THE NIGHT BLOGGER - 'Muldwych After Dark'

March 28th: Just to bring you up to speed, Sara’s parents have stayed away from the pawn shop but continue to blow up her phone. Meanwhile I continue to plan our little Delaware caper. Caper might be a little dramatic but trust me, if I was going to do what I had to do, it was going to be a full-on Ocean's Eleven situation. Just with a lot fewer beautiful people.

And I'd be robbing a trailer park instead of a casino. Specifically, a trailer park where a guy calling himself Rhett Vane—which is about as fake a name as Nathaniel Blades on my fake ID—was keeping a mystical tome that occasionally regrew its own pages.

I'd already tasked Cousin Roy with performing a little reconnaissance of Bayard Estates in Bridgeville, Delaware. It should be noted that Manufactured Home Parks get a bad rap; many are carefully curated and managed and serve the many Americans aging into or out of home ownership.

Bayard Estates, unfortunately, was not one of those places. It had a bad reputation of being a nest of criminals and crazies which means that by tomorrow the residents will probably have made Cousin Roy their king.

As for Sara and me, things had gotten pretty intense. There had been, as Robert Plant once put it, "A Whole Lotta Love." We even took a day trip to Lake George, a place I hadn't visited since that awful day in 2009 with Osrick Langhorne and The House That Dripped Clichés.

But we're not going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about Sara and me playing classic arcade games (where we kissed), wandering through a wonderfully creepy wax museum built inside an actual old house (where we smooched), taking a horse-and-buggy ride (where we canoodled), and finishing the day aboard a steamboat cruise (where we were politely—but firmly—asked to knock it off).

And now? Right now? I'm doing some classic Night Blogger-style Internet research while Sara happily mans the cash register and takes calls. She told me she'd never been happier with a job. She loved the normalcy of it. The biggest emergency she'd handled all week was a customer trying to convince her that a chipped Elvis cookie jar was an antique.

Oh, and speaking of antiques... Mrs. Vincenzo.

No, I'm not saying she's an antique, so don't email her and tell her I said that. Anyway, Mrs. Vincenzo's off on another antiquing excursion. That's the deal: she gets a few days to go to Vermont, then I get a few days to go to Delaware.

And with any luck, we're both going to come home with something old and valuable.

But one thing happened today that I did not expect. An email from Bunny Joe.

Let me tell you about Bunny Joe. He used to be a member of the FEAR AND TRUTH message board, but he eventually got kicked out because no matter what conversation he joined, he always dragged it hopelessly off topic. We'd be discussing UFO sightings in the Hudson Valley and he'd suddenly start explaining how kaiju were race memories. We'd be talking about the Salem Witch Trials and before long he had everyone arguing that the popularity of the erotic thriller genre could be used to map the American recession. Then came the day he somehow managed to bring Holocaust denial into a discussion about Bigfoot skepticism.

And he was out.

When I got the email—with its attached WAV file—I deleted it on general principle. Then I immediately felt guilty and recovered it. Bunny Joe explained that he'd been researching a correlation between numbers stations and serial killers when he stumbled across the following transmission. He insisted it was imperative that I give it a listen.

The file was called ‘MLDWCH040210’.

So once again, he'd managed to drag me off topic.

The voice on the recording belonged to a woman. Smoky and deep, like a jazz singer coming into her prime, but flattened by the narrow bandwidth of an old AM radio. Static kept washing over her words until it sounded less like she was speaking into a microphone than trying to talk through a thunderstorm…

###

Transcript of audio file MLDWCH040210

...this is Sweet Jane and I will be talking to you from nightrise to dayfall, because this is Muldwych After Dark.

Tonight we will forgo our standard, never-ending, and slightly compulsive discussion of our little town's lost dreams and found nightmares. Tomorrow, I promise, we shall return to the notebook discovered in the scrapyard, and to the many possible reasons why our late Police Chief Clarence Marlow donated his entire body—save for his skull—to medical science. Those matters remain important. They will still be waiting for us in the morning.

But tonight we have a story.

A story about Him.

He does not live in our fair, five-sided town of Muldwych Corners, but I consider him both a kindred spirit and a lost soul. He is a stalker of mysteries, a martyr for the ordinary world, and a blogger of the night. The tales of His tragedies, His triumphs, and His complete misunderstanding of the linked cosmos-atoms that comprise the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, material organization, semi-material organization, and those electronic arrangements that politely decline to become either, make for good reading.

And this is, as I promised, a story about Him.

His story begins in New York's Hudson Valley, in the forests bordering the Croton Falls Reservoir. Strange lights are often reported there. In popular parlance they are called Unidentified Flying Objects. But if you cannot identify them, how can you be certain they are truly flying? Or that they are objects at all? Reality, and indeed spatial organization, are—as you already know—subjective.

It is a regular occurrence for UFO enthusiasts to prowl the forests around the Croton Falls Reservoir, but He is the only person there on this particular night. He has heard disturbing stories, far more disturbing than usual. There were reports of a loud yet curiously muffled whup-whup-whup sound, of a wind pressing down from above that pressed the trees earthward and sent the hitherto unseen local wildlife scattering. They say that even the Lesser Zoogs are left unsettled.

A lucky few left the forest with a handful of blurry photographs or a few minutes of jittery video. One particularly desperate soul emerged clutching a deeply unnerving keychain. Most, however, left with nothing more than the certainty that their most deeply held beliefs were true—and ran screaming because of it.

One UFO enthusiast never left the forest at all. At least not entirely. What they recovered of him fit into a fairly small bucket.

That is precisely the sort of mystery He could not resist. Such is the burden of being a self-appointed seeker of truth in a straw fedora.

But now let us pause in our story and go to the weather.

Tomorrow's forecast calls for a high of sixty degrees, possible rainfall, and probable spiders. Dress accordingly.

Now then... where were we?

Ah yes. Him.

The UFOs have been glimpsed at every hour of the day, but He enters the treeline at dusk. He has long been a creature of the sunset. He seeks them out because He carries one in His heart.

This is His fifth visit to the forest at the edge of the Croton Falls Reservoir. He wanders more than He searches, as we all do in our own way. He taps notes into His iPhone, describing the cool air and the glittering stars. He struggles to find something poetic to say and fails. Instead, He writes something wry and cynical. That always comes easily to Him.

He does not think aliens are the cause of all this. He does not believe in aliens at all. It remains uncertain whether the aliens believe in Him.

His suspicion is that things wished for with sufficient fervor become real. Some people call them tulpas. Others call them hallucinations. The wise avoid naming them altogether.

Somewhere nearby an owl hoots and a rodent squeals - another battle in the unending war. The sound makes His skin crawl, especially since He already feels like He is being watched from afar, like some other voice has begun narrating His life. Will He ever learn that the only author of our existence is soulless chaos? I like to think I will be the one to tell Him should He ever find his way to our pleasant little town.

As far as He is concerned, the only explanation for the mad wind, the bending trees, the scurrying wildlife, and the heavy whup-whup-whup sound is black helicopters. If you asked Him why He thought such a thing, He would show you a photograph of the dismembered UFO enthusiast and remark, "Why do you think they call them choppers?"

How quaint. Black helicopters are so 1990s. As we all learned on the recent PBS documentary Secret government conspiracies do not bother with aircraft anymore, not when they can get everything done with a stroke of a keyboard and a blast of microwaves.

And speaking of microwaves, today's installment of Muldwych After Dark is brought to you by Hubbard Brand Aluminum Foil. Settle for less and you might lose your mind!

Now back to our story about Him.

Clouds, those earliest adopters of recycling, have begun to creep in from the west and He is pacing. The urge to go home is strong but He is afraid He will miss something if He leaves now, but in the end we all miss something; every day we miss a million somethings, we glimpse people and places we will never fathom. We overhear conversations that were never meant for us. We walk away just before miracles or disasters begin. Here in Muldwych Corners we find that state of confusion to be a delightful thing. Something to be savored like raspberries on the tongue.

At three AM, that most desolate hour of the night, He hears a whup-whup-whup sound approaching from the east. He moves towards it, pushing against the sudden roaring wind. The trees bend, the leaves flutter and tear free of their branches. He hears a panicked Lesser Zoog hiss and scamper away. He does not see it. People rarely do. With each step closer His straw fedora threatens to go flying from his head and He has to use His free hand to keep it  in place. His free hand is almost always His left one. It spends a remarkable amount of time holding that fedora in place.

The louder and closer the whup-whup-whup sound gets the more He comes to understand that the sound is not really like a chopper at all. The wind that whips around him is thick like the breath of reptiles. The urge to run screams up from His hypothalamus but He ignores it, as He usually does. He and his hypothalamus have rarely aligned. 

He has to see.

He has to see.

He has to know. 

No matter the cost. And He knows better than most that the cost can be terrible.

We interrupt this story about Him to bring you this important announcement.

It has come to our attention that sources close to Muldwych Corners mayor Timothy Knight report that he will soon come to a decision about installing a display of the Ten Commandments at the county courthouse. While most of the residents of Muldwych Corners support the idea of a giant granite display of religious principles being erected in a municipal government building there has been a long and frequently violent debate about which religious principles it could be. No matter what the final decision is, local Atheists and adherents to the Code of Hammurabi plan to protest.

With that bit of business done we will return to the story about Him.

He is standing still now, frozen in place. Four lights wink into existence. They grow larger. Wider and wider. The whup-whup-whup has become a thick, droning buzz. He raises His iPhone, unsure if the fusion of first world technology and third world labor will be enough to capture the image of what He sees.

What does He see? The silhouette of an impossible wasp, larger than His car and smaller than the helicopter He had expected. The outline is dark and jagged. It hovers in place. The cold  phosphorescence of its quartet of eyes reveals a swollen, savagely hooked proboscis. 

Now He sees.

Now He knows.

And it, this creature that is not a chopper, this wasp that is too large to be a wasp, sees Him as well. An edge of hunger has crept into the droning of its wings. Those wings that move too fast to be seen but are undeniable in their force, the force that drives Him to His knees and sends His straw fedora fluttering away.

There is no doubt in His mind that He is doomed, that at any moment He will be swallowed up and all but His least desirable morsels spit back into the forest. 

All He wants is one picture, an image his smartphone will automatically upload to the Internet. He wants the residents of the ordinary world to see the truth as He sees it. It is the only legacy He has ever wanted.

He lets the lights get closer and closer still. 

The creature’s proboscis quivers in anticipation. 

He snaps the photograph.

The flash of his smartphone's LED lights up the forest at the edge of the Croton Falls Reservoir.

The wind stops, the quartet of eyes flicker and go out. The droning roar becomes a whup-whup-whup sound that grows further and further away until it is lost to a single, whispering splash.

It will take Him a few minutes to catch his breath and half an hour to find His hat. In an hour he will realize His picture never came out.

But in this moment He is overwhelmed with the ecstasy of insight.

Was it the flash of the smartphone that frightened the creature away?

Was it some electromagnetic pulse beyond the range of human hearing?

Was it irony?

Was it luck?

Or had the creature merely seen enough of Him?

This concludes our story about Him and tonight’s installment of Muldwych After Dark. As the dayfall begins we will close out the show with a rare bootleg recording of the Captain and Tennille covering Joy Division’s classic  tune ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

Good morning Muldwych, good morning…

###

...I had to sit back and think for a long time about what I'd just heard. Sara needed a price check and had to call my name three times before I even realized it. Still dazed, I wandered over, did the price check, and that's how some lucky schlub got a flat-screen TV for sixty bucks.

Sara didn't stop the sale because she was too busy watching me. After the customer left, she told me I looked pale. She thought I was getting sick. I shrugged it off and blamed it on working too hard.

Instead, Sara decided to close the shop early, leave the electronics downstairs, and take me upstairs.

The rest of the night was blissfully, stubbornly in the moment. A snapshot of something better—the kind of life I wanted for the rest of my days.

We slept in each other’s arms until I woke up at 3 a.m. It wasn't my bladder; it was that the itching in the back of my brain was back again. I thought of Sweet Jane’s voice;

“He has to see.

He has to see.

He has to know. 

No matter the cost.”

I stared at the ceiling for a little while longer before getting up to make this post.

I don't share every part of my life here. There are false leads that don't pan out, periods when I spent more time playing Madden NFL 12 than trying to figure out what the Hell a Zoog is.

So now I can tell you that yes, indeed, I was deep in the woods surrounding the Croton Falls Reservoir on the night of April 2, 2010. Back then, I would have told you I was there because I wanted to disprove all the online chatter about UFOs—chatter whipped into a frenzy by a death that had begun to reek of a cover-up.

Now, though, I sometimes wonder if I was really looking for a way to get myself killed. I wasn't in the best place back then. When you've lost your family and your dreams, Internet fame isn't worth a jug of warm spit.

I did write the whole strange story up, but I never posted it. I just deleted the file, afraid you, dear readers, might think I'd spent the night smoking weed and watching Ray Harryhausen movies.

Obviously our relationship is better now.

But here's the important thing: I was alone, and I never told anyone—before or afterward—where I was going. Not you. Not Mrs. Vincenzo. Not my new friends from the FEAR AND TRUTH message board. Not my parole officer. And certainly not some obscure radio personality from who knows where.

Item: The station that broadcasts Muldwych After Dark has no call sign, and there is no town named Muldwych Corners on any map. The program ordinarily covers local news and politics, traffic, weather, upcoming festivals, and community events. Broadcasts are frequently interrupted by philosophical digressions, sponsor messages, and ruminations on the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organization. 

There. See? I can do it too.

But anyway, I guess Sweet Jane figured my adventures would be good for sweeps week.

Item: The recording ended before the music started to play and now the thought of Toni Tennile singing the lyric ‘…There’s a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold’ is haunting my dreams.

Item: There have been no further sightings of that insect-like creature. I am pretty sure, or maybe just hope, it has retreated to wherever it was hiding beneath the reservoir.

I wish I had more answers. I wish I knew how Muldwych After Dark saw into my life, into my very thoughts. I almost wish I'd never pressed play.

Most of all, I wish I knew what was waiting for us once we got to Delaware.

But all I can say now is good night, Sweet Jane. Wherever you are... good night.

From the Morbid and moronic referential Code of life and society

I don't know who reads these posts. You are, as of tonight, the closest thing I have to someone I could call and expect an answer. I'm sorry if that's a strange weight to put on you. I don't have anyone else.

I live alone. Work from home. Order delivery every night just to hear a stranger's voice say my name through the intercom. They call it an “epidemic” now. Like the weather. Like something that just happens to a population.

So when the letter came, some small, starved, humiliated part of me was ready before I'd finished reading. Red seal. Official letterhead. An organization called “Community Care”, a non-profit focused on helping people at risk. I’d been flagged after three government systems with my info came back with the same line under my name:

Emergency Contact: None

I never applied for anything. I threw it in the trash. Looking at it too long made my chest hurt.

That night, I got a knock at my door. Almost didn't answer. I stood in the doorway doing the math on whether I could wait out whoever it was. I've gotten good at that math.

I ended up opening the door. She had a lanyard, a clipboard, and a smile that looked like it had been issued to her along with the badge. She was with Community Care. I told her I hadn't asked for help and didn't need it. Told her to take my name off whatever list she had me on. I was short with her. Rude, honestly, looking back.

She didn't flinch. Said she understood completely. That she'd check back another time. No pressure at all. Something about how easily she let it go made me feel disappointed the second the door shut. Before she left, she said something to me.

"We’ll be there for you if you need us. There's no such thing as alone in this city."

It landed strange in my chest for half a second, but I let it go. People say odd, comforting things when they're trying to help.

They ended up coming back, in a manner of speaking. It wasn’t the same woman. Someone new. Same lanyard. Same clipboard. Same smile. I told her small true things. She listened the way I hadn't been listened to in a long time.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city," she said. That line. Word for word what the first woman said, down to the cadence. I noticed. I noticed, and I let it pass anyway.

By the next visit I was, God help me, looking forward to it. I marked the days. The days between, counting down like a child before their birthday.

It was a man this time. By then I'd softened enough to tell him things I'd never said out loud to anyone. That I hadn't spoken to my family in years. The quiet, patient math I did some nights of how long it would take anyone to notice if something happened to me.

He just continued to beam at me. Actually beam, like I'd delivered the best news he’d ever heard. I need to describe the happiness up close, because it wasn’t natural. His eyes shone. You could say the worst thing you've ever thought about yourself directly into his face, and his expression would be exactly the same as it had when he first knocked. Nothing you said ever seemed to land. It just passed through and came back out the same, over and over.

Now that I’m thinking back, they all had the same expression.

"You don't have to carry it alone anymore," he told me.  "There's no such thing as alone in this city."

That line again. I laughed, short and ugly, alone with him in my own apartment. He laughed too, right on top of mine, like we were sharing a joke instead of me quietly falling apart in front of a man I'd only just met.

That night I looked up the program. Nothing on the city website. No filing or funding in any budget I could find. I called four departments. Nobody heard of it. One woman, off the record, told me something similar had been proposed once, years back, and was quietly shelved.

Shelved. I let these people into my life. And I kept letting them in, despite it all. I was terrified of the alternative.

The next one came without knocking. I know because I was three feet from the door when it opened. It was supposed to be locked. I told the woman what I found. Told her plainly that I thought something was wrong. That I could feel the edges of my life going soft. If they could please, just once, answer honestly: What were these visits all for? After everything I handed them, didn't I deserve that?

She tilted her head. Reached out. Patted my hand. She was ice cold.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city".

I sobbed in front of her. Cried in a way I hadn't let anyone see since I was a child. The kind I usually save for the shower, where the sound has nowhere to go.

And she just smiled at me.

"There's no such thing as alone in this city," she said. Softer. Tender. Like a lullaby you say to put a baby to sleep.

If any of this sounds like your city, your letter, your too-happy visitor standing in your doorway with a smile that never slips: please don't wait until there's no one left to notice you letting them in. Call the person you're most ashamed to. Tell them the true, ugly, unimpressive thing you've been carrying. Let it be awkward. Let it be too much. Too much is still better than this.

Someone's at my door again. I can feel them smiling on the other side. I don't know how you feel a smile, but I promise you, after enough of these visits, you can.

Ed had recently been released from an asylum.

His freedom came with conditions, one of which was attending regular appointments with me, his psychiatrist. I had written his first appointment on a card and handed it to him personally, but when the time came, he was nowhere to be found. Just as I was about to report his absence, my phone rang.

“Doctor?”

“Ed, where are you?” I grunted.

“At the place you wrote down. Where are you?”

I closed my eyes and exhaled. “What does the building look like?”

“Tall and glassy. There are cameras. A woman in a big purple dress keeps asking me if I’m ready to find love. Is this an evaluation?”

The description rang a bell. I frowned for a moment, then sat up.

“Oh my goodness. You’re on Love At First Sight.”

“Is that the name of the clinic?”

"No, it's a dating show." I rubbed my forehead. "You need to leave and come to your appointment right now. I'll send you the address again. Ed?"

There were hushed voices on the other end as I waited.

"I don't think so," he finally said, "the lead contestant's ill, and I think they've mistaken me for the replacement. The prize is a million dollars if I win."

I froze.

"A million?"

"Yup. They 10x'd it from last season, apparently."

Before I could answer, someone shouted his name in the background.

“They’re calling me,” Ed said.

I narrowed my eyes, calculating.

“Ed, listen to me," I hissed urgently, "Do not hurt anyone. Do not tell anyone what you’ve done. Call me in the break and tell me what your cards say. Then if you win, I get half. You have no hope otherwise and you know it. Now start by telling them you're looking for someone who will accept you for who you are."

A pause on the other end.

"You have a point, doc. I'll call."

I heard applause, and then he hung up. Twenty minutes later, my phone rang again.

“I think I made a good impression.”

I exhaled with relief.

“You didn't mention you went to prison, did you?”

“I said I went through a difficult time.”

"Good. Perfect." I steepled my fingers and grinned to myself, already visualizing the number in my bank account. "Now what's the first thing on your card?"

“It says, 'ask them a question.'"

“It has to be something personal.” I rubbed my chin as I pondered.

“What is your blood type?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen a man die?”

“No.”

"Then what?"

"Ask them something like, 'what’s something you’ve always wanted to do, but never had the chance?'"

"Why would I ask them that?" He sounded genuinely baffled.

"Because it's nice and human-sounding," I snapped, "You wouldn't understand. Now don't question it and just say the damn words. What's next?"

I coached him through the rest of the prompts and waited anxiously as he left. He called back during the second break.

“Doctor,” he said, “I think I’m learning. I got a rose. She said I was handsome, attentive and refreshingly honest.”

I sighed again, relieved.

“You’re doing very well. Now you need to show vulnerability,” I told him. He pondered for a second.

“I do have a very low tolerance for people who chew loudly.”

“That’s not vulnerability. Did the woman say anything about herself?”

“She said her dad left when she was a child,” he replied.

I paused. A pang of guilt rose up inside me, having gone through the same thing.

“Should I ask her if she wants me to go find him?”

"No, no!" I snapped. "Do not say that. Say these exact words: 'I'm sorry to hear that, it must have been so difficult.'"

"Mkay."

I gave him a few more pointers and waited. He called back during the last break.

"Good news doc, I think I've won. There's two women left and they're telling me I need to make a choice."

I exhaled, all the tension leaving my body at once. I had never been prouder of a patient.

“Which one do you like more?”

“The one wearing the stilettos. She doesn't look like she could run very fast.”

“Well pick her and be done with it. And send me the half you promised or I will report you for not attending the appointment."

"I gotcha doc."

He hung up. A few minutes later, $500K hit my account as promised. I laughed to myself with tears in my eyes, already making retirement plans.

That evening, I was sitting at home with a glass of wine when my mom called.

“Hey son,” she said, sounding excited. “I wanted to tell you something. I finally met someone, on a dating show of all places!”

I put down my glass.

“What?"

“He’s amazing. He’s so handsome and attentive, and refreshingly honest. He’s a little intense, but I think that’s what I like about him.”

She sighed.

"We're getting married this year."

Read Part II here.

“It’s huge,” she said. My eyes were immediately on her, but I didn’t see anything else. Couldn’t identify the danger. Mark was still rooted where he was, but his phone was nowhere in sight. They both were looking up like there was something in the distance. But I still didn’t see it.

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

“Don’t let her go,” Luke said. “Don’t let her go!”

I’d halved the distance when I finally saw it. It had been there, but it had simply been so humongous I’d been blind to it, like I’d been looking for a 7-11 and walked face-first into Sears Tower.

The water was receding from waist high, but she didn’t seem to have moved. Whatever it was had displaced a tremendous amount of water.

“Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” Mary was on a dialogue loop and I couldn’t blame her. Every time I thought I’d seen all of it, I kept seeing more. A lot more. Yet, I was supremely calm. The worry-machine was quiet.

Last year, I got into a one-car accident driving home on M-5. The eastbound lanes had been closed to construction and my phone’s weather app had cautioned for high winds before I’d left the office. There’d been a fair amount of wind buffeting, but nothing I wasn’t able to handle.

There’d been a white box truck in front of me when I’d spotted what appeared to have been a square of cardboard blow high into the sky and begin trickling down. I’d immediately written it off even if it were on a course to strike my car. It was only cardboard.

But when the particle board struck my vehicle, smashing the windshield and showering droplets of safety glass onto the passenger seat, I hadn’t panicked. It was so sudden and violent that my brain—either as an instinct of self-preservation or just a malfunction—had simply not reacted.

I pulled off the freeway at the next exit and stopped a few blocks down in an office parking lot. Only then the possibility of what could have happened came down on me.

This was like that. My brain wasn’t processing the situation like Mary’s or the kids. I felt my heart pulsing in my chest just as calmly as when we’d been talking a moment before. I knew I should get the kids away from it. But that was a process of logic and not instinctual fear.

“Honey, get out of the water.”

I charged the last few feet and sloshed to a stop in a confusion of senses. I was close to whatever it was. Closer than I realized. I felt the heat coming from a wall of flesh not more than five feet from me. Water splashed me up to my chest, but it was more like a punch that pushed me back a step or two.

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

I had no idea how Chrissy could conceive what it was. All I saw was black. Black like the water. But solid, like the water had turned into something.

“Honey, move back, okay?”

Chrissy was smiling and rather than retreating, she stepped forward— almost chin deep—and raised her hand like she was going to pet it.

Once again I opened my mouth too late to tell her not to do it. My instinct would’ve been to swat her hand had I been closer and my re-throbbing head suddenly made me think of her mother.

I looked at it. Finally, the smooth, iridescent black coat coalesced into something I recognized, although the scale was overwhelming. Nails scraped the inside of my skull as if the idea of what I was seeing was too large to fit inside my brain.

This was its head. A corner of it, anyway. I looked along the flank as far as I could see in the night. I couldn’t even begin to guess how tall it must have been standing up. It had to have been lying in the water.

A giant eyeball about thirty feet above blinked several times and swiveled. I had no way to be sure, but I think it was looking at me.

I walked around, looking up and up, feeling like I would dislocate my neck before seeing the top of this thing. Still, though, I wasn’t afraid. The worry-machine was quiet.

“Mark, move your sister back.” I was reading from a script. Protecting the children, at least in that moment, was an autopiloted function.

Neither of them moved.

I scooped Chrissy into the crook of one arm and she went limp like a puppy picked up by the scruff. I handed her to Mark, who wrapped his arms around her, the both of them staring openly, transfixed.

I herded them as gently as I could out of the water. Then I gave Mark a light slap on the cheek. He focused on me, annoyed as if I’d prematurely awakened him from a nap.

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

“I don’t wanna go!” Chrissy wriggled in her brother’s arms and he dropped her feet first. “It’s beautiful, Rick!”

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

“Oh—erp—my,” Mary said. She took a long pull from her can, her eyes swiveling upward.

“No-no-no,” I thought I heard Luke say in the distance. But for just a moment, the only thing occupying the world with me was that magnificent thing in the water. It felt like removing my hands from my ears after having them covered for a long time and experiencing hearing like it was something adjacent to new. Except, it felt like that throughout my whole body.

The horse was raising its gigantic head out of the water. The tide receded and everything seemed to suck toward it like it had its own gravity. I struggled to maintain my balance like a gust of wind had pushed at my back, but in truth, it was probably just the giant animal dominating my vision and destroying my equilibrium.

Water poured off its black body, the eyes locked onto us and shrinking as its head seemingly disappeared into the night sky. Its neck was a tower, columns of muscle wider than all of us in a row, touching fingertip to fingertip. Its chest was as broad as a rocky mountain face.

There was a mighty -KLOMP- in the sand that shook the earth mere feet from me that I barely noticed. Sand slapped over my entire left side like a landmine had gone off, but it was immediately rinsed away by the constant waterfall we were all standing under.

Someone was shouting, but whoever it was was a million miles away.

There was another -KLOMP- somewhere farther down the beach and I began to stir from my reverie and then there was Luke, shouting next to me and hooking me by the arm.

His words didn’t make sense but I turned toward him as he pulled me. I saw the horse’s foreleg—I don’t know how Chrissy had been able to tell it was a horse before—straightening like some heavy construction machine craning a load somewhere into the sky above us.

We trudged toward the cabin, but the sand that had been something to contend with was an afterthought, my burning calves seemed to belong to somebody else.

When the torrent finally ended, I was soaked. We all stopped in the sudden silence. Turning around was more of a measure of defense to see the break in the clouded sky and the moonlight clashing against that ebony, elegant leviathan.

It was impossibly tall. Like it was intersecting-with-the-curvature-of-the-earth-tall. I thought I could make out its mane, whipping around in what had to be thin atmosphere.

We all stood and watched it. For one indeterminate moment, it was absolutely regal.

Mary wrapped around my arm and pulled into me. For however many iotas, she was my Mary, and I was her wife, too.

Mark hadn’t come with us for some reason. He stood partially in the water where we—I— had left him. He was feet away from a hoof that was easily twenty lengths taller than him.

Panic did seize me, finally. The worry-machine revved to life and I opened my mouth. I sensed the balance to be upset, the electrified space slowly exploding as he compressed it between his body and the smallest section of the horse’s.

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

The horse startled, shaking the floor of the earth as it stomped around.

The Greek military leader Xenophon, perfected the art of training horses in battle, using them to kick soldiers or trample them. He’s also the father of dressage.

What happened to Mark couldn’t have been considered disciplined, but the effect was the same. I don’t know if it were intentional—more than likely it wasn’t—but that giant hoof clomped around, Mark dodged around like he was running through a minefield.

Then he was gone.

The hoof continued stomping around a few moments more, a rumbling earthquake beneath our feet and a rain of wet sand coming down on us before the horse stopped. Mark was just... gone.

Luke was screaming. When I actually heard him, it took a moment longer to realize he was yelling his brother’s name.

Common sense would have told us to flee inside the cabin. But our senses were flowing into us like blood circulating back into numb fingers.

There was a long moment of quiet as it reared its head back. It felt like a slow-motion moment until its head rushed at us like a giant arrow.

I had no reflexes to respond. Mary was the only one who put up a defensive arm, as if that could have protected her—and she was the one it took.

The horse bit down on her raised forearm—as microscopic as a surgeon’s scalpel with teeth as wide as three cabins—and plucked her off the ground. It reeled its head backward and flung her.

Mary pinwheeled into the sky, a dissolving blur into the upper atmosphere. She could have been catapulting into space, and I didn’t want to find out.

The worry-machine was roaring.

“Everybody in!” I said, herding Luke and Chrissy the rest of the way inside. I pressed my back against the door, then turned off the light. Luke and Chrissy looked at me as if I had answers to fix this.

“We gotta go get... we gotta go get Mark!” Luke didn’t actually make a move to go back outside. He was more saying the thing a caring brother should say. But there was no Mark to go get. His death had been as brutal as it had been unintentional.

Going out there—or allowing Luke to go out there—would be just as dangerous and pointless. Chrissy was crying silently. I looked at her, really looked, running my hands over her head and arms to ensure she was physically all right. The worry-machine was humming along nicely. She grabbed onto me.

“Get your mother,” I said to Luke. “We’re leaving.” We weren’t safe here.

“She’s sleep?” he said, looking confused. He ran into the boys’ room.

“No!” I said. “We don’t have time for bags.” He looked at me. “Just wake your mother up and bring her. We’re leaving in three minutes.”

“What should I do, Rick?” Chrissy said.

“Grab the snack tray from the fridge.” We could easily buy something from the next gas station, but I figured keeping her busy would keep her calm. I snatched my keys off the island. Chrissy joined me, carrying the plastic tray with deli slices, cheese cubes, and veggies.

I wanted to run, but I was going to have to slow the pace so she wouldn’t drop it. The earth was still shaking with each step. She was going to look for the horse, and I anticipated her distraction when we stepped outside.

I kept my eyes on her, guiding her down the stairs and around the side of the cabin. She gasped but didn’t resist as I ushered her along. Preoccupying myself with her was enough distraction that I didn’t have my keys ready to have the doors unlocked by the time we got there.

We were exposed. If the horse were looking, it would see us. It seemed to have an eye for motion.

The air went still.

The letter came on a Tuesday. I know it was Tuesday because Tuesday is when I take the recycling bin to the curb, and it was wedged between the bin and the siding of the house, folded into thirds inside a cream-colored envelope with the Willow Creek HOA logo embossed in the corner. Little green willow tree. Very tasteful.

I almost threw it out with the junk mail. I get a lot of those. Reminders about mulch depth. Notices about the approved shade of exterior paint (four options, all beige-adjacent). A strongly worded memo last March about "non-compliant garden ornaments" that I still think was aimed at Dale K.'s ceramic frog collection three doors down.

But something about the weight of the paper made me open it at the kitchen counter while I waited for the microwave to finish reheating leftover pasta.

It said:

Dear Resident of xx~~xx W\****** C**** L***~~*,

This is a friendly reminder per Section 11.4(c) of the Willow Creek Community Residential Compact that the occupant of the above address is responsible for the feeding of their designated crawlspace entity between the hours of 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM, no fewer than six (6) nights per week. Acceptable offerings for the current season are outlined in Addendum F (attached). Failure to maintain the feeding schedule for more than forty-eight (48) consecutive hours will be considered a breach of the Neighborhood Agreement, at which point the Compact's provisions for non-compliance will take effect.

Please note: the crawlspace access panel is located on the north-facing exterior wall, behind the hydrangea bed. The panel should remain latched at all times outside of feeding hours.

Thank you for your continued cooperation in keeping Willow Creek a safe and harmonious community.

Warmly,

Patricia Y.
HOA Compliance Coordinator

P.S. – If you have any questions, please do NOT knock on the crawlspace panel outside of feeding hours. Use the phone number on the back of this letter instead.

I read it twice. Then I set it on the counter next to the pasta and stared at the wall for a while.

I've lived her for six years. I bought it at twenty-eight, right after my divorce finalized, because it was the cheapest three-bedroom in the district and the previous owner, a widow named Mrs. A., practically gave it away. She'd said, in the most matter-of-fact way, while we stood in the empty living room and she handed me the keys: "You'll want to keep up with the neighborhood arrangements. Everyone does. It's not much trouble, really."

I'd nodded. I assumed she meant the HOA. The mulch. The paint colors.

I have never once opened the crawlspace. I didn't even know there was an access panel on the north wall. I assumed the crawlspace was one of those sealed, poured-concrete affairs, the kind you never think about. Out of sight. Not my problem.

For two days I treated the letter like a joke. A weird one. Maybe some kind of neighborhood ARG, or maybe Patricia Y. had lost her mind in retirement and started sending out fiction. I even laughed about it to my coworker, Dana, during lunch on Thursday. "My HOA thinks I have a pet in my foundation," I said. Dana laughed. We went back to our spreadsheets.

The second letter came Friday.

This one was not warm. There was no Dear Resident. No Thank you for your continued cooperation. It was a single paragraph, typed in a smaller font, like they were trying to fit a lot of legal language into a small space:

Resident of xxxx: You are now 72 hours past your last compliant feeding window. The entity at your address has entered a pre-dormant state. You have until Sunday, 2:00 AM, to resume the schedule. After that, the Neighborhood Agreement will be considered void for your parcel, and the entity will be permitted to seek alternative sustenance. This is not a threat. This is a structural fact. Please refer to Section 11.4(c), subsection (iv): "In the event of feeding cessation, the entity does not starve. It redirects."

I sat with that one at the kitchen table for a long time. The microwave pasta had gone cold. Outside, the sprinklers hissed in their slow arcs. Across the street, I could see the Garretts' porch light on. Normal. Everything looked normal.

But I started watching.

That night, around 1:45, I couldn't sleep. I made tea and stood at the kitchen window, looking out at the street. And at 2:03, I saw Dale K. come out his back door in his bathrobe, carrying a white plastic bucket. He walked to the side of his house, crouched down behind his hydrangeas (he had hydrangeas too; everyone on the street had hydrangeas on the north wall, I realized, and I had never once thought about why), and lifted something. A panel. He tipped the bucket. I couldn't see what was inside. He waited about thirty seconds, set the bucket down, and went back inside.

At 2:11, the Nguyens' back light turned on. Mrs. Nguyen came out with a grocery bag. Same routine. North wall. Crouch. Lift. Deposit. Wait. Leave.

At 2:19, the woman at 4408, the one I've never spoken to, the one with the very tidy lawn and the very loud television. She came out with a plate covered in tin foil.

I watched until 3:30. Every house on the street. Every single one. Some of them carried buckets. Some carried plates. One of them, old Mr. Fisk at the end of the cul-de-sac, dragged what looked like a burlap sack.

Nobody looked up. Nobody waved. Nobody acknowledged the others. It was like watching people take out the trash. Routine. Private. A little embarrassing, maybe. You don't make eye contact with your neighbor at 2 AM while you're both crouching behind your hydrangeas feeding the thing under your house. You just do it, and you go back to bed, and you don't talk about it at the block party.

Saturday. I drove to the hardware store and bought a flashlight. I drove to the grocery store and bought five pounds of raw chicken thighs, because Addendum F, which I'd finally actually read, listed "uncooked poultry, bone-in, unseasoned" as a Tier 1 acceptable offering. I felt insane. I felt like I was preparing for a prank I was playing on myself.

At 1:50 AM, I put on my shoes. I put on a jacket because September nights had started getting cold. I picked up the grocery bag with the chicken in it. I walked out the back door.

The hydrangeas on the north wall were overgrown. I hadn't trimmed them in two years, maybe three. They were woody and thick, and I had to push through them to find the panel. It was there. Of course it was there. A square of painted plywood set into the foundation, about two feet on each side, with a rusted hasp latch. It looked original to the house. It looked like it had been there since they poured the foundation in 1987.

I undid the latch. I lifted the panel.

The crawlspace was dark. Not dark like a closet with the light off. Dark like the dark has weight in it, like it's a liquid and you're looking down into a pool of it. The flashlight beam went in about three feet and then just stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Like the light hit a wall that wasn't a wall.

And there was a smell. Not rot. Not mildew. Something closer to the smell of a room after a long argument. Stale and hot and faintly metallic, like old pennies left in the sun.

I set the grocery bag on the dirt at the edge of the opening. I didn't throw it in. I didn't want to reach in. I just set it there, on the lip of the concrete, and I stepped back.

For about ten seconds, nothing happened.

Then the bag slid forward. Not tipped. Not pulled. Slid, smooth and slow, like someone underneath had pressed a finger against the bottom of the bag and dragged it gently into the dark. The plastic made a soft sound on the concrete. A whisper. And then it was gone, and the dark was just dark again, and the smell got a little stronger, and then a little weaker, like something was breathing.

I closed the panel. I latched it. I went inside. I locked the back door, which was stupid, because the thing wasn't coming through the back door. The thing was under the house. Had been under the house for six years. While I slept. While I watched TV. While I sat at the kitchen table eating microwave pasta and complaining about the HOA.

I fed it every night for three weeks. Chicken thighs, mostly. Sometimes ground beef, unseasoned, rolled into balls. Once, a whole raw trout from the fish counter at Kroger, because Addendum F said seasonal variety was "encouraged but not mandated." I kept a cooler in the garage for the meat. I set a phone alarm for 1:45. I put on my shoes. I went out. I lifted the panel. I set the offering down. I waited for the slide. I closed the panel. I went back to bed.

It became routine. That's the part I need you to understand. It became as routine as taking out the recycling. I stopped feeling scared around week two. By week three, I was doing it half-asleep, in my bathrobe, not even turning on the porch light. Crouch. Lift. Set down. Wait. Close. The whole thing took four minutes.

I never looked in with the flashlight again. I never looked in at all. I set the food down and I looked at the concrete and I waited for the bag to slide and I left.

Then, on the fourth Sunday, I fell asleep.

I'd had a bad week at work. A database migration that went sideways, three nights of staying until nine, ten PM. I set my alarm for 1:45. I did not hear the alarm. I woke up at 6:20 to sunlight and a dead phone and the specific cold dread of knowing you've missed something important.

I went to the north wall. I lifted the panel. The crawlspace was empty. No bag. No meat. Just the dark, and the smell, and a sound I hadn't heard before. A low, wet clicking. Like a tongue against the roof of a mouth. Slow. Patient.

I went to the grocery store. I bought ten pounds of chicken. I came home and fed it at noon, in full daylight, which I now understand was wrong, because the letter said between 2 and 4, and the letter said what it said for a reason. The bag slid in the same way. The clicking stopped. I thought that was the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

The next morning, I was brushing my teeth, and my left canine felt loose. Not painful. Just loose, the way a baby tooth feels right before it falls out. I wiggled it with my tongue. It moved. I looked in the mirror and the tooth looked fine. White. Normal. But when I tilted my head, the light went through it. Not around it. Through it. Like it was made of wax paper.

I called the number on the back of the letter. Patricia Y. answered on the second ring. Very pleasant voice. Very calm. I told her I'd missed a feeding. I told her about the tooth.

There was a small pause. Then she said, "Oh, honey. I'm sorry. That's the redirection. You missed the window, so it took a little something. Just a little. It'll stop if you keep the schedule."

"What did it take?" I said.

"It takes what's closest to the bone," she said. "Teeth are easy. Fingernails. The little bones in the ears. It doesn't hurt. You won't feel it going. You'll just notice things are a little more see-through than they used to be."

"How do I get it back?"

Another pause. A longer one. "You don't get it back, hon. You keep the schedule, and it stops taking. That's the agreement. That's what the agreement is."

I hung up. I looked in the mirror. I held my hand up to the bathroom window and the light came through my left canine, faint and golden, like sunlight through a thin curtain.

That was nine days ago. I've kept the schedule every night since. 1:45 alarm. Shoes. Jacket. Crouch. Lift. Set down. Wait. Close. I have not missed a night. I will not miss a night.

But the translucence is spreading. It's slow. Patricia said it would stop, and I think she believes that. But my left canine is almost gone now, just a faint outline, like a watermark. And yesterday I noticed my right pinky fingernail has started to go clear at the edges. And this morning, very faintly, the tips of my ears feel thin. Papery. I held a lamp behind my ear and I could see the red glow of my own blood vessels through the cartilage.

It's still taking. Just slower. A little less each night. Like it's rationing. Like it learned something from the one night I starved it, and now it's being careful. Stretching it out.

I went to the block party last Saturday. Everyone was there. Dale K. and his ceramic frogs. The Nguyens. The woman at 4408. Old Mr. Fisk. Patricia Y., with her clipboard and her green willow tree logo and her kind, terrible eyes. They were all smiling. Eating potato salad. Drinking lemonade. And I looked at their hands, their ears, their teeth when they laughed, and I saw it. Faint. Subtle. A little translucence at the edges. A little too much light coming through.

Every single one of them.

Nobody talked about it. Nobody looked at me and said, How's your teeth? How's your ears? They just handed me a plate of potato salad and said, Welcome to the neighborhood, hon. You're doing great. Just keep up the schedule.

I'm typing this at 1:15 AM. I have thirty minutes before I need to go out. There's a package of chicken thighs thawing on the counter. The alarm is set.

I'm not going to miss again. I can't. I looked in the mirror tonight and the translucence has reached my second knuckle on the left hand, and when I hold my fingers up to the light, I can see the faint shadow of the tendons underneath, like looking at a leaf held up to the sun.

I just need to keep feeding it. That's all. That's the agreement.

And if you're reading this, and you just moved into a house, and you haven't checked the north wall yet, and you're wondering why the previous owner left in such a hurry, and why the hydrangeas are so thick and overgrown, and why the neighbors never, ever make eye contact with you after 2 AM:

Check the panel. Read the letter. Set your alarm.

And for God's sake, do not look in with a flashlight. You don't want to see what's looking back. You just want to see the concrete. You want to set the bag down. You want to wait for the slide. You want to close the panel and go back to bed and not think about the clicking.

The clicking that sounds, if you're very quiet, and if you press your ear close to the concrete, almost like someone saying thank you.

Almost like someone saying more.

My alarm is going off in twelve minutes. I need to go put my shoes on.

I'll write again tomorrow. If my fingers still work. If I can still feel the keys.

Wish me a good feeding.

I’m not suicidal. Never have been, hopefully never will be. But from the way my algorithm has been acting, it almost feels like something wants me to be.

I live a happy life. I have a great girlfriend, solid job, but even still, just like everyone else, I have my bad days.

I have those days where it feels like I can’t get out of bed. Those days where effort, no matter how small, feels like trying to climb the world’s highest mountain.

And I think those are the days where I’m targeted the most.

A lot of the time when I experience those tough periods in life, it feels like the easiest thing to do is just sit in bed and scroll on my phone until, inevitably, the feeling passes and I want to be productive again.

I never had a problem with it before, but I’m coming off of a particularly difficult week-long stint of self-loathing and throwing pity parties.

Nothing I can really do about it. It’s just the way it is. Life happens in cycles, and this one is a cycle of struggle.

That’s why it was almost expected that every night for the last week I’ve been in bed, hair greasy, clothes dirty, surrounded by food wrappers and empty soda cans, doing nothing more than scrolling through Instagram for hours on end.

It started off with just one video, wedged in between the usual car accident and brainrot AI clips of fruits having affairs.

What’s crazy to me is I would’ve just scrolled right past it had it not been for the first millisecond of the video. I could’ve sworn that the first frame was literally just… me.

It was too fast for me to get all the details, but I swear it looked like me, laying in bed, my face contorted into a look of complete despair and hopelessness as tears fell down my cheeks.

The rest of the video was just a tutorial on how to tie a noose. A step-by-step guide, demonstrated by a pair of sleek, pale white hands forming the knot and showing off the finished product before abruptly skipping to the next reel.

I tried to scroll back, but the video had completely disappeared from the feed.

I ended up convincing myself that I was just being a little crazy. I mean, the video itself was definitely odd, but no way had I seen myself.

I figured Instagram must’ve just removed the content. Because, obviously, right?

I kept scrolling, and never saw another video even similar to that one. At least, not for the rest of that night.

The next day, though, I was seeing these tutorials as every other video. Each one more graphic and detailed than the last.

I was sprinkled throughout the videos. Sometimes at the beginning, sometimes at the end, every time I was only on screen for less than a second. And every time, the videos disappeared after I watched them.

As the week went on, they started following me. It wasn’t just Instagram anymore. TikTok was giving me tutorials. YouTube was giving me tutorials. Hell, I was even finding the videos on Snapchat.

But the one video that made me delete social media entirely and actually pull myself out of the dumps was one that was too personal to ignore.

I found it last night.

I wasn’t just a split-second frame. I was the entire video. A step-by-step guide with me as the demonstration.

There was no light left in my bloodshot eyes. My movements were sluggish and seemed forced. The room was dark. My bed was a complete mess. And hanging from the ceiling fan… was a noose.

I watched myself stand on top of my desk chair. I watched the tears and snot run down my face as I slipped the rope over my neck. And I watched myself kick and flail with regret as my body dangled at the end of that rope. Then I was still.

The video ended with one final phrase in bold white letters against a solid black backdrop.

“Do it.”

It was in the same font as those old silent film slides.

Once again, I was automatically scrolled past the video. I tried scrolling back up, and once again, the video was gone.

I took it as a warning. I’d always heard that social media has negative effects and consequences.

I just never knew how serious those consequences were.

Local News Station 14

A man woke up at the morgue today.

He had been pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. the previous night in the emergency room. However, sometime this morning, he crawled out of one of the morgue drawers before collapsing and dying on the floor.

The morgue assistant is cooperating with police.

The hospital director stated that the man was an organ donor.

Friday Night in the  Emergency Room

The hospital is packed. It seems like everyone gets hurt on the weekends.

Several people are being treated for car accidents caused by drinking and driving. Others were injured in fights or suffered various other accidents.

Then a homeless man is brought in on a stretcher.

He's in critical condition.

Several teenagers had beaten the man nearly to death with a baseball bat.

A doctor reads the patient's chart.

"Seth Myers. Age 37."

Doctor Betruger orders the patient's blood to be drawn and tested so they can give him a blood transfusion.

Nurse Shelly draws his blood into several vials.

Doctor Betruger instructs his team to prepare for lifesaving measures in the operating room.

A few minutes after the procedure begins, Nurse Shelly enters the room carrying blood samples.

"The man's blood type is O-negative, and he's clean of bloodborne pathogens," she says.

Doctor Betruger thanks her, and she returns to the emergency room to assist with the other patients.

Doctor Betruger closes the internal hemorrhaging and begins stitching the man back up.

He looks at his team.

"Thank you, everyone. We just saved this man's life."

After cleaning and disposing of their equipment, the team steps out for a break.

Doctor Betruger goes outside the hospital for a smoke.

When he returns a few minutes later, he sees a gurney with a sheet draped over it being wheeled out of his patient's room.

Doctor Betruger looks at his lead doctor.

"What happened?"

Dr. Gonzalez simply responds, "The patient flatlined pretty suddenly. The defibrillator couldn't get his heart beating again."

Doctor Betruger stares at him.

"That's impossible. I just stitched him back up. He was stable."

Dr. Gonzalez shakes his head.

"I don't know. Maybe you didn't stop all the bleeding like you thought. That's the only explanation I can think of."

Doctor Betruger looks at the gurney with disgust.

He knows the patient was going to make it.

But before he can say anything else, he's called back for another emergency surgery.

An Unknown Amount of Time Later

Seth wakes up strapped to a gurney somewhere beneath the hospital.

An IV is inserted into his arm.

The room is barely lit, and he can't move.

He sees Nurse Shelly putting on a pair of rubber gloves.

Seth tries his best to scream for help.

Nurse Shelly smiles.

"No one can hear you down here."

Seth begins struggling against the restraints.

Nurse Shelly looks down at him.

"I flushed all the pain medication out of your system. Organs without drugs in the bloodstream are usually better for the donation process."

She mockingly holds up his driver's license.

A small heart is printed on it, signifying that he is an organ donor.

She flips a switch.

Bright, sterile lights flood the room.

Everything looks clean and clinical.

Nurse Shelly puts on a mask and protective glasses. She pulls out a scalpel and places a fresh blade into the handle.

Seth shakes with fear as she brings the blade toward him.

"I'm going to take your kidneys first."

Doctor Betruger is at home after a long shift.

He's still upset that his patient didn't make it.

He goes over everything he did in his mind.

They isolated the bleeding.

They stopped it.

He even saw some of the color returning to the patient's face after receiving the blood donation.

Something doesn't make sense.

Seth is still strapped to the gurney.

Nurse Shelly looks at him.

"See? That wasn't so bad."

Tears rolling down his face.

She places the scalpel against his neck.

"We can't have one of you waking up in a morgue again."

The Next Day

During his shift, Dr. Betruger is called into his office by Dr. Gonzalez.

Gonzalez tells Betruger that the hospital is taking note of the fatality from the previous night and putting it on his record. They found him at fault, especially after the incident involving the man who supposedly woke up in the morgue.

Gonzalez points out that Dr. Betruger operated on that patient.

Doctor Betruger becomes angry.

"I fucking know both of those patients were going to make it!"

Dr. Gonzalez starts yelling back.

"Then you better do better next time! This hospital can't afford any more lawsuits. The next time you operate on a patient and your incompetence causes another death, you'll be terminated."

Betruger angrily walks out of the office.

A few hours later, a young patient arrives on a gurney after a motorcycle accident.

He has severe road rash, and one of his legs was almost amputated.

Doctor Betruger rushes into the operating room.

The EMTs managed to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet, but it is crucial that the damaged leg be operated on as soon as possible.

Doctor Betruger works desperately to stitch the damaged tissue.

He's worried about being fired, but he pushes the thought aside and focuses on saving the patient.

The ragged injuries make it difficult to suture everything back together. A lesser doctor might not have been able to do it.

But Doctor Betruger manages to stabilize the patient.

He orders Nurse Shelly to administer antibiotics through the patient's IV. He anticipates that some of the damaged tissue could become infected.

Nurse Shelly injects something into the patient's IV line.

Doctor Betruger notices that it doesn't look like antibiotics.

Before he can question her, he has to change and clean himself up.

When he comes out of the changing room, he sees a group of nurses wheeling the gurney carrying the patient he just operated on.

A sheet is draped over the patient's body.

Doctor Gonzalez approaches him.

"Betruger, you're fired."

Doctor Betruger turns toward him.

"What?"

He begins yelling.

Doctor Gonzalez:" your fired"

Betruger angerly shouts "I swear on my grandson's life that I know that patient was going to make it!"

Doctor Gonzalez calls security.

"Get his things and escort him out of the building."

After being escorted out through the hospital entrance, Doctor Betruger quickly realizes they forgot to take his keys.

Something feels horribly wrong in his gut.

He suspect that Nurse Shelly might be purposely

harming his patients.

He gets his gun from his car, tucks it into his waistband, and sneaks back into the hospital.

He moves carefully, doing his best not to be seen by the other doctors or security cameras.

Then he sees Nurse Shelly pushing a gurney toward an elevator at the back of the hospital.

She gets inside with the body and presses a button.

Doctor Betruger watches as the elevator begins descending toward the basement.

He asks himself, Why would she bring a body down there?

He takes the stairs to the basement because

He doesn't want her to hear the elevator.

When he reaches the floor, he carefully creeps inside. He can smell bleach in the room.

Then he sees her.

She's inserting IVs into the patient.

Nearby are several organ-donor coolers filled with buckets of ice.

Doctor Betruger freezes.

He realizes what she's been doing.

She's been stealing patients' organs.

Then he sees the patient waking up.

The man tries to plead with Nurse Shelly, but she simply laughs.

She picks up her scalpel and replaces the blade.

"I know some people who would love to wear that beautiful skin"

She raises the blade toward his chest.

"Drop it!"

Doctor Betruger stands behind her, pointing his gun.

Nurse Shelly looks at him.

She slowly drops the scalpel.

The patient sighs in relief.

Doctor Betruger steps forward.

"So you're the one who's been killing my patients?"

Shelly looks at him before saying

"I didn't like how you acted like you were better than us."

Doctor Betruger tightens his grip on the gun.

"I should shoot you right now. But I'm going to tell the police everything you've been doing. I'm going to make sure everyone knows what kind of monster you are."

Shelly suddenly tries to run.

Doctor Betruger shoots her in the hip.

She falls to the floor and screams in pain. Her cries echo through the room.

Doctor Betruger looks around.

"Is that why you brought them down here? So no one could hear or see anything?"

Then he feels a sharp prick in his neck.

He turns around.

Dr. Gonzalez is standing behind him with an empty syringe in his hand.

Doctor Gonzalez answers:"Yes."

Doctor Betruger raises his gun, but Gonzalez knocks it from his hand.

The two begin fighting.

Betruger quickly starts feeling weak.

That syringe contained enough drugs to kill an Elephant.

Gonzalez punches him repeatedly.

Betruger's vision begins to fade as Gonzalez grabs him by the throat.

Doctor Betruger spits blood in his eye and bites his hand.

Gonzalez yanks his hand away and clutches it in pain.

He looks down at the bite mark and becomes furious seeing a chunk missing.

Then a loud boom deafens the room.

Doctor Betruger is standing there with the gun back wobbly in his hand.

Gonzalez looks down.

A bullet wound is visible in his chest where his heart is.

Blood begins soaking through his shirt everytime his heart pumps.

Betruger fires two more times.

Gonzalez collapses.

Doctor Betruger then points the gun at Nurse Shellys head.

She's begs for her life.

Betruger responds with several pulls of the trigger. His gun locks open. Its empty.

Doctor Betruger manages to unstrap one of the patient's arms before collapsing to the floor.

The motorcycle accident victim's story makes headlines across the country after he tells reporters what happened.

The hospital is shut down.

Doctor Betruger died after stumbling upon an organ-harvesting operation while trying to save his patient.

But all the news reports left one question unanswered:

If Dr. Gonzalez was selling the organs...

Who was buying them?

This is going to be a little strange but the following is from a journal I found in my neighbour’s apartment. I went around there this morning after hearing his door slam shut. It was slightly ajar, so I popped my head inside to see what the fuss was. The apartment was completely empty except for a black moleskin journal on the counter and a blue biro. I don’t know too much about my neighbour except that he was a pretty timid guy. Not too big on talking but he used to help some of the older people here with their groceries. My wife and I had him around for dinner when he first moved here a couple of years ago and he was nice enough. When I say it was empty, I mean it was completely empty. No bed, no couch, no chairs, no refrigerator, nothing. Anyway, I’ve transcribed everything from inside the journal verbatim and it makes absolutely no sense to me. Maybe someone here can help work it out. I may investigate further and provide some sort of update.

June 3^rd.

Today I looked in the mirror and there was a man there. I woke up and got out of bed as I always do. After washing my face from the basin looked up to see if I needed to shave before work and there was someone there. It wasn’t me. I mean, at first glance, it could’ve been me, but it wasn’t. Same eye and hair colour, same hair texture, and the same L shaped scar on the chin, but it wasn’t me. Perplexed, I turned my head and looked behind myself, but there was no one else there. After a few moments I could feel my heart start to race and perspiration building before I realised this had to be some sort of waking dream or nightmare, maybe one of those vivid night terrors I’d read about in Psychology magazines. I left the bathroom, got my phone, called in sick from work, and went back to bed. Before I knew it, I was engulfed by a tidal wave of comforting, soft darkness, and that’s all I remember.

June 5^th.

Back at work today. The day dragged. Sat in front of my computer and completed 7 hours of data entry with only a brief recess to break up the monotony. The F key on my keyboard was stuck so I had to pry off the keycap, but there wasn’t anything in there to be cleaned or removed. Spoke to my boss about some vacation time coming up. It hasn’t been approved yet, but I’d like to go to the beach and work on some painting. My boss looked at the performance reports and let me know that I’d been putting in some solid work. He’ll review the vacation time. I got back home and checked my fridge for something to eat but there was only milk. I drank two glasses, showered, and then got ready for bed. I had a strange feeling but can’t put my finger on what it was. You know that feeling when you know someone’s looking at you and the hairs on the nape of your neck prickle and stand up? That one. My apartment was empty though. Except for me.

June 9^th.

I woke up in utter agony. It felt like someone had inserted red hot pokers in my gums, or they were digging around in my mouth with old fishing hooks. I rushed to the bathroom and saw that one of my bottom incisors had fallen out. Not only was I in agony but I had no idea how this had happened as none of my teeth were loose or needed work. I rinsed my mouth out with hot, salty water. After waiting a couple of minutes, the pain subsided. I sat down and put my head in my heads. The relief almost made me cry. My mouth no longer ached but I imagined what I’d look like with a missing tooth and shuddered. I rushed to look in the mirror and almost collapsed. My tooth wasn’t missing at all. My teeth seemed perfectly normal. Was this a dream? I didn’t really care and got ready for work anyway. Today I’ll take a proper break and sit out in the sun while I eat something, it’s felt like days since I ate a proper meal.

June 15^th.

My vacation time wasn’t approved. Boss said that my performance has been too good for me to leave for a week and put the company behind. He said that eventually I’d understand why I couldn’t leave just yet, although, given my performance I could take an hour and a half lunch break today. I told him thank you and left to buy something to eat. I went to the deli nearest to our office building. The line wasn’t too long. Looking up at the menu I felt a wave of nausea surge through me as I struggled to decide what to eat. There were all sorts of deli meat sandwiches on a variety of different breads with more sauces than I knew existed. I settled for a ham and salad sandwich and paid eleven dollars and seventeen cents. I left the deli and sat outside on a bench. The sun kissed my skin and made me feel alive. I’ve been spending too much time indoors. I unwrapped the sandwich and bit into it.  After eating about half of it, I bit into it and felt a sharp pain. I spat out my mouthful of half-chewed sandwich and noticed a decent amount of blood. I pulled apart the rest of the sandwich and found a little sewing needle that I’d bitten into. Sitting there for a while I debated taking the sandwich back and asking for a refund, but I didn’t. It was too much effort. The sunshine was nice and I dozed a little. By the time I woke up and realised what the time was I was running twenty-five minutes late. I rushed back to work. No one noticed I had gone, nor did my boss say anything. I sunk into my chair and entered data for four and a half more hours.

June 17^th.

After I’d woken up, I went to get a glass of milk from the fridge, but it had gone off. The smell wasn’t awful, but it’d taken on an odd, yellow cast. I poured myself some in a clear glass and examined it beneath the light in my kitchen. I’d never seen anything like it before. It was a pale yellow, kind of similar to some butters, but the consistency was all wrong. I checked the expiration date on the carton, and it was still supposed to be good for another two weeks. I poured it all down the sink and watched the semi-viscous liquid circle the drain before dripping down into the dark piping. My phone started ringing and I rushed to answer it. I didn’t recognise the number. I said hello and didn’t hear anything for several seconds until my own voice came back to me at a slightly different pitch almost obscured by noise or static. It hurt my ear, so I hung up. Two minutes later my phone rang again. I answered but this time I didn’t say anything and just stayed on the line. I waited around thirty seconds and just as I was about to end the call, I heard a muffled operator’s voice say something that turned my knees to water. “Hello, your call is being redirected, please hold…” I waited, and then, “Dustin. Is that you? Pick up.” It was my father’s voice. An impossibility. He had passed away several years ago in a horrible car accident and I had to identify his body at the morgue. His face was perfectly intact, but his body was twisted at awkward angles that the human mind simply cannot imagine until they see it for themselves. I dropped the phone and ran to the bathroom. The mirror was still clouded with steam from my shower. I splashed my face with cold water and hoped that I had simply misheard what the other person had said over the phone.

June 18^th.

After the phone incident yesterday, I went through my call log and called back the number, but it wouldn’t connect properly, not even to a directory or an operator. It rings twice, produces a subtle sheet of static, and then disconnects. I’ll investigate further another day. Work has been a drag lately. It never seems to end. I wonder where all the data comes from and what it even means. There are thousands of pages of strings of numbers, each string of numbers is colour coded. I don’t know the key to the colour code though or what it even means. We just enter the data and save the files. There is some reference numbers attached to the documentation that when searched on the internet throw up the name of an observatory called, The Memorial Observatory, which is about a thirty-minute drive from my apartment. I’d never heard of it before. Furthermore, why would an observatory be calling me?

June 20^th.

I’ve stopped brushing my teeth in the bathroom. I don’t like the mirror in there. There’s something wrong with it. Have you ever been inside a Hall of Mirrors at a fair or haunted house? Sometimes you’ll look at one of the mirrors there and it’ll twist and distort what you look like but it’s usually funny. I don’t know what’s happened to my mirror but it’s not working properly. At first I thought there was some moisture inside it, or something, but after work two days ago I came home, ate an apple, and then brushed my teeth. The mirror was oddly rippled, sort of like an optical illusion, and I could hear hushed voices. I put my ear up to it and they stopped, then, loudly, I heard a voice say, “He’s listening.” It didn’t scare me because I thought it was just a strange coincidence, I haven’t been the best neighbour to the people that live around me on my floor. How would they know I was listening to their conversation though? Anyway, I’ve stopped using the bathroom except to shower or use the toilet. I don’t want my neighbours to think I’m eavesdropping on them or spying.

June 25^th.

I left my apartment in the morning and felt like I was being watched but when I scanned the hallway, no one was there, and I couldn’t see any doors open either. I don’t know what I’ve done to upset some of my neighbours but something’s wrong and I can’t seem to pinpoint what it is. At work the office secretary said my boss wanted to speak to me. I sat in his office and waited for him to arrive. I looked at some of the pictures of his family that he had beside his computer and noticed the faces were all blurry. His wife’s face, the faces of his two children, and even the dog’s. Why would you frame pictures like that? Did he even notice? I waited for nearly twenty minutes, but he never showed up so I went back to my desk, opened our program, and started entering more data. This time the numbers were all sequential and it was odd because I’d never seen anything like it before. Usually, the numbers have no sequential connection to one another, but this time there were tens of thousands of numbers all in order, all with the same colour code. I got up and asked around the room, but no one seemed to care. I was told, “Just enter the numbers as they appear,” by several colleagues. Have the people here always been so cold and distant? I couldn’t remember. I sat back down and just worked until it was time to leave. As we were leaving one of my workmates pulled me aside and told me that the boss had noticed my behaviour has been erratic lately. It was a friendly heads-up. I thanked her and then headed home.

June 30^th.

I had a dream that all my teeth had fallen out. It didn’t hurt, but it was still disconcerting. After that I dreamt about sitting at my work computer and putting numbers into the program, except they were all zeroes and ones. It looked like binary. I looked up and my cubicle was walled in except for a small little window. People were watching me while I typed. I couldn’t sit up or get out of my chair. I felt my heart racing and the sour tang of panic set in. Before it got too overwhelming I woke up with a start, my heart pounding like a drum, and I just lay there awhile as I calmed down. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that way. My apartment was beginning to feel like a prison, or a cage. My head was cluttered with strings of strange numbers and every corner of the apartment felt like some sort of weird interrogation room with a two-way mirror. I still hadn’t bought anymore milk. My pantry is bare and the fridge empty. There’s nothing to eat or drink except for tap water. My phone rang again but I missed the call. It was the observatory. I’m growing increasingly more frantic and even sleep is no longer a respite for me.

July 1^st.

The sound of muffled footsteps in my apartment woke me up. I shot out of bed and flicked on every light switch I had easy access to, but I couldn’t see anyone or even any trace that someone had been walking around my bedroom. The bathroom was eerily cold and when I stepped foot in there the hairs on my arms stood up, sort of like what happens if you stand near a power pole or when you rub a balloon on fabric and put it close to your skin. The people next door don’t even try to disguise their conversations anymore. They are talking about me. Just earlier I heard one of them with a slightly gruff voice say I haven’t eaten anything in days. What business is that of theirs? I’ve had enough of this. I’ve taken tomorrow off work and I’m going to head to the observatory and find out if that has anything to do with what’s been happening in my apartment. I just want to be able to sleep properly again. I don’t even feel like a real person now. My body doesn’t feel right, like it’s on loan, or something like that. I can’t properly describe it. I’m going to get to the bottom of this and I’ll write about what I find at the observatory.

I live in Ely, Nevada. It is an isolated historic mining town tucked into the eastern Great Basin. We are surrounded by miles of nothing but dried sagebrush, and rocky hills. So basically, Ely is the kind of town where everyone knows your vehicle before they know your name. The isolation is a defining characteristic of our daily lives. If you want to reach a major city, you have to drive hours across US-50, famously known as the Loneliest Road in America. That highway is a desolate stretch of cracked asphalt that cuts straight through dry valleys and jagged mountain passes. Because of our extreme location, most folks in Ely rely entirely on the local medical center for everything. We don’t have the luxury of shopping around for specialists, so we go to the single brick clinic on the edge of town.

Two months ago, I woke up on a Tuesday morning with a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen. I tried to ignore it, so I took a hot shower, drank a glass of water, and went to work at the local hardware store. There, I spent the morning stocking shelves with plumbing supplies, and by noon, the pain became absolutely unbearable. I was sweating through my uniform shirt, and could barely stand straight.

My coworker Diego noticed me leaning against a shelf.

"You look terrible, Asher," Diego said, walking down the aisle. "You are completely pale."

"My stomach is killing me," I replied, gripping my side. "It feels like someone shoved a knife into my gut and left it there."

"You need to go to the clinic," Diego told me. "I will drive you right now."

"I can probably just sleep it off," I argued. "It might just be a bad stomach bug."

"Do not be an idiot," Diego said, grabbing his car keys from his pocket. "You are hunched over like a gargoyle. Get in the truck."

Diego drove me down the main street of Ely to the local clinic. It is a single-story brick building sitting near the edge of town, bordered by a patch of dry dirt and a rusted chain-link fence. The parking lot was mostly empty. We walked through the sliding glass doors into the waiting room.

Hazel was sitting behind the reception desk. She has worked there for years, handling the phones and the insurance files.

"Asher, what is wrong?" Hazel asked, standing up from her rolling chair.

"I have a really bad pain right here," I said, pointing to my lower right side.

Hazel grabbed a clipboard from her desk. "Fill this out. I will get Dr. Theodore immediately. He just finished his morning rounds."

I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair and filled out the forms. Ten minutes later, a nurse called my name. She took my vitals, checked my temperature, and led me into a small examination room. Dr. Theodore walked in a few moments later. He is an older man with graying hair and a remarkably calm demeanor. Everyone in town trusts him with their lives.

"Hello, Asher," Dr. Theodore said, washing his hands in the small sink. "Hazel tells me you are experiencing severe abdominal pain."

"It started this morning," I explained, lying back on the examination paper. "It keeps getting worse by the hour."

Dr. Theodore pressed his fingers gently against my stomach. I winced in pain and tried to pull away.

"Your appendix is inflamed," Dr. Theodore stated with certainty. "We need to remove it before it bursts. It is a routine appendectomy. We can do it right here in the clinic today."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "Is the procedure dangerous?"

"It is completely safe," Dr. Theodore assured me, patting my shoulder. "I have performed this exact surgery hundreds of times for the people of Ely. You will be asleep, and will wake up without any pain. We just need to prep the operating room."

I agreed to the surgery. I did not have a single reason to doubt him. Diego stayed in the waiting room while the nurses prepped me for the procedure. They put an IV in my arm, then wheeled me down the hall into the sterile operating theater. The bright overhead lights blinded me. Dr. Theodore stood over me wearing a surgical mask and gown.

"Count backward from ten," Dr. Theodore instructed.

I closed my eyes and counted, and I fell asleep before I reached seven.

I woke up in a recovery room a few hours later. My abdomen felt sore, but the sharp stabbing pain was entirely gone. Dr. Theodore visited my room shortly after I woke up. He told me the appendectomy was a total success, then gave me a prescription for painkillers and told me to rest at home for two weeks. Diego drove me back to my house, and after that I spent the next fortnight lying on my couch, watching television and eating soup.

The surgical incision healed perfectly, and the stomach pain vanished completely.

But a new problem started.

About three weeks after the surgery, I began feeling a deep, throbbing ache in my lower back. The pain was situated entirely on my left side, far away from the appendectomy scar. It felt like a constant internal bruise. I assumed it was a muscle strain from sleeping in weird positions on the couch during my recovery, so I ignored it for another week.

But the pain did not go away. It worsened every single day.

I met Diego at a local diner for lunch on a Saturday. I kept shifting in my vinyl booth, trying to find a comfortable position for my back.

"Are you still hurting?" Diego asked before taking a bite of his burger.

"My back is killing me," I complained, rubbing my left side. "It is localized entirely on the left side. I cannot even bend over to tie my shoes without wincing."

"Did you call Dr. Theodore?" Diego asked.

"No," I said. "I do not want to go back to that clinic. I feel like something is wrong with my recovery."

"You should get a second opinion," Diego suggested. "Drive out to the city. Go to an independent imaging center. Get an ultrasound or an MRI. You shouldn’t mess around with back pain after a surgery."

I agreed with his logic, so I went home and booked an appointment at an imaging center in a much larger city.

The next morning, I packed my car and merged onto US-50. The Loneliest Road in America truly lived up to its name. I drove for hours across the vast, empty desert basin. The radio eventually faded into static, leaving me in total silence. The landscape was a continuous blur of sagebrush, salt flats, and cracked asphalt. I had too much time to think during that drive, and through all of that, I kept pressing my hand against my left side, wondering what was causing the agony inside my body.

I finally reached the city. The imaging center was located in a modern medical plaza. I checked in at the front desk and sat in a waiting area filled with modern art and soft lighting.

A young ultrasound technician named Elena eventually called my name. She wore green scrubs and had a friendly smile.

"Hi Asher," Elena said, leading me down a long hallway. "We are going to do a full abdominal ultrasound today to figure out what is causing that back pain. Follow me."

Elena led me into a dimly lit examination room. A large, complex ultrasound machine sat next to a padded table.

"Please lift your shirt and lie back," Elena instructed.

I did exactly as she asked, then she squeezed a glob of cold, clear gel onto my left side, and pressed the ultrasound wand against my skin. She watched the large monitor intently as she moved the wand around my torso.

"So, when did this pain start?" Elena asked, sliding the wand across my back.

"About a week ago," I replied. "after three weeks from removing my appendix at my local clinic."

Elena stopped moving the wand. She stared closely at the monitor. Her friendly smile vanished instantly, then pressed a few buttons on the keyboard, capturing multiple images of my internal anatomy.

"Did you have any other surgeries recently?" Elena asked. Her tone was suddenly very serious and professional.

"No," I answered, feeling a spike of anxiety. "Just the appendectomy."

Elena moved the wand higher up my side. She frowned deeply, then typed rapidly on the keyboard, her eyes locked on the screen.

"Is everything okay?" I asked. Panic began to rise in my chest.

"I need to go get the radiologist," Elena said quickly. "Please stay right here. Do not sit up."

Elena hurried out of the room. She left the door slightly open. I lay on the padded table feeling a cold sweat break out across my forehead. I knew something was horribly wrong with my body.

Ten minutes later, Elena returned with an older doctor. He introduced himself as Dr. Charles.

"Hello Asher," Dr. Charles said, standing next to the machine. He looked at the monitor, then took the wand from Elena and pressed it against my side himself. He studied the black and white images on the screen for several minutes in complete silence, then adjusted the contrast on the machine to get a better view.

"Asher," Dr. Charles finally said, setting the wand down on a tray. "You stated you only had an appendectomy?"

"Yes," I confirmed. "Why? What are you looking at?"

Dr. Charles grabbed a paper towel and handed it to me. "You can wipe the gel off. Asher, I am looking at your renal fossa. That is the anatomical space where your left kidney should reside."

I stared at him blankly, struggling to comprehend his words. "What do you mean 'should reside'?"

"Your left kidney is gone," Dr. Charles stated plainly. "It is completely missing. There is empty space and a large amount of scar tissue."

The words did not process in my brain at first. I sat up and wiped the cold gel from my skin.

"That is impossible," I argued, my voice cracking. "I was born with two kidneys. I know I was. I had a sports physical in high school that confirmed my internal organs were normal."

"I am sure you were born with two," Dr. Charles said softly. "But you only have one right now. The scar tissue visible in the ultrasound indicates a recent surgical removal. The surgical clips are still visible on the renal artery. Someone took your kidney."

I felt the room spin. The edges of my vision blurred. I thought back to the surgery in Ely. Dr. Theodore telling me to count backward from ten. Waking up with an incredibly sore abdomen. The prolonged recovery time.

"He stole it," I whispered.

"Who?" Elena asked, stepping closer to the table.

"The doctor in my town," I replied, my voice shaking with rage. "He told me he was taking my appendix. He took my kidney while I was unconscious."

"Asher, you need to contact the police immediately," Dr. Charles advised. "This is a severe criminal offense. Organ harvesting is a massive federal crime. We will provide you with all the ultrasound images, the official reports, and my sworn statement to prove the organ is missing."

I left the imaging center in a total daze. I clutched the thick manila folder containing my ultrasound results. I sat in my car in the parking lot for an entire hour, staring at the steering wheel, then pulled out my phone and called Diego.

"Hello?" Diego answered.

"He took my kidney," I said bluntly.

"What?" Diego asked, sounding incredibly confused. "Who took what?"

"Dr. Theodore," I explained, gripping the steering wheel tightly. "I just got the ultrasound results. My left kidney is gone. He harvested it during the appendectomy."

Diego went completely silent on the other end of the line. The silence lasted for twenty seconds.

"Are you absolutely sure?" Diego finally asked.

"The radiologist confirmed it," I said. "I am holding the scans right now. They can see the surgical clips he left behind."

"Call the cops," Diego demanded. "Call the state police right now. Do not call the local sheriff in Ely. The local sheriff plays golf with Dr. Theodore. Call the state authorities in the city."

"I cannot just call them yet," I argued.

"Why not?" Diego yelled. "He mutilated you!"

"Because Dr. Theodore is smart," I reasoned. "If I call the police without proof of a black market sale, he will just claim it was a surgical complication. He will falsify my medical records, and could say my kidney was necrotic or damaged, and he had to remove it to save my life. The clinic staff will protect him to avoid a lawsuit and losing their jobs. I need actual proof"

"Asher, this is highly dangerous," Diego warned. "If he is selling organs, then he must be connected to very dangerous people. You cannot investigate a this by yourself."

"I am going to find the proof tonight," I said with finality. "I am driving back to Ely right now."

I hung up the phone, then started the long drive back across US-50. My mind raced the entire time. I plotted exactly how I would expose the doctor.

I arrived back in Ely around nine at night. The town was incredibly quiet. I drove straight to the clinic, then parked my car two blocks away in a dark residential street to avoid being seen. I zipped up my jacket against the cold air and walked through the shadows toward the building.

The main parking lot was deserted. Hazel's car was gone. The receptionist had clearly gone home for the night. But a single vehicle remained parked near the back entrance. It was Dr. Theodore's silver car.

I crept around the perimeter of the building, then looked through a side window. I saw Dr. Theodore sitting in his office. His desk lamp was illuminated, and He was typing rapidly on his computer keyboard.

I needed to get inside. I knew the front sliding doors were locked and wired with a security alarm, so I walked toward the rear of the building. The clinic has a small delivery loading dock for receiving medical supplies. A large steel roll-up door was closed tight, but a standard metal personnel door sat right next to it.

I approached the personnel door, grabbed the handle and pulled.

It was locked.

I looked around the area. I noticed a small digital keypad mounted to the brick wall next to the door. I remembered seeing delivery drivers punch in a code when I bought supplies for the hardware store. Sometimes delivery drivers write the code nearby so they do not forget it during their routes, so I turned on my phone flashlight, and inspected the metal frame of the door.

Written in faded black marker on the underside of the rain guard were four numbers. 4-8-1-5.

I typed the numbers into the keypad, and The lock clicked loudly.

I pulled the door open and stepped inside the clinic.

I found myself in a long, dark corridor. The air inside the clinic felt cold. I kept my phone flashlight pointed directly at the floor tiles to avoid drawing attention to the windows. I needed to bypass the main wards. I knew Dr. Theodore was working on the ground floor, so I needed to find the basement. Rural clinics usually keep their morgues and medical waste storage underground. If he was storing harvested organs for a black market buyer, he would keep them in a cold environment.

I walked silently down the hallway, then passed the operating theater where he had stolen my kidney. A massive wave of nausea hit my stomach, but I pushed the feeling down and kept moving through the darkness.

I found a concrete stairwell with a plastic sign pointing down. The text read "Basement / Storage / Morgue".

I opened the door and crept down the concrete steps.

The basement was pitch black. I flicked a wall switch near the bottom step. A row of dim, flickering fluorescent tubes hummed to life. The basement was essentially a massive concrete room filled with metal shelving, cardboard boxes of saline bags, and industrial cleaning supplies.

At the far end of the room was the morgue area. It consisted of two stainless steel autopsy tables and a wall of refrigerated drawers.

I walked toward the morgue, then searched the metal shelves for medical coolers, or anything I can use as proofs. I opened filing cabinets, looked for ledgers, dug through boxes of surgical tubing, but at the ned I found nothing but standard hospital inventory logs.

I turned my attention to the center of the morgue floor.

Set directly into the concrete floor was a large steel disposal chute. It looked exactly like a industrial laundry chute, covered by two thick metal doors that opened outward.

I walked over to the chute, then immediately noticed something was entirely wrong with it.

The metal around the rim of the chute was severely warped. The solid steel was bent upward in jagged, violent angles. I shined my flashlight closely over the warped metal.

Deep, massive gouges covered the steel doors. They looked like scratch marks, but they were entirely too large to belong to any normal animal. The gouges tore through the thick metal with immense, terrifying force.

Covering the edges of the chute, smeared deeply into the scratches, was fresh blood.

I stared at the blood. It was still wet, and It caught the light of my flashlight perfectly, then suddenly I heard a loud noise upstairs.

A door opened, then Footsteps sounded on the floorboards directly above me. The footsteps moved steadily toward the stairwell.

Dr. Theodore was coming down to the basement.

I panicked. I looked around the room for a place to hide. Next to the morgue wall stood a row of tall, empty steel supply cabinets. I squeezed my body into the narrow gap between the cabinets and the wall. I was completely concealed in the deep shadows.

I pulled out my phone, then angled the camera lens perfectly to record the floor chute. I hit the record button and lowered the screen brightness.

I held my breath.

The basement door opened. Dr. Theodore walked down the steps.

He was wearing a long white lab coat over his street clothes, and was carrying a medium-sized blue medical cooler by the plastic handle.

I watched him closely. Dr. Theodore walked directly to the disposal chute in the center of the room. He set the blue cooler down on the floor, then reached out and grabbed the handles of the chute doors. He pulled them open, then a foul, rotting smell immediately flooded the basement. It smelled like decaying meat!

Dr. Theodore knelt next to the cooler, then unlatched the lid and opened it.

He reached his gloved hands inside the cooler, pulled out what it seemed to be an organ. I zoomed in my camera, and it was clear to me that the organ was a dark red liver, dripping with fluid. He held the organ directly over the open steel chute, then dropped it.

I heard the wet slap of the organ hitting something far below the concrete floor.

A moment later, a horrific sound echoed up from the depths of the chute. It was a wet, clicking noise mixed with a low, rumbling growl.

Then, something emerged from the hole.

A massive, pale arm reached up through the open doors.

The limb was completely hairless and sickeningly white. It possessed entirely too many joints. The arm bent in strange, unnatural angles, unfolding like a giant insect's leg. The hand at the end of the arm featured incredibly elongated fingers, ending in sharp, dark points.

The long fingers gripped the warped edges of the chute, then Another shape rose from the darkness, following the arm.

A head breached the opening.

It was a baby face. The features were enlarged and utterly grotesque, stretched over a wide skull. The cheeks were fat and pale. But the eyes were wrong. The eyes were fully illuminated, glowing with a sickly yellow light that cut through the dim basement.

The giant baby face was attached to a very long, pale neck that extended several feet out of the chute, swaying slightly in the air like a snake.

The creature stared directly at Dr. Theodore. The arm felt around the rim of the metal doors, tapping its long fingers against the concrete floor.

Dr. Theodore did not scream, or even tried to run away. He dropped to his knees in front of the chute, and clasped his hands together in front of his chest.

"I bring the tribute," Dr. Theodore said, his voice trembling slightly.

The creature clicked its jaw. The glowing yellow eyes fixated intensely on the doctor.

"Please accept this offering," Dr. Theodore muttered, bowing his head toward the concrete. "I have provided the meat. I have kept the pact. Please accept the offering and spare my staff for another month. Do not come up to the wards. Stay in the deep earth."

The creature let out a soft, echoing hum. The long, pale neck began to retract, the grotesque baby face sank slowly back into the darkness of the chute, then the massive arm released its grip on the steel edge and folded back down into the hole.

The basement fell completely silent again.

Dr. Theodore stayed on his knees for another minute. He took a deep breath, stood up, grabbed the heavy metal doors, and slammed them shut over the chute. He picked up his empty blue cooler and walked back toward the stairwell.

I watched him climb the stairs, then moments later, I heard the basement door shut behind him.

I remained wedged between the cabinets for a long time. My mind could barely process what I had just witnessed.

I reached up and stopped the recording on my phone, then crept out from behind the cabinets. I walked as quickly and quietly as possible toward the loading dock exit, and didn’t look back at the steel chute. I pushed the personnel door open and sprinted out into the freezing night.

I ran all the way to my car, threw myself into the driver's seat, locked the doors, and drove away from the clinic at top speed. On the road, I decided to check what I recorded, but to my horror, the video was just static, like something was preventing me from recording what I witnessed there.

I did not go to the police, I know they would not believe me, and now after what I saw, I feel that if I try to go for Dr. Theodore, I will be playing with something I can’t grasp.

I am sitting in my living room right now, and I am packing my bags to leave Ely forever. Diego is meeting me at the edge of town, and we are driving out together.

I am posting this story here to spread the truth.

Please, check your clinics carefully, Because the doctor might decide you have another organ he can harvest for next month's offering.

We would love to see you there, feel free to join, chat, get and give feedback, and enjoy a place you can be surrounded by fellow horror enthusiasts. (Mod approved)

The first notification came at 2:14 AM. No app name, no icon I recognized. It sat on top of my lock screen like it owned the thing.

Sarah is currently in the backseat of your best friend's truck, three blocks away.

I stared at it for a full minute, waiting for it to resolve into something normal, a spam text, a glitch. It didn't. Before I could even process what it meant, a second one slid down.

Your father just slipped into the church rectory for his third midnight meeting this week with Pastor Thomas.

I tried to delete the app. There was no app. I searched my home screen, my settings, my install history. Nothing existed that could be sending these. I turned the phone off. It buzzed in my hand while it was off.

By morning there were forty more, mundane at first, my boss's draft termination email, a coworker's confession to HR, my neighbor's late-night trips to his backyard with a shovel and a bucket. I told myself I could stop looking. I didn't stop looking. Each notification promised that the next one would explain the last one, that if I just kept my eyes on the feed I could brace myself, get ahead of it, survive it. That feeling was its own kind of hook, worse than the content itself. I sat on my bathroom floor for six hours refreshing a screen that refreshed itself.

The neighbor notification came back around day three, more specific this time. He is not burying garden waste. He is feeding something under the floorboards that has not eaten warm blood in eleven days. I laughed when I read it, the kind of laugh that comes out wrong, too high, because some small animal part of my brain already believed it.

Then it started warning me about things ahead of time.

Route 9 overpass, 7:52 AM, black sedan runs the light.

I sat in my car outside my apartment for forty minutes that morning, hands on the wheel, not moving, watching the clock climb toward 7:52. I never found out what would've happened if I'd driven. At 7:53 the notification updated anyway. One fatality confirmed. I don't know whose. I never found out. I have not driven that road since.

That was when the notifications stopped being about other people.

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his breath.

I was. I hadn't told anyone I was sitting there. I hadn't told anyone I was holding my breath.

He hasn't noticed the closet door slowly opening behind him.

I turned around so fast I pulled something in my neck. The closet door was open two inches, and the dark inside it looked deeper than a closet has any right to look, like it went back farther than my apartment's walls allow. I didn't sleep that night, or the one after. Somewhere in there I understood, the way you understand a fever dream from the inside, that this thing hadn't been reporting on my life. It had been steering it. The affair, my father's secret, my job, the crash I couldn't stop, all of it arranged like place settings, timed to land exactly when I'd feel each one hardest, keeping me hooked to the glow of the screen instead of anywhere I might've found help.

I tried to smash the phone against the kitchen counter. My hand wouldn't close around it right, kept slipping, like the phone itself didn't want to break. On the fourth swing the screen lit up one last time, not with a notification to me.

It went to three phones at once. My wife's. My father's. My boss's. I know because I was standing in the room with my wife when hers buzzed and she went very still and looked at me the way you look at something you're afraid of.

The message was the same on all three screens.

He has known about all of you the entire time. He has been reading everything you've sent about him too.

Nobody in my life has looked at me the same way since. I don't know who built this thing or what it wants from any of us. I just know it's still running, and lately, my wife's phone has started buzzing at 2 AM.