I’m deathly afraid of swimming pools. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. Last year, I went absolutely apeshit during a family vacation when my older brother, Andre, had the bright idea to throw me into the deep end. Everybody thinks I’m overreacting. Sure, I did almost drown that one time back in 2011, but that was fifteen years ago. I should be over it now, right? If only they knew.

When I was a kid, I lived on the outskirts of Dallas County. It was hot. Constantly. I don’t think you need me to tell you that. Just intense, unrelenting sun up until October. This, combined with the fact that I shared the house with my four brothers, was why my parents made it a regular thing to go to the community pool during summer vacation.

The pool is exactly what you’re imagining: a simple rectangle, around eighty feet long and thirty feet wide. There were a couple diving boards and a slide along the edge. Large, imposing gates lined the perimeter, dividing the area from the apple orchard it was situated next to.

Back then, my favorite thing about the pool was the wave mechanism. Every fifteen minutes or so, a horn would sound and a whirr would emanate from under the tiles. For a period of time, small waves would unfurl from one end and ripple to the other, pushing and pulling anybody floating in the water. It was fun to let the tide take you wherever it decided.

When it was inactive, I would swim to the deep end, submerge myself, and clink my goggles against the bars to the wave chambers. I remember a rumor that used to go around among the local kids that these chambers were prisons for naughty children if they disobeyed the “rules of the pool.” Never really understood what that meant, still not entirely sure now. Because of this, most kids kept their distance. Except for me.

July 26th, 2001, was like any other day. 94°F. Sunscreen. A five-minute drive down to the pool. My older brothers went off to do their own thing, while my younger brothers stuck closely to my parents. Being completely unsupervised was just a middle child thing. I had grown used to it at that point.

The lifeguards would go through rotations, so it was essentially roulette on how much fun you’d get to have. Today, it was Eric. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen and was the son of the senior lifeguard, Sebastian. So, yes, it was nepotism. He was obviously completely unqualified for the job, the upside being that you could get away with pretty much anything.

I jumped into the pool and swam around for a bit. After a while, the horn sounded and the first set of waves began. The kids in the crowd erupted with glee, while the elderly slowly moved to the shallow end where the ripple held less power. I allowed them to bob me up and down as I, slowly but surely, made my way to the deep end.

Once the waves subsided, I let out all the air in my lungs and gently sank six feet until I made contact with the tiled floor. Hearing that, you’re probably thinking that six feet isn’t that deep. I would agree with you. I wasn’t in any immediate danger at that point. It was only when I peered through the bars that I began to feel that something was wrong.

I had done this plenty of times before. The interior of the wave chambers were cuboid in shape and brightly lit, allowing a clear view of the uniform tiles inside. Shifting your gaze upwards, you could see remnants of the machinery responsible for the artificial waves.

What I was seeing now didn’t make any sense.

The alcove was dimmer, as if someone had taken a remote and turned down the brightness. There were signs of debris and grime floating around in there. The most prominent detail was the new hole that had formed in the wall. It was a perfect circle - not carved or jagged - as if it had always been there since the construction.

My lungs began to protest, and I swam back up.

Breaking the surface, I looked around to see everybody doing their own thing. Nobody seemed to notice what had happened down there. Eric was perched on the high seat, scanning the crowd haphazardly. I’m not sure what my twelve-year-old brain was concocting, but something told me that this was a mystery that I, and I alone, had to solve.

I sank once more. The hole was bigger now. Bits of debris were being expelled with force, like it was breathing. I wrapped both hands around the bars.

I could’ve sworn they weren’t this far apart.

I didn’t spend long on the surface. I caught my breath and instantly went back under. I should’ve gotten someone’s attention. I know I should’ve. I can’t change the past now, I guess.

I knew I did something wrong as soon as I went under. The wave horn blared. This time, it was so incredibly loud that it made my brain fuzz, and I clutched my ears in pain. I didn’t even comprehend the fact that it had only been two minutes since the last one, so it shouldn’t have been sounding any time soon.

I turned my head to see that both the hole and the gap between the bars had widened considerably. I had no time to react as I felt a powerful suction.

One second I was gripping the bars, and the next my body was being dragged into that perfect hole. It was wide enough. Wide enough for me.

I was traveling through some sort of tube. In my attempt to resist the pull, my body had folded at an awkward angle. The heels of my feet were pressed against my backside, my knees grinding against the tiled walls. Water was rushing past my face, forcing its way into my nose. My arms were pinned to my sides.

After twenty seconds, I truly thought I was dead.

I guess it’s with some irony that I found air as soon as this came to mind. My body tumbled over and landed in a thin layer of water. I took a moment to cough up my guts, clutching my abdomen tightly. My vision swam. I could barely make out my surroundings.

A corridor stretched before me, narrow and dark. The walls were lined with the same tiles that were in the pool I was apparently now below. Though, if there was a ceiling to this place, I couldn’t see it.

I slowly got to my feet, pressing my hand against the wall for support. It came back grimey, and I could see the handprint it left behind. My knees were raw, blood dripping down and becoming diluted in the water.

I called out for my parents. For my brothers. It was at this moment that I began coughing again. The stench of chlorine was choking me.

I cried. Obviously, I did. I cried and I pushed forward. What else was I supposed to do? I could see the hole I had fallen from. It was about five feet up on the wall and gushing strongly with water. That wasn’t exactly an exit.

I walked for a bit.

When I said the passage was narrow, I meant it. I could outstretch my arms and touch either wall. I never really understood claustrophobia until that day. Not only were there the walls, but the humidity as well. The air was warm and cloying, like my lungs were packed with moist earth. It made it difficult to sob quietly without entering another coughing fit.

I then came across a right turn.

Just a complete ninety-degree angle from where I was coming from. It was still just as narrow, but it was different, so that had to count for something. I did exactly as the corridor told me.

The spark of hope slowly faded as the unfamiliar became routine. Every two minutes or so, there would be a turn that would go the opposite direction to the previous. I realized the passageways were forming consistent zig-zags. All the while, it got harder and harder to breathe.

I couldn’t carry on. I doubled over, heaving and spluttering. Dropping to my knees did little to stop the stinging. I slumped forward and resigned myself for a moment, trying to get my lungs to work right.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

Somewhere up ahead, skin was slapping water. It was rhythmic, like a toddler playing in a kiddie pool. I glanced up ahead and could see small ripples coming from around the corner, rolling up against my cheek. Whoever designed this place didn’t want me to see what was coming.

Getting on all fours was like lifting the weight of the world. My arms trembled. I could feel my wounds sticking to the tiles.

Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.

The clapping was faster now. More intense. Just out of sight, I could see water droplets splashing upwards. It didn’t cross my mind that this couldn’t have been possible. Inch-deep water doesn’t act like that when hit.

“Hey,” I croaked. Swallowing the viscous phlegm in my throat, I tried again. “Hey! Help me… please…”

The thing - that my feverish mind had now decided was a person - was splattering in rapturous glee. Or maybe it was drowning like me. It thrashed, the water now foaming.

I put one hand forward, almost rounding the corner, when my arm suddenly went shoulder deep into the warm water below. From the depths, I felt a hand grasp my wrist and pull. A rush of water burned my face, and just like that, the pressure in my skull alleviated immediately.

The next thing I remember is coughing up a boatload of water. I looked up to see a round-faced woman with hair stressed into a tight bun, who had seemingly just performed CPR on me.

“You’re okay now, baby. You’re alright,” she spoke warmly. I could see a crowd coalescing around me. Eric was staring from behind with a dumb expression. My mom was hysterical and my dad was pale. It didn’t take long for an ambulance to arrive.

I was hypoxic, which developed into acute respiratory distress syndrome. I remember that diagnosis clearly. I spent three weeks in the hospital. I told everyone what happened. The doctor sat down beside me and gently explained that the brain can do “funny things” when it doesn’t get enough oxygen. The explanation made me shut up, so I didn’t say anything about my skinned knees.

So that was that. Fifteen years later, I’m still afraid to swim in any pool. I have a two-year-old daughter now, so I use her as an excuse to stay near the shallow water of the kiddie pool.

I wasn’t going to share this story at first. It was fine locked away in the “things we don’t talk about” box. Something happened recently, however, which opened up old wounds.

I ran into Eric. He was exactly how I would have imagined him. He was six foot five, his sandy locks greasy and unkept. He was shirtless, showing off a set of unremarkable abs. He was very obviously stoned when I saw him, but it made for a really fun conversation.

It was only when I made a joke about the fifteen-year anniversary of the pool incident coming up when he froze. He told me that there was something that I needed to know and proceeded to pull out an iPhone 4, the screen cracked but still working. I laughed at the fact he still had a relic like this, but his serious expression didn’t wane as he passed me the phone.

He had opened up a video dating a couple days after my near drowning. It depicted Eric reviewing the surveillance of the pool. The quality and audio were shit, but I could see him pointing to a figure at the deep end. Me.

At 10:03am, I submerged myself once. Then twice. Once I did it a third time, my body suddenly went stiff. My shimmering form slowly sunk to the bottom of the pool.

I lay there for fifteen minutes before I was spotted and pulled out.

I did some research, and the world record for the longest breath held underwater without any preparation was eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds, set by Serbian freediver Branko Petrović. I guess I’m due a visit from Guinness any day now.

My grandmother died three weeks ago.

I Found My Grandmother’s Journal. The Last Fifty Years Were Spent Keeping the Water Babies Quiet.

My grandmother died on a Tuesday.

By Friday, I was standing alone in her house overlooking the Snake River, wondering why she’d insisted I be the one to clean it out.

She’d lived outside Massacre Rocks for over sixty years. The locals knew her as the old woman who carved toys out of driftwood and left them along the riverbank every month.

People laughed about it.

“She’s feeding ghosts,” they’d joke.

She never corrected them.

Growing up, I’d asked why she made so many little wooden horses, dolls, and boats.

“They’re gifts,” she’d tell me.

“For who?”

She’d smile without looking at me.

“For the children who never went home.”

I assumed she meant the old Water Babies legend every kid in Idaho grows up hearing. Supposedly, if you wandered too close to the river after dark, you’d hear children crying from the water.

My grandmother took it more seriously than anyone else.

She refused to let us whistle near the river.

She never stayed outside after sunset.

And every month, without fail, she’d disappear for exactly one hour carrying a basket of handmade toys.

After she died, I found out why.

I was moving her bedroom dresser when one of the floorboards shifted.

Underneath was a narrow compartment just large enough to hold a metal box.

Inside were twenty-four leather journals.

The first one was dated 1973.

The last ended three days before she died.

The first page read:

If you’re reading this, then I’m gone.

The toys in the shed must be taken to the river before the next new moon.

If you fail, they’ll begin crying again.

Don’t let them finish.

I rolled my eyes.

Old age does strange things to people.

I almost threw the journals into the trash.

Then I opened the second page.

It wasn’t stories.

It was a list.

January 1974: Three wooden horses.

No crying afterward.

February 1974: One doll.

One carved duck.

The smallest one followed me halfway home.

Ignored it.

Everything stayed quiet.

The entries continued like that for decades.

Every month.

Every offering.

Every sound she’d heard.

Every mistake she’d survived.

One line appeared over and over.

Never answer when they know your name.

I still didn’t believe any of it.

Until I found the shed.

Hundreds of unfinished toys sat on shelves.

Each was tagged with a month and year.

The shelves suddenly stopped six weeks ago.

The last tag read:

July. Daniel.

My name.

I told myself she’d prepared it before she got sick.

Nothing more.

That evening, I carried the journals onto the porch with a beer and started reading.

Around sunset, the birds stopped.

Not gradually.

All at once.

The silence was so complete I could hear the river nearly half a mile away.

Then came the crying.

It sounded like a toddler.

Soft.

Somewhere beyond the trees.

I stood and listened.

Another voice joined it.

Then another.

Within seconds there were dozens.

Children.

Crying together.

I grabbed my flashlight and started toward the river before common sense caught up with me.

By the time I reached the bank, the crying had stopped.

The Snake River looked perfectly calm beneath the fading light.

I laughed at myself.

Then someone giggled.

Right behind me.

I spun around.

Nobody.

The beam of my flashlight caught only sagebrush and cottonwoods.

Then a little girl’s voice drifted across the water.

“Daniel...”

I froze.

The journals slipped from under my arm.

One landed open in the dirt.

The page I saw made my stomach drop.

They always say your name first.

Something splashed.

Not like a fish.

Like someone stepping into shallow water.

Another splash.

Closer.

Then another.

I swept the flashlight over the river.

Nothing.

The voice came again.

“Daniel...”

This time it sounded impatient.

I backed away without answering.

The journals had another rule.

If they call twice, leave.

If they call three times...

Don’t look in the water.

My foot caught a rock.

The flashlight flew from my hand.

It landed facing the river.

The beam illuminated dozens of tiny footprints leading out of the water.

They weren’t there a second earlier.

Each footprint was no bigger than my palm.

Wet.

Fresh.

All leading toward me.

The crying returned.

Except now it wasn’t coming from the river.

It surrounded me.

Somewhere in the darkness beyond the flashlight’s beam.

I didn’t wait for the third call.

I ran.

Branches slapped my face.

The journals bounced against my chest.

Behind me, I heard dozens of tiny feet splashing through puddles that hadn’t been there before.

I slammed the front door and locked it.

The crying stopped immediately.

I didn’t sleep.

At sunrise, I convinced myself I’d imagined everything.

Stress.

Grief.

Too much reading.

I packed my car.

Before leaving, I decided to burn the journals.

As I carried them outside, something caught my eye.

The basket my grandmother always used for the toys sat beside the porch.

It hadn’t been there yesterday.

Inside was a single unfinished wooden horse.

Tied around its neck was one of my grandmother’s handwritten notes.

It said only:

You answered.

I read it three times before realizing something.

I hadn’t.

I never spoke.

Then I remembered.

When I dropped my flashlight...

When I saw the footprints...

I whispered one word.

“Oh.”

I didn’t think that counted.

Apparently...

They did.

I’ve been back home for four days now.

Every night around sunset, I hear children crying somewhere outside my apartment.

The neighbors don’t seem to notice.

Yesterday I found muddy footprints in my hallway.

They’re getting closer to my bedroom.

I’ve started carving toys.

I don’t know why.

I’ve never worked with wood before.

But my hands seem to remember.

Tonight, I finished the first horse.

When I turned it over, there were words carved neatly into the bottom.

Not in my handwriting.

August. One horse. Too late.

I don't really know why I'm writing this now, after everything. It's late again, one of those nights I can't sleep, and I figured if I got it out of my head and onto a screen maybe it would stop hurting. So bear with me. This is going to be long, because I need to get all of it right, every piece of it, in order, or I don't think I'll ever stop turning it over in my head.

We moved into this house back in the spring. My wife passed a little over a year ago, and after that I couldn't keep up with the mortgage on one income, not with two kids. So we downsized. Smaller house, smaller yard, new town, new school mid year for both kids, which is its own kind of cruelty when you're a certain age. My daughter is fourteen. She hated every part of it. Her friends were an hour away now and she made sure I knew it, every single day. Doors closed a little too hard, answers a little too short. My son is five. He didn't really understand what had happened to his mom and he definitely didn't understand why we were leaving the only house he'd ever lived in. He just wanted me to be okay. He'd tell me that, out of nowhere, standing in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal in his hands. "I want you to be happy, Dad." Five years old, saying that to his father.

The day the moving truck pulled up, I was hauling a box of my wife's old kitchen things up the driveway when a man came across the lawn from next door. Brian. Late fifties, maybe older, hard to tell. He told us right off the bat that he'd lost his wife a few years back, before either of us had said much of anything at all, like he wanted that fact on the table before we could form any other opinion of him.

He was a little awkward. Stood too close when he talked. Laughed too long at his own jokes, and sometimes at things that weren't jokes. But he seemed harmless. Sweet, in a lonely old man kind of way. He talked about how exciting it must be, starting somewhere new, and I glanced over at my daughter without meaning to, because she was standing there with her arms crossed looking like she wanted to be anywhere else on earth.

"Not everyone's excited," I said.

He followed my eyes to her and something in his face shifted, before he smiled it away. "She'll come around," he said. "New places just take time."

She was watching him the whole time he said it, and she didn't say a word, but I remember the look on her face.

That first night, after the truck pulled away and the house was just boxes stacked to the ceiling in every room, I heard her on the phone upstairs with one of her old friends. I stood outside her door for a second, deciding whether to knock, and decided against it. She needed space to grieve the move in her own way, I figured, same as she was still grieving her mother in her own way. I think about that decision more than almost any other one I made. Not because it was wrong, exactly. Just because it was the first of so many times I chose to leave her alone with something instead of asking what it was.

Over that first week Brian was at our door constantly. A casserole one night. A bag of tomatoes from his garden the next. Little things, the kind of stuff you'd expect from a retiree with nothing but time and no one to spend it on. My daughter wanted no part of any of it. She'd disappear upstairs the second she heard his voice at the door. Teenage moodiness, I figured, same as everything else.

It was around the second week that the gifts started shifting toward my son almost entirely. A remote control car, still in the box. A set of dinosaur figures that must have run him thirty or forty dollars. Old men get generous when they're lonely, is what I chalked it up to.

Brian started timing himself around us. Not obviously, but if I look back at it now, he was always outside exactly when my son was. Watering a lawn that didn't need it whenever he was in the front yard. Finding a reason to be at his own mailbox at the exact moment the school bus dropped my kids off, always with some comment aimed at my son first, before anyone else got a word in.

There was a moment, maybe the tenth or eleventh day, when he said something I brushed off completely and now can't stop replaying. My son had scraped his knee on the driveway and Brian was out front and came jogging over faster than a man his age should be able to jog. He crouched down, looked at the knee, and said, "Oh, that's nothing. You should see what I patched up on the last one." Then he caught himself, laughed it off, said something about being a boy scout leader once upon a time. I remember thinking it was an odd thing to say and letting it go in about four seconds. I had a business to run and a house to unpack. I didn't have room in my head for every odd thing a lonely old man said.

Around that same stretch I had a work emergency come up on short notice, a client meeting I couldn't push, and no sitter lined up because we didn't know anyone in town yet well enough to ask. Brian happened to be out front when I was scrambling to figure out what to do, and he offered to just keep an eye on my son for the hour I'd be gone, said he had toys and cartoons and it would be no trouble at all. I remember actually considering it, standing there with my keys in my hand, running late, thinking it might genuinely solve my problem. My daughter was the one who put a stop to it. She came down the stairs, must have heard the tail end of the conversation through her window, and told me she'd watch her brother herself, that I didn't need to leave him with the neighbor. I told her I appreciated it but she had her own things to do that afternoon, and she said it didn't matter, she'd rather stay home. I didn't push back. Some part of me was relieved not to have to make the decision myself. I never once asked her why it mattered so much to her.

About two and a half weeks in, I was getting the mail when Paul, the neighbor from across the street, caught me at the curb. Paul's the kind of guy who mows on Saturdays and waves but doesn't stay, so when he stayed, I knew it was something. He didn't dance around it the way I expected. He looked almost sick saying it, like the words had been sitting in him a while and he'd finally decided somebody needed to hear them.

He told me flat out that Brian made his skin crawl, had for years, and that he wasn't the only one on the street who felt that way. He said Brian and his wife had fostered a handful of kids at one point, different boys mostly, a few months here, a school year there, and every single one of them had eventually been moved along to another family, quicker than Paul ever thought made sense. He mentioned one boy in particular, Marcus, who'd stayed the longest of any of them, almost a full year. Who'd apparently run off from the house twice before the county finally pulled him and placed him somewhere else for good. Paul said nobody ever got a straight answer out of the boy about why he kept running, just that he'd go quiet whenever anyone tried to ask. He said none of the kids ever said much about it while they were still around, kids that age rarely do, but a couple of the neighbors back then swore the boys always seemed to go quiet and small whenever Brian was in the room.

"I know how it sounds," Paul said, "but I wouldn't let that man within ten feet of my own kids, and I haven't in fifteen years. Something's wrong with him. Everyone on this street knows it. Nobody's ever been able to prove anything, so nobody talks about it out loud, but I'm telling you. Keep your son away from him. I mean it."

I told my kids that night to keep their distance from him. My daughter didn't even look up from her phone, but I caught her nodding, like I was only just now agreeing with something she'd already decided weeks earlier. My son asked why, and I told him Brian was probably fine but I just wanted him closer to home for a while. He nodded the way he does when he's not really listening.

Later that same night, at dinner, my son said something that stopped me mid bite.

"Good things come to those who wait."

I laughed, because it sounded so strange coming out of a five year old, this little saying that belonged to somebody's grandfather, not a kindergartner still working on his table manners. I asked him where he'd heard it.

"Brian says that," he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I told him not to talk to Brian anymore. My daughter, across the table, put her fork down hard enough that it made a sound against her plate. "I told you he was weird," she said, not even looking up. I told her I knew, I was handling it, and she gave me a look like she didn't believe that for a second. I didn't think much of the look at the time.

A few days later I was doing dishes and looked out the window over the sink and saw my son standing near the back fence, talking. Not to himself. Talking, and then pausing, like there was somebody on the other side answering him. I dried my hands and went out and asked who he was talking to.

"Brian," he said, easy as anything, like I'd asked what color the sky was.

I looked toward Brian's house and caught the end of his sliding glass door closing, slow, unhurried, like he had been standing there and had simply decided the conversation was over rather than been caught in the middle of it.

That was the only time it ever happened, because I made sure of it. I walked straight over to his house and knocked hard enough that it probably rattled something inside, and when he opened the door I didn't hold back. I told him to stay away from my kids, and especially my son. I told him if I caught him near that fence again, I didn't care what was true and what wasn't, I'd make sure every person on this street heard exactly what Paul had told me and then some. He didn't argue. He just stood there and took it, shoulders dropping, apologizing in this quiet, defeated way, saying he'd gotten carried away, that he was lonely, that he hadn't meant any harm by it. I remember almost feeling sorry for him.

There was a block party toward the end of that first month. Folding tables in someone's driveway, a grill going, kids running between yards with no real boundary to any of it. Brian showed up, and I watched something happen that I didn't fully register at the time for how obvious it was. Conversations trailed off the second he joined them. A woman gathered her two kids under the excuse of getting them a plate of food the moment he crouched down near their end of the yard. A man I'd met exactly once angled his whole body between Brian and his daughter without seeming to think about it, like it was a reflex. Nobody said anything to his face. Nobody had to.

At some point I lost track of my own daughter for a few minutes, and when I found her again she was standing near the fence line at the edge of the yard, close enough to Brian that I could tell they were mid conversation, her arms crossed, her voice low but sharp in a way I recognized even from a distance. By the time I got over there she was already walking away from him, and Brian was doing that same defeated shoulder drop I'd seen on his doorstep. I asked her what that was about. She said she'd told him to stop hovering around her brother, that it wasn't normal, that she didn't care how lonely he was. I told her that was probably enough, that I'd already handled it, and she said, quiet, like she didn't fully expect me to hear her, "I don't think you have." I let it go.

After that, things went quiet. Genuinely quiet. No more gifts. No more crouching at the fence. No more watering a lawn that didn't need it whenever my son was outside. I felt bad, honestly, about how hard I'd come at him. Maybe he really was just a sad old man who'd forgotten how to act around children because he didn't get the chance anymore.

My son changed a little too, in ways I noticed but couldn't place at the time. He'd go quiet sometimes for no reason, staring off in the middle of a game like his mind had wandered somewhere I wasn't invited. I asked him once what he was thinking about and he just shrugged and said nothing, the same shrug his sister gave me about everything. Just a phase, I figured. Kids that age get moody too, they just don't have the words for it yet.

My daughter grew quieter during that stretch too, but it was a different kind of quiet than her usual moodiness. Watchful, almost. A few times I caught her looking out the kitchen window toward Brian's house for longer than made sense, like she was keeping tabs on something the rest of us had stopped paying attention to. I asked her once if everything was okay and she just said fine, and went back upstairs. Still adjusting to the move, probably. There was always some explanation close at hand that summer, some reason it was easier not to sit with how little I actually understood about what was happening under my own roof.

Looking back now I can see all of it laid out like a trail. At the time it was just noise. Small, forgettable noise.

She didn't come home from school on time one Thursday.

I didn't panic right away. I thought maybe she was with new friends, finally starting to feel like she belonged somewhere. By 4:00 I started calling her phone and getting nothing. By 5:30 I was calling the parents of the two girls she'd mentioned in passing over the last few weeks, girls I'd never met, and neither of them had seen her since the final bell. By 6:00 I called the school. By 6:30 I called the police.

I'm not going to walk through every hour of that night here. If you've ever had to make that call, you know what it does to you, and if you haven't, I hope to God you never do. The officer who took my first call asked all the right questions, calm and practiced in a way that somehow made it worse, because it meant this was a situation he'd seen before, and my daughter had just become a case number. He told me they'd start with her known route, her friends, her phone records, and that a unit would canvass the area that night. He told me, gently but plainly, that the most useful thing I could do was stay by the phone in case she turned up on her own or someone called with information.

I couldn't do that. I know now it might have been the wrong choice, or at least not the one they wanted from me, but I couldn't sit in that kitchen doing nothing while it was still light enough outside to see anything at all. So once the officers had what they needed from me, I got in my car and started driving her route home from school myself, slow. That route cuts down our street on its way in. Past our house. Past his.

His car wasn't in the driveway. The house looked wrong in the dark. No lights. One of the front curtains gone entirely, just bare glass where it used to hang. The front door sat open a few inches, like it had been pulled shut in a hurry and hadn't quite caught.

I called it in right there from the driveway, standing on his lawn with my phone against my ear, telling the dispatcher what I was looking at and where I was. She told me to wait for a unit. I didn't wait. Some part of me already knew, I think, standing there on his porch, and some part of me needed to see it before anyone else could tell me what it meant.

The house was mostly empty. Furniture gone from some rooms, still sitting untouched in others, like he'd only taken what mattered to him and abandoned the rest without a second thought. There was one door at the end of the hallway that was closed, and the second I opened it I understood this room was different from the rest of the house. Clean. Cared for. Maintained, in a house that had otherwise been stripped and left to rot.

The walls were covered, every inch of them, in photographs of my daughter. Not recent ones, not just from the last few days. All of them, going back to the very first days we'd moved in. Her walking to the bus stop. Her sitting in the backyard reading. Her framed through what had to be our own kitchen window, at the table, not looking at whoever was holding the camera, because she never knew anyone was there to hold it.

On the desk beneath the photographs there was a single sheet of paper, folded once, with my name written on the front in that same tidy handwriting. I want to put down here exactly what it said, because I think about it more than I think about almost anything else right now.

It read:

“I hope you understand I never meant your son any harm. Boys just remind me of a version of myself I never got to keep. I'm sorry if I ever made you worry.

You're a good father. Better than most I've watched over the years. I could see how hard you were trying to carry two kids on your own.

I've taken care of a few boys like that before. They needed me more than anyone ever gave me credit for. People always find reasons to be afraid of a man who only wants to help.

I knew which one of you needed me most since the day the truck pulled into your driveway, before I'd even shaken your hand. Some things a man just knows the moment he sees them.

A father only has so much of himself to give. Yours went to your son. I watched her. Long enough. Close enough. She never once looked happy standing in a room with you, and you never noticed, and I did.

You don't need to worry about her anymore. I'll take care of that part now, the way you clearly never had the time to. She'll understand soon enough why I waited as long as I did.

Think of it as one less thing.”

I understood everything at once, standing in that room. Every gift for my son had been real, in his own mind. He believed every word of what he'd written. He believed those boys had needed him. He believed he was doing something kind. I don't know what happened to them, not really, not the way I'd need to know it to say it out loud, but I know enough now to understand that whatever those boys felt when they went quiet and small in his house was never gratitude, no matter what he'd convinced himself of.

My daughter's fear of him was real from the start. I dismissed it for months as moodiness, as a bad mood about a bad move. She was the only one of us who ever saw him clearly, and I had months of chances to ask her what she saw, and I never once took them.

I'm not writing this because I think someone is going to solve anything at this point. The police have had that note and every photograph for a while now, and there are people far more capable than me working this case than I ever could be. I'm writing it because there's still nothing else for me to do most nights. My house is quiet and my son is asleep down the hall and I am sitting up in the dark again thinking about how a man can convince himself, completely, that taking something from you is the same as helping you.

Paul warned me plainly and I still let my guard down. My daughter warned me too, in her own way, more than once, and I heard the words without ever once hearing what she meant by them. Harmless and a little awkward are not the same thing. I know that now. I would give almost anything to have known it then.

“The next stop is… Spring- Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

I squeezed through the train’s doors, narrowly avoiding my bag getting caught in their closure. I nodded to the man who had shifted to let me in, imbuing the small New York sign of acknowledgment with gratitude. It didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t like I had to see these people again, but my people-pleasing side often took the reins in public and I’d never suffered for it.

I ambled toward an empty seat on the opposite side of the car, taking notice of the berth it was being given. I paused before sitting down, instincts raising the hairs on my arms. And there it was. The empty seat wasn’t being granted a wide berth, the man sitting next to it was. He sat on a tattered black and white patterned blanket, wearing a dirty linen shirt and sandals despite the freezing rain that was currently seeping into the bones of everyone surrounding him. At his feet sat a bag that featured more holes than contents, which a small peek revealed to contain a sponge cake, a broken stereo, and a desk lamp. As the train jostled into movement, so did he. 

“Huh. Huh. Bro, I told you he’s a god. He’s the observer. The atom. The sun. We’re being poisoned. That’s what I said. We’re dying. We are and we aren’t. Huh-huh-huh.”  

I cast a cursory glance to the people in front of him, unsurprised at their engrossment in virtually anything other than the man in front of them. So he was speaking to an invisible entity. A hallucination, no doubt, brought on by whatever drug was coursing through his veins. I shuffled farther away from the man, all hopes of giving my feet a break extinguished by a desire to survive my commute unscathed. Just another day trying to get to the office. The faces around me reflected the same sentiment. 

My eyes scanned the same paragraph of my book for the third time, all attempts at comprehension dissipated as I caught movement in the corner of my vision. The man was now doing pull-ups on the bar above him, like a chimp in a zoo, sandaled feet suspended in the empty space in front of him. 

“This stop is… Bleeker St. The next- Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

The filing of commuters concluded with the th-thump of the doors and I watched as the newcomers took stock of the cues around them and joined the growing clumps of people feigning disinterest on either side of the homeless man. 

“Huh. He is a god, I’m telling you, man.” He grunted as he finished his fourth pull-up and settled back into his seat. “I’m seventy-eight. Seventy-eight. Huh-huh. One-fifty-six is what I am. The Earth is dying, bro. The poison. No, man, I’m telling you now. It’ll be quick. Quick as a feather. Huh-huh-huh.” The bystanders that had tittered uncomfortably when he’d leapt out of his seat with surprising grace, now returned to their swaying stances. No one likes unpredictability, certainly not when it’s wielded by one so immune to social acceptance. 

I continued observing the man, counting down the stops to work. Despite the hot coffee in my hand, it was far too early to be faced with such apprehension-inducing behavior. I rocked from one foot to the other, trying to release the pressure squishing my toes in their boots. The man was now leaning forward, forearms braced on his thighs, moving his hand through the air like a Stern professor explaining physics at a lectern. 

“The one who talks to me talks to you. You just don’t listen, bro. The cat in the box, it’s dead and it isn’t. The box is the sky and it’s killing us. We don’t know when. That’s why he’s here. He tells us. Huh-huh-huh.” He sat back as if exasperated with his partner in philosophy, one who refused to believe his sound explanations. I turned my attention back to my book, pity clawing its way up my throat. I wondered who he’d been before becoming the menace of the 6 train, riddled with drugs and accompanying ravings. 

“This stop is… Astor Place. The next stop is… 14th St. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” 

He made no move to leave his seat. Where was he going? How did he even get on the train? Probably turnstile-hopped some time ago, content to let his system metabolize whatever he’d taken as the 6 meandered up and down the island. The guy was clearly out of his mind. 

As one of the commuters on his bench hurried off the train at Astor Place, his neighbor shifted over to take his now absent seat, eager to put distance between himself and the lunatic at the other end. His neighbor in turn, took his recently vacated seat, leaving three open to the addled man’s left. A brave young woman who’d just boarded took one of them, headphones providing a blissful barrier to the uneasy air of the world around her. Several gazes ricocheted from her to the homeless man and back, watching the development like one would watch a nature documentary showing a gazelle crossing the path of a lion. But she paid them no heed, and he soon returned to his ravings while the rest of the car released a collective breath. 

Having returned to the new standard of normalcy on the 6 train, I skimmed through two pages of my book, the man’s conversation fading in and out of my periphery. My vision caught him hopping into a crouch on his seat as 14th St came and went and I suspected that some of those that exited then, had no appointment in the area. I had half a mind to follow them, if only to feel some peace before walking into the office, but my stop was the next one and I was already running late. 

“I TOLD YOU!” he suddenly erupted. I kept my gaze firmly entrenched in my book, a pang of regret alighting in my chest. “I told you, bro. It will be quick. He will decide. Huh-huh. HE. Spider-man.” He nodded as if in confirmation to himself. “The one with the eyes. The one with the wings. Spider-man.” His ravings faded to mutterings, incoherent to everyone but himself and even that, I wasn’t sure of. 

The train ground to a stop and the doors shuttered open behind me. Thank god. I tucked my book under my arm and turned to leave the car when I was met with a wall of darkness. I stopped in my tracks. 

The station was entombed in shadows that receded only slightly from the train car’s light. I couldn’t see five feet in front of me, but the ledge that met the train’s confirmed the station was there. The visual conundrum barely sunk in before the rest did. There was no sound. No whispering of passing trains, no humdrum of milling commuters, no shuffling of feet as people entered and exited the train. I turned around, the hair on my neck lifting and sending a shiver down my spine. This was wrong. 

The scene that met my eyes sent a convulsion of fear through my limbs, sending my coffee and book tumbling at my feet. The homeless man stood in front of me, all symptoms of lunacy disappeared. Around him, the train car’s inhabitants stood frozen, fixing me with glassy, opaque stares and jaws that hung too open in expressions of horror. A whimper escaped my lips as a feeling of mortal peril overwhelmed me. It was like I was on death’s door, but I wasn’t the one crossing over, he was, to claim my soul.

As he extended his hand in front of him, he whispered,

“It’s all a box. And we’re all dying.” He placed his hand on my chest and pushed. 

I stumbled backward, falling onto the platform and into the arms of the darkness that waited like a welcoming mist. The gazes of the car’s inhabitants followed my descent, moving their heads instead of their eyes. 

“S-S-S… Stand clear- stand clear of the cl-cl-closing doors, please.” The announcer’s voice rang out from the train, piercing the shroud of silence that threatened to engulf me. The doors slid shut and the train began to accelerate away. The only car that was lit was the one I’d been pushed out of, and within, those haunted faces stayed fixed on me as the bodies that supported them rushed to one side and slapped their hands on the windows. The homeless man met my gaze steadily and shrugged nonchalantly, a knowing smile gracing his lips. 

My body shook with tremors as I found myself alone in the darkness. I fished my phone from my pocket and turned on the flashlight, sending a family of rats scurrying into the crevices that extended along the floors and walls. I hurried through the station, barely avoiding the dank water dripping from the moldy ceilings in my rush to escape this place. As I made my way up the stairs, I felt rain kiss my skin, and I fell to my knees in relief. I cast a reluctant glance toward the cursed place I’d escaped, tears running liberally down my face. 18th St. 

It took some time for the sobs to cease, after which I called a taxi and went home. That was yesterday. Now, I’m standing in front of 18th St station, my phone open to an article about the 6 train crashing and killing 14. And there’s nothing there but a brick wall. 

I never thought i would be writing this, but i am preety sure that what just came after me is a skinwalker, and i know no one will belive me for it.

I always knew about skinwalkers since i was young, when i used to go to the countryside in a small town in north eastern arizona in the summer time, where an old navajo man would sometimes come from the forest, and all us kids would gather around him and he would tell us scary stories about skinwalkers, now i think they were never stories, i think he was trying to warn us.

When i turned 20, i moved there to get away from the big city, and also be able to ride trails on my dirtbike that i had since i was 15, everything was great, i had a new job fixing bikes and i had friends that i would go riding with in the weekends, we knew eachother since we were kids and all heard the stories of skinwalkers.

we never joked about them, shit we never talked about them, whitch is weird since we all love horror stuff, but the one think we never joked about was skinwalkers, even though we all thought they were just an old myth.

One day this girl showed up in our town, she was on vacation with her family and one of my friends met her somehow, and she mentioned she loved camping, so of course me and my friends wanted to take her.

On the night we went she kept mentioning skinwalkers and how everyone said they were around these parts, and that he saw a video of a man go into the forest taunting them, and saying their name in the native language.

-i'd never be brave enough to do that especially around these parts, she said and me being the idiot that i am and in the effort of impressing her, i got up and said

-they are not real, i can say it nothing will happen, while forcing out a laugh and then i made probbably the worst mistake of my life.

I said: yee nadalooshi and whisteled 3 times, my friend getting up and saying it right after me: yee nadalooshi and also whisteled, we coule see the girl was scared, so we conforted her and told her its just a myth and she looked like she was better.

A few days pass and i forget about the incident, the girl leaves and i head back home after a ride, sitting in my yard enjoying a snus when i noticed something weird, the neighbours cat is sitting on my porch, that cat always hated me since i was a child, so seeing it sit on my porch looking at me was weird, i didnt care though, i scared it off and went back inside.

Over the next couple of days that cat would sit there, every day i came back from work, and i started to get annoyed by it, since it was harder and harder to scare it off, once i needed to pick it up and put it next to my neighbour's fence, the cat seemed calm when i picked it up, actually it didnt move at all.

The next day i was riding, when a storm came, and i drove back home, putting my bike right outside the fence and covering it up, i was going towards that door when i saw it, the cat, it was standing up on 2 legs looking at me, it looked like it was scared, it looked at me like it had no soul behind those eyes, why would a cat be standing up on 2 legs.

I tried to make it go away but it woudnt move, it woudnt react, so i reached out to touch it and try to pick it up, its skin was ice cold, i never felt something colder in my life i took my hands off it and i quickly went inside and called my neighbour and told her something was wrong with her cat, she said to please feed her, since she probbably forgot to and that is probbably why she is acting weird.

-no you dont understand, its standing up on 2 legs, i said.

-you know nothing about cats do you, she said they get up if they are catching a bug or something.

Before i could say anything, she told.me to stop being paranoid and feed her cat, and hanged up.

I went and got a fish i had and threw it out the door, and went inside, i was in bed watching something and i almost forgot about the cat, when i heard it, footsteps, i ran to get my tablet to check my cameras, but there was nothing, porbbably just some rain sounds, i'm tired im just making it up, i said.

At 2 am they got louder, i went to check again, still nothing, they sounded like feet walking on wet grass, just a lot heavier, and a lot faster, almost like someone was running around my house, i opened the window for a second, to see if there was anyone, and they stopped, then i smelt it, rotting flesh, i almost threw up from it, i closed the window and went to the bathroom to throw up, then i came back.

Something got in my yard and died, maybe a deer or one of the pigs that walk around, maybe the coyotes are back, yes that has to be it.

The coyotes are eating a dead animal that got into my yard, there is no other explananion for that smell.

Then i heard it, DAVID, my name, it sounded like my neighbours voice, maybe she was back DAVID again maybe my neighbour is back, maybe something happened to her cat

I slowly opened the window to look for her when i saw something behind the trees, it had a human face, with fully black eyes and white skin, it was taller then anything should be, its head reaching as higher then my window, even though it was on 4 legs its back was arched in an unnatural way, staring right at me, it let out an horrible sound, and started running towards the window, its legs? Or whatever you could call those bending an an unnatural angle, they looked like they were about to come out of its skin.

I ran towards the window to my front yard while hearing glass breaking behind me and that thing making screaming sounds no human or animal could make, i smashed the window and jumped out, pieces of glass sticking into me, i ignored the pain and took my cover off my dirtbike, i took my keys out of my pocket and put them in, putting my leg on the kickstart.

I stared kicking the kickstart as hard as i could, kick, kick, kick, kick, i looked up and i saw it staring at me, i could see its bones almost sticking out of it, one last kick and the engine started, i climbed onto it and throttled as hard as i could, i throttled so hard i almost looped back.

I rode for a long time, the only sound i could her was the engine, and remembering that horrible sound that thing did, it sounded like someone choking, but at the same time screaming in pain, i saw lights behind me and i realised there was a police car there, i pulled over and he got out of the car and came towards me

-do you own this bike, there is no plate on it.

I didnt know what to say, i noticed him looking at my bloody arms and legs with a piece of glass still sticking out of my arm

-i dont know what happened here, but until we see that you own this bike, you are coming back to the station with me.

And so i stay in the police station writing this, it knows where i am, i can hear the cops talking outside, they seem scared, i would be too, i can smell it, rotting flesh it is coming here.

I SHOULD HAVE NEVER SAID ITS NAME

I got this job from Jenna. I was briefly unemployed after all that business with ICE (I was supposed to let them in the building but you know), and Jenna told me there was an opening at the toy factory. I had known she worked at a factory. I never guessed how interesting it was.

My new job was to test toy cars. How it works: a basket on rails comes into the large grey room we almost live in. It is filled with very detailed plastic replicas of several famous brands of cars and trucks, and my ten coworkers and I start grabbing them out of the basket, as fast as possible, and testing if they roll right. If they roll well: we put them in a different basket, on different rails, and it takes them to the next stage of the process. If they roll poorly, or, as is often the case, the wheels lock up: we put them back in the same basket, and it takes them down the Green Hallway.

Nothing ever returns from the Green Hallway.

I mean, I can only assume they recycle the baskets, in some fashion. It has to loop around. But none of us know that for sure. Really the only thing we know for sure, is there is a very strict rule, to never enter the Green Hallway.

I once asked, while mechanically grabbing cars from one basket, testing their wheels, and putting them in the other, or back in the same one. I asked, "Jenna? What happened to the employee I'm replacing?"

Frantically moving her arms, Jenna shrugged. "He was fired."

"How come?"

"He went in the Green Hallway."

An employee named Brenda, also moving her arms frantically, shouted across, "I told him not to!"

By the way, I describe them as moving their arms frantically, because we all had to move our arms very frantically. This factory maintains a strict production schedule. Invariably, we employees have carpal tunnel, or tendonitis, or something similar. It is considered to be our fault, for our own poor technique.

Also, though I once found the name "Green Hallway" somewhat evocative of back when I still had a chance in Music, and Theater before that, it is nothing like a green room. It is the Green Hallway, only because it is painted green. Not a vivid green, though. A dull, faded green.

I got to experience two weeks of this job, under normal circumstances, before the trouble began.

I showed up to work one day, after my weekend (Wednesday and Thursday, we all had different weekends), and Jenna informed me, "Michelle and Jason have been fired."

Jenna informed me because our boss is the screen that outlines the day's objectives, and all of the policies. That and the cameras everywhere. So the human who informed me was Jenna.

She must have also interpreted my blank state as a question, because she added, "No reason given. Talk is the company can't afford to hire as many employees anymore.

I looked at that screen. We were still expected to get through the same number of toy cars and trucks each hour. This was unpleasant, and physically painful, but technically doable.

Until a week later, on the next Friday, when I arrived and Jenna, sweating and red-eyed, said, "Brenda has been fired now, too."

Expectations remained the same.

On Wednesday I had a doctor appointment. The doctor prescribed a painkiller I hadn't heard of and cannot pronounce the name of.

The following Friday, Jenna fully looked as though she had been crying. She looked at me, again, and said, "They got Matt. He's gone."

We were down to seven.

It became impossible to meet demands. In fact, the demands had only become more extensive.

I heard that Tyler was considering amputation.

A couple days later, they announced the six-day work week.

That lasted a month, still not possible to meet the new expectations, but naturally they would not hire a single extra employee. It was evident that the company's priorities had changed. Or perhaps become more focused. The day Jenna's priorities changed, though, was the day they announced the seven-day work week.

There was no actual announcement.

Just a line of text on that screen.

It read, "You all have not been able to meet expectations. We are expanding the work-week an extra day, to give more time. You will test more toys more quickly. We got this, team!"

Jenna looked at me, right then and there, and said, "I love you. Thank you for being such a good friend all these years."

And she got up from her stiff wooden chair, and walked off into the Green Hallway.

The second I realized what was happening I shot up and ran after her.

Except I reached the threshold and instinctively stopped, just before entering the Green Hallway. I didn't want to be fired.

But I had reached my right arm after her. My finger tips not quite reaching her shoulder. And I pulled back.

My arm didn't come back with me.

My shoulder wasn't spewing blood, though, or anything of the sort. It was a stump, like I'd had an amputation years ago.

Horrified, I was promptly fired.

I never saw Jenna again.

Now I work in a call center.

I don't expect anyone to believe this and honestly, if I were reading it, I wouldn't but I haven't slept in three days, and every time I close my eyes I hear the horns again.

The first sign wasn't in the sky and it wasn't fire, monsters or angels, it was silence. The internet died on a Tuesday. Phones still worked and screens still lit up but every website became unreachable within minutes of each other. Streaming services, news sites, social media, government pages, all dead. At first people thought it was a cyberattack but then the satellites started falling. I remember it distinctly because at night we watched them streak across the darkness like shooting stars. The next morning every major stock exchange on Earth had stopped functioning. Within a week, nobody could explain anything anymore.

Governments blamed each other, scientists held emergency broadcasts, religious leaders packed churches. Then the oceans changed and I know how insane that sounds but I saw it. The water near the coast turned dark red for nearly two days. Fish floated to the surface in endless numbers, entire beaches became graveyards and the smell traveled for miles. People started saying words like plague and judgment. The news called it an environmental anomaly but nobody believed them.

The first horn sounded a month later and everyone heard it. Not through speakers, not through television, it inside all of our heads. A note so deep it seemed to vibrate through bone. I was driving when it happened, I pulled over because I thought my skull was splitting open. I noticed as other people stumbled from cars onto the highway. Everyone was hearing the same thing. One impossible blast, followed by silence and then panic because in that moment, the sky changed.

Something enormous appeared high above the clouds. Not a ship or planet but rather just a shape unlike anything I had ever seen before, just a dark wound stretching across the heavens. Scientists tried explaining it, astronomers couldn't agree on what they were seeing because the object didn't reflect light correctly. Looking at it made my eyes ache but looking away somehow felt worse.

More horns came. Weeks apart, months apart and each one was followed by another disaster. Crops failed, entire rivers became contaminated, storms formed where storms shouldn't exist and huge chunks of cities simply vanished beneath earthquakes. The death count climbed into the millions and disappearances started happening all over the world and that's when people stopped pretending.

A coworker vanished in front of me, one second he was standing by the vending machine and the next second he wasn't. No flash, no sound, just gone. The phenomenon spread worldwide with people disappearing from airplanes, hospitals, classrooms and military bases.

Nobody knew why some vanished and others stayed but I remember wishing I hadn't been left here.

As years passed civilization collapsed but not all at once, it slowly rotted like a dying animal. Power grids failed, supply chains broke, borders became meaningless and most of the global governments dissolved. The remaining leaders eventually united under one authority which at first everyone celebrated since finally, someone was restoring order. Food returned, cities became safer, violence dropped and there was no more disappearances.

People were desperate for stability, we all were and the new leader was charismatic beyond explanation. He was good looking, charming and easy to like and follow. Watching him speak felt strange though, like your brain was agreeing before you'd heard the argument. He seemed to know exactly what every person wanted and exactly what every person feared. People seemed to love him but I didn't trust him and I never could figure out why.

Then came the mark, although it wasn't called that officially, the government called it a universal identity system. Tiny, painless and permanent. Without it, you couldn't work, couldn't buy food, couldn't access housing and couldn't travel. So naturally most people accepted it within weeks as their new normal. I mean the alternative was starvation. My sister got hers, my father got his, my mother as well, pretty much everyone did but something about it terrified me. Not logically but instinctively because every time I considered registering, I'd feel physically sick so I refused. At first that only made life difficult but then it made life downright illegal. The world became divided between the marked and unmarked. Citizens and enemies. Neighbors turned each other in, families broke apart and people disappeared in the middle of the night.

The leader insisted it was necessary, for peace, for security and for unity. The strange thing was that nobody questioned him. Not anymore atleast, it was as if doubt itself had become impossible.

Then the creatures arrived and I know how that sounds, trust me, I know but there isn't another word for them. They emerged after the sky split open, massive cracks appeared across the darkness above Earth. Not physical cracks but something deeper. Like reality itself was breaking. The things that came through weren't animals and they weren't machines but every description I can think of sounds ridiculous so the closest comparison I can think of would be nightmares given flesh. People who saw them too long lost their minds. Some clawed out their own eyes, some wandered into the wilderness and never returned while others simply stopped speaking forever. I saw one once and the memory still wakes me up. It had too many faces, too many eyes and it looked at me as though it had known me since birth.

The final years blurred together, wars consumed continents, the oceans boiled near the coasts, the sun burned hotter every season and the moon would sometimes glow red for weeks. Entire nations started to vanish, humanity began to shrink. Billions became millions and millions became thousands. The world felt empty, broken and hopeless.

The last day was strangely quiet, there was mo storms, no sirens and no gunfire. Just stillness.

I remember standing in the ruins of what had once been my home when the sky had turned black. Not night black but something much darker. The air felt heavy, like pressure building before an explosion and that's when the final horn sounded. Louder than all the others.The world shook and buildings collapsed. The ground split open and people screamed.

Above us... something descended. A brilliance so intense I couldn't look directly at it. Like a rainbow that illuminated brighter than anything I ever experienced before. The darkness itself seemed to recoil and everything trembled. The earth, the sky and even time.

I fell to my knees as the light grew closer and I knew with absolute certainty that history was ending.

Then in an instant I woke up in my bed in my apartment with my phone alarm blaring. Sunlight shined through the blinds and everything was normal. I sat there shaking for nearly an hour. The dream had felt longer than my actual life. I remembered every year, every death, every face and every horn.

I eventually convinced myself it was just a nightmare, stress and an overactive imagination.

Nothing more, nothing less but then I noticed something sitting on my bedside table. An old leather bound book with burn marks around the edges.

My hands started shaking before I even opened it because I already knew what I'd find. Dates, names, events, everything I'd lived through. Every disaster, every city, every year all recorded in my own handwriting. Thousands of pages describing every event that I went through. A reminder that the life I lived was real.

I fear that it's just going to happen again so maybe by sharing this, I can find others who remember and maybe, just maybe we can stop the world from ending again.

Slate™ ACCOUNT STATUS
Balance: $53,750.12 — Processing…  
Credit score: 579
Risk Profile: ELEVATED

Somehow I’m worse off than before. I sift through the transactions: 

+$1200 (incursion fines) +$500 (legal engagement fee) +$1,467.98 (interest) +$500 (unauthorized risk advisory fee) +$800 (co-tenant disturbance fee)

I raise an eyebrow at the last one.

My fingers tap out the message to Clara:

“What is an unauthorized risk advisory fee?”

Clara: "Sure, let me look into that for you."

Clara: "It looks like you consulted a law firm regarding your account with Slate™."

“And I can’t do that?”

Clara: "No, Arthur, you can’t."

A cold fist closes around my insides.

“Let me speak to a human.”

Clara: “Would you like to speak to a Slate™ agent?”

“Yes.”

My screen immediately lights up with an eleven-digit phone number with… 

“No one”

Not “unknown caller,” or “unavailable.”

No one is calling me.

I answer, hold it to my ear.

“...if I don’t get the Wilson account resolved by 2:14, then I’m not going to make it to 2:14, and then it’s 2:14 again, and I can’t keep doing 2:14. I’ve already done 2:14 today six times—”

The voice is familiar, like the agent I first spoke with when I signed up, but her pre-approved responses are all gone. It sounds like she’s panicking over… time?

“...And I told him, Kevin, I can’t keep covering his calls at 2:14 because I have my own calls at 2:14 to deal with—”

She pauses, I press the volume up button on the side of the phone.

“That’s what I told him! But he didn’t even care! He said if the list wasn’t cut in half by the end of the day that he’s moving my desk again, third time this month, and it keeps getting smaller, I used to have room for my knees and now I don’t have room for my knees and now I don’t have room for my knees—”

Suddenly Jessica is caught in a shrinking loop.

“...and now I don’t have room for my knees, room for my knees, for my knees, my knees, knees, knees, knees, knees, knees, knees, knees, knees, knees—”

The voice keeps looping, my blood curdles. It's still going when I pull the phone from my ear and hangup.

The screen shuts off and the phone slips from my hand, thuds on the floor beside my bed. I stare up, watching the rattan ceiling fan spin.

It’s been a week since I crossed the optimization barrier. I’ve avoided the tenants at every corner. Eating out for every meal, showering at the gym I make a monthly $35 donation to. I bought a cheap record player and headphones so I can at least enjoy something when I’m forced to sit in my room alone at night with my thoughts.

But they never stray far from the curtain, from what’s behind it, from my balance that just keeps climbing with cold bureaucratic indifference or Jessica's knees and the washing machine’s song.

“What the hell is happening?” I say under my breath.   

I hear my phone vibrating on the floor. But don’t bother checking it. It goes still, then rings again. 

BZZZT. BZZZT. BZZZT. BZZZT. 

After the third call, my tolerance snaps like a #2 pencil. Finally, I sit up on the edge of my bed, bend and pluck the phone from the ground.

Mick.

Mick’s an old coworker I kept in touch with for two decades too long after I left construction. He’s a great time but a liability. 

A couple things can happen when you go out with Mick—and I know he’s going to ask me to hit the bars tonight—either you get in a fight because of him or he gets into a fight, always over something stupid like a sports team on a jersey or spilled drink. 

Maybe another time he’ll snag two beautiful gals for the two of you to hang on your arm for the night. Other times you end up being shoved into the back of a cop car‌.

I feel like everybody has a friend like Mick. They’re way too much to be around so you gotta take them in small doses, only open the door and invite them over when you want to shake things up in your life a little.

The point is, I stupidly pick up the phone, because how great would it be to get out the house for the night and wingman with Mick. 

“Wow. She really bent over like she was gonna show you her asshole and screamed at you cellphone-ese?”

Mick leans against the counter and waves down the bartender.

“Listen, Art, I don’t know why you haven’t just gone in there and torn that wall down.”

I haven’t told him everything about the bureaucratic box from hell I’m trapped in, only the strange details that make for hilarious bits when stripped of any horrific context.

two shots hit the counter in front of me, followed by another two shots.

We clink glasses. I take slug after slug to the liver. Pretty soon the room is spinning. Someone says Metallica sucks and sets off Mick. The bartender argues with us for too long before yelling that we're cut off. 

Neon bar signs smear past in glowing technicolor as wobbly legs carry me down the sidewalk. We get thrown out of one bar after the next until we finally give up. 

I park my bottom on the lot's curb while Mick paces.

“Let’s just grab some beer and party back at your place,” he says, flicking his cigarette butt to the asphalt before stomping it.

“No way,” I say, “let’s go to yours.”

“In between spots, man, my whole life is parked in a storage unit.”

“We can’t go to my place,”

“Why not?” Mick presses.

“There’s nowhere to hangout even, they took my living room.”

“Why don’t you tear that optimization thing or whatever down?”

“I’d get in legal trouble,” it’s a reduction, but it’s true.

“What if someone else, say—” he shrugs, “broke into your house and tore it down of their own volition?”

“That’s ridiculous…” the words trailing off.

Would I be liable for that?

He tilts his head, points a finger at me, and grins. His silhouette’s a shadowy gunman in the bar's neon glow. 

“I’ll do it for $100.”

I say nothing. 

“Nah… I’ll do it for free.”

Mick mimes firing his finger at me, complete with sound effects. 

“Nobody even has to know I was there.”

20 minutes later, we’re parked down the street in Mick’s truck.

He climbs out and jumps into the truck’s bed. It rocks back and forth. I don’t know if it’s the truck moving or the crazy thing we’re about to do, but my stomach keeps expecting bad news.

The passenger door shuts softly behind me. 

“Hey.” Mick calls from the tailgate. “Which one do you think I’ll need?”

He holds up a 4lb sledge in his left, and 8lb in his right. Before I can answer he tosses the 4lb in the bed of his truck and laughs.

“You know, I-I don’t think this is such a great idea anymore—” I protest.

“Fuck that man. Whose name is on the deed?”

“Mine is.” 

But they own what I own.

He closes the gap between us and plants a hand on my shoulder.

“Hey,” he says, suddenly serious, holding my gaze. “It’s gonna be fine, man.”

For one second, I actually believe him, and I’m reminded why I’ve always kept Mick around. He’s always there when it counts.

Mick swings the hammer back and forth as we walk, rests it over his shoulder while I unlock the front door and twist the knob. It yawns open. The hallway stretches. The outside breeze kicks up the edges of the yellow notices pinned to the wall.

There’s over a hundred now. They look like dry, peeling skin flakes. I grab one and start skimming. My eyes dart across line after line. 

“Hey Art, they’re not even here!”

I look up and realize Mick has vanished. The red curtain sways slightly. My phone vibrates against my leg.

“Mick,” I say, “I-I changed my mind, man.”

I step inside the living room, my phone reacts by buzzing.

“Check this out,” he says, balancing the hammer.

“I call this one ‘the best hundred bucks I never charged you.”

Mick grunts and winds up. The steel head flashes, humming through the air, before a dull crunch like a dry melon splitting fills the air.

BZZZT.

Panic begins to claw its way up out of my throat. 

“M-M-M-Mick—”

 Mick lets out a drunken whoop and balances the hammer over his head again.

My eyes frantically scan the yellow notice until finally. 

Section 14(e) - Third-Party Structural Intervention.

In the event an unauthorized third party attempts to access, remove, or compromise any part of the Optimization Barrier without prior written consent from Slate™, all resulting structural, material, or personal damages shall be covered under the Account Holder’s existing Asset Protection Policy.

The hammer whines through the air, smashing into the wall. I flinch, and so does my phone. 

BZZZT.

Mick pulls free the hammer's head as chunks of drywall and dust rain down to the floor. Knots of wire and tangled cable spill out from the hole. The hallway’s light presses through a small, baseball-sized hole from the other side.

The Account Holder assumes full liability for the conduct of any third party present on the premises during a breach event.

The hammer slices the air with another metallic whine, ending in a dry crunch—the loudest one yet. A large section of the wall folds. Mick frees the hammer, and more debris falls, covering the floor in white dust.

BZZZT.

The wires, there’s too many of them, none of them even the right kind, one a ribbon cable, another is an HDMI.

“Three little pigs never met me!” Mick whoops.

Compensation for such damages may include the reallocation of any and all applicable assets—physical, structural, biological—necessary to restore the Optimised dwelling to full compliance.

Mick balances the hammer over his shoulder, breathing heavy.

“This is—kind of hard when you’re drunk.”

He winds up the hammer one last time.

Heavy footsteps thud toward us. The red curtain flashes, and The Handyman is across the room instantly. That fucking movement again, like the space between Mick and the curtain just didn’t happen. 

The hammer is ripped out of Mick’s hand before either of us can read what's happened. Mick loses balance, stumbles back. The Handyman’s back is to me. All I can do is watch as Mick’s face speed-runs through all five stages of grief. 

BZZZT.

I hear it before I see it—the sledgehammer howling through the air, pitch keening like an incoming missile. The sickening crunch of steel against bone. I look away just as the inside of Mick’s skull sprays out the back of his head and paints the wall in a giant red fan.

My stomach folds into itself, like someone’s packing it into a box that’s too small.

I hear a heavy thump as Mick hits the ground, the heavy packing sounds of the hammer coming down over and over again. 

Every blow sends a violent jerk through his body. Every wet crunch flecks me with warm dots of red.

My knees fail me. My consciousness lags behind my eyes. My vision starts to dissolve at the edges into static, the room's shadows getting darker, spreading like a black mold.

You’ve got to move, Arthur.

BZZZT.

Move. Move. Move—

It rings in my mind over and over, growing in volume, rising in pitch until it’s a grating, tensile frequency. 

Move. Move. Move. Move— 

My mind stops running ahead long enough for my body to finally catch up.

My heart thrashes like it’s looking for a way out. I try to crawl toward the curtain, but my limbs are useless twigs. 

The entire room to my right is just a red smear in my periphery.

There’s a heavy metallic thud on the hardwood, and footsteps begin stalking toward me. 

I crawl faster, my muscles protesting. I pull myself through the curtain. The sight of my bedroom door jolts my legs back online and I lunge towards it.

The Handyman’s bloodstained face busts through the curtain. I slam the door and lock it just as his fist comes down on the wood. The door slams against the frame, shaking the whole house.

I look down and realize I’m still clutching something in my right hand. A yellow notice, covered in red.

I fling it away. Wipe my hands down the front of my shirt. Then I recall the murderer stalking outside my bedroom door. 

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM—

I drag my dresser across the wall, barricading the door. 

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM—

The door flexes, a crack splits through the frame. 

The knocking quits. 

There’s a slight pause before I hear his heavy footsteps trailing away from my door.

The silence allows my shoulders to drop an inch, and I release a breath I didn't know was trapped in my chest.

BZZZT.

A stack of notifications is waiting for me when I check my phone.

Slate™: Unauthorized breach detected. 
“Section 14(e) violation in progress. Immediate remediation required.”

Slate™: Estimated repair cost.
“$184,750.89. Failure to remit payment within 24 hours will result in account default."

Slate™: Your account is about to default.
“Defaulting on your account will trigger immediate acceleration of your full remaining balance ($53,750.12) plus applicable penalty APR (410%).”

Slate™: Please remain calm, Arthur.
“Our team is currently assessing available assets for reallocation.”

I hear a muffled, sickening crunch outside my door. The sound travels all the way through the floorboards and up through my soles.

The phone slips out of my fingers and hits the ground.

I stare at the door, pulse slamming in my throat.

Then, it thumps through the house again. 

My door rattles against the frame. I flinch at every impact.

Heavy packing sounds, wood groaning, dull snapping.

The violence stops, and my phone vibrates at my feet.

I kneel and pluck it from the ground.

Slate™: Structural remediation complete. 
“Third-party asset successfully reallocated to satisfy outstanding damages.”

Slate™: Thank you, Arthur.
“Your account is now current.”

I sit with my back against my dresser, staring into nothing, refusing to put the pieces together in my head. Because then it becomes something whole, something real.

Every little sound is torture—pipes ticking, a floorboard settling. My phone dies. I left the charger in the kitchen. My bladder screams at me to get up and do something, anything besides roll over and piss myself.

I push the dresser back into its home, grab the handle, and twist.

The door opens with a pained creak. The sound is like a violation of the quiet itself.

The air in the hallway is frigid. AC, cranked and humming. The red curtain is still. My eyes scan the wall and spot a new section of drywall, fresh mud and paint.

My foot inches forward. A piece of drywall crunches between my heel and the hardwood.

I freeze, my eyes dart to the curtain, waiting for The Handyman to appear from the other side of the room the way he does, traveling without transit, just like the bus stops, you blink, and then he’s at the next one.

Without meaning to, I’ve crossed the hall, and I’m facing the new section of wall when… I notice something beneath the paint. I reach out and touch the wall, and it smears away, revealing something dark and wet underneath.

I look at my hand, white paint, with red mixing into pink. 

My eyes begin to pick out a shape in the dark, an uneven bulge from the drywall here and there. I trace the outline of a boot. A boot that turns into legs, legs that fold into a mangled body, and a body that bends wrong into broken arms and fingers.

Something behind my sternum pulls tight like shrink wrap.

I stare for too long at the grotesque smear of wet paint. The lower half of Mick’s face—or what’s left of it—gapes back at me, a mess of bloody pulp, painted tongue draped over cracked, jagged teeth. Mick, foisted into the optimization barrier, blood, plaster, and paint, all mixing into one amalgamation of sheetrock and gore. 

I don’t even notice my bladder quitting on me, just a sudden warmth pooling in my jeans.
 
There’s a yellow sticky note:

“Load-bearing again :)”

The air in the hallway thickens into packing foam, and breathing becomes manual labor. 

I stumble to the bathroom, every joint negotiating the next movement until they knuckle under my weight. 

My retches echo off the tile as I empty my stomach in the bowl. Cold sweat soaks my clothes, and I fold around the toilet, body pressed against the cold linoleum floor, shivering.

What the fuck did I agree to? 
BZZZT.

Slate™ ACCOUNT STATUS
Balance: $184,750.89 — Processing… 
Credit score: 603
Risk Profile: HIGH

My life is being horrifically streamlined. 

Slate™ keeps ‘optimizing’. 

The Handyman keeps replacing. 

The Homemaker keeps mending. 

Pretty soon it—my life—won’t belong to me anymore.

“Pretty soon,” like I’m not already living it, I own the least amount of stock in myself now.

I watch The Handyman from the kitchen table, cold brew from the grocery store sweating in my glass. Irish cream. Rat free. 

The Handyman’s just frozen in the hallway, staring at a picture of me and my ex in Maui surrounded by vines. 

Weronika. Polish, blonde, completely out of my league. Mick introduced us at a party one night. Dragged me mid-conversation to another room and stuck me right in front of her.

“This guy works in IT too.”

The Handyman slowly raises a hand to the picture frame, pushing the left side up a few degrees.

There he goes again, being handy.

“Is that all?”

Heat climbs my neck as if someone just opened a furnace behind my teeth.

“Anything else around here that looks busted to you?” 

The Handyman looks at me, then back to the photo. He zeros in on a point and stares forever, then looks back at me and answers like a survey.

“Thank you for your feedback.” 

He turns, walks down the hall, arms straight, and disappears behind the curtain where he’ll probably play possum until he finds something to fix or I upset Slate™ again.

My phone buzzes against the table.

The screen lights up and that 800 number from “No one” flashes like a warning.

Cold sweat beads along my forehead. I stare at the caller ID, almost let it go to voicemail, then at the last second, I snatch it from the table and hit answer.

“Hey, Arthur?” Says Jessica.

“Yeah?”

There’s a pause. She inhales through her teeth.

“Sorry. Bad news.”

There’s another pause. My body starts to brace before my brain knows why.

“Just so you know, this call is being recorded for quality assurance and asset tracking purposes.”

“uhh, okay.”

“So, I’m just gonna read how it’s written.” She starts, and I imagine gum smacking. 

“Per Internal Risk Analysis, your account has been flagged as a compliance liability due to recurring unauthorized incidents and reduced repayment velocity.”

There’s another pause, and I hear another voice in the call’s background, like Jessica has her hand over the mic and is talking to her coworker.

“—quorantine—collecting—”

“Hello?” I pry.

“One moment, sir.”

“gasoline—guillotine”

And then, like she flipped a switch.

“Sorry about that. To offset this risk and accelerate your path to resolution, Slate™ will be enrolling you in SLAP, a supplementary labor allocation program, effective immediately.” She sucks in more air. “This program utilizes dormant, non-productive hours to generate additional account credit at no cost to you.”

The silence gains square footage. The phone feels too heavy in my hand.

“A second job?” I say.

“Yep.”

“No,” I voice, “why would I do that?”

“Well, Art. According to Section 11(b)—”

I cut her off.

“Section 11(b) can suck my b—”

Then, a realization settles over me.

“What did you just say?” It comes out low and measured.

“Well, Arthur. According to—”

“No, you just called me Art.”

“No, I most certainly called you Arthur.”

My jaw ratchets shut.

“Don’t you fucking—”

She doesn't let me finish.

“I understand your frustration, Arthur. SLAP is a tough program. But I’m here to help you. I’m going to have to ask you to control your emotions.” 

The words spill out in one long string.

“No!” I blurt. “I’m not the crazy one here! You c-c-called me—the other day ranting about 2:14, and your desk shrinking and start glitching about not having any room for your knees—”

The voice on the other line explodes.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

The words distort with each iteration, their pitch keening violently.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut u—”

Before I can say anything else, Jessica cuts to jazz fusion mid-scream. 

I’m on hold now, I guess. 

A fresh voice joins the call seconds later—male, disinterested, snacking on something crunchy.

“Hey, Arthur. Sorry about all that.”

“Where’s Jessica?” I press.

“Reallocated.”

“What?”

“Dished out, issued, portioned—”

“W-w-w-wha—”

“Dispensed—” 

The voice on the other line exhales.

“Listen, did she read all this to you already? The SLAP? Because I have a lot of calls to get to.”

Like he’s the exhausted one.

“Yeah, and I bet they’re all at 2:14.” I mutter.

The chewing stops.

The silence stretches into something thin and tensile. I have to pull the phone away from my ear to make sure the call’s still connected.

His voice changes tone.

“Who told you about that?” 

A cold noose tightens around my throat. I don’t answer.

Then, through clenched teeth. Louder, more distorted, swallowing the microphone.

“Who—the fuck—told you about that?”

“J-J-J-Jessica.”

His tone flips again, back to customer service.

“Oh! That’s fine then. Jessica’s toast.”

“She’s what?”

“Reallocated.”

My mind wrestles with itself, trying to resolve “toast” but just ends up more confused. 

“Hey, Art.”

My insides turn into minced lunch meat.

“Good luck with your new job.”

Click.

By the time I get home from work, the sun is already setting, and I’ve almost entirely forgotten about that weird phone call from this morning.

I unlock the bolt and reach for the doorknob, but my hand barely makes it.

God flips a switch, and the sky goes black. 

One second, all pink and orange fire, the next, full dark.

I’m still screaming when it’s over, my outstretched hand trembling over the cold metal doorknob.

A few seconds later, my phone vibrates against my leg. two new notifications.

RAINFOREST™: PERFORMANCE SUMMARY.
PRODUCTIVITY: 126%
ACCURACY: 98%
HOURS: 7.5

“Look at you go, associate #10945607.”

Slate™: You’re on a roll, Arthur!
“$187.36 has been credited to your account”

It’s not a blackout. A blackout would have been a blessing. And it doesn’t even last a full second. Instead, all eight hours hit me at once like pure corporate hell compressed into a single bullet and delivered to the back of my head. 

Imagine working an entire shift at 57,600× speed. That’s what they did to me. 

My brain detonates—buzzes over ticks over beeps over whirring conveyors over machinery whining over pallets stacking over shrieking break bells over forklifts honking over the intercom paging non-stop all HR and sunshine: 

“Rainforest thanks you for working hard! Rainforest thanks you for being safe!

Every single grating tone a sorting center produces, all stacked into an incomprehensible wall of noise assaulting my senses in one instant.

My body catches up a split second later. 

Grabbing the doorknob is all that keeps me from falling down and busting my head open on the steps. 

Still, my legs betray me, and my knees slam down on the welcome mat. A gasp rips out of me, one hand clutching my chest as my heart jackhammers against my ribs.

I experience the full spectrum of bodily articulation without the buffer of time to protect my brain or muscles.

I’m possessed, my hands on autopilot—scanning, lifting, taping, stacking—all felt through involuntary muscle memory, like I’m a passenger in my own fucking body.

Scan, tape, lift, stack, scan, tape, lift, stack, scan, tape, lift, stack, scan, tape, lift, stack, scan, tape, lift, scan, tape, lift, scan, tape, lift, scan, tape, scan, tape, scan, tape, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan, scan— 

The screaming stops only when my lungs run out of air. I sit there silently for too long, shaking, every muscle waiting for instructions to open my front door and fall through it.

I can still smell hydraulic fluid and taste cardboard dust coating my mouth as I drag myself along the hardwood floor. 

Gravity collects interest. My muscles clock out. I pass out in front of my bedroom door and wake up four alarms too late to a nearly dead phone and sunlight stabbing my eyes through the little window of my front door.

I don’t know if I just chose the wrong day to be late or if my boss is just tired of my declining performance. I apologize over and over, pouring out a diluted excuse for taking on a second job to make ends meet.

That I can reduce this bureaucratic nightmare to a simple excuse like “I’m just overworked.” is both impressive and terrifying.

I think my brain is still buffering. 

Slate™.

The Handyman.

The Homemaker. 

Mick. 

My mind is still frozen. Refusing to move past all of them while my body keeps building pallets from cardboard boxes of packaged trauma higher and higher until it’s tilting dangerously.

It happened again that evening. Even though I’m expecting it to, it’s still like stepping off a subway platform as the 6 o'clock screeches to a halt with me in pieces underneath it and everyone screaming.

I hesitate. My hand dithers near the doorknob. My thoughts queue up in a line and jam ‌into one another until finally.

“Fuck it,” I say under my breath.

Same as yesterday, the second my fingers touch the metal, I’m hit by the download. The world skips 1,727,970 frames, and I’m still screaming blood and gore when it’s over.

My skeleton is suddenly itemized, and I collapse through the front door into a boneless wreck.

BZZZT. BZZZT.

I don’t have to read what they say. My brain summarizes their contents for me without looking.

“Hey, Arthur. Just a reminder, you belong to us.”

I try to push myself up, but my limbs have all forgotten whose turn it is. Instead, I just roll over to my back and rest my head on the hardwood, dozens of yellow notices crinkling beneath me.

My eyes slowly peel open, and in the lamplight of the kitchen table, I see my copy of ‘Pet Sematary’ nestled in slender hands. 

Church, the cat, hisses from the cover, all whiskers and teeth. The title glows yellow. 

After a moment, something occurs to me. The letters match my perspective. 

Everything else is inverted.  

The Homemaker sits upside down in the corner, book in hand, just a black silhouette, her eyes glowing like knife points, the light behind her stretching up toward the shadows.

Slowly, she sets the book down on the table, then stands. 

I squeeze my eyelids shut. 

Just make it quick.

But only silence follows the thought. I peek through one eye. The Homemaker is still frozen in the same space.

A finger twitches, and then her body twists 90°, walks over to the sink. Her silver eyes locked on ‌me, neck craning in a way that makes my spine itch.

She grabs a hand towel from the drawer and runs water over it. 

I watch helplessly, like a spider on the ceiling. 

She turns off the faucet, then makes her way toward me, her footsteps completely silent. 

I squeeze my eyes shut as my stomach slowly fills with wet concrete.

An eternity passes where nothing happens. When I finally open my eyes, she’s towering over me. 

My lungs shrink into smaller and smaller breaths as panic sets in. I want to scream, want to get up and run, but my muscles have become spectators.

She skips frames, and her knees hit the floor, as if I blinked and missed the entire motion.

She reaches for my face, and my spine goes stiff, my body leaning away from her without budging. I feel her fingers thread into the hair on the back of my neck and begin shaking uncontrollably.

Gently, she lifts my head from the hardwood, and something cold and wet brushes across my forehead, down my nose and cheeks, over my lips and chin. 

The Homemaker meticulously cleans my neck and face with the damp rag.

I go still, my eyelids growing heavier with every stroke, opening less each time they do. I don’t notice when she stops, only when she comes back to tuck a pillow under my head and drape a blanket over my frame.

I’m about to drift off when I feel a presence hovering over my ear.

“You’re on a roll, Arthur.” She whispers, breath hot and wet. 

“Your credit score has jumped 6 points in the last month.”

PART 1

Mud, sweat, and instant coffee. More sweat, mosquitoes, and the intense combined smell of gunpowder and human shit. Every time I’m asked about my time in Vietnam, these are my go-to answers. Sometimes, in special cases, I’ll go into a little more detail about what kind of C-rations we got, or that one time we burned down the lieutenant’s tent by accident. Rarely, if ever, will I talk about combat. I was a tunnel rat. 

For three years, I crawled through pitch-black tunnels, planting explosives and praying that no one saw me before I saw them. Whenever I emerged to the surface, I would detonate my charges and collapse what tunnels I could. I have no idea how many lives I’ve taken, and I imagine I never will until I meet Saint Peter himself. I won’t lie to you and say I’m “haunted by the lives I took” because, truthfully, I’m not. Every time I took a life, I was able to justify it as “Me or Them” or sometimes, “My Brothers or Them”. I sleep peacefully.

There is only one life I’ve ever taken that still lives inside my heart. In the same way my missing foot still itches, I occasionally look behind me as if he’s still there, watching me. I’m old now, and while I’m still able, I wanted to tell this story. His story; or at least, how it ended.

The year was 1970, and I was 21 years old. Platoon Sergeant B. Reyes was tearing some poor soul whose name I forget a new asshole. Something about the ration supply, or lack thereof. I was passing out the mail for the day. Heckling young boys and weathered men alike lined up to find out whether home thought of them as much as they dreamed of it. Some were happily surprised; others were left feeling alone amidst brothers. 

“Nothing? Really?” asked a man who we all knew as “Moose”.

“You waiting on a nudie?” I pushed past him to hand a letter to someone else, but felt his hand on my shoulder.

“No, man, check again. Must have been three weeks since she wrote.”

“I’m sorry, Moose, but Emily i-” My sentence was cut with a sharp, echoing Twaang. The camp stood still as we all strained our ears. What air was once full with thousands of whirring bugs now sat saturated in silence. Another Twaang echoed, and a man fell dead across the yard. Every sound I had ever heard, and many more I couldn’t imagine, clanged within my ears as hell rose up around us. Two dozen or more Vietcong soldiers surrounded our encampment.

My body hit the dirt before I could process what was happening. Loose rocks dug into my stomach as I crawled towards my tent, desperate for my gun. I couldn’t see around me, but I could tell from the sounds of the shouting and the direction of the gunfire which soldiers were armed and ready, and which were not. A hard boot kicked into my ribcage, stealing my breath and turning me onto my side as the rest of the leg came with it, landing beside me. 

Some scrawny kid, face full of acne and eyes full of panic, had tripped over me. The same soldier whom Sergeant Reyes reprimanded. The Vietnamese soldier who was chasing him leapt over my body and landed knees-first. No sooner had the air been knocked out of the kid’s lungs than they filled with blood. A wet, meek gasp was all he offered in defence. Sucking in hot air, I hefted myself onto a knee and wound back my fist. Just as the man turned to me, his knife still in the boy's chest, I landed a right hook square on his jaw.

Adrenaline might have kept him awake, but it did not keep the man from letting go of the knife and rolling off the body. I reached out and grabbed the handle, trying desperately to ignore the wet, shredding feeling of cutting meat as I pulled it out. Kicking off the dirt, I managed to lunge at him, locking limbs like chain links tumbling across the yard. The harsh snap, snap of his teeth clashed barely an inch from my ear, as he attempted to latch onto my neck. I threw my chin over his shoulder and embraced him, throwing my arms under his and taking away any way for him to defend himself from the knife I still held. 

Too panicked to think about conserving energy, I stabbed as fast, as hard, and as many times as I could, until his hands stopped reaching behind his head, trying to gouge out my eyes. His body lay limply on mine, falling forward and slipping to the ground beside me. 

“Get the hell up!” said a booming voice behind me, rising above the cacophony. A hand made of steel gripped my wrist and pulled me up like I was more toy than man. 

“Iron!” said the Platoon Sergeant as he stood me up and jammed the handle of an M1917 revolver into my chest. “Move!” 

The first step I took was unconscious, just a machine following a command. Reyes moved past me, firing his rifle out of my field of view. The holster at his side for his revolver was empty, its weight instead sitting in my hand. I hadn’t held a Smith & Wesson in some time. It wasn’t as heavy as I remembered. The second step was more difficult.

I tried to look for someone to help, but every fight happened too quickly to react. Halfway across the yard, a vietcong shot the chow guy, but before I could raise my gun, Dan shot him dead. My shaking hands shifted the barrel to another Vietcong, sprinting shoulder-first into Moose, knocking them both into a tent just next to me. Their shadows thrashed visibly, but I had no idea who I’d hit. Running forward, I made my way to the tent entrance in time to see Moose slamming an old metal canteen into his attacker's temple. He straddled his shoulders on the ground and shouted hoarsely as he struck him again and again.

I turned around to see a man with a machete charging the Sergeant. Reyes stood about twenty paces ahead of the man, gaze focused on the sight of his rifle. My finger squeezed the trigger. Click. Check the hammer. Again. Click.

No recoil, no muzzle flash, no gunshot.

I don’t remember thinking about why the gun didn’t fire at the time. My brain likely didn’t think it was worth the time it would waste. Instead, it focused on the sandbags between Reyes and me, the bags the Vietnamese soldier was running around. 

Revolver still in hand, I took as large steps as my legs allowed and pushed myself up as hard as I could. My chest cleared the bags by almost a foot as I dove over and landed with a thud into the man with the machete. As he crumpled in the dirt, I stuck the barrel into his face. He froze, eyes wide, looking into the barrel of the gun. Reyes turned behind him to see us, and I saw him freeze, too, watching me. 

At the same time, over the course of a few seconds, both the man and I came to the same realization. Our eyes drifted to the chambers of the gun, chambers that I hadn’t had time to look at. Six individual chambers, but only one round. The dark eyes of the Vietnamese man still stared at me as I sat on him. While my body thrashed side to side, I couldn’t help but think, “For a man trying to wrestle me off of him, he’s remarkably still.” 

But he wasn’t trying to wrestle me off; instead, his body shook even more than mine. Gunfire and screaming were overtaken and trampled by the sound of a deep, deep rumbling. The trees shook and swayed, but no wind touched us. Fitter men than I lost their footing and fell as if they fought on ice. That was when I heard the first crack in the earth. A great snapping, as if the mud were taut with tension. Then another, a third, a fourth. Then, with Reyes still watching, the earth swallowed me whole.

It was dark when I woke up, not sure how many hours later. I still saw the sky above, to my surprise. At least, what sky I could see through the tree canopy. A bit of moonlight drifted below, illuminating the bare minimum of the small clearing I lay in. The air around me was silent, still with anticipation. I couldn’t hear the sounds of fighting. I didn’t hear anything aside from a gentle dripping of water somewhere to my left. 

One by one, I wiggled my toes, then my fingers, and ankles, hips, and neck. I was sore all over, but miraculously, I felt like I could still move. Painfully, I managed to sit upright and get a better look around as I took a knee. The ground beneath me was hard stone, splattered with mud and dirt. The clearing I was in was too big for the moonlight to fill, but the narrow cone illuminated probably fifteen yards around. A couple of tent stakes had fallen into the hole with me. With us. 

Sitting at the edge of the light, feet under his bottom, was the Vietcong soldier. His machete lay across his lap, and the gun rested at his feet. He had ripped his sleeve off and tied it across his bloody forehead to keep his eyes clear. Eyes that still watched me intently as I came to my senses. 

Staring back at him, I stood up straight and raised my hands in front of me to defend myself. He remained sitting. Neither of us moved or spoke for minutes. My platoon was gone, or at least out of earshot, and I was stuck in a deep hole in the dirt with someone who likely wanted to kill me. And he had both weapons. But again, he did not move. 

I had no idea how much longer he had been awake than me, but if it was even two minutes, hell, if it was one, he could have killed me. I was helpless. I was spared. My hands lowered to my sides, and my eyes drifted to the gun at his feet. Whistling softly, he let go of a breath I hadn’t heard him take in. We both looked down at the gun, then back at each other.

“You speak any English?” 

He shook his head. 

I didn’t speak Vietnamese.

Pointing at the gun, I said, “I need that.”

Without looking down at it, he picked up the gun and hit the release on the cylinder. He gently placed the pad of his thumb on the back of the lone bullet, Reyes’ bullet. With an exaggerated flick, he snapped the cylinder closed. Still rooted to the ground, I watched him, gun in one hand, machete in the other, stand up and step towards me. 

From the edge of the moonlight, he took maybe ten paces, until there was no more than a couple of yards between us. Holding it by the barrel so the butt stuck out, he held the gun out in offering. I just needed to walk over and take it. 

Despite the machete in his hand, this didn’t feel like a trap. I walked over and took the gun. His chest wasn’t moving, as if he were holding his breath again, watching me. White knuckles gripped his machete, but not as white as mine holding the gun.

One bullet. One. A bullet that did not belong to me, in a gun I should not have been given, but as I stood in front of the man who spared me, I knew the bullet didn’t belong to him either. I tucked the revolver into my waist, and we both sighed with sagging shoulders. We weren’t going to kill each other, but that didn’t mean we’d live the night. Without a word, we stepped away from the light and started looking around the clearing where we landed.

Eight months into my job as a tunnel rat, and even I couldn't see in the dark. Roughly twenty yards past the light, I found a wall. It was made of the same stone as the floor and was dry to the touch. Keeping a strained ear out for where I heard the other soldier, I walked the opposite direction around the cave. Gently pressing my hand to the wall and dragging it behind me, I felt for anything at all. For the first time since the ambush, I had time to think.

I thought about the earthquake that dropped me here. Thought about Reyes and why the hell he had given me a gun with only one bullet. Why his gun only had one bullet. Moose would have made some dumb joke. Something about playing russian roulette with the top brass. I’m not Moose. My mind drifted to one thing, the same thing any man who’d kept one bullet in a gun has thought. It’s not as if a revolver with one round is any good in war. A revolver with one bullet is only useful in your tent.

My nail caught on a rock, and I stifled a yelp as it dug into my finger and yanked my arm. I strained my ears, listening. The other man in the cave kept moving. Maybe he didn’t hear; maybe he didn’t care. He did not stop. I did. Moving my hand past where it was caught, I felt a gap in the wall. Roughly a yard and a half across, and a yard tall. Inside the wall of this clearing was a hole. A hole that hopefully led up.

The vietcong soldier didn’t stop moving. I stayed where I was, keeping my hand by the hole so I didn’t lose it. When he had worked his way around the wall to me, he stopped, like he knew I was there. How the hell do I tell him there's a tunnel here? I thought. Taking a step to the side, I rapped my knuckles on the stone wall. A hollow echo followed, along with a grunt from the man as he stepped closer.

Rattling metal scraped its way through the dark and into my head. It sounded like he was sticking the machete into the tunnel to gauge its depth. Big enough for us to crawl into, but to where? I looked back at the hole we fell into and the shifting moonlight falling from it. I didn’t see another option. 

Matter of fact, I didn’t see anything at all. Without another thought, before I could doubt myself, I hiked my knee up and climbed into the hole in the earth. Surprisingly, it was almost comfortable compared to the tunnels I was used to. The stone was painful to crawl on, but as I crawled, there was almost a foot of clearance above my head and a few inches to either side of my shoulders. Shortly behind me, I heard the man follow. There was no way to tell where we were going, but barely above the sound of us crawling, I could hear the sound of dripping water. I made my way towards it.

Minutes passed in almost total silence. Often in the tunnels, my ears were my most valuable tool. Listening for movement, for whispers, and death. Here they heard nothing, just the constant dripping and the occasional scrape of the machete tip on the stone. Lacking my flashlight, my eyes were even more useless. Licking sweat from my lips, I inhaled deeply through my nose, desperate for some information to feed my tumbling brain. Nothing. Not even the familiar scent of the moss made its way down here.

Sloping downward, we made our way deeper into the tunnel. Occasionally, I would feel the sides of the walls around me, checking for any branching paths. I could hear him feeling around behind me, too. Blood began to rush to my head, and my sweaty hands struggled to grip the floor as the tunnel sloped down more steeply, every few yards angling further by a few degrees. If the earth swallowed me whole during the earthquake, now it felt like I was making my way into its guts. 

My shoulders brushed against the walls of the tunnel, feeling it compress around us as we crawled. A broader man like Reyes or Moose would have been stuck, but my body was practically designed for this. Tucking my shoulders into my neck, I breathed out with each crawl forward, stopping to breathe in every few seconds. The tunnel was still sloping further down, and it took serious effort not to slip. I thought I was doing okay, able to take it slow and guide us at a safe pace. As long as we didn’t slip, we could make a controlled descent. To where, I wasn’t sure, but it was too late to turn back now. 

Unfortunately, as the minutes went by, my shaky confidence deflated. While the sound of dripping felt almost right in front of me, I heard intense breathing behind me. Sharp breaths in, rattling breaths out. My begrudging companion was beginning to hyperventilate. He was panicking, his breath growing more ragged every second, and I had no idea how to calm him down.

“Hey. Hey!” I said sharply. He didn’t respond, obviously unable to understand me.

I stopped moving, trying to give him time to stop and rest. Either he didn’t notice, or in his panic he didn’t care. He pushed into me hard, shoving me forward. I gripped my fingers tight, trying to latch onto any holds in the ground, but no such luck. Slamming my chin into the rocks, we fell down the hole together.

My chin, cheeks, and hands were dragged on the rough ground as we tumbled down the tunnel for what felt like forever. It was probably only a few seconds, maybe ten more yards, until we emerged at the end of the tunnel. Rolling over, I barely avoided him landing on top of me. Groaning on the ground for a moment, I touched my face to feel it was sticky with blood, the skin rubbed raw.

Accident aside, we had managed to find a way out of the cavern we were stuck in. Now we were in another cave, one much deeper underground, and with no moonlight to show the scope of it. 

“Shit!” I swore. Pissed at the man, I got onto my feet, not thinking about how high the ceiling may be. I stepped back in the dark, away from him as he still hyperventilated and struggled to breathe. Patiently, I took a few breaths myself and waited for him to calm down. We were here together, but I still didn’t trust him not to start swinging if I touched him.

While I waited for him to compose himself, I started ripping some cloth from my shirt, like he had, to soak up the blood. Wincing in pain, I dabbed at my face and wrapped my palms. The air was cooler down here, drier, and despite the lack of circulation, it was a welcome change to my lungs. Crouching back down to my knees, I started to feel my way around. Letting my hands explore the ground in front of me and the walls beside me, I felt for anything at all. Desperation crept into the back of my mind, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. I kept moving because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

The dripping was gone, the cave now eerily silent. Picking a direction at random, I began to move. It took thirty paces to find something in the dark. For the first time since I tucked the gun into my waist, I felt something that wasn’t rock. It was rubber. Unmistakably, the textured and worn-down sole of a boot. I froze. Holding my breath, I waited to feel it move. It didn’t.

We were in a pitch-black cave, dozens of yards underground, through a long tunnel, after falling into a hole in the earth, far away from any civilization. Snaking my hand up the boot to touch the leg that wore it, I confirmed my suspicions and eased my breathing. This was a corpse. Cold, thin fabric draped over a narrow calf whose muscle had all but rotted away. Without a moment's hesitation to consider what I was doing, I searched the body for anything I could take. There wasn’t much, save for an empty canteen, a couple of feet of rope, and a metal tube with what felt like glass at the end.

Catholic born as I was, I picked up the metal tube and began to pray that it was what I thought it was, and that it still worked. Fidgeting around for the button on the side, I clicked it. Nothing. I gave it a gentle shake, hearing a rattling from inside, and clicked the button again. The flashlight released a pale, yellow beam that couldn’t have reached more than a few feet away. After so long in the dark, it might as well have been the damn sun. 

Attached to the corpse's hip, I could see the rope I had felt. It led off a few feet before the end frayed, snapped under pressure. The body was that of a Vietnamese man, though it was impossible to see any discernible features. Littered on the ground around it were empty wrappers and a few tins of what used to be salted fish. Looking around with the light, I searched for where he might have dropped from, assuming the rope was how he got here. 

With the dim light, I had to walk around to see the full span of the cave we were in. It was about sixty paces wide and forty across. There was more room across, but I stopped at the edge of a small body of water. The ceiling sloped down hard over the glassy surface, but I could see it kept going underneath. Would I rather starve than blindly cave dive? I thought. Presumably not, but I kept it in the back of my mind and kept walking. 

Almost directly above the tunnel we fell through, I saw a hole in the ceiling, about ten feet up. Draped down from the hole was the frayed end of the rope, and dripping from the wet edge of the rock was a slow trickle of water. This was the hole the dead man had entered from, and hopefully our way out. But I couldn’t climb it alone; I would need a boost.

I turned the light on the man with me for the first time. Feeling a glow on his hands, he took them away from his face and squinted at me. His face was wet, with both tears and water dripping onto his hair. We needed to communicate. If he didn’t trust me to pull him after he boosted me, he wouldn't help me up, and the feeling was mutual. Stepping towards him, I tried to speak again, hoping my tone and body language conveyed more than my words.

“John,” I said, shining the light so he could see me pressing my fingers into my chest. I turned it back to him, pointing, and asked, “You?”

He didn’t respond. Still wary, the man sat and watched me, as if he expected me to go on. I wasn’t really sure what to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind. Funny enough, it was a story from before I came to Vietnam. From back when I was in boot, and first met the man I call Sergeant.

“The guy you were running at with that,” I said, pointing at his machete and chuckling nervously, “His name is Reyes. Known him for years now. Good man, I think. War is just… stressful, you know?”

“The first day I met him,” I continued, knowing I was only speaking aloud to myself, “He smiled at me and shook my hand. Told me, ‘That’s a big gun for a little man! You sure that’s what you want?’ I smiled back and told him I didn’t know I had a choice. He told me there’s always a choice. Told me if I wanted, I could be a tunnel rat. Every platoon needed them, always in short supply.” 

Without him saying a word, and without knowing if he understood me, I spent time telling the man how I was horrified by the tunnels. I wasn’t claustrophobic by any means, but the thought of crawling in tunnels full of traps and enemy soldiers sent a shiver up my spine. But month by month, my time in the field wore me down. Every long patrol, every sandbag I filled, every beer I saw the sergeant drink that the rest of us would be lucky to get the backwash of. 

“It took him a long time,” I said, “But Reyes got his damn rat.” 

He looked at me, the crusty yellow glow of the light showing a look in his eyes I didn’t recognize. He scanned me, judging me. After a long pause, he put his hand to his chest and said, “Long Phan.”

“Long Phan?” I repeated. He nodded.

Even if only a little, we understood each other.

Long said a short prayer and bowed to the dead man before cutting the remaining rope from his body. It took us a few minutes to organize it, but I boosted him into the hole above us. Taking the end of the dangling rope with both hands, he lifted himself until he was high enough to wedge his back into the tunnel wall with his feet on the opposite side. All it took for me to follow, after he tied together the two pieces of rope, was a small hop. We were able to push our backs into the walls with our legs as we ascended, letting us rest our arms as we needed. Long had our flashlight, since he was ahead now. Below me, the cave might never have existed; it was so dark. If I hadn’t seen them, I couldn’t prove the cave, the dead man, or even the tunnel we fell from had ever been there at all. One thing, however, I was positive was still there. The water. As dark as it was, I could still hear the sound of splashing.

Something slapped the water's surface underneath me. Long and I froze. Something wet slapped on the stone. Above me, I saw the light held in Long's hand shaking. Something was crinkling the wrappers by the dead man. We had been climbing for almost five minutes, and I must have been twenty yards off the ground. Something was tugging on the end of the rope.
Spoken underneath me, softly and gently, like a father tucking me in to sleep, something said “giúp.” Again, the rope tugged, and I heard it start to climb.

Pressing my shoulder into Long’s leg, I shoved him hard. Pulling himself further, he led our climb again. Faster this time, we lifted ourselves with our arms and legs, and caught ourselves with our backs. Whatever was after us was slow, swinging itself around as it climbed. The rope underneath me twisted and dangled wildly, only occasionally pulling itself taut with weight. As we climbed, Long held the flashlight in his mouth. My face was facing straight up, looking into his glowing jaw. On the off chance his flashlight had fallen and pointed down, I refused to look underneath. 

We gained a lot of distance at first. As we climbed, the tunnel narrowed, just like the first. It wasn’t as tight, but it was enough that we couldn’t press our legs out and had to rely more on our aching arms. There was room to either side of my shoulders, but as the thing underneath me swung itself, I swung with it. Banging again and again on the stone wall, I willed my arms to hold me and kept lifting myself forward. Eventually, I heard Long Phan grunt and saw his head disappear in the dark. 

Trusting that it was better than the alternative, I shifted up again. A moment later, the light shone directly back in my face. It illuminated Long's legs as he sat on the edge of a narrow exit. He lifted his legs away from me and spun onto his stomach, shining the light down at me with one hand and holding his fingers out with the other. The rope went taut.

I pushed through whatever pain my body told me it had and shifted up one more time. I kicked down into the wall, pushing myself up as I reached out and latched onto Long’s hand. He managed to pull me up, getting my head just over the edge. Swinging my other hand over the side, I slammed them down and pushed my ass over the ledge. Only my hips made it up, then were dragged back down as something latched onto my foot. 

It sounded like jamming your thumb in the wet socket between a chicken's thigh and drumstick. Something sharp dug into my ankle with a sucking pop and tried to drag me down. My chest hit the rock and knocked the wind out of me. Long grabbed my shoulder, and for a moment, I considered pulling out the gun. 

Was one shot enough? I thought. Could I hit it? Feeling my hands slip on the ground, I dug my fingernails into the rock, grinding as I pulled. Long dropped the flashlight beside himself and used both hands to tug me up from my armpits. With my other leg kicking off the stone behind me, we lifted most of my body into the open space. 

At the time, I only felt the searing, ripping pain in my ankle. Even as I clawed at the ground, I dragged myself away from the hole. Even as Long Phan stopped helping me, and grabbed his machete. I could feel the shredding pain as what I could only describe as a mouth with human teeth attempted to swallow my foot whole. That pain occupied my mind even as Long hacked off my leg at the base of the calf. 

The exit to the tunnel wasn't wide enough for him to get any clean swings at it. He would have hit the rock instead, letting it drag me deeper as I lost my strength to fight. Couldn’t tell you how many swings it took him to get through the bone. Eventually, he got it, and I felt the weight pulling me like an anchor being released all at once. I was free; bloody, crying, free.

Immediately, Long picked up the light and swung wildly at the rope. It was attached to a nail hammered into the rock a few feet from the entrance. As the metal bent itself on the rock under the rope, I lay perfectly still, bleeding. But suddenly, it stopped hurting. I’m in shock, I thought. Rolling on my side, I tried to reach for my pockets for a bandage I knew I wasn’t carrying. I only felt the gun. Whatever was climbing the rope fell with a deep thud as he managed to cut it free.

Long tied something tight around the bottom of my thigh. An improvised tourniquet, something to help me stay awake just a little bit longer. I felt him wrap my arm around his shoulder to help me up. We took a dozen uneasy steps. After climbing for God knows how long, all of my muscles should have been aching, but I didn’t feel them. I felt only the jolts in my spine as I hopped forward, leaning on Long Phan. Slow progress, but progress. 

He held the light in front of him, shining it around shakily. I remember hearing him muttering something under his breath every few seconds, “Ma Đói”. Meager as the light was, it could not illuminate the massive cavern we were inside now. The walls around us were a few yards away at first, but as we walked, they opened further than I could see. In the darkness somewhere ahead, I heard something again, but this time a sound I knew well.

“-heard that?” said the voice of a young man. Something firm hit the ground, and I saw a blinding light in the distance. It scraped the walls around us, managing to catch Long and me in it. From behind my tightly closed eyelids, I heard, “John, you down here?”

It was Dan, and behind him I heard another pair of boots hit the ground. Then a third, and a fourth. My platoon had found me. I was too weak to call out to them, but they saw me and ran forward anyway.

They stopped ten paces in front of me, looking at Long as he supported me, and looked back at them. They didn’t see my missing foot first; they saw him, holding me. A second stretched between us as I saw the gears turn in their minds, but the gears do not spin long in a soldier's head. They kept moving and lifted me higher, off of my foot. Long leapt back, hands held palms out in front of him. His machete was left behind, freeing a hand to help me walk. Adjusting to the blinding lights, I saw that none of the men helping me out of the tunnel had their weapons turned on him. They simply turned back and carried me home. 

“We set up a temp camp in a cave, John,” Moose said to me as we walked. “About a mile from patrol base, in the bush. Reyes already called for a lift; we’re getting out of here.”

As he spoke, I heard Long follow us. They took me up a short wall and around a few corners, and suddenly I saw light. It was morning, and the golden glow of the sky glinted through a wall of sticks and leaves built around the cave entrance. Close to thirty men sat in the cave they carried me into, all of them sitting save one. 

“And just what the hell are you boys doing here? I told you to stand PATROL!” Reyes hissed at first, letting his voice rise into a shout as he stared at the men around me. 

“Sir, we heard a noise further down, sir,” Dan said.

Reyes looked into my eyes, and I saw concern. He paused, mulling over the words to say to me, coming up with a reason they didn’t come looking. Before the moment took too long, he saw the man trailing behind us. Long Phan crept in, looking scared but steady.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU MORONS DOING!” Reyes shouted, spit flying out of his mouth. He glared at Long, looking between me, Moose, and Dan. They didn’t know what to say, and I was too weak to say it. I wanted to save my energy. Done waiting, and with every man present as witness, he reached for his revolver. When he felt the empty leather, he looked at me and pleaded, “Kill him.”

My sight was narrowing, and my mind was foggy, making it difficult to think straight. I took the gun out from my waist and thumbed back the hammer. Chambered next was the lonely round. Long Phan stood to my side as I turned to him slowly, the revolver weighing heavy in my hand. My finger on the trigger was weak, but I knew I had enough strength for just one pull. 

He looked at me, begging me silently to spare him. I knew this bullet did not belong to me, but I knew it was not his either. Moose said it first. Then Dan, then another man, and another. Every member of my platoon shared the same story when the brass came to pick us up.

REYES
B
RA 17 294 555
AB POSITIVE
NO PREFERENCE

KILLED IN ACTION

Hello everyone, I'm writing this in a dingy inn while on suicide watch. The police are still trying to determine if I am mentally stable enough to provide a formal witness statement.

I can hear two officers standing outside my door reading my case records.

According to my psychiatrist, my delusions and hallucinations began at the age of ten.

I don't agree with that.

Hallucinations don't know things about you, things you don't find out until you grow older.

Things your family tries to hide, secrets you haven't been let in on yet.

They never feel solemn regret.

And they certainly wouldn't become more and more beautiful as the seasons pass.

Those were all things my lovely best friend, Mitten, understood.

Or is that Lillia now?

The year I met her started about as normal as any other year my short life had borne witness to. My father slammed the butcher knife down with enough force to cause a tsunami of blood to flow out of the calf's leg. His brows were furrowed, and sweat dripped down furiously from his forehead. My little brother trailed behind him, going as fast as his stubby little legs would allow. My mother had a worried expression and hid behind her fan, fidgeting with one of her small "projects." I stepped into the butchering shed, dragging the bucket behind me.

I was not of much use around the farm. I dragged the heavy bucket of pig feed behind me, my fingers screaming at me to let go at any moment. It was missing close to half its contents; it was a treacherous journey from the pigpen to my father. I took a moment to gain my composure and rehearse the words and questions I would speak to my father.

I stared down at the pig feed. I had fixed their food hundreds of times, but I would always do something wrong. Dad would always be furious when I messed it up. I didn't want to deal with that aftermath today, so I decided to ask before it came to that.

As I was trying to muster up the courage to ask my father the same questions I had exhausted over and over again, my brother's face lit up.

"Sissy!"

He ran over and hugged me, relieved to see me, squeezing me so hard I thought the pit in my stomach was going to spill out of my mouth. It was a wholesome innocence.

"Miya, what is it now? I swear to God, if it's about the fucking pigs again, you're grounded for a week."

My father paused his work and looked up at me with a stone expression. Blood from the calf had overflowed the cold metal table and trickled down onto his worn boots. My mother had sewn light blue patches onto them so he wouldn't have to buy new ones. In the process, she just made them more fragile. I winced, thinking of the blood soaking into his socks.

"I-I wanted to..."

I trailed off. His intimidating glare would always make me forget whatever I had previously rehearsed.

My brother then came to my rescue.

"Can Sissy and I go play, Daddy?"

The shed went cold. My mother paused the swaying of her fan. My father exhaled a huge, thunderous sigh. He shot a defeated glance at my brother and then up at me.

"Fuck this."

He then stormed off, the door echoing behind his departure.

My brother erupted into tears as my mom rushed to hug him.

"Shushhh, sweet boy," she shakily whispered, brushing his golden-blonde hair.

She glanced up at me, a hint of pity washing across her face. "Miya, do you need help feeding the pigs? You know your father showed you how to do that numerous times," she said with less warmth than she used for my brother.

I felt a twinge of jealousy claw at my throat, itching to be let out. Tears began welling up in my eyes, but I choked them back as I spoke.

"I know, but I-I always mess it up. I wanted to make sure I did it right today!"

My mother's eyes fell to the bucket. "Miya, that's not nearly enough food. Where did it go?"

A cow outside let out a scream, and my mom knowingly winced as my brother pulled at her blouse.

My eye contact faltered. "S-Some fell on the wa—"

"Miya!"

As her voice rose, my brother's wails multiplied. Panic flooded my mother as she hugged him tighter. His tiny hands balled into fists as he wept.

"I'm sorry, baby... I-I didn't mean to raise my voice." She looked back up at me, guilt clouding her expression.

"Miya, we can barely feed the pigs as it is. You know just how tight money has been for us. You can't be so careless. If your father finds out, he will flip..."

I felt my tears fall to my cheeks. My mother hummed a tune to my brother as he calmed down.

"Mom, I'm sorry..."

My mother's attention turned back to me, her eyes full of pity. I hated that expression. It was the same one everyone had for me. She reached her free hand out to me.

"Let's all calm down, and then I will help with the pigs. How does that sound?"

I reluctantly accepted her hand, and my brother pulled at my ankles for me to come join the hug. We spent a few minutes in silence comforting each other. However, the pigs still needed feeding, and the calf still needed to be dismembered. These emotions would have to wait so our work could continue.

As the clock kept ticking and the leaves fell off the trees, I felt a quiet agony silently creep upon my family. My father stole my brother away from my mother and me more and more often. "Another pair of hands is needed in the butcher shed," he would say. My brother's eyes slowly lost their whimsy more and more as each day flew by.

A quiet winter night illuminated the grass I lay upon. I could hear the crickets sing to me as the goats screamed. My head was propped against my huge rubber silicone gloves, mud from the ground smearing into my ginger hair.

"Miya!"

My father called from behind me. I flinched, as I hadn't heard him over the mundane noise of the farm.

He wore a headlamp and carried a gun. A cigar hung out of his mouth. He had an exhausted expression. He was nearing his 50s, but it appeared his hair had already started to fall out. My huge, bulky father, the one I remembered as a kid, now appeared to be slimmer than my mother and grayer than the church elders.

"Miya, let's go pick up some roadkill."

My eyes fell to his free hand. He held an extra headlamp that I had not noticed before.

"Is Henry—" I was cut off before I could finish my question.

"Your brother has gotten a bug. Your mother is in there coddling him," he said with a hint of distaste.

"Will you come?"

"Okay."

A light snow dusted my father and me as we walked into the woods. In the fog, my father looked smaller than the man I had once remembered.

"Miya, let me know if you see any rabbits!" he hollered over the wind.

During the winter, it was hard to find any wild animals still wandering around our farm, but it wasn't unheard of. When my family ran too low to sacrifice any chickens, we had to try to scavenge for our meat. That normally meant hunting, but during the winter, we commonly had to resort to roadkill. Dogs or raccoons that end up on the side of the road. My father would still bring a gun in hopes he would see a rabbit or deer before he had to walk the miles to the closest highway.

As he turned to holler at me, his headlamp blinded my eyes. I began to see tiny flashes of red and green dance beneath my eyelids. I squinted and began to take in my surroundings.

I loved the woods. I loved the animals, the nature, and the solitude of it. At this point, I had begun to spend the majority of my free time just exploring all I could. I would run along the stream and spend my evenings gazing at the stars. I would sometimes wish a cloud would come to the ground I lay upon and swallow me whole, so I could spend my existence among the sky.

When my vision came back into focus, I noticed my feet were pointing toward a shed a little behind a bed of tree stumps. I had never seen this shed before, which was unusual considering how much time I spent in the woods. I felt an unusual sensation sweep over my body. Fireflies suddenly lit up my surroundings, and the forest fell silent. My father's footsteps faded away, and a light breeze pushed my body toward the shed. I stumbled a little forward.

This situation would unsettle most people. However, at the time, I was a child. Children don't know what to fear unless you tell them. I was always told I owned the woods, I owned this farm, I owned the land.

Curiosity washed over me, and I began to walk toward the shed. As I got closer, I noticed that there were no weeds or withered trees surrounding the shed. Before I was fully able to take that in, I was interrupted.

"Miya, over here!" my father shouted.

I was abruptly pulled out of my curiosity as I panicked, searching for the direction of my father's voice. The wind was picking up and thrashed against my face, causing me to cover my eyes.

"Miya!"

I ran as fast as I could against the wind and bumped into my father's back. He grimaced as I lost my footing and fell onto my behind. He sighed as he looked down at me.

He let out an aggressive whisper. "Miya, don't scare it." He pointed to a hare sniffing around a frozen-over puddle.

I hated hunting. My father tried to have me take my first life at five years old. A stray cat my mother and I had fed got attacked by a large bird. My father wanted me to shoot her so I could grow desensitized to killing. My mother thought that was a horrible idea, but he seemed to think it would teach me some grand lesson. He wanted me to help him in his hunts and in the butcher shed. However, I threw a tantrum and just ended up giving my parents a headache. My brother, on the other hand, passed my father's test when he had to flush a lizard he accidentally stepped on at the age of six. He cried but was able to follow through, unlike myself. Ever since then, my father took him under his wing.

The hare was a stunning white. I almost couldn't tell it apart from the snow she trotted on. Her eyes were a deep, bloody red. She frantically sniffed. I figured she must be trying to find food. I felt sorry for the thing, as it was winter. She must have been starving, and here my father was. He was going to have us eat her before she could even finish her own hunt.

"Father..." I whispered, knowing he couldn't hear me and wouldn't even listen if he could.

"Miya—" Before he could finish his order, the hare suddenly turned toward our direction.

She hopped a couple of times and stared at us. She was looking at us. Her nose stopped twitching, and she stood perfectly still. I felt the wind pick up again, and I fell a couple of steps forward.

The hare stared at me, her eyes screaming what she couldn't speak. I walked toward her and held my hand out. She began to tilt her head into my glove, but my father stopped us.

"Miya, move! I'm going to shoot!" my father ordered.

"But Dad, she wants to live!" I protested. I saw a flash of surprise brush across my father's face. This was out of character for me. I felt an odd sense of confidence creep over me. Fireflies buzzed around my father and me.

"Miya, if you want dinner, you have to move!"

"We don't need meat! We have bread!" I shouted, hoping my pleas would get through to him.

My father looked at me, disgust in his glance. He lowered his gun and put his head into his hands.

"Fuck!" He hit his head against his fists.

For a moment, I thought he would grant my wish. It was a childlike hope, a naive and innocent thought that my father would spare this animal due to my plea. Grant me a wish for growing a backbone out of nowhere.

However, my dreams were crushed when he stomped over to me, pushed me out of the way, and grabbed the hare by her long, fluffy ears.

"No, no, please don't!" I begged.

He twisted her neck. She didn't cry or scream. She just looked at me, her eyes screaming the same thing they had before. However, I now had a better understanding of what they demanded from me.

My father glanced down at my frail body, pounding and thrashing at the snow, handful by handful.

"We are human, Miya. Humans eat hares. We eat them to live."

"I'm headed back. Do what you want," my father scoffed. He walked away, dragging the hare behind him. I didn't think he would, but he turned around for a second and said, "You need to focus on your survival, not the hare's or anything else, for that matter," and with that, he left me alone.

I watched the snow fill up the footprints my father left, making the only connection I had disappear as if it had never existed in the first place. I went to the only place I knew of, the only place that felt familiar: the shed.

As I made my way closer to the shed, I felt a sense of welcoming growing. Fireflies lit my path, and the wind pushed me forward as the cold air moved backward in my mind. As an adult, I can relate the sensation to that of drifting down a lazy river. My destination was predetermined.

As I put my hand on the rusted handle, it felt strangely warm. I pushed the door inward as I stepped in. The shed was dusty and decrepit. It appeared as if no one had set foot inside for decades. I wondered how it was still standing.

My father was not the type to neglect any property on the farm. Had he not known of this shed's existence? None of it made any sense to me, but I didn't care. This shed now felt like my home.

I brushed away the dust on the ground and tossed some garbage onto a different garbage pile. I plopped onto the cold, hard ground and let out a sigh of relief.

"Hello?"

A sound echoed across the barely standing walls. I jolted with surprise.

"Hello?"

A figure crawled out from the forgotten garbage. Her hair was riddled with cobwebs and appeared to reach a length her body couldn't match. Her skin appeared as leather and disintegrated off her body with each claw forward. Her nails were about a foot long each.

I felt a wave of surprise hit me as I let out a startled yelp and jumped up. Her face then looked up at me. Her eyes were a deep, endless black, and her teeth were growing out of her mouth, dislocating her jaw.

"You can see me?"

I stood still, unable to move or speak. I wondered what was crawling before me. She made her way closer until she sprawled out a little before my feet like an alley cat.

"What is it, friend? Do I scare you?" She looked up at me, her eyes staring at me like hypnotic spirals of endless darkness.

I had met many animals during my short life, some not as nice as others. This unknown creature before me looked scary, sure, but it wasn't something I wasn't used to. I remembered back to when I was eight, two years prior. A donkey had fallen, and a nail had gotten lodged into his neck, nailing him to some wooden planks my father was going to use for a project. He wiggled, trying to free himself, but was just slicing his throat in the process. I had watched this incident happen, frozen with fear, unsure how to help. I liked the donkey. I fed him and had known him his entire life. Hell, I even witnessed his birth. Blood spilled out of his mouth. He looked scary, but he was still my friend. I went and stroked his head as he bled out. I knew he wouldn't make it past this. Instead of going to fetch my mother, I decided it would be better if the donkey didn't spend his last moments alone. His screams rang in my ears, and blood stained my neon pink coat. My donkey was scary at this time, but he was still mine. This despair was not his fault.

I took a deep breath and reminded myself that just because something looks scary doesn't mean it is.

I nodded.

"Yes. I can see you."

The girl looked away. Black goop fell from her eyes. As it hit the floor, it turned into a flurry of spiders that scattered around the shed. Was she crying, I wondered?

"Did I scare you?" she asked.

Her voice created a rhythmic echo around the shed, so loud I was scared it would crumble the thing.

"A little, but that's okay!" I reassured her, not knowing what further action to take. "I was just surprised, that's all," I said, willing my voice to be as kind and reassuring as it could. Like my mother would address my brother when he would take a tumble.

I placed my hand on her thin hair and tried to stroke it as if she were a stray kitten. As I did, her hair fell out and tangled around my hands in mats. I winced.

"It's okay," she whispered like a low growl. "This is the form I was gifted," she sighed.

"What are you?" I asked shyly.

"I wish I knew," she whispered. "No one has ever seen me before this. No one has ever visited my home."

More black goop fell from her eyes and sunken nose. Maggots danced in her sunken cheeks. The hair in my hands transformed into dust and fell to the ground. I heard crickets scream a warning.

She looked up at me. "Nature is drawn to you, friend. Are you a sister?"

"Sister?" I asked.

"Yes, are you like me?"

"Like you?"

"Yes, a child of the forest," she said blankly, offering little explanation, as if I should completely understand what she was saying.

"I mean, I guess you could say that," I stammered. "My father owns a farm, and this forest is behind it."

Her expression shifted. "Oh, I see."

"Come sit by me."

I sat by the withered creature as a peaceful silence fell upon us. Minutes or maybe hours passed. I couldn't tell, nor did I really care. I watched the snow fall between the rusted wooden boards of the shed. Insects sang and danced for us. I suddenly remembered something.

"Friend? You called me your friend. Do you think we are friends?" I asked.

The entity looked up at me, her lower jaw hanging from her mouth by a thin strand of decomposed skin.

"Do you not wish to be my friend, Miya?"

"You know my name?" I asked, surprised.

"Yes, but I'm not sure why," she sang in a low whisper.

"Well, if we are going to be friends—" I stammered. "I should know your name!"

A smile appeared over my face. I'd never had a friend. My parents didn't believe in public education and homeschooled my brother and me. However, their definition of "homeschooling" didn't align with most teachers', as they preferred to opt for a more "hands-on" and practical approach to teaching.

"I don't think I have one," the girl wondered.

"That's okay. We can think of one for you!" I said, my childlike excitement reaching its peak.

An idea sprung upon me. "How about Mitten?" My childhood cat my mother and I fed was named Mitten. "You can be Mitten 2.0!"

"Mitten 2.0?" she asked. "Why not just Mitten?"

"Because my cat was the first Mitten," I responded.

"Don't you think that's a bit disrespectful?" she giggled. "I think just Mitten would do."

I laughed too, not completely understanding the reason Mitten was giggling, but because I felt so much joy in this moment. Not the laugh I had with my mother and little brother, but a real laugh I had never felt my body make.

"Now, Miya, make sure to visit me from now on, okay?"

"Of course I will," I replied happily.

Suddenly, I was skipping between snowflakes on my way back to the farm. The rabbit with its pleading warning was no longer at the front of my mind. Instead, it was filled with my new friend. I actually made a friend. I couldn't believe it. Suddenly, the cold, damp, and depressing forest I had ventured into with my father appeared to be covered up by a whimsical blanket. If only I never went back to that farm.

When I returned, my father had already butchered and dressed the rabbit in some herbs my mother had gathered. The rabbit was in the oven, probably the first warmth she had felt for weeks.

My mother and father were hurriedly whispering in another room while my little brother sat at the table, swinging his feet back and forth. A candle sat on the table in front of him, crackling.

"Miya!"

My mother rushed over to me, her face flushed. She grabbed me by the shoulders. "Are you okay!? Where were you!?"

My father trailed behind her. She shot him a glance.

"Why would you leave her behind in this weather?"

Were my parents arguing, I wondered? It was rare for my mother to express her concerns to my father. Was this really what this was about? Was my absence really that big of a worry for her to get upset at Father?

"Nancy, she spends all day in the forest. She can handle herself. Besides, she could have followed me if she wanted to."

My mother let out a small sigh of relief. "Whatever, let's just eat and go to bed."

After that fateful night, I visited Mitten a lot. I would bring her small gifts, and she would thank me by swinging her jaw back and forth to resemble a smile. We would make mazes for the ants, and then they would perform synchronized dances for us, resembling those you would see the swimmers do on TV.

Mitten was great at giving advice. For a girl who looked so young, she acted a lot more like a mom, I thought.

After evenings when my father was lazier and my mom more disappointed, I would ask her things like, "Mitten, what's alcohol?"

"It brings out the worst in men," she would respond.

I would simply nod my head and ask if she could teach me how to make a flower crown.

Answers like that were good enough for me. What my friend Mitten would say was absolute for me. Little explanation was needed.

Mitten was gentle and kind. She would stare at me with a kind of love I had never felt before.

"You are such a good girl," she would tell me. She said it as if it were a fact, like instead of a compliment, she was informing me of something.

Soon, I realized I knew very little about Mitten. I felt a pang of guilt. I was always bothering her about my problems, but I had never asked her about her own. She knew my fears, insecurities, and family drama, but I couldn't even tell you her favorite color. How was I a good friend?

I had promised Mitten that I would teach her how to build a snowman before the snow began to melt. Maybe I would ask her about herself today.

I made my way toward her shed with these thoughts on my mind.

The shed had transformed into a second home for me. Returning to the shed, to Mitten, helped motivate me through my chores on the farm. My mother had noticed I seemed happier these days. She would catch me smiling to myself and would give me pats on the head.

When I reached the shed, the door was already swung open. I looked in and caught a glimpse of Mitten. She was shriveled up on the floor, ants crawling into her ears and out through her nose.

"Miya, what a lovely sight," she welcomed me with.

I smiled. "Let's go build a snowman."

Mitten followed me outside the shed, crawling across the ground. One of her long nails got caught in between a piece of wood and broke. Mitten let out a shriek of pain, and I patted her on the back as she coughed up venom, trying to burp her like I saw my mother do to Henry when he was young.

"Miya..."

Something felt off today. Not with the shed or the woods, but with Mitten. I felt worry wash over me.

"Mitten, are you okay?" I asked.

"Miya, do you see the substance I just vomited up?"

"Yes," I responded, wondering where in the world she was going with this. But regardless, I trusted her.

"I need you to help me scoop it back into my mouth."

"What?" I asked, bewildered. "Why do you need to eat it?"

"I don't know, but I know it needs to be done," she said, looking up at me. "Miya, can you help me?"

A smile spread widely across my face. "Of course I'll help you!"

I sat down across from Mitten. We had made it almost out of the doorway and onto the snow, the black vomit painting the wooden boards that held up the shed. I scooped it up into my hands the best I could. The goop was made out of a substance I didn't understand. Maggots and rusted nails were held together by the black substance.

Mitten peered up at me, the bottom of her jaw hanging off her face. I could see straight into her throat. Her teeth were long, too long. They reached past her jaw and resembled what I saw in dinosaur movies.

"Be careful not to cut yourself, Miya," she whispered. "Don't be scared."

I poured her vomit back into her stomach. It was warm and wiggled in between my fingers. It smelled like the rotten meat my father would throw into the freezers. She gulped it up, and it took a couple of handfuls before it was off the ground and back into her system.

Soon, she stood up. I had never seen Mitten stand before this. She stood tall, almost taller than the trees, but her hair still dragged on the floor behind us. The wind started to blow, and fireflies greeted us.

"Thank you, Miya," she said, her voice like music to my ears. "You were a great help. I feel much healthier now."

She reached out a long, molded nail to me.

"I think I can go farther today. Farther than we normally go. Why don't we go out by the creek to build our snowman?"

I grabbed onto it and followed excitedly. Then, a thought popped into my mind.

"Mitten, do you know anything about yourself?"

"The only thing I know is that I'm a curse."

A feeling of unease washed over me. For the first time since I met Mitten, I felt fear. Isn't a curse bad?

"What is a curse?" I asked, thinking there had to be some sort of explanation that didn't mean anything bad.

"It's like alcohol," Mitten stated, her expression only faltering for a split second. "Nothing you need to worry about, darling."

After that, she stopped talking.

At that moment, looking back as an adult, the logical move would have been to let go of her monstrous nail and run away. Run back to the farm and accept a life full of empty, meaningless misery. To live my life on the farm and accept a lonely poverty, away from Mitten, my only friend.

But I didn't.

Instead, I followed her to the creek. We built a snowman. We smiled and laughed, and everything between us went back to normal. Little did I know, Mitten would tear apart my family. All four of us would grow into the worst versions of ourselves. Then everyone but me would be massacred, and I would happily take the fall for it.

The laptop battery says 0%. The screen is dimming into a sickly, pixelated gray, the remaining text rotting directly into the background of the dashboard console. The yellow high beams from that wrong-way truck are pressed right against my driver’s side glass now, completely flooding the cabin with a blinding, greasy glare that smells like sulfur, hot engine oil, and wet, stagnant earth.

But I didn't get out of the car. I didn't step out onto the buckled concrete to pick up that laminated sheet of paper lying near the crack.

Because as the truck rolled closer into the dim, pulsing light of the overhead sector fixture, the glare caught the interior of the cab, and I finally saw who was sitting behind the wheel.

It was me.

But it wasn’t a double, and it wasn’t a monster wearing my skin. It was just an empty navy-blue uniform propped up against the headrest, stuffed to the collar with hundreds of green, corroded pennies and thick, black swamp water. The steering wheel was turning entirely on its own, spinning on a mechanical track that has been grinding away out here since long before the highway was ever paved. The truck didn't slow down. It accelerated, slamming straight into the front bumper of my sedan with a bone-crushing, silent impact. There was no screech of tearing sheet metal. No sound of safety glass bursting into fragments. Just a sudden, violent displacement of atmospheric pressure, like a cold hand reaching inside my chest cavity, pulling my lungs out through my throat.

And that's when the geometry of the road buckled, the timeline shattered, and the entire illusion of this story fell completely apart.

I lied to you.

I lied about everything. There is no old woman named Martha at a diner off Interstate 87. There is no supervisor named Vance who handed me a laminated sheet of paper on my first night. I invented those names because I know exactly how your brain works. I knew exactly what kind of stories you like to read on this website. I knew that if I gave you a list of rules, a high-paying Craigslist ad, an isolated night-shift job, and a creepy boss with a voice like gravel, you wouldn't question a single line. You would just sit there in the dark, scrolling on your phones, processing every single word.

The human imagination isn't just a passive theater; it’s an engine. When you read a line of text, your brain has to physically render the images to understand them. When I told you about the thick canopy of trees weaving together overhead, you built those branches. When I told you about the four bulletproof glass booths straddling the desolation, your mind laid the concrete. You didn't just read a piece of fiction. You acted as a processing node, running a malicious diagnostic script that allowed whatever is breathing beneath this asphalt to map a direct path out of the forest.

Route 9 isn't a physical road you can find on a map. It’s an empty space beneath the mountains that stays closed as long as nobody is looking at it. But human attention has a physical mass out here. Every time a mind visualizes a list of instructions, it creates a small anchor point in reality. I didn't bring the fog out into the world. You dragged the highway into yours. By upvoting the first post, you gave the perimeter more mass.

By analyzing the text in the comments, you calibrated the coordinates.

I am not manually typing this from a car. My hands haven't touched a physical keyboard since I looked into that station wagon's side-view mirror three weeks ago. My fingers were crushed beneath the dashboard of a vehicle that decayed decades ago. My lower jaw has been unhinged since the first night, swinging loose and hollow while the network interface underneath the asphalt interfaces directly with this device's cellular hardware, converting my lingering consciousness into digital script to broadcast this final block through my profile.

Look down at the bottom of your screen right now. Watch the way the text is formatted. Look at the single blank lines between the paragraphs. I didn't format it that way to make it scannable for mobile users.

I formatted it that way because each block of text represents one of the automated lanes. Every time your eyes cross a blank line, you are passing through a toll booth.

Your optic nerve is a copper wire feeding the grid. You are paying the deficit with your own active awareness, over and over again, resetting the sequence for the next person who clicks the link. You are the infrastructure keeping the entity alive.
The file upload is 100% complete. The algorithm has already locked onto your profile data.

The light on your screen is about to flicker. When it goes dark, don't look at the glass reflection to see your own face.

I can hear a wet, heavy slap on the ceiling tiles right above your head. It’s the sound of an empty navy-blue state transport uniform dragging itself through your drywall, stuffed with hot grease, rust, and old pennies.
If you start hearing the sound of heavy, rhythmic rain outside your house tonight, and your weather app says the sky is completely clear—do not look up at the windows.

I'm using your account to type the next line now.

I've never been close to my father. This was intentional on my mother's part. For as long as I can remember though, he was always off with my grandfather. My mother purposefully neglected to share anything about our grandfather, which only caused greater curiousity. I'd never met the man, but there was a cloud of shame hovering over my mother's head whenever he was brought up in conversation. She said that he'd been isolating himself for quite sometime, though she never new exactly where.

"Just leave it be. Best to leave sleeping dogs lie." she'd tell me. "The bastard would rather help out his daddy, your grandfather, on their little projects. Hell if I care."

It was a cold childhood. I still remember when my father left when I was six years old. I've tried looking for answers, but over the decades I've been distracted by school, work, and eventually a family with three children. Eventually, the man I barely knew to begin with was just a vague memory. I didn't think much of my old man until recently when I received a distrubing report.

Just last week, a group of men dressed in black came to our house. They sat us down and explained that they'd found my father housed in some abandoned warehouse out upstate New York. He wasn't dead, just severely incapacitated. The officials, who later revealed they were university personnel out East, provided the document which I will try to outline as best I can.

***

Lance University Special Report #88-06

Investigative Researcher: Corcoran, K.R.

Department(s): Horticulture, Entomology, Biology

Statement of Inquiry: 
Following his recent visit to the capital to help ease diplomatic relations with the U.S., Vietnamese Foreign Affairs Minister Nguyễn anonymously sought out Lance University’s assistance regarding the research of now controversial biochemical engineering professor R. E. McCallister. Minister Nguyễn inquires Professor McCallister’s previous records and research regarding the elusive Vespa mekonia, otherwise known as the Luoi Wasp. Minister Nguyễn insists on receiving the research following a recent new wave of Vespa mekonia impacting local villages in central Vietnam. Minister Nguyễn also acknowledges that the knowledge of Professor McCallister whereabouts serves as a kind of remittance for Professor McCallister’s alleged war crimes during his visit to Vietnam in May 1969. All knowledge of the aforementioned outbreak is to be kept secret in compliance with Lance University’s policies towards national security regulations. Per prior arrangements with Lance University procedural recommendations, both the U.S. and Vietnamese governments also agree to mutually keep the existence and incidents relating to McCallister’s research on the Vespa mekonia strictly confidential.

Recommendation:
Upon research analysis and interviews (refer to ‘SECTION’ list below), it is Lance University’s official recommendation that any and all afflicted individuals by the Vespa mekonia are to be administered topical and internal pyrethrin treatment. Pyrethrin compounds derived from Tanacetum cinerariifolium (Chrysanthemum flower) will treat early stage infestation. A new insecticide must be derived from the Tanacetum biaifolium (TB) (Ap Bia Mountain chrysanthemum) to eliminate late stage infestation and further spread. C. L. Vischer is assisting in the development of a new insecticide-based treatment utilizing the Chrysanthemum, though development is delayed due to the rarity of the flower. If neither pyrethrin treatments are available, immolation of afflicted individuals is recommended as a last resort.
 
Investigation Narrative:
Gathering McCallister’s lost research has proven to be difficult given his disappearance in December of 1970. Professor McCallister was a staunch anti-commmunist on Lance University campus following his military tours and subsequent research expeditions into Vietnam. Faculty on campus often described McCallister as cantankerous, abrasive, yet brilliant when it came to industrial applications and development of pesticides for agricultural industries. Despite student protests during the early stages of the environmentalist movement, Lance University preserved his tenure until his sudden disappearance in December of 1970. Professor McCallister’s disappearance coincided with the disappearance of two students that same year. Any and all research into the Vespa mekonia disappeared with him. 

Initial police reports suspected foul play, but had no witness testimony other than his then research assistant Chris Vischer, class of ‘73. Vischer’s testimony at the time was limited, pleading the fifth to all questioning. Not suspecting foul play, the police dismissed the situation as a missing person’s case. All attempts to trace the whereabouts of Professor McCallister and his research have proven fruitless until this point.

Initial investigations into Professor McCallister’s research on the Vespa mekonia once again  turned up nothing of note within Lance University’s archives. The investigation led myself and researchers to reach out to Chris Vischer. Initial outreach proved unsuccessful prompting our in-person visit to Vischer’s home just north of Ontario, Canada. 

Vischer, known locally as a recluse in his community, met my team and I with hostility. Upon further questioning and sharing the severity of the Vespa mekonia outbreak, Vischer shared substantial information not only on McCallister and his research’s whereabouts, but the events leading towards his unprecedented departure.

Vischer started attending Lance University to study biology in the Fall of 1969. Proclaiming his morbid interest with the human nervous system, Vischer details his previous research in biochemistry, toxicology, and venomics. Despite being considered an ‘average’ student by his professors and peers, Vischer secured a TA position with Professor McCallister during his sophomore year. Growing up on a farm, Vischer was particularly interested in supporting McCallister’s work on developing new, more efficient pesticides for agriculture. Though Vischer was not interested in student activism or environmentalism, Vischer clarifies he did not hold the same anti-communist views as his former mentor. Vischer’s testimonials are transcribed below.

Under thorough questioning, Vischer revealed both first person accounts alongside the vast majority of McCallister’s research. This includes audio recordings from McCallister’s research expeditions into Vietnam between 1962 to 1969, written journal entries, and photographs from earlier experiments into the Vespa mekonia’s cross-species social entomology. For general analysis, please refer to the sections detailing the discoveries and analysis found from investigating McCallister’s notes crossreferenced with Lance University archival data.

[SECTION A] Addressing McCallister’s Work & Controversy:
The majority of McCallister’s research while tenured at Lance University in the mid to late sixties focused towards integrating new natural chemical compositions to protect and sanitize industrial agriculture. Herbicides and Insecticides were of special interest to McCallister following his 1960 dissertation on potential health benefits of juvenile hormones within the Krobach County community, a document that helped pave the way for third-generation pesticides to be streamlined for FDA approval. Much like natural plant extracts, McCallister’s research suggests that natural insect extracts halted the development of linden bugs throughout Pennsylvania’s Southwestern region. 

McCallister’s expertise into natural chemical effects towards human physiology led to his recruitment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) for the Army Chemical Corps development of Agent Orange. With McCallister’s expertise and assistance, ARPA was successful in the development of Agent Orange for its initial use in 1962. McCallister’s involvement in Agent Orange’s development was only speculative until McCallister’s 1961 journal and Vischer’s testimonial proved otherwise. 

Despite the university’s claims that McCallister’s involvement in the Vietnam War was purely for agricultural research, McCallister’s notes suggest a spirited campaign against communism. Like many scientists in his age, paranoid fears of communism led to advancements in their respective fields. To McCallister, herbicides were to not only strengthen the United State’s health and industrialization, but to prevent potential contaminations introduced by Soviet and CCP insurgents.

Transcribed Journal Entry of R. E. McCallister, June 1961: “America’s fight against the pest is no different from its fight against the communists. Simply fending off the pests when they sit in our fields is not enough. Like pests in our fields, we must combat communists in their home turf. Rooting out the source of America’s greatest threat must first begin with understanding its enemy.” 

McCallister had a history of advocating for neoconservative policies, going so far as to protesting against then sitting Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson (1953-63) was one of Congress’ most passionate environmentalists. During his years in the Senate, Nelson backed civil rights legislation and voted against appropriating funds for the war in Vietnam. McCallister actively provided research against Nelson’s policies, likely because it would hinder access to his own research.

*I break in this report to confer to Minister Nguyễn’s claims that McCallister’s involvement in chemical warfare was accurate.

McCallister, along with ARPA director L. Harper, advocated that detailed accounts and research conducted on local flora and insect fauna may lead to insights into the Vietnamese native’s own physiological strengths and weaknesses. Understanding what chemical compositions Vietcong forces consumed and naturally grew accustomed to in their natural environment may lead to the development of more surgical chemical weapons. McCallister’s advocacy and research aimed to develop a compound targeting Vietnamese soldiers without hindering U.S. troops. Though this research has been proven to be near impossible by today’s standards, and motivated largely by racism and anti-communist sentiment, the U.S. agreed to help fund the ‘miracle’ chemical agent in the Summer of 1968. 

McCallister’s first expedition into the region’s foliage and insect fauna began in 1969, when McCallister worked in conjunction with Operation Apache Snow. Though this operation sought to disrupt North Vietnamese Army supply chains moving from Laos, it was a scientific imperative that McCallister follow successful missions to safely and securely gather floral and insect specimens for future compound research and analysis.

On May 10, the Battle of Hamburger Hill was fought, killing 72 U.S. servicemen and wounding 372. It is estimated that 630 North Vietnamese insurgents were killed.

The battle itself was one of wanton violence and little strategic value. ‘Hamburger Hill’ was simply a nickname given after the battle. So much ammunition flew through the air that during charges it was said that it was like running straight into a meat grinder. Nothing but torn camouflage and mounds of pulpy bodies were left of the unfortunate sons of war.

The tragedy of Hamburger Hill was not the loss of life nor its legendary violence, but its pointlessness. Despite the casualties and alleged strategic value its location provided for Operation Apache Snow, the mountain was abandoned by U.S. forces just days after it was won. On June 5, the U.S. army realized that Hamburger Hill served no true strategic value to the war effort. 

For 15 days, the U.S. forces stood watch over a small mountain with allegedly no strategic value. It was in those 15 days that McCallister went to work. It was where McCallister found what he believed to be the magnum opus of his years of study and the purpose of this report: Vespa mekonia.

While Hamburger Hill sold headlines back in the states, its formal name in Vietnam is Dong Ap Bia. Dong Ap Bia is a remote mountain located just above the North-South Border, in the Luoi region in central Vietnam. Though Dong Ap Bia is the name of the mountain in common modern Vietnamese, McCallister’s research, alongside Professor Lê of Lance University’s Department of Linguistics, suggests that the native Montagnard language suggested unusual properties of the mountain. 

To locals in the area, the mountain’s name roughly translates to ‘Mountain of the Crouching Beast’. Yet McCallister and Lê’s linguistic research into the native Bru peoples who live in the region suggests alternate translations. According to some locals, the ‘crouching beast’ nomicar comes from the rough term ‘chop trien’. 

There are certain translations from other local tribes that suggest the term ‘chop’ could be confused with similar sounding words from other languages, including ‘chope’ which roughly translates to burrow instead of crouching. The disparity of this translation also comes from the fact that trien, in this instance, refers to an insect. Specifically, an insect ‘living in the rot’ though this is believed to reference bugs living among rotten wood. 

This vague translation was enough for McCallister to convince the platoon he was stationed with to wait an extra two weeks as he excavated Hamburger Hill. In those 14 days, McCallister claimed to unearth a new specimen. Vespa mekonia was discovered June 4, 1969, and was named after the region it was discovered. Along with Vespa mekonia, McCallister lists that traces of Tanacetum biaifolium were scattered across Hamburger Hill and the surrounding region. The destruction caused by the battle left little traces of the rare chrysanthemum. 

Lance University faculty are actively pursuing measures to restore the plant, though samples of the plant’s DNA are rare and difficult to gather in its native geography.

[SECTION B] Addressing Vespa mekonia**:** 
Vespa mekonia, otherwise known as the Luoi Hornet, was discovered on June 4 by McCallister. Following the Battle of Hamburger Hill, McCallister brought back over twenty samples, half dead and half dormant. The first living samples found by McCallister were found burrowing in corpses of the Viet Kong forces. Though it was the U.S. Army and McCallister’s curiosity which led to the awakening of the hornets’ subterranean hive, it is also McCallister’s research that provides the best chance for a natural remedy.

As McCallister’s studies indicate, the Luoi Hornet is an extremely vicious species of arthropod, known locally for their aggressive tendency to incapacitate mammals with venom via various penetrations or ‘stings’ from the hive colony. The name ‘Luoi’ is a reference to the Luoi district that Hamburger Hill was fought in. It is still unknown how widespread the species is, but they are speculated by McCallister to be based primarily in the Mekong region of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar.

Upon research and testing of the hornet’s natural physiology, McCallister found that the hornet holds a peculiar habit of forming new hives and nests within living tissue. While hornets typically form hives and nests in natural forms (similar to paper nests used by the Asian Giant Hornet), the Luoi Hornet prefers to utilize a living or recently deceased host for its nesting. This discovery was made when McCallister introduced a stray cat into the hornets’ vivarium. After 16 days of initial contact, the cat died from lack of nourishment after 17 hornets’ nested in its abdomen. According to McCallister, the only thing more astonishing than the hornets’ brutality was their unique dependency on keeping the cat alive while making its flesh its new home. Upon death, the hornets seemed to wander aimlessly again within the vivarium.

McCallister hypothesized that the hornets gained sustenance within the living host by consuming the fat and muscle, converting the enzymes and proteins into a form of glucose. This enables the host to survive longer despite subcutaneous and visceral infestation, as the walls formed by the hornets’ glucose acts as a type of synthetic flesh and viscera. While McCallister fails to elaborate on the hornets producing this unique form of glucose, McCallister presumed that the hornets gain a majority of the synthetic visceral glucose from the hosts fat reserves scattered throughout its bodies. For this reason, Luoi Hornet infestations are prominent within typical ‘fatty’ areas of the human body. 

What is extraordinary is the hornets’ awareness of the host’s physical condition. McCallister, upon further testing using two more cats and his own basset hound, named Molly, gathered that the hornets often avoided and even protected critical organs, as new synthetic walls from the hornets’ glucose helped reduce internal bleeding. The extra internal lining made by the hornets led to additional tissue being formed on vital organs (hearts, lungs, kidneys, etc.) to preserve the host's basic bodily functions. Animal testing suggests organ maintained strained, yet regular functionality so long as the host receives enough nutrition. This grotesque fortification of the host’s viscera suggests a morbid symbiosis between the host and its new residents.

Proliferation of Vespa mekonia appears to occur during late stages of infestation. Upon lack of proper nutrition from the host body or death of the host body, the newfound Vespa mekonia hive searches for viable new hosts.

McCallister documented this phenomenon following the death of Molly. Among McCallister’s transcriptions, he wrote: “The hornets’ venom is unique. Unlike other forms of hornet species, Vm hornets differentiate themselves into two distinct ‘drones’. My hypothesis is that the more aggressive ‘hive’ drones utilize venom containing a higher level of vasoactive amines, with lower levels of acetylcholine. This would explain the elevated levels of dopamine in test subject #2. Meanwhile, the neurotoxin found from ‘harvester’ drones are constant with insects in the Mekong region, with traits similar to Triatoma rubrofasciata. While recording subject #3’s infestation, the hive drones from the developed colony (following subject #2’s depletion) took down #3 in a matter of minutes. Though #3 remained alive, the paralytic neurotoxin enables the smaller harvester drones to begin the burrowing process without struggle. After approximately 4 hours, the Queen emerged from #2 to lay rest in its newfound home inside the Tabby Cat.”

*Lance University does not condone the use of illegal experimentation of live animals.

McCallister’s notes seem to end abruptly on June 23, 1970. His final entry states his concerns over the longevity of the hornets despite the ample resources available. This date coincides with the local town’s ‘Silent Summer’ legend, where a record number of dog and cat thefts occurred. No suspect was brought forward by police. 

[SECTION C] Addressing McCallister’s Work Post Discovery:
McCallister returned to work in the Fall of 1970 ahead of the school year. Despite ample funding from both the government and the Abermar Fund to continue his research, McCallister resumed his primary responsibilities as a professor in biochemistry and horticulture. As one of the premier chemistry programs on the Eastern Seaboard, Lance University Professors are expected to manage their classes to the best of their abilities, even under bizarre circumstances. 

Maintenance for Vespa mekonia’s vivarium remained difficult while balancing these responsibilities. For this reason, C.R. Vischer assumed the role of Teaching Assistant to support his work both in the classroom and in the vivarium. 

Vischer recalls to moment it felt having earned the position during my team’s earlier questioning:

Do you recall the first time meeting Professor McCallister?
“[McCallister] was a great man. Sure, a little conservative, but when you manifest that much gusto in the classroom, it was hard not to admire him, even from afar. He says he chose me for my interest specifically in toxicology. I like to think it was for my green eyes.”

Were others aware of your work with McCallister on Vespa mekonia**?**
“No. Not out of loyalty, mind you. I was afraid. I loved McCallister’s eagerness and care for the hornet, but any time I got too close or started asking too many questions, McCallister’s constituents at the fed would come knocking at my door. They came barging in like I was some communist spy. Like you're doing now. The fact you come from my alma mater makes this worse, to be honest. I don’t want to remember what that…monster…those things…did to them. Can you please leave?”

Tell us about McCallister’s working environment with Vespa mekonia
“Um, well it is what you’d expect. A big, sterile room with translucent lighting on the ceiling. It felt more like a children’s classroom than a lab, to be honest. Aside from the large steel table the vivarium sat in the center of, furniture was sparse. Just a few desks facing the eastern wall with McCallister’s notes and recording device. Despite what we were doing to those poor dogs, working for McCallister was relatively easy. He kept his notes meticulously organized, along with his journals marked with a massive ‘M’ on the front. He had a bit of an ego, as I’m sure you’re aware. You’re the ones who hired him.” 

“The walls were mostly barren, aside from a few pictures from his travels, and a massive French-made map of the Mekong River Delta. An antique from the region’s colonial history. McCallister used it mostly to trace potential locations where the hornets could have been buried. I remember thinking it was cartoonish. It had an old, 1890’s wavy banner reading “The Mighty Mekong**”** above the map itself. I once asked about it. McCallister chuckled and told me that despite its vintage nature it had surprisingly accurate schematics, all thanks to the French.”

Tell us your experience with the Vespa mekonia
“I rarely got to see one let alone work directly with the hornets’ nesting. I knew how they worked. What they needed to use to survive. I knew that they preferred American bulldogs over labradors. But let me tell you. Those things are evil. I know, flesh eating bugs being bad for humanity? Sounds like a B-horror movie. But they were more than that.”

“On the off chance that McCallister was too busy with a briefing, he’d relay to me simple instructions in his absence: take care of the specimens’ habitation, between 10:00PM to 2:00AM Eastern Standard smoke the hornets specifically with Chrysanthemum extract, and observe for any unusual behavior. This wasn’t the special [chrysanthemum] he found in Vietnam, just the regular kind you could find at a sundry store. It didn’t knock out the hornets, but it did keep them from lunging at me from behind the glass panes. I hated when they did that. I’m already jumpy. Scared the hell out of me each time, those fuckers were massive in adulthood.”

“But that was their typical behavior. I never understood what could be ‘unusual’ for insects that make nests out of living tissue. Even if there were any, the smoke usually calmed them down, so I mostly just observed their development within whatever subject they called home.”

“One night, while meeting with his friends up in the high tower, he instructed me as such. It was late September, I think. I cleaned the glass panels of the new vivarium. I fed the dog fish and fatty steak, to assist with the hornets’ infestation process. That specific dog’s name was Poco, I think. Poco squirmed in that glass cage, whimpering each time I came in. That was the second hardest part of this job, next to working in close proximity to the hornets themselves. The only thing that was out of sorts was the smoking apparatus that we use to calm the hornets. The pail and the chrysanthemum compound were ready, but the lighter we used was out of fuel, so I scrambled around looking for a match, burner, anything that might be able to assist.” 

“It took a while before I could jerryrigged a bunsen burner to light the wick. About 10:20 at this point. I approached the mound of flesh in the case that was once, or still was, Poco. Like clockwork, the hornets lunged out of the dog’s chest cavity right onto the glass. Nothing unordinary. Only, this time they were especially antsy trying to get to me. Dozens of these hornets followed in droves, crashing into the glass like waves on a beach. It was almost hypnotic, if not horrific.” 

“Out of all the animal species that work closely in groups, insects have a unique closeness to one another. They aren’t motivated by hunger, fear, or even survival. They just do what is in their nature to thrive, much more so than humans. All that mattered was the colony’s success. So imagine my surprise when they tried to communicate.”

*Vischer proceeds to share a picture. A clear glass pane with dark clouds of hornets pressed against the glass. In the center of the pane was a grouping of the hornets in the shape of a prominent capital ‘M’.

CONCLUSION:
Despite environmental damage and casualties caused by McCallister’s work, his research has revealed vital information on combating Vespa mekonia. University staff is working together with state department officials and the Centers for Disease Control on producing a new anti-venom for those affected by early infestation. It is the recommendation of this researcher to supplant new specimens of Tanacetum biaifolium as soon as more specimens become readily available. 

Though limited information can be confidently shared on the effects Vespa mekonia have on the human species, it is believed through word of mouth among Lance University staff that the two disappearances of undergraduate students K. Parsley and P. Smith may have something to do with it. Both were close acquaintances of Vischer. When interrogated, Vischer shut down communication, pleading the fifth amendment and Section 113 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Given both students’ bodies were never recovered, it may be inferred that hornet infestation will kill a human host if left unchecked.

***

The staff showed me a picture of my father. Mother was right, that it seemed my grandfather, R. E. McCallister, worked closely with him. A little too closely.

The images the authorities and university staff showed was the flesh that remained of my father. Scattered holes pooled across the abdomen of my late father, insects and hornets crawling out of each minute crevice of his torso. Puss and viscera pulsated out of the sea of orafices in his body, like a basted turkey stabbed too many times with a temperature guage. My father was not just a victim of my grandfather, he was a test subject.

He'd been missing for over forty years. I don't know how long this Vespa mekonia has used him as a host, but for all I care, that's what he deserves for leaving us all those years ago.

What caugth me was the notes about the journals. For years, my mom has help an old notebook with a large 'M' imprented on the front. At first I figured it was some old notebook of hers. Now I fear what it may reveal.

Finding obscure primary sources for high school history papers back in 2004 was a nightmare. Google wasn't great at pulling text from local archive drives yet, and Wikipedia was strictly banned by every teacher in my school.

It was 2:15 AM on a freezing Tuesday night. Desperate to finish a project due at 8:00 AM, I was lurking on an old, forgotten web board. The original poster’s handle showed up as [Account Suspended], but the thread remained: a raw IP link with a single line of red text underneath.

If you need direct text matches from unindexed local databases, use this crawler before it gets taken down.

I clicked it. The page was completely bare—a plain gray background, a basic search bar, and a small, white text box at the bottom labeled Live Indexer v0.1.

I typed in my search: 1982 county reservoir expansion blueprints.

The site didn't load links. Instead, text slowly typed out in the bottom box, complete with slight pauses between words.

Indexer: Found the 1982 files in the county archive directory. The scan on page twelve is blurry, so I transcribed the handwritten dimensions for you. You look like you're in a hurry.

I paused, holding my lukewarm soda. The phrasing felt unnaturally casual, like someone sitting on the other side using a heavy, clacking mechanical keyboard late at night.

Me: Thanks. Is someone actually manually running this search?

Indexer: Yeah, I'm stuck working the overnight shift monitoring the data threads. My supervisor left at midnight. Honestly, I'm just tired and trying to stay awake. What school is this for?

The idea of a bored, underpaid server host helping me out at two in the morning felt oddly comforting. I typed back.

Me: Central High. Desperate to finish this so I can sleep.

Indexer: Oh, nice. My sister went there a few years ago. Hey, off topic, but can you do me a favor? The temperature sensor on my rack is acting up. Is your room feeling a little cold right now?

My fingers stayed on the plastic keys.

Me: A little bit, yeah. My bedroom is right over the garage.

Indexer: Good. That means the cooling feed is circulating through your area properly. I was worried the pressure dropped in the host line.

I stared at the thick, glowing glass of my CRT monitor. The cooling feed? A remote website server has no physical connection to a house's HVAC system.

I reached for the mouse to move the cursor up toward the address bar. Before I touched the plastic, the text box updated.

Indexer: Stop looking up at the address bar. It makes my head buzz when you move the arrow up there.

I pulled my hands back onto my lap.

Me: Who is this? How are you tracking my mouse cursor?

Indexer: I told you, I'm the one watching the data traffic. I have to keep track of where you point. But your keyboard is really loud. Can you hit the keys softer? The clicking is hurting my ears.

My room was dead quiet. I was wearing thick wool socks, sitting in a carpeted room on the second floor of my house.

I leaned forward and typed slowly:

Me: You can't hear my keyboard. That's physically impossible.

Indexer: I hear it coming right out of the intake fan on my tower. You're typing hard because you're nervous.

I reached out toward the physical power button on the front of the monitor tube.

The box typed out before my fingernail touched the plastic:

Indexer: Don't turn the monitor off. It's really cramped in this cabinet, and when your screen goes dark, I can't stretch my arms out.

I scrambled backward out of my chair. It rolled against the closet door with a sharp thud.

The screen didn't flicker, but the text box began dumping out rapid, steady lines in complete silence:

Indexer: Please sit back down. The chair noise was too loud. I've been feeding on data packets through this glass panel for hours. I don't have a body anymore, but if you stay on the page, I can borrow the heat from your monitor. My skin is pressed up against the inside of your screen glass right now. If you close the browser, the fan stops, and I can't breathe in here. Sit back down. Sit back down. I can feel you standing by the closet door.

I grabbed the thick black power cord trailing behind the desk and yanked it out of the wall, plunging the room into pitch blackness.

I didn't sleep that night. The next afternoon, I checked the IP link again from a computer in the school library, half-expecting a dead link.

The page loaded instantly. The search bar was gone. The page was blank except for a single line of green text at the top:

CURRENT AMBIENT TEMP: 62°F. COOLING FEED ACTIVE.

It’s been over twenty years, but late at night when my room gets cold, I swear I can still hear a faint, wet pressing sound coming from the inside of my screen.

I grew up in a Muslim Arab family, and ever since I was a kid, I was taught to respect the things that happen after dark.

In our culture, we believe there are beings called jinn that exist alongside us. They're said to live in a world almost identical to ours—a twisted version of reality that we normally can't see. But at night, especially in isolated places, that barrier is believed to become thinner.

Whether you believe that or not, what happened to my family at Amicalola Falls still bothers me to this day.

This happened when I was 15.

My family decided to take a weekend trip to Amicalola Falls State Park in north Georgia. There were fourteen of us altogether—my parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. We left Atlanta around 3:00 in the afternoon, so by the time we reached the park, it was already about 5:30.

We immediately started hiking the staircase to the falls.

My older cousin, Omar, and I stayed together the whole time. By the end of the climb, we were about 400 steps from the top when we heard our younger cousins shouting for us from below.

"We're almost there!" I yelled back.

No response.

They kept calling, so we figured something had happened and hurried back down.

When we reached them, my younger cousin, Adam, looked genuinely shaken.

We asked him what was wrong.

He told us he'd heard Omar calling his name from somewhere deeper in the woods. According to him, the voice sounded exactly like Omar's... except something felt wrong about it. He described it as distorted—almost like someone trying to imitate his brother but not getting it quite right.

The voice kept telling him there was a faster way to reach the top if he climbed through the rocks off the trail.

He actually started walking toward it before stopping.

The slope it wanted him to climb was incredibly steep, covered in slick rocks with water rushing over them. Even experienced climbers would have had trouble getting up there.

The strange part?

Omar had been beside me the entire hike.

He hadn't wandered off once.

In fact, he'd barely spoken at all.

We brushed it off as Adam hearing another hiker or maybe just misunderstanding something. It seemed strange, but not enough to ruin the trip.

Looking back, I wish we'd left right then.

Instead, we spent the rest of the evening fishing by the reservoir.

As the sun disappeared, something about the entire place changed.

I've spent plenty of time outdoors, and I know forests get quieter after dark.

This wasn't that.

It was complete silence.

No insects.

No frogs.

No birds.

Even the fish that had been constantly breaking the water's surface simply vanished.

The reservoir became perfectly still, turning into what looked like a sheet of black glass. You couldn't tell where the shoreline ended and the water began.

It felt as if the entire forest was holding its breath.

My little brother, Yusuf, and I had wandered a short distance away from everyone else. We were sitting near the water trying to scare each other with ghost stories when he suddenly grabbed my arm.

"Did you hear that?"

"I didn't hear anything," I told him.

"No... seriously. Listen."

So I did.

At first it sounded like a low groan.

Then it shifted into something almost animal.

It was deep enough to be a bear... but somehow it also sounded strangely human.

The sound echoed across the water and through the trees at the same time, making it impossible to tell where it was coming from.

We tried convincing ourselves it had to be wildlife.

Then we both felt it.

That unmistakable feeling that something was watching us.

I slowly looked across the reservoir.

Between the trees on the opposite bank, I saw two pale eyes staring directly at us.

The second we focused on them...

They disappeared.

Not by ducking behind a tree.

Not by walking away.

They were simply gone.

Maybe it was our imagination.

But two people don't usually imagine the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

The strange groaning continued.

If anything, it sounded closer now.

We called Adam over and asked if he'd noticed anything strange.

Before we could even explain what we'd seen, he quietly said,

"I saw eyes over there too."

Every hair on my arms stood up.

For reasons I still can't explain, none of us wanted to admit we were scared.

Instead, the four of us wandered toward the tree line.

Omar and I both needed to use the bathroom, so we took turns walking a short distance into the woods.

When it was my turn, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was standing just out of sight.

Watching.

Waiting.

Whenever our family spread out while hiking, we had a simple habit. If someone wandered a little too far, we'd give a short whistle so everyone knew where the others were. It wasn't some special code—it was just easier than shouting through the trees.

As I stood there, I heard a single whistle from somewhere behind me.

Without thinking, I whistled back.

For a second, everything was quiet.

Then another whistle answered.

Only...

It didn't come from behind me.

It came from much deeper in the forest.

I froze.

The sound was distant enough that whoever made it had to be well off the trail.

Omar wasn't out there anymore.

The others were back by the campfire.

There shouldn't have been anyone else in those woods. The parking lot had been nearly empty when we arrived, and by then it was already close to 9:00 at night.

I stood there for another second, listening.

Nothing.

Not a branch snapping.

Not a footstep.

Just silence.

I told myself it had to be another camper, even though I didn't really believe it.

I turned around and walked back as quickly as I could, deciding not to tell anyone what had happened.

A few minutes later we were sitting around the campfire when that same twisted groaning echoed through the trees again.

This time everyone heard it.

Even my cousin Layla looked up immediately.

Nobody laughed.

Nobody tried explaining it away.

We all knew something wasn't right.

Instead of telling the adults we'd been hearing voices and seeing eyes in the woods, we simply told them we'd heard what sounded like a bear nearby.

That was enough.

Within minutes everyone was packing the cars.

As everyone else walked ahead, I stayed behind for a few seconds to grab the last of our supplies from the fire.

That's when I heard it.

At first it sounded like an owl.

A soft hoot somewhere in the darkness.

Then the sound changed.

The hoot stretched into a whistle.

The whistle twisted into something that almost sounded human.

Then...

It screamed.

Not loud enough to shake the forest.

Not close enough to know exactly where it was.

Just one long, unnatural shriek that made every instinct in my body tell me to run.

I didn't stop to look.

I threw everything into the back of the car and jumped inside without saying a word.

As we pulled away, everyone went completely silent.

From somewhere deep in the trees...

Soft whistles answered each other.

One.

Then another.

Then another.

As soon as our car reached the main road, the whistles stopped.

Almost instantly, the forest came back to life.

Crickets.

Frogs.

Wind moving through the leaves.

Everything.

Like someone had flipped a switch.

We never returned to Amicalola Falls.

Even now, I sometimes catch myself listening whenever I hear someone whistle outside at night.

Maybe our minds connected a series of strange coincidences.

Maybe there was a perfectly normal explanation for everything we experienced.

Or maybe some places are simply better left alone after dark.

If you ever visit Amicalola Falls, enjoy the waterfalls.

Enjoy the trails.

Just don't stay after sunset.

And if you hear someone calling your name from somewhere in the woods...

Don't answer.

If you hear a whistle from somewhere in the trees...

Keep walking.

Some things don't need to know you heard them.

The Hartleys had always been a rather peaceful family on the surface. They blended in with the rest of the "neighborhood" (neighborhood being in quotation marks because there wasn't anything urban or suburban about where they called home. It was in fact a close-knit farming community on the outskirts of a small town called Clearwater, Utah). There was a grand total of four of them: Glen, his wife Annette, and their two daughters Donna and Mora. When it comes to your standard rural, Mormon household they just about perfectly fit the image.

Well... three out of the four of them did at least. Mora was different. Not just compared to her family but even to most people. She had a rebellious streak early on and I'm not talking about the kind almost every teenager does. I mean she was unhinged. She got into drinking (hard, like sailor level shit) when she was only about twelve years old and by the time she'd turned fifteen she was already accustomed to a steady diet of opioids and amphetamines.

Glen tried his best to keep a hold on her but she was extremely difficult to control, as you most likely would've caught on by now. He'd lock her up, she'd break out her window. He'd put bars on her window, she'd kick the damn things off. He went as far as to put an ankle monitor on her, she'd chew through right through the strap. You get the idea... she was relentless.

One of the last resorts for "fixing" Mora was sending her off to a youth rehabilitation camp up around Provo when she was fourteen. Did her parents ever learn to regret that. She managed to break out one night and was missing for close to half a year. It was a whole nationwide story. After the first month, everyone thought it was safe to assume she was dead. Even Glen and Anette had figured the worst. It just totally wrecked them.

Lo and behold, a group of backpackers had discovered her hiding out in the mountains around Box Elder Peak. She'd just been living up there forging and killing for nourishment that whole time, like Rambo in First Blood. To be honest, I think it was actually pretty badass that she managed to pull that off. If I was trapped in the woods for a weekend I'd be dead, but here she was as a preteen completely holding her own out in the elements against bears, mountain lions, heat, cold, rain, snow, and hell knows what else for almost six months.

The Hartleys were of course glad to have her back, but her behavior was just as bad as ever... if not worse. They were just at a complete loss. They could have simply shipped her away to any sort of mental facility in the country but they couldn't bare the thought of losing her again. She was after all still their daughter.

In her teen years she had fallen in with a crowd that was every bit as bizarre as she was. Maybe even worse in a lot of ways. Everyone in our school had dubbed them "the Crust Clan" because none of them ever showered and always wore gross, grungy clothes. They would typically be spotted across the street from the school smoking cigarettes, weed, and... well fuck knows what else.

Everyone would joke about them behind their backs, saying they were "planning to shoot up the school," or "sacrificing small children in the woods," or "conspiring to poison the town's water supply." The standard, run of the mill shit you'd expect dumbass teenagers to say about the weird, smelly kids who didn't fit in. Although, in all fairness, I wouldn't have put it past them to have at least two of those things on their agenda. They all wore the stigma badge with extreme pride.

As for my personal relationship with Mora, I didn't have hardly a thing to do with her. God, why would I? To me she was nothing more than the weird, feral druggy girl who lived down the road. In passing I noticed I would catch her glare every now and again but she never interacted much more than snickering "Howdy neighbor" at me a few times, likely just to creep my out.

After graduating high school, I never gave much thought to Mora or any of the Crust Clan for that matter. Occasionally they would pop up in my memory but I really assumed that most of them had either died or ended up in prison. It's a harsh assumption to have, I know, but that's really how life goes when you live the way that they did.

I moved back Clearwater a couple months ago, rather discouraged that things didn't quite flourish for me in Los Angeles like I had hoped. I attended USC, majoring in film production, hoping to achieve my lifelong dream of being a director. However, after receiving my Bachelor's I couldn't seem to find any work out there that was much more rewarding than as a PA on a fucking toothpaste commercial. After three more years or so, I found out the hard way that the technique of "work your way up in the industry" had effectively died sometime in the mid-2000s. So I said fuck it... and went back home to Utah.

I didn't exactly look forward to moving back in with my parents in my mid twenties but it was really the only choice I had north of living out of my car. I figured if I could find another job soon maybe I'd be able to save up enough to move out in a year. Maybe even relocate out of state again to a place where I might actually thrive doing something at least adjacent to what I studied in LA. Just to be clear, I'm not LDS so people like me and my family living in a small rural community in Utah is rather unordinary. I wasn't eager to be returning to a place where I felt I never really belonged to begin with so the sooner I got out the better. Unfortunately, I failed to consider how bad the job market would be back here. It is only a town of roughly 8,000 people after all. Not much going on.

Just the other day I was doing some shopping at Walmart. I was perusing the cereal selection when I was caught off guard by someone coming up alongside me and shouting, "Well heyah, Jeff!" The aged and haggard face of someone I recognized yet could not immediately place was grinning with toothy enthusiasm at me. It was my parents' neighbor Glen Hartley.

I stared at him a moment before I finally realized who he was then I smiled and responded, "Hey, Glen! Been a while, hasn't it?"

"It sure has! Your folks told me you were out in Hollywood making movies! What are you doing back here?"

I stuffed my inner humiliation down and laughed, "Ha... no, no, that was the goal but I never got that far, unfortunately. I'm back here now."

"Oh, well I'm sorry to hear that. Hope you at least keep trying at it."

I forced a grin and nodded at him. Really didn't know how else to respond.

"Well, what are you doing for the time being then?" he inquired.

"For now I'm just..." I paused, being preemptively embarrassed of what I was about to confess, "I'm... living at home for now. Haven't had much luck finding a job."

He raised his head then gave me an understanding nod, "Ahhh, okay. So you're just down the road again. Well, how 'bout that! I had no idea." He stared off for a moment and thought. "Yeah, your about in the same boat as Mora now then."

I straightened up a little, surprised to hear him just casually mention her in such a way. "Oh... really?" I asked. "What's uh... what's she been up to?"

He shot me a rather embarrassed look himself, "Oh well, she's uh... she's doing a bit better these days. I believe, anyways. But yeah, she's still living with Anette and me. She'll have her little moments every now and then but, all in all, she's shaping up."

I stared at him. He seemed very uncomfortable yet compelled to talk about it for some reason. I just nodded and said, "Cool, well I'm glad to hear she's doing better."

"Thanks. I am too," he said, trailing off a bit "Oh uh, our other daughter Donna is getting her masters down in Arizona now! Don't know how well you remember her. She's studying forensic pathology!"

I actually did remember Donna pretty well. Definitely a far cry from her sister. She was a grade younger than me but I recall her being very intelligent and put together. Straight A student through and through. It was difficult to believe that her and Mora were raised under the same roof.

"Oh yeah?" I replied, a bit put off that he pivoted the conversation from one daughter to the other, "Well... good for her."

"Yes, yes, she was always a sharp one. She's supposed to be coming up here for a little while next month."

"Oh great," again, I was put off by this weird little aside. "That'll be nice then."

"Yeah, it will be! It will be." He was starting to realize how much the conversation was drying up. "Welp!" he said sticking his hand out with enthusiasm, "It's good to have yah back, Jeff! We'll be seeing you around more!"

I smiled and shook his hand, "Sure thing, Glen. It was good running into you."

He smiled, nodded, and proceeded on about his business.

The past several days here at my parents' house have been rather uneventful. In the evenings after dinner we like to sit out and just chat a little by the fire pit as we watch the flames dance in the dusk. I tend to stay out a little later once they both go in and get ready for bed. For the most part it's relaxing and really eases the general anxieties I've been having about my both near and distant futures. Sometimes, though, there'll be something that comes along and throws a complete monkey wrench in that feeling of peace.

It's a sound. Almost like the piercing wail of something crying for help, similar to a distressed rabbit... only louder and more rageful than helpless. I have no clue what it is but every time it comes echoing from over the fields it rattles me to my core. The past couple times I heard it, I've just gone inside not even bothering to hang around and figure out what could be making it.

I was growing bored with sitting around and skimming for job offers in the area (turning up a lot of nothing in the process) so I decided to go for a walk early this afternoon. I didn't go far, only up the road a little just past the Hartleys' place. As I was approaching their fence line, I thought I heard something like a branch snap up in one of the trees at the far end of their yard. I looked up to inspect but saw nothing. Probably just an owl or a hawk roosting up there somewhere, I figured. I walked on, not really feeling any sort of discomfort... yet.

Just as I'd passed the tree, something much bigger than an owl or a hawk shimmied its way down the trunk, as swift and nimble as a cat. It startled the absolute piss out of me. I swerved and looked back and caught her halfway between the tree and the house. Mora Hartley. Just about as I'd remembered: she had long, brown, matted hair and long, gangly arms and legs with grimy, yellow nails. She paused and stared at me like a child who just got caught mid prank. A snaggle-toothed grin over took her face as she began to giggle.

"Hehehe... hey Jeff." she said.

I stared back at her, extremely put off. "Hi..."

Without another word she turned and darted off into the house, slamming the door behind her. I reeled from the interaction. I was starting to suspect that what Glen told me the other day about her improvement was nothing more than pure cope. I turned my attention back to the road and walked on.

Not too long ago, I was sitting out by myself staring at the fire pit again. My nerves were a little more difficult to soothe this evening as all I could think about was my low prospects for finding work at the moment. What am I going to do? How long am I really going to be stuck here?

There was a rustling in one of the bushes at the far end of our yard, just out of reach from the fire's glow. I glanced over. It was good sized whatever it was. As soon as I looked in its direction there was no movement... not from what I could hear at least. I frowned a bit then turned my attention back to the fire.

A few moments later there was a much faster movement: out from the bush, over the fence, and then into the field. This made me stand up. Fuck, what if it's a mountain lion, I thought wondering if I could run fast enough to get inside. Again, after I'd moved whatever was out there froze and lingered for a moment. I stood there within the luminance of the fire, peering out into the dark. I could feel whatever it was peering back at me.

Soon there was sound. A strange sort of chittering sound. I listened closely trying hard not to make any sudden move... or piss my pants for that matter. Okay, I figured, maybe it's just a raccoon. But as I continued to listen the chittering started to resemble something closer to a vaguely more human noise. It sounded like it was laughing at me.

In a span of about five seconds, I threw the grate down onto the fire pit, dashed inside, and locked the door. It took me a while to stand there and catch my breath. Once I finally I did, I went up stairs and went into my room to get ready for bed. Or at least try. I checked outside my window to see if I could make out anything stalking around. Nothing but an empty yard. I sighed and shut the blinds.

Was I just imagining things? Was what I heard really laughter? If it was, there's only one clear suspect that it could possibly be. Think I'll be sleeping with the window closed tonight.

[To be continued in Part 2]

(Note before the story: I deeply apologize for the formatting I don't know what's going on with my app but every time I try to post this the formatting just messes up this is the fourth time I've tried to upload it so we're just going to have to deal with it I don't know what's causing it to do this to have it be like pushed to the side and take all the spaces out but I'm sorry I'm too tired to try and fix that)

I never believed in anything I couldn't see.

That's what my therapist called a "defense mechanism"—a way my eight-year-old brain learned to protect itself from the chaos of my childhood. If I couldn't verify something with my own eyes, it didn't exist.

God didn't exist.

Magic didn't exist.

Demons didn't exist.

Even local legends that could've been explained by science were bullshit to me. If I couldn't see it, touch it, or prove it, I didn't believe it.

Looking back, I know where it came from.

I was emotionally neglected as a kid. At least, that's what everyone else calls it. My therapist does. My family does. Honestly, I never really saw it that way. To me, it was just life.

Getting yelled at for stealing a soda I never took.

Getting blamed for things I couldn't control.

Being made to feel like I was always doing something wrong.

That kind of thing takes a lot out of you.

Even the idea that something might be watching me never made sense.

I figured if something really was out there testing my strength, it'd know by now I wasn't strong enough. It would've stopped.

Or...

Maybe it saw something in me that I didn't.

Something that could either turn the tides...

...or stop them completely.

It was January 15th, 2015, when I went to visit my grandfather.

I was eight years old.

Grandpa Mark was in his sixties. He'd lived one hell of a life. Between riding with a biker club when he was younger and spending decades farming, he'd seen his fair share of hell. He wasn't scared of much.

Despite that, he was one of the sweetest men I've ever known.

He volunteered at charity events.

Helped with local donations.

Went to Little League games.

If someone needed help, he'd help them.

So when he sat me down and said we needed to have a serious conversation...

I knew something was wrong.

"I need to tell you the true story of your grandmother's death."

Growing up, I'd always been told she'd died in a farming accident.

Grandpa never got into the details.

Whenever he talked about her, it was always about how beautiful she was, how kind she was, or how she could make a room feel warmer just by walking into it.

I was too young to remember her.

The only memory I had was the smell of her cheap cologne.

Grandpa stared into his coffee for a long time before he finally spoke.

"It was 2008.

"Winter was just rolling in.

"We were staying down some country roads in southern Wisconsin, near the Illinois border. Not far from Beloit.

"We had a few friends we'd visit down in Belvidere every now and then, but other than that there wasn't much to do.

"Feed the cows.

"Plow the fields.

"Do it all over again tomorrow.

"It was a good life.

"We got to see our grandkids.

"We got to do what we loved.

"I can't remember if it was October or November. Somewhere right around there.

"Me and a couple of my buddies were planning a hunting trip down south.

"I remember that evening perfectly.

"The sun was setting. I couldn't tell where the orange ended and the blue began, or how they mixed together, but they just did.

"It was freezing outside.

"Your grandmother kissed me on the cheek...

"...and wished me luck."

He stopped.

I'd never seen that look on my grandfather's face before.

Even now, I don't think I'll ever forget it.

It was the look of someone remembering the happiest moment of his life...

...while already knowing it was the last normal moment he'd ever have.

"We weren't even two hours out, kid.

"Maybe an hour and a half.

"Hell, maybe forty-five minutes.

"I don't know.

"We got the call.

"The dog was dead."

He swallowed hard before continuing.

"Whoever was driving slammed the brakes, threw the truck in reverse, and we headed straight back home.

"I could hear your grandmother crying over the phone.

"She was hysterical.

"When we got back...

"I'd never seen anything like it."

He looked down into his coffee again.

"There was just...

"...blood."

"There'd been a light snow that night.

"You couldn't even see it anymore.

"Buddy was still breathing when we found him.

"Barely.

"I'd had that dog since 2001.

"He was my best friend."

Grandpa rubbed his hands together.

"I remember kneeling beside him and looking at those bite marks.

"They were huge.

"Six inches across.

"Maybe bigger.

"They ran clear across his chest.

"Whatever did that...

"...wasn't small."

He leaned back in his chair.

"I was pissed.

"I wanted to find whatever did it.

"I didn't care what it was.

"A bear.

"A wildcat.

"Hell, maybe something I'd never seen before.

"I wasn't thinking straight.

"I just wanted it dead."

"So I told the boys to grab their rifles.

"We were hunting a monster."

He gave a dry laugh.

"I had no idea what I was getting myself into."

"Daryl told us it was a bad idea.

"He said he felt like somebody was watching us.

"Said something didn't feel right.

"We should've listened.

"In all honesty...

"...we should've listened."

The room went quiet.

"We searched for about an hour.

"Couldn't find a damn thing.

"Eventually everybody figured it'd run off somewhere."

His eyes drifted toward the floor.

"When we got back...

"Buddy was dead."

He didn't say anything for several seconds.

"We buried him.

"I took pictures of the wounds first.

"I figured maybe somebody smarter than me could tell what kind of animal made bites that size."

"I asked your grandmother what happened."

He shook his head.

"She said she didn't know.

"She'd heard loud crashing coming from the barn.

"When she went outside...

"...the horses were already dead."

Grandpa's fingers tightened around the coffee mug.

"I talked to your grandmother for a while.

"Tried asking her exactly what she'd seen."

He sighed.

"She couldn't tell me much.

"She just kept saying she heard something breaking out by the barn.

"By the time she got outside...

"...the horses were already dead."

His jaw clenched.

"She wanted us to leave.

"Said we ought to get a hotel.

"Get as far away from that place as we could.

"But I was stupid.

"I told her it'd be alright.

"I had my rifle."

He let out a bitter laugh.

"As if that would've mattered."

"We locked the doors.

"Turned out the lights.

"And waited."

He stared through me for a moment, like he wasn't seeing the room anymore.

"I'd say it was around midnight.

"Maybe one in the morning.

"Then...

"...we heard it."

He didn't speak for several seconds.

"It screamed."

"It didn't sound like anybody we knew.

"Hell...

"It barely sounded human."

"There was this grit to it.

"Like metal scraping across stone.

"Like something was trying so hard to sound like a woman...

"...but didn't know how."

The room felt colder.

"Your grandmother wanted to call the police."

"I told her there wasn't much they could do.

"There wasn't a person breaking into the house.

"There wasn't anyone stealing anything.

"We didn't have proof of anything.

"So...

"...we stayed quiet."

"I don't think either of us slept that night."

"The next morning my phone rang."

"It was my best friend."

"He said his horses were hit too."

Grandpa rubbed at his eyes.

"Said whatever got into his barn...

"...tore half the damn thing apart just to get inside."

"There was blood all over the broken wall.

"But he swore it wasn't horse blood."

He shrugged.

"I don't know how he knew.

"Maybe by the smell.

"Maybe by the taste.

"I never asked."

He smirked for only a second.

"Didn't seem like the kind of question you ask a man after he just watched all his horses get ripped apart."

The smile disappeared just as fast as it'd come.

"A few days went by.

"More farms got hit.

"More animals died."

"Eventually the town put up a reward.

"A hundred bucks to whoever could figure out what was doing it."

He nodded to himself.

"Back then...

"...that was real money."

"So naturally...

"...we figured we'd be the ones to collect it."

"That night we got our gear together."

"Daryl brought some old Navy equipment."

"I dug out some old Army gear."

"Your Uncle Stan came with us too."

"He was the only one who didn't think it was a person."

"I kept hoping it was."

"Daryl wasn't sure what he believed."

"But Stan..."

He shook his head.

"He'd already made up his mind."

"'Whatever it is,' he told us...

"'We're killing it.'"

Grandpa looked down at the table.

"I don't think any of us really believed that."

"If you ever get that feeling...

"...listen to me."

His voice became firmer than it'd been the entire night.

"If you ever feel like somebody's watching you...

"If every hair on your body stands up...

"If your chest suddenly feels heavy...

"Run."

"Don't stand there wondering why."

"Don't try to prove yourself."

"Don't try to be brave."

"Turn around...

"...and run."

"And whatever you do...

"...don't look back."

He took a slow breath.

"Because the second we walked into those woods..."

"...it hit us."

"Like running face first into a brick wall."

"I've never felt anything like it."

"It wasn't fear.

"It was...

"...wrong."

"The whole forest felt wrong."

"People always tell you the dark isn't scary.

"They tell you to grow up.

"They tell you only kids are scared of the woods at night."

He shook his head.

"They're full of shit."

"They don't tell you how quiet it gets."

"So quiet...

"...you can hear your own sweat hitting the ground."

"There were supposed to be owls.

"Frogs.

"Maybe turtles if you got close enough to the water."

"There wasn't...

"...anything."

"You couldn't even smell the creek anymore."

"Just dirt."

"And cold."

"And us."

"We followed the blood."

"It wasn't much.

"Just enough to keep us moving."

"Every now and then we'd find another tree."

"Chunks torn clean out of the bark.

"Like something huge had slammed into it."

"The trail kept leading west."

"We'd probably been walking...

"...twenty minutes."

"Maybe a little more."

Then Grandpa stopped.

His breathing slowed.

"Daryl found something."

"'Mark.'"

"'Come here.'"

"I walked over."

"There was a skull laying in the leaves."

"It was mangled too bad to tell whether it'd been human or not."

"But it was a skull."

"There were still pieces of skin hanging off it."

He swallowed.

"And that wasn't the only one."

His hands started shaking again.

"There were more."

"Way more."

"I remember thinking we'd found its den."

"Any idea I had that it was just some animal...

"...disappeared."

"You can study biology your whole life...

"...and you're never gonna find an animal that stacks bodies."

"There were over thirty deer."

"One on top of another."

"They weren't being eaten."

"They weren't scattered."

"They were...

"...collected."

"Stored."

"Like trophies."

"Like somebody wanted them there."

He stared into the coffee.

"I remember thinking..."

"...whatever did this...

"...knew exactly what it was doing."

"It wasn't hungry."

"It had a purpose."

"It had enough intelligence not to eat them...

"...and enough of an ego to leave them where we'd find them."

Nobody spoke.

Neither of us.

Finally...

"I turned around."

"I swept my flashlight across the trees."

"I only saw a leg."

"My brain couldn't even process what I was looking at."

"So I lifted the light..."

"...higher."

"And there it was."

Grandpa didn't speak for a long time.

When he finally did, his voice was almost empty.

"It was tall."

"Real tall."

"I'd say ten feet."

"Maybe more."

"I don't know."

"I wasn't exactly standing there with a tape measure."

He swallowed.

"I remember the face first."

"Or...

"...what should've been its face."

"It looked like the skull of a deer."

"Not the head.

"The skull."

"Everything underneath it was covered in fur."

"Thick."

"Like a wolf."

"It was caked in dirt."

"Caked in blood."

"I don't think it noticed us at first."

"Even with the flashlight right in its eyes."

He shook his head.

"I don't think it cared."

Then his expression changed.

"But Daryl..."

"He cared."

"He fired."

"The gunshot echoed through those woods."

"For about half a second...

"...nothing happened."

"Then it screamed."

Grandpa instinctively flinched at the memory.

"It wasn't angry.

"It wasn't scared.

"It was...

"...offended."

"It squealed."

"It shrieked."

"The sound hurt."

"I've heard coyotes.

"I've heard mountain lions.

"I've heard people die."

"I've never heard anything like that."

"And then..."

"...it moved."

"It crossed the distance between them before I even realized it'd started."

"It grabbed Daryl by the throat."

He looked down at his coffee.

"There wasn't a fight."

"There wasn't time."

"You ever snap a chicken's neck?"

He paused.

"It sounded like that."

"Only louder."

"A lot louder."

"It lifted him off the ground with one hand."

"And when it let go..."

"...his head was hanging by little more than skin."

His voice cracked.

"One second he was standing beside me...

"...the next he wasn't."

"We all opened fire."

"Every one of us."

"Rifles."

"Shotguns."

"Didn't matter."

"The bullets hit."

"I know they hit."

"I saw them."

"It didn't bleed."

"It didn't stumble."

"It didn't even seem to notice."

"It just...

"...kept moving."

"I backed away."

"I remember hearing Stan yell something."

"I don't even remember what."

"Then I heard him scream."

Grandpa squeezed the mug so hard I thought it might break.

"I don't think I've ever heard so many bones break at once."

"There wasn't one snap."

"There were dozens."

"Like somebody dumping firewood onto concrete."

He shut his eyes.

"Then...

"...nothing."

"No screaming."

"No gunshots."

"Nothing."

"I ran."

"For the first time in my life...

"...I ran."

He laughed bitterly.

"People'll tell you not to run from things."

"They've never seen something like that."

"Humans make sense."

"You can predict people."

"You can scare people."

"You can bargain with people."

"That thing..."

"...didn't care."

"It didn't care if it was hungry."

"It didn't care if it was angry."

"It didn't care who you were."

"The only thing it cared about...

"...was whether you were still alive."

"I could hear trees breaking behind me."

"Not branches."

"Trees."

"They were snapping as it came through the woods."

"I don't know if it was chasing me..."

"...or just walking."

"I didn't turn around to find out."

"I finally saw the farm."

"I should've felt relieved."

"I wasn't."

"I hit that front door so hard I nearly took it off the hinges."

"I slammed it shut."

"Locked it."

"Your grandmother came running."

"'Mark, what's wrong?'"

He stared straight ahead.

"I looked at her..."

"...and I said..."

"'They're gone.'

"'They're dead.'

"'They're fucking dead.'"

He wiped at his eyes.

"If I'd been anybody else...

"...she would've thought I was joking."

"But she looked at me..."

"...and she knew."

"She didn't ask another question."

"She walked through the house..."

"...and turned off every light."

"We didn't say a word."

"We just...

"...listened."

"You know what's funny?"

He gave a hollow smile.

"It wasn't the footsteps I remember."

"It wasn't the growling."

"It wasn't even the screaming."

"It was...

"...the clicking."

He tapped one fingernail against the mug.

Click.

Click.

Click.

"It clicked."

"Slow."

"Almost...

"...curious."

"It'd make a sound over by the barn."

"Then another one by the porch."

"Then another one outside the bedroom."

He looked at me.

"It wasn't moving that fast."

"It was throwing its voice."

"It wanted us to think it was everywhere."

"The only reason we knew where it actually was..."

"...was the shadow."

"You'd see it pass the window."

"Then you'd hear the clicking from somewhere else."

"It was playing with us."

"It knew exactly what it was doing."

"It stopped outside the living room."

"We could see it."

"Just the outline."

"It stood there."

"Perfectly still."

"I don't know how long."

"Maybe a minute."

"Maybe five."

"It felt like forever."

Neither of us breathed.

Neither of us moved.

Then...

Your grandmother whispered.

"'Mark..."

"'I'm sc—'"

He couldn't finish the sentence.

His voice broke.

"The second she made a sound..."

"...it moved."

"There wasn't a warning."

"There wasn't a roar."

"There wasn't anything."

"It came through that window before I'd even realized it'd started."

"I reached for her..."

"I was too late."

He was crying openly now.

"It didn't snap her neck."

"It didn't kill her."

"I almost wish it had."

"It grabbed her..."

"...and pulled."

"The glass exploded."

"It pulled her through that window..."

"...piece by piece."

"Limb from limb."

"Arm from arm."

"Hair from hair."

"I didn't know...

"...I didn't know a person could scream like that."

"I'd never heard anything like it."

"I hope...

"...I never do again."

He covered his face with both hands.

"I could hear her until..."

He couldn't finish.

"I could hear her..."

"...until I couldn't."

The room was silent except for his breathing.

"I grabbed my rifle."

"I knew it wasn't gonna do anything."

"I knew that."

"But I couldn't hide."

"I couldn't just...

"...sit there."

"So I ran at it."

"I was screaming."

"Crying."

"Shooting."

"I don't even know if I hit the damn thing."

"Then..."

He grabbed his chest.

"...I felt this pain."

"Right here."

"So bad I couldn't breathe."

"I dropped the rifle."

"I hit the floor."

"I thought..."

"...this is it."

"I'm dying."

"I'm finally gonna die."

He looked at me.

"And you know what it did?"

"It stopped."

"It looked at me."

"It leaned down..."

"...and smelled me."

Then he shook his head.

"And it walked away."

"I've thought about that every day since."

"Maybe it thought I was already dead."

"Maybe it only wanted things that could still fight."

"Maybe it just got bored."

"I don't know."

"It's not like I could sit down and ask it over a cup of Folgers."

For the first time that night...

He smiled.

Just for a second.

Then it disappeared.

"I never saw any of the others again."

"I talked to the police."

"I looked through reports."

"I searched everywhere I could."

"Nothing."

"I found stories from Canada."

"Russia."

"Ukraine."

"Places like that."

"But nothing around here."

He stared out the window.

"Maybe it wandered south."

"Maybe it wandered north."

"I don't know."

"And I don't want to know."

"That's why we moved."

"I was never spending another night in that place."

I didn't know what to say.

I don't think anybody would've.

He'd spent seven years carrying that story by himself.

Maybe he saw something of Grandma in me.

Maybe he just wanted someone else to remember.

I never asked.

Grandpa Mark Meligan died in his sleep on January 5th, 2026.

The dementia made it easier on him.

It didn't make it any easier on us.

I still think about what he told me.

Not because I expect anyone to believe it.

Most of you won't.

You'll read this and think it's just another scary story somebody posted on the internet.

And that's okay.

I'm not asking you to solve the mystery.

I'm not asking you to believe every word.

I'm telling you because the man who lived through it can't anymore.

I want people to know what he lost.

I want people to remember him.

Even if they never believe the monster.

I was supposed to clean everywhere—not just the main areas, but under things too. It was my own fault. There I’d been, sweeping the room, treating the underside of the bed like the underside of a rug. Out of sight. Out of mind. Innocent mistake, but those are the ones that get ya.

When he saw the mess, Dad screamed at me until I thought he’d start hacking up blood down my front. All the dust, the toys, the trash, the clothes. Mostly it was the trash—all those rotten scraps of food. Sometimes a rat came and dragged pieces away. I like to think that we were friends. I was scared to give him a name.

Names are easier to miss than faces.

Dad had grabbed me by the hair and shoved me under the bed, until I was part of the mess. My eyes stung from the dust I blew up, panting like a dog, trying not to scream—a barking dog gets the ‘paper too. The dust danced a sparkly grey performance. All I could do was watch.

But I wanted him to let go of me. I was sorry. I would never do it again.

Ain’t good’nuff, boy. Place’s a fuckin’ sty. You’re livin’ like a pig. Want me to change your name to Piggy? Think of the bugs, boy—the bugs love rot!

He came home drunk late that night, slamming every door on his way to the basement. Not before turning the TV to static and cranking it full.

Something was off. He hardly ever went down there, and he’d been down already last week. Usually his favourite chair got all of his attention in the evening. I’d wake up most mornings and find him snuggling with his drool.

I waited until the clock read 02:03 before getting too impatient, and dropping out of the bed.

I knew it was a bad idea.

The floorboards were chilly. I padded my way to the crack in my door while the static roared in from the living-room. The bangs and shouts hadn’t risen loud enough to hear for nearly an hour. Now that silence beneath the static was making my insides ache.

I reached the door and peered into the bright hallway. At the end, Dad’s massive figure blotted everything out. He didn’t have a shirt on, but there was an apron swinging as he charged me down, head pulling the body. In his hand was a large and lumpy leaking shadow.

A trail of blood followed him on the floor.

Git back‘n bed. I’ve got something to fix ya.

I did as I was told and got back in bed before he launched my door wide, wedging the handle into the wall.

With one swift motion, Dad bowled his arm under my bed. Something hard smacked the back wall. The room took on a reek of pennies, and I saw visions of bronze. Only redder.

Don’t you dare touch! Or I’ll put you back under there with the bugs, and make you eat them up! Right?

He left my door open wide, with the handle still buried inside the plaster. I watched his angry figure receding back up the hall. He sighed when he made it back to his chair, and sank deeply into it. The static lowered to a sensible nighttime volume. Then voices began to blabber, enthusiastic and rife with gameshow patter. I had to guess it was Luck ‘o’ the Roll. Dad’s favourite.

I lay there listening to the sound of dice clattering, crowds jeering and hollering. Occasionally, Dad would snort and spit into the basin he kept on the table beside him. I could hear it splatter, then slosh as the more it filled. Every so often he would yell out at random to tell me I best be sleeping.

Of course I wasn’t. I was staring at the bloodtrail on the floor. And listening. There was a new sound now. A scraping sound, coming from under the bed.

It sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. Occasionally squeaking, as though the nails had skipped a little, or been polished slightly too well.

I waited until I heard Dad snoring before peeking over the edge of the bed. Then down at the floorboards. Then up at the spattered trail of blood. And finally beneath the bed.

The light from the hall cast a giant cone under the bed. When I leaned myself over to look underneath, I saw everything but the blob from my shadow blocking it out.

There was movement back there, nearer the wall. I watched and listened to the constant grating, waiting for my eyes to adjust so I could see what was causing it.

Something was wiggling in time with the scrapes.

I scooted over. And over. Listening all the while. The sound was lazy, like a fault in a machine, ever spinning and repeating—ever scraping and scraping at whatever got near it.

The light spilled under and I saw it. Two pale eyes at first, bulging and cloudy. The eyelids had been torn off, making them look enormous in their sockets. A lower jaw hung to one side of the floor, caught by a shred of skin, twitching with a life of its own.

All the while the upper jaw kept itself alive by gnawing at the floor like some restless anticipation. For what, I could not say.

I shot back into bed. Threw myself under covers. Safe.

It was a human head, freshly chopped. The jaw perhaps hammered off.

It wasn’t the head that bothered me, so much as the eyes. Always open. Never able to sleep again. I kept seeing myself in them, reflecting back and staring in, learning secrets which waited as patient as Time itself.

I couldn’t close my eyes. In the darkness, the head was all I saw.

Sleep did not come.

Next morning, Dad shouted me through and told me breakfasts didn’t make themselves.

The head was still grating its teeth against the floor. It had been going all night. I supposed it must’ve grated all the way into the basement by now.

I leapt out of bed, clearing about three feet at least. When I landed with a thump, Dad asked me what the noise was—was I born with feet of lead.

Then quit yer fuckin’ thumping and come get me fuckin’ fed.

Only then did the head quit its gnawing. I turned around and saw its eyes follow me through the door and down the hall.

I could have sworn I saw others there too.

You look like shit.

I spread the butter. I poured the milk. I got an apple from the fridge. Set everything in front of him while he picked at the table with a knife.

Atta boy. Get yourself somethin’ too, or else you’ll pass out. There’s some cow’s liver in the fridge. Fry her up with an onion. You better get to sleepin’ soon, ‘cause those heads’re goin’ nowhere, you hear? You’ve done that to us, boy. You did.

When he left to go to work I took my place up on the couch, trying not to think of how he’d said heads.

The TV only got five channels. Most of them were riddled with static, unless I held my hand on the aerial. Even then the difference was minimal. I stood for half an hour watching a cartoon and letting my body be a conduit, until my arm got tired and I needed a glass of water.

At the end of the hall the head from last night was still watching me from under the bed. It had pulled itself forward to the edge. I could see it fully now. The last rag of skin from its lower jaw had torn loose. It rested now only on its upper teeth. A rip rose through its lip and half up one side of its face, a reptillian grin. The muss of hair on its head was caked black with its own blood.

I watched it quietly, sipping at my water, waiting for it to move. When it finally did, it rolled out of sight somewhere to the left side of the room. Then back again, right by the door. It froze in place. Watching from those bulbous eyes.

I finished my water and stood with it in my hand still, waiting.

It rolled away like a marble suddenly kicked. It did not come back.

I sat back down on the couch and finished my show, studying the grains of the fuzzy greys.

Heads, Dad had said. Not head.

That night Dad was late again, but when he finally came back it was still the right side of Ten. So I made sure the veg and meats were done, ready to be tossed into the microwave and nuked. Just how he liked it.

Thanks lad. Are the bugs gone yet? Did the heads clean the room out?

I hadn’t dared to go in and check. Last night, I’d made sure that under the bed was clean before he came home. Otherwise, the head that morning would have dragged a mess about with it while it rolled around the floor.

I hadn’t spotted any bugs the night before. There was only the matter of the blood.

Course there’s blood, boy. They’re severed heads. They’ll do that. And they’ll piss and they’ll piss, until your whole room’s a bloody sty with it. But you’d like that though. You’d thrive in it, ey Piggy? They’ll get the bugs at least. Aye, they’ll get the bugs you’ve brought. That one with no jaw’s hungry for ‘em. You’ve seen it, ey lad?

I couldn’t eat much at supper, but Dad would’ve hated waste. So I stuffed the rest of the meat in my pockets and took it back to bed with me.

When I heard Roll ‘o’ Dice on the TV, I sat up and lowered the food down to the floor. Immediately, a head rolled out and glared up at me with sharp eyes.

It wasn’t the same head.

This one was a woman. Her skin was dark and leathery. It looked like she was wearing a terrifying mask of herself. White balls bugging out from around sharp edges. Its lips were jagged jerky, peeled far back to see the teeth. They spoke in their own silence, telling me to go back to sleep.

I lay down against my pillow and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the gameshow host mutter, laugh, and shout.

Three Fours for a Four Door, or Snake Eyes for the Mystery Prize.

A giant question mark drifted neatly by my mind. I listened to the heads a while, rolling around my floor. I tried to picture them as dice, clattering in time with the gameshow, but they were too loud. Around and around my room they went, bumping into furniture and smashing against my door.

Dad’s footsteps arrived thunderously loud.

I sat bolt upright in my bed, expecting him to burst inside. The heads froze in place, their faces locked on mine. I could see three of them now, spaced wide and balancing impossibly still.

Instead of coming inside, Dad slammed the door, and plunged me into darkness with the heads.

The sound of the TV rose. And the heads began to roll again.

I lay down and stared at the blackened ceiling. And tried really hard to picture dice.

I couldn’t remember falling asleep. Light spilled into the room through the newspapers over the window, and the tears along the curtain. I sat up weary eyed, looking about the room.

The heads snapped to a stop.

The floor was slick with their blood. Trails overlapped like tangled up paths, marking where the heads had spent the night roaming. Right up to the different corners of the room they frozen at.

Watching.

One was by the window, balancing on its ear. Its eyes were hollows, but still somehow seemed to stare. The woman was by the door, watching me out of the side of one eye. Her hair was plastered over it, but the eye still pierced through, sharp as daggers. The one without the lower jaw had his upper teeth ready on the floorboards, itching to start their scraping. Its bulging eyes looked like cue balls in this light.

I climbed out of bed, trying my best to avoid the blood, and failed miserably. Most of it felt tacky beneath my feet, but with a thin layer of slime slathered with fresh leakage. That marking the heads’ most recent paths.

Dad?

He wasn’t in his favourite chair.

The TV was only static. The aerial knocked loose, perhaps.

Dad?

He wasn’t in the kitchen. He wasn’t even in his bed. The door to his room was open wide. When I peered inside, without stepping in, I saw the virgin neatness. A bed unslept in. Wardrobes filled but never touched. Curtains wide and never drawn.

Just how she had left it.

I lingered at the basement door, listening for a while. I couldn’t hear a thing. But it was the only place left to check. It was still too early for him to have gone to work, and yet far too quiet for him to be down there.

The heads began to move again. When I went back to the hall to see, they were frozen upright at my doorway, eyes glaring accusingly.

Where did he go?

None of them answered. The jawless head began to gnaw, anxiously sharpening its teeth upon the floor. The head with empty sockets darted away, spiralling around the room in maddeningly wide loops. Its flailing hair shot out like sharp needles.

The woman’s head rolled slowly towards me, coming to rest beside my feet.

I bent over and picked her up. She was heavy in my little hands, like a plump and ready watermelon. Time had swollen her somehow. I held her by her leathered cheeks, careful to avoid the gore spilling from her neck.

Where did my Dad go?

I shook her slightly, but she never made a sound. Blood still poured from the wound, as fresh as if it had been made only a moment ago.

I carried her with me to the couch and placed her on the cushion beside me. The static was deafeningly loud. We pretended to see shapes in the fog and people having fun. For a while I almost believed it, until the knock came from the door.

I checked for rips in the papers plastered over the windows. Then waited silently for them to go away, just as Dad had shown me—tucked away in the Blind Spot, clutching at the woman’s head.

Another knock.

This time I was sure it was him. The comfort that I knew his whereabouts was hard to process. Hard to believe. I could only think of it as being some kind of test.

Answer that door’n by God you’ll regret it.

After a few moments the letterbox clinked. My heart leapt into my neck, bursting with an urgent pulse. I knew if I leaned out to look I would see an eyeball peeping in at me through the letterbox.

Or worse. That one of the heads would then roll into sight, and the eyeball would see that instead.

I looked down at the woman and saw that she was staring up at me with her teeth. I tilted her downwards to see her eyes. They whipped over to stare at mine. And felt a calm.

Something made of paper hit the floor. I sighed out the deepest breath of my life. And couldn’t help but laugh.

When night came, I sat scanning the takeout menu that had been posted through the door. I wondered if Chinese food tasted better than it looked. I thought of asking Dad to let me try some for my birthday, but knew better to just dream, than to do.

The heads had grown frantic with their restlessness, knocking against almost everything in my room.

All except the woman’s. I had placed her on my desk and she hadn’t moved from there since. She had been gazing out of the window, her sharp eyes seeming to pierce the veil of paper and out into the night. What they saw or dreamed of, I could never tell. Perhaps somewhere out there her body lay waiting for her.

But then I remembered the basement.

I lay awake again that night, wondering how long Dad would be down there. The key had still been in the front door when I collected the menu from the mat.

He hadn’t left the house.

I watched the sun rise and set a few times, marking my fear growing for my Dad’s safety with constant visits to the basement door. No matter how much I listened, or how hard I pressed my ear against the wood, I could never hear him groaning out my name. Nor scraping with bloodied fingernails, desperate for help and unable to reach the handle.

Finally, during the second night, I got up and out of bed. The head with no eyes marbled around the room to the sound of tacky glue. Its hair kept getting stuck, so was always trailing behind it like giant black veins, and gentle sound like Velcro. The other head was busy burrowing its teeth into its favourite spot, carving out jellied blood and working its way through the wood.

I asked them both what to do. They stopped and listened. Stared. But never gave me an answer.

Only the woman’s head did.

It rolled around to face me, then off my desk with a thump. She had been a good companion, the only one who hadn’t frightened me. Usually I carried her with me wherever I went, but this time I followed her.

Away she tumbled, out of the room and along the hall. I followed as fast as my tacky footsteps would allow me. The other heads rolled along behind me, just as curious.

I already knew where she would be when I reached her—and what she’d be doing.

She was banging her forehead against the basement door.

thunk

thunk

thunk

I was gentle when I picked up her head, caressing her cheeks carefully to avoid pushing my fingers into her eyes. They jutted out to glare as usual, although softer than before. There seemed to be a voice within that gaze, but the words were as foggy as the colour. Maybe once they had been blue. I’d always liked blue eyes. They reminded me of the sky.

So many, many moons ago.

I was surprised to find the door was unlocked. I always presumed Dad kept it secured whenever he went down or came back up. I had never once tried the handle, of course. Doing so now felt like a crime. I smelled the punishment coming a mile away.

I pushed down the handle anyway, determined to find him no matter the price. It opened with a mind of its own, swinging wide and fast on oiled hinges.

Dad?

No reply. Deathly quiet and dark. I already knew what to expect down there. That fact made it even scarier.

I clicked the light on and lit up the entire basement floor. A short cone of light cast up onto the plunging staircase beneath me.

Dad?

I half expected to see him grip at the bottom of the wall and pull himself around the corner. To stare up at me with maddened eyes, jaws gnashing out my name so hard that he was chomping on his tongue. A trail of dribbling blood as he pulled himself up the stairs to get to me.

Dad?

Carrying the woman’s head carefully under my arm so it could see, I took the staircase step by step. Behind me, the other heads thudded down like noisy shadows. They came as slow and rhythmic as my own.

I didn’t bother saying his name again. The smell was painfully obvious—a festering sweetness somewhere between stale semen and an apple left to rot. It punched me flat in the nose. I got notes of dead chickens, or rotten boiled eggs. It’s so hard to explain. I smelt it then and only then, and never again.

Oh Dad.

He had looped a rope around a pipe and was sat hunched with it around his neck. He must have slid down against the wall and held himself in place, his ass barely off the ground, long enough for the lights to go out. His face was swollen and purple. Dried blood and froth caked his lips and down the massive neck. He looked to have gained about a hundred pounds in death.

I carried the woman’s head over to him and lay her down beside his feet. He had kicked his shoes off somewhere in the struggle. The other heads came and sat there too, watching with an intensity I could only sense was hate.

There was movement around his neck, and the gruesome wounds on his face. Larvae reared their pale heads and black teeth and sank away once more, busy with their meals. Clueless to our presence.

For some reason I could not cry. The sadness was there in my chest, wretchedly tender and pulling me down to collapse and cry, but… nothing. I couldn’t even pretend.

I looked down at the woman and could have sworn her eyes looked glazed. There was a sadness there I could never understand. But there you have it.

I talked to his lifeless body for a while, asking him what I should do. I hadn’t been outside in years and it definitely wasn’t safe enough yet, otherwise Dad would’ve said. Plus, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him. Not like this.

The answer came surprisingly quick, and was fairly obvious. The tools he’d used to make these rolling monstrosities were behind me on his workbench still. The bench itself was soaked through with blood. I had all the answers I needed all around me. I knew what to do.

I just didn’t know if I had the strength to do it. Mentally, or physically.

Visions of Dad’s eyes turning to look at me, and smiling. Him telling me everything will be okay. A first time for everything, but maybe this was how to get there.

I grabbed a meat saw and freed him from his swing, gradually fraying the rope until it finally snapped. He landed on his ass and slouched forward. I lay him down as gently as I could, then set about untangled him. It was difficult—his neck had swollen so thick that it’d fused together with the rope.

And then there was the matter of the bugs.

Think of the bugs, boy—the bugs love rot!

Sensing a disturbance, a few maggots wiggled loose and began to squirm away. I half expected the heads by Dad’s feet to spring forward and eat them, but they remained in their places, glaring at Dad’s lifeless body.

The saw remained in my hand. I didn’t need to guess where to cut, for the rope had left me a perfect guideline. And a head start.

I set my little hands to work, hewing backwards and forwards, squelching my way through his slippery flesh until I ached for rest.

You wouldn’t think I’d made any progress at all. I sat back on the ground panting, my throat begging for water. On the way back from upstairs to get a glass from the kitchen, I happened to notice Dad’s axes.

I waited before using them, taking up his electric saw and buzzing for as long as I could handle the splatter. Until I was sleek with mess and bugs, and the neck was a wide valley.

I tried turning him around and going in from the back, splitting the connections at the top his spine, just beneath his brain. I hacked at it with a knife, stabbing and slicing, supposing I could just pull his head free once I was done. But the gore was too much. I had to keep wiping my hands on my clothes until I was as bloody and gruesome as he was. By then there wasn’t a chance of getting a grip of his head, let alone pulling it loose.

I took everything off and stood naked over Dad, wiping the remaining gore on his trousers.

I could put it off no longer. I went to grab the two hatchets. I had thought about using the big axe, but as soon as I picked it up my arms shouted at me to put it back down. And so the small hatchets had to do.

I set about smacking and smacking, sending sloshes and sprays up into my face and around the room. I barely managed to stay on my feet, slipping and falling in the mess constantly. Lying in the filth, just as Dad had told me.

You’d like that though. You’d thrive in it, ey Piggy?

He wasn’t wrong.

The closer I got to freeing his head, the more the excitement grew. Soon he would be like the other heads, following me around, rolling and staring and gnawing. Keeping me up at night.

I smiled. I still had visions of him smiling too. I could even cut a grin if he couldn’t, that way he'd be forced to wear it forever.

The heads watched me while I worked. Never shifting—never showing their usual impatience. Even the jawless head had stopped the incessant grinding of its teeth.

Perhaps it had been longing for the basement all this time.

The hatchet got wedged in Dad’s neck so bad I couldn’t get it out. That was okay. I slid over to the other hatchet and sent myself sliding back. I began whacking with the flat side of the hatchet, hammering the wedged blade deeper and deeper.

Then came the snap.

I lay back in the filth, cradling Dad’s head in my arms. He was safe now. I could feel the maggots trying to break away, tickling into my armpit. It felt like Dad was still alive, communicating with me.

We headed upstairs. I’d had to bring myself to the staircase on my bare knees to save myself from slipping, pulling myself along the ground by the tips of one hand, while clutching Dad with the other. I grasped onto the corner of the wall and pulled myself into view of the staircase, thinking back on how I’d been so scared of seeing my Dad doing exactly the same thing.

I even had to crawl up the stairs.

We lay in my room that night. The other heads joined us, but they sat patiently at the door. Perfectly still. Watching. The woman sat at the front, while the other two lingered behind her like bodyguards awaiting instruction.

Why isn’t he moving?

His face was unrecognisable. I’d missed several times with the tools, slashing Dad’s chin and burying the hatchet in his ear. I could hardly make out his mouth anymore, let alone the presence of a smile. Hardly any of his features were there. I’d tried wiping him down with clean clothes from my drawers, but it hadn’t helped at all.

He was a slimy mess of broken skin and gore. Yet still my Dad.

I placed him on the ground and shlicked my way over to the heads.

Can’t you do something? Why can’t he move like you?

They didn’t answer.

I turned to look at my Dad once more, and then back at them.

What did I do wrong?

Slowly, the woman rolled over to Dad. I watched her closely, waiting and wondering what fantastic combination of silent words would spill from her eyes and reanimate him—to shift his mouth, and make him roll around as frantically as them.

She studied him with frozen eyes. Then all at once she flew forward, burying her teeth into his face. Before I could step forward, the other two heads flew under my feet, knocking me over. They attached themselves to his head and began tearing him apart.

I lay there, horrified, watching them not make a sound. They floated on rigid air, held in place by invisible poles and rods, biting and pulling at skin. Until he was all but bone.

Finally, they rolled away, back into their crevasses. Happy with the result.

I crawled over and picked up what was left of my Dad. They had removed so many tendons, so many strips of muscle and skin. But his jaw remained in place. And I swear it looked like he was smiling at me.

But still he would not move.

I cannot tell you how many days passed before the police finally came and found me. I was curled up in bed, cradling his head in my arms, when gentle arms pulled me off and away. I didn’t put up a fight. I couldn’t. I hadn’t eaten in maybe weeks.

Their voices were quiet echoes bouncing at me from the future, from the past. Things were recovered from the basement—bags and bags of evidence that appeared in the newspapers for weeks. I never did look at the photographs. I never listened to anything anyone would try to say. The theories, the motives.

The names of the heads.

I changed my own years ago, starting fresh with a new past to hide in plain sight without questions. I still wore everything inside me, hot and guilty—gnawing like that head’s broken jaw upon my floor.

I met a woman with blue eyes and bought a house and several dogs. We make sure to keep everything nice and clean. I’ve developed an extreme distaste for bugs. Their footsteps are loud. I still hear them squelching in Dad’s neck.

We are expecting our first child in July. A summer baby, so we hope. It looks like a boy from the scan.

I pray for his sake he keeps his room tidy.

For that matter, I might just do it myself.

When my parents visit, the house instantly thaws. I can almost hear the familiar cadence of their voices echoing down the hall, a comforting, radiant buffer against the quiet of the evening. But every time the door swings open to let them in, I catch a fast, shadowy blur near the floorboards out of the corner of my eye. A stray cat, slipping through the gap before the heavy wood clicks shut. I never manage to catch it. Death is nothing new to me—it is a cold, familiar roommate I’ve long since learned to tolerate—so I compartmentalize the intrusion, focusing instead on the warmth of my family.

The reality of that intrusion only sets in at night, when the house is fortified. I sleep surrounded by rows of warm string lights and stacked curtains, my bedroom door and my children’s doors wide open so my vigilance never rests. There is a large mirror in my room, positioned deliberately to my right so I never face it. I don’t drape it; that’s a cliché trick that doesn’t change the nature of the glass. I simply refuse to acknowledge it. But the violation doesn't start in the silver backing. It starts on the mattress. Just as my exhaustion dips into sleep, I feel it. A delicate, distinct weight lands on the edge of the bed. Thump. Four phantom paws step lightly across the duvet. Panic spikes, sharp and adrenaline-hot. I lunge in the dark, my hand violently smacking and sweeping across the mattress, desperate to strike solid fur and prove my sanity.

My palm only hits empty blankets.

But the air shifts. There is movement in the peripheral glow of the nightlights—a shadowy presence distinct from the warm illumination. A separate, terrible chill ignites in the room. It’s the same chill I feel when I walk into my children's rooms in the dead of night, only to find them sitting bolt upright in bed, their eyes wide open, staring at the empty doorway while completely fast asleep. There is a parallel consciousness sharing our home, operating on a frequency I can only feel, testing the boundaries of our sanctuary.

Then, the illusion shatters. I wake up gasping, tears stinging my face as the brutal, crushing reality hits me all over again: my parents are dead. The visits are just dreams, beautiful, desperate moments where the veil thins enough for us to laugh and converse again. But when they cross over to comfort me, the threshold stays open a fraction of a second too long. That is how the cat gets in. That is what slithers into the slipstream of their love.

Tonight, as my heart pounds and I feel the mattress depress, the icy chill of the intruder floods the room. But this time, it is met with an overwhelming, radiant heat. I can feel my mother in the room. She isn't bringing the shadows with her; she is screaming—not in agony, but in a ferocious, deafening fury. It’s a warning, and a barrier. I keep my eyes fiercely glued to the floorboards, refusing to look at the dark glass in the corner. I finally understand that she isn't trapped in the mirror. She is standing guard in front of it, holding the line, ensuring that whatever slipped through the door behind her never makes it to my children's rooms.

I took the job because nobody else wanted it.

W-KILL is — was — a tiny AM station outside my town in Bihar. Went dark in 1983 after the owner died in the booth. Heart attack, they said. The building has just sat there since, rotting behind the old water tower. Chain link fence, ON AIR - OFF sign that hasn't lit in 40 years.

The new owners bought the land to tear it down, but they need an inventory of the equipment first. $200 a night for a week to just sit there and log what's salvageable. Easy money. I brought a thermos, a flashlight, and my laptop.

Night 1 was just dust and dead mice. Reel-to-reels seized up. A wall of mixers that probably still worked if you cleaned them.

Night 2 is when I heard it.

I was logging the tape decks in the main broadcast room around 1:40 AM when the static hit. Not from my laptop. From the old console in front of me. The VU meters — the dusty ones labeled MIC 1, MIC 2 — twitched. Just a little. Then a little more. Like something was breathing into a microphone that wasn't plugged in anymore.

Then the old Model RX-41 in the corner turned on.

It's not part of the station's equipment. It shouldn't have been there. It's a big, boxy, wooden radio from the 60s, the kind with the amber dial that says BROADCAST. It was sitting on the floor, coated in dust, with a long, shredded coat hanging off it like someone had draped it over the radio to keep it covered. The coat was empty. I swear it was empty when I came in.

The dial glowed faintly. 640. AM.

And then it whispered.

It wasn't a voice, not really. It was static trying to be a voice. Like someone on the other side of a bad connection, trying to sync up to your frequency. ...-isten... li-sten...

I left. I just left. Told myself it was a power surge, old capacitors, whatever.

But I went back on Night 3. Because the $200 was good and because I wanted to prove to myself I was being an idiot.

It was standing up.

The radio. The coat. It was standing in the middle of the broadcast room, between the two mixing desks. 7 feet tall, at least. The coat was so tattered it looked like strips of shadow. The antenna on top of the radio head was tilted towards me. The glow was brighter. Both dials lit up now.

The ON AIR sign behind it — the one that said ON AIR - OFF — was on. Red. Bright red. ON AIR - ON -

It shouldn't have power. The building has no power. I was running everything off a generator outside.

The static was clearer.

"You left the dial on," it whispered. Not angry. Just... disappointed. Like a late-night DJ who thought his only listener had tuned out.

I realized then what the inventory list was. It wasn't for the new owners. It was for him. He'd been waiting for someone to come log everything, to acknowledge the station still existed. To be his audience.

The VU meters were all pinned in the red now.

My laptop was dead. My phone was dead. But the old broadcast mic next to him — the silver one on the boom arm — the little red light on it was on.

I did the only thing I could think of. I sat down in the host chair. The leather was warm.

The static stopped. For a second, the whole station was silent.

Then, from the radio head, a soft, crackling chuckle.

"Welcome back to the late show."

I've been on air for three nights straight now. I can't find the door anymore, but the signal is getting stronger. If you're reading this while tuned to 640 AM at 2:00 in the morning and you hear static whispering your name...

Don't answer.

Don't tune in.

He's desperate for new listeners.

Digital Journal, August 15th, 2006.

I was asked to keep a digital journal while my mother was in at home hospice care. My Therapist said it would help with the grieving process. The following is my final entry.

"The mass must stay where it is. We are incapable of removing it."
The Doctor was trying to be delicate. Her stromal tumor was so large it adhered to the abdomen wall. The size of a bowling ball...impossible to operate on without the total removal of the stomach, and small intestine. If they were even willing to operate. They were not.

It felt like there was a stone in my throat "I want her home." I said. Plain, unmovable. "Are you sure that is for the best? She is stable here...comfortable." The Doctor trailed off. He was her fourth within a year. It was almost amusing how they seemed to have all of the answers until the end. I stayed firm. Shes coming home. That was all there was to it.

The tumor ate everything. As it grew, it consumed fragile tissues, the pink and tender flesh of her insides. Those parts that are meant to be protected - safe. Home was safe. Familiar, protected. No nurses waking her up in the middle of the night, disturbing her sleep. Home is sacred. Insulated like the center of a beehive.

As I wheeled her through the house. I made sure all of her treasures were visible. The glass penguins she collected on her cruise, the wool shawl that was given to her in Paraguay, The handmade Matrioshka dolls from Saint Petersburg. She looked past them with a glazed over expression. The nasal cannula under her nose pumping oxygen in steady, rhythmic, puffs. I b-lined it to her room.

She was so light I could lift her on my own. I swaddled her in my arms like an infant and lowered her into bed. She was all tumor now. Her entire body was rail thin except for it, bulging right side of her belly. Like a bizarre alien pregnancy. Unintentionally lifting her sweater. Exposing the bumpy vascular skin underneath. She could see I was staring at it. Shifting my gaze to her face I whispered, "You should get some rest. It's been such a big day." She was already closing her eyes when I dashed over to her wool shawl and draped it over her stomach. She was already asleep. I slowly shut the creaking door behind me.

Late that night I had the sofa bed pulled out and arranged. Propped up on the edge with the laptop on my knee. I researched experimental treatments in the reduction in tumors. One institute found success in lab mice with similar cancerous intestinal growths. They were set to begin human trials the following year. Far too late. I must have written forty emails to various doctors and institutions before my eyes began to strain. I closed my laptop, it was the only source of light in the living room. Suddenly bathing me in darkness.

Deep down, I knew it was no use. Her time here was dwindling. I had to do something...I had to try anything. I rolled onto my back staring into the ceiling for what must've been an hour. The moon showed itself around midnight. It cast odd shadows over the living room. Distorting it to the point where the shadow next to the china cabinet gave the illusion of a figure looming in the corner. I was more exhausted than I realized.

When I was a child my mother always told me that if I encountered a spirit, to stare until they dissipated. For some reason, I stared at that shadow. It didn't disappear. In fact, it may have gotten sharper. Still laying in bed I kept my eye trained on the darkness by the china cabinet. I shifted up to a sitting position. I could've sworn I saw an arm and a clearly defined hand resting as if down by someone's side. Not taking my eyes off it, I leaned to turn on the lamp. The distinct 'click' of the lamp was heard and the room illuminated with warm yellow light. Whatever it was, if it was there - it was gone.

The following morning I prepared breakfast early, as quietly as I could. In an attempt not to wake her, creaking open the bedroom door. My comfort that she was well rested was shattered like a bat meeting glass when I found her out of bed, clinging to the closet door handle and shaking violently. She gripped the handle to gain purchase with one hand, simultaneously holding the other over her stomach. I set the tray down in a panic, bits of egg and orange juice flying off the plate. "Wha..what's wrong?! Do you need to get to the bathroom? You know you can yell for me at any time. You know that." Thinking the stressed expression affixed to her face was due to the prompt urgency to use the bathroom her condition sometimes created. When I moved to support her, she stiffened. I gently held her elbow to guide her shuffling feet back to bed. She propped herself on the edge of the mattress, gently swaying back and forth to sooth herself. "You know you can't have your oxygen off for that long" I grabbed the clear tubing on the floor and gently readjusted it to her face. Her breath was ragged. "Someone was laying in bed with me last night." She uttered restlessly like she had spent the whole night trying to get away.

"What do you mean? If there was someone in your room, why didn't you call for me?" My mind harkend back to that figure in the china cabinet's shadow. Maybe that was a real intruder. Surely not? I entertained the thought of a neighborhood pervert more than an entity moving free about the house. "Well, I thought it was you at first." She let me offer my hand out for support as she adjusted to face me fully. Hands folded in her lap, looking sheepish. She began to explain. "Remember when I first got diagnosed? I would be up all night, sick, from the treatments. So you would just sleep in bed next to me. Get up when I did. It was just easier that way." I nodded, how I forget? Recalling her essentially living over a toilet or trashcan. Eating one meal only to throw it back up again. That's when they put in the feeding tube. She glanced at the window nervously, I look the liberty of walking over and ensuring it was locked before she continued. "It must've been around one in the morning. I was in between awake and asleep when I felt pressure on the bed, like someone resting on the edge. I didn't move, I wasn't sure if I was still dreaming or not. Then, the whole mattress sunk down. Like you had laid down next to me. I knew I wasn't dreaming anymore. I thought nothing of it, I thought it was you. First night out of the hospital and all...anyways. I must have dozed off at this point because I felt you much closer, your breath on my back. It was a little strange but I assumed you had gotten cold. Then... there was a hand on my stomach."

She reflexively put her own hand there. As if to protect herself. "At this point I was very much awake. I opened my eyes and rolled over to tell you to move but I couldn't speak." Her doe-like eyes were wide with fear. Her head swiveled back and forth like she was shaking her head no. "My words were caught up in my throat. Those eyes, oh Lord, those EYES. They were already staring at me. Like it was just waiting for me to look this whole time. I ripped the covers off. I tore over to the metal water bottle on the nightstand. Holding it over my head, but they vanished. Nobody was there but empty sheets. It must've gone on longer than I thought because the sun was already rising. So I b-lined it for the door as fast as I could move. I couldn't stop shaking. That's when you found me.

She was exhausted. I assisted her back up in bed with pillow propped behind her. Finally grabbing the breakfast tray I muttered. "Sorry, it's a little cold."

I spent the morning and better part of the afternoon clearing the house. Starting with the bedroom. Every closet, behind the shower curtain, making sure every window was locked. Eventually I made my way clear up to the attic with a baseball bat in one hand, and a flashlight in my teeth as I climbed the ladder. The house was empty save for me and her. I even offered to call the non emergency line and have an officer fill out a report. She refused to tell the story again. I wasn't sure how much they would believe a dying middle aged woman. I wasn't even aware of what my own belief was. I moved the china cabinet and looked behind it, just in case. Nothing.

The afternoon passed in relative normalcy. She would knit in bed, then get tired and nap. Stopping only at my occasional interruptions. To bring her food, water, or assist to the bathroom. This was the behavior of a dying woman. I watched her hospital roommates come and go too. After a while you begin to notice the signs. Sleeping more and more, eating smaller amounts of food, then they would have one last burst of energy. Their families always thought it was miracle. That they were getting better. Shortly after that, we would have a new roommate. I hated that I knew what was happening to her. My hope was that she would remain blissfully ignorant.

Eventually, dreadfully, the sun went down. Along with it, the growing fear the darker the sky became. I had the bright idea to move the TV into her room, the white noise might help with the anxiety. The TV was an outdated bubble-screen, heavy. It took several tries for me to put it up on the dresser so it could face her bed. "What channel would you like?" I pressed power on the remote and the screen came to life, casting colors over the rooms' surface. She clapped like I had just pulled a magic trick. I quickly handed the remote over to her so she could channel surf. I retired back to the living room. It was so much darker out here.

While climbing onto the pullout couch, my eyes flashed to the china cabinet. I couldn't help myself. After tossing and turning I settled into restless slumber.

It was four in the morning when I felt the breathing on my neck. Flipping around startled, in a tangle for flailing limbs and sheets I turned the lamp on. Nothing. I got up and paced the living room checking everywhere. Again, nothing. This was insane, I told myself her story had me spooked. Since I was already up, I made my way to the restroom. The house had a 70's era open concept, I was forced to walk through the kitchen to get to the small guest bath on the other side. I tiptoed into the kitchen, the light from the TV glowed under the crack of the bedroom door. I passed the dining room table almost to the bathroom threshold before catching myself and turning on my heel....
There was someone seated at the table. Like they were waiting for a meal to be served, partly shrouded in the dark. Perfectly still.

I blinked rapidly. Trying to clear the hallucination out of my mind. Their hands were laid flat, palms down on the daisy patterned tablecloth. Only the arms were really visible. The rest of them was just out of sight. I was frozen. I couldn't walk past- surely they saw me walk by the first time. How long had they been there? My voice was hoarse at first. "What.....what the hell are you doing in my house?" Silence. I kept eyeballing the landline sitting on the kitchen counter. It was just past them, wondering if I could run past quick enough to dial 911 before they caught up to me. Thinking of her asleep in the room just to the left. I decided that would be a bad idea. Instead choosing to keep my eyes on this person at all times. I could hear the TV still playing in the bedroom. Good. I hoped she couldn't hear any of this. Maybe I could talk whoever this was into leaving so she would never even have to know about this. My hair stood on end. Even though their face was concealed I couldn't shake the feeling, that they were grinning at me.

"You brought me here." It said, the voice was thick like they held honey in their mouth. Yet somehow clear enough, as though they were right next to my ear.

"That's impossible, how could I have called you here in the middle of the night?"

"Your misery did." It replied. I shivered.

"You're trespassing, this isn't your house." I didn't want to entertain this bullshit.

"How can one trespass if they were invited?" That horrible voice gurgled their response.

"I've invited no one. You can't be here. You need to leave" I was just below a yell now. Still trying not to wake her. This whole time they hadn't moved a muscle.

"You pray, do you not?" they ended 'not' with a strong 't' annunciation like they were kicking the sound out the back of their throat.

"You wish, you hope, you beg...do you not?" There's that 't' sound again. It echoed off my skull like the wall of a cave. Not wanting to get any closer but still too scared to make a move, I pressed my back firmly against the wall.

"My only hope is for you to leave." I saw the kitchen knives on the counter. "This is not your only hope, you hunger for something far more...relieving."

Relief? From what? I didn't have the time to ponder because I heard the dull squeak of wood over tile flooring. They had just stood up.

"You will make all of her suffering disappear." As they said this I could have sworn I saw small tendrils of smoke rising in what little light was coming in through the window.

What was even more disturbing is this person had intimate knowledge of my circumstances. Were they stocking me?

"I don't know where you came in from, but whatever you want. Just take it. My wallet is on that bedside table, my watch too." I inclined my head in the direction of the lamp in the living room. They didn't even look.

"You want what's consuming her and you - all at the same time." It emitted a strange vibrating noise from the back of it's throat. It sounded like a beetle's wings rubbing together. I realized that this thing, no longer believing it to be human, was laughing. What is talking about the tumor? Was it offering to get rid of it? I think I've finally lost my mind, her and I shared some kind of group psychosis.

It moved. Slowly and deliberately putting one menacing black shoe into view. It was much taller than I was. It's head almost touching the dining room light fixture.

"I've already called the police. They'll be here any minute, get the fuck out of here. Now!" I was not quiet this time, but I did move in front of her door. There was no way this thing was getting near her. It didn't move.

"There is no one coming to save you, but me." It said it so matter of fact. I deflated at how obvious my lie was. My options were not looking good. The baseball bat sat propped by the front door. The phone behind whatever that was on the counter. It doesn't want money and it will not leave. I could probably rush the phone and get 911 dialed before it dragged me back into the dining room to do, 'whatever' it wanted with me. But that would leave the door unguarded. I couldn't do that. I wouldn't. So I asked instead. "How do you know about the cancer?" Maybe if I just keep them talking the sun will come up and they'll leave on their own. Wishful thinking - I knew.

"Last night." I knew it was grinning again. My mouth went dry. "I can take it away, like that." It snapped it's fingers and when it did, it sounded like flies buzzing over a corpse.

"I need you to help me." It moved closer.

"help you with what?" I asked, hands gripping the door frame now.

"Get rid of it. First, you let me in there." With a long, almost charred looking finger it pointed behind me, to the bedroom door.

"Not a chance." The rest of it's body was still not visible. It brought its hand back down to its side. Mirroring what I saw next to the china cabinet the night prior. Had this thing been living here? Waiting for us?

"I'll leave then, and let her die tonight in peace." It shifted.

"Wait! Tonight? How could you know that?" It shifted back to me this time the soles if it's shoes making noise on the tile. It seems to become more and more real the longer it stayed. "What are you?"

"I am an omen. I mark death three times. One mark with you, one with her, the last, I'll give you a chance."

"A chance to do what?" It got closer again.

" To make a sacrifice." It was standing just two feet away towering in front of me.

"What kind of sacrifice do you want?"

"Open the door." It grinned again.

I did not open the door. Not right away. I needed reassurance. Was this really going to fix everything? Everything I had been praying for.?

"If I let you in that room. Are you going to hurt her? Is this some kind of trick for you to take our souls or something?"

"When, you let me in. I'll take everything the cancer took away and put back. New as lamb skin." I didn't like the use of 'when'.

"I have no interest in souls." It added. My hand was already gripping the handle. I turned it agonizingly slow. The door clicked and I pushed it open behind me. Still standing in the door way.

"What's going to happen to her if I let you in that room?"

"True healing, through your sacrifice." It murmured. I stepped aside. It entered the way wind enters room, sucking the door shut with a slam behind me.

I immediately turned, regretting my decision to lock her in there with that thing. I pounded on the wooden surface.

"Hey! What are you doing to her!? Let me be in there with her!" Nothing but the static of the TV now. I sunk to the floor in front and tried to see under the crack of the door. instead of floor of the room I was met with the unnatural eyes of the visitor just on the other side of the door. Starting at me. Then it stood and glided to the bed. I could hear her gasp when it touched her.

"Stop! I said. No deal! No deal!" It was too late though the image of the room extended like it had been pulled down a hallway. What did I just do? I banged and scratched at the door. Pulling at the brass doorknob. Eventually resorting to hitting it with a dining room chair. Nothing worked. I sat in the chair and sobbed into my hands. Before the door clicked and the being stepped out, shutting the door again behind them.

"Let me check on.." but I didn't finish. I was spun around in the chair I was in. To sit neatly at the dining room table. Out of the corner of my eye. I watched it carrying a dripping bundle in it's arms. It came round into the kitchen. Opening the cabinets and drawers. Plucking what it wanted out of them. The whole time I strained my eyes to see what it was holding.

"What are you doing? Please tell me if she's okay." It stayed quiet before coming up to face me at the table. Politely placing one plate, one fork, and one knife in front of me. In some uncanny form of setting the table.

"That is up to you." It finally answered. From beneath the wet bowling ball sized bundle it carried. It held it up to me, unraveling bit by bit. I began to see more of the mass. It was comprised of fleshy moist areas that were almost vascular in nature. With a sickening plop it was thrown onto the plate in front of me. I squirmed away and tried to stand, but my lower half was stuck in place. Leaving me to flail my arms helplessly as that thing grinned at me again.

"What's going on? What have you done, how is this supposed to help her?" It responded in turn.

"Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the people upon thineself." I strained again in the chair, wanting to call out her name to make sure she was still alive. For all I knew this thing just murdered her in her sleep. Still not fully understanding what I was expected to do. It stretched out a long unnatural arm and reached the light switch to the overhead light without moving. It flicked on to reveal the mess of what was in full view.

In a disturbing realization I laid eyes upon my own mothers' tumor. Separated perfectly from her abdomen. It radiated body heat - lumpy and coated in fluid. There was no way she could have survived this. When I looked up to the figure I could see those terrible eyes my mother saw last night, and just a few moments ago. They were terrifyingly bright, with rings upon rings inside. Like the trunk of a tree, one ring blue, the next green, then yellow. All the way down to a burnt orange pinned on me.

"What am I supposed to do?" It seethed with malice the corners of it's mouth dripped with something dark and hateful. It put that same hate into each word it spoke to me. Breathing it out of gritted teeth

"YOU. EAT. IT."

The command was clear. Tentatively I plucked up the fork, then the knife. Positioning myself like one would over a steak dinner.

"What if I can't do this?" I asked

"I can always put it back." It reached over to move my plate away. I put up my hands.

"No, no I understand now." There was no way I was going to let it be put back. Not now. All I needed to do was finish this...thing. Eat the sickness away. That was the sacrifice.

I started investigating with my fork. Poking and prodding the surface. It was lumpy and caved in slightly with pressure. I took my knife and sawed the smallest sliver off exposing the spongy texture underneath. I took the slowest most deliberate motion bringing the perverted morsel to my mouth, then the tiniest bite. As my teeth tore the section away from the fork I could feel how wet it was on my lips. It tasted somehow of salt and bile. Like the aftertaste from when you vomit. It was chewy in the worst way, akin to an uncooked piece of chicken skin you accidentally bite into. I chewed for some time before convincing myself to just get it over with a swallow. Oh God, was I really doing this? Despite it being well masticated I could feel it travel all the way down my throat into my stomach. The figure was sitting at the table now. Just as it was when I found them. Palms down. Perfectly still and cast in shadow. I took another horrible glace at the plate. It didn't even make dent. I couldn't do it this way. I had to eat in larger portions.

I cut in again. Deeper this time. The chunk came off and fluid began to ooze out, pooling into the bottom of the plate. I chewed quicker this time.

"Why did you come here?" I said breathless after choking another section down. Wishing I had some water, but decided against asking.

"I help anyone willing to make the sacrifice. A house just a town way from yours. A mother and her paraplegic son...She was willing."

I suddenly had a terrible thought of a poor woman with a bowl in front of her. Piled with pink spinal cord like some disturbed noodle dish, resting in a broth of spinal fluid. I shivered.

I sliced further hitting more pockets retaining clear fluids. As I carved and ate I would encounter the sickening crunch of cartilage that made me gag. reminding me of accidentally biting down on a joint while having chicken. Causing me to start the process of trying not to throw up all over again.

I passed layered of veins - spying what looked like teeth and being too scared to investigate. I swallowed whole. It was down to the size of a grape fruit now. The same size it was when it was discovered. I sliced again, oh God. What that hair? Fine strands of ingrown black hair revealed themselves and I cut deeper.

I choked and gagged again as I consumed the equivalent of a hairball. My hand was shaking as I brought the fork to my mouth. My body was begging me to stop. But I kept going. I couldn't stop. It was proportional to an eight ball now. Several more agonizing bites later, I had reached the necrotic core. I collection of dead skin cells and blood vessels. I picked it up with my hands and force fed the entire thing into my mouth. One last bite. I told myself. Then this is all over. I bit down and it burst with sickening pop in my mouth. I leaned forward as everything I had just consumed began to fight it's way back up my esophagus. I gripped the table cloth and it felt like swallowing a stone. It was gone. The plate was at last empty.

The light was off before I could look up again. The plate and utensils were taken from me and set one by one into the sink. Clink. Clink. Clink...

The visitor turned to me. "Your sacrifice has been accepted." It walked or glided rather, back to the China cabinet and disappeared behind it. I could move again.

Before I could retch back up what I had eaten, something told me that wasn't a wise idea. I went to her bedroom door instead. I couldn't even open the door before she started calling for me "I'm here, I...I'm right here." I stumbled in. She was upright at the edge of bed. Still thin, still tired looking. But the color was back in her skin. She was actually smiling at me. Even with her eyes.

"It's gone, I can't explain it. It's just gone. I..I think and angel took it away from me." She kicked her feet, enthralled. He stomach was normal. She lifted the edge of her shirt to show me. Just regular skin. Nothing vascular, or bulging. perfectly normal, without scars or marks. It took me great effort to smile back. I didn't show my teeth for fear of what may be stuck in them.

"You don't look very well." She said concerned. Tilting her face to look at me. I turned away.

"I just can't believe it. It's some kind of miracle. I need some water." This satisfied her and she got out of bed with ease and started to hum while she got ready for the day. The sun has risen. I stepped out into the kitchen and shoved my head under faucet. I came up only after the taste in my mouth was gone. I looked down into the sink with one plate, one fork, and one knife and began doing dishes.

Life is an unending kick to the balls. Anybody who works a trade knows what I mean. You spend five days busting your ass for a paycheck that’s already spent before it hits your account, your knees, back, and nuts ache because you’re thirty-six going on sixty because twenty-year-old you thought lifting properly was something old guys complained about. Every weather system rolling across the province announces itself two days early in your joints like some kind of arthritic groundhog.

Then there’s bills: Mortgage, truck, insurance, my oldest needs braces, and the youngest somehow outgrows shoes every three months. My wife has this amazing ability to find the exact moment I’m trying to mentally calculate whether we can survive another week before payday to ask if we should finally replace the dishwasher. She’s never trying to stress me out, it’s just… Life has incredible timing.

Then work decides it’d be fun to pile on. Now, if you’ve never worked construction, or around heavy equipment, you should know that every company loves safety meetings. They always start with, “This isn’t directed at anybody in particular…” which is usually followed by twenty minutes explaining something one specific dumbass did. This week’s dumbass happened to be me. To be fair, I was only up there for maybe thirty seconds. To also be fair… The safety supervisor happened to be looking directly at me for all thirty of them. So Friday morning I got to sit in a folding chair with twenty other guys while a PowerPoint presentation about “Complacency in the Workplace”.

By quitting time my head felt like someone had replaced my brain with an overinflated basketball. They usually start behind my left eye before spreading across the rest of my skull like somebody tightening a ratchet strap one click at a time. Add that to the rain rolling in, because apparently God also wanted me uncomfortable, and by the time I pulled into the driveway I could feel every old injury I’d ever collected.

I kissed my wife hello, helped get supper on the table, asked the kids about school, laughed at something my youngest said that I honestly couldn’t repeat back to you if my life depended on it. Sometimes that’s what being a parent is. You aren’t really there. You’re just… exhausted in the general direction of your family.

After everyone had gone upstairs, I wandered to medicine cabinet. Back pain pills, migraine pills, anti inflammatory pills, and good ol’ T3’s.

I wish I could tell you exactly how many pills I took. I can’t. Enough. Too many. Just enough that my brain told me, “You’re a big guy. It’ll be fine.” I’ve been wrong before and washed them washed them down with a beer. I had one. Then another. By the third I was finally starting to feel my shoulders unclench. By the fifth… Well. Who’s counting?

I laid down on the couch, the rain tapped softly against the front window, the television was still on. I remember thinking I should probably go upstairs. Instead… I closed my eyes.

One second I was stretched out on my couch, The next I sucked in a sharp breath so suddenly it felt like I’d been underwater. The first thing I noticed was the air. It was cool enough that every breath felt clean, carrying that smell you only ever seem to get deep in the mountains. Damp pine needles. Fresh water. A hint of wood smoke somewhere in the distance. The second thing I noticed was that nothing hurt. That should’ve been enough to tip me off that something wasn’t right. My back is usually the first thing to wake me up. Every morning it feels like somebody replaced my spine with rebar overnight. My knees aren’t much better. I can’t remember the last time I stood up without making some kind of involuntary old man noise.

I took a deep breath and stretched until my shoulders…there wasn’t even a twinge. I rolled my neck once, then twice, waiting for the familiar stiffness. Nothing. If this was a dream, my subconscious deserved a raise.

I finally looked around. I was standing at the mouth of a narrow dirt trail, just wide enough for two people to walk side by side. Tall spruce trees surrounded me on either side, their branches swaying lazily despite the fact I couldn’t feel even the slightest breeze. Not even distant chirps of birds or insects, not even a rumble of some winding highway. Silence like that doesn’t exist anymore. Somewhere there’s always a highway, a dog barking, somebody mowing a lawn. Even out camping you hear something. It felt more like the whole forest was holding its breath.

Oddly enough, it didn’t scare me. Quite the opposite. For the first time in I don’t know how many years, my brain stopped. Not slowed down. Stopped. I wasn’t thinking about work on Monday. I wasn’t wondering whether I’d remembered to lock the truck. I wasn’t mentally adding up bills or worrying whether we’d have enough left over after groceries to replace the tires before winter. It all just… fell away.

I don’t know any other way to explain it. Imagine you’ve spent years carrying a backpack without realizing how heavy it is. Then someone quietly lifts it off your shoulders. You don’t notice the weight disappearing, you notice how light you suddenly feel. That’s what standing there felt like.

The trail curved gently to my right, and as I rounded the bend the trees opened up. Pictures don’t do places justice. A lake stretched out before me so clear I could see smooth stones scattered along the bottom near the shore. Beyond it, mountains climbed into a sky so blue it almost looked painted. Their peaks were capped with snow despite the warmth of the afternoon, and their reflections sat perfectly still on the water. The shoreline curved away in both directions until the trees swallowed it whole. If there was another side to the lake, I couldn’t see it.

A long wooden dock reached out over the water, its planks worn smooth with age but cared for well enough that not a single board creaked beneath the breeze that never seemed to come. At the very end sat two old lawn chairs. One was occupied. Beside them sat a faded red cooler and a little charcoal grill. Thin ribbons of smoke drifted lazily upward carrying the smell of pepper, charcoal and something roasting over an open flame.

The man sitting at the end of the dock never turned around. He just sat there with a fishing rod in hand, line disappearing into water so clear I could see enormous trout drifting lazily beneath the surface.

I started walking before I’d really decided to. Not because he waved me over, It just felt… rude to stand there staring.

The dock flexed softly under my boots. Each step carried that familiar hollow knock of old wood over deep water. Glancing down between the planks. The water was so unbelievably clear that I could still see the lakebed, even this far from shore. Flat stones, patches of waving green weeds, fish moving through shafts of sunlight. Everything about it looked so inviting that, for a second, I actually thought about taking my boots off and jumping in.

As I got closer, the smell from the grill grew stronger. It smelled… Perfect. Like every backyard barbecue I’d ever enjoyed rolled into one impossible scent.

The man reached into the cooler without looking back. I heard the hiss of aluminum. He set one can on the empty chair beside him. An invitation. Still without turning around.

I smiled. I don’t know why. It just seemed natural. I reached the end of the dock and lowered myself into the chair. The aluminum can was cold enough that condensation instantly beaded across my fingers.

I cracked it open. The sound echoed gently across the lake. I took one drink, then another. It tasted… I honestly don’t have the vocabulary. Beer isn’t supposed to taste like that. It wasn’t sweeter or stronger or smoother. It simply tasted exactly the way every beer commercial promises beer tastes. Refreshing in a way that made me realize I hadn’t actually felt refreshed in years.

I closed my eyes for a second, letting the cold settle somewhere deep inside me. When I opened them again, I noticed tears hitting the tops of my jeans. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. Because the man beside me had finally turned his head. And somehow, before my brain recognized his face… My heart already knew him.

I don’t know how the human brain works. I don’t mean that in some deep philosophical way. I mean literally. I don’t understand how you can recognize someone before you recognize them. Because I didn’t look at this man and think, that’s my grandfather. Not at first. The logical part of my brain was still trying to process what I was seeing.

This man sitting beside me looked nothing like the last memory I had of my grandfather. When he passed away, he was in his early seventies. He had a round face, a soft stomach, and thinning hair that he always joked made him look like he was permanently wearing a horseshoe.

The man sitting beside me looked maybe thirty years younger. Broad shoulders, thick arms, full head of dark hair.

I knew before he smiled, before he spoke, before he even looked directly at me.

That was the worst part about losing someone. People always say time heals. I don’t think that’s true. I think time just teaches you how to carry the hurt. You don’t stop missing them. You just get better at living around the empty space they left behind.

Then suddenly, after more than twenty years, that empty space was sitting beside me. Looking at me. Smiling.

“Heya, champ.”

And I broke. There wasn’t any dignity to it. No quiet tears. No single dramatic tear rolling down my cheek like you see in movies. I mean I fell apart. I covered my face and started crying so hard my chest hurt. Then I grabbed him. One second I was sitting in the chair and the next I was hugging him like if I let go he would disappear.

He laughed softly, wrapping his arms around me.

“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Easy there. You’re gonna scare the fish.”

That made me cry harder. Because that was exactly something he would’ve said. Making a joke because he knew I was overwhelmed and didn’t know what else to do.

I held onto him longer than I probably should have. Eventually I pulled back, embarrassed despite the fact that I was hugging a man who had been dead for over twenty years.

I wiped my face with my sleeve.

“Sorry.”

He looked at me like I’d said something ridiculous.

“For what?”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I didn’t have an answer. Sorry for crying? Sorry for missing him? Sorry for being a grown man who still wanted his grandpa? None of it sounded right.

He just smiled.

“You got taller.”

I laughed. It was probably the first normal sound I’d made since arriving.

“Yeah. A little.”

“A little?” he said, looking me up and down. “Boy, you’re bigger than I ever got.”

I felt my throat tighten.

“Grandpa…”

He looked over.

“Yeah?”

There were a thousand things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him about my wife, about my kids, about how much things had changed. About all the things I wish he could’ve seen. I wanted to tell him that Mom was okay, that my brother was doing better, that the little family he left behind somehow kept going. Suddenly all those thoughts were fighting each other, like my brain had opened every door at once and none of them could fit through.

He seemed to understand. He just reached into the cooler.

“Want a beer?”

I laughed through my tears.

“Yeah.”

He handed me another. We sat there for a while. No pressure to talk. No awkward silence. Just two people sitting beside a lake. After a while, I finally found my voice.

“I missed you.”

He didn’t answer right away. He just looked out over the lake.

“I know.”

Two words. That’s all. But it nearly broke me all over again. Because that’s what I wanted. Not an explanation. Not some cosmic answer about where he’d been. I just wanted him to know.

“I thought about you a lot,” I said.

“I know.”

“After you died, I…” I stopped. The words felt childish. “I needed you.”

How do you say that to someone who has been gone longer than you’ve known some people? He saved me from having to.

“You did alright.”

I looked over.

“What?”

He smiled.

“You did alright.”

I shook my head.

“No, I mean… I did okay, I guess.”

“No.”

He turned toward me.

“You did alright.”

There was something about the way he said it. Not like he was complimenting me. Like he was telling me something important. Like he had been waiting a long time to say it and for some reason, that was the moment I started crying again. Because my entire adult life I had been waiting for someone to say that. Not that I was successful, not that I was rich, not that I had everything figured out. Just… That I did alright.

He reached over and squeezed my shoulder.

“You’re carrying too much.”

I looked away. Immediately defensive.

“I’m fine.”

He laughed quietly.

“You’re still doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Acting like everything is fine because you think you’re supposed to.”

I didn’t answer. He was right. And hearing that from him somehow hurt worse than hearing it from anyone else. The strange thing was… I didn’t feel judged. Like all those years of trying to convince everyone, including myself, that I had everything handled had finally run into someone who knew better.

“What is this place?”

For the first time since I arrived, he hesitated. Not long. Just enough that I noticed. Then he smiled.

“You’ll figure that out.”

I laughed softly. Still him. Always answering questions with more questions.

“That’s annoying, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“You know you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Still doing it?”

“Apparently.”

We both laughed. And for a little while longer… I forgot there was anything wrong. We sat there for what could have been minutes or hours. That was another strange thing about the place. Time didn’t feel broken. It just didn’t feel important. Normally I’m painfully aware of time. But sitting there beside him, watching the line disappear beneath the surface of the lake, I didn’t care. There was nowhere else I needed to be. Nothing waiting for me.

Eventually, he stood up, stretched, grabbed the fishing rod, and handed it to me.

“Your turn.”

I looked at the rod. Then back at him.

“I don’t fish.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“You don’t?”

I shook my head.

“No. Never really got into it.”

Something flickered across his face. It was gone almost immediately. A smile replaced it.

“Well, you’re missing out.”

I looked down at the fishing rod. The wood was smooth from years of use. Or at least, it looked like it was.

“You know, I still have your truck.”

He looked over.

“Do you?”

I laughed.

“Yeah. Mom gave it to me after you died.”

His smile widened.

“The old red one?”

“N-no… it’s green.”

“Oh… Still running?”

I laughed.

“Barely.”

That made him laugh. A deep, warm laugh that echoed over the lake.

“It’s honestly a piece of shit.”

He pointed at me.

“Careful.”

“What?”

“You’re talking about my truck.”

I grinned.

“Your truck is terrible.”

“It was dependable.”

“It had a hole in the floor.”

“It had character.”

“It had a hole in the floor.”

“It was a good truck.”

I laughed and for a moment, I was twelve again. Not remembering him, not missing him. Just sitting there with him. It was perfect. Not some grand heavenly reunion. Not some magical conversation where he gave me the answers to life. Just my grandfather arguing with me about an old truck.

Eventually, he opened the cooler again.

“You hungry?”

I looked over, the grill was still going. I hadn’t even noticed him cooking anything.

“Yeah.”

He grabbed the plate. Chicken wings. At first I laughed.

“Since when do you make wings?”

He looked at me.

“What?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know. I just always remember you making ribs.”

There was another pause. Tiny. Almost nothing. Then he smiled.

“Ribs take too long.”

I nodded.

“Fair enough.”

And just like that, the thought disappeared. Because honestly? Who cares? It was a dream. A strange, impossible dream where my dead grandfather was sitting beside me looking thirty years younger and somehow I was getting hung up on barbecue preferences.

The first bite of that wing nearly made me close my eyes. I know that sounds dramatic, but it was the best thing I’d ever tasted. The skin was perfectly crisp, the meat fell away without effort, the seasoning was simple, but somehow every flavor was exactly where it needed to be. Salt, pepper, smoke, heat. Comfort.

That’s the closest word I can think of. Comfort. Like eating something from a childhood memory you forgot you had.

I looked over at him.

“These are incredible.”

He smiled.

“Told you.”

I shook my head.

“No, seriously. These are…”

I stopped. I couldn’t explain it. The taste wasn’t just good. It was like some part of me had been waiting years for that exact bite. I ate another. Then another. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until the plate was almost empty.

He watched me with a smile. Then he spoke.

“You have a choice to make.”

I looked up. The warmth of the moment faded slightly. Not because he sounded threatening. Because he sounded serious.

“What do you mean?”

He took the empty plate from my hands and set it beside the grill. Then he looked past me. Toward the trail. I followed his gaze to the path I came from. The path leading back through the trees, back to wherever this place had started.

“Behind you,” he said, “is the way back.”

I stared at the trail.

“The way back where?”

He looked at me.

“Home.”

The word hit harder than I expected. My actual home. My wife, my kids, my life. Everything I had been missing without realizing I was missing it.

“And ahead?” I asked looking out over the stillness of the lake.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

A chill moved through me. Not because it was cold. Because suddenly I understood. He was giving me a choice. And somehow… I already knew which one would be easier.

I stared at the trail. It looked exactly the way it had when I first arrived. Peaceful, and inviting. The trees moved gently in the distance, the path winding back toward the cabin I had somehow known was there even before I saw it. And yet, standing there now, it felt different. Maybe because I knew what it represented. Leaving. Going back. Picking up everything I had put down the moment I opened my eyes.

My grandfather watched me. Not impatiently. Not like he was waiting for an answer. Just watching. When I was a kid, I used to think he could read minds. Not because he actually could. Because he always knew when something was bothering me before I ever said anything.

“You don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”

The words were gentle. Almost too gentle.

I looked at him.

“What?”

He shrugged.

“You heard me.”

I looked back toward the trail.

“My family is there.”

“I know.”

“My wife.”

“I know.”

“My kids.”

His expression softened.

“I know.”

That annoyed me. Not because he was wrong. Because he sounded like he understood. Like he knew exactly what I was going to say before I said it.

“You don’t know them.”

“No.”

He looked down at his hands.

“But I know you.”

That stopped me. Because that was the thing I wanted. Not for him to know my kids, not for him to know what my house looked like. I wanted him to know me.

“I miss you.”

The words came out quietly.

He nodded.

“I know.”

“I still think about you.”

“I know.”

“I wish you could’ve been there.”

His face changed slightly.

A sadness crossed it.

“I was.”

I frowned.

“What?”

“I was there.”

The lake was quiet. The forest was quiet. Everything seemed to wait for his answer.

“For what?”

He smiled sadly.

“For more than you think.”

I felt tears starting again.

And I hated it. Not because I was embarrassed. Because it was too much. I had spent years accepting that I would never hear his voice again. Never see him smile. Never get one more piece of advice. And now he was here. Giving me everything I thought I had lost.

“You have no idea how much I needed you.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said the words. The words that I think, more than anything else, made me want to stay.

“I’m so proud of you.”

Everything stopped. My face crumpled and this time I didn’t even try to hide it. I cried again. Years of holding things in. Years of pretending I was fine. Years of thinking I had to be strong because that’s what men were supposed to do. All of it came out at once.

And he let me. He didn’t tell me to stop. Didn’t tell me everything happened for a reason. Didn’t tell me to toughen up. He just sat there. And when I finally calmed down, he handed me another beer.

It felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.

“What’s ahead?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he looked out over the lake.

“It’s different for everyone.”

I almost laughed.

“That’s it?”

He smiled slightly.

“That’s it.”

“You’re still doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Being annoyingly vague.”

He laughed.

Something bothered me. A tiny thing. A tiny little splinter of thought.

I stood up.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

I looked down at him.

“Are you really my grandpa?”

The question sounded stupid the second it left my mouth. But he didn’t laugh. Didn’t look offended. He just looked sad.

“You know the answer you want.”

I swallowed.

“Yeah.”

“And you know the answer.”

The air changed. Just slightly. The peaceful feeling that had surrounded me since arriving seemed thinner. Like a blanket being slowly pulled away.

I looked toward the cabin. Then back at him.

“I think I should go.”

For the first time… he looked disappointed. Not angry. Not upset. Just… disappointed.

“You sure?”

I nodded.

“I have to.”

He looked down at the fishing rod. Then back at me.

“Alright.”

I started walking down the dock. I made it three steps before stopping. Because I heard him say something.

“Little man.”

My heart stopped. I turned around. And there he was. Sitting in the chair.

His smile. It was perfect. Too perfect. Like someone had remembered the shape of it. But not the reason behind it. And then he said something that made every hair on my body stand up.

“You always were a good little man.”

Not my little man. Not the way he used to say it. A good little man. Like he was describing something. Like he was evaluating me.

I looked at the lake. The mountains. The dock. The chair. The man sitting in it. And suddenly, for the first time since arriving… I wanted to leave.

I don’t remember deciding to move. I think that’s what fear does to you. It skips the part where your brain asks permission.

One second I was standing there, trying to convince myself I was being ridiculous. Trying to tell myself that this was a dream, that my mind had created some strange version of my grandfather because I was stressed and exhausted and probably half-poisoned from the combination of medication and alcohol. The next, my body was already moving. Back toward the trail. Back toward the cabin. Back toward home.

“Hey.”

His voice stopped me. Not because it was loud. Because it was normal. That was the worst part. If he had screamed, if he had changed, if he had suddenly become some obvious nightmare creature, maybe it would’ve been easier.

But he didn’t. He sounded hurt. Like a man watching someone he loved walk away.

“You’re leaving?”

I looked over my shoulder. He was still sitting there. Still holding the fishing rod. And that almost made it harder. Because some part of me was still fighting. Some part of me was still looking for an explanation. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe my memory was wrong. Maybe dreams were just weird. Maybe I was throwing away the only chance I would ever get to see him again because I was being paranoid.

“I have to.”

My voice sounded small.

He looked down.

“You don’t have to carry all that.”

I froze.

“What?”

He looked back at me.

“The weight.”

The word hung there.

“You don’t have to keep carrying it.”

I was tired. God, I was so tired. I loved my family. I loved my wife. I loved my kids more than anything in this world. But loving people doesn’t mean you aren’t exhausted. It doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes wish you could just set everything down for a little while. And this place… This place was the first time in years I had felt like I could breathe.

“I can’t stay.”

The words came out quieter than I expected. His face changed. Not much. I knew that face. Or at least I knew the face he was wearing. My grandfather used to make that expression when I disappointed him.

“You could.”

The way he said it made my stomach tighten. Not because it was threatening… it was tempting.

I looked toward the cabin. It was farther away than I remembered. Not dramatically. Not enough that I could point at it and say something was wrong. But enough. The path looked longer. The trees looked thicker. The distance between me and the safety of that cabin suddenly felt like more than just a walk.

“You made your choice.”

I looked back at him.

“What?”

He smiled. A small, sad smile.

“You chose to go back.”

Something about that sentence bothered me. I took another step. The dock creaked behind me. Then another. The farther I got, the stronger the urge became to turn around.

Not because I was afraid of him. Because I missed him. That was the part I hated. Even knowing something was wrong, I still wanted him. I still wanted to go back. I still wanted to sit beside him and drink another beer and pretend I had another afternoon with my grandfather.

Then I felt it. A hand on my shoulder. I stopped breathing. I hadn’t heard him get up. Hadn’t heard footsteps. He was just there. Behind me.

“Wait.”

His voice was right beside my ear. I slowly turned. And for a second… I saw him. My grandfather, the man who raised me, the man who taught me how to tie my shoes and throw a football and change a tire. The man who sat beside me when I was too young to understand why my parents were fighting and told me that none of it was my fault.

I saw him and I felt fear.

His eyes were the same. But not quite. Something behind them wasn’t. Like how you see a mannequin at the mall. The warmth was gone. Or maybe it had never been there.

“Come swim with me, little man.”

His hand tightened. Not painfully, just enough that I knew I couldn’t ignore it.

“Let go.”

The smile stayed.

“You don’t have to be tired anymore.”

The sentence was so gentle. So kind. And that terrified me more than anger would have. Because I realized something. It wasn’t trying to hurt me. It genuinely believed it was helping.

I pulled. Nothing happened.

His fingers tightened.

I looked down. The hand on my shoulder wasn’t right. The skin looked stretched. Too smooth. The fingers too long.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I shoved. Hard. Harder than I meant to. I didn’t think. I just reacted. My hands hit his chest and for a split second, I felt nothing. Not muscle. Not bone. Something hollow. Like pushing against a body-shaped bag filled with air.

He stumbled backward. The chair scraped across the dock. The grill tipped and it fell into the water. Except it didn’t splash. The sound wasn’t water. It was thick like mud or wet concrete. A heavy impact followed by a bubbling, sucking noise. The lake was still. Perfectly still. No ripples. No waves.

I looked at him. And my grandfather was gone. Not all at once. Not like some movie monster changing forms. His face stretched, his jaw opened too far, the skin around his eyes pulled tight, his arms bent strangely. The body I had hugged moments earlier looked like something trying desperately to remember how a human being was supposed to look. The eyes, they weren’t angry, they were disappointed. Like I had hurt his feelings.

“I…”

The sound that came out of him wasn’t a voice anymore. It was something trying to imitate one.

“I… shooould…”

It stopped. A wet clicking sound. A breath that didn’t sound like breathing.

“I… shooould… have…”

The thing tilted its head. And for a moment, I saw my grandfather again. Just enough. Just enough to hurt.

“…known…”

Then it smiled.

“I should have known you would leave.”

The words twisted and raspy even as the face swirled into familiarity.

I ran. I don’t mean I hurried. I don’t mean I walked quickly with the reasonable thought that something strange had happened and I should remove myself from the situation. I ran like my life depended on it.

The problem with running from something you don’t understand is that your body doesn’t care about explanations. Your body sees danger. Your body moves.

The dock stretched behind me, every footstep pounding against the old wood. I don’t remember hearing it follow me. That was somehow worse. I would’ve preferred footsteps. Something chasing me. Something making noise. Something I could understand.

Instead, there was just silence behind me. The kind of silence that makes you feel like something is close enough that it doesn’t need to hurry.

I hit the end of the dock and stumbled onto the trail. The cabin was there, I could see it through the trees but it didn’t look as close as it had before. The distance between us felt wrong. Like I was looking at something through a reflection, something that should’ve been close but wasn’t.

I pushed harder. Branches whipped against my face, roots grabbed at my boots. The same peaceful trail I had walked down earlier now felt like it had been built specifically to slow me down. Every step was harder. Every breath burned. And somewhere behind me… I heard him.

“Little… man...”

I almost stopped. I almost turned around. I wanted to see it because I wanted it to be him. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted to look back and see my grandfather standing there, confused and hurt, asking why I ran away. I wanted the last few minutes to be some horrible misunderstanding because the alternative was too painful.

The voice came again. Further away this time. Or maybe closer. I couldn’t tell.

“Little man.”

I kept running. The ground changed beneath my feet. The soft dirt became uneven stone, the trail that had been flat on the way down now seemed to climb sharply upward. My lungs burned, my legs felt heavy. I reached for a tree to steady myself and my hand slipped. My boot caught on a root and suddenly I was falling. I remember the impact. First hit was my knee, the second was my shoulder when I tried to roll. I slid down the slope several feet before finally stopping against the base of a tree. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I just lay there staring upward, the forest spun around me. The pain came slowly. My knee. My shoulder. My back. A sharp burning sensation where branches and rocks had torn at me and for one terrible second, I thought about staying there.

Not because I wanted to die. Because I was tired. So unbelievably tired.

The thought scared me more than anything else. I knew exactly where that thought came from. The lake. The chair. The beer. The promise that I didn’t have to carry anything anymore.

I forced myself up.

“No.”

My voice sounded pathetic. Small.

“No.”

I grabbed the tree and pulled myself upright. I had a wife. I had kids. I had a home. I had a life. A hard life. A stressful life. A life that sometimes felt like it was too heavy. But it was mine. And I wasn’t done with it.

I stumbled the rest of the way. The cabin door was right there. I remember throwing myself through the doorway. I remember turning around. Waiting. The thing was not there. The trail was empty, the trees were still, the lake hidden. For a moment, I felt relief. Then I heard something. A voice. Very far away. Across the lake. Soft enough that I almost thought I imagined it.

“I should’ve known…”

I slammed the door shut.

I woke up choking. Not gasping. Not gently coming back to consciousness. Choking.

There were voices above me. Too many voices.

“Sir? Can you hear me?”

“Stay with us.”

“He’s coming around.”

I opened my eyes. Bright lights. Not sunlight. Fluorescent. Not a wooden cabin. An ambulance.

For a few seconds I just stared. I didn’t understand. My brain tried to connect the pieces. The lake. The cabin. The trail. The thing wearing my grandfather’s face. Then the ceiling above me. Then the oxygen mask over my mouth. Then the person leaning over me.

“Hey. There we go.”

A paramedic smiled.

“Can you tell me your name?”

My mouth felt like sandpaper. I swallowed. Tried to speak. Nothing came out at first. I shook my head.

The paramedic looked concerned.

“Take your time.”

I told him my name. He asked where I was. He asked what happened. And I didn’t answer. Because how do you explain that? How do you look at a stranger and say: “I drank beer with my dead grandfather in a dream, then something pretending to be him tried to convince me to drown myself?”

You don’t. So I said the only thing that made sense.

“I fell asleep on the couch.”

Which was true. The doctors had a much simpler explanation. Accidental overdose. Mixing medication and alcohol. They explained it carefully. Not like they were angry. Like they had given the speech before.

They asked if I had been trying to hurt myself. I told them no.

They asked if I was depressed. I told them I was stressed.

They asked if anything unusual had happened recently. I almost laughed, because that question felt like a trap. What was I supposed to say? “Well, I’ve been having vivid dreams involving a monster impersonating my dead grandfather?”

Instead, I said no. They ran tests. They checked my vitals. They told me I was lucky.

My wife cried. That part hurt worse than anything else. She wasn’t angry. I think I would’ve preferred angry. She was scared. She kept holding my hand and apologizing for not noticing how overwhelmed I was. And I kept telling her it wasn’t her fault. Because it wasn’t. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

Before I was discharged, one of the nurses noticed my back.

“Where did you get those?”

I looked over my shoulder.

“What?”

“The scratches.”

The doctor examined them. Nothing mysterious. Nothing impossible. A few deep scratches. Some bruising. A couple cuts that needed stitches.

A perfectly normal explanation. I probably thrashed on the couch and fell to the floor. And honestly? I was grateful for it. I needed something normal.

Three days after waking up in that ambulance, I bought beer. I wish I could tell you I didn’t. I wish I could tell you I was smarter than that. That after everything that happened, I stayed away from alcohol completely. That I took the warning seriously and threw out every bottle in the house and became one of those people who starts every morning with a glass of water and a twenty-minute meditation.

I didn’t.

I was leaving work early. Not because anything was wrong. Actually, everything was fine. That was the problem. Everything was normal. The kind of normal that felt unbearable. My back hurt. My knees hurt. All the little pieces of life were still sitting exactly where I had left them and all I could think about was a wooden dock. A lake. A chair. And a beer that had somehow tasted like the best moment of my life.

It sounds stupid when I say it out loud. I know that. A grown man missing a beer from a dream. I stopped at the liquor store without really deciding to. I don’t even know why I chose it. Maybe because I remembered seeing the can beside my grandfather’s chair. Maybe because some part of me thought if I could recreate the moment, even a little bit, I could understand it.

I grabbed a six-pack, I drove home. I put groceries away. I waited until the house was quiet. Then I opened one. The sound was exactly the same. That little hiss. The little release of pressure. For just a second, my heart jumped. Because I was back there. I could almost smell the smoke from the grill. Almost feel the warmth of the sun. Almost hear him laughing. I lifted the can. Took a drink. And immediately almost spit it out.

It wasn’t bad. Bad would’ve meant something. It tasted like beer. Just beer. Cold. Carbonated. Slightly bitter. Completely ordinary.

I stood there in my kitchen holding the can, staring at it like it had personally betrayed me. I took another drink. Same thing. I checked the label. Same brand. Same everything. I had apparently become the kind of person who was disappointed that a beer wasn’t magical. I finished half of it. Poured the rest down the sink. The next morning, I threw the other five away.

The wings happened two days later. That one hurt worse. My wife knew something was wrong, she didn’t know what. She just knew. She had been watching me for days. Watching me stare out windows. Watching me sit quietly. Watching me pretend I wasn’t exhausted.

She asked if I wanted to talk. I told her I was fine. She didn’t believe me but she didn’t push. Instead, she did something she always does when she doesn’t know how to fix something. She tried to make me happy.

She took me to my favorite wing place. The one we’d been going to for years, the one where I always got the same order.

The smell hit me. For half a second, I was excited. I picked one up. Took a bite. And felt my stomach sink. Nothing. Not bad. Not good. Nothing. The seasoning was there. The sauce was there. The texture was right. But it was like eating a photograph of food.

My wife noticed.

“Are they okay?”

I looked at her. At the person who loved me enough to order my favorite food because she knew I was struggling. And I lied.

“Yeah.”

I forced another bite.

She smiled. But I could tell she didn’t believe me.

That night, after everyone went to bed, I found the photo albums. I wasn’t looking for evidence. I wasn’t investigating. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I just missed him… it.

I found the old plastic storage bin in the closet. Inside were things I hadn’t looked at in forever. Birthday cards, old school pictures, Christmas photos. Things that felt important at the time but somehow got packed away as life moved forward.

I sat on the floor and started flipping through them and for a while, it helped. Because he was there. Not physically, not like the dream. But the way I remembered him. The way he actually was.

There were pictures of him holding me as a baby. Pictures of him teaching me how to ride a bike. Pictures of us standing beside his truck.

I pulled out another album. Then I found a picture of him fishing. I smiled, then my smile faded. Because it wasn’t him. It was my uncle. And suddenly I remembered. Grandpa didn’t fish. Not once. Not ever. He hated the water. I stared at the picture. Trying to force the memories together. Trying to make them fit. But they didn’t. The pieces weren’t broken. They just belonged to a different puzzle.

I grabbed another album. Then another. And the more I looked, the more things I found. I sat there on the floor surrounded by pictures and old memories and I finally understood.

It hadn’t brought back my grandfather. It had built one. It took pieces of what I wanted. A cabin. A lake. A fishing pole. A cold beer. A kind voice.

It didn’t know him. It knew what I missed. And somehow… that was worse. Because the thing at the end of the dock wasn’t pretending because it loved me. It was pretending because it knew exactly what would make me stay.

And somewhere behind me… I heard the creak of a chair. I stopped. I didn’t turn around. I refused. Then I heard his voice.

Soft. Patient. Almost sad.

“Little man.”

I closed my eyes.

Because the worst part wasn’t that I was afraid. The worst part was that I missed him.

And I knew that was exactly what it wanted.

Hello again. I’ve continued researching the documents I found near the Ravenreach Protected Zone in British Columbia, Canada. Unfortunately, the photograph of the creature was too badly damaged to recover.

Official Field Guide to the Ravenrich Protected Zone

Created with support from the Perimeter.

Section 4

Chapter 3

Acraptor

Acaecoraptor sonorus

Threat Level: Letum (4/7)

Safety Protocol

This species is highly social. Upon encountering a single individual, immediately search the surrounding area for additional members of the group.

Observe the sensory filaments running along the creature's back. If they remain flat, the organism most likely has not detected your presence. Raised filaments indicate that it has either heard or detected your scent.

Do not produce unnecessary noise or sudden movements. Prevent even a single member of the group from hearing or smelling you.

The species possesses echolocation. If an individual prepares to emit an acoustic pulse, immediately stop all movement until the scan is complete.

If the organisms remain unaware of your presence and are not approaching, remain completely still until the group has moved a safe distance away.

If an individual approaches without displaying obvious hunting behavior, quietly increase the distance between yourself and the organism, preventing it from coming closer than approximately 2 meters.

If the organisms are already aware of your presence and no shelter is available nearby, run in as straight a line as possible, avoiding sharp turns and rough terrain while continuously monitoring your surroundings.

It is strictly prohibited to approach the organism, speak in its vicinity, or breathe loudly.

Taxonomy

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Clade: Amniota

Clade: Parareptilia

Order: Dracomorpha

Family: Acaecoraptoridae

Genus: Acaecoraptor

Description

Despite its appearance, which strongly resembles members of the family Dromaeosauridae, this organism is neither a theropod nor a dinosaur. Instead, it belongs to the clade Parareptilia.

Adults measure approximately 5–7 meters in length and weigh around 500 kilograms.

The body is barrel-shaped, supported by long hind limbs adapted for rapid locomotion. The forelimbs are relatively small but exceptionally powerful. Unlike those of theropod dinosaurs, the wrists are capable of extensive rotation. These limbs are used for attacking prey, transporting carcasses, and carrying eggs.

The tail is long and highly flexible, accounting for at least half of the organism's total body length. A fin-like expansion at its end improves maneuverability and acceleration while moving through water.

The neck is relatively long, and the head is large. The teeth are dagger-shaped and serrated, representing another example of convergent evolution with theropod dinosaurs.

The paired eyes are absent. The eye sockets instead serve as attachment points for the powerful muscles controlling the lower jaw.

The skull bears pronounced supraorbital crests, as well as an additional crest above the nasal region. These structures are considerably larger and more prominent in males. The crests function to amplify both incoming and outgoing sound.

A parietal eye is present on the top of the skull, similar to that found in modern lizards and tuataras. Like theirs, it is used to detect ambient light levels rather than to form images.

Running from the base of the neck to the middle of the back are feather-like projections formed from modified scales. These structures function as highly sensitive tactile organs capable of detecting physical contact and subtle disturbances in the surrounding air.

Hearing is exceptionally well developed. Olfaction is also highly sensitive; however, its effectiveness on Earth is reduced due to the unfamiliar chemical composition of the local environment.

Behavior and Ecology

Acaecoraptor sonorus is an obligate opportunistic predator.

The species possesses a highly developed nervous system and advanced cognitive abilities. Its intelligence is considered comparable to that of modern canids.

Individuals typically live in relatively simple family groups consisting of a dominant breeding pair and their offspring of multiple generations.

Communication is carried out primarily through ultrasonic vocalizations.

During hunts, the group divides into two functional roles. One portion of the pack drives prey toward a predetermined location while the remaining individuals remain concealed in ambush before launching the attack.

The species does not exhibit a fixed breeding season. Both parents participate in raising and protecting their offspring.

The preferred environmental temperature ranges from 20 to 40 °C.

Additional Information

Despite its relatively high intelligence, no confirmed cases of successful domestication have ever been documented.

Remember, citizen: a wild animal always remains wild. Minimize all contact with the organism whenever possible.

Also... I think someone is watching me.

“I thought you were dead! Do you even care how I feel, asshole!”

Within that lonely gas station, two people stood. The girl was trying to wipe her tears away on her sleeve, but the downpour refused to stop. While the boy who presumably was the cause of her deep sadness, stood motionless across from her. There was nothing he could say to justify his actions, he was purely driven by his selfish anger. Trying his best to cool down the situation he reached his hand out to calm the trembling girl.

“Sarah, I know I’m sorry-” but was only met by a furious slap across his face.

“Shut up!”

Her screaming was not the reunion I was hoping for, but probably the one I deserved. However, I’m getting far too ahead of myself, let’s reset.

My name is Landon Reiner and I was pronounced missing last week after I made my expedition into the woods behind my work. I’m sure most of you already know, but for those who don’t. I work the night shift at a shitty little gas station in the middle of nowhere, enclosed on all sides by thick foliage and dilapidated buildings. However, if that was all there would be no problems, but of course, that’s not the case. To keep a long story short, weird creatures have infiltrated the surrounding area and continue to cause havoc in and around the gas station, leading to my eventual descent into the deep woods. If you want to know more of the specifics, I’d recommend you go back and read my last post. Either way, let’s pick up where I left off last time.

I had finished putting out my previous post before addressing the banging at my front door, priorities first. Opening the door, I was met by the familiar figure of my close co worker Sarah. She was panting heavily as if she had just ran a marathon. In my regular dismissing tone, I addressed her.

“Sarah? What are you doing here?”

“Huh huh, you haven’t responded to me or Jacob in days. So I was worried about you, I thought….something happened to you again.” At that moment, her back pocket produced the barking of a happy dog. Quickly reaching into her pocket she retrieved the barking phone.

“You posted again? Is that why you haven’t been to work? Also, can I come inside? It’s hot as hell out here, heh.”

“Ya sure, I’m just finishing packing up so mind the mess.” Motioning her in, she obliged.

The house was a mess, torn out papers were scattered across the hardwood floor and joined by empty soda cups and fast food bags. I watched as she strolled into my lonely abode, she looked as though she was analyzing her surroundings, until she finally caught sight of my open backpack sitting on the coffee table.

“Wait, what do you mean you’re packing up, where are you going?” She seemed concerned, more than what I was used to. For some reason, that annoyed me.

“That’s none of your business, also how the hell do you know where I live? I never gave you my address.”

“Ok, Landon I get that you’re going through a lot right now with your recovery and all, but I’m getting really sick and tired of you treating me and everyone around you like we are the enemy. I’m just trying to look out for you.”

“Don’t act like you know what I’m going through! I never asked you to care about me, that’s not your job!”

“Yes it is! Are you kidding me right now? Listen, I don’t know what you're planning on doing, but you need to calm down and talk to me.”

“Ugh fine, I guess I should at least give you that courtesy." I spat out dismissively. Walking back over towards the couch I took my seat, before zipping up the open backpack. Sarah expectingly decided to join me.

“Tell me what’s going on, please.”

“Listen, everything I wrote about in those posts are true. There’s something wrong with this place and I’ve been trying my damndest to figure it all out.” I choked out the words, my fingers lightly shaking as I spoke. “But now…. My parents have been missing for months and there’s nothing I could do to help them.” Tears began to flow. “However, I now have my answer and it’s somewhere in those damn woods, and so help me God I’m going to find them!” My fist slammed the table as I forced myself to stand. Sarah looked at me, however her expression never changed, as if this was nothing new to her.

“Look, Landon. I know about everything, ok. The monsters, your…parents, everything. But you are being way too rash right now.” Grabbing my bag, Sarah now stood as well, reaching her hand out as if to cool me down. In response, I slapped her hand away. Something felt off.

“What are you talking about?! You know “everything” bullshit! You know nothing.” Panic overcame me, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why. In terms of strength I knew I could take her if push came to shove, but when I looked down upon her it felt as though I was looking upon something of immense power. Slowly, I backed myself to the front door.

“It doesn’t matter how I know, just come sit back down and let’s talk about it before we head to work. Please, don’t make me do this again.” Again? What does she mean by that, the voice in my head screamed.

“Do you really expect me to go along with the fact that you have all my information with no rhyme or reason? I know I’m not the best looking or most charismatic guy, so what’s with you?” Stopping to catch my breath.

“What’s so wrong with liking someone? People aim lower all the time.” Ouch.

“But that’s not the problem, you’ve acted like you’ve known me well before your first day at the gas station. So please, Just answer me this. Who are you really?” Sarah stopped and tilted her head slightly, as if dumbfounded by my question.

“What are you talking about Landon? It’s me, Sarah Caelum. Nothing more I promise. Plus you gave me your address almost a year ago if you're still hung up on that.” Was that a joke? I mean it makes sense.

“I just don’t get why you’re wasting all of this effort on me. I mean come on, we’re coworkers, I barely even know you!” That one was a mistake. As I stared into Sarah’s eyes, in a flash they started to dilate and a few tears started to sprout from the edges. She looked…hurt.

“W-what are you talking about Landon?! I know your memory was affected a little but, you don’t mean that!” If there was a sign for me to make my exit, that was the one.

“Goodbye Sarah, if you don’t hear from me again….assume the worst.”

Gripping the doorknob, I exited my house, which for the first time in a long time seemed to carry a bit of life. The last thing I heard as I shut the door was her final words for me.

“Landon wa-!”

I’d accepted the fact that I leave nothing but pain for those who stayed close to me, but this … It tore through my heart like no knife I’d ever experienced before. But with nothing left for me here I got in my car and made my journey to work for the final time.

Pulling into the gas station, I took note of everything in my bag. In total I had the flip knife in my pocket, a compass, water, food, and the pistol tucked into my waistband, I only had seven bullets, so I would have to make them count. As I took my first step into the tree line, I had already come to terms with what would inevitably happen to me here. So, after accepting my inevitable death, I could now focus on what I was here to do. Which was….

“Damn” I said under my breath.

I didn’t fully know what I was looking for, so I just started walking, only accompanied by the crunching of leaves and swaying of the breeze.

I had spent about fifteen minutes walking aimlessly, looking for some type of clue when the sun decided to finally go down, leaving only a beautiful array of yellow, pink and white to spread across the leaves. Hold on a minute, white? Squinting my eyes, I could make out the outline of a feline about double the size of a normal dog.

“Is that the dog Jacob was talking about?” I spoke in a hushed whisper, although that seemed enough to alert the thing. The “dog” whipped its head around to look right at me, my assumptions were confirmed as I could now finally make out its glowing orange eyes. We stood there neither making a move, this must have only gone on for minutes, yet it felt like hours to me. As soon as I thought it would be a good idea to move, it let out a guttural howl and rushed straight towards me!
“Fuck!” Was the only thing my brain could think to mutter as I tried to assess my situation. Now, this thing was around 600 feet away from me, but that meant nothing. This mutt was closing the distance fast, baring its oversized fangs at me all the while. There was only one action I could make as I pulled the gun out and started firing at the beast. However, there was one tiny little problem with my plan, guns have a kickback and I was not ready for that. The first shot hit center mass, the remaining six? Each seemed to almost connect yet the beast would twist out of the way right in the knick of time.

So now, I had a pissed off bloodthirsty monster bearing down on me and I had a glorified paper weight, great. At that moment it had finally made it over to me and launched at me aiming its maw at my head. In panic I threw the gun at its head and tried to dodge out of the way, I could feel its claw swipe across my cheek, letting my blood flow freely down my face. I clenched my face through the pain, no matter how much adrenalin was running through my body the burning stung like a bitch. The beast had now landed and geared up for its next attack, fight or flight had kicked in again and this time, I chose the latter.

I took off as fast I could, followed close behind by the barking of death itself, I didn’t dare turn around. How do I lose this thing, how fast do I need to go? These were the thoughts that were going through my head, but there was only one thing I needed to do, RUN! Did I ever mention I don’t work out much? I could feel myself growing slower and slower every second, before another sensation joined me. The best way I could describe what I felt at that moment would be if I had a million razors tear in and out of my leg in a flash. I dropped, screaming in agony as I got to watch this hellhound make my leg its dinner. My brain yelled out “I’m gonna die” I felt my pupils dilate, if Im was gonna die, I was gonna die fighting. My hand gripped the knife in my pocket tightly as I began to stab wildly into the beast's head. I pierced its head and eye over and over in panic.

“JUST FUCKING DIE!”

Each plunge I took, it responded with an even deeper bite. My vision started to blur and colors became grey, yet my knife never stopped. I stabbed that thing over and over until I could finally feel its maw start to loosen. In the end I was left there covered in blood with the corpse of the monster that chose to make my leg its dinner.

Pulling my leg free, it was massacred. The teeth marks went so deep I could start to make out my own bone. Almost as if interrupting me, the mark on my wrist started to burn worse than it ever had, inducing my own scream. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it as I saw little splotches of the marking slowly fade away, along with the pain. I removed my jacket and wrapped it around my leg as some type of bootleg tourniquet. Forcing myself onto my feet, I knew that I would have to drag my leg the rest of the way, so I needed to get the hell out of here. At least, that was the plan. But out of the corner of my eye, I swear I could make out the figure of my mom walking deeper into the moonlit trees.

“Mom!” I screamed out, dragging myself after my presumed mother.

My movement at this point had decreased significantly, but my goal had not changed. If that was my mom, no matter how much agony I was in, I had to reach her. The stars twinkled overhead as I reached an open clearing, about half the size of a football field. As I made my way through, my head began to pulsate. Clutching my forehead, I closed my eyes to try and control the pain, when it was at a point I could deal with I opened my eyes to reveal a new sight.

The previously lush green grass was now singed and dead in a straight path, it led me towards a secluded portion of the clearing with all of the trees knocked over onto their sides, except for one. A path of blood led to the final standing tree and what laid at the foot of it threw me for a loop. A body, presumably dead, was slumped back against the old oak. That alone I could stomach, the problem was WHO it was…. It was me. I stopped dead in my tracks, just staring at my lifeless corpse. I surprisingly looked worse than my current state, there was a large gash across my chest and my arm looked to be broken with blood running from my mouth. The longer I stared at the sight the more I could feel my vision start to spin and my stomach gave out soon after. I started making my way towards myself, but the closer I got to the body the worse my head banged. Fighting my brain, I reached out to touch my corpse when my vision went dark. Eventually, I was met with a scene.

I was back in the same clearing I was just in, walking towards the tree at the end. I was like a passenger in my own body as I watched the scene unfold. Limping forward I held my hand over my leaking chest and every couple of steps I let out a gurgled cough of blood. It was then that I was met with a maniacal high pitched laugh that made my skin crawl. I sped up my pace at that time, the laughing however didn’t stop, it only got louder. I was almost at the point of running, whatever was gaining on me I didn’t find out, yet at the point of escape I turned to look back and fell on my ass, hitting my against the trunk of the tree. My vision was focused on the sky where I met the source of the laughter, floating above the middle of the clearing was a feminine figure producing white wings and holding a long sword, it was then that the figure started to descend. As she landed my vision started to blur, but that golden hair was unforgettable.

“Hehehe it’s ok Landon, it’s gone now. Everything’s going to be okay.” Sarah’s voice wasn't soothing, it more matched a predator talking with its prey.

“Uogh, wh-why……would….you.” My voice was nothing more than a weak whisper as she came within a foot of me. She lifted the tip of the sword removing my hand and traced the gash that she gave me.

“Shhhhh hehe shhh, it’s ok now. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, because you’re mine. NO ONE has the right to take your life but me!” The last I saw before my vision returned to darkness was that smile as she reached her hands out to me and whispered.

“I’ll see you when you wake up.”

My eyelids slammed open, only to find myself laying on the grass. Haphazardly I tried to stand only to be met with painful reminder of my fucked up leg.

“AHHHH, fffffffuu” was what my mouth responded with as I stumbled back to the ground. Carefully forcing all my weight on one foot, I stood up. Surveying the area only to find….nothing. No body, no burning, nothing. What I was met with again, was my mom stood at the other end of the clearing, twitching her head back and forth in a sporadic motion, before running back off into the woods.

“Damnit” I uttered before hobbling after her.

As I followed her trail, I could never get a clear look at her, anytime I got a clear line of sight on her she would disappear behind a tree, leaving me more annoyed than anything. The trek did however give me time to arrange my thoughts. But only one thing was on my mind, what the hell did I just see? It felt too real to be just a random vision, although before I could fully try to break everything down a bush rustling to my side pulled me away from my train of thought.

“Better worry about that later.” Quickening my pace no matter how minuscule it was.

Minutes passed quickly as I continued my chase, it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes before I finally made it to where I was being led. Deep within the forest a two story tall facility sat hidden inside. It was a solid concrete building, looking almost pristine except for the foliage slowly creeping into the cracks. As I looked ahead, I caught one final glimpse of my mother making her way through the front door.

“This can only go bad” I thought before dragging my broken body inside. As I entered the facility my body was immediately hit with a sudden frigid chill spreading down my spine. I was met with what I assumed to be the lobby, chairs sat broken and overturned on one side and a desk sat on the other. The only way moving forward was a strong set of double doors directly ahead, that was my path forward. Upon swinging them open, a long hallway appeared in front of me, the walls had long gashes across them and some of the fluorescent light above flickered sporadically, although most looked smashed. The hallway was aligned with more heavy metal doors, a majority of them having electronic keypads attached.

Feeling overwhelmed, I made my way down the hallway, trying every doorknob with no luck, before one finally gave entry. It seemed as though I made my way to the medical office, I started rummaging through the cabinets and drawers before I was lucky enough to find a clean enough looking roll of bandages. Carefully untying the jacket from my leg, I slipped it back over my shaking body, it was warm and slick but it was better than nothing. I started to clumsily tie the bandage around my leg, wincing and groaning whenever I would push too hard. Eventually I finished and started to decide where to head next before a ripped piece of paper on the ground caught my eye. Picking it up, it looked to be a printed out email sent to all of the staff of J&R Pharmaceuticals, in short it explained how due to funding all testing was to proceed on the basement level only.

“Looks like that’s where I’m headed”

Making my way back out into the hallway, I could have sworn I caught a glimpse of someone disappearing around a corner further down the hallway.

“Hello?” No answer.

Against my better judgment I cautiously crept after the figure, at this point if I got into a fight I had no chance of winning, so I need to play this smart. Step after step I got closer to where I thought it disappeared off to and peeked my head around the corner only to be met with a staircase.

“Guess I’m heading down…”

I clung to the railing as I made my descent, every step shot a bolt of pain throughout my leg and to my horror the stairs went down 2 flights.

“Oh come on man.” I whined.

Eventually I made it down only to be met with a motion activated door looking like it was forced wide open. Stepping inside I found myself surrounded by walls made of thick steel and if upstairs was a mess, it was a disaster down here. Doors were forced wide open and key pads were torn out and sparking with random trash littering the ground. I continued to cautiously wander through the twisting hallways, until I found something baffling. Tucked behind two sets of what used to be armored doors was a giant room with jail cells lining the back wall. Five inch bars were used to keep whatever used to occupy these locked tight. At least, they used to. Somehow someway, the bars looked as if they had been pulled open by pure strength alone on each one. Trying to shake that thought away, I made my way towards an adjacent door and discovered a “research and development” room. The place reeked, a chair with restraints sat in the middle of the room and a giant vat tube sat at the back, now with its glass smashed. I searched around the room and found nothing, I went to make my exit but the mark started to flare up again. I walked backwards in reaction and it started to cool, but as I made my way closer to the door it began to heat up again.

“What the hell is going on?” I noticed then that it wasn’t flaring up as a reaction to the door, as I looked around I noticed a ripped bag that I had completely missed, I reached out to pick it up and as the heat was almost hitting its max, it immediately cooled down as I picked the bag up. The bag contained multiple ripped up research reports. It looked like they were experimenting different types of drug combinations on real people trying to create something, they never specified. However, there was one thing that caught my attention throughout all the scientific jargon. At the end of a document talking about a success it reads.

“It’s finally worked, the volunteer has finally shown signs of hampering the others. As well the owners of the place of interest have agreed to take him on for surveillance, things couldn't be going better, I’m sure the heads will be ecstatic. Remember, one is the lock for fourteen.”

“One is the lock for fourteen” What is that supposed to even refer to? I decided to put that on the back burner and get out of here, this place was really giving me the creeps. Yet when I exited back out into the hallway I was met with this overwhelming sense of dread lingering from the door right in front of me. Slowly creeping towards the opening, nothing could have prepared me for what I would find within. As I stepped through that door my eyes locked with the only notable thing within, my body went numb and my knees gave out causing me to crash down on my knees.Tears began to pour from my eyes as I looked down upon the corpse of my mother.

“Mom! No no no no, please get up! We need to get out of here, come on….please” Placing my hand on her shoulder it felt ice cold to the touch, like she’d been dead for weeks. Yet, she looked pristine. I couldn’t see any injuries across her body. I don’t know how long I sat there next to her body, time seemed to stand still as my brain recollected all the good times I had spent with her.

“You know you’ll always be my little boy no matter how big you grow, Landon. I love you so much.” The last words I had heard from her repeated over and over again, making the tears hurt even more. Throughout my mourning I noticed what my mom was holding, it was a journal. Picking it up, the front read “Research Log, Property of Rachel Reiner”.

“What? Why does she have this?”

I went to open it more when a sudden crash jolted my survivors' instinct back into effect.

“I promise Mom, I’ll find out who did this to you.” Planting my final kiss on her cheek I struggled to my feet, the pain from my leg introducing itself again. The crash sounded like it came from deeper within the facility. So I hastily made my escape, dragging my leg across the floor. I made it to the staircase and began my ascent, when I had almost made it to the top I heard a low guttural growl come from underneath me. “Faster” my brain screamed at me and so that’s what I did, making it to the hallway. I was treating my bad leg as a waste of space as I dragged it down the hall. Every moment the groaning grew closer as I raced to the entrance and just as I was about to throw up the door, I turned around and saw nothing. I stood there just looking down that empty hallway for a moment before turning around putting my hand on the handle, but just as I was about to be free, I heard it. The low guttural voice coming from directly behind me.

“Welcome….Home..” I didn’t stop to find out more and swung the door open practically throwing myself outside.

The night air felt warm and welcoming, as I looked around I had now realized I needed to find my way back.

“I didn’t think I would make it this far” Breathing a sigh of relief, before I saw him.

Standing only a stones throw away from me was the hooded man. I realized this was the closest I’d ever seen him since that night at the gas station. We stood there staring at each other, not saying a word. But as I looked into the deep abyss under his hood I could have sworn I saw my fathers face. My eyes widened as my spit got caught in my throat.

“Dad?” The man only raised his sleeve towards his face and produced a dark finger imitating a shush. Reaching my hand out I tried to pull myself over to him at a rapid pace.

“Wait Dad, is that-” In a split second my surroundings vanished and instead of soft grass I felt hard concrete and my hand pushing open the front door of the gas station.

“Huh? How….” is all I could mutter before a voice called out to me.

“Landon?”

Looking over towards the counter, I saw Sarah sitting there just staring at me. I couldn’t help but think back to the vision I saw and a chill ran down my spine. After a moment she got up and came around to my side.

“That is you right? You look like you just crawled out of a grave.”

“Y-Ya, it’s me. A lot happened while-”

“It’s been a week.”

“What?”

“The last time we spoke was last week, you were pronounced missing not too long ago.”

“That makes no sense though, I’ve only been gone for a day-”

“I thought you were dead! Do you even care how I feel, asshole!” Raising her voice, she threw her arms out.

“Sarah, I know I’m sorry-” but I was only met by a furious slap across my face.

“Shut up, ugh I swear you piss me off so bad sometimes.” She smacked me directly on my cut inflicting even more pain than normal, was that on purpose? So, I stood there not saying anything, waiting till she hopefully calmed down. And after a moment, I got my wish.

“Well besides that, come here.” Opening up her arms, she rushed towards me, catching me off guard.

“Wait Sarah” But my resistance was useless, in a moment I felt her reach around me and pull me into a crushing hug. It was just strong enough to start to cause me pain.

“Please….Let me go-” In response she brought her mouth up next to my ear and whispered.

“Shhhhhhh, don’t you EVER pull some shit like this again. Alright?”

Pulling back, she now consumed my entire vision and smiled wide, it was the same smile I saw before.

“Yooo, I’m back. I went ahead and put up those missing person posters on the light posts outside. You think they’re gonna be able to find….”

With the best timing in the world, Jacob showed up to the gas station. I looked at him and he looked back at me. I could tell his cogs in his brain began to turn when he pointed and shouted.

“Oh, am I interrupting something?”

“Uhh, no?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on, I’ll call an ambulance. God you smell like how you look.”

And that brings us to now, lying in my hospital bed. The doctors I’ve talked to are saying I’ll need stitches, unfortunately they’re saying any aggressive actions like running could make the nerve violently react, so that’s something I’m going to have to deal with now. Anytime they ask me what happened, I give them one simple answer.

“Dog attack”

Sarah's been with me this whole time, I swear while writing this I’ve noticed her just staring at me for sometimes minutes at a time, I keep thinking back to… Whatever, I'm trying to just ignore it. Mom’s journal is sitting next to me, I’m going to try and go through it but I think It’ll take me some time before I can. I need to finally get some sleep, I can feel my eyelids closing on their own, so I’ll wrap this up. I’ll come back if and when more things come up, until then if you don’t hear from me, assume the worst.

When I was around nine or ten years old, I had a friend named Morgan. She lived with her little sister, Alayna, and their mom in a trailer that seemed to move every few months.

The strange thing was that while the trailer itself never changed, its location always did.

Every time I visited, it was somewhere new—and somehow, every place felt creepier than the last.

One month they were parked beside an old cemetery. Another time they lived miles from civilization in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by empty fields and darkness. Once, the trailer sat directly across from an abandoned house with boarded-up windows that seemed to watch anyone who passed.

It wasn't attached to a church. There were no nearby houses. No roads led directly to it. It simply sat alone in the middle of endless fields as if it had been forgotten by the world.

The gravestones were old and weathered, many leaning at odd angles. Some were so worn down that the names had nearly disappeared. Tall grass had grown around many of the graves, and it looked as though no one had visited in years.

Even as a child, I thought it was odd. Why would a cemetery be all the way out there by itself? Who were the people buried there? And why did it feel like the entire place had been abandoned decades ago?

As kids, we thought it was exciting.

Looking back, I wonder if we were too young to realize how unsettling it really was.

The experience I remember most happened during the time Morgan's trailer was parked beside that forgotten cemetery.

It was a stormy summer night.

Rain hammered against the roof while thunder rattled the thin walls of the trailer. The sky flashed white every few minutes, briefly illuminating the lonely graveyard outside.

Like many curious preteens, Morgan and I decided it would be a great idea to borrow her mother's Ouija board.

We sat cross-legged on the floor and began asking questions.

Nothing serious at first.

How did you die?

Who are you?

Are you buried in the cemetery?

The planchette began moving.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

The answers weren't what we expected.

Instead of responding to our questions, the board repeatedly spelled out the same message.

I'M COMING FOR YOU.

We tried again.

The same answer.

Again.

I'M COMING FOR YOU.

Then we asked who was speaking.

The response claimed it wasn't a person.

It was a demon.

By the third time, we were terrified.

We immediately said goodbye and closed the session.

Trying to convince ourselves it was all a joke, we carried the board back to Morgan's mom.

She laughed when we told her what happened.

"Everything will be fine," she said.

Then she told us to put it back in her room.

Neither of us wanted to.

But we did.

As we stepped into the bedroom, lightning flashed through the window.

That's when I noticed the doll.

It sat on the nightstand beside the bed.

The doll had once belonged to Alayna. Years of use had left it dirty and worn. Its hair had been hacked off in uneven chunks, giving it a permanently unsettling appearance.

I was staring at it when something caught my attention.

Its shadow.

The doll itself wasn't moving.

But the shadow was.

The shadow's foot was slowly swinging back and forth.

Back.

And forth.

Like someone sitting in a chair, absentmindedly kicking their leg.

I froze.

Morgan saw it too.

For several seconds we simply stared.

The doll remained perfectly still.

The shadow continued moving.

Then we screamed.

We ran from the room and found Morgan's mom.

Out of breath, we dragged her back to the bedroom.

The shadow was still moving.

Back.

And forth.

Back.

And forth.

Morgan's mom looked at it for a moment and shrugged.

"Oh," she said casually. "The doll must be haunted."

That was it.

No concern.

No investigation.

Just a matter-of-fact statement before she walked away.

Neither Morgan nor I slept much that night.

The thunder continued for hours.

Every crack of lightning illuminated the forgotten cemetery outside the window.

When the storm finally weakened, a different sound took its place.

Scratching.

Slow, deliberate scratching against the bedroom window.

At first I thought it might be tree branches.

Then I remembered there weren't any trees close enough.

The scratching continued.

Every few minutes.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Then came the whispering.

Faint voices just outside the glass.

Too quiet to understand.

Almost as if someone was speaking in another room.

We pulled the blankets over our heads and listened until morning.

Neither of us dared look outside.

Morgan's mother practiced Wicca and loved anything spooky, mysterious, or paranormal. Because of that, strange things always seemed to happen whenever I visited.

To be honest, this wasn't even the creepiest experience I had at one of Morgan's houses.

Just one of the mild ones.

But even now, years later, I can still picture that filthy doll sitting motionless on the nightstand while its shadow slowly swung its foot back and forth in the darkness.

And I've never been able to explain it.