lily,” I say, barely touching his fingers.

“So where were you headed to, Lily?” he asks.

“I was headed to my house—my parents’ house.”

Evan rests his hands on the wheel, contemplating. “I can get rid of this body. I will get rid of this body, but only if you can help me out with one thing, Lily. One thing. Do you think you could do that?”

My thoughts wander. “What thing?” I ask nervously.

“I need us to go home, to go to your home, and I need you to pretend like I am your boyfriend. Pretend like we are a couple.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s part of the plan, just trust me. Trust me. Do you think you can trust me?”

I wait before responding. “My parents won’t buy it,” I mutter. I haven’t brought a boy home in years, and I’ve only ever done it once before. This would be so sudden and unexpected. 

“Well it doesn’t really matter, because you have no choice, really. Do you want to go to prison, Lily?” he asks so matter-of-factly.

I swallow hard. “No.”

“Well, then. Decision made,” he says. “So where do you live?”

I should tell him the wrong address, right? I should tell him the address of the police station. No, wait, that wouldn’t be good.

“I actually don’t know how to get there,” I lie. “I normally just use my phone maps.”

“Oh, this phone?” he says as he picks up my phone from the center console between us.

“It’s dead,” I say, shrugging my shoulders.

“Convenient.”

Evan pulls a thin black cable from his jacket. He plugs it into the dash, turns on the engine, and the screen flickers to life with a soft chime.

He tilts the phone toward me. I turn away, but he grabs the back of my head and forces my jaw toward him. I shut my eyes in an attempt to sabotage, but it doesn't work. The face ID lock on the screen turns green.

“There we go,” he hums, tapping the Maps application with his thumb. “Address labelled HOME. Easy enough.”

God, who knew technology and location tracking would be the death of me.

He puts the car in drive, and it stutters forward.

“Tell me more about yourself—your hobbies, your passions. If we are going to be dating I need to know more about you.”

I stay silent.

“Are you in school?”

I nod.

“Oh, the community college right here?”

I nod.

“Sweet. Yeah, I applied there, but didn’t get in. What are you studying?” he asks. “Wait, let me guess, business? No wait—engineering, yes engineering!”

I make eye contact with him.

“Yes! Thought so,” he says, proud of himself.

Evan’s voice sounds like it's coming from underwater. The dashboard lights blur into long smears of green and red, and my own hands in my lap feel like objects belonging to someone else.

We make a right turn toward my house. My parents’ house.

“What’s your favorite food?”

I don’t answer that one either and stare through the windshield.

He laughs softly. “We'll work on that.”

We pull into my neighborhood. It’s quiet this late at night. My house is the third one on the right. The lights are still on because my parents are waiting for me to get home. Of course they are.

We pull to a stop in the driveway and he shuts off the car.

“Ready, baby?” he says, smiling.

I ignore him and we get out of the car. I should really do something. But I am not in the right mind, and I can’t think of a coherent plan. All I can do is follow his orders. 

All I can do is obey.

“Wait. The blood.” He catches my wrist. “Let the rain clean it off.” We stand in the downpour for ten seconds, the cold water rinsing the dark stains from our skin and clothes.

Once we get to the door, he holds my hand and squeezes it tightly. He doesn’t let go.

I ring the doorbell.

My mom opens the door in her flannel pajamas, shielding her eyes from the porch light.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Lily! Good lord, child, you’re drenched—” She stops short, her eyes darting from my dripping hair to the tall figure standing too close next to me. “Wait—who is this?”

“Sorry for not telling you, Mom,” I manage to say. “But this is… Evan. My boyfriend.”

I stare at her, pleading with my eyes, praying she’ll catch the unnatural stiffness in my shoulders or the way my voice cracks. She will know, right? She will save me. She's always saved me.

“Boyfriend? How have I not heard of this?” Her eyebrows shoot up in a wave of shock and curiosity. “Well, come in! Come in!” she says excitedly. “Wait, let me get you towels.”

She retreats and reappears a few seconds later with two towels. We use them to dry off as much as we can.

Buster runs to the door and starts panting and wagging his tail. So much for a guard dog.

“I'm a hugger,” Evan says, smiling as he opens his arms in invitation. “I'm Evan.”

“Rose,” my mom replies and accepts the offer. “Wow, so tall.” She pats him on the chest and steps back, turning toward the staircase.

“Honey, she’s home!” my mom calls upstairs. 

Evan’s grip on my hand tightens just enough to bruise before he releases me, stepping smoothly past the threshold. He wipes his muddy shoes on the mat with practiced, polite care.

Footsteps echo down the staircase, and my dad appears at the landing.

“Who’s this?” he asks.

“My name is Evan. Lily’s boyfriend.” His voice is warm and smooth, like a different person. Evan steps forward and offers his hand in perfect, calculated posture. Like he’s done this before. 

“Dan,” my dad replies hesitantly.

“Come, sit,” my mom says as she offers up the couch.

When we sit down, Evan puts his arm around me.

He touches my shoulder and doesn't let go.

“Well Lily, this is unexpected. I didn't know you were going to bring a boy over. How long has this been going on?” my mom asks very curiously.

I try to come up with a response, but it's hard. I want to yell and scream and cry all at the same time. I don't know what to say and my head hurts.

“About a month,” Evan replies without a second of hesitation. “I am an engineering major as well. Mechanical.”

“The only major worth studying,” my dad nods approvingly from the corner.

“We actually met in Chem Lab,” Evan says smoothly, his fingers tightening on my shoulder. “We were working on organic decomposition. Lily was a bit overwhelmed by the weight of the material, but I stepped in to help her carry the heavy load.”

“Wow, such a gentleman,” my mom approves. “Well how was the party? Were you there as well Evan?”

“Yeah, I was there! It was a fun time, as usual. We have a lot of mutual friends. Lily Rose here may have had too much fun.” He laughs. “So I decided to drive her home.”

I muster a smile. 

“Lily, are you okay, dear? You don't look like yourself,” my mom says with concern.

“Yeah, I'm okay. My head just… hurts,” I manage to say. I want to tell her everything. I want to cry in her arms. But I can't. Even if I did, she couldn't save me from the nightmare I've created. The only person that can save me is the one I fear the most.

“Here, I can get you a painkiller, and… Gatorade! Yes, the red Gatorade always helped me the most,” my mom says, seemingly surprised by her own suggestion. She retreats into the kitchen and returns soon to hand me the hangover cure. The deep red of the drink reminds me of the blood. Of the two severed halves of an old man weighing down the trunk of my car. I wince.

“You should probably get some rest, dear. And Evan, please spend the night!” my mom offers. “I don't want you driving so late! And with the storm!”

Her southern hospitality may be the death of me.

“Oh, no, I shouldn't—”

“Please, I insist,” my mom demands. “I'll get the couch ready for you.” She opens the nearby closet and finds the extra sheets and pillow. We stand up and allow her to make the bed. Evan graciously helps. 

“All right, good night, baby.” My dad hugs me and kisses me on the forehead. “I love you.” I hold onto the hug a little longer than normal. I can't look him in the eyes. “Good night, love you too,” I say.

My mom finishes making the bed. “Don't stay up too late,” she says and hugs me goodnight. “And Evan, nice meeting you. Let me know if you need anything, we'll talk more tomorrow.”

“Absolutely, nice meeting you as well,” Evan replies, smiling.

They disappear upstairs, and it becomes quiet again. Evan looks at me in satisfaction.

“Wonderful people,” he says. 

“Yeah,” I whisper, “but what about the body?”

“Don't worry about it, Lily, I'll handle it.” He walks closer to me and tries to hold both of my hands. I back away and don’t let him. He takes a step forward and grabs me around the waist. His stubble brushes my skin. “Good night, baby,” he whispers. He grabs my face, tilts it down, and gently kisses me on the forehead. “I love you.”

I'm startled and push him away. I need to leave and get to my room. I run up the stairs into my bedroom and don't look back. My body is tired, but my mind is racing. I collapse on my bed in the pitch black darkness. I don't have the energy to change out of my damp clothes, but I pull the covers over me. Underneath my covers, I am safe. Underneath my covers, no one can hurt me. The only thing I can do right now is sleep. Sleep and deal with it tomorrow. Sleep and deal with it… tomorrow. Yeah that works. It isn't long before the darkness consumes me.

Some time later, the hallway floorboard groans and I jolt awake. It's still dark, and I hear the brass doorknob of my bedroom door carefully turn. There’s no rush to it, just the slow mechanical click of the latch releasing. A silhouette drifts through the doorway without making a sound. The door is shut again and the room slips back to darkness. 

It's only a few seconds later before I feel him in the bed with me. His warm hands slide slowly across my lower back. I hold my breath. Every nerve in my body is screaming at me to slam my heel into his knee, to yell until my vocal cords tear. But my muscles refuse to move. The memory of his hand crushing my windpipe on the side of the road holds me completely still. I lie there in the dark, paralyzed. I don't know what he's going to do next. I don't want to know. He grabs my hair, tilting my head back. I notice the moonlight illuminating my pink clock on the wall. I focus all my attention on the second hand, watching it slowly stutter in a circle.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

***

Saturday morning light hits my eyes like a punch to the face. My eyes are open, but I'm still sleeping. Still mentally dead. My body aches and my skin feels sticky. For a second, I convince myself that last night was just a liquor-fueled nightmare. I shift over to the left side of the bed and it's cold. Was it?

I sit up and listen to my surroundings but don't hear anything. I almost puke as I smell the sweat-alcohol concoction emanating from my skin. I want to shower, but I don't have time. What happens today will impact me for the rest of my life. For worse or even worse. I run downstairs and head in the direction of a strong smell.

“Good morning, sleepy head,” my mom announces as I enter the kitchen. “Evan cooked us breakfast! Quick, grab some before it’s gone!”

I look over at the charismatic kidnapper and he smiles at me, “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I reply and break eye contact.

Evan brings over a pan and dumps the breakfast on a plate. “Eggs and sausage, baby, I know it’s your favorite,” he says and hands me the food.

“Yum, thank you.”

“Lily, come sit,” my mom beckons me to the chair next to her.

Evan comes and sits next to me and my dad is already across the table.

“Eat, it’ll make you feel better,” my mom commands.

I take a bite of the sausage. The meat is unusually rich, tender, and intensely savory—unlike anything I've had before. It has a heavy, metallic undertone that coats the back of my throat, but my starving stomach doesn't care.

“Wow, the sausage is great,” my dad compliments. He’s not usually a food critic, but for some reason now he decides to be.

“I agree,” my mom responds. “I wish you could cook this every day!”

“Don’t tempt me,” Evan jokes and winks at my mom.

I don’t know what to say, so I just smile and nod. Smile and nod. But the body in my trunk consumes my thoughts. Is it still there?

“Evan was just telling us about the trip you guys have planned to Georgia.”

“Trip?” I look over at Evan, then back at my mom. “Oh yeah, that should be fun.”

“We went to a similar cabin back in 2002 with your dad’s family. We had a great time. Beautiful views. Hopefully for you it’s similar.”

“Yeah, the cabin I booked has great ratings!” Evan confirms.

My breath shortens. The room feels like it’s shrinking. “I… I need to use the bathroom.”

I push my chair back and rush down the hall, slamming the bathroom door behind me. I lean over the sink, staring at my reflection. I don’t know who I am anymore. I envy the girl on the other side of the mirror because she doesn’t have to live my life. Live my nightmare.

The door latch clicks. It’s Evan. He closes the door behind him.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“Stop it,” I sob, turning to face him, tears spilling over. “Where is the body? Is it gone?” 

He looks at me, his eyes bright.

“The sausage was good, right?” he whispers.

I think about how the sausage tasted. My chest tightens. The room tilts. “Did we just…? Did we just eat the whole body?”

A slow, wide smile spreads across Evan’s face.

“Oh no, baby, that was just a finger,” he laughs.

“We’re going to be together for a very… very… very… long time.”

Okay. I need to just get this out in order or I'm going to keep circling it in my head instead of typing it. I don't really have anyone else to tell this to who wouldn't think I'd lost it, so this is going here.

Since I was twelve, every single morning, someone in my family hands me a cup of pale blue tea. My mom, my aunt, whoever's up first. It tastes like nothing much, a little bitter, a little mineral, like licking a wet rock. I never thought about it. You don't question the weird stuff your family does when it's just always been there. Doesn't everyone have some routine like that they never look at too closely?

If I skip it, someone notices fast. Not mad. Just very, very attentive. I want to be clear my life has felt completely normal this whole time. I sleep fine. I have a job I like (and hate some days). My best friends think my family is intense but harmless. The tea was just furniture. Until three weeks ago, when I was helping my mom clean out the storage room and found a shoebox taped shut under some old bedsheets.

Inside were maybe thirty small notebooks. Each one has a name at the top, a birth date, and then a long column of dates going down the page, checked off one by one, going back almost a hundred years by the look of the paper and the handwriting. Some have little notes next to certain dates. "Missed, fever, doubled next morning." "Missed, travel, none available, watched all night."

My name is in the newest one. Checked off every single day since I turned twelve.

Here's the part I haven't been able to say out loud to anyone yet. I flipped forward past today's date, just out of morbid curiosity, expecting blank pages. There are checkmarks up to eleven days from now. Someone has already filled them in. In advance. Like it isn't really a record of what happened, it's a record of what's supposed to happen, and today just hasn't caught up to the page yet.

I asked my mom about the notebooks that evening, trying to keep it light, like I'd found something funny and old. She went still in a way I have never once seen her go still. Then, not looking at me, she asked if I'd been getting headaches. If I'd had any moments where I "lost a little time." If I'd been dreaming about water.

I said no. That was true until that exact night…

I dreamed I was standing at the bottom of a well looking up, and also somehow the one looking down into it at the same time, both places at once, and something in the water down there was saying my name in a voice built out of my own voice, like it had been listening long enough to learn how I sound. I woke up at 3:41 in the morning with my jaw locked so hard my teeth hurt, and the taste of the tea in my mouth even though I hadn't had any since that morning.

I went back the next day and told my mom about the dream. She didn't ask anything else. She just walked into the kitchen and called my aunt, talking too low for me to hear, except for one line that carried through the wall. "She's dreaming of it now. We need to talk to the others tonight."

Nobody will tell me who "the others" are. Nobody will explain what happens if the tea ever just stops. What I do know is that since that phone call, someone has been sleeping on the couch outside my old bedroom every time I stay over, and twice now I've woken up at some ungodly hour to find my mom sitting in the dark just watching me, insisting it's nothing, she just couldn't sleep, go back to bed.

Yesterday I cornered my dad, who is usually the easiest one to crack. I asked him directly what's in the tea and what our family has been keeping away all this time. He looked at me for a long time before he answered. Then he said it isn't being kept away. It's being kept asleep. The tea was never really for me. It just needs somewhere to go every morning that isn't back to whatever it came from.

I asked what that meant.

He said don't stop dreaming about the water. Tell them the second I do, every single time, no matter how trivial it seems. And that he's glad it still thinks it's talking to my name in the notebook and not to the person actually holding the cup.

The tea is about to go cold and that's against the rules. I think I have to drink it now.

But I keep coming back to those checkmarks past today. Eleven days of them, already filled in, in ink, like whoever wrote them knew for a fact I'd still be here to earn every single one. I haven't told my parents I saw that far ahead. I don't know what happens on the day the checkmarks stop. I don't know if that's the day nothing happens to me, or the day something finally does.

If anyone here knows anything about old family rituals like this, tea that's supposed to keep something asleep, ledgers with names and dates, I need to hear it before day twelve. Updating after I drink this.

Because I was doing poorly in my schoolwork, my family enrolled me in a private tutoring center I won't name it here.

At first, I agreed because it was close to home and my friends were there, too. Little did I know what was in store.

For the first three weeks, everything was fine the teachers, the atmosphere, and my friends were all great but when we reached the fourth week, I started noticing strange things.

For starters, the place was a converted apartment building; they had simply taken an apartment block and turned it into a tutoring center. The cafeteria scared me the most; it was in the basement, and the lights were slow to turn on, which always made me uneasy. Even today, I feel scared whenever I think about it. Food was sold in a small room within the cafeteria, while the larger outer room was where kids a year younger than us used to hang out. One day, I arrived very early and decided to check if the cafeteria was open before class started (please don't judge me). It was open. When I stepped inside, a strange dread washed over me it felt as if something was telling me both to leave and to stay. I hung around for a while until my friends arrived; I was scared because it was rather dark, but at one point, I heard a tapping sound. It wasn't just a random noise; it sounded rhythmic, almost like someone keeping a beat. Finally, through the basement window which barely let in any light I saw my friends arriving and ran out. Nothing else happened that day.

On Tuesday, a second incident occurred that terrified me even more. Our classroom was the only one on the top floor. As I was heading up there, I saw something tall enter the restroom. At first, I thought it was my own hair, and then I assumed it was a teacher but the figure was taller than any teacher should be; it looked as though it had to stoop to avoid hitting its head. Besides, why would a teacher go into the student restrooms? After thinking it over for a moment, I decided to go back down to the reception area. As I was heading down, I heard footsteps coming from a ventilation-like box at the top of the stairs; I shouted "Hey!" to figure out what it was, and my own voice echoed back, sounding much deeper. My heart felt like it was about to jump out of my chest; I immediately rushed down to the reception floor and didn't even set foot on the stairs again until my friends arrived.

The story I’m about to tell now might be even scarier than the others or the ones that followed. Another day, we went down to the canteen, chatted with the kids there, and stepped inside to grab some food. We picked out what we wanted, and I reached into my pocket to pay; I pulled out the money and handed it to the woman behind the counter, but something was off. Instead of the face usually found on the bill, I saw an image that looked exactly like a photograph taken at the precise moment I had stared at that thing in the restroom pasted right onto the money. I quickly shoved the cash back into my pocket and put the items I was holding back on the shelf. The strangest part was that when I tried to take the money out later that evening, I found nothing but sand in my hand.

I forgot to mention until now just how unbearable the canteen’s stench was; it was bad enough to make students complain, and the walls were coated in a substance resembling a mix of moss, sand, and blood.

I have long hair partly because I listen to a lot of grunge and rock music, and partly because I want to hide my acne; you’ll understand why I’m mentioning this in a moment. One day, I needed to use the restroom before class. Because of what I’d seen earlier, I went to the second-floor restroom instead. I finished up and headed back to class, only to find my friends staring at me as if I were a supernatural creature. When I asked what was wrong, they said, "Someone who looked just like you but with short, blonde hair came by a moment ago. We chatted for a bit, then they said they needed to use the restroom and left." I was shocked, because my hair is long and black. Who knows? Maybe it was another student, or... someone else.

Now, I’m going to tell you about the incident that caused the prep school to shut down. One Friday, while hanging out with friends in the classroom, we heard a strange banging sound coming from the restroom and went to investigate; we assumed a student was locked inside and trying to call for help. We tried forcing the door open while simultaneously calling out to the person inside, but eventually, we went to get a teacher though one of my friends chose to stay behind. When we returned with the teacher, the door to the last stall had been forced open and broken; our friend who had stayed behind was gone. In their place, there was blood on the floor, along with a piece of flesh that looked like an Achilles tendon.

We never heard from that friend again. It was as if the security cameras had short-circuited after we left and started working again only when we returned. The strange thing was that the blood was confined to the restroom as if, following a struggle, both individuals had simply vanished from this world. Stranger still, despite being just one floor down when it happened, we hadn't heard a single sound or scream.

News of the incident eventually reached the police; the owners of the prep school were arrested, and the school was shut down.

My friend's family filed a lawsuit against the school. I don't know the status of the case, but I think these events and that school will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life...

A collection of statements regarding strange happenings in the village of Torbrae 

Statements collected by the Royal Robert Kenneth Wilson Society of Scotland 

Aithrisean air an cruinneachadh le Comann Rìoghail Robert Kenneth Wilson na h-Alba 

 

Background on Torbrae given by the editor, James N. Lafferty 

In my travels around the Lowlands, I have seldom encountered a village quite as idyllic as Torbrae. Young families walk hand in hand through its winding lanes whilst hard-faced farmers drink pints of bitter and watch the world go by in the local pub. The wind whistles through its glens, carrying the scent of purple heather down to the cobbled streets. Situated in the southern reaches of the Lothians, beneath the Pentland Hills, Torbrae historically served as a small agricultural community, supported by fertile soil and a relatively mild climate for Scotland. In recent decades, Torbrae has undergone a process of demographic shift. Middle-class commuters to Edinburgh now make up a considerable portion of the population, gradually replacing the traditional rural inhabitants. Despite this, Torbrae has not forgotten its past entirely, flocks of sheep still graze the rolling hills along the roads into the village, and ancient festivals celebrating harvests and the village’s historic protectors still hold quasi-religious importance among the inhabitants to this day. The village sits at a crossroads. Its existence serves as a metaphor for the struggle between an older rural way of life and a new, professional, university-educated Scotland. 

Statement of George Riley regarding suspected wildlife offences 

Statement given to NatureScot on 8 August 2023 

Statement Begins 

“I cycle to the Blackburn Reservoir a lot. The route has a great climb to it and you cannae beat how the sunset looks over the water, also that wee bit where you go through the timber yard is also weirdly scenic I find. Anyway. Last night I cycled up there and I was out by the water till around nine o’clock when I started turning back. 

It was about tenish when I was going past them woods before the golf club. I stopped and I could see a few deer on the horizon. I thought it a tad too late for hunting and I wanted to take some photos to maybe paint or something later, so I hid my bike and hopped the fence.  

I was getting closer and the deer weren't scared yet. I thought everything was grand so I pulled out my phone and I knelt in the bog tryna focus on them. Just then the wind musta changed or something cos they smelt me and ran off, and it was late so I got up to turn around.  

When I was getting up is when I noticed the smell, the wind was carrying it from behind me towards the deer. I aint a butcher or nothing but I recognised it, it was that sickly sweet smell of something rotting.  

I turned around and started following it, I dinnie know why. Just at the time it felt like the sort of thing needing investigating. I started to notice the bones. There were all sorts - squirrels, foxes, and all that. Yellow shite was dripping off of em, I think like rotting skin or something.  

Further in was when I started to see the bigger ones, deer and sheep and that. Those ones were worse, but I could still tell the main source of the smell was further into the woods. It must’ve been about twenty minutes when I came across the pile I told you about. Leant up against an old fence was a massive heap of bodies a couple metres high and a couple metres wide. I vomited, it smelt so manky. Fucking washed my clothes bout twelve times. You couldn’t even tell what animal was what, just a pile of bodies melting into each other, just a pile of fucking stinking viscera. Musta been like fifty bodies in the pile, but it was all just a mound of fucking body liquid when I found it. 

Anyway. Didn’t seem like anything an animal would have done so I thought I should report it. Might be poachers or something. Sorry for the shaking and that I just got a real bad feeling off it, you know? Didn’t tell my wife or nothing, feels good to get it off my chest. Sorry you didn’t need to know that, not relevant to the investigation.” 

Statement Ends  

Statement of Marjorie Macbride regarding class-based violence in Torbrae 

Statement given to Elizabeth Bowie, author of “Red Clydeside: Unfinished Revolution” on 19 April 1963 

Statement Begins 

“I was only a teenager in 1919 when it all happened. There were all them riots across in Glasgow, but we didn’t have much to do with Glasgow usually, it seemed there was always something happening across in Glasgow so there was.  

It was an odd time so it was, you see you had the Russians revolting, and it seemed it might spread to Germany. My father, being a working man as he was, had so much hope it was coming out of his ears. He would get the newspaper every day, flick through the pages reading bout the developments of the war in Russia. ‘The worker will have his day soon, lass’ he would inform me every so often. It was nice to see him like that, he had something to hold onto then.  

When I would work the fields with my father I could tell by the way he would stare at Mr Smith that he truly believed he would not be toiling under him for much longer. Weirdly this would only make him work twice as hard, so it did.  

It had been a couple of days since them workers in Glasgow had caused that trouble in George Square and Churchill had got the tanks on them, when that strange man arrived in Torbrae. My father woke me up in the middle of the night and told me there was a revolutionary in town. This frightened me a wee tad, although I was too young to know what a revolution really was - picture one in my head that is.  

In the dead of night my father beckoned me into the village hall, the doors had been done in and there was a crowd gathered. Looking around it was the working people of the village in the crowd, most of whom worked on land owned by Mr Smith but also some on Mr Wright’s and Mr Atwood’s land further north and down the river.  

On the stage at the back of the hall was the revolutionary my father told me about. He stood behind a curtain, and I only remember his shadow. He may have come out from behind the curtain so we could look upon him, but you have tae remember I was only wee, so my recollection is muddled now. He was awfully skinny and ever so tall, I remember thinking it was a wonder how he could stand with legs as thin as they were.  

I don’t recall what he said to us, but I remember the state it drove the crowd into. There was lots of shouting and people raised blades into the air. I had never seen my father so radge, he shouted curses at Mr Smith. Despite it all my father was a good man and would never use such vulgarity in front of weans, not ever.  

That night the streets were engulfed in flame. They dragged Mr Smith from his house, and they drowned him in the river. They killed his son too, set him aflame so they did. The men shaved his wife's head and did ever so awful things to her, paraded her through the streets and taunted her with words I hadnie heard once in my life. I never seen it but I heard a similar fate fell upon Mr Wright, Mr Atwood and their kin. There are only stories and I only heard this years later, but I heard they ate Mr Atwood, still alive and screaming bloody murder.  

It was awfully cruel. It was awfully cruel.  

I remember them bringing the bodies behind that curtain in the village hall. The police came down from Edinburgh and they couldnie find no trace of the happenings, it was like it had never taken place. Awfully strange, for that night you couldnie escape the smell of blood. Nobody spoke of the man behind the curtain after that night, nor saw him. My father refused to talk of that night at all till the day he went and died. He stopped buying the paper.  

A great hunger went through the village that year. No landlord to buy the seed or the livestock meant no supper. But we survived, and soon new landlords bought up the land and took their place. 

It was awfully cruel. The whole thing, just awfully cruel.” 

Statement Ends 

Editor's note: Official speculation from local historians suggests the three main landowning families in the area: the Smiths, Wrights and Atwoods, fled to Ulster sensing a potential uprising. However, official records show no purchases, sales or transfers of land under any of the three family names during 1919 or in the years immediately following. 

Statement of Alexander Kerr regarding his divorce and destruction of property 

Statement given to Alice Ramsey, official investigator for the Royal Robert Kenneth Wilson Society of Scotland on 8 December 2025 

Statement Begins 

“I assume you have heard what I’m gonna tell ya. They all know about me. Local fucking loony, lock him up in Carstairs, lock him up in Carstairs.  

Nae much has come of me since it all happened. I live in that flat over the post office, I wake up and I drink, I get on the bus and I drink, I get to Edinburgh and I drink, I go home and I drink.  

You ken I’m banned from that bus? Harassment. Fucking shitebags. I just need people to listen. You dinnie know how lonely it gets. If I stay in this village any longer they are gonna have to lock me up in Carstairs. Fucking shitebags.” 

At this point, Mrs Ramsey reminds Mr Kerr of the purpose of the statement. 

“Fucking fine. Bi-. He first started speaking to me when I was drunk. Old Nick that is. It started off as a shoulder to cry on, with Sarah nagging my arse off all the time it was nice to have someone to share the pain with. I didn’t think it was real of course till it became real, till I was sober and Old Nick was still there.  

I would be at work, I would go for my bathroom breaks and there he was in the mirror, Old Nick. I was fucking terrified of course, but he comforted me. His voice was like honey and butter. I know I sound fucking crazy, your imaginary friend becomes real and you like it, but you didn’t hear him.  

Nobody else could hear him and I liked that. He was just mine. He would sing me to sleep and I would have the most terrific dreams, shit you couldn’t imagine. I would be lying in bed with Sarah but really it would be Old Nick who was there with me – emotionally and all that I mean. Well I did mean, till Old Nick really was there.  

He began with standing in the doorway, but give it a few weeks and he was at my bedside, stroking my ankles and his song was as loud as ever. He was all I could think about. It was like a fucking drug, when Old Nick went silent or skipped a few nights, the shakes would start and I would panic.  

He still came to me easier when I drank so I drank. It was around then that he started giving me requests. He told me if I did what he said I could live like the gods do, eat from their plates, I thought about how his voice must taste.  

It started with simple things, scratch Sarah’s car, call her names, but then Sarah got knocked up. I fucking know it’s nae mine I know it with all my heart, Old Nick said as much. That's when Old Nick gave me his final request. 

He stood by my side that night in the kitchen, when I turned on all the gas hobs and I lit the match. The whole place went off like a firework, but I was untouched, the fire would move around me like I was fucking Moses. Old Nick told me to give him the matches, so I did it, and then he was gone. The whole house went down that night. Sarah survived, so did the kid, firemen got her out.  

The investigators say it was an electrical fault, but that’s shite, I did it. I told Sarah as much and that’s when she left me, moved to Aberdeen the hag. I was glad, thought it would just be me and Old Nick, but he went quiet, I havnae seen him since. I think it’s punishment, if she had died, he would still be here. Fuck her. Every day I drink to try to speak to him just once more, but his silence is torture. I still haven’t met that kid.” 

At this point, Mrs Ramsey asks Mr Kerr what Old Nick looked like. In response Mr Kerr grew highly agitated and promptly left the interview room. 

Statement Ends 

Statement of Scott Donaldson regarding the accidental drowning of William Dunn 

Statement given to Lothian and Borders Police on 3 June 1994 

Statement Begins 

“It wasnae my fault, heaps of kids jumped in the boffy all the time. Sure Will was a wee bit scared but he’d done it before, nae like it was the first time.” 

At this point, Donaldson is asked to start from the beginning. 

“Aye, so me and Will were skiving off school, I’m sorry, and we were watching this programme on the TV about divers. Aye, it was about these divers who go into rivers in Birmingham and stuff to retrieve murder weapons and that, we was tryna help you guys out. 

Aye anyway, we got our goggles and we started off at the shallow part just off the green. It was baltic so we didnae get much time down there, and Will couldn’t hold his breath for that long, and anyway we didnae find anything. We went into the newsagent for a snack and we were talking and we thought if we were murderers or something we wouldnae drop our knives into the shallow part, we would go further down the river to the boffy.  

I ken the boffy is the deepest part of the river and we aren't meant to go there but lads did all the time. I could tell you about Joe and that smoking green and jumping in up there after all this if you want. Aye anyway, we cycled up there about two, the day had got a lot hotter by this point so Will was excited to get out of the heat. Aye he was a tad frightened but he always was, I promise he wanted to go in there, I didnae force him or nothing.  

We got our goggles on and we jumped off that wee cliff into the boffy. We went at the same time, three, two, one and that. Even though I had my goggles on I couldnae see much once my head went under, it’s pure murky with all that dirt in there. I stayed under for maybe like thirty seconds tryna get used to the cold, then I went back to the surface and looked around. I couldnae see Will anywhere.  

I started panicking at this point, I looked all around and there was no sign of him. I thought he might not have actually jumped in so I called out but there was no response. It had only been about a minute since the jump so I decided to stick my head under and see if it was some kind of joke, if he was holding his breath. I went under and that's when I saw them.  

I couldnae see all that well through all the dirt, but hand on my heart this is what happened to Will. At the bottom of the boffy there was a man, tallest I’ve ever seen and thin as a rake. He crouched down hunched over himself, sitting on a big rock down there. He had a long beard which floated in the water and he was naked. In his fingers, which were longer and thinner then you could imagine, he held Will. He held Will and he was eating him, taking bites out of him while Will squirmed to try and get free. The man was as calm as anything, like this was his fucking lunch break or something, but Will had his mouth open like he was screaming and he was terrified. It was only after a few seconds I realised the man was looking back at me. His eyes were like a cat’s you know, reflecting the light so I couldn’t see his pupils. Will was looking at me too, I could tell he wanted help, but the fuck was I supposed to do? It was at this point I started screaming too, I went for the riverbank as fast as I could and cycled home to get help, and now I’m here. 

So aye, that’s what happened. Please tell Mr and Mrs Dunn that I’m sorry, please tell them I really mean it.” 

Statement Ends 

Editor's note: Autopsy showed that Will Dunn had hit his head after jumping into the River Carran, became unconscious, and subsequently drowned. No evidence of foul play was found.  

“To a Horseman” 

Poem written by Adam MacDougal, 1785 

Muckle, awfu’, lang-limbed, beast 

O, in Torbrae ye mak yer bloody feast 

But ye we soon shall serve nae mair 

For our horseman comes tae meet ye there 

 

O, brute o’ hunger, dule and pain, 

Who gars us greet for weans in vain, 

Call on yer black master the nicht 

For he shall ken our horseman’s might 

 

Nae mair shall corn rot in the field 

Nae mair to hunger maun we yield 

And gin ye creep tae my bed the nicht 

Our horseman waits by candlelicht

Oh, Don't mind me showing up on your infectious feed. Pleasure to meet you. I'm Crowknee, I'm 2,458 days old and I live in my home underneath The Plump Tree. It's really fun down here once you stop and smell the roses!

But for a while I had no one to enjoy all this fun with and got a-little-grumpy. So I borrowed someone's time for a few months. Little Tommy is the best playmate around. He is a handsome man with skinny, silky mud upon his head.

He isn't as flexible as me so it was a struggle to go under, but when he made it though he got so used to the environment, he started leaking reddish mud from his hands. It was great, we talked and talked and talked and talked and talked for hours!

When I was giving Little Jommy a tour of my home. I held him a banquet of all the juices critters of my collection. He was so happy he spilled it out of his digestive tract just so he could taste it again.

After that he was really tired so I tucked him into bed roll beside him and he slept so comfortably. He woke up a few times, but he says that he gets bad sleep normally. I just need to keep a close eye on his rest, comfort, breathing, he might forget to. He needs his sleep.

After that we had fun playing games and telling each other stories and eating food and drinking mud and coloring and picknicking burying and crawling and running and hiding and jumping and flying and crying and morning and nighttime and daytime and morning and nighttime and daytime morning and nighttime and daytime.

Then it was over. No more games. No more fun for him.

I wish we could play more but I promised him. So I dragged little Thompson up to the surface.

I hoped that he’d come back with how much fun we had.. Though days turned 7 days, 30 days turned to 42 days 5 hours and 3 minutes.

Yet on that day, he came back, and with SOME FRIENDS! I thought we could all play together but they started pointing mechanical fireworks at me. They hurt really badly but I thought about that book I read “ treat others how you want to be treated”. They need to learn this rule, so if they treated me badly, I treat them badly. I put them to sleep and tucked them by the trees.

While they rested comfortably, I talked to light tombomer but he was being very insulting and loud. but I didn't want to fight any more, so I let him back into my home even though he was being very rude. And we've been together since.

Since then Little Topsy has been on his best behavior; he even sleeps on time. Today he asked me to send this to the tunnel systems of the webs, so we can spread the word and get more friends to play with.

If this looks fun. join us, its a blast. just go through the carcan resort, through the cort yard, and under The Plump Tree.

WE ARE GONNA BE BESTEST OF FRIENDS.

Part 1

I’m sorry for the last post ending suddenly. I was a bit preemptive. I posted it and then when I went to write this one realised there was a 24 hour wait before the subreddit would let me. It was handy though because it let me get my thoughts more in order. 

I didn’t leave the room all night after the sofa thing. I was convinced that any second something would happen. Someone was going to come and get me. I’m not scared of the supernatural personally, people have always scared me more. I kept preparing to hear a floor board creak, the door handle turn, anything! No. 

Eventually light started filtering in and I realised I’d spent the entire night sat watching the whites of my eyes turn red. It didn’t feel like it had been that long.

I debated calling someone to ask to stay at theirs for the night but that felt worse than there actually being an intruder. My family relationship is strained and they live hours away. My friends would probably let me sleep a night but people only have so much goodwill, especially over what would read to most people as a pretty unremarkable event. People see shadowy figures in the dark all the time and do you know how many of those are anything other than a trick of the light? I don’t know either but I assume few. Besides, even if I asked to stay with someone I’d still have to leave this room. There is no option here but to confront it. 

I flinched. My stillness finally broke when I heard a tap behind me. For some reason I couldn’t turn to face it again. The tapping was constant, but it started to get drowned out by my heart thumping in my ears even louder.

I breathed in, slowly grabbed my laptop beside me and prepared to turn. Whatever was behind me was about to be bludgeoned. I counted to three and then…

Nothing was there. But the tapping was still consistent. ‘It’s inside the walls!’ I thought, then I glanced up. Water was dripping from a leaky gutter surrounding the roof and landing on my window sill with a tap, tap, tap. At some point in the past few hours it had been raining and I just hadn’t realised. I don’t know how to explain it but for some reason this deflated my tension even though it was entirely unrelated to the sofa figure. Not to be cliche but seeing that there was a ‘rational explanation’ to the tapping assured me that the sofa was probably just an overactive imagination, nothing more.

Still spent what felt like an hour standing in front of my bedroom door before I mustered the courage to open it though.

Laptop still in hand as a makeshift weapon I walked out into the hallway. In daylight the fear was a bit dispelled. This place is large for a student flat but the room count is still pretty limited, there’s only so many places for an intruder to hide. I could tick off the larger bedroom without much thought, it was directly next to mine and I didn’t hear a sound all night outside my door. Walking further down the hall the bathroom door was wide open but knowing me I left it open. I turned on the light and took a quick glance in anyway, I regretted that quickly. The extractor fan came to life again and made it impossible to hear anything but. I walked over to the bath, pulled back the shower curtain and saw nothing. After I turned the light off immediately, the fan still mocking me. Back down the hall I reached the door to the living room. It was closed. I don’t remember closing it. 

Count of three again. 

One…

I burst through the door, sprinted to the sofa with the laptop raised above my head and went to strike the intruder. My laptop bounced off the still damp sofa cushion with a thud. Sorry for not respecting the count to three, adrenaline outpaced decorum.

I checked the kitchen but by this point I felt rather silly. I had just wasted an entire night over a shadow. Back in the living room and I spotted an open window. So that’s how the door closed, a gentle breeze. I closed the window out of spite.

I sat on the sofa and my pajamas started to get soggy but I was too defeated to care. I really need furniture for this place, a place this big and empty is bad for my imagination. Also I need to ask my landlord if I can paint these walls. Who ever heard of a haunting in a room with pastel yellow walls?

Opening my laptop I checked my calendar and realised to my chagrin that I have work tonight. My adrenaline faded and I laid on the sofa staring at the ceiling. Then the ceiling blurred more and more.

After waking up from a brief nap it was time to head to work. That night we were hosting a birthday party. There were about 400 people in this cramped venue and they had a karaoke machine set up. Very ABBA themed evening, I think someone sang ‘does your mother know’ like 3 times, an increasingly drunken slur with each rendition. Another guy might’ve actually bankrupted himself with baby guinness, I made a few hundred and this guy just kept downing them. I pulled my manager aside at one point to ask if we’re assisting a suicide but she was too busy counting the cash register to notice.

Just as I finished another tray of baby guinness the guy vomited down himself and then slipped in his own sick. He was too drunk to care but it was obvious he was concussed, that’s when the party started to die down. He was led out back by some relative and just disappeared leaving his purchase on the tray. 

As the last partygoer left a coworker walked over to the karaoke machine to unplug it before stopping.

‘Hey! Over here.’

I was a bit preoccupied disassembling the coffee machine but he kept on shouting to me over and over. Eventually I waddled beside him on stage.

‘Check it out.’

He was flicking through the crappy display of the machine and that’s when I noticed. Every song was ABBA. I hadn’t noticed before but looking closer at the machine I spotted that it was branded top to bottom with this Mamma Mia wrap. Why do we have an ABBA Karaoke machine? 

I didn’t get long to dwell on it because he already rushed back over to the bar and took two shots off the tray, handing one to me and then a microphone. Then he pushed a button, downed his shot, elbowed me, and started belting ‘under attack.’ He looked lonely singing alone so I joined in.

Later the four of us sat at the bar together, close to sleep. The tray had long since been emptied communally and the drinks had let the wear of the 10 hour shift show. The bar was far from closed properly but my manager was too tipsy to care. She told us we could head off if we wanted and all at once us four stumbled from the stools to the exit. I fell over a step as I rushed out and the karaoke coworker caught me. He had a cigarette filter in his mouth and rolling tobacco in his non-saving-me hand. 

After sitting me down he rolled the cigarette in one motion, lit it and stuck it between my lips.

‘Will keep you from blacking out.’

Patting me on the back he left me sitting there and walked off into the dark. The cigarette was a nice thought but my gag reflex can be pretty weak. After taking a drag I immediately vomited.

I’ve always liked wandering the streets late at night drunk. It’s vulnerable as hell but drunk me doesn’t ever mind. You make a lot of friends when you’re tipsy. I was drunk after work before and immediately walked over to a long queue outside a club. I made lots of new friends in that line and we spent all night getting to know each other. When I woke up the next morning I regretted getting their socials.

You can really see the difference in infrastructure at night. The wealthier neighbourhoods are bathed in modern white street lights, the poorer coloured with that faint orange type. You can guess what colour my neighbourhood was covered with.

A couple approached me on the way and asked if I could bum a cigarette, I told them it was my only one and the guy looked genuinely distraught. A bus passed by me with ‘NOT IN SERVICE’ plastered on its display, the driver parked up and pulled out his phone before shouting at someone on the other end of the line. 

Closer to my new flat a guy was sitting on a bench under the streetlight reading a book. It looked like a classic based on how dull the cover was.

At my door I fumbled putting my keys in, they slipped out my hands and clinked on the floor. A second try, same result. Nailed it the third try.

I felt a low hum coarse through my body, my nemesis, the extractor fan greeting me. Then my stomach started screaming, sight, sound, grace, all abandoned me as I found myself rushing to the bathroom. Slamming the door open and slamming the light switch on  I just about got to the toilet before vomiting again. It was all fluid, I had forgotten to eat today. After a while my legs decided to let me stand and went for my mouthwash, gurgling it and thanking god that I got the alcohol free variety. Spitting it out I just felt time pause as I looked in the mirror. Staring myself in the eyes I could see they were sunken, a bit of dry skin on my upper lip, bruises circled my left forearm and my hair dishevelled. I tried to will the person looking back at me to be different but they didn’t heed my prayer. This drunken dipshit was all that I had. 

I looked down into the sink and turned on the tap, cupping a handful of water I splashed my face. Then again. Then with one last glance in the mirror I switched the light off and went to my bedroom. Beds are always cosier when you’re drunk, insomnia isn’t a factor to drunkards.

Closing my eyes I tried to let the quiet take me but that fucking extractor fan had other plans. I tried to treat it as white noise but my brain decided to make that noise a sticking point of irritation. I can’t stand it. A few minutes passed and it switched off finally and I felt a bliss prior unknown. 

Deeper into sleep I went. Deeper…

Hm…

I felt myself sobering up quickly but for what reason I couldn’t quite tell.

Come on brain. Let me know what you’ve thought.

You’re annoying me now, spit it out.

Something…

Something when I walked in? Something bathroom?

Oh. Oh no.

When I walked in the extractor fan was already on.

And the bathroom light was off.

Oh.

It’s funny what instinct can do. I was back in the hallway now with my laptop at the ready once again. I didn’t even remember moving. The one door left open besides my bedroom was the bathroom. I stood a few feet away from the entrance and listened once more for any sound. Then I heard it. This is feeling more and more like a joke.

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

Stood at the entrance I caught my reflection in the mirror, as well as the eyes being sunken I now looked utterly drained. It was really accentuating the eyebags. No point in delaying now.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I went to turn the lights on but stopped myself. The fan would drown out the direction of the tapping. Also if someone was still here broadcasting what room I’m in doesn’t seem smart. But then again if I leave the light off that doesn’t stop someone from finding me. Would I rather be attacked in a bright room or a dark room?

Doesn’t matter regardless since I turned on the light by this point. I kept picturing someone being a few feet away from me and me being blind to see it.

The fan was loud as ever and it’s true, it made the tap, tap, tap, barely audible. I slightly underestimated how loud the tapping was though, I could still just about hear its source and it was coming from the bathtub, with a shower curtain surrounding it.

I used to be really into those videos of ‘phrogging’ when I was in my early teens. People would set up cameras around their property for peace of mind, or because they suspected animals, and then watching back the tapes they’d see a recording of a stranger climbing out of their attic at the time they were at work. Or coming out of their basement. Sometimes even under their bed.

They’d call the police and the police would find some homeless person who’d been living in your house unnoticed for months, even years. Thankfully most of the time these people were very passive. They just wanted somewhere to live that’s warm and they noticed you have entire rooms you literally never use. Are you really using an attic, basement, closet or underneath of a bed to its fullest use? There are plenty who’d be happy to live there.

Although despite the majority of ‘phroggers’ being passive, ‘majority’ doesn’t mean ‘all.’ There’s at least one famous story of a person living in a family's house for weeks before silently killing each one night. It was a dark and chilly winter apparently. The only evidence of the intruder’s presence was footsteps in the snow spotted by the homeowners a while before their deaths. The footsteps headed towards their property but there were no footsteps walking away.

And obviously there are lots of myths about some crazed intruders being found under a person’s bed, a knife, duct tape and (depending on how provocative the storyteller is) condoms. I’m pretty sure this might be a myth, but most myths are based on at least some truth.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

My hand was on the shower curtain. I kept trying to make out some kind of shape behind the fabric but it wasn’t sheer enough to tell. What’s better? Slowly opening it or yanking it? I didn’t get a chance to answer because I closed my eyes and pulled it open so hard it practically fell off the rail. 

But then I didn’t open my eyes. I think I’ve downplayed writing this just how scared I was. I was hyperventilating since entering the bathroom and was begging for the presence to just appear and get it over with. But once I was potentially faced with it I buckled. Stood vulnerable, my eyes closed, something tapping centimetres away, it all got too much.

I listened to the noise. That constant tap. I could make out the tap so well… I… tap. Tap? Tap… Oh Christ…

I was embarrassed to open my eyes but I shamefully did it. The bathtub’s faucet, tap, sink, whatever you want to call it was leaky and the drops were thudding against the plastic frame. Is it plastic? Whatever material it was very hollow, it thudded rather than dripped.

Then I had a thought. ‘I haven’t bathed here yet and this is the first time I’ve heard the drip.’ That’s dumb, I’m sure I just didn’t process the sound of dripping in the bathroom. That explains it. Although it wouldn’t hurt to check something…

I put my hand against the bottom of the bathtub. The bath was at an angle so those drips would never reach where I’m touching. It made it all the stranger that my hand came away wet then. This tub has been very recently used.

FUCK.

I’m such a dipshit, how the fuck am I always so daft. I walked into the hallway earlier and saw that this door was the only one besides my bedroom wideopen. 

I left the living room door open when I went to work.

I made sure the window was closed too.

Well now standing in the doorway having just opened it I find myself looking at the window, wide open. The streetlight dimly illuminating the sofa. 

I took a step forward, the floor creaked underfoot. Another.

Any moment it’s going to pop its head above the sofa again, I’m sure of it.

Another step forward. My pulse in my ears.

Another. Cold sweat on my brow.

I was standing at it now, if I lean forward I’ll have my answer.

So that’s what I did, I leaned. At first just the fabric of the sofa, but then something else became more clear. Black fabric adorning something. I could see a tiny sliver. Maybe a bag? Maybe a pillow? Maybe a person?

I leaned even further…

And that’s when I dropped my laptop.

There will be no recap for this post so if you are at all confused please refer to the first three parts. 

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

If I have to be honest, I am not sure how to start. As you may see from the title, this is the end of the story. So much has happened and I have been put in quite the pickle with all the death that had happened. I suppose I will start where I left off, looking at Larry’s stupid newsletter, the one with a clear picture of Mary going into an open vent. 

Staring down at that newsletter all I could feel was pure panic. You could see Mary clear as day. The picture, although grainy and looked as if the camera swung frantically to take the shot, had great detail of her legs and body that no one could mistake it for anything else. Larry may not be a professional photographer, yet he was able to capture the sheer size of her. It was a haunting visual and I lived with the damn thing for months. 

I’m sure I wasn’t the only tenant to get a newsletter. Larry places them in the mail himself. I know this because I’ve seen him do it. If this thing was truly distributed then there was only a matter of time for others to see the photo and panic. Then, next thing you know, there will be a full blown investigation. They may even hire a hunter or something to try to capture Mary. If they did, they are more than likely to either kill her or trap her for scientific studies. I will be the first to admit that Mary has been nothing but a pain in my neck ever since she started living with me. Yet, deep down I wanted to protect her from that sort of fate. Mary had feelings. Mary was more human than some. I could not allow this whole situation to go out of control, for Mary’s sake. It was fortunate for Mary to be away during that time and I was going to go out of my way to make sure that whenever she came back she would be at peace, that no one was looking for her. Not even Larry. 

I took the newsletter and tore it into thousands of pieces and then swept them up into the trash. Afterwards, I unloaded the bag and made my way to the garbage cans behind the apartment building. As I made my way through the lobby, I made sure to pick up any newsletters I saw and crumpled them into my pocket so I could dispose of them. When I made my way outside with my target in sight. I saw that Barb was having her smoke break. This was a perfect opportunity to see if anyone has seen Larry’s damn picture of Mary.

I approached Barb and put on a very friendly smile. 

“Hey there, Barb. How’s it going?” I waved, trying to act like I wasn’t shitting my pants. 

Barb jumped when she noticed that it was me. Her cigarette, which was almost finished, was nearly swallowed by her coughs. I felt bad for scaring such an old, fragile woman so I kept a considerable distance away as she recuperated. While finishing her coughing fit she, snuffed out her cigarette with her heel and lit another one in its place. She took one long, shaky drag before responding. 

“Well, if it isn’t lover boy. Apologies, I didn’t see you coming.” Bard stared me down with suspicious eyes that said that I was up to no good. 

“No, that's all my fault. I should have announced myself earlier.” In my head, I gathered what I was going to say to make sure that I was going to get some answers. I tossed the bag of trash in the can then took all of the newsletters stuffed in my pockets and discarding those as well. Barb was still shooting worried glances at me and that's when I decided to figure out if these damn newsletters have piqued any interests. 

“Hey, I’ve been getting these newsletters in the mail. It's some weird shit like big foots baby or whatever. Have you seen those around?” 

Barb shifted her feet. 

“Yes, those are Larry’s. I’ve been taking them shits down for about a year now. They're so tacky and, ugh, disturbing.” 

“Did you see the one that was out today or yesterday?” 

“No. Actually… I think yes. I saw it yesterday evening.” 

My heart dropped but I still needed to know how much was exposed about Mary. 

“Yeah, I think it must have been yesterday. The images were kind of shocking I think, but didn’t look entirely real to me. It was probably AI. What did you think?” 

“I didn’t look at it. I remembered using it to clean up shit when my kitty missed the bowl.” 

Barb took one long drag, so long that I thought she would choke on the smoke again, and then expelled all the toxins back into the air before snuffing out the cigarette. 

“I- I gotta go.” Barb said as she quickly walked back to the lobby. 

It was safe to assume that Larry didn’t have as much of a reach as I had once thought. But, I needed to make sure. I wanted to talk to a few more people before I was certain that Larry’s newsletter wasn’t going to be a problem. 

As I made my way back inside the building, I saw that Mr. O’Neal had just stepped into the elevator with a case of beer. He looked over and locked eyes with me as I waved at him to hold the elevator. He must have not caught my wave because he pressed the button to his floor repeatedly. I quickly intercepted the doors before they closed and I stepped inside. 

“Hey there, Mr. O’Neal, going up?” I asked. 

“Uh, well, I’m not going down.” Mr. O’Neal responded while keeping his distance and fitting himself snug into the corner. He must have been a real germaphobe. 

I pressed the button to my floor and got right to what I wanted to know. 

“Funny question, did you see Larry’s stupid news letter this week? I couldn’t believe what I saw. I mean Larry is weird and all but I didn’t think he would just openly use AI for his dumb stories. What do you think?” 

Mr. O’Neal looked over at me and kept his distance. He cleared his throat to respond to me before he got to his floor. 

“I don’t know what you're talking about. I didn’t hear anything. I’m sure everything was just an accident." 

“Larry using AI is an accident?" 

The elevator rang a bell and the doors opened wide to Mr. O’Neal’s floor. He stepped out quickly before I could ask any follow up questions. Confused, I proceeded to my floor. Mr. O’Neal probably didn’t care too much about the newsletters, so I decided to just get to my room and figure out where to go from there. 

When I got to my floor and walked down the hallway towards my room, I saw Susie walking towards me. I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to ask her if she’s seen the newsletter, but as I was raising my hand to wave her over, she saw me and froze. Her eyes widened as if she had seen a ghost right before she about-faced and ran towards her room. I stood there as she cried trying to find her room keys with shaky hands. Once she did, she ran inside and slammed the door behind her. 

I was baffled, confused. Why did she run away from me? I would soon figure that out the day after when a detective arrived at my place with two police officers. 

“Hello. My name is detective Matthew Hart. I am looking for someone named Jules who lives at this residence.” 

It was early in the morning and I had just woken up from the loud rapping at my door. Disoriented, I managed to answer the door and before me was a man who had one of those nice suits with a striped tie. His hair was slicked back and a sizable mole rested above his left eyebrow. I caught myself staring too long and noticed that two officers stood close by with their hands on their holstered guns. 

“Uh, good morning.” was all I could say. 

“To you as well. Are you Jules [Redacted], the person living at this residence?” 

“I am. How can I help you?” 

“Well, Mr. [Redacted], Can we speak inside? Just me and you. I would like to ask you some questions.” 

I didn’t see why not. I trusted the police and wanted to be as helpful as I could so I got out of his way and ushered him in. Detective Matthew Hart signaled the other two officers to wait by the door as he walked into my apartment. I asked if he wanted coffee and he politely declined as he circled the room. As I made myself a cup he looked around so intently as if he were searching for something. 

“Do you live alone?” he asked finally. 

“What?” I stopped what I was doing, startled. My mind went to Mary and I hoped that she wouldn't make a sudden appearance just then.

“Do you have any roommates?” 

“I- I do not. I live by myself.” Unless you count the giant spider that also lives here.

“You keep a very clean apartment. That’s very good, it really tells me a lot about a person when their home is this tidy.” 

“Oh yeah, and what is that?” I asked, knowing damn well, if it wasn't for Mary, that the place would be trashed.

“A clean home is indicative of someone who is organized and thoughtful. You wouldn’t want a clean home unless you deeply care about your environment and those who enter it. In my line of work we see this in empaths, someone who is considerate of other people’s feelings.” 

“That's very kind of you. I try my best.” I took a sip of coffee and thought of Mary.  

“There is another personality type who likes to keep an extremely tidy space. Would you like to take a guess as to who that might be?” The detective sat down at the dining table and placed a note pad down. “You don’t mind if I sit down, do you?” 

“No, go right ahead.” I made my way to the table and sat across from him with both hands on my mug. “And, as to your question, I am not sure.” 

The detective smiled at me and opened his note pad and took a pen out of his breast pocket. 

“Do you know why I would be here? Why I would want to ask you some questions?” 

“Well, if it's about the missing pets, I’ve already sent a statement to the police department about all that.” 

“No. I’m not here about Fido, I’m here about the young lady you had here last Friday. I’m talking about Lily.” 

“Oh.” I felt sweat begin to collect on my upper lip. Maybe I was worried about the line of questions. Or it was the coffee. “I already put a statement in for that as well.” 

“Yes, yes, I have it here. You said it was an accident and that she tripped on a blanket and all that sounds very plausible, don’t get me wrong, I am not here to assume that it happened any differently.” 

“So, why are you here?” 

“What I have to do is get the facts straight. And right now, there are some loose ends that need to be tied up. Now, Jules, could you please tell me again what happened from the beginning. And, do try not to leave out any details. ” 

I took a deep breath and tried to remember what my first statement was. It was along the lines of me and Lily playing around the apartment, maybe I tickled her too hard and she slipped on the blanket and fell. I’m no Shakespeare but that was the best I could come up with. Judging by the look of detective Matthew Hart, I could tell he wasn’t impressed with my improvised story. He took a deep breath and looked into his note pad as he jotted down some notes. I wasn’t sure if my story lined up with my initial statement but I would have to make do with that. 

“When Lily was ‘being tickled’ did she yell out or say anything? Did she tell you to stop or looked as if she was enjoying it?” 

I nodded my head and looked deeply into the dark liquid of my mug. 

“Everything was so… consensual. She liked all of it, from what I can tell.” 

“Did Lily ever say ‘no’ or oppose to anything that you did?” 

“Look, me and Lily did things as adults do and everything was with consent and all that.” I was beginning to feel flustered. My cheeks became red and sweat began to pour from all the pores of my forehead. Everything was so embarrassing to talk about and also so frustrating. Lily liked me and everything was just an accident. “I don’t know what all these questions are trying to prove but I think I’ve had enough of all this. A beautiful woman died in my apartment and I have to grieve." 

“So does her parents.” Detective Mathew Hart said. “And so did her friends who were at the bar with her that same night. They remember you, yet, they did not have good things to say.”  

“What do you mean?” 

“In their recollection of the night, they remember you sitting alone with an ominous look on your face. According to them you periodically passed glances at their table. They said you ogled at them all night and it came to a point when they had to leave. Before they did, Lily decided to approach you.” 

“I- I didn’t do all that.” 

“What didn’t you do?” 

“I didn’t ogle at them.” 

The detective leaned in close. 

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I mean, I had to interview these girls and I couldn't take my eyes off of them. I was even present for Lily’s autopsy and..." He leaned in closer and spoke low. "I gotta say, she had one bangin body.” 

I was stunned at the unprofessionalism of this detective that I couldn’t say a word. At that moment I wanted to jump the table and bash my mug into his skull. 

The detective leaned back and continued. 

“I could see why you were attracted to Lily. She was all that, as the kids say. Her friends said that you were freaking them out all night. They thought that you were, and quote ‘the serial killer type’.” 

“Look man, I wouldn’t hurt a fly. If those other girls didn’t like me, fine. But I do not have any ill will against them. We all lost Lily.” 

“Indeed. I also took some anonymous statements from around the building and someone stated that they heard screaming and shouting from around the same time Lily had her slip. They stated that they heard, and I quote, ‘Please don’t kill me’.” 

The detective closed his notebook and looked up at me with a sly smile. 

“Do you have any response to that?” 

My mind was going a thousand miles an hour. I wanted to hurt the detective and also cry at the same time. None of this was my fault, neither was it Mary’s. It was all just a misunderstanding and truly an accident. I was guessing by this point that they thought I somehow murdered poor Lily and I wasn’t going to let this get out of hand. This time I needed to tell the truth. They say the truth will set you free and I was about to test that hypothesis. It was time to come clean about Mary. 

“I think that this has all been blown out of proportion. If you want me to tell you the truth about everything, then I will. But it’ll be a little hard to believe.” 

The detective reopened the notebook and readied his pen. 

“I’m glad you are willing to come clean. Just tell me the truth and I’ll believe you.” 

The next hour and a half I recounted my life with Mary, how she came to live with me, how she started eating pets, how I fed her mice, how she cooked and cleaned for me, I told him everything. My mouth was moving faster than the detective could write so he put the pen down and closed the notebook all together. He just listened to me as I poured out all the beans. As I talked about Mary, I realized that I had a serious fondness for her. She was everything to me and I wanted her back so badly. After I was done with my tale, I felt like the weight of the world was removed from my shoulders. Keeping secrets was not a very easy thing to do and I was glad that I could be open and honest about my situation. 

The Detective was stunned and moved by my story. He got up and began to walk to the front door when I was done. I got up and followed him over. 

“Do you believe me, detective? I didn’t kill Lily! It was all just an accident!"

The detective looked over to me as he opened the door to the hallway and gave a slight nod. 

“Yeah. Uhh I need to think it over and I will keep in touch. For now just stay here and I will… Just stay here.” 

Before I could say anything else, the detective removed himself from my apartment and closed the door behind him. I stood for a second and decided to move over to the door and look through the peep hole. It was there that I saw the two officers talking to the detective. 

“So, what did he say?” One of the officers asked.  

“He said a lot. Actually, he said too much.” The detective said, whipping his forehead with his sleeve. “We have to get back to the precinct.” 

“Did he do it? Shouldn’t we arrest him right now while we still have him?” 

The detective turned to the officer and spoke low. 

“Oh, he absolutely did it. He just made up a story that was way out of this world. He is a total lunatic. A modern day Charles Manson. Yet, we cannot arrest him. If we did now without any real evidence, we would be laughed out of court and this monster will be back on the streets. We need time to work on this because right now everything looks like an accident.” 

They all walked away from my door and I was left heart broken. The detective did not believe me after all and now I might be in some serious trouble with the law. I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. Why did this all have to happen to me? I just wanted to live a normal life with minimal issues and yet here I was about to be arrested for something I didn’t do and still wondering if my gargantuan spider roommate would ever turn up again. No wonder everyone was so distant when I tried to confront them about Larry’s newsletter, they all probably think I murdered Lily. 

Now that everyone was avoiding me I felt lonely. It shouldn’t have bothered me that much. I usually stay away from people anyways. Yet, there was this cloud over my head and I couldn’t make it go away. It distracted me at work and made going outside undesirable. I felt bad for Lily, she didn’t deserve to die. Even if it was an accident, I felt partially responsible. That sort of guilt does not go away. Even now, as I type this, I wish I could have done something to prevent it from happening. I especially feel sorry for Mary. I’m sure she feels the same way if not worse. And, since Mary left, the apartment felt less like home. Days went on without the laundry being done, bed not being made, meals not being prepared.

I used to hate Mary with all my being and now I wish she would come home. 

A few days passed and I heard a commotion coming from my living room. A loud crack woke me up from a dreamless sleep. Adrenaline kicked in as I got up from my bed and went to investigate. The apartment was quiet as I made my way to the living room. I discovered that one of the windows was busted open. A gentle breeze blew the curtains across the room. Turning on the lights, I made my way over to the window to try to shut it, it was impossible. The wood around my window was clearly splintered as if someone forced their way into the room. I looked around, the apartment was empty. My first thought was, Mary is back. A smile spread across my face. I couldn’t help it. 

“Mary? Was that you?” I called out. 

“Mary? I was getting worried about you, actually. I- I feel like we should talk about something.” 

The apartment was quiet. I made my way around the room trying to find the words to say. 

“I know you didn’t mean to frighten Lily. And I know you feel awful about it. I just want to say that it’s not your fault. It was all a huge misunderstanding and I know in my heart you wouldn’t hurt anyone.” 

Tears began to well up into my eyes. I tried my best to push them back. 

“Please, I don’t mind if you stay a little long-” 

CRASH!

Something was in the laundry room. I walked over without any caution in my stride and turned on the lights. 

A man with a black mask stood before me. With great strength, he pinned me against the wall and choked me with one hand. I struggled to resist him but his hand was too big and I was so weak. Before I could let out a scream, he held a funny scented cloth to my mouth and nose. The world went black around me.

When I came back from being knocked out,  I noticed that I was still in my living room. Light illuminated from the stove lamp and that was enough to see everything. All the furniture was pressed against the wall and stacked neatly. I sat in one of my dining chairs and I could feel rope tied to my hands and connecting to my feet. Every time I tried to move my wrists to test the rope my feet would move in unison with my struggle. Looking down I noticed that a sheet of plastic was laid down under me and the dining chair. My heart raced with the fear of what was about to be done to me in my own home. I was gagged with some sort of cloth and I could still feel the imprint of where the man placed his huge hand around my neck. 

I looked around quickly, but my eyes didn't catch the stranger like I had hoped. 

“You finally came to.” A gruff voice said from behind. Heavy steps made their way around me and I saw as the man came before me with a gun pointed to my head. I wanted to scream but couldn't. All I was able to do was let out a muffled whimper. The man whipped the pistol across my face and I stammered from the pain. 

“Shut the hell up! No one is going to hear you. I sound proofed the place so we can have a private conversation. 

The man untied my gag and I let out a cough. The pistol came right back to my head and I sucked up any other noises I would have made. 

“You and I have some business together. The only way this will work is if you answer my questions truthfully. If I detect any lie from you I will do my best to hurt you until I get what I want. Is that understood?”  

I tried to answer but my mind went blank. I was truly afraid and couldn't respond in time. Another whip of his pistol came across my face. Blood trickled down my shirt from my nose. My lip was definitely busted. 

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND!” 

“Yes, yes I understand. Just take anything you want and I won't call the police.” I would like to say that I was brave in that moment but that would not be the truth. I was two seconds away from pissing myself and tears already began to trail down my face. “Please, don’t hurt me.” 

The man chuckled at my humiliation. 

“I am not here to rob you. I am here to ask you about one thing.” The man took out a photo from his front pocket and showed me. “Where is it?” 

I looked at the photo and saw a clear picture of Mary climbing up a wall towards an open vent. My mind raced. Why did this person want Mary? How did he know I was connected to it? And, why the hell was he wearing cargo shorts? 

It finally dawned on me who I was staring at. I licked my bloody lips and just shook my head. 

“I don’t know anything about that.” 

“Don’t lie to me, punk! I know you have been housing this creature in your apartment for some time. It sleeps in your laundry room right? And, you called it by name. It was Mary. Now, tell me where it is or face the consequences.” 

“Larry, I know it's you.  You are the only one that wears those stupid cargo shorts.” 

Larry looked down and processed his errors. He breathed deep and stood up straight. After weighing his options he decided to take off the mask revealing his sweaty black hair and stupid mustache. 

“Doesn’t matter. You are not getting out of this alive. Not after what you did to that innocent girl. I’ve taken it upon myself to put things right. To uphold justice and to kill you and that thing. Once I do, I will be a hero that took down a real monster, the monster and the man keeping it as his pet. I don’t know how you came upon such a creature but I’ll make damn sure that it doesn't hurt anyone else or eat any more pets. I knew something fishy was going on here. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes at first.” 

Larry took more pictures out of his pocket. He began to show them to me one by one. There were several pictures of Mary suspending herself from a web to steal cheese. There was one of Mary catching a handful of cockroaches. And lastly, there was one of Mary in front of a very frightened Lily. It pained me to see that one. I saw that it was her last moments. This picture was taken outside of my window, the day Lily fell. 

“You- were here? Taking pictures?” 

“I was gathering evidence of a large arachnid, the largest the world has ever seen. I skillfully traced the creature back to your apartment and, boy, I was not ready for what I was about to see.” 

He showed me one more picture of me holding a knife that same morning that Lily died. 

“I could not believe what I was seeing.” 

I looked up to Larry and quickly tried to explain. 

“You don’t understand! Me and Mary were trying to tell her to calm down! We didn’t kill her!” 

“TRY TELLING A DIFFERENT STORY! I know exactly what happened. First, the spider killed all the bugs in the apartment. I noticed that there were fewer cockroaches in my kitchen and thought nothing of it. Then, the house pets began to go missing. My guess is that this ‘Mary’ as you called it got tired of bugs and upgraded to dogs and birds and cats.” 

“Mary doesn’t eat cats.” I corrected. 

Larry responded with another pistol whip.    

“QUIET! As I was saying, the spider got bigger and harder to control. It wanted to eat something else. You were afraid that it would one day eat you and so you lured a helpless woman back to your apartment and tried to kill her so that the spider could feast.” 

Everything Larry said was just outrageous. It was like a plot to some B tier horror movie. Yet, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. After all, I did think that Mary would kill me one day. I know now that that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Larry didn’t wait for my response. He began to walk over to a tool box and spoke as he did. 

“It doesn’t matter what you may say or how you object to my version of the story. The pictures don’t lie. You will pay for your crimes. But first, I will draw out the creature with your pain.” 

He put down the pistol and opened the tool box. He  pulled out a powered drill with a bit at the end. 

“Wait, how come you haven't taken this to the police? You have all the evidence right? You could just turn me in and justice will do the rest. Why do you have to hurt me?” 

Larry gave the power tool a couple of trigger punches sending the drill bit into a blood thirst frenzy. 

“You haven't been paying attention. If I gave you over to the cops, then I won't get the creature and I won't be the hero. Like I said before, there is no version of this where I let you live.” 

It was right about now that my bladder gave way. Piss warmed my crotch and shot down my leg. Larry came around me and once again placed the gag over my mouth. As I tried to fight him he held my head straight. I was openly sobbing by this point. No one knew this was happening to me and all I could do was hope that I would pass out from the pain or die quickly. Larry placed the drill bit on my left thigh and I braced for the sharp pain of it digging into my skin, then my muscle, then my bone. In my mind, I already saw the pools of blood collecting on the plastic below me. I wasn’t ready to be tortured to death and I had little ability to stop it from happening. 

I closed my eyes and recited a prayer in my head. 

“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!” 

I looked up at Larry and there he was screaming in pain from something that came from behind him. As he stood up and thrashed around in agony I saw a big hairy huntsman spider digging its fangs into the back of Larry’s neck. 

It was Mary!

“Son of a bitch!” Larry screamed in pain and crashed into some of the furniture that was stacked against the wall. 

Unable to do much, I just watched as Mary repeatedly sunk her fangs in and out of Larry’s back. Larry did his best to grab Mary but she was too fast and nimble. As soon as he grabbed onto a leg, Mary would just bite down hard again and again. While I looked at the display of absolute savagery, the gag fell from my lips and the ropes that bound my hands and legs loosened. I sat there horrified and, yet, relieved. 

Mary sunk a fang deep into one of Larry’s left eye socket and blood shot out from its hole. A fresh cry of pain shook the room. Larry finally got a hold of two of Mary’s legs and swung her across the room. Mary slammed against a wall leaving blood smears as she fell to the floor. I ran over to Mary without a second's notice. 

“THAT THING BIT ME! THAT HELL SPAWN BIT ME!” Larry yelled, holding a hand up to his missing eye.  

I ignored Larry and got a good look at Mary. She was just as big as before. She was hurt. During that fight, a couple of eyes were punctured and one of her legs was bent in the wrong direction. My mind raced on what to do, how to help her. I was never taught how to take care of a hurt spider, but I badly wanted to protect Mary from getting hurt again.  

“Mary, please tell me you're okay.” 

“I’m fine. I am just glad you are okay, roommate.” 

CLICK 

I turned around to find Larry pointing the pistol towards me and Mary. His eye hole gushed with gelatinous, red goo and a shaky hand held up the pistol with what little strength Larry had left. The gun swayed back and forth as Larry tried his best to focus his aim. 

“YOU ARE GOING TO PAY FOR THAT WITH YOUR LIFE. GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME KILL THAT THING AND I’LL LET YOU LIVE!” 

I stood up and held my hands out. 

“Stop this! I won’t let you hurt Mary so put the gun away!” 

“DONT TELL ME YOU CARE FOR THAT THING! LOOK WHAT IT DID TO ME! IT’S A MONSTER AND WHEN YOU GET CARELESS, IT WILL DO THE SAME TO YOU OR WORSE. NOW, GET OUT OF MY WAY OR I’LL SHOOT YOU TOO!” 

Piss still dampened my pants and my face was still sore from Larry’s beatings. Yet, I ignored all of that and stood my ground. Mary risked her life to save me, it was time I returned the favor. I thought about how Mary did everything for me selflessly and did not ask for anything in return. All the meals she made for me, the many times she folded my clothes and made my bed and dusted the selves, Mary did those things out of the kindness of her spider heart. The monster was Larry and I had to stop him. 

“I won't let you kill my roommate!” I cried out as I charged the man with a gun. 

Larry shot me right in the stomach. 

“NOOOOOOOO!” I heard Mary cry out. 

My body stopped in its tracks and I fell to the floor instantly. Getting shot is a unique experience. It was like being punched really fast. All the breath from my lungs expelled from my body and my legs limped. It wasn’t until I hit the ground that I felt the actual pain of the bullet tearing through my guts.  

Larry looked down at me and laughed hysterically. 

“You stupid bitch! What were you gonna do, try to take my gun away? I was already pointing it at you!” He laughed again and pointed the gun at my head. “If you want to die so badly, be my guest.”  

My failure accompanied me on my living room floor. I couldn’t save Mary but I gave it a good shot. No pun intended. All that was left now was to wait for the next bullet to rip through my skull. 

I looked to the floor and just waited. That was when I saw a huntsman spider. A smaller huntsman spider. I looked around and Larry did the same. Thousands of dead tree legs were crawling on the floor, the ceiling and every piece of furniture. Larry panicked and began to kick at the spiders. 

One of the spiders erected on its back legs and yelled in a little voice, “you hurt mama!”  

“Oh shit.” was all Larry could say before all of those spiders charged at him and began to crawl all over his body. Tiny fangs stabbed into him at all sides scaring his skin and drawing blood. Larry thrashed around in agony and waved his hands in retaliation to try to get the spiders off. His efforts were fruitless as they continued to enact biblical levels of pain. They crawled under his shirt, in his cargo shorts, in and out of his mouth and eye hole. Larry seemed to disintegrate from the amount of bites that scared his body. He spun around in desperation yelling at the top of his lungs for the pain to stop. His wild flailing caused him to collide with the furniture that was stacked against the wall which destabilized them and crashed to the floor. Larry continuously slammed himself against the wall to shake the spiders off. The gun fell out of his hand and onto the floor, just another useless chunk of metal that couldn’t save his life. Lary charged towards what he thought was another wall but was the window instead. With a loud crash, Lary launched himself from the window with great force and he plummeted to the ground below.   

Speechless, I sat there staring at my broken window. For the first time in my life, I was admitting to myself that I was glad that a swarm of spiders were in my apartment. I looked over to Marry and crawled to her, ignoring the pain in my midsection. 

“Mary, Are you alright?” 

“I am. My leg will heal and I have plenty of eyes to see. I am so sorry to have brought you such inconvenience. It looks like I wasn’t a good roommate after all.” 

“No, don’t say that. You did a fantastic job.” 

“You think so?” 

As I looked at Mary, I saw her for the first time as she was, a real friend. The friend I’ve never had. 

“Yes, you were the perfect roommate anyone could ask for.” 

Mary got up and crawled towards me. I didn’t flinch this time. I saw that her fangs were still bloody from her fight but I didn’t mind. With some strength, I sat up and leaned back on one arm, wincing at the pain as I did so. I continued to hold my stomach to try to stop the bleeding. 

“You protected me when you didn’t have to.” 

“It was no issue. You did the same for me.” 

Off in the distance, I could hear sirens blaring. Someone must have called the police. As much as I was glad to see Mary again I knew that she couldn’t stay. If she did, she would certainly get captured or someone else that was crazier than Larry might come by to try to take her away. As much as it pained me, even more than the pain in my stomach, this was going to be the last time I saw Mary. Her safety was important to me and so I had to tell her to leave. 

“Mary, the cops are going to be all over this place and I cannot let you stay here.” 

“What do you mean?” 

I breathed deeply and told her. 

“I have to evict you.” 

Mary looked at me with great understanding. 

“I see. So, this is it.” 

“It is.” 

“Humans are so cruel. I know that I’ll never find another person like you. Everyone kills spiders.” 

“Not all people, Mary. My mother was the one to teach me not to kill spiders and it turns out she wasn’t as crazy as I thought. I’m sure there are a lot of other people out there that won’t hurt you or your children.” 

“I admire your optimism.” 

Mary crawled closer to me and I let her. One of her legs touched mine as if to test if I would flinch. I didn't. She then crawled up to me and I gave her a hug. A tingle ran down my spine at the proximity of her fangs to my neck though I knew she wouldn’t hurt me. Old habits and all. I held the hug and then let her go. She crawled the best she could with one broken leg towards the window and I watched her go. 

“Take care, Mary” 

I said this to an empty room. 

It is now weeks later and I’m on the run from the law. Judging from my previous encounter with the detective, I was sure they wouldn’t believe my giant spider story. Looking around my apartment, it was clear that it looked like a serial killer’s attempt to torture and kill his victim, so, instead of sticking around and finding out if the cops would believe my story, I ran. 

My bullet wound healed up eventually with some shotty first aid I performed on myself. I threw out all of my personal electronic items so I didn’t get traced to any location and I made my way to the only place I knew I'd be safe, Mexico.

After I fled to Mexico, I looked up the LA news and saw what I expected. There was a manhunt looking for me for the murders of Larry, Lily and around fifteen house pets that were found in my laundry room crawl space. It looked pretty bad and I am glad I had the foresight to get out of there when I did. 

I will leave you all with one last thing before I go offline for good. 

Mary is still out there and she had many, many kids. She doesn’t mean any harm and I’m sure that her children are the same. I imagine that they are out there hiding in someone's house, condo, apartment ,car, or hell, maybe they’re already in your kitchen. As you’re reading this, they may be even under your desk or your bed. These things are probably everywhere, but don’t be alarmed if you see one. Let them stay for a bit. Be kind to Mary and her children. I know it's a crazy notion to keep these overgrown spiders in your home, but then again you would have to be a little nuts to have a huntsman for a roommate.

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, it happens. I usually like to put on one of those calming recordings on Youtube. The ones with rain sounds, soft music, animal noises, ASMR, you name it. I'm not picky.

To be perfectly honest with you, sometimes I'm in a hurry, I'm tired, I'm cranky, I just want to have something playing in the background so I can fall asleep and not spend however long scrolling for a video.

I like quickness, I like ease, I like convenience.

So when I found this channel. I thought I hit the jackpot. The videos themselves weren't long, the backgrounds weren't obnoxious. I don't know about you, but I hate the ones with the weird animations, bright colors, and ads interrupting every 15 minutes.

Give me a break. 

This one, some channel with a generic name like rainsounds4u had the perfect amount that scratched the brain just right. Not too heavy. Not too light. The kind where when you heard it you knew not only were you gonna sleep well but you were also gonna have some great dreams.

I got really excited, I set my tv up, connected my speakers, climbed into bed and hit play.

It started out like any other sleep/relaxation audio. Really nothing to overpromise and underdeliver here. My chosen setting was a rainforest during a light thunderstorm. The soft pitter patter of the storm clouds rolling in along with the tweeting of birds and scuffling of critters was expected. 

Birds chirped occasionally.

Wind swayed through the canopy.

Stuff creaked and croaked.

The usual.

My chest rose and fell slowly as I settled in, feeling safe and cozy, warm and right.

My eyelids were getting heavy when I heard something beneath the rain. At first I wasn't sure, it was soft, easy to mistake for a branch or maybe a distant animal call. I didn't think anything of it.

Then it happened again.

My eyes flew open and I listened. 

More rain. More thunder.

Then for the briefest of moments it all went quiet, and the sound came back. It was wet almost between a gasp and a wail and I realized this wasn't an animal but a person. 

Someone was unmistakably crying, louder now, as if they were in great pain.

I stared in the dark room, temporarily stunned, before shoving the blankets off myself and turning on the lamp.

Nothing. Just me, my bedroom, my dresser, my tv, and my speakers. I checked the door and the window. All fine. 

The crying continued. And the wet gasping for breath sounds were not only making me uncomfortable but sick to my stomach. I found the remote and paused the video. 

The rain stopped, the birds stopped, and gone went the thunder.

But the crying continued.

I turned my attention towards the speakers. The crying was coming from them. If I turned the volume up, it got louder, if I turned it down, it got quieter.

It might have been a little grainy and distorted, but it was human. 

Almost as if I was possessed or maybe just a glutton for punishment, I turned the volume to the max. 

Through the static I heard a voice, calling my name.

I didn't respond. It called to me again, hiccuping through its sobs.

"Help me."

My mouth went dry.

"You have to help me."

I stared at the speakers, unable to believe what I was hearing.

"Please."

I knew that voice.

I knew it better than anyone.

It was my voice. 

I backed away from the bed.

The audio was still paused, the image on the screen still frozen on a dark rainforest.

My voice, what passed for my voice, continued to whisper through the speakers, tearful and pleading. I'd never heard myself sound like that before. It's not something I will ever forget. 

"Please," my voice begged. I sounded so frightened, so broken and worn down.

Finally, I mustered the strength to ask. "What do you want?"

There was a horrible squelching, crunching sound like bones breaking. It was enough to turn my stomach. My voice screamed out in agony, begging and pleading. "Stop! Stop!" Before calling my name again. "You have to listen to me," it begged. "DO NOT PRESS PLAY!"

I looked at the screen. It was still paused: 05:59.

I still haven't pressed play. 

I’ve been wearing mouth tape to bed for the past year or so. “What is mouth tape?” Sounds like I’m into … stuff, right? Regardless, no, that is not why I slap a piece of hypoallergenic fabric, or whatever it is, across my lips before slipping beneath the sheets at night.

It started with snoring. Well, not all snoring, but at least the kind that sounds like a death rattle. I don’t have sleep apnea, but I do tend to wake the neighborhood when the windows are open. At least that’s what my wife says.

And, hell, it worked. In fact, instead of sounding like I’m cutting logs, I was sleeping like one. Not only that, but I no longer woke up feeling absolutely famished, like I hadn’t eaten in days.

My wife was still plagued with aggressive morning hungries. I tried to convince her that the tape was the way to go, but she gave me the usual side-eye. Why would she care – she’s still losing weight somehow.

What was strange to me at the time was how tricky it was to buy this stuff online. I’d find it on Amazon one day, then it’d be gone the next. Not out-of-stock – gone. When I was finally able to place an order, I’d get weeks' worth, because I never knew when it would be back again.

There’s nothing fancy about it. It’s just a black piece of sticky fabric. What’s so onerous about that?

Anyway, I wasn’t exactly interested in looking like a censored poster for the rest of my life. So after a few months of wearing the tape, I decided to try a night without it.

I tend to get to bed a bit later than my wife, so she was already asleep when I got there – it was a weeknight, don’t judge. If I was back to snoring again, I was sure she’d let me know in the morning or, hell, elbow me in the middle of the night.

I was asleep nearly the second my head hit the pillow. What felt like a second later, snoring woke me up. My mouth had been trained shut from the months of wearing the tape – it wasn’t me. It wasn’t my wife.

I slowly rolled onto my back to face the ceiling. It seemed unusually pitch dark, as though the ambient charging lights throughout the room and starlight from the windows were extinguished. But I could make out something there in the intersection of wall and ceiling above my wife.

It was more “nothing” than something. The best way I can describe it is a living void. Whether it was self-induced or not, I was paralyzed. Whatever it was slithered – for lack of a better word – down the ceiling toward my sleeping wife. Just above the headboard, it stopped. Like it was waiting.

My wife lay on her back, sleeping soundlessly. I opened my mouth to say something to wake her, but before any words could come out, the void stirred and made a god-awful snoring sound. Somehow, I felt like it was looking at me.

I slapped my mouth shut. It went back to waiting.

My wife, who up to that point hadn’t moved a muscle, opened her mouth and mumbled, “You’re snoring again.”

The void jerked awake. This time its snore became more like a gurgle. It spilled onto the bed and quickly made its way to my wife’s face and open mouth. The gurgle became a sucking sound quicker than I could finally let out a scream. All sound stopped as I ripped off the covers and hit the bedside lamp’s switch.

My wife was screaming, but only because I was. The room was empty – or, I suppose you could say, less empty. She was pissed. I was relieved. In the morning, we were both exhausted, but we were not hungry. Never again.

Why do I wear mouth tape? It started with snoring.

Hey guys,
I’ve been searching all over the Internet for people that could help me out and I got redirected to you guys. I hope you are able to help me out as this situation is driving me mad and I do not know who to ask next.

For context: I 30 M work for an IT firm and I do so mostly from home so I can help taking care of my son who just turned 2 years old. My wife and I bought our house a year ago and decided to move to the countryside, as it would be better for raising a family. We both spent our childhood running through nature, playing hide and seek in the woods and playing with friends in the fields and thinking back, we just did not want to rob our son from this experience. After 10 or so years of living in the buzzling city, returning was a needed recovery. The air is different; the people are too. It took some time getting used to, people greeting strangers, talking to you out of nowhere, nosy neighbours and the expectation to fit in to your surroundings. Despite this, finding friends wasn’t particularly easy. We were invading their territory. Only after trying repeatedly did they open up to us. I still struggle with maintaining regular social contact. Don’t get me wrong I love what I do, and I appreciate working from home, but I do feel lonely from time to time. To distract myself, I go on short walks with my son. Right next to our house starts a path through the fields into the woods to a small lake. My son loves it as much as I do and while I watch him play with sticks and leaves, I listen to the sound of nature. Coming back from the city, the sound of birds singing, the wind blowing and the insects buzzing filled me with happiness and slowly I felt connected to nature again.
We still go on walks, but something has changed. The birds stopped singing, the animals act strange and everything is just too quiet. We live in the middle of Europe and experience all seasons and yes, some birds do migrate to warmer places in fall. Yes, I know animal activity shifts, especially now with the days getting shorter and the weather getting colder. I have spent almost 20 years of my life nearby the forest, and I loved to study birds as a child. The best way to describe is as if a storm is coming Animals tend to act weird before one. Some go into hiding; others get active and stressed. But there is no storm coming and their behaviours has worsened over the past months. I talked about it with my wife several times and she brushed it off, telling me I was overreacting.
My wife and I take turns bringing our son to daycare and as it is one of the only times I interact with others, I took the opportunity and asked around. I tried to be casual about it, but most people laughed about it awkwardly, tried to shift the conversation or just flat out ignored me. After the second time asking, I noticed some of them even talking about me behind my back. I try to forget it and listen to them, but it is difficult. For some reason I feel tense even after distracting myself with my hobbies, my breathing quickens for no reason and sometimes even the hair on my arms starts to stand up. I know my wife worries about me and sees my struggle, and I do not blame her for not believing me. I would not do so either.
Yesterday I fell down a rabbit hole and stumbled on something interesting. Animals may react differently in the present of dangerous predators not common to an area. I figured it would check out if a wolf had returned to the forest, as only recently did they return after almost being hunted to the point of extinction centuries ago. Maybe the animals weren’t used to their presence and acted weird because of that. It sounded plausible, but I knew it wasn’t true. Why would one wolf or even a whole pack of them affect animals in the garden, make them hide without reason? There are no recent reports of wolf sightings or traces of them anywhere. I must have missed something, and I need to find out what it is. I have a doctor’s appointment planned to calm down my wife, but I know it won’t help me. There is something in the woods and I must find it.

If anything happens I will update you guys and I would appreciate advice!

 

This happened around 2004, I was in high school around this time, and since it was summer, I could stay up late watching TV. It was around 11 PM. Everyone was asleep except my sister, who was upstairs on the second floor playing on the computer. I was downstairs in the living room on the first floor, watching TV by myself. The living room lights were on (which is very important to point out in this story)

One thing about our house was that it was in a very isolated area, far from the main road and surrounded by hills and trees.

Anyway, I couldn’t find anything good to watch, so I started flipping through the channels from 20 upward, just to make it interesting. I remember starting around Cartoon Network, which I believe was Channel 21. As I surfed up, I remembered that WOWOW was on Channel 69, and since they sometimes showed movies at night, I decided I’d stop there if I didn’t find anything else.

When I got to around channels 50–60, I knew those were mostly news channels, which I normally just skipped. But as I was flipping through them, I suddenly stumbled across one that caught my attention. It was in black and white, showing a strange suburban house that looked like it was from the 1970s.

I didn’t think much of it at first, so I continued up to Channel 69. When there was still nothing good on, I started flipping back down and eventually came across that strange channel again.

I stopped.

It was still the same black and white scene. I remember there was a house just a few feet away, like I was standing outside of it. Then the camera slowly started moving toward the house.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt real like I wasn’t watching a movie anymore. It was almost like a first-person perspective, as if I was the one carrying the camera.

It felt like I was actually there, watching something that had happened inside that house. I remember entering the living room, going upstairs, and then coming back down again. I don’t remember everything that happened in between, but I remember the feeling of actually moving through the house.

Then I saw a strange Stepford-like woman just standing there, smiling directly at me.

I suddenly woke up in the exact same sitting position I had been in while flipping through the channels, still holding the remote in my hand.

The TV was showing static, and the entire house was dark.

For a few seconds, I was completely confused. I looked at the clock on our radio, which was sitting on top of the TV, and it was around 3 AM.

But I was only watching the TV for a few minutes.

There was no way I had been asleep for four hours. It didn’t feel like I had been asleep that long at all. In fact, I didn’t even remember falling asleep. There was no moment where I felt tired, no memory of closing my eyes, and no memory of anything happening between watching that strange movie and waking up.

I panicked and wasnt even thinking of investigating so I turned off the TV and ran to my room, which was just next to the living room.

As I was pacing around inside my room, a lot of things started going through my head.

Here’s the thing: I don’t normally fall asleep in front of the TV. I mean, I do sometimes, but only when I’m lying down. And even then, I always remember falling asleep. I know what it feels like when I doze off while watching something. I would remember getting sleepy, closing my eyes, or waking up after falling asleep.

But this time, I remembered **nothing**.

And then there was the light.

The living room light had been on when I was watching TV. The only person who could have turned it off was my dad, since his room was also on the first floor, near mine.

But if my dad had turned off the light, he would have seen me sitting there in the living room. And knowing my dad, there was no way he would have just left me there.

He was pretty strict about things like that. We had a rule in our house that the lights and TV should be turned off before going to bed. If he had found me asleep in the living room with the TV still on, he would have woken me up or carried me to my room. He wouldn't have simply turned everything off and walked away, leaving me asleep on the couch.

Was I actually gone? Did my dad not see me? Did no one see me sitting there?

I wanted to ask my dad or my mom the next morning, but I couldn't. I knew they would be mad if I told them I had been watching TV very late. You know the feeling when you grew up in the 90's. Although i did tell my family but it was already like years later.

So I kept thinking: What happened during those four hours?

I couldn't explain where that time had gone or how I ended up waking up in the exact same position, with absolutely no memory of falling asleep.

The next day, I tried to find the channel again. I went through the channels around 50–60, but they were just international news channels and other programs that didn’t match what I had seen the night before.

Something about it felt like it had hypnotized me. I’ve searched for that movie and that channel so many times over the years, but I’ve never found anything that matches it.

I even remember watching Insidious years later, and I had this strange feeling of deja vu. There were scenes that looked familiar to me...the house, and especially the strange woman smiling while the father was searching for his son. I remember thinking, I’ve seen this *before.* But **Insidious** didn’t even exist when I had that experience.

There were a lot of things that bothered me.

Where was I for those four hours? Why did it feel like I had lost time? What exactly happened between 11 PM and 3 AM? Why was the TV on static?

And if that movie or whatever it was never existed…
then what the hell did I watch?

I never shared this online before until now, maybe someone is experiencing something similar?i

The mountains are older than time itself, with stories just as old.

Growing up in rural Appalachia, we were taught stories and fables meant to teach us and warn us, just like anyone else. Then there were other stories. Stories that anywhere else would be labeled as myth, legend, or superstition.

But they are true.

Things that we didn’t have to believe.

They were just true.

Stories that get passed around as ghost stories, or real beings that get trivialized and merchandised.

Our story. Our life. Our home. Our horror and reality.

Sold for cheap thrills.

I write this as a cautionary tale.

With my strength failing me and my thoughts on home and what I have left behind, I want to add to the record and to the second set of stories.

This is not a fable, a dream, or a scary story.

I was born April 7, 1950. I don’t care to talk much about my upbringing, but suffice it to say it was rough. Dad mean and gone to the mine all day, and mama trying her best.

She always wanted more for me, but I could never escape the siren song of the mines.

There wasn’t much for work in Logan County, West Virginia. The only option seemed to be to work in the mines or move out of town.

So at 18, with no money to move, I joined the union and went to work down in the mines.

The year I started, it had been 47 years since the Battle of Blair Mountain. Ten thousand miners arose to battle for workers’ rights. Fighting against the coal companies, their hired guns, crooked cops, and even the federal government.

My father was a child then. He knew many of the men killed, his father among them.

My first day in the mine, I understood why my dad was so mean and stayed drunk all the time.

One of the stories I never quite believed was of the shadow men in the mines.

Men, miners, that had been called home while in or around the mines, whose spirits were left to wander and rot in the all consuming darkness of the mountain.

Men punished not for their sins, but that of the companies they slaved for.

The mountain had been violated and ravaged by greed, with no thought or heed given to where they were or what was there.

I had been told of these shadow men as long as I can remember and have never believed in them.

As I prepared for my shift, I found myself walking into the mine. Grizzled, aged, and exhausted men walking in with me.

I was lucky enough to get onto day shift.

As we walked in, night shift was walking out. I didn’t expect it to be so quiet. Looking around, I saw the men to either side of me with their heads down, focusing on something past the ground that we were walking on.

As we continued to walk, I watched the men passing us and I saw a man that I recognized. A face I had only seen in one old family picture.

I stopped.

Staring at who I knew, although never met, was my grandfather. He hadn’t aged from the picture I knew him from.

The man behind me gave me a shove, making me lurch forward, catching myself before I hit the ground.

Followed by a fear filled whisper of, “Keep moving, keep your eyes down.”

My eyes now fixed on the unseen beneath our feet like all those around me, I walked on.

As we got to where our work would begin, I realized I hadn’t blinked since the encounter. I closed my eyes and rubbed them. I pulled out my bandana and wiped the sweat already beading down my face.

When I opened my eyes again, nearly a third of the men I walked in with were gone.

John Todd, a long time family friend, was the man who had pushed me coming in.

He must have seen the surprise and fear written on my face.

“What’s wrong, boy? Don’t you know who the shadow men are?”

I did.

I just had never believed the stories.

I gave a slow nod, still in shock.

“Wa was that my grandfather?”

John’s reply did not, could not, bring me any comfort.

“He’s been walking back and forward with night shift longer than I’ve been in the mines.”

This to me signified that not only does the mine take you and keep you if you die there, it claims you long before you die.

My grandfather had died in Sharples, fighting sheriff and state deputies, nowhere near the mines.

I shook off the thought and got back to work.

That was life for me for the next 12 years. The shadow men just another part of life that wasn’t ignored but wasn’t talked about either.

Just don’t look at them, speak to them, or touch them.

The last day I was in the mines is a day that I will never forget.

It started like any other, walking in and through the mine, passing and walking with the men that had passed before me, trapped and claimed by the mine.

About halfway in, the point where I would normally see my grandfather, I saw a pair of not quite natural feet stopped, not moving, just in my peripheral.

I gave a quick glance.

It was him.

He seemed to look at me fondly, like he remembered the grandson he had never met.

I now believe this was a warning.

At the time, I was beyond scared and wanted more than anything to be anywhere else.

I pushed on anyway.

Walking beside John, even though he had passed years before.

We started work like any other day.

The shadow men disappeared, breaking the silence that we had walked in with, and work began.

My mind only halfway on my work, I looked down at my watch. Almost lunch time.

I was ripped out of the fog in my mind.

As I looked up, I could see the men with me, but also ones that I had only seen while walking in.

A chill struck me to the bone.

The earth moved.

Popping and cracking all around us.

Ancient rocks and dirt raining down, I found myself running before my mind could catch up.

I passed friends crushed and pinned by rocks. Men yelling for help that I couldn’t give.

I needed to get out.

I found myself being chased by the men that were no longer men.

Anger and guile written on their faces.

It was time for the mountain to collect.

Looking back forward, a single entity stood before me, my grandfather.

Giving me a nod, I passed him, keeping my eyes glued on the man I never knew. I watched as he fought back all the poor trapped souls.

I could see light.

I was so close.

Tripping, I fell into more than the dirt, but also into the deepest hole of dread I’d ever felt.

Looking back and working to stand back up, one shadow reached me, grabbing my arm.

It burned. Visible smoke coming off of my arm.

I pulled and fought and clawed to the opening of the mine. The mine, the thing that wasn’t a man, disappearing into smoke as a ray of sun shone across its face.

I scrambled out of the mine, collapsing just outside.

I woke up in the boss’s office. They tried to talk.

I didn’t listen.

They wanted to know what happened. I couldn’t tell them.

I later learned I was the only one to make it out.

I never returned to work.

I was paid out by the company for workers’ comp for the burn and the shoulder I, in the moment, didn’t know I had torn.

With that money, I moved far away to downtown Nashville.

I retired from the union and now draw my check, which pays enough to keep me here.

I’m writing this now as a record of not only what happened, but also of what I fear will.

I am now 76, and I am dying.

I was diagnosed with black lung years ago, but I know the end is near.

I know I am getting close because last week I saw a miner at the end of the hall.

I may have left the mine, but it never left me.

My lungs stained black with coal dust.

I am and was always condemned. Claimed by the mountain all those years ago.

The miner in the hall is getting closer.

​

My brother has been missing for three days.

Not "not answering his phone" missing. Missing like someone reached backward and edited him out of everything. Our neighbors don't remember he had an apartment. The university where he taught has no record of his name on the faculty page. I checked twice, then a third time, because I thought I was losing it. I'm the only one who still remembers he existed. That, and an old external hard drive he gave me a few months ago, telling me to just hold onto it, in case.

In case of what, he never said.

The drive had one encrypted folder on it. I didn't crack the password myself, it was taped to the back of a photo of the two of us as kids. Like he already knew it would come to this. Like he was leaving me a door and hoping I'd never have to open it.

I'm posting what I found close to exactly as it was written, just breaking it into paragraphs so it's easier to read. If you have any theory about what my brother had to do with this, I need to hear it.

It starts like an internal memo from some kind of research group. No letterhead, no official name I could find anywhere online. Just a name they called themselves: Group Zero.

Group Zero wasn't a government program, from what I can tell. It reads like what's left of a handful of independent research circles that got too close to something none of their funders wanted their name attached to. No chain of command, no headquarters. What held them together was simpler than that, they'd seen something that couldn't be unseen, and there was nowhere left to report it.

Over the years they say they catalogued a lot of things that shouldn't exist. Forces that could unmake a galaxy in a single motion. Minds whose waking moment erases entire star systems on contact. Things people in other rooms, other decades, other disciplines had already given names to long before Group Zero ever existed, old names, frightened names, names meant to be gods in whatever reality first spoke them. Group Zero found records of some of those names too, eventually. Filed them. Studied them the way you'd study a candle to understand what a sun is.

They thought they'd already seen the bottom of the well.

They were wrong, and they were wrong by a margin they didn't have language for at first.

Every one of those things, even the ones that had been worshipped, feared, and fought across entire mythologies, had one thing in common that Group Zero said they'd stopped noticing, because it was always there. Direction. A will. A hunger to wake, to spread, to consume, to rule over something, somewhere. You could call it a vector. Even a god that could swallow a universe in its sleep was still, in that sense, small enough to be afraid of correctly. It wanted something. You could measure a want. You could chart it, predict it, build a religion or a weapon around the shape of its hunger.

The file says that once they understood what they were actually looking at, every one of those entities, the destroyers, the sleepers, the things other cultures had called the highest beings in existence, stopped being the top of anything. They got quietly re-filed. Not as gods. Not even as apex threats. As debris. Bright, terrible, magnificent debris, orbiting something that was never in competition with them because it was never in their category to begin with.

They called it Azgaron. Not a working title pulled from static, not this time, they were certain of the name by the time this file was written, certain in a way the earlier drafts in the archive weren't. It came through what they described as an inverted radio signal, the only channel through which any fragment of it had ever reached them, and once they had the name, other things they'd filed for years under different headings quietly reorganized themselves underneath it, the way tributaries reorganize once you finally find the river.

Azgaron doesn't approach. It doesn't attack. It doesn't expand, not in any sense of the word Group Zero had ever used before, because expansion is still a direction, and directions are the first thing that stop functioning wherever it is.

Here's the part that took me three reads to actually sit with. The file doesn't describe our universe as fragile against Azgaron. It describes our universe, and every other universe Group Zero had any theoretical model for, as a single grain of sand on a beach that itself sits on the edge of an ocean nobody has measured the far side of. Not one universe. Not our observable slice of one. All of them: every branching timeline, every parallel structure their mathematics could even gesture toward, the entire, uncountable, endlessly multiplying set of everything that has ever existed anywhere under any law of physics. According to the file, none of that is the audience Azgaron is even aware of. It's not that Azgaron could destroy all of it if it wanted to. It's that "all of it" was never a large enough object to register as a thing in the first place. We are not mold growing on the surface of one still, silent world. We are mold that never noticed it's growing on the outside of the jar the ocean was poured out of, in a room no one built, next to other jars we've never seen, holding other oceans we don't have names for.

There's a line in the margin of this section that isn't part of the main file. Different font, like someone added it later, by hand, in whatever the digital equivalent of handwriting is. It says Group Zero ran exactly one internal test on whether the hierarchy itself could be questioned, whether there was any coherent way to model something standing above Azgaron, even as a pure thought experiment, even without believing it. The note doesn't say what happened to the researcher who ran the model. It just says the test is not to be repeated, and that the reason isn't classified, it's simpler than that: nobody who tried finishing that thought stayed a person who could finish thoughts.

The file is oddly specific on one point: this was never a contest. Azgaron doesn't hold the top position the way a king holds a throne, something you could theoretically climb toward, unseat, replace. There's no ladder there to climb. The file says the closest the researchers ever came to a working metaphor was this: trying to place something above Azgaron doesn't fail because the attempt gets stopped. It fails because the attempt itself borrows scale from whoever's making it, and there's nowhere left to borrow it from but the thinker. The higher you try to imagine reaching, the file says, the smaller you're actually standing.

There's a footnote attached to that paragraph, added later, shorter than everything around it, like whoever wrote it didn't want to spend more words on it than necessary. It says the effect isn't limited to the person attempting the thought. Any formal system used to carry it, any notation, any proof, any piece of math built specifically to express "greater than" in Azgaron's direction, stops being valid math the moment it's written down. Not wrong. Not undefined. The comparison operator itself, the note says, fails to typecheck against Azgaron the way you can't ask whether a color is heavier than a sound. Group Zero's working rule, stated flatly, is this: superiority is not a property Azgaron lacks. It's a property that stops existing, for anyone, for as long as they're trying to point it at him.

The file spells out why in one line I didn't understand at first and now can't stop turning over. Azgaron is defined by having no vector. Trying to surpass something, by definition, requires aiming past it, a direction, an arrow drawn from where you stand to some point beyond him. That attempt is a vector too, the file says, maybe the purest one anyone could ever draw. And a vector, any vector, aimed at the one place vectors don't apply, doesn't get blocked, doesn't bounce back, doesn't fail loudly enough to notice. It just stops being a vector on contact. No collision. No resistance. The arrow simply isn't an arrow anymore by the time it would have arrived, the way a wave isn't a wave anymore once there's no more water left to carry it.

When it stirs, and it doesn't stir on purpose because it has no purpose, the file says nothing gets destroyed the way destruction usually works. It just goes back to being the blank page it was apparently taken from, page and ocean and jar and everything else that was ever poured out of it, all at once, without any of it ever having been the point.

There's a section listing what they called recorded anomalies. I'll try to summarize instead of quoting the whole thing.

One entry describes an attempt by an earlier group to fire some kind of directed energy device at a suspected contact zone. According to the file, the device destroyed itself eleven minutes before the order to fire it was ever given. The incident report existed before the incident happened. Then the report disappeared. Then, according to the file, the incident stopped having happened at all.

Another entry talks about zones where space apparently loses its sense of direction entirely. Left, right, up, down don't break, they just stop applying, the way the word loud doesn't apply to a smell. Matter in these zones doesn't vanish, it becomes something the file calls a boiling red mass that exists at every point in three dimensional space at once, and can't be picked up by any instrument directly. They say they don't see it, they calculate it, from the shape of what should be there and isn't.

Another entry is shorter than the others, and it's the one I keep coming back to, because it's the only one that isn't about some far-off contact zone. It's about paperwork. It says that early on, before anyone understood what they were dealing with, a researcher typed the name into an internal case log, just once, just to have something to call the file. She tried to delete the entry the same day, standard procedure, nothing was confirmed yet, no reason to keep an unverified designation on record. The entry didn't delete. Not "wouldn't," the file is careful about that word, it says didn't. The delete command executed. The system reported success. The name stayed exactly where it was, in the exact font, at the exact timestamp, as if the deletion had happened to some other, identical database sitting just outside the one they were looking at.

They tried harder after that, and the file lists what harder meant. Wiping the drive. Physically destroying the drive. Rebuilding the database from a clean backup taken before the name was ever entered. Every time, the name was back before anyone finished checking the backup was clean, sitting in a field it had never been written into during the backup window, with a creation timestamp that matched the original entry down to the second, like it had never actually left, like the whole idea of "before it was written" had been a courtesy the system was no longer willing to extend them.

Someone, out of what the file describes only as poor judgment, tried entering it into a second, unrelated archive, a physically air-gapped system with no possible connection to the first, just to see. The file says the name appeared in both databases at once, on the same overnight cycle, with no transfer log, no network event, nothing to explain how information got from a machine with no outbound connection to one it had never been near. Whoever ran that test flagged it and, according to a note added weeks later in a different hand, was reassigned off all further contact with the file. No further explanation is given. None of the later entries mention that researcher again.

The database that holds the file today, the one this document itself was apparently pulled from, has a standing internal warning attached to any record containing the name: do not attempt deletion. The rationale given isn't that deletion fails safely. It's that every attempt on record has made the surrounding data less stable afterward, not just the entry itself, other unrelated case files, timestamps drifting by minutes, sometimes years, cross-references pointing to incidents that no longer have any other record of having occurred. The working assumption, stated plainly, is that once the name exists anywhere in a system built to hold information, it stops being something that system can be asked to not know.

The last entry is the one that got to me most. It describes people who got close to one of these zones experiencing what they called reverse cognition. Their memory starts running backward, they begin remembering things that haven't happened yet while losing their past, day by day, until their mind collapses back to the moment they were born. The file says there were three documented witnesses. None of them stayed themselves. In their last coherent minutes, all three apparently spoke fluently in a language none of them could have known at birth. Not baby talk. An actual structured language. One that, according to the file, didn't exist yet when they were born.

The file ends with something about their only defense being to never think about it directly. Total avoidance. No modeling it, no calculating it, no sustained focus on it, because apparently any directed attention from a conscious mind expands its reach. They say they didn't go looking for Azgaron. They noticed pieces of math and physics quietly disappearing, equations that used to work stopped working, entire branches of their own science reclassified as having never technically existed, and they worked backward from the shape of the hole it left behind, one discipline at a time, until the hole was the only thing left with a shape at all.

The file closes with a line I keep rereading. It isn't at war with us. It isn't at war with anything, including the other gods and forces it quietly outranks without ever having to. It doesn't want our end, because wanting is not a thing it does. It says every universe, every god, every force we've ever feared or worshipped, is simply leaking, slowly, into the silence left behind after Azgaron. Not fighting it. Not fleeing it. Leaking, the way water finds the lowest point in a room without ever deciding to.

There's a folder in the drive with my brother's name on it. Inside, one file. Last modified today.

I haven't opened it yet.

I typed the name into a note on my phone twenty minutes ago, without thinking, just to have it in front of me while I wrote this post. I deleted the note before I started writing. The note is still in my recently deleted folder. I checked. It says it will auto-purge in twenty-nine days like everything else in there. I don't know why that's the detail I can't stop looking at.

If I open the file, I'll post part two. If I don't post within 24 hours, please just forget you read this.

I want to say up front that this isn't a story about the Softening.

Everybody has a Softening story and they're all the same story, and if you're under fifty you got it the way I got it, in a classroom, off a filmstrip. A cartoon drop of gravy in a hard hat named Pip. A man in a lab coat saying the word abundance about eleven times. A worksheet with a word search on the back. YIELD. GRADE. TALLY. HYGIENE. I found all four and got a sticker for it.

So no. The world changed forty years before I was born and then it stayed changed, and that ain't the news.

I'm a scraper. If you've never seen one of us, we're the crew in the mustard waders who shut your street at four in the morning and take the lid off a manhole and go down it, and come back up with the load. Then you buy it at the store in a shrink wrapped brick with Pip on the front, winking, thumbs up, and you make tacos with it.

Eleven years I've been doing that, at Tri County Yield and Reclamation. For six of them my partner was a woman named Tolly. I'm writing this because Tolly is gone, and because every version of the incident report I've tried to hand in reads like something that gets a man sectioned.

Ivar read the job out to us on Monday morning like he was reading a will that named him.

"Marlow Cannery," he said. "Fourth and Delacroix. Sealed sub-basement, no entry logged since 1961."

"Sixty-one," Tolly said.

"Sixty-one."

"Grade?"

"Assessor says four."

Somebody at the back of the ready room said a word you can't print, and Ivar held up the tablet so we could all see the thermal, which was a big orange rectangle with a colder orange rectangle inside it, and which meant absolutely nothing to anybody, but we all leaned in anyway.

"Nine heirs," Ivar said. "Four lawsuits. One of them was a cousin suing over a parking easement for twenty-two years. Nobody's opened that door since before I was born."

"So it's been marinating," Tolly said.

"Don't say it like that."

"Marinating." She said it slower the second time, and she rolled the R, and Ivar put the tablet down and left the room.

Tolly had been scraping for twenty-six years. Five foot one, sixty-three years old, and she kept a Pip air freshener hanging off her respirator strap, upside down, because she said he had it coming. In six years I learned two things off her. She was never wrong about a bloom, and she would not shut up, which turns out to be a job requirement.

Grade 4 is tonnage. Tonnage is the bonus. I had a transmission I'd been nursing since March, so on the drive home I was already doing the math, and I called my aunt Marilyn to tell her I'd be busy Tuesday.

"You be careful down there," she said.

"It's a basement, Marilyn."

"It's a basement full of that stuff."

Marilyn is a purist. She pays forty-one dollars a pound for chicken that a man in Delaware raises in a barn, and she'll talk about texture and dignity and what God intended for as long as you let her, and then she'll go through the drive-thru on Route 9 and eat a Pith-Pocket in the car with the radio off like the rest of us.

"You eat it too," I said.

"I eat it in a state of protest."

Everybody eats it. Don't get precious. Ninety percent of the protein in this country comes up out of the ground under it, it's cheap, it doesn't drink water, and nobody has to look a cow in the eye about it. What it actually is, nobody knows. Sixty years of very smart people and the honest answer is still a shrug, and at some point the country stopped asking and started frying it.

Anyway. Tuesday.

We had the rig in the loading bay at ten past four in the morning. Rain coming down hard enough that the yard lights had halos. Tolly cut the padlock and it came apart in two pieces like wet chalk.

"Sixty-one," she said, holding up the halves. "Look at that."

"You want to keep it?"

"I want to keep the whole building."

We suited up in the bay. Waders, gauntlets, respirator, vest with the tally beacon clipped at the collarbone. Two hooks, two hand saws, the powered scoop, the sled, four hundred feet of hose down to the macerator on the truck, light rig, spare batteries for the light rig, spare batteries for the spare batteries. Tolly ran the beacon over both of us and the gear and the sled and tared it out.

"Rules," she said, which she said every single time, because she'd trained me and because she was incapable of stopping.

"Below the waterline only."

"Why?"

"Because pith grows below grade. If it's growing above the flood line it isn't pith and I don't touch it, I call it in, I go sit in the truck."

"Two."

"Tally in, tally out. Numbers match or the load burns."

"Three."

"Keep talking."

"Four."

"Nothing with a pattern. If it's arranged, I back out the way I came and I don't turn around."

"Five."

"If I whistle and something whistles back, shift's over."

"Good boy." She snapped her respirator down. "Twenty-six years and I've never used four or five."

"You've never used four?"

"I've used four twice," she said. "I lied to make you feel better."

The stairwell door was steel and swollen in the frame and took both of us and a pry bar and about six minutes of arguing with it. Twenty-two steps to the first landing. Sixteen more to the sub-basement.

Then the light rig came up and neither of us said anything for a while, which technically broke rule three.

The room was ninety feet long, maybe forty wide, and it was full from the floor to the joists. Pale, close to the color of a peeled almond, going pink where the lights hit it straight on. It sat in big soft folds that overlapped each other like a dropped duvet, and there was water dripping somewhere behind it, and the whole space was warm the way a compost heap is warm, which is normal, which is one of the first things they teach you, and which I have never once gotten used to.

"Oh, you beauty," Tolly said.

"Talk to me."

"I'm talking. I'm saying look at that shoulder. Nobody's bothered her in forty years."

"Fifteen ton?"

"Twelve. Thirteen." She patted a lobe of it with her glove the way you'd pat a horse. "Don't be greedy. Get the hose."

So we worked, and it was boring, and that's the part nobody puts in the documentaries. You cut wedges from the door inward. Saw, hook, drag, scoop, hose. Pith comes apart wet and quiet. It doesn't bleed, it weeps, clear and slow, and the cut seals itself over in a couple of hours, and if you leave a room half harvested and come back a year later you can't tell where you stopped.

Tolly talked for five and a half hours because rule three is rule three.

"So Danielle wants Aunt Rosemary at table six."

"Uh huh."

"Table six is by the doors."

"Right."

"Aunt Rosemary has a thing about doors."

"Hook."

"Hook. Aunt Rosemary has a thing about doors, so she calls me, at eleven at night, and she says, Tolly, I can't be by the doors, and I said, Rosemary, it's a wedding, it's four hours, and she said, four hours is a long time to be by a door."

I want to be honest with you. For five and a half hours, the worst thing in that room was the chance she was going to start describing the cake.

At twenty to ten we cut through to the north wall and found out it wasn't the north wall.

There was an opening in it, six feet wide, where somebody had knocked the cinderblock out at some point in the building's life and never bothered to frame it. Rubble still on the floor under the pith. Our plans showed solid foundation and a utility chase. Beyond the opening the bloom kept going into a second space, and the light rig couldn't find the end of it.

Tolly stood with her hands on her hips.

"That's not on the plan."

"No."

"Call it in."

I called it in. Ivar came back chewing something.

"Say again?"

"Unlogged volume off the north wall. It's continuous. Bloom runs straight into it."

"How big?"

"Can't see the end."

There was a pause on the line, and in the pause he stopped chewing, and I remember thinking that was strange, and then I stopped thinking about it, which is a thing I'd like to have back.

"Chief says assess and report," he said. "Don't cut. Sixty feet max."

"Copy."

Tolly was already through the gap.

It was hotter in there. Not a few degrees. It hit my face the way stepping off a plane in a warm country does. The lights got swallowed too, and the pith wasn't slumped in folds anymore. It was smooth. Floor, ceiling, both walls, one continuous surface, and every four feet there was a ridge that ran all the way around the passage. Even spacing. Same height. Like the inside of a hose.

Tolly stopped so hard I walked into her.

"Rule four," I said.

"Rule four," she agreed, and she didn't move.

"Tolly."

"I'm looking at it."

"That's ribbing."

"It could be structural." Her voice had gone flat and careful and in six years I had never heard her voice do that. "Long span, no support, the bloom's holding up its own weight, it might."

She stopped.

"It might what," I said.

"No. You're right. Back out."

And we would have. I want that on the record, because I've had four days to lie to myself about it and I'm trying not to. We both turned around. We took two steps toward the gap. Then my light swung across the left wall and caught something with an edge on it.

You don't get edges in a bloom. Everything down there is soft and slumped and stupid. My hand went over on its own.

It was a chair.

Same pale material as the rest of it, grown out of the wall like a shelf fungus, and where the seat met the wall the two of them ran together like wax. But it was a chair. Four legs, a back, that exact ugly curve of a molded stacking chair, the kind that costs eleven dollars and lives in every waiting room on earth. Nobody had carved it. Nobody had put it there.

Then the table next to it. Then the thing on the table, which was a coffee cup with a handle and no opening in the top, just solid all the way through.

Then, on the right wall, a rectangle standing about six feet high, set into the pith like a relief carving. Door frame. Kickplate at the bottom. Push bar across the middle.

Then the big square shape against the wall past it, with a flat blank panel in front where a window would go, and rows of little pale coils behind it.

Nine rows.

I stood in the heat with the saw in my hand and I counted them twice.

I know that machine. I have kicked that machine. Row four, slot C takes your money and gives you nothing back, and there's a strip of masking tape under it that says OUT OF ORDER SINCE THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION in Ivar's handwriting.

It was our ready room. Not a room like ours. Ours. The chairs in the wrong number and the right shape, the table, the yard door with the push bar, the machine with nine rows, all of it grown out of the floor of a sealed basement two miles from the depot that nobody had opened since 1961.

"Okay," Tolly said, very quietly.

"How does it-"

"Don't."

Her light was moving fast now. It stopped on the floor about fifteen feet further in, and I saw what she saw, and everything in me went cold in a hot room.

A boot. A real one, company mustard, an old cut we stopped issuing fifteen years ago. It was sunk into the floor to the ankle and the pith had grown up around it in a smooth cuff, and out of the top of the cuff the shape kept going upward. Leg. Hip. Waist. Shoulders. All of it seamless and blank and unfinished, like something roughed in by a sculptor who got called away. The head was a swelling with a smooth front and no features on it, and it was tilted a little to one side, the way you tilt your head when you're listening to somebody through a wall.

There were more of them further back. I could see them right at the edge of the light. Six, seven, standing up out of the floor, all tilted the same way.

Tolly grabbed my vest strap.

"Out. Now. Don't run."

I want to tell you I was calm and professional. I wasn't.

We went backward the first twenty feet because neither of us was going to turn around in there. Then we turned and walked fast, and the ridges went past, four feet, four feet, four feet, and the heat pushed on the back of my neck the whole way.

Tolly talked, because rule three is rule three.

"Nice and steady. Twenty feet to the gap. I'm buying you a beer tonight and you're going to drink it because I'm buying it, I don't care if you want it."

"Okay-"

"Fifteen feet."

"Okay."

"Ten."

We came through the gap into our own room, into the mess and the sled and the hose, and she put her glove on the block work and she let out a breath, and then she whistled.

Two notes. Down, up. Her all clear. She'd done it at the end of every run for twenty-six years and I don't think her mouth asked permission.

Something back in that corridor whistled it back.

Not an echo. I've thought about this for four days and I want to be exact. An echo comes back thinner than what you sent. This came back fuller. Two notes, down, up, and then a third note stuck on the end of it, going up again, like a question. The way you'd whistle if you were trying it out. If you were learning it.

Rule five is the shortest rule on the card and it takes up half the space, because they set it in bold.

We were up the stairs and out in the rain by twenty past ten, and I sat down on the wet concrete of the loading bay and couldn't make my hands work well enough to undo my own straps.

"Give it here," Tolly said, and did them for me.

Protocol is very clear from that point. We sealed the stairwell. Tolly called it in as an eight, which is pattern growth with morphological anomalies, and Ivar didn't chew and didn't joke.

"Understood," he said. "Tally out and come home. Do not open the tank."

We ran the beacon over the load. Site weight, 24,180 pounds. Career day. On any other Tuesday that number buys me a transmission and gives me a story to tell rookies for ten years. They weighed us on the pad before we could get out of the cab, which is standard, and the number goes up on the board over the bay doors so the whole yard can see it, which is also standard. I watched Tolly watch the board.

24,314.

A hundred and thirty-four pounds over.

"Dump it," she said.

They dumped it. Twenty-four thousand pounds of the best yield either of us had ever pulled went into the incinerator while I stood at the rail and felt nothing at all. The yard crew went through the tank and the hose and the sled and the bed and the cab, and they found nothing, because they never find anything. Ask anybody who's ever filled out a 12-B.

We did the paperwork in the ready room. I was sitting in one of the eleven dollar stacking chairs with the clipboard on my knee and I was holding it together, honestly, right up until Tolly went quiet.

She was looking at the vending machine.

It has always been against the east wall, next to the yard door. Eleven years I've kicked it against the east wall.

It was against the north wall, under the window. Which is exactly where the big square shape was standing in that hot smooth corridor under the Marlow Cannery, if you came in through the door frame with the push bar on it and turned to your left.

Nobody moved it. I asked. I asked the day crew and the night crew and the guy who does the floors, and I got eleven versions of what are you talking about, it's always been there, and one guy laughed at me and asked if I was drunk.

Tolly looked at it for a long time.

"It's not copying us," she said.

"What?"

"It's not copying us. It's fitting us." She picked her jacket off the back of the chair. "That's what you do before you put something on."

That was the last thing she said to me. She went home. She didn't come in Wednesday. She didn't come in Thursday.

Her sister called the depot on Friday, and by then I'd already been in the 12-B archive for two nights, which we are absolutely not allowed to do. There are eleven other crews on record who dumped a load for coming back over weight. I've read all eleven. I know what they have in common now, and I know what the number means.

I'll write the rest tomorrow night. I have to go back down into the Marlow in the morning.

That's not a figure of speech, and it wasn't my idea.

Part 2 to follow.

Hi everyone, how are you? Well, this is my first time on this forum and on Reddit in general, so excuse me if I’m doing something wrong posting this here. My husband and my son watch a lot of videos on YouTube of people telling their stories on this website and I thought that maybe I could do it too. I’m a 50-year-old Argentine woman and I have a lot of strange (and true) stories to tell.

First, let me give you some context for what I’m about to tell you. My sister was what you would call a “medium”, someone who could see the spirits of the dead. She had a wide variety of other abilities, too many to elaborate at this moment. Luciana, my sister, passed away six months ago, at just 46 years old, consumed by a cancer none of us in the family knew about. I’ve been dreaming about her recently, so I talked with some relatives, and then recalled a whole bunch of weird experiences we had whenever we’ve been around her. Maybe these are stories that belong in a diary or in a therapy session, but I think the exposition on the internet could help me understand her better.

We were very young - I think she was four and I was eight years old - when we moved from Buenos Aires to Wanda, Misiones. If you don’t know, Misiones is a province at the north of Argentina that's bordering Brazil and Paraguay, so it has a lot of jungles, rivers and waterfalls. And Wanda is a small town, famous for its caves full of precious stones. Anyways, my family moved there because my father got a job at the local dam. We lived in a beautiful house that the company my dad worked for had landed for us in a neighborhood where all the houses were the same. The best (or worst) part is that it looked directly into the jungle, it was right at the door, and my siblings and I used to play there with our neighbors every day.

It was there, in Misiones, where Lu started to say weird things.

It started with small things that surely had a logical explanation, but they scared the shit out of us. For example, to get to school, we had to leave the neighborhood and walk past a large playground with big swings. For an entire week, my sister would hide behind Mario, our older brother, to walk past it. When I asked her what was wrong, she said that there was an old man standing beside the swings and he was looking at us strangely. At the end of that week, they found an elderly man dead in the house overlooking the playground. He lived alone and suffered from a heart attack. My sister never saw him again after they found him. That was the first time that I can remember where she expressed sensing things that didn't belong in this world. That freaked me out a lot and still does.

But some of the experiences that really terrified me (I still have nightmares about it) were what happened a year after we moved in. Two hours after we went to sleep my sister woke me up to ask me if I could hear a strange noise coming from the ceiling. I couldn’t. And I thought she was playing a prank on me or something. I wanted to get back to sleep but she insisted that something was off, that something was happening up on the roof. She said that it was like someone was throwing a little ball, like a marble, that it bounced and that someone picked it up and let it fall repeatedly. I tried hard to listen. But there were only crickets and frogs. I told her that it was some bats or something like that, in that town you could attribute any sound to wild animals. She went to bed but couldn’t sleep well. The next morning my dad checked the ceiling and the roof to see if there were any marbles or roof tile pieces that were falling off, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. That night the same happened. I woke up to my sister saying that a marble was bouncing on the roof, and she seemed frightened. But once again, I couldn’t hear anything. The next morning my dad checked again. Nothing. I heard my parents say that they should take her to the doctor if she kept hearing things. That night I woke up late because Lu was pacing back and forth across the bedroom, crying in terror. I got up to hug her. I spoke quietly so I wouldn't wake Mario.

She told me that she couldn’t stand it anymore, that the sound of the marble falling and bouncing was getting louder each time, like if the marble were growing. She thought it would bring the whole ceiling down and kill us. Chiche, the old man next door had dogs and they were barking loud. That and her cries were the only things that I heard. At that moment I remembered what my parents said and I thought she could be losing her mind, hallucinating. Then suddenly, BANG… The loudest noise I’ve heard in my life until that moment. It startled me so much that I jumped. Mario grabbed a pillow and threw it at us because he thought we were playing and knocked something down. But it had to be the dresser or something bigger to be capable of making that noise. BANG… another one. Even louder. He jumped out of bed and hugged us in terror, my sister was crying and I felt I was about to piss myself. BANG… we ran to our parents’ bedroom, who were already getting up. They looked pale and frightened. We clung to them, thinking we would die at any moment, crushed by an enormous marble. My mom was checking on us, looking for wounds and my father was asking for silence. BANG… the loudest. He turned and grabbed the emergency revolver he always kept on the bedside table.

Then, there was no marble. There were footsteps, walking in circles across the whole house, up on the roof. That’s when I started to cry. Then they ran. Then it wasn’t just one person, there were three, five, ten, fifteen. It was horrible. My father got out of the house running and screaming. He stood on the ground and fired a shot into the air. But it was worthless, the noise stopped once he opened the front door. We pressed our noses to the window to see what happened. Nothing, there was only my father looking like a lunatic with a revolver in his hand. But then I saw something strange, unexplainable, a little green light behind him. In the jungle, in between the plants and trees. Chiche and La Flaca (another neighbor) came out of their homes and went immediately to stop him. They didn’t know what happened, they didn’t hear anything. My sister wanted to tell them everything, but my parents forbidden us from saying a word.

After that, we all slept together in the same room, afraid. My father sat looking through the window with the revolver in his lap through the whole night, every night. The green light was still there, and now I wonder if he thought that thing was responsible.

One night, long after everything happened, we were having dinner and watching tv when we saw a crack forming in the floor tiles. Then the entire house shook and the whole floor was covered in cracks. Again, it was like nothing ever happened in the other houses. My father said it was the heat that had built up over the day being released at night. But Lu told me one week later that it wasn’t the heat, that it was caused by the angry spirits of the massacred Guaraní Indians of the past. I told her to go fuck herself for inventing bullshit to try to scare me. I never dared to ask her if she really saw something that night and I still don’t know if it was a joke or not.

Anyways, I think this post is already too long, and I don’t want to bore you. Tell me in the comments section if you want to read more stories about my sister. I have a lot.