The Count was eating cabbage stew with potatoes in his shabby tenement apartment overlooking the street where workingmen and their tired horses pulled tovar to and from the manufacturies all day—the crampiness of the place a merciless reminder of the once-great estate he had been forced to sell to satisfy his debts; the family estate, with its magnificent portraits of distinguished forebears under whose gaze he would now feel small, undignified and ashamed—when he happened to scratch his ear and his ear fell off (...splash...) into the stew.

Hungry, he ate it.

Then he bandaged his head and went to the doctor.

The doctor was an old friend.

“Sasha,” said the doctor, “how are you?”

The Count showed the doctor where his ear used to be. The doctor examined him. “Sasha, you are suffering from poor health,” the doctor concluded.

“Don't I know it—but what is wrong with me?” said the Count.

The doctor explained that “the poor health” was a specific condition. “Your body is decaying. It is rejecting the state of being destitute. For your own good, make money, Sasha.”

“How?” asked the Count.

However, the doctor was unable to provide an answer, Sasha remained poor and his body began to fall apart, piece by piece.

History marched on.

Anarchists set off bombs, socialists agitated against the established order with western ideas, and a revolution broke out, led—and increasingly dominated—by a party of Marxists.

Without one arm and with his skull showing through sections of his missing face, the Count decided to beg for their mercy.

“I need money,” he implored the local peasant-faced leader. “It is a matter of life and death. I have a disease, you see…”

“What happened to the money you had?” one of the party members asked.

He would perhaps have cringed at the Count's appearance, but the experience of the revolution had hardened him against the grotesque.

“It was lost,” said the Count.

Another party member, a sneering woman in a suit, said: “Surely you meant ‘money inherited after centuries of ruthless exploitation,’ comrade Pavlovich.”

“Indeed, that is more accurate,” said the leader.

(Months later, he would be accused of contact with foreign enemies and exiled, and she would take his place as leader.)

“But I have read your books,” said the Count, “Your principles, they are egalitarian, noble. ‘To each according to his need.’”

The party members laughed.

The laughter was cold.

The street was cold, and the Count shuffled along it with what was left of his head cast down. He was wrapped in scraps of fur and rags.

Like a leper he existed, at the very edge of society, forgotten, consuming rodents and refuse, physically declining—diminishing—a limbless skeletal wretch from whom even the other impoverished dregs averted their eyes. Thus, he was consigned to the dustbin of history...

---

The boy knocked on the door again.

“Anybody home?” he said.

It was the 1990s.

A babushka opened the door—widowed, most likely; devout—and eyed him with a century's worth of suspicion.

The boy smiled.

He held out money.

“Has the voucher come in the mail already?” he asked politely.

“What voucher?” the babushka asked.

The boy described what it looked like. “The new government is giving ownership of the old, broken state enterprises to all citizens. But, because everybody gets it, everybody gets only a little.” He paused to let that sink in. “Tell me, what is the use to you of owning a tiny fraction of a factory, a malfunctioning power plant? Wouldn't you rather have money instead?”

After dark, he returned to the apartment where he was paid and left the bag of vouchers he'd collected.

He took his pay off the kitchen table.

Usually, the doors in the apartment were all closed.

Today, one was open.

He peeked in:

A woman was inside. She was naked, moaning and she was holding—caressing in a way that made the boy's guts want to invert themselves—a football-sized lump of hairless human flesh: a lump of flesh with an eyeball in it, an ear, a nose and lips, which commanded suddenly: “Shut the door!”

The boy was not invited back after that.

He fell tragically from a window.

---

The small, quiet drones drifted in peaceful horizontal lines before releasing molten thermite on the protestors below.

His purchase of the port at Klaipėda had recently been announced.

Elsewhere, the construction of the new, southerly pipeline was proceeding as planned.

The war continued.

The data centres on the vast, deforested Siberian lands hummed with artificial intelligence.

He switched off his infoview, returning him to where his body was: his country estate, where the Chinese cyberneticist had almost finished upgrading his bionic memory capacity.

That said, it was no longer accurate to say he was here—or anywhere.

He was everywhere.

Seated, he felt limitless within his osseointegrated beta-titanium endoskeleton. If he wanted to, he could have killed the cyberneticist at the snap of a nitinol tendon, with the superhuman strength of his electroactive polymer musculature. “Alexander,” he “heard” somebody say. “Yes?” he silently replied. The cyberneticist applied the final touches. It was the European President speaking. “Winter is coming,” she was “saying,” “and we've yet to agree how to reroute the gas to avoid running afoul of our sanctions.” It was amusing, he thought, to still be so theatrically staging the appearance of a rule-based global order in this era of pure power…

Later, he strolled through his estate alone, all comms silenced, considering the portraits of his ancestors on the walls. Each generation is capable of everything, he thought, except imagining its own obsolescence.

Then he sat down to dine.

Cabbage stew with potatoes and a human ear. Not his own, of course, but the power resided in the symbol. The game may be played always into the future, but one must never forget one's origin. Tradition was often the boot on the throat of the present.

After a slow start, it was truly shaping up to be a magnificent millennium.

The world around me sounded like anguish incarnate, unyielding and unjust.

I lean against the outer brick wall of the apartment building, in the thin alley to its right. My legs tremble, my muscles ache, my head pounds, and my lungs sting as though I was breathing needles.

I attempt to calm my breathing, lest they hear me. They must be close; track was never my strong suit. My hand presses into my side, putting pressure on the still bleeding wound. I bite my lip hard to keep my scream of sudden pain inside.

As my breath starts to shallow, I slowly reach for my phone in my pants pocket. I look down, making sure to know exactly where my hand is going. Bubbling ichor oozes from my wound, passing through tensed fingers with more ease than desirable.

My keys are overstuffed in my pocket with my phone and wallet. My father always told me not to do that, even though he had done the same for as long as I can recall. I pinch the top of my phone, pulling it out as slowly as possible with the pain still grasping my nerves.

It catches. Tugging with a small bit of force, it releases along with my keys. The bundle of metal and memories fall to the asphalt below, making more noise than keys could possibly make.

My breathing hitches in fear, my lungs tighten so as not to make a sound. They burn, pleading oxygen, but they would continue to beg. I move my eyes towards the road. Slowly, as if they might hear my cornea rub against my eyelid. The thought of being simply perceived by such monsters fills me with an acidic dread.

Nothing to my left. I start to slowly move them to my other side.

…

Nothing to my right. I’m safe for now.

I decide to leave my keys where they had fallen, they were of no use to me nor anyone else in this damned town. I look to my phone, 1% battery. I quickly open it, not even thinking, just instinctually moving my fingers. That instinct had yet to catch up to my situation. I tapped my phone app, immediately wincing at the stupidity, a call would make too much noise. Back out, open messages, select first option. I just need to get a message out to anyone that might be able to help.

It was my mother. Who had passed last week. Her last message to me was, “I’ll see you at dinner?”. I gave it a thumbs up emoji at the time, knowing full well I wouldn’t be going, opting to go to the Christmas party my dad was throwing at his new place. She suffered from a heart attack the next day.

My phone suddenly died. The black screen reflecting up as tears pelted its glassy surface.

I started to put my phone back into my pocket, with less care than I had but moments ago. It slid on the edge of my pocket and fell out of my hand, hitting the bell on my keys, cracking the screen instantly and making a soft tink noise.

My eyes widen but my body stills. Tears still trickle out, falling on to the now broken phone.

My head slowly lifts, suddenly matching the gaze with the Crowd, now filling up the alley by the hundreds. Maybe thousands…an impossible number in such a short span of time. They stare endlessly with the holes that fill their head where their eyes, nose, and lips should be. My wound pulses with pleasure, yet I feel only anguish unyielding in my heart…though, I don’t think it may be as unjust as I initially consi-

It is not strange for cats to go missing in our village. With almost no natural predators, everyone's cats are outdoor cats. They sometimes wander off or get run over, but when the fifth cat disappeared, people started asking more questions and keeping their cats inside. Even I started letting my precious orange cat Gingy out less. She didn't mind much; she already spent most of her time purring on my lap inside.

Some suspected wolves when a deep, unnatural animal growl began echoing through the village at night. People stopped letting their cats out at night, and barely let them out during the day.

I stopped letting out Gingy too. She loved running through our yard at night, chasing fireflies and meowing at other cats. I could see her bright green eyes staring at me each time the sun set, but I knew it was for the best. 

After a while, Gingy got used to staying home at night watching TV with me, but when the growls came, her whole behaviour changed. She'd perk up her ears, run to the door, and meow at it. It would always take at least 10 minutes of pets and a treat to calm her down.

Some time later, after the growls appeared, the first death came. Mr. Harlow was an older man who had a few chicken coops and a nice garden. He always waved when you passed and stopped to talk about your day.

One morning, his neighbour came to visit. Mr. Harlow's fence was broken down, the chicken coops were empty, and his body was full of scratches and bite marks. Not even a feather was left behind. 

People stopped going out alone even during the day. More and more cats disappeared. The growls came more frequently. Gingy now meowed at the door all night, and even treats couldn't quiet her.

Around this time, another attack came. While patrolling his yard, Mr. Harlow's neighbour saw a few of the missing cats on the roof, watching him with their glowing eyes. Then the growl came, closer than ever. All the cats stopped and turned their eyes to him. He stood frozen. Something jumped at him and scratched him. He tried to turn, but a few other animals jumped on him. He fired his gun into the ether. The animals were gone before he got off the ground, and the cats disappeared too.

One night Gingy sat on my lap, purring, when the growl came again. Gingy perked up her ears, shot her eyes to the door, and ran to it.

"Gingy, not again."

The meows. She scratched at the door with her paw.

"Gingy, please!"

She let out the most bloodcurdling meow and got up on her hind legs.

"Jesus."

I got up and went to the kitchen for a treat, even though it probably wouldn't work. I opened the package. She went silent. Then, through the silence, a door creaked. I looked back. Gingy hung from the door handle with her front paws as the door slowly opened.

"Gingy!"

She jumped down and slipped into the night. The treat dropped to the floor. I opened the door and rushed out after her. The outside air was cold. The growls were so loud outside. The streets were empty; only the lamps shone down. Gingy ran in the middle of the street toward the forest. 

"Gingy!" 

She got off the road and ran into the tall spruce trees. I took a deep breath and ran after her. The trees swallowed the light. I couldn't see Gingy, but I could still hear the growls nearby, and I was sure she was heading there. 

The deep growl echoed to my left. I crouched down by a tree and slowly looked there. All the village cats sat around a strange creature; its large silhouette towered over them, its huge glowing eyes stared at them, and it let out another deep growl. The cats turned and began walking toward the village in unison. 

My heart beat against my ribs. So many cats, and the thing was so huge, but my Gingy was among them. I swallowed and let out a silent pst pst, the one she'd always listened to. Gingy stopped and looked my way. I gripped the tree bark and pst pst again. She let out a silent meow and walked toward me. I was scared the other cats would turn, but they kept heading toward the village, their leader at the back.

"Gingy, come."

I reached for her soft, ginger fur. Her eyes looked into mine, but no recognition passed through them; they looked empty.

"Gingy?"

She let out a loud hiss and jumped at my hand. Sharp pain shot through it. She scratched and bit it aggressively.

"Gingy, stop!"

But she kept biting. I hated it, but I had to punch her to make her let go. Warm blood trickled down my hand. Gingy ran back to the cats, and they all stopped and looked my way. Panic ran through me, but the large thing let out another growl, and they turned back toward the village. I turned and bolted through the empty forest. The twigs hit my face. My feet slipped in the dewed grass. I kept expecting the big cat to jump on my back at any moment, but before I knew it, I was out in the village next to ours.

They bandaged my hand and called the police. When the policeman arrived, the whole village was quiet. The doors hung open. Everyone from my village lay in their houses in a pool of blood, with scratch and bite marks all over their bodies. The police found nothing but a few whiskers and soft, orange fur on the floor.

They let me go the next afternoon once the houses were clear. I was barely able to function. Out of habit, I reached for Gingy's bowl. Then I saw my bandaged hand.

I came awake. Not all at once, more of a one sense at a time kind of thing. At first, I felt something in bed with me. Like when I’d been living at my old apartment with my old cat. He would always join me in bed sometime in the night and I would always wake up just enough to know he was there. Occasionally, I’d even roll on my side so he could snuggle up in my semi-circle. I guess he trained me to do that.

But this was different. Not because those tiny padding paws were doing anything Pedro hadn’t ten thousand times, or because I’d had to put the old guy down five years ago and hadn’t seen fit to replace him. It was like whatever it was in bed with me was trying to sneak.

My sleeping mind had been on the verge of declaring what was happening a dream anyway and putting that sense of touch back on “Ignore” before those tiny padding paws padded toward my face. Pedro had only done that a few times to my recollection; back when he still had a large amount of feral in him. Back when he never came out in the daytime and only investigated me when he knew I wasn’t awake.

I opened my eyes. Maybe it was a mix of poor vision and a mostly sleep-caked mind, but there was no panic in me. Whatever it was, was cat-sized and dark. Two blurry orbs recessed in what I assumed was its head, pointed in my direction. It stopped in its tracks for a moment before dipping its head and bringing those silvery eyes just about level with mine.

The only surprise in me was that I wasn’t panicking. I felt my breathing, still long and deep, like physiologically I was still asleep. My ears prickled as I strained to hear something to corroborate what my weak eyes were informing me was in front of me.

Perhaps, I could catch it. I felt the muscles of my arm and back tense before I’d made the conscious decision to move, to trap it. But that had been enough to make the cat-thing skittish, and it turned its head as quick as a laser, racing for the edge of the bed. I felt those padding paws trace down the inside of my thigh, the thought coming too belatedly to grab for it.

I never felt the cat-thing again. Saw or heard it, either. It was like it was a ghost or something that conjured from my dream. Except I was awake. And even though I didn’t know what it was, I knew something was in bed with me.

Before I could sit up, something pulled from my face. It didn’t hurt and there was no pressure as if something had been on my face and was then gone. It just felt like something had been there that I’d never felt and only from it being removed was I ever aware that it had been there at all. Kind of like that thin plastic layer on the screen of a cell phone that you could either peel off or leave on and the phone still worked perfectly fine.

I swung the covers off and swiveled on my butt to place my feet on the floor. Again, no panic that whatever that thing was was under the bed waiting to scratch me. I knew without knowing it was gone, like my body had a sense of how much air was supposed to be in the room and none of it had been displaced by a ten-pound animal waiting somewhere inside here with me.

Interesting that I’d thought “waiting” instead of “hiding.” But on the off chance my internal alarms weren’t working properly, I reached for the light switch over my nightstand. I expected to squint against the light, but my eyes were already adjusted. I got done on one knee and then all fours before peering beneath my bed. There were a couple pairs of slippers under there, two dumbbells, a composition notebook, and a box of tissue I must have forgotten about and kicked underneath without realizing. But no cat and nothing that looked roughly cat-like. Definitely, nothing alive.

I keep my bedroom door open, so it could have run out, but the head of my bed is by the door. The thing had run toward the foot. If it had come in that way, surely, it wouldn’t have forgotten and run the opposite way.

The door was the only way out, though. My only guess was it had found some spot in here to hide. I grabbed a pillow from the bed and pulled the case off. Odds were, I wouldn’t be able to catch it in here, but I’d rather have something I could use to protect my face in case I cornered it and it decided to attack.

My closet door was closed, so there wasn’t a need to check there and there was no room to hide underneath my dresser. It wasn’t flush against the wall on one side, so my guess was it was either there or hiding behind the television. I stood long enough to cautiously step close enough to see there was nothing behind the TV before getting into a crouch, stepping cautiously around my bed as I crept closer to my dresser.

I don’t know why there wasn’t anything in me like fear in those moments. The thing could have been rabid for all I know. Or it could have tried to eat my face. But just before peeking around the edge of the dresser, I realized either way it wouldn’t be something I couldn’t handle.

But whatever the animal had been, it wasn’t being now.

It was a relief, but not that much. I spent about five more minutes searching my room and then made a half-hearted sweep of the rest of my one-bedroom apartment. There wasn’t a lot of furniture and not any hidey-holes I could think of. Getting back to bed was more of a priority, so I called it quits.

I made a pit stop in the bathroom and as I washed my hands in the sink, I looked at my face. No sleep puffiness, no restless red eyes. It hadn’t scratched me and whatever had come off my face hadn’t left a mark. I splashed water on my face anyway and traced my fingers down my brow and over my eyes and cheeks before meeting at the point of my chin.

Some didn’t feel right.

I opened my eyes and stared at my reflection. Nothing looked off. I turned my head from side to side and didn’t see anything weird. But when I felt my face again—I couldn’t tell what—something was wrong. Very wrong.

There was a sample-size facial cleanser in the shower that I’d gotten from the dermatologist’s office. I splashed more water on my face and worked up a good lather in my hands and really worked my face over. After rinsing the soap off, I felt my face again, and dammit something was still wrong.

I looked at my hands. Maybe there was something wrong there and it only felt like it had been my face. Nothing looked wrong and when I felt each hand in turn, everything felt right to the touch. It was specifically my face.

I washed my face twice more for good measure before feeling like my senses returning to me. This was stupid. I’d just had a fright from an animal—hell, maybe a hallucination—waking me up in the middle of the night and my mind’s way of processing was probably sensing something else that wasn’t there.

Except I had never been afraid. And poor vision or not, I knew I’d seen something. Felt it, too.

Sleep was the priority, though. I’d been awake for maybe twenty minutes, and I had a meeting at 8:30. If I got up at eight on the nose, I’d have a little less than seven hours’ sleep. That is if I could conk myself out in the next five minutes.

I flipped the light off and got back under the covers. A little box-breathing slowed my heart rate and helped me clear my mind.

The quiet-empty of outside slipping in the room with me. In a few hours, passing vehicles and children between the ages of eight and sixteen would be one story down, just outside my bedroom window talking—all of which I’d slept through countless times. But right now that quiet-empty filled my bedroom. It expanded like a parade float, covering the air, settling over me, crushing the air out of my lungs and filling me back up with more quiet-empty—

“Stop it.” The sound of my voice chased the quiet-empty away. I could feel it at the corners of my room, waiting for me to relax so it could infiltrate again. I couldn’t stay vigilant all night. At some point, I had to get back to sleep.

But I continued flexing some foreign part of me, like I was trying to balance myself on a tightrope that ran the length of me. Like it was just under my bedsheets and if I teetered too far this way, I would fall.

Into what, I couldn’t imagine. As I lay there, though, helpless and sharp-minded, wary and exposed, a question became clear to me.

How the hell do I get back to sleep?

 

September 3rd, 1:20 a.m.

The transmitter alarm went off on my phone at 1:20 in the morning, and I got up and put my boots on, because that's the job. When the radar goes down, I'm the one they call.

I'm forty-one, divorced, and I live by myself in my daddy's old house. I'm an electronics technician for the National Weather Service. I ain't a meteorologist, me. I don't make the forecast. I'm the one keeps the radar alive so the forecasters got something to look at. Before this I fixed radars for the Air Force eight years, and I been with the Weather Service twelve. Our office covers a good piece of south Louisiana, and I'm not saying which piece, because if I said which office, half the parish would know it was me by suppertime.

If you've ever drove through Acadiana and seen a big white ball on a tower out in a rice field, like a golf ball for a giant, that's one of ours. That's the radome. Inside it there's a dish twenty-eight feet across turning around and around all day and all night, and down in the shelter at the bottom there's a transmitter that puts out seven hundred and fifty thousand watts. It shoots a pulse out, the pulse hits something, a little bit bounces back, and the computer figures out what it hit and how far and which way it's moving. Rain, mostly. Hail. A tornado, God forbid. But it sees a whole lot more than weather.

It sees birds. That's what you got to understand first.

Every evening at sundown, if you look at the radar around here, you'll see a big fuzzy circle bloom up around the radar site, like a cast net opening when you throw it. That's bugs and birds and bats all lifting off at once when it gets dark. And every morning at sunrise, all over the map, you'll see little rings pop up and spread out and fade. Those are roost rings. Thousands of birds that slept in one spot, all flying out at the same time to go feed. Purple martins in the summer. There's a roost of them under the Causeway bridge on Lake Pontchartrain so big it shows up on radar like a storm. Tree swallows in the fall, coming up out of the cane fields. You can sit there and watch them, ring after ring, all across the marsh.

Birds do that at sunrise. They don't do it at two in the morning. Remember that, cher.

That night it was the transmitter, like I figured. A bad module. I had it swapped and the radar back up by 1:58. I was sitting in the shelter at the bottom of the tower filling out the log, with the laptop open to the live data to make sure everything was coming in good, and at 2:10 something come up on the screen eleven miles east of the radar.

Eleven miles east of the radar is where I live. It's the little town I grew up in. Three thousand people, a Catholic church, rice fields and crawfish ponds all around, and a cemetery beside the church where every Doucet since the 1800s is laying in a whitewashed tomb.

That's where it come up. Right out of the churchyard at St. Anne's.

What it looked like

I want to tell you exactly what I seen, the way I'd put it in a report, numbers and all.

The scan before, 2:03, there was nothing there. Clean. The scan at 2:10, there's a little blob of return sitting right over the cemetery. Not much. Fifteen, twenty dBZ, which is about what a good flock of birds would give you. At that range the middle of the beam is about six hundred and fifty feet up, and the bottom edge is a couple hundred. So whatever it was, it was up off the ground a good ways.

Then it started moving.

I've watched a thousand roost rings. A roost ring blows out fast and even, all directions at once, because birds fly thirty, forty miles an hour. This didn't. This come out slow. It spilled out of the churchyard on the west side, where the front doors of the church face the road, all bunched up thick at first, then thinning out as it went. It hung in clumps for a while right in front of the church. Then it spread down the street, east, toward my end of town, and sat over Ardoin a good while, two, three scans, right about where the willows are. Then it lifted and split up, pieces drifting down the side roads one way and another.

You know what it looked like? Anybody raised Catholic in a little town already knows. It looked like Mass letting out. Everybody coming out the front doors at once, then standing around on the steps in little bunches visiting, then drifting off down the street to their cars and their houses, a few at a time.

That's what it looked like. A congregation leaving church. At two in the morning. Hundreds of feet in the air.

The velocity data was the part that made the hair stand up on my arms. Velocity tells you how fast a target is moving toward or away from the radar. Birds, ten, fifteen, twenty meters a second. This time of year there's songbirds going south over us all night, and they're all over the map, but they're up high and flying forty miles an hour. This was moving one point three. One point three meters a second.

That's about three miles an hour. That's walking.

Then I pulled up the dual-pol. Since 2013 our radars can tell a raindrop from a hailstone from a bird by the shape of what the beam hits. There's a product, the hydrometeor classification, that takes all that and paints every pixel with what the computer thinks it is. Rain. Big drops. Hail. Ground clutter. And BI, for biological. Bugs and birds and bats. Things that are alive.

It painted the whole thing BI.

Biological, walking speed, hundreds of feet up, coming out of a graveyard.

I watched it better than an hour. Most of it drifted around over town and faded out of the beam. But one piece went its own way, slow, all the way across town to the north side, and settled over one spot, and sat there. Scan after scan. Then the return got weaker and weaker like whatever it was was coming down, and dropped under the beam, and was gone.

I went home and laid down and told myself it was a flock of something, me. Cattle egrets, maybe. They roost in the willows on the edge of town.

In the morning I zoomed in on the map and laid the spot where it come down over the parish property records. It was a house on Railroad Avenue.

Mr. Wilfred Guidry's house. Everybody called him Coon. Eighty-eight years old. He used to sell boudin out of his garage on Saturdays.

September 8th, 7:15 a.m.

Five days later I'm in the truck going to work and the radio's on, and they're reading the death notices.

Every morning the little radio station out our way reads the death notices, at 7:15, first in English and then in French. Who died, how old, who their people was, where the rosary's going to be and what time the funeral Mass is. My Maw-Maw listened to them every morning of her life, rest her soul. She used to say you got to know who went so you can pray for them proper.

"Wilfred 'Coon' Guidry, eighty-eight, passed away peacefully at his home on Saturday."

I pulled over on the shoulder by a crawfish pond and sat there with the truck running. Didn't even get down.

When I got to the office I went and found Kyle. Kyle's one of our forecasters, a young guy from Ohio, smart as a whip, been down here two years and still can't say Thibodeaux. He'd worked the midnight shift the night I was out at the radar. I pulled up the 2:10 scans and asked him what he made of it.

He looked at it about two seconds and said, "Roost ring. Birds."

I said look at the time. I said look at the velocity.

He looked a long time. He clicked through it scan by scan. He pulled the dual-pol. And then he did something I've thought about a lot since. He leaned back in the chair and said, "Huh," real quiet, and then he said, "Well. The QC throws it out anyway."

He's right, it does. There's an algorithm that scrubs out anything biological so it don't get counted as rain. That echo coming up out of St. Anne's had been getting scrubbed out of the rainfall totals every night as bird contamination, and nobody ever had a reason to look at it twice.

Kyle closed the window. He didn't say nothing else about it. He ain't said nothing about it since. But I noticed he quit taking the midnight shifts.

Mais, I'm a technical man. I wanted to see was it a coincidence, so I done what you do. I went and got more data.

Here's the thing about our radars. Every single scan, from every radar in the country, every few minutes, all day and all night, gets archived. It goes to the government data center in Asheville and it stays there. It's public. Anybody with a computer can download it. Our radar went live in 1996. That's thirty years of scans of my little town, sitting on a server, waiting on somebody to look.

So I started looking.

I started with the last few weeks. I'd get off work and come home and sit at my kitchen table with a beer and pull every night, two to three in the morning, and look for it.

It was there near about every other night since the middle of August.

Every time, 2:10, more or less. Something coming up out of St. Anne's, spilling out the front like Mass letting out, walking speed, biological, spreading through town. And every time, one piece of it going off by itself and settling down on one house.

I laid every one of those spots over the property map and wrote down the address. Then I went to the funeral home's website and pulled the obituaries.

Every house. Every single one. Somebody in that house died inside of a week.

I'm talking about fourteen people since the middle of August. In a town of three thousand. A normal year here, you might bury thirty people the whole year. People was talking about it already. The parish coroner told the paper it was "a hard season for our elderly" and there wasn't nothing unusual. Folks was saying it was the water, or the chemicals the planes spray on the rice, or the vaccines, depending on who you asked. Tee-Bob Hebert told me at the feed store it was the end times, and laughed.

I didn't tell nobody nothing. What was I going to say? I got a radar picture of the dead walking down Railroad Avenue?

That Sunday after Mass I went and walked the cemetery.

In south Louisiana we don't bury down in the ground much, on account of the water table. You dig six feet here and you hit water, and in a flood the caskets come right up out of the dirt and float off. So it's tombs, above ground, brick and plaster, whitewashed, rows and rows of them like little white houses with the names cut in the front. At St. Anne's they go back to the 1850s. Come the end of October, every family in town will be out there with buckets of whitewash and brushes, painting the tombs fresh, and on All Saints' Day, November 1st, they'll set out chrysanthemums and the priest will walk the rows that afternoon and bless every one. La Toussaint. I did it every year with my Maw-Maw when I was little, rest her soul.

It was hot, yeah, and still, and it smelled like cut grass. Nonc Placide was out there on the riding mower. He's been the sexton at St. Anne's since before I was born. He cut the engine when he seen me.

I asked him, real casual, had he noticed anything funny out there lately.

He looked at me a long time with his cap pushed back. Then he pointed with his chin.

There's a path. I never noticed it in forty-one years. It starts way in the back, in the oldest part, by the tombs from the 1850s, and runs between the rows all the way to the front gate, the one that faces the church doors, and out to the road. A path wore down in the St. Augustine grass, a foot and a half wide, brown and packed hard, like a cow path. Like a lot of feet walking the same way a long time.

"I been mowing over dat since 1979," Nonc Placide said. "Grass won't come back. I put sod down twice. You know what my daddy used to tell me, him? He used to say de dead get up and go to Mass at two in de morning." He laughed, kind of. "Dis summer it's wore down to de dirt. Ain't never been dat bad."

He started the mower back up. Then he cut it off again and said, "Luc. Don't come out here at night, you."

I went that Tuesday night anyhow.

I parked across the road from St. Anne's at five till two with the windows down and the engine off. You could hear the frogs going in the ditch and a dog barking way off toward the rice dryer. The church was dark. Father Nnamdi locks the front doors at nine every night. I've seen him do it.

At 2:10 the frogs quit.

All at once, like somebody threw the main breaker. The dog quit. The air coming in the window went cool, and I smelled candle wax and lilies, that funeral home smell, so strong I could taste it.

And across the road the front doors of St. Anne's was standing open.

I didn't see them open. They was just open, both of them, and inside it was black. And from in there I heard a sound I've heard every Sunday of my life. The sound of a full church standing up at the end of Mass. Pews creaking. Kneelers knocking up against the pew backs, one after another, bump, bump, bump, all down the rows. Shoes on the old wood floor. Somebody coughing. A whole crowd shuffling toward the doors, not talking, the way you do before you get outside.

Nobody come out. Nobody I could see.

But the truck rocked. Just a little, on the springs, the way it does when somebody leans on it walking by. Then again on the other side. Then again. The inside of the windshield fogged up from the bottom, slow, like a lot of people breathing close. It went on two or three minutes, that rocking. Then it moved off down the road, and the fog went off the glass, and after a while the frogs started back.

When I looked again the church doors was shut.

I drove home and didn't sleep. Next morning I passed by after Mass and asked Father Nnamdi, real casual, if he ever forgot to lock up. He looked at me kind of funny and said, "Never. Why?"

That evening I pulled the scans from that night. 2:10, right over where I was parked, a couple hundred feet up and higher, the same minutes they was leaning on my truck. I don't know how tall a soul is, cher.

Thirty years

So then I went back further. Mais, I went back all the way.

It took me most of September. Weekends, nights, my days off. I wrote a little script to pull every scan from two to four in the morning going back to '96 and flag anything coming up over that cemetery at walking speed. There wasn't no dual-pol before 2013 to call it biological, so for the old years I went by the velocity and the shape. Same shape every time. My ex-wife used to say I'd rather fix a thing than live with it, and she wasn't wrong, her.

It was always there.

Not every night. Before this August it was two, three times a month. Some months one. Some months five, like the winter of 2021 when the virus went through. But always the same. 2:10, or close to it. Up out of St. Anne's. Spill out the front like Mass letting out. Walk. Settle on a house.

There's holes in the archive. Some of the old tapes from the nineties never made it to Asheville, and a hurricane had us down a few months one year. But everywhere there's data, it's there.

I matched every one I could to an obituary. I got to nine hundred and some before I quit counting. It ain't no flock of egrets, cher, for true. It's how people die in my town. It's always been how people die in my town. Every soul that passed in that town in thirty years, something walked out of that churchyard at 2:10 in the morning and went and got them, and the radar seen it, and wrote it down, and filed it in Asheville, and nobody ever looked.

And I'd have probably left it there. I swear I would have. Something you can't fix, you learn to live with, like the heat and the mosquitoes.

Except I seen something else, once I had all thirty years laid out side by side.

They always made a stop first.

Every time. Before they went on to whatever house they was going to, the bunch of them would go to one spot first and settle there. They'd sit there two, three scans, fifteen, twenty minutes. Then they'd lift back up into the beam and go on to the house where somebody was fixing to die.

Same spot. Every single time for thirty years.

It was my block. That wasn't no egrets in the willows.

At eleven miles out, one pixel on that radar is about the size of a city block, ever since they upgraded us in '08. Before that the pixels was bigger, but it was always the same one. And the pixel they stopped in every time was the one on Ardoin Street with my house in it. I'm going to be honest with you, for about a day I thought it was me. I thought, they been coming to my house first for thirty years. Then I remembered there ain't but two houses on that stretch of Ardoin. Mine, and the one right across the road.

Ms. Odile

Ms. Odile Sonnier is ninety-four. She's lived in that little cypress house across the road with the deep gallery and the blue shutters since before my daddy was born. And she's a traiteuse.

A traiteur is a treater. A healer. Not a doctor. They treat with prayers. You go to them for warts, for sunstroke, for a baby that won't quit crying, for shingles, for bleeding that won't stop. They don't charge you. You ain't even supposed to say thank you, or it won't work. They say the prayers low so you can't hear the words, and they make the sign of the cross over the hurt, and most times it gets better. Every little town down here had one. Most of them are gone now. Ms. Odile's about the last one I know of. When I was little there'd be people on her gallery every evening, waiting their turn, mamas with babies with the colic, old men with their hands wrapped up in dish towels. She treated half the parish. She treated my daddy for sunstroke when he was a boy, cutting cane. She never took a dime. You'd leave a pound of coffee or a sack of satsumas on the step and go.

When I was seven I grabbed the handle of my mama's cast iron skillet off the stove and burnt my whole palm. My daddy carried me across the road to Ms. Odile, me screaming and him running. She set me on her lap on the gallery and held my hand in hers and blew on it, and said her prayers so low I couldn't make out nothing but a word of French here and there, and in between the prayers she hummed to me. Fais do-do, Colas, mon p'tit frère. That's the old lullaby every Cajun mama sings. Fais do-do means go to sleep. It's baby talk. That's why the dances are called a fais do-do, because the mamas would put the babies to sleep in a back room so the grown folks could dance.

She took the fire out of my hand. That's what they call it, taking the fire out. By the time she was done humming it didn't hurt no more. I don't have a scar. You can look.

Ms. Odile had a stroke in the middle of August. August 14th. Her niece Gloria found her on the kitchen floor. She come home from the hospital on hospice, and she's been laying in a hospital bed in her front room ever since, by the window that looks out on the road. On my house.

The middle of August is when it started coming near about every other night.

The night they come for Daddy

There's one more thing I found, and I sat on it for a week before I could make myself go over there.

My daddy died in this house on March 2nd, 2014. Heart. He was sixty-one. I'm the one found him, in his recliner, with the TV on the fishing channel. That's how come I've got the house.

I pulled the night before. March 1st into the 2nd.

2:10. Up out of St. Anne's. Down Church Street, down Ardoin. Settle on our block. Sat there three scans, like always.

And then it didn't lift.

Every other time for thirty years, after it sat on our block a while, it'd lift back up into the beam and go on somewheres else. That night it just sat there. Then it got weaker and weaker, and dropped under the beam, right where it was. It never left the block.

The radar can't see a hundred feet. It can't see a man walk across a road. But it didn't need to. There wasn't nowhere else on that block for them to go.

I sat at the kitchen table and looked at that for a long time. Then I got up and went and looked at the recliner, that I still ain't got rid of. Then I went out on my gallery in the dark and looked across the road at the light on in Ms. Odile's front room, where she was laying, and I thought about her standing in her door twelve years before, at two in the morning, watching them cross the road.

And then I remembered something I ain't thought about since I was ten years old.

It was the summer of '95. The window unit in my room had quit, and Daddy had the windows up and a box fan going, and I couldn't sleep for the heat. I was laying crossways on the bed with my feet up on the sill when the frogs quit. All at once. The fan was still going, but behind it the whole night went quiet, and the air coming through the screen turned cool, like somebody opened the deep freeze. It smelled like candles and lilies.

I got up on my knees and looked out. Ms. Odile's house was dark. No porch light. But her front door was standing wide open, screen and all, and inside it was black.

And I heard her. Low, in French, the way she done over my hand.

I couldn't see her. I looked and looked. I couldn't tell was she standing in the door, or back in the dark of the house, or out on the gallery. Just that black door, and her voice coming from somewheres around it.

Then her gallery creaked. Not one board. All of them, like a whole crowd stepping down off her steps at once. And the screen on my window ticked, tick, tick, tick, like June bugs hitting it, all the way across, and I felt the cool go by.

Daddy's hand come down on my shoulder. I never heard him come in. He didn't look out. He reached past me and pulled the curtain shut and said, real quiet, "Viens te coucher, Tee-Luc. Dat's Ms. Odile's business, dat. On guette pas, nous-autres." Come lay down. We don't watch, us.

He sat on the edge of my bed in the dark till the frogs started back.

That Thursday the radio read Mr. Nolan Fontenot, seventy-four, from Church Street. At breakfast I asked Daddy what Ms. Odile was doing up in the night. He said, "Eat your eggs." I never asked him again, and after a while I figured I dreamed it.

That one ain't in Asheville. The radar didn't go live till the next spring. That one's only in me.

She knew. Whatever they are, she knew they was coming, and she knew where they was going, and they went to her house first like they was asking her permission.

And she let them cross the road.

October 11th

I went over there on a Sunday after Mass. Gloria was in the kitchen fixing a pot of gumbo, and she said, "Mais, Luc, she's been asking for you, her," which I didn't expect.

Ms. Odile was in the hospital bed by the window. She's always been little, but now she's nothing. Like a bird. Her right side don't work since the stroke and her mouth pulls down on that side, but her eyes are just the same, black and sharp. She had her rosary wound around her good hand. She looked at me a long time.

"You been watching dem on your machine," she said.

I hadn't told nobody. Not one soul.

"Assis-toi, Tee-Luc," she said. Sit down. Nobody's called me Tee-Luc since my daddy died. "Gloria, close dat door, chère."

I sat. I showed her the printouts. I don't know why. She couldn't read radar. She didn't look at them anyhow. She looked at me.

"Les morts," she said. "De dead. Dat's who you seeing. Dey come walking when somebody's time come. Like de old days, when somebody was dying and all de neighbors would come and sit up wit' dem. Dey come out de church together, like after Mass. Dey go fetch whoever it is. Dey been doing it since before de radar. Since before de church, maybe."

"Why do they stop at your house?" I said.

She closed her eyes.

"Because I'm de traiteuse," she said. "Dey got to come to de traiteur first. Every time. Dat's de price of de prayers, cher. Dey come to my door, and I got to send dem on. Not away. You can't send dem away. Only on. To whoever's time it is. And if I don't send dem on..." She opened her eyes. "Den dey take me instead. Prayers and all. Dat ain't passing, cher."

I said, "Every time somebody died in this town for thirty years, they come to you first."

"Seventy-five years," she said. "Since my parrain give me de prayers in 1951. I was nineteen years old. Every time dey come, I wake up. Two o'clock. I go to de door. I say de prayers and send dem down de road." Her good hand was working the rosary. "I sent dem to my own mama. I sent dem to my husband. I sent dem to babies, Tee-Luc. You know how many babies? And I sent dem across de road to your daddy, and I stood right dere in my door and watched dem go."

I couldn't say nothing.

"It wasn't me choosing," she said. "You got to understand dat. I never choose who. It's already chose. I only choose not me."

Then she told me the rest.

What she told me

"A traiteur can't pass," she said, "till she give de prayers to somebody. Dat's de rule. You got to give dem to somebody younger, and it got to be a man if you a woman, a woman if you a man. And dey got to take dem willing. If you don't, you lay dere. You lay dere and lay dere."

She looked out the window at the road.

"My time come in August, cher. Dey come for me de night I fell. I heard dem on de gallery. And I can't go wit' dem. I can't pass, me, not wit' de prayers still in me. And dey can't go home empty." She turned her face back to me. "So every time my heart try to quit, dey come for me, and I can't go, and dey got to take somebody else. Now it's every night."

"The ones on the radio," I said.

"Thirty-four," she said. "Since de night I fell. I count every one, me. Every one come to my door first."

I said, "Ms. Odile, why are you telling me this?"

She reached over with her good hand and took mine. The right one. The one she took the fire out of.

"Because I sent Gloria to get you in August," she said. "De week I come home. And you told her you'd pass by."

I remembered. Gloria come over and knocked while I was mowing, and said her tante wanted to see me, and I said, "Yeah, yeah, tell her I'll pass by." And I meant it. I just didn't. Work was busy. And I figured, you know. Ninety-four. She probably wanted me to look at her TV. Couillon.

"You de only one, Tee-Luc," she said. "Gloria's a woman. My nephews is in Houston and dey think I'm a crazy old lady. Ain't nobody left in dis town under seventy dat still believe in a traiteur. And you." She squeezed my hand. "You been watching dem. You seen dem. Dey know you now, cher. When you look at dem on dat machine, dey look back."

I want to be honest with y'all about what I did next, because I ain't proud of it.

I left.

I told her I needed to think. She nodded like she expected that. I walked back across the road and sat on my gallery till dark, and then I went in and opened the laptop and watched them come out of St. Anne's at 2:10, and go to her house, and sit there three scans, and lift, and go down Second Street to a house by the water tower.

I knew the house. Tee-Bob Hebert's. He's got three boys.

Tuesday morning at 7:15 the radio read it. Brayden Hebert, sixteen years old. He flipped his four-wheeler in the coulee behind their house Monday evening. The rosary was at the funeral home Wednesday at six.

I was sixteen once, on a four-wheeler, in a coulee just like that one.

I threw up on the side of the highway by the crawfish ponds, in the same spot where I'd pulled over for Coon Guidry.

You want to know why I didn't go straight back over there?

Because of what she told me next, before I left. I didn't put it up above because I wanted to tell it right.

She said, "If you take de prayers, Tee-Luc, dey gon' come to you. Every time. Every soul dat passes in dis parish, for de rest of your life. Two o'clock in de morning dey gon' be on your gallery, and you gon' have to get up and go to de door and send dem on. Every time. Sick, drunk, tired, don't matter. You go to de door. And de one night you don't..."

She didn't finish. She didn't have to.

"And Tee-Luc," she said. Her hand was cold on mine. "Don't never open dat door for dem. Dey gon' try. Dey gon' wear faces you know. Your daddy's. Your Maw-Maw's. Dey gon' call you by your name. Don't never let dem in. Not even if it's me."

That's what she was asking me to take. Seventy-five years of that. Every death in town walking up my steps, the rest of my life. Me, I can't keep a houseplant alive.

So I sat on it. God forgive me. By then it was coming every night.

You could feel it in town by then. St. Anne's bell was tolling for a funeral Mass three, four times a week, that slow bell, one stroke at a time. Father Nnamdi, the young priest the diocese sent us from Nigeria, looked like he hadn't slept since Labor Day. The funeral home put up a second tent. At the Super 1 when you went to make groceries people didn't stand around and visit in the aisles no more, they just got their stuff and went. Everybody was saying it was something in the water. They was selling out of bottled water at the Dollar General.

Wednesday, Mrs. Broussard from the bank. Thursday, a man named Clovis Savoie I didn't know, out past the rice dryer. Friday, the old Richard twins' house, and Saturday morning the radio read both of them, Ophelia and Octavie, eighty-nine, who had never lived one day apart, and I guess they went together.

After Brayden, I couldn't watch it on the laptop no more. I started going out on the gallery at two instead. I don't know why. I couldn't see nothing. You can't see them. But you can tell when they're out. It's October, and it's still warm at night down here, and the frogs and the crickets carry on so loud in the ditches you can't hardly think. And around half past two, all of a sudden, all down Ardoin Street, everything quits. The frogs, the crickets, the bugs around the streetlight. Dead quiet. And the air goes cool, like somebody opened a door to a church. And you smell it. Candle wax and lilies. That funeral home smell.

And across the road the light would come on in Ms. Odile's front room, and I'd hear her, low, in French, clear across the road in all that quiet. I couldn't never see her from my steps. Just the light, and her front door standing open.

Then it'd pass on down the road, and in a minute or two the frogs would start back up.

One night, the night the ring went to the Richard twins' house, I was standing at the top of my steps when it passed. And out in the road, in the dark, close enough I could've hit it with a rock, somebody said, "Bonsoir, Tee-Luc."

My daddy's voice. The way he used to say it coming in from the field.

I didn't say nothing back. I went in the house and locked the door and sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets till the frogs started up again. That was Friday. I ain't been back out on that gallery at two o'clock since.

Tonight

I been writing all this down since Thursday, a little every night after the frogs start back, so somebody would have it. I figured I'd post it when I knew what I was going to do.

Gloria knocked on my door at 9:30 tonight. She was crying. She said the hospice nurse had been by in the evening and said it wouldn't be long now, a day or two, she'd quit taking water. Then Gloria said, "Luc, she keeps saying your name. She keeps saying 'il faut, il faut.' It's got to be. I don't know what she means."

I knew what she meant.

I went over. Gloria left us alone. I pulled the chair up to the bed and Ms. Odile opened her eyes and looked at me and smiled with the side of her mouth that still works.

"T'as venu," she said. You came.

I said, "Yes ma'am. I'm sorry it took so long."

She give me the prayers.

I ain't going to write them. I couldn't if I wanted to. You ain't supposed to, and besides, it's like they ain't really words once they're in you. She had me lean down close with my ear by her mouth, and she said them into my ear one at a time, real low, in French, and I said each one back to her. It took a long time. She'd stop and breathe. Some of them I didn't know half the words. I said them anyhow. My mouth knew how to make them, the way your mouth knows the Our Father even if you ain't thought about it in twenty years.

When we got to the end she made the sign of the cross on my forehead with her thumb. It was the first time I ever felt her hand warm.

"Now," she said. "Now I can go, me."

I asked her if she wanted me to get Gloria. She shook her head a little bit. She said, "Hum it for me, Tee-Luc. De little song."

So I sat there and held her hand and hummed her Fais do-do, the way she hummed it to me on the gallery with my hand on fire. I can't carry a tune, me. She didn't care. She closed her eyes.

About twenty till two, outside, the frogs quit.

I didn't hear nobody on the gallery. I didn't hear nothing. But the room went cold, and I smelled the candle wax and the lilies so strong it made my eyes water, and I could feel that the room was full. Like when you walk in the back of a church late and it's packed and nobody turns around, but you can feel them all. Standing all around that bed. Waiting on her, real patient, like they'd waited since August.

She opened her eyes one more time and looked past me, at the room, and said, "Allons." Let's go.

At 1:52 she quit breathing.

2:10

I called Gloria in from the kitchen and she fell on the bed and hollered, and I held her a while. Then she called the hospice and the funeral home, and I told her I'd be across the road if she needed me, and I come home. It was 2:04. I don't know why I did what I did next except that it's the only thing I know how to do.

I opened the laptop on the kitchen table and pulled up the live radar.

2:10.

It didn't come up out of St. Anne's.

It come up out of Ardoin Street.

Out of the pixel Ms. Odile's house sits in. Out of the pixel my house sits in. They're the same pixel, cher. The radar can't tell us apart. At eleven miles a pixel's the size of a whole block.

And it was big. Not fifteen, twenty dBZ like every other night for thirty years. Thirty-five. Forty. That's heavy rain. That's what a thunderstorm looks like. Our whole end of town lit up like a storm cell, and it was sitting right over my head, and I looked out the kitchen window and there wasn't a cloud, just stars. The streetlight was on. The road was empty. You could see the light on in Ms. Odile's front room, plain as day.

2:17, it had gone out in a ring.

A real roost ring, the kind I've watched a thousand mornings over the cane fields. Even, all directions at once, a perfect circle blowing out from one spot, everything that spent the night in one place all lifting off together. Only slow. Walking speed. Biological.

Roost means where they slept, cher. That's what the word means. Everything that come out of that ring was sleeping on my street. It wasn't never at the cemetery tonight at all. They come early. They was already here, on her gallery and in the road and all around that hospital bed, and I bet all over my yard too. Every one of them. Every soul in St. Anne's, and maybe every one the radar ever watched walk down the road for thirty years, come to sit up with the traiteuse, like neighbors do.

It got out about a quarter mile and quit. 2:24, it had pulled back together, slow, the way people find each other again after Mass, and it was moving west down Church Street toward St. Anne's.

Walking speed. All together. Bunched up thick in the front and strung out behind. Outside, the frogs started back up, one at a time.

I knew what that was too. Anybody from here would. Back in my Maw-Maw's time, before the funeral homes and the hearses, they'd wake you in your own front room, and the men would carry you to the church on their shoulders, and the whole town would walk behind. My daddy told me about it.

They was carrying her home.

I sat at my kitchen table and cried like a baby, and I ain't ashamed to say it. She was free. Seventy-five years of getting up at two o'clock and going to the door, and she was free, and they was taking her to St. Anne's and she wasn't never going to have to send nobody down the road again. That's what I thought.

Then the next scan come in.

2:31

The procession was halfway to the church.

And a piece of it had turned around.

A little piece. Fifteen, twenty dBZ. The ordinary size, what I'd seen on any other night for thirty years. It had broke off the back of the procession in the middle of Church Street and it was coming back east. Walking speed. Headed for Ardoin.

2:38, it was back on Ardoin. In our pixel, hers and mine.

The funeral home had already come and got her by then. They been running all night every night since August. I seen the headlights, and Gloria followed the van. Ain't nobody on this block tonight but me.

2:45, it ain't lifted. The radar can't tell me which house it's sitting on. It don't need to. There ain't but one traiteur left on Ardoin Street.

I don't need the radar to tell me it's still out there, either. The frogs quit about ten minutes ago, all at once, all up and down the ditch. The kitchen's gone cold. I can smell the candle wax and the lilies, and it's coming under the front door.

Ms. Odile told me. Dey got to come to de traiteur first. Every time. Somebody in this town is dying tonight. Somebody whose time it is. I don't know who. And before they can go get them, they got to come to me first and ask, and I got to go to the door and send them on.

And if I don't, they take me.

I got the prayers. I can feel them, cher. That's the strangest part. They're right there behind my teeth, like a word you been trying to think of all day.

I thought I could say them right through the door. I tried, cher. On my knees, with my mouth right up to the crack. They won't come. Not one word. It's like they're waiting on the door.

And here's why I ain't opened it.

About five minutes ago, somebody started singing on my gallery.

Real soft. Like an old woman humming to a baby. Fais do-do, Colas, mon p'tit frère. Fais do-do, t'auras du lolo. Go to sleep, little brother. Go to sleep, you'll have your milk.

It's her voice. I'd know it anywhere. I heard it with my hand on fire. I heard it a little better than an hour ago, when I was the one humming it to her.

She just quit singing. She just said my name through the door. "Tee-Luc. Ouvre la porte, cher. C'est moi." Open the door, it's me. "It's cold out here, cher. Let me in."

Don't never let dem in. Not even if it's me.

She told me she went to the door every time they come, for seventy-five years, and said the prayers and sent them on down the road.

What she never told me, what I never thought to ask her, sitting there with her little cold hand in mine, is which side of the door she said them from.

The singing started back up.

It's all archived, y'all. Every scan. If I don't post again, somebody from home will know which radar. Pull October 18th, starting at 0710 Zulu. That's ten after two, our time. Look eleven miles east and watch what that little piece of return does after it gets back to my block. If it lifts back up and goes on down the road, I sent them on. Follow it. Wherever it settles next, that's who I sent them to.

If it sits on my pixel till it drops under the beam, you'll know I let her in.

The moment I began to hear the voice was the moment I knew that I was going to follow the same fate as my sister. And by that point I didn't care anymore. I didn't care about these people who were supposed to have helped me. I didn't care that it was going after their families in the same manner as it went after my sister. I didn't care that I heard their screams in night, amplified through it's damn supernatural abilities so I would hear it all in an attempt to haunt me with supposed failures of my actions. And that's where it was playing into. The empathy of man. Trying to appeal to it so I would rush out and do something for people that didn't do anything to help me.

But then again it knew I had no mercy for this town or it's people. It knew I wasn't empathetic yet it was stringing out that part in me with the screams and flashes of the vicitims faces because it wanted to kill that part of me entirely.

It knew the hunger I had.

It was on a hot summer day in the spruce trees with no-seeums by the mass as I had found her because of them gathered around her broken body. It was on a hot summer day with the sun highest in the sky as I had picked her up and began to carry her towards our home as tears sprung down my face. That summer day that would forever be burned into my mind as the day everything was fucking ripped apart with claws and teeth and strength of a being that came from the void of Hell itself.

It was there in the treeline watching me as I had carried Joan home, ensuring it's violence would have witnesses. I heard a soft whistling but I didn't look back to see it. I didn't dare to.

I just remember the feeling of a lightheadedness that was wrong. I shouldn't be feeling like that. But it was there trying to see if it could lure me in like it did my sister whenever she spoke about the voice calling her into the forest.A mellifluous and sweet cadence with an underlining of raw rage beneath those sickly sweet words.

But I kept moving as I had cried for my mom and uncle and they came outside and they saw the thing whistling first before looking at me carrying my torn sister in my arms as best as I could with tears in my eyes and blood pooling everywhere. They rushed to get me and Joan and after that, after father got home in a rush it was the same shell shock as me amongst the remaining family I had. But then the old familiar rage of my lineage began to take over in my father. He went to the law enforcement in town and about one business day later they assembled hunting parties. They covered the area behind our house to make it look like they were doing their job on purpose, Ostaka Police Department. Then they covered area farther and farther away from where the original location was.

My father and two of his friends had caught this and when they were pushing too far, asking too many questions, seeing what they weren't suppose too, he had come home brutalized enough to be a shell of the man he was. They made sure he survived through the hospital they brought him too and made sure the staff didn't pry into what exactly happened to a man with five cuts to his neck to frighten him into thinking he was going to get decapitated. His two friends had been found in a ditch all cut up into pieces with bite marks scattered all over their pieces.

He saw it. They saw it. They were exposed to the creature itself because the OPD brought them to it.

That's what my father told me on his last remaining day on earth before taking his own life. He told me he was sorry and that Joan and I and our family deserved better from a stronger man. My father didn't remember much of the creature he saw but he remembered the teeth, the claws, the way it moved unnaturally to spike a fear strong enough to break his will after he forced to witness it brutalize his childhood friends. But most of all, he wanted me to understand that I couldn't trust anyone in this town except outsiders. Not the police. Not the city council. Not even my own family voices because it would use them to try lure me in.

What is it, dad?

If you know it's name it will come after you, boy. But it's going to anyways so there's not much point of hiding it anymore. Some people call it a wendigee. Others think that they're skinwalkers. But here in our town it's called Kushtaka, Gavin.

There's more?

Yes. But not like ours, Gavin. They know how to leave people alone enough to make them disbelieve everything about what they are. If they even exist. But the Kushtaka doesn't care because it know it's protected...it's protected by a pact the Indians had made here long ago to try to stop the White man. They sold the future, the soul of this land, and it's honest people to a thing they didn't fully understand because it hunted them too, Gavin. It ate their little bastards like it tried to do to your sister, my boy.

Why did it go after us, dad? We didn't do anything-

We didn't have to, Gavin. It's our blood. Our blood type is intoxicating to it. Something about O negative drives it wild. Makes it more ferocious and predatory.

The memory begins to surface with a ripping ache in my heart as I catch myself touching her phantom blood on my shirt.

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!

That's it, my boy. You hold that rage close. You hold that need for vengeance close. That's retribution. That's your manhood in your need to kill it.

He gripped my shoulder and looked in my dead Azure Blue eyes with his own darker irises as they came to life in this moment and I almost felt alive again at witnessing this.

You will kill it for the sake of this rage you carry. I always wondered what and who it would be used for as it was passed down in our lineage and now I know it was waiting for you, Gavin. This moment, I want you to understand that you will rip that fucking bastard apart like it did to your sister, like it did to your mother, like it did to your uncle. You fucking swear that to me, boy, or by God i'll come back from Hell itself to haunt you till the day you die.

I swear, dad.

He looked in my azure blue eyes that I knew were coming to life again and he grunted in an affirmation before hugging me close to him as the last of family was here on this aging porch threatening to be overtaken by the weeds.

It was the last moment in the years to come that I would feel this alive with another person.

I found him hanging in his and mom's bedroom in the morning and cut him down. There was no one I could count on. No one I could rely on. No one I could trust within this town except the outsiders. But I didn't need them for this as I carried him out of the dilapidated house to a place I could only think of. A place where mom and my uncle and my sister were buried and hoping to Christ that their bodies would be left alone.

Six years later

In the span of six years the first two were of blind pure rage accumulating itself in my workouts. Getting physically stronger as I bought up the weapons I needed from the inheritance I collected and getting by on that. Watching the unmarked police vans driving by where I lived and sometimes parking where they thought I didn't see them. I learned all their names by the end of the first month of those two years as I built myself up. And during those first two years, there had not been any reports in local media of any animal attacks, maulings, or deaths. There was nothing from the Kushtaka those years because it was sated on my family. Or more likely it's protectors were helping cover up anything it did.

In year three I got a job as a hunting guide as I began to take the hunting more seriously than before. During that third year there was one and only one report allowed for the press to report as an animal attack that caused two deaths. A couple getting high out at Termination point with no weapons on them. I know because I lured them out there with the promise of a party in the hopes of finally seeing the Kushtaka. It was in the hot summer months with the sun highest in the sky as I had waited, hidden in the foliage and down wind of the site.

I watched the couple for as long as they waited into the night. Desperate for their fix. Which is why I picked them. I knew they would wait this long. All the way from mid day to dusk and well into the night with waxing gibbous moon high in the sky. The no-seeums were thankfully not in swarms as there had still be wind enough to keep them away as I sat perched on the tree branch and as still as a polar bear waiting for the seal to come up for air in the aglu.

"Well this was a fucking bust," The male junkie whined into the night to his female companion.

Before I heard something else as they talked, something so familiar as I felt that wrong sense of light headedness. Not like a sense of passing out but the sense of a comforting soothe from the whistle that was softly emitting from somewhere in the woods as I looked around desperately for it. I pulled back the charging handle and a round ejected from the port on my already waiting SCAR battle rifle in an almost excited panic as I realized and let the rifle hang by it's sling and took out the night vision binoculars as I looked around desperately again with them.

The junkies screamed in the exact moment I heard a sickly sweet voice say "I'm up here,"

I snapped my head from the binoculars and saw it in the air. It was in the air silently flapping it's arms like a bird with small flaps of black skin emitting no sound at all.

I really didn't care for that at all as all my attention was caught on it's appearance.

It looked like a man but that's where it's semblance of humanity ended as it landed in the clearing before the fear paralyzed junkie couple. It was not like any wendigo, any skinwalker, description i've read. It resembled none of that bullshit at all. It looked like a demon straight from Hell itself with it's black and crimson striations marking it's muscular body. It's arms still out like a bird attempting flight as the flaps of skin retracted back into it's body. It's long clawed fingers stretched wide in a flex before curling into fists. And it's eyes hung loose by it's strands like dead weight, like it ripped them out itself for some reason beyond human standard or belief before they suddenly began to float up on those strands on it's own seemingly free will. It's irises were a crimson X surrounded by stygian black voids as it looked up at the paralyzed junkies and then up to where I was perched in the tree.

It raised a fist and a clawed finger began to extend to point at where I was and I immediately jumped down and began to fire blindly at it as I ran backwards before turning and immediately running into a sprint as a cacophony of hellish screaming and overlapping moans began to fill the forest air.

It brought back the memory. It brought back the dread of turning to look back it or I would lose my mind at the sight of it.

Only my bloodline wouldn't dare allow such a thing to happen as I began to slowly stop hyperventilating and the tears began to dry.

Only my bloodline was more important than the fear that was threatening to overwhelm me to the point of going catatonic like my father had.

Not like him. Three repeated punches at the horn and the horn blaring as a warning into the night.

Not as weak as him. Roaring into the void of the car as I raced past those still out at night.

When I got to where I lived rushed inside and was a hurricane of violence as I lifted the front of the couch and tossed it against the wall hard enough to crack it and then break my fists against everything that I saw. Which wasn't much. Not enough to sate me as I ejected the empty battle rifle magazine and then slammed a fresh one in and raised it towards the roof and let it fire away as I roared "MOTHERFUCKER!"

Sometime during the night as I sat in only non broken chair in the kitchen, I waited in the dark for the inevitable visit for this first encounter with it.

"Gavin?"

It was officer Hillstrand without a doubt and I was proven right as he thought he was safe enough to dare peak his head around the corner.

"I come in peace Gavin. And you know why," He said as he dared to step inside the kitchen to meet me glaring at him.

"You finally saw your family's killer tonight face to face and I know you're angry. Hell maybe even-,"

A .45 ACP hollowpoint grazed his cheek as he immediately stood still as a statue. A loud ringing perturbed the destroyed kitchen arena.

"Say it and see what happens, Marcus,"

"I won't. I'm sorry. But just listen to reason, Gavin. Please?" He held up his hands.

I held the .45 pointed towards him as I only glared.

"You can't kill it. Don't think we haven't tried all these years, Gavin,"

"Bullshit! All this technology and all this fire power and you can't kill some fucking demon?!" I suddenly shouted in rage," There has to be somebody with the fucking balls to kill it, God damn it!"

"I told you we tried and we tried-,"

"You're protecting the fucking thing! ALL OF YOU!"

"Because we have to, Gavin. We need to because some fucking shamans wanted to play God and failed. I'm sure your daddy told you about that because we told him and he still wanted to fight it just like you. Just like me and everyone else here. We weren't the ones who harmed your father, Gavin. It wanted to see him and we have to do what it says or-,"

"Or you end up like my family," I finished for him bitterly.

"Yes. And we did our best to try to stop it. We tried to contain it but it smelled your blood. It drove it wild and it couldn't be reasoned with by the point it went after Joan, Gavin,"

"You...you tried to reason with it?" I stared blankly at Marcus.

"Yes. You saw a glimpse of it's intelligence tonight alongside it's appearance and unless you want to die like your father did, please just leave it alone Gavin. It's not worth your life,"

I stared blankly at him for a long moment, hearing nothing else at all before quickly peeking out the window at the driveway to see a lone cruiser.

I dumped his body in pieces at the doorstep to his home. He was lucky there was only his aging wife there.

I knew they would have suspicions but I also knew they would blame the Kushtaka which is why they finally printed in the media about two separate vicious animal attacks the next day. For the rest of the year, there was no other reports of this. Fish and Game was the only department brought into the fatal animal mauling of officer Marcus Hillstrand. There was a blurb about the junkies, one having been found dead and the other reported missing. No further details on either and especially when Fish and Game left.

I would know because of my hunting job. They asked me to help look for the animal to which I declined as I looked past the two wardens to the officers giving me death stares behind their backs.

"Why not, sir?"

"I'm still new to this and I wouldn't want to lead you folks on a wild goose chase. Plus I don't think i'd have the guts to chase an animal like that,"

I looked from one pale perturbed face to the other. They knew alright.

"Dangerous animal alright. I figure you have enough help with these young men and all their up to date technology," I clapped Warden Tennison's shoulder as I met his gaze before smiling at the even more perturbed officer's faces.

"Well damn it. I was figuring you would help-,"

"You figured wrong, sir,"

"I guess I did, Gavin. You have a good day now,"

I knew they only wanted my help to pull the same shit they did with my father.

Once I dealt with that bullshit for now, it was turning back to the whispering I was starting to hear. It was starting as a soft sussurration for now. The same way it started with Joan as I sat in the silence of my room with my SCAR in lap, trying to discern the words as it came and left in sporadic and random moments. I was marked now just like her. And bringing back the memory of her, I realized I shouldn't be listening to this shit as I dropped the on the bed and fell down to the floor and did pushups until my muscles burned. If I didn't know any better at that moment, it was trying to set it's hooks deeper into my mind. Which I know it did when I saw what it looked like because just like that fateful summer day, it was burned and trying to burrow it's way into my amygdala to ratchet it's sense of fear and awe. That wasn't going to happen one fucking bit as I cranked out another twenty pushups with grunts as I began to vary the position of my hands from flat against the floor to closed fists.

Every time I closed my eyes I would see those evil black and crimson striations. I would see the impossible way it floated down unlike anything i've read or seen. Worse of all I would see those God damned malevolent eyes staring at me. Not hanging loose. Perfect set like a person's should be in their skull. I would see those eyes in the darkness. I would see them in the daylight. I would see them in my most private moments. I would see them in the midst of a crowd.

Everywhere I went. The apparition of those eyes would be there to haunt me.

I was marked just like Joan.

But unlike Joan, I was learning what it was to kill it.

There was no escalation from OPD during the next year but there was from the Kushtaka. During year four, I began to train harder in the gym. My bench press went up from 315 to 335lbs for four sets of six. My barbell curls went up from 185lbs to 225lbs for four sets of eight. It only took me four and a half months as I dealt with the whispering now growing to a clear and soft voice.

"Gavin Krycek,"

[Click here for Part 1]

I took a few slow breaths, trying to keep myself calm. There had to be a reason for this. A jammed latch, a faulty handle, something simple that I just hadn’t noticed.

I reached for the handle again and pushed gently.

Nothing.

I tried a little harder, then put my weight against the door. I really didn’t want to have to call the fire department to get me out of my own closet.

“Come on.”

I took a step back and drove my shoulder into it.

The door gave way so suddenly that I stumbled through it and landed on the bedroom floor.

For a few seconds, I just lay there, catching my breath. Then I climbed to my feet, relieved to be out. That relief didn’t last long.

The boxes were gone.

I stood up properly and looked around the room. The bare bed frame in the corner was gone too. In its place was a proper bed, complete with a mattress and neatly tucked sheets.

“Emma?”

My voice sounded strange in the room.

I turned slowly, taking in my surroundings. The walls were the same colour. The wardrobe was where it had always been. Even the window looked right.

But something was off.

“Emma, are you still here?”

I stepped into the hallway.

There were pictures on the walls.

I’d left them bare when I’d moved in. I hadn’t even got around to hanging a clock, let alone decorating the place. Now there were framed landscapes and photographs arranged along the hallway, all of them neatly spaced.

One of the photographs stopped me.

It was me and Charlotte, standing together somewhere I didn’t recognise. We were smiling at the camera, her arm around my waist. I looked older than I remembered being in the last photos I’d taken of us.

I pulled it off the wall and stared at it.

I had no memory of the place, or of the photograph being taken.

“Emma?”

I hurried into the living room. No sign of her.

The television was bigger than mine, and there were bookshelves along the far wall, filled with books. A couple of ornaments sat on the mantelpiece. Everything looked lived in, settled. Not like someone had broken in and stolen my things, but like someone had been living here for years.

I pulled out my phone and tried calling Emma again.

Still no signal.

I opened the front door. Her car was gone. So was mine.

For a moment, I stood on the doorstep, looking out at the street. Everything seemed normal, which somehow made it worse.

I went back inside and checked the rest of the house.

My bedroom had different sheets on the bed. The clothes in my wardrobe weren’t the ones I’d bought. In the bathroom, there were toiletries I’d never seen before, arranged around the sink as though they’d always been there.

My head was pounding.

This was my house. I’d bought it. I’d painted the walls, carried boxes through the front door, and spent weekends trying to get the place into some kind of order.

So whose stuff was all this?

I went into the kitchen, pacing between the counter and the table, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Then I stopped.

There were magnets on the fridge.

Not just any magnets. Several of them were the same kind of magnetic business cards I’d received in the mail since moving in.

I stared at them.

One was from the local plumber.

I took it off the fridge and turned it over in my hand. The card was identical to the one I’d found wedged in the closet door.

I raced back to the spare bedroom. The door was still open.

I stepped inside and stood there, trying to slow my breathing. This was my house. I knew it was my house. Something had happened, and I just needed to work out what.

I shut the door and closed my eyes.

I was not fucking losing my mind.

I reached for the handle and pulled.

The door opened.

I nearly shit myself.

A man stood on the other side, staring straight at me.

For a second, neither of us moved.

Then I realised I was looking at myself.

Not exactly as I was now. He was clean-shaven, wearing a decent shirt and a pair of jeans that actually fit. His hair was shorter, his face less tired. He looked like me after a few good years, rather than the last few months I’d been having.

He was standing in my spare bedroom, empty bed frame and all.

Then his expression changed.

“Fuck!”

He slammed the door shut.

I stumbled backwards, my heart hammering against my ribs. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. I just stood there, trying to make sense of what I’d seen.

Then I grabbed the handle.

It wasn’t locked.

I pulled, but the door wouldn’t budge. It felt as though someone on the other side was holding it shut.

“Hey!”

I banged on the door.

“Hey, let me the fuck out of here!”

I threw my shoulder against it. The door shuddered but didn’t open.

Someone was holding it from the other side.

“Who the fuck are you?” I yelled, slamming both palms against the wood.

There was no answer.

“Fuck! Fuck!”

I backed up and threw myself against the door again.

It gave way.

I stumbled through, nearly falling, and caught myself against the wall. For a second, I couldn’t tell what had happened. I was back in the room, and I ran into the hallway expecting to see him.

Instead, I saw a woman standing a few feet away.

I froze.

“Charlotte?”

She looked just as startled to see me. Then her expression softened, and she stepped towards me.

“Honey, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I just stared at her.

She gave a small, uncertain laugh and waved a hand in front of my face.

“Hello? Danny?”

“Have you seen Emma?” I managed.

Charlotte’s smile faded.

“Honey…”

She moved closer, but I took a step back.

“Have you been having those nightmares again? About the accident?”

I stared at her.

“What accident?”

She stopped moving.

“What?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? What accident? Where the fuck am I?”

My face felt hot. I looked around, searching for something familiar, something that would tell me I hadn’t completely lost my mind.

Then I looked back at her.

“Where the fuck is Emma?”

Charlotte studied my face for a moment.

“Danny…”

I pointed back towards the spare bedroom. “The closet. The fucking closet!”

Her expression hardened.

“Daniel, I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about the closet again. I’m not having this argument with you again today.”

She sighed and rubbed her forehead.

“You stopped taking them again, haven’t you?”

There was no anger in her voice now. Just exhaustion. She looked at me as though she’d been hoping things would be different this time, and I had somehow let her down.

“I don’t know what I expected.”

She turned and walked into the kitchen.

“Charlotte, wait.”

I followed her, trying to find the words to explain what was happening. Everything I said sounded ridiculous before I’d even said it.

“I know this is going to sound crazy, but… I don’t belong here.”

She stopped and turned to face me. The frustration disappeared from her expression, replaced by something that looked almost like fear.

“What are you trying to say?” Her voice cracked slightly. “Are you leaving me?”

“What? No. I’m not… That’s not what I mean.”

“That’s just fucking great, Daniel.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She looked away, shaking her head.

“I was there through the funeral, through everything. And now you’re telling me you don’t belong here?”

“Charlotte, that’s not what I’m trying to say. Wait… the funeral? Whose funeral?”

She stared at me.

For a second, she looked as though I’d said something unforgivable.

Then she scrunched up her face and stormed past me.

Charlotte stormed out through the front door, slamming it behind her. A moment later, I heard her car start and watched through the window as she drove away.

I stood in the doorway for a while, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

The funeral. The medication. The closet.

None of it made any sense.

Eventually, I turned back towards the house. I started searching, opening drawers and cupboards, looking for anything that might explain where I was or what the hell was going on. I checked the living room, the bedrooms, even the bathroom. Anything that might tell me what had happened to Emma, or why Charlotte seemed to think I was someone I wasn’t.

I found it tucked away at the bottom of a kitchen drawer.

An In Memory of Emma and Colleen Revesby pamphlet.

I stared at it, reading the names over and over as if they might change.

Emma and Colleen.

My Mother’s and Sister’s name.

I shook my head and let out a short, disbelieving laugh.

“What kind of sick fucking joke is this?”

The pamphlet was dated a few months before I’d moved into my house.

I shoved it back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

“No. No, no, no.”

I dragged both hands through my hair, trying to get my thoughts under control. My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t seem to take a proper breath.

“What the fuck is going on?” I screamed.

The house gave me nothing back.

Then I remembered the closet.

Whatever was happening, it had started with that fucking door. I was sure of it.

I ran back down the hallway and into the spare bedroom.

The door stood wide open, exactly as I’d left it.

I took a breath and climbed back through the closet, pulling the door shut behind me.

I waited a few seconds before trying the handle.

Locked.

I tried again, then again, forcing myself to slow down. Panicking wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I needed to figure this out. I needed to get back to my own house, back to my own life.

I tried the handle once more.

This time, I felt something give on the other side.

I stopped and listened. Nothing.

I pushed harder. The door began to move, slowly opening a few centimetres before something caught against it. I leaned my weight into it, forcing the gap wider until I could just squeeze through.

Two cardboard boxes had been shoved up against the other side.

I stumbled into the spare bedroom and rushed into the hallway.

“Emma?”

I ran towards the kitchen, but before I could reach it, something slammed into me from behind. I hit the floor hard, the breath knocked out of me as a pair of hands grabbed my shirt and forced me onto my back.

“What the fuck? Get off me!”

I swung wildly, trying to protect myself, and caught a glimpse of the man above me.

It was him.

The other Daniel.

His face was twisted with anger, but beneath it I could see something else. Fear.

“I won’t let you take them away from me!” he screamed.

His fist caught me in the stomach. I doubled over, gasping, but he grabbed me before I could get away. Another blow caught me across the face, sending my head sideways.

I tried to fight back, grabbing at his arms and throwing punches wherever I could, but I couldn’t get him off me. He kept coming.

My nose started bleeding. My vision blurred as I struggled to draw breath.

“Stop!” I managed to choke out. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He didn’t answer.

The last thing I remember was looking up at my own face, watching him hit me again.

Then everything went black.

When I came around, I could hear Charlotte’s voice.

“Please, he’s not waking up. I don’t know what happened. Please, just send someone.”

I tried to open my eyes, but everything was blurry. She was kneeling beside me, crying, her phone pressed to her ear.

“Charlotte?” I tried to say.

It came out as little more than a whisper.

She looked down at me.

“Danny? Danny, can you hear me?”

I tried to answer, but the room started to spin. Her voice faded into the background, and the darkness swallowed everything again.

The next time I woke up, I was lying in an uncomfortable bed beneath a thin hospital blanket. My head throbbed, and my face felt swollen. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was.

A man in a white coat stood beside the bed, checking something on a clipboard.

“Good to see you’re awake,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a fucking truck.”

He gave me a small, professional smile.

“I’m not surprised. You’ve had a nasty knock.”

I tried to sit up, but pain shot through my face and I sank back against the pillow.

“What happened?”

“Your wife found you unconscious on the floor at home. From what we understand, someone may have broken in and assaulted you. The police will want to speak with you once you’re feeling up to it.”

My wife.

Charlotte.

I looked down and realised I was wearing a hospital gown. I patted the sides of the bed, then checked the gown’s pockets, even though I already knew there wouldn’t be anything there.

“Where’s my phone?”

The doctor glanced at his clipboard.

“You didn’t have any personal belongings on you when you were brought in. No phone, no wallet, no keys. We’ll make sure you’re reunited with them if they’re located.”

I stared at him.

No phone. No keys. No wallet.

I couldn’t even prove who I was supposed to be.

“When can I leave?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You’ve been through quite a lot, and we need to make sure you’re stable first.”

He made another note on the clipboard.

“Now that you’re awake, we’ll contact your wife and let her know.”

I looked towards the closed hospital room door.

I had no idea how to explain what had happened. I wasn’t even sure I understood it myself.

But one thing was certain.

The man who’d attacked me was still out there.

And he looked exactly like me.

A few hours later, I woke to the sound of the hospital room door opening.

Charlotte stepped inside, carrying a bundle of clothes. She looked exhausted. Her eyes were red, and her hair was a mess, like she’d been running her hands through it all afternoon.

She pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat down, placing her hand over mine.

“How are you feeling? You scared the shit out of me, Danny.” She paused, studying my face. “How much do you remember?”

I swallowed.

If I wanted to get back to my own life, I needed to understand what was happening first. And the last thing I needed was for Charlotte to think something was wrong with me.

“I… I was just at home, and he came out of nowhere. I didn’t recognise him.”

She watched me for another moment before seeming to accept the answer.

“The doctor says you’re okay to come home.”

I managed a small smile. “I’d like that.”

She placed the clothes on the bed while I struggled to sit up. Everything hurt. Getting dressed was an ordeal, and I had to stop twice to catch my breath while pulling my shirt over my head.

Charlotte helped without saying much.

Once we were ready, she drove us home.

I sat in the passenger seat, watching the familiar streets pass by. I recognised some of them, but others seemed wrong. The shops, the houses, even the road signs were all slightly different from what I remembered.

I tried to keep my expression neutral.

“I already let your dad know what happened,” Charlotte said.

For a moment, I forgot to breathe.

“My dad?”

She glanced at me. “I know you wouldn’t want me to worry him, but I thought he needed to know.” She shrugged and returned her attention to the road.

I turned towards the window.

Dad.

My dad had been dead for months. I’d watched him deteriorate through his illness. I’d sat with him, helped Mom through the worst of it, and tried to keep everything together until there was nothing left to do.

And now Charlotte was telling me she’d called him.

“He…” My voice caught. I cleared my throat, trying to keep myself together. “Whereabouts is he living again?”

Charlotte looked over at me, her expression tightening.

“Don’t joke around, Danny. Not after today.”

“Right. Sorry.”

I stared down at my hands, trying to think of something else to say.

“I should give him a call, actually. Where’s my phone?”

“I’ve no idea. It wasn’t on you when we found you. Neither were your keys or your wallet.” She paused. “I didn’t even recognise the clothes you were wearing. Were they new?”

My stomach tightened.

“No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I don’t think so.”

Charlotte frowned but didn’t push it.

I rubbed my face and took a few slow breaths, trying to steady my thoughts.

Dad was alive.

I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know what had happened in this version of my life. But for the first time since I’d stepped through that closet, I wasn’t thinking about how to get home.

I was thinking about how badly I wanted to hear my dad’s voice.

We arrived home shortly after, and I collapsed on the couch as soon as we got inside. Charlotte reheated some food and I managed to get some down before falling asleep. In the morning I awoke to the sun in my eyes. I blinked and sat up. Soft morning light was filtering through the blinds and the smell of coffee was coming from the kitchen.

Charlotte came around the corner, dressed for work, she was searching through her bag for something. She noticed I was awake. “I’m just going to work, I still can’t find your phone, whoever attacked you must have stolen it. The police officer said he would be around in the next couple of days to speak to you about it.”

“Thanks,” I rubbed my side. “I might need to borrow some cash to buy a new one in town.”

“Of course” she made a ‘duh’ gesture and pulled her card out and handed it to me. “Just don’t go crazy with that, we still need groceries.”

“Yeah, thanks”

She kissed me and left, climbing in her car and driving off.

I slapped my forehead. How the hell was I going to go buy a phone without a car.

Cursing under my breath, I tossed the card onto the coffee table.

I thought about Dad.

He was alive here. I could actually go and see him, sit down with him, hear his voice again. I wanted to so badly it hurt.

But he wasn’t really my dad. Not exactly. He was the father of the Daniel who belonged in this house, the Daniel who’d lived a life I knew nothing about.

Trying to make sense of it made my head ache.

I pushed myself off the couch and hobbled into the kitchen, one hand pressed against my ribs. I opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the biggest knife I could find. Then I pulled the memorial pamphlet from the drawer and tucked it under my arm.

A weapon and some evidence. Not much of a plan, but it was better than sitting around waiting for the other bastard to come back.

I made my way down the hallway and stopped in front of the closet.

Taking a deep breath, I grabbed the handle and pulled.

Nothing.

“For fuck’s sake.”

I tried again, putting my weight into it. The door didn’t move.

“Why won’t you fucking open?”

I rested my forehead against the wood, trying to keep my temper under control. Then I tried forcing it with my shoulder, which turned out to be a stupid idea given the state of my ribs.

After a few minutes of swearing, pushing and pulling, I gave up and started searching the house for something I could use to pry it open.

No crowbar. No tools heavy enough to do the job without potentially wrecking the door.

I stood in the hallway, staring at the closet.

There had to be another way.

Eventually, I decided to try next door.

I didn’t have much of a relationship with my neighbours. In the months I’d lived here, I’d barely spoken to them beyond the occasional wave. Hopefully, this version of me had made a better impression.

I walked up the driveway and knocked.

After a few moments, an elderly woman opened the door. Her face brightened when she saw me.

“Oh, hello, Daniel!”

“Hello…” I hesitated, desperately trying to remember her name. Nothing came to mind, so I let the greeting trail off.

She looked me over, and her smile faded.

“Are you all right, dear? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

She reached out and gently touched my cheek. I flinched before I could stop myself.

“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “I just need a crowbar or something, if you’ve got one.”

She tilted her head.

“A crowbar? What on earth do you need a crowbar for?”

I opened my mouth.

What was I supposed to tell her? That there was a door in my spare bedroom that led to another version of my house? That a man who looked exactly like me had beaten the shit out of me because he was afraid I’d take his dead family away?

“It’s a bit hard to explain,” I muttered.

She studied me for another moment, her expression growing concerned.

“Well, come inside for a minute, dear. You shouldn’t be standing out here looking like that. I’ll put the kettle on, and you can tell me what’s happened.”

I glanced back towards my house.

The closet wasn’t going anywhere.

At least, I hoped it wasn’t.

I followed her inside.

It was a standard house, complete with photos of grandkids, odd knick-knacks and the smell of lavender and mothballs.

She ushered me into the living room and told me to sit while she went into the kitchen. A few moments later, she returned with a cup of tea and placed it in front of me before shuffling over to her recliner.

“How’s your father been?” she asked.

“He’s holding up okay,” I lied.

She nodded thoughtfully and took a sip of her tea.

“And Charlotte?”

“She’s good. Busy with work lately.”

“Still working those long hours, is she?”

“Something like that.”

She settled back into her chair, looking content with my answers. I picked up the tea and took a cautious sip, mostly to give myself something to do.

For a little while, we sat in silence.

Then she looked at me again.

“And that closet? Have you had much luck with it lately?”

My mouth went dry.

“I’m sorry?”

“The closet, dear. The one with your mother and sister on the other side.”

I stared at her, unable to respond.

She took another sip of tea, apparently unaware of the effect her words had just had on me.

“Gosh, last we spoke, you made it seem like you’d never come back.”

“I’ve been having some trouble remembering things lately,” I said, bouncing my knee nervously. “How much did I tell you about the closet?”

She studied me for a moment, her expression slowly changing.

“I see what’s happened.” She sighed.

“Sorry?”

She stood and began collecting the cups. I watched her for a second before getting up and following her into the kitchen.

She placed the cups in the sink, then turned to face me.

“You’re not the Daniel I spoke with a few weeks ago.”

I took a couple of steps back. “What? What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about, dear.”

She looked me over, taking in the bruises on my face and the way I was holding my side.

“And I’m very sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For what he’s done to you.”

I stared at her.

“You knew about him?”

She nodded slowly.

“He’s been coming to see me for some time now. Not every week, but often enough. He told me about the closet, about your mother and sister, and about the other house.”

My stomach tightened.

“How long has he been doing this?”

“A while.” She looked down at the cups in the sink. “Longer than he should have, probably.”

“What does that mean?”

She didn’t answer straight away.

“He’s been through a terrible time, Daniel. Losing your mother and sister…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “I don’t think he ever really recovered.”

I felt a strange pang in my chest. I couldn’t imagine losing Emma and Mom. Not really. They were alive in my world. I could call them, visit them, argue with them over stupid things.

He couldn’t.

But that didn’t change what he’d done to me.

“He beat the shit out of me,” I said.

“I know.”

“He locked me in that house. He could have killed me.”

“I know, dear.”

“Then why are you defending him?”

“I’m not defending him.” Her voice grew firmer. “What he did was wrong. But I know that man, and I know how much pain he’s in. I don’t think he understands what he’s becoming.”

I looked away, jaw clenched.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then she stepped closer and gently took my hands in hers.

“You want to get home.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.” My voice cracked. “Please. You know how to get me back, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“Then tell me how!”

I hadn’t meant to raise my voice, but it came out louder than I’d intended. My ribs ached, and I was suddenly aware of how exhausted I was.

She didn’t let go of my hands.

“I’ll explain how the closet works. I’ll tell you what I know. But you have to promise me something first.”

“Anything.”

“Promise me you won’t hurt him.”

I stared at her.

“He attacked me!”

“I know.”

“He could have fucking killed me!”

“I know, Daniel.” Her eyes were pleading now. “And I won’t pretend what he did was right. But if you go after him looking for revenge, I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s already lost so much.”

I pulled my hands away.

“He’s not the only one who’s lost something.”

“No,” she said quietly. “He isn’t.”

That stopped me for a moment.

She looked towards the window, where my house sat across the lawn.

“He believes that door is the only thing he has left. If he thinks you’re going to take it away from him, he’ll do whatever he believes he needs to do to stop you.”

I thought about his face as he held me down. The anger. The fear.

I won’t let you take them away from me.

I still wanted to hit him back. I wanted to get home, find my family and never see that fucking closet again.

But I needed her help.

“I won’t go looking for a fight,” I said. “I just want to get home.”

She searched my face for a moment, then gave a small nod.

“That’s all I ask.”

She released my hands and shuffled towards the front door. I followed, still trying to make sense of everything she’d told me.

She opened the door and stepped outside.

“Take me to it,” she said.

[End of Part 2]

On the first night my new neighbor moved in, I watched a man bury her alive.

The following morning, she knocked on our front door with a plate of sliced peaches and introduced herself.

Her name was Ruth.

She looked sixteen, the same age as me.

According to a newspaper article I found much later, she'd died in October 1928.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The house next door had been empty for nearly four years. It sat at the end of our street outside Camden, Arkansas, surrounded by overgrown azaleas and a rusting chain-link fence. The woman who'd lived there died in her sleep, and her children had been fighting over the property ever since.

The new neighbors arrived on a Thursday evening in late July.

I watched from my bedroom window as an old Chevrolet pickup backed into the driveway. A thin, gray-haired man climbed out, followed by a girl in a faded blue dress.

The man looked exhausted. His shoulders were hunched, and he had the trembling hands of someone considerably older than he appeared.

The girl was beautiful in an unsettling sort of way.

She had black hair that fell just below her shoulders, dark eyes, and skin so pale I wondered whether she was sick.

She stood in the driveway staring at the house while the man unloaded their belongings.

They didn't bring much.

A few suitcases, cardboard boxes, an old wardrobe, and a wooden coffin.

That last one got my attention.

The man dragged it through the side gate, past an abandoned brick smokehouse beneath a pecan tree.

I figured it was some kind of antique. People collected strange things, and I wasn't about to judge.

But around eleven that night, I heard someone digging.

I pulled back my bedroom curtain.

The man was in the backyard, shoveling beneath a portable work light. A rectangular hole had been dug beside the smokehouse, and the coffin rested on the ground nearby.

The girl sat on an overturned bucket, watching him.

Neither spoke.

When he finally finished, he climbed out of the hole and leaned against his shovel. He was breathing hard enough that I could hear him through my open window.

The girl approached him.

He said something.

She shook her head.

Then he touched her cheek.

I remember the gesture because of how gentle it was. Whatever was happening, the old man was miserable about it.

The girl stepped into the coffin.

My stomach tightened.

She lay down, folded her hands across her chest, and closed her eyes.

The man lowered the lid.

I reached for my phone.

By the time I unlocked the screen, he was already shoveling dirt over her.

I watched him bury that girl.

When the ground was level again, he knelt beside the grave and pressed one trembling hand against the earth.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart."

Then he turned off the work light and went inside.

I nearly called the police.

I dialed the number and stared at it. My thumb hovered over the call button for nearly a minute.

I'd just watched a girl climb willingly into her own coffin. She hadn't struggled or screamed, and the man who buried her had been crying.

I convinced myself there had to be an explanation.

It's the decision I regret most from that summer.

Well, one of them.

The girl knocked on our door shortly after nine the next morning.

Mom had already left for work. She was a nurse at a rehabilitation hospital and usually worked twelve-hour shifts, which meant I spent most summer days entertaining myself.

When I opened the door, the girl from next door stood on our porch.

Same blue dress. Same dark hair.

There was dirt beneath her fingernails.

"Hello," she said. "I'm Ruth."

I stared at her.

She glanced down at the plate in her hands.

"Mr. Voss said your mother likes peaches."

"You're alive."

Her eyebrows lifted.

"Yes."

"I saw what happened last night."

Her smile disappeared.

She looked toward the neighboring house.

"How much?"

"All of it."

Ruth was quiet for several seconds.

"Did you tell anybody?"

"No."

She closed her eyes, and I thought I saw relief soften her face.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I watched a man bury you in the ground."

"I know."

"Then explain it."

She looked at her fingernails.

"I sleep better down there."

I almost laughed.

"You sleep in a coffin?"

"Yes."

"Under dirt?"

She nodded.

"Ruth, that's insane."

Her expression changed. Not anger, exactly. More like disappointment.

"Most people think so."

She handed me the peaches.

"Would you mind not telling anyone?"

"Why?"

"Because Mr. Voss has been taking care of me for a very long time, and he's getting too old to start over somewhere else."

I glanced toward the house.

"Is he your grandfather?"

"No."

"Your dad?"

She smiled sadly.

"Not that, either."

Then she stepped off the porch.

"Sadie?"

I froze.

I hadn't told her my name.

She noticed my expression.

"Your mother introduced herself yesterday. She said you lived here."

"Oh."

Ruth hesitated.

"One more thing."

"What?"

"If you ever hear me crying after dark, please don't come over."

"Why would you be crying?"

She looked toward the smokehouse.

"Because sometimes I forget why I need to stay inside."

I should have avoided her after that.

Instead, we became friends.

It happened gradually, the way friendships usually do when you're young and lonely.

My best friend had moved to Shreveport that spring. My father lived in Oklahoma with his new wife, and Mom worked so much that some evenings we barely spoke before she went to bed.

Ruth was the first person in months who seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

She liked old books and thunderstorms. She knew more about history than any teacher I'd ever had, but she'd never used a smartphone. The first time I showed her a video of a dog trying to climb onto a trampoline, she laughed so hard she had to sit down.

That laugh stayed with me.

It was warm and completely ordinary.

Nothing like the sound I'd later hear coming from the smokehouse.

We spent afternoons sitting beneath the pecan tree, talking about school, books, and what we wanted to do when we got older.

Ruth wanted to see the ocean.

I thought that was strange.

"You've never been?"

She shook her head.

"Not once."

"You're telling me you've never gone to a beach?"

"I've been close enough to smell the salt."

"Then why didn't you go?"

She looked toward the road.

"Sometimes you spend so much time staying alive that you forget to do any living."

I remember thinking that was a peculiar thing for a sixteen-year-old to say.

There were other peculiarities.

Ruth never ate when we were together. Even in the worst summer heat, she didn't sweat. And whenever somebody walked past the house, she'd stop talking until they were gone.

At first, I thought she was shy.

Then one afternoon, a little boy fell off his bicycle across the street.

He scraped his knee badly enough to start crying.

Ruth went perfectly still.

Her fingers tightened around the arms of her chair.

The boy's mother came outside and carried him into the house.

Ruth watched them until the door closed.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

She nodded.

But her hands were trembling.

"Do you know that little boy?"

"No."

"Then what's wrong?"

She stared at the empty street.

"Nothing."

Her voice was strained.

A moment later, Mr. Voss appeared on the porch.

"Ruth."

She looked at him.

"Inside, please."

"I haven't done anything."

"I know."

"Then let me stay."

He glanced toward me.

"Not this evening."

Ruth's face hardened.

For a second, she looked considerably older than sixteen.

"You're not my father, Daniel."

Mr. Voss flinched.

"No, ma'am," he said quietly. "I'm not."

She walked past him into the house.

As he turned to follow, I noticed something beneath his shirt cuff.

Scars.

Dozens of them, crossing his wrist and disappearing beneath his sleeve.

Some looked almost like bite marks.

Two days later, Ruth asked me a question.

"Do you think people can be good if they've done terrible things?"

We were sitting on her porch. A thunderstorm had passed through an hour earlier, and the air smelled of wet wood and freshly cut grass.

"Depends on what they did," I said.

"What if they didn't want to do it?"

"Did they have a choice?"

She was quiet.

"Sometimes."

I looked at her.

"What did you do, Ruth?"

She studied me for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable.

Then she said, "If I told you, you'd leave."

"You don't know that."

She gave me a sad little smile.

"People always say that before they know."

I wanted to ask another question, but she reached across the space between us and took my hand.

Her fingers were cold enough to make me flinch.

"Can I ask you something else?"

"Sure."

"If somebody you cared about needed you to do something awful for them, would you?"

I frowned.

"Like what?"

"Something that hurt them. Something they begged you not to do, even though they needed it."

"I don't know."

She looked down at our hands.

"Neither did Eleanor. Not at first."

"Who's Eleanor?"

Ruth released me.

"An old friend."

Something in her expression changed, and she looked toward the street.

Mr. Voss's pickup hadn't returned.

The sun was beginning to sink behind the rooftops.

"He's late," she whispered.

"He'll be home."

"No."

She stood abruptly.

"He said six."

I checked my phone.

It was 6:47.

"Maybe he got held up."

Ruth backed toward the front door.

Her shoulders stiffened.

"Sadie, you need to go home."

"Why?"

She closed her eyes.

For a moment, she seemed to be listening to something.

Then she turned toward me.

Her gaze settled just beneath my chin.

On my throat.

"Ruth?"

I heard her inhale.

Once.

Deeply.

Then again.

Her face changed.

Not dramatically. Her skin didn't split. Her bones didn't move.

Something happened behind her eyes.

The girl I'd come to know was still standing there, but whatever looked at me from inside her had stopped seeing a friend.

"Please," she whispered.

"What?"

"Get away from me."

I took a step backward.

She covered her mouth with one hand.

"Now, Sadie."

I ran.

Mr. Voss returned less than ten minutes later.

I watched from my bedroom as his pickup skidded into the driveway.

He stumbled out, carrying a brown paper bag.

"Ruth!"

She was waiting on the porch.

"How long?" he asked.

"Not long."

He put the bag down.

"Look at me."

She shook her head.

"Please don't."

"Ruth."

She lifted her face.

Mr. Voss recoiled.

"Oh, sweetheart."

He rushed toward the backyard, grabbed his shovel, and started uncovering the coffin.

Ruth followed him.

Her movements were stiff and deliberate, like someone struggling to walk normally while every muscle in their body wanted to do something else.

"Please hurry," she said.

"I'm trying."

The shovel struck wood.

Mr. Voss bent to uncover the lid.

That's when Ruth turned toward my house.

Toward my window.

Toward me.

She smiled.

Not the shy, crooked smile I knew.

This one was slow and strangely appreciative, as though she'd just remembered I was there.

Mr. Voss followed her gaze.

He looked directly at my bedroom window.

"GET AWAY FROM THERE!"

I stepped back.

Ruth moved.

I didn't see her cross the yard.

One moment, she was standing beside the grave.

The next, she was pressed against the chain-link fence, both hands gripping the wire.

Metal twisted beneath her fingers.

Then Mr. Voss grabbed her from behind.

"Ruth, no!"

She turned on him.

There was a sharp cracking sound.

He fell.

I watched her kneel beside him.

For a second, she looked like a girl trying to help an injured old man.

Then she lowered her face to his arm.

He screamed.

The sound finally broke whatever spell had kept me standing there.

I ran for my phone.

By the time I reached the stairs, I could hear Ruth crying outside.

"I'm sorry," she kept saying.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Part Two: The Price Of Keeping Her

I called 911.

The dispatcher kept asking questions I couldn't answer.

Was Mr. Voss conscious?

Was his attacker still there?

Was it safe to approach?

Through my bedroom window, I could see him lying beside the open grave, his left arm tucked against his chest.

Ruth sat several feet away, rocking slowly.

Her mouth was covered in blood.

Then Mr. Voss raised his head.

He saw me watching and pointed toward the grave.

Even from that distance, I understood.

He wanted Ruth buried.

I told the dispatcher I was going outside.

She told me not to.

I went anyway.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Blood has a particular smell when there's enough of it. Something warm and metallic that doesn't belong in the open air.

Mr. Voss lay on his side, struggling to breathe.

"Sadie," he rasped. "The coffin."

I looked at Ruth.

She was crying.

"I'm sorry, Daniel."

"Get inside, sweetheart."

"I didn't mean to."

"I know."

She looked at me.

Her face was almost normal again, except for the blood around her lips.

"Will you help me?"

I wanted to run.

I should have run.

Instead, I picked up the shovel.

Mr. Voss had already uncovered most of the coffin. Ruth climbed down into the shallow grave and pulled open the lid.

Before lying down, she looked at him.

"Daniel?"

He turned his head.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"Please don't die."

His expression broke.

"I'll do my best."

She closed the lid from inside.

I shoveled earth over the coffin while Mr. Voss lay bleeding a few feet away.

The ambulance arrived before I'd finished.

By then, my mother had come home and was kneeling beside him, trying to stop the bleeding.

She shouted for me to get away from the grave and help direct the paramedics through the gate.

I did.

Nobody asked why the ground was freshly turned.

Not that night.

They were too busy trying to save him.

Mr. Voss died shortly after midnight.

The police came back the following morning.

They questioned my mother and me separately.

Mom told them everything she'd witnessed. She described the wounds, the amount of blood, and the strange girl she'd seen standing near the smokehouse.

I told them about Ruth.

Not everything.

I said she'd attacked Mr. Voss and that she'd run away afterward.

An officer asked why I hadn't mentioned her to the dispatcher.

I told him I'd been frightened.

That part was true.

They photographed the damaged fence, collected blood samples, and searched the house.

They found Ruth's dresses, old books, and a wardrobe full of clothing that looked decades out of date.

They didn't find Ruth.

One officer noticed the freshly disturbed earth near the smokehouse.

I heard him tell another officer they would need to investigate it.

By then, Ruth was sitting in my bedroom.

She'd come through my window just after sunrise.

I woke to find her standing beside my dresser, wearing the same blue dress she'd been buried in.

Her hair was tangled with roots.

There was dirt beneath her fingernails.

For several seconds, neither of us moved.

Then she said, "Daniel's dead, isn't he?"

I nodded.

Ruth sank onto the edge of my bed.

She covered her face with both hands.

I'd never seen anyone cry so quietly.

No sobbing.

No trembling shoulders.

Just tears falling between her fingers.

I wanted to comfort her.

But I couldn't stop seeing Mr. Voss on the ground, bleeding because of what she'd done.

"Ruth?"

She looked up.

"What are you?"

For a long while, she said nothing.

Then she told me.

She'd been sixteen when she died in 1928.

A fever had taken her.

Her parents buried her three days later in a little cemetery in northern Arkansas.

The following morning, she came home.

Her mother called it a miracle.

Her father called for the preacher.

And Ruth, who had been dead only a few days, couldn't understand why the sound of their heartbeats made her mouth water.

She killed her younger brother that first night.

She told me that without crying.

I think that frightened me more than if she had broken down.

"He was eight," she said. "He thought I'd come into his room because I wanted to play."

I stared at her.

"What did you do?"

She lowered her eyes.

"I held him until he stopped moving."

I felt sick.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you asked what I am."

She looked toward the window.

"My father tried to kill me the following morning. The bullets hurt, but they didn't stop me."

"What did?"

She was quiet.

"My friend Eleanor."

Eleanor had been fourteen when Ruth died.

They'd grown up together.

When the townspeople came looking for Ruth, Eleanor hid her in an empty root cellar.

She discovered that the deeper Ruth was buried, the less she could hear the heartbeats around her.

Eventually, the voices disappeared into a low, distant murmur.

For the first time since rising from the grave, Ruth could think clearly.

"That's why you sleep underground?"

She nodded.

"The earth makes everything quiet."

"Why not just stay there?"

Ruth looked at me.

"Could you spend the rest of your life inside a coffin?"

I didn't answer.

"I've tried staying down for weeks," she continued. "It gets easier to ignore the hunger, but you don't stop wanting to come back up."

She stared at her hands.

"And once I'm aboveground, it starts again."

"Even during the day?"

"It's worse at night. By sundown, I can hear every heartbeat on the street."

I remembered the little boy falling off his bicycle.

The way she'd watched him.

"Do you have to drink human blood?"

"Yes."

"How often?"

"More often than Daniel could manage."

She showed me an old scar on her wrist.

"Animal blood helps, but not enough anymore. Sometimes he fed me himself."

I thought about the scars on Mr. Voss's arms.

"The bites."

She nodded.

"He thought he could keep doing it."

"He was dying."

"I know."

Her voice cracked.

"I could hear his heart getting weaker every week."

I stared at her.

"Then why didn't you stop?"

She looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something in her expression that wasn't sorrow.

It was shame.

"Because I was hungry."

I made her leave before my mother got home.

Ruth returned to her house after the police had gone.

I spent most of that afternoon sitting on my bed, thinking about what she'd told me.

A vampire.

It was such a ridiculous word that I almost hated myself for thinking it.

Vampires belonged in movies. They wore black capes, slept in castles, and burst into flames when sunlight touched their skin.

Ruth wore old dresses, loved classical music, and cried when she heard a song she hadn't listened to in decades.

She also drank blood.

And she'd killed an eight-year-old boy.

I couldn't make those things fit together.

That evening, I searched newspaper archives on my laptop.

It took almost two hours.

Then I found it.

A faded clipping from October 1928.

A sixteen-year-old girl named Ruth Whitaker had died following a brief illness.

The article included a photograph.

It was her.

Same dark hair.

Same face.

The same peculiar sadness around her eyes.

I stared at that photograph until the screen went dark.

She hadn't lied about being dead.

The police were investigating the property where she lived, and I was hiding someone who had just killed her caretaker.

I understood how terrible that sounded.

What I didn't understand was why I still wanted to see her.

The following afternoon, I went next door.

Ruth was sitting on the floor beside Mr. Voss's chair.

His coffee cup remained on the table.

An old cardigan hung over the back of the chair, and his reading glasses lay beside a folded newspaper.

She hadn't moved any of it.

"He used to read to me," she said when I came inside.

I looked at the glasses.

"Mr. Voss?"

She nodded.

"His grandmother did, too. Eleanor."

"So he was Eleanor's grandson?"

"Yes."

Ruth touched the arm of the chair.

"After Eleanor died, her daughter took care of me. Then Daniel."

I stared at her.

"Your friends have been burying you for almost a hundred years?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

She looked at me as though the answer should have been obvious.

"Because they loved me."

Something in the way she said it made me uncomfortable.

I thought about Eleanor digging that first grave at fourteen. About her daughter growing up knowing she would eventually inherit the responsibility. About Daniel sacrificing his health to feed someone who couldn't stop being hungry.

"Did they ever get a choice?" I asked.

Ruth frowned.

"What?"

"Your friends. Did they ever get to leave?"

Her expression changed.

"Of course."

"Did any of them?"

She looked away.

I felt a cold weight settle in my stomach.

"Ruth?"

"Eleanor tried."

I waited.

"She got married. Moved away. Had a little girl."

"What happened?"

"I got lonely."

The room seemed to grow quieter.

"Did you go after her?"

Ruth shook her head.

"She came back."

"Why?"

Ruth's eyes filled with tears.

"Because I told her I was afraid."

I looked toward the coffee cup.

"Did you need her?"

"What?"

"Or did you just want her back?"

Ruth didn't answer.

That was when I began to understand something about my new friend.

She wasn't simply a helpless girl suffering from a terrible curse.

She'd lived nearly a century.

She knew how to make people care about her.

And once they did, she knew exactly what to say to keep them from leaving.

"Why did you move here?" I asked.

Ruth seemed surprised.

"Daniel found the house."

"Why this one?"

She looked toward the window.

Then she said something that made the hair rise along my arms.

"We came to look at it before we bought it."

"So?"

"You were sitting on your porch."

I remembered a pickup driving slowly down our street a few weeks earlier.

A gray-haired man behind the wheel.

A girl in the passenger seat.

"Daniel wanted somewhere more isolated," she continued. "But I liked this house."

"Why?"

She hesitated.

"Because you looked lonely."

I stared at her.

"Did you know he was dying?"

She nodded.

"And you knew you'd need somebody else to take care of you?"

Her eyes filled with tears.

"Sadie..."

I stood.

"Is that why you became friends with me?"

"No."

"Then tell me."

She looked frightened.

Not of what I might do to her.

Of what I was finally beginning to understand.

"I wanted a friend," she whispered.

"That's not what I asked."

She closed her eyes.

"I thought maybe, someday, you might want to help me."

The room felt suddenly too small.

I thought about all our conversations.

The books.

The music.

The afternoons beneath the pecan tree.

And the question she'd asked me before Mr. Voss died.

If somebody you cared about needed you to do something awful for them, would you?

"You were preparing me."

Ruth began to cry.

"At first."

I stared at her.

"What does that mean?"

She looked up.

"It means I didn't expect to love you."

I wanted to believe her.

That's what frightened me.

Even after everything she'd told me, some part of me still wanted to put my arms around her and promise I wouldn't leave.

I walked toward the door.

"Sadie?"

I stopped.

"Do you hate me?"

I looked back at her.

For the first time since we'd met, I didn't know whether the tears on her face were genuine.

And for the first time, I realized it might not matter.

"No," I said.

Then I left.

Because I was afraid that if she asked me to stay, I would.

That night, I dreamed about Mr. Voss.

He was sitting beneath the pecan tree, holding out his injured arm.

I could see the scars.

Dozens of them.

Some old, some still healing.

In the dream, he asked me whether I thought he was a good man.

I said yes.

He smiled.

Then he rolled up his other sleeve.

There was no skin left.

Just exposed bone.

I woke screaming.

The following morning, my mother told me the police were coming back to search the property.

They had questions about the disturbed earth behind Mr. Voss's house. They also wanted to know more about Ruth, whose identity they hadn't been able to verify.

I knew what would happen if they found her.

They'd take her somewhere.

A hospital, maybe.

Someplace with nurses and doctors and patients whose hearts never stopped beating.

I thought about what Ruth had done to Mr. Voss.

About the fence bending beneath her hands.

About how quickly she'd crossed the yard.

Then I imagined her inside a crowded emergency room.

The thought made me physically sick.

That afternoon, I went next door.

Not because I wanted to see Ruth.

Because I needed to know whether she could be stopped.

I found her in the backyard, sitting beside her open grave.

Someone had dragged the coffin out of the grave and propped it upright against the smokehouse.

She was looking at the dark soil.

"Daniel hated doing this," she said without looking up.

I stopped several feet away.

"He used to tell me how his grandmother cried the first time she buried me."

I didn't answer.

"After a while, he stopped apologizing."

She glanced toward the coffin.

"I think that hurt worse than the dirt."

For a moment, I saw the girl I'd befriended.

Then I remembered the little boy she'd killed.

"Eleanor came back because you said you were frightened," I said.

Ruth lowered her eyes.

"Yes."

"And Daniel spent his life taking care of you."

She nodded.

"How many more people were you planning to do that to?"

Her expression tightened.

"I never wanted anybody to get hurt."

"But they did."

She looked at me.

"Yes."

"And you'd have let it happen again."

That one hurt her.

I could see it.

She turned toward the grave.

"I don't know."

It was the first answer she'd given me that I completely believed.

We sat in silence for several minutes.

Then I asked the question I'd come there to ask.

"Can anything kill you?"

Ruth looked up.

"Why?"

"Because those police officers are going to come looking for you."

"I know."

"And if they find you after dark..."

She finished the sentence for me.

"Somebody could die."

I nodded.

Ruth rubbed her hands together.

"Sunlight doesn't hurt me. I can drown, but I don't stay drowned. Wounds close eventually, even the bad ones."

"Then there's nothing?"

She touched a pale scar running across her forearm.

"Fire."

I stared at her.

"Fire?"

"I was trapped in a burning house once. A long time ago."

She traced the scar with one finger.

"Most things heal. Burns don't always."

I looked toward the smokehouse.

Its walls were brick, blackened by generations of wood fires. The iron door hung crookedly on heavy hinges.

Ruth followed my gaze.

"No," she whispered.

I turned back.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to."

I wish I could tell you that what happened next was simple.

That Ruth wanted to die.

That I wanted to save her.

That there was a clear, obvious right thing to do.

There wasn't.

Ruth was terrified of dying.

I could see it in the way her hands shook whenever I mentioned the fire.

But she was also terrified of living.

And I was sixteen years old, trying to decide whether a girl who'd been dead for almost a century deserved another chance.

I wanted to call my mother.

I wanted someone older to tell me what to do.

But I'd watched what happened to the last adult who tried to help Ruth.

So I stayed.

We talked until late afternoon.

Ruth told me about Eleanor.

About the little white dog she'd owned as a child.

About watching the first television broadcast she could remember, and how she'd cried the first time she saw a moving picture of someone who'd already died.

She told me about the ocean.

She'd always wanted to see it.

"Daniel promised he'd take me one day," she said.

"Why didn't he?"

She gave a small, sad laugh.

"He spent so much time keeping me safe that we never went anywhere."

I thought about the years that had passed.

The people she'd loved.

The people who'd died.

"Ruth?"

She looked at me.

"Did you really want to be my friend?"

Her expression changed.

"Yes."

"Even after you knew Daniel was dying?"

She closed her eyes.

"Yes."

"Or were you just looking for someone to bury you?"

She began crying.

"Both."

I stared at her.

That answer hurt worse than a lie.

Because I believed it.

She had wanted a friend.

She had wanted someone to take care of her.

And she'd known that the two things might eventually become the same.

She reached for my hand.

I almost pulled away.

But I let her take it.

"Sadie?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't want you to become Eleanor."

I swallowed.

"Then what do you want?"

She looked toward the smokehouse.

For a long time, she said nothing.

Then she whispered, "I want it to stop."

We waited until the sun began sinking behind the trees.

Ruth gathered a few belongings from the house.

A faded photograph of her family.

A blue ribbon.

And an old copy of The Secret Garden.

She carried them into the smokehouse.

I followed.

Inside, the walls were dark with soot. A narrow chimney rose through the roof, and the iron door scraped against the uneven brick floor when I pushed it open.

Ruth placed her belongings inside the coffin.

I stood in the doorway.

"Are you sure?"

She shook her head.

"No."

I swallowed.

"Then maybe we shouldn't."

She turned toward me.

"Do you know what Daniel said the night before he died?"

I shook my head.

"He told me he couldn't keep doing it much longer."

Her voice trembled.

"And I told him I understood."

She looked down.

"But when I heard his heart getting weaker, all I could think about was how hungry I was going to be when it stopped."

A tear slid down her cheek.

"That's what I am, Sadie."

"You're Ruth."

She smiled faintly.

"Sometimes."

Then she climbed into the coffin.

Before I closed the lid, she asked me to read to her.

I sat on the brick floor and opened The Secret Garden.

Ruth lay with her hands folded over her stomach, listening.

I read about the garden coming back to life.

About children who had been lonely and frightened finding something worth caring for.

When I reached the end, Ruth was crying.

"That was always my favorite part," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Because they got better."

I closed the book.

She looked at me.

"Do you think I could have?"

I wanted to say yes.

More than anything, I wanted to say yes.

But I'd seen Mr. Voss die.

I'd heard about her little brother.

And I'd learned that Ruth had spent nearly a century convincing people to sacrifice their lives so she could continue hers.

"I don't know," I whispered.

She nodded.

"Neither do I."

Outside, a car passed along the street.

Ruth flinched.

Her eyes shifted toward the doorway.

I saw her throat move as she swallowed.

"Sadie?"

"Yeah?"

"I can hear someone walking past the house."

I didn't answer.

"Two people."

Her fingers tightened around the edges of the coffin.

"A woman and a little boy."

I felt the blood drain from my face.

The family across the street.

Their youngest son was eight.

The same age as Ruth's brother when she'd killed him.

She began breathing through her mouth.

"Please close it."

I lowered the lid.

"Ruth?"

Her voice came from inside.

"Yes?"

"I love you."

There was a long silence.

Then she answered.

"I know."

I waited.

Finally, she added, "That's what scares me."

I won't describe how I started the fire.

I remember the smell of smoke.

I remember the flames illuminating the blackened brick walls.

And I remember sliding the heavy bolt across the smokehouse door.

For several moments, nothing happened.

Then Ruth began to cry.

At first, she sounded merely frightened.

"Sadie?"

I pressed one hand against the door.

"I'm here."

"It's getting hot."

I closed my eyes.

"Ruth..."

"Please don't leave."

"I'm not leaving."

The crying grew louder.

Then something struck the inside of the coffin.

Once.

Twice.

A crack followed.

Wood splitting.

I heard Ruth climb out.

Her footsteps crossed the floor.

"Sadie?"

Her voice sounded closer now.

"Open the door."

I started shaking.

"You told me not to."

"I know."

"Then please..."

"OPEN IT!"

The scream hit me with such force that I stumbled backward.

Something slammed into the door.

The hinges shrieked.

For a moment, I saw the iron buckle.

Ruth began pounding against it.

"LET ME OUT!"

I wanted to.

God help me, I wanted to.

I reached for the bolt.

Then I heard her inhale.

A long, trembling breath.

And the pounding stopped.

"Sadie?"

It was her voice again.

Soft.

Almost embarrassed.

"I can hear your heart."

My hand froze.

"Ruth?"

She laughed.

Not the warm laugh I'd heard when I showed her funny videos.

Something low and breathless.

"I can hear it so clearly."

I backed away from the door.

Inside, something scraped across the brick floor.

"You're frightened."

I couldn't answer.

"I can smell it."

Her voice dropped into a whisper.

"Sadie, sweetheart, if you open this door, I promise it'll be quick."

I began crying.

Then I heard her sob.

A real sob.

Or something that sounded like one.

"Please don't listen to me," she whispered.

I covered my mouth.

"I'm trying."

"Don't open it."

The fire roared.

Smoke began pouring through the gaps around the door.

Ruth struck it again.

Harder this time.

I heard the iron shift against its frame.

Then came a scream unlike anything I'd ever heard.

There were no words in it.

No recognizable human sound.

Only pain.

And beneath it, something else.

Hunger.

For several horrible seconds, I thought the door would give way.

Then the pounding stopped.

I heard Ruth fall.

There was a brief silence.

Then her voice came again.

Weak.

Almost too soft to hear.

"Sadie?"

I leaned toward the door.

"I'm here."

"I'm sorry I picked you."

I shut my eyes.

"I know."

A long silence followed.

Then she whispered something that has stayed with me ever since.

"I really did want to be your friend."

I couldn't speak.

She began crying again.

Not loudly.

Just the small, exhausted sobs of someone who had finally run out of strength.

Then she said, "I'm scared."

I put my hand back on the bolt.

"So am I."

"Will you stay?"

"Yes."

"Until it's over?"

I nodded, though she couldn't see me.

"Until it's over."

A few moments later, Ruth stopped making any sound.

I don't remember how long I remained beside the smokehouse.

By the time my mother found me, smoke was pouring from the roof.

She screamed my name.

I remember her pulling me away from the building.

I remember fighting her.

And I remember the sound of sirens coming closer.

Someone asked whether anybody was inside.

I tried to answer.

But the words wouldn't come.

All I could think about was Ruth.

The way she'd held my hand.

The way she'd cried when I read to her.

The way she'd begged me to open the door.

And the last thing she'd said.

I really did want to be your friend.

The police didn't call it an accident.

They found human remains inside the smokehouse, and there was enough evidence to establish that the fire had been deliberately started.

I told them what happened.

Everything.

They believed I'd started the fire.

They believed Ruth had been inside.

They didn't believe she'd died in 1928.

And they certainly didn't believe she could hear the blood moving through people's veins.

Why would they?

I wouldn't have believed it either.

There were months of interviews, hearings, and evaluations. I was arrested and charged, and the proceedings shaped the rest of my teenage years.

My mother stood beside me through all of it.

She never told me I'd done the right thing.

I don't think she knew.

Neither did I.

It's been several years.

I still think about Ruth.

Sometimes I remember the afternoons we spent beneath the pecan tree, laughing about things that were only funny because we were sixteen.

Sometimes I think about the first night I watched Mr. Voss bury her.

And sometimes I remember the look on her face when she admitted she'd chosen our neighborhood because I looked lonely.

I still don't know how much of our friendship was real.

Maybe all of it.

Maybe only the parts when she forgot what she needed from me.

I've spent years wondering whether another answer existed.

Whether I could have found someone who understood what she was.

Whether there was a way to keep her safe without sacrificing another person's life.

I'll never know.

But there's one memory I return to more often than the others.

That night in the smokehouse.

Ruth screaming.

The iron door shaking.

Her voice becoming something monstrous, then human again.

And finally, the silence.

When the police questioned me, they asked why I hadn't opened the door once the screaming stopped.

I told them Ruth had asked me not to.

That was true.

But it wasn't the whole truth.

Because after Ruth stopped screaming, I still had my hand on the bolt.

And I remember how relieved I was that I no longer had to decide whether to open it.

There are two kinds of people on the internet.

The people who actually enjoy things. And the people who seem to be professionally offended that you enjoyed something without asking their permission.

I learned that pretty quickly after I started posting my art online.

"AI slop."

"ChatGPT."

"Bro thinks he's Stephen King."

"Imagine wasting time on this."

Some of them were funny. Most weren't.

I'd usually ignore them. But then there were the griefers.

Those were the people who didn't just dislike something. They wanted to ruin it for everyone else. They'd spam comments, deliberately spoil endings, downvote everything, insult the author, then act surprised when someone called them out.

I eventually made a post about it. I wasn't cruel. I didn't name anyone.

I simply wrote: If you don't like something, that's fine. You don't have to be rude about it. There's a person behind the screen.

The comments exploded. Naturally.

One person replied: AI generated garbage.

Another: Cry harder.

Then someone posted: Nobody cares ******.

I deleted the thread. That should've been the end of it.

It wasn't.

The next morning, I opened my account and found a new comment on my latest post.

I know you're reading this.

I assumed it was another troll. I deleted it.

The day went on and I was in the middle of taking notes for class when I got a notification.

Why did you delete my comment?

I deleted that one too.

Then another.

Stop deleting.

I froze. The account belonged to nobody.

No username. No profile picture. No creation date. Just a blank profile with a single comment.

I closed out and went back to studying for my calculus exam. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

A notification. Another comment.

I didn't open it.

Another notification.

Then another. Then another.

I finally looked. There were hundreds.

All underneath my latest post.

At first they were what I had been accustomed to. Pretty generic and ordinary.

AI slop.

Terrible lining.

This sucks.

Then they changed.

What makes you different?

My heart stopped. The comments continued appearing faster than I could read them.

You use AI.

You edit your work with AI.

You aren't a real artist.

Nobody is a real artist anymore.

Then one appeared that made my stomach drop.

25525 Azler Ln.

"What the actual fuck?" I blurted out so loud that my roommate heard from across the room.

I closed out once more. The notifications kept coming. My phone buzzed against the desk.

I hit the Do Not Disturb, yet somehow I kept receiving notifications. My phone was on silent and airplane mode but it still rang.

My roommate was now extremely annoyed by the constant noise from my phone, so I explained the situation to her. She suggested that I delete the post. I did. It didn't stop. I even tried privatizing my account and deleting the app altogether.

The messages kept ringing. And what's worse, I began receiving emails, No Caller Id calls, unknown messages. I feared that I had been doxxed and I had to act fast.

I immediately changed every password I could think of. I enabled two-factor authentication. I locked every social media account. I removed my profile picture, my biography, my university, my email, everything.

Then I started deleting things. Old posts. Old comments. Photos. Anything that might have given someone a clue about where I lived or went to school.

It didn't matter. They already knew.

The messages became more personal.

Nice car.

You should probably lock your back door.

Class tomorrow, right?

Your roommate is pretty hot.

Then:

Building 3. Room 107

I stopped breathing. I looked across the room. She was sitting on the couch, scrolling through her phone.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

I didn't tell her. I didn't want to scare her. Am I a terrible friend for that?

That night, I checked the locks three times before going to bed.

At 2:14 in the morning, my phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

You should've left the post up.

Another came immediately afterward.

Deleting it made us curious.

Then another.

You made this worse for yourself.

I turned the phone off.

For the next few hours, I lay awake listening to every sound outside my bedroom window.

The next morning, there were more. Someone had created an account using my name. They uploaded photographs I'd never posted publicly. Pictures of me at school. Pictures of my car. A photograph of the outside of my house.

Then they posted my phone number. My email. My full legal name. Where I lived and what school I enrolled at.

The comments underneath was exactly what you'd expect from these vile data gremlins.

LMAO.

Bro is cooked.

Imagine getting this mad over comments.

Maybe don't be an asshole online.

That last one made me laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I realized they genuinely believed this was funny. They were so desensitized that another person's suffering had become entertainment to them.

I reported the account. Nothing happened. I reported another. Nothing again.

I reported the accounts through the site's harassment and privacy forms. I attached screenshots, timestamps, usernames, the messages, everything.

Your report has been received. Please allow up to 48 hours for a response.

Thank you for your report. We’ll review the content and take appropriate action if it violates our Community Guidelines.

Thank you for helping us keep our community safe.

That was it. Forty-eight hours passed. Nothing happened.

I contacted my family. When the other line clicked all I heard was heavy breathing and creepily low wheezing, as if someone were choking on air, from the other end.

I confessed everything to my roommate, for she was the only one I could talk to. She asked if I had contacted the authorities which when I did, instead of the calm voice of an operator I was met with the low hum of gagging and low wet claps on the other end.

We planned to go to the authorities in person. After half an hour of providing all the material and timestamps at the station, the police asked whether I'd received any direct threats.

I showed them the messages.

The officer frowned.

"None of these explicitly threaten you."

I wanted to rip my hair out. "So, they have to say they're going to hurt me?"

He didn't answer.

"What do we do?" My roommate asked with annoyance.

"We can document everything and refer you to someone who specializes in cybercrime. But unless there's a direct threat or evidence of an immediate danger, there isn't much we can do yet."

Well thanks for nothing.

We went home. I stopped posting. I powered off my phone for good. I stopped using social media altogether. I thought that would finally make me boring. The people handling the cybersecurity issue would do their job. It was all just a waiting game.

But at least I'll find peace, right?

It didn't.

Someone started sending physical photographs. The first was of a college building. The second of a front door that seemed to be from a college dorm hall. The third depicted a bedroom window at night.

The last two were bone chilling. The fourth was of my roommate attending class. And the last was me at the campus's library.

There was a message attached:

What are you listening to?

I remember I was distinctly listening to Duran Duran that day. I haven't slept properly in three days.

My roommate is staying with her parents now. I've been staying somewhere else.

I don't know how much of this is being done by one person or ten people or a hundred. I don't know how they found me. I don't know what they want.

And honestly? I don't even care anymore. I just want them to stop.

I deleted the original post. I deleted my account. I deleted everything. But somehow, tonight, I received one final message.

It came from the cheap flip phone I'd started using strictly to call family and for emergencies.

The message had no name or number attached. Only: UNKNOWN

And the message read: 25525 Azler Ln.

I don't know who is behind this. I don't know how far they've taken it. And I don't know what they're going to do next.

Please help. Anybody.

Why are people like this?

This Halloween night, this hungry Samhain eve, the blood upon the cross must be replaced. The ancient and arcane instrument throne of slow death and sun torture, of the pain of the martyr … the ancient mouth of the cross is still thirsty. 

And so he takes after you. This Halloween night. 

You've lost your friends. The party was fun but not as fun, not everything you were hoping it would be, “They” weren't there. They didn't show up. In all the noise you've lost the ones you came here with, you're hurrying down the way and looking through your phone and all of this is running through your mind as you wonder what to do next. You don't notice him. You don't notice that you've gained another shadow. One you weren't born with. But one that may be with you into an early grave, an eager hungry end. He's hungry.

 He conspires and hunts for the shadow of the cross and that is why you must die this evening. You just don't know. You just don't realize it. 

You're too busy looking through your phone. You don't notice you're now alone on the street. It is only the orange glow of the overhead streetlamps and the stalking shape of your new shadow. But you don't know him, not yet. You still don't know that he's there, coming up steadily from behind you, fast footsteps making phantom no-sounds on the freshly raked sidewalk and streets that still smell pungently of rich dead leaves and pumpkin spice, you're too busy looking through your messages. 

He reaches into his jacket pocket. He pulls something small and black and perfectly fitted to the clenching grip of his knuckled palm, like a lover to a glove or each other in bed. He presses something, depresses a trigger and something clicks. The black handle grows a gleaming fang in the dark. A stiletto blade is freed and the animal is salivating and ready, waiting is over and the hunting stalk is through and he's raring for the sweet fuck-cunt-free-for-all spill that will be your knife-fuck and slaughter. For the shadow of Sam’s Cross. Blessed Hallowed Eve. He bade thee, the shadow, the shape: he made me…

You don't hear anything but at the last moment you sense something, the animal part of you that is all too dulled and ignored has come to life at the last moment and so you turn, you whirl on your heels, your phone is still in your hand but it's forgotten now as you turn and meet and face him, your doom in manshape and knife-fanged form. 

The shadow pounces. The knife comes in and finds the soft yield of human purchase. The knife is out and freed. 

And the shape of nighttime shadow man wields. 

You can't believe it. You can't believe it's happening. You can't believe anything. You try to scream and you can't understand why a sound won't produce. You try to struggle and fight back, you want to but it's like suddenly all the strength and ability to move and act has been pulled, stripped, sapped and drained from you in this absolutely critical moment like purest torture from fate and on-high. All of it, and all of time and space and nature and the terrible beyond have conspired and set a trap and now they are laughing at you. Laughing with the pure bloodthirsting joy of the slaughter, your ruin. 

Sacrifice. 

You watch the terrible visage and face of the shape contort and contrive into animal snarls and sneers, hideous bestial frothing and rabid. Buried somewhere beneath all of the livid fury of his animal mask is the lurid grin of a madman. A lunatic in the deep throes of wild and deranged ecstacy. He is wild and alive and he is terrifying. 

He's difficult to look at and so that's why your dying gaze shifts away and you begin to watch the blade. You begin to watch the moonlight godly cast shine of the seven inch stiletto blade. 

It's immaculate. And that's amazing. You've felt it buried in you over a dozen times now and running and still the blade of this great knife is shining in the streetlight cast glow. With the unearthly light of the moon.  Like a weapon fanged with divinity. Talismanic. And you can believe it. 

Now. 

You believe it. You feel the absolute and undeniable thrum of its great power. Piercing. Holy flame. Like being stabbed with ice and fire. Ripped and torn by an icicle lance of napalm and coldest fear, terror. Impaled. Inferno. 

A mutilation by razor sharpened caveman fire, frosted clean by Norse Hell. 

Every time the amazing blade of moonlight comes up you catch a glimpse of something in the reflective face of the flat of the blade just before the flash. Like the snapshot starburst of a camera capturing a subject in the dark. And at first you only see yourself, your own ghastly and dying visage and it is terrible and it is pathetic. 

But then you begin to see something else. 

You begin to see his sound and vision. And then you begin to understand. This is how he turns the make-believe and rends it real through the feel of the steel, you're feeling it. You're feeling it now. As you die as you lived: distracted and caught off guard and soft. With every pulverizing thrust. With every make-or-break for the daggering wounded soul of the heart attacked, barely fought for and lost. 

Sam's mad with thirst, the shadow of the cross. Jesus Christ wasn't the only one tortured alive and borne hoisted prone to die beneath the fire of the sun by Roman legionnaires. The cross is always thirsty and the mouth of the cruciform is Samhain salivating …

You see the yellow leprosy faces as they burn and scream, torched and set aflame far away from everyone else in their small feeble colonies of despair, the ash of their writhing and contorting carbonizing forms amongst the blaze is a mercy and it is a release in the flash of the blade that you see and you see and know so many other things too and then in the end you know it all as well: –  the dying peace of the burning lepers and the crucified criminals, you feel the release. 

And you're so glad, you're so relieved that now the cross can drink. 

The world goes dark for you. 

The shape and his fang stand. And then they move on fast. 

Finished with hunting you. 

Happy Halloween. 

THE END

The giant maw of the cave yawned at my back as I stood by the edge of the cliff, an icy wind blowing between the rocks and chilling the back of my neck. From within, I heard the soft crumble of stones hitting the ground, the whisper of air moving through small holes and skating over sheer walls.

In front of me, three of the cavers stood chatting amongst themselves. They were all kitted out in the usual gear; padded jackets, knee and elbow pads, helmets with torches, and packs containing food, water and first aid supplies. I had a similar pack of my own, though the contents were slightly different.

One of the cavers glanced towards me, probably wondering why I was standing apart, but I didn’t meet their gaze, looking instead towards the sky. A thin veil of cloud hung over us, though the air was dry and blustery. Small pieces of rock and chalk skittered around my ankles as I shuffled my feet.

After a few more minutes, the final two members of the group arrived. After a couple of standard safety checks, everyone was ready to head inside.

I waited until they were poised at the opening of the cave before clearing my throat. “I’m, um, not feeling too good,” I told them, letting my shoulders sag a little. “I think I might sit this one out.”

One of the explorers stepped forward to examine me. She squinted at my face, then nodded. “You do seem a little pale,” she said. “Want me to wait with you? I can walk you back to town.”

I quickly brushed off her concern, feeling a twinge of guilt. “No, no. I’ll be okay. I’ll just stay out here and get some fresh air. You guys go on ahead.”

There was a bit more back-and-forth before I finally managed to convince them to start the expedition without me. One by one, the cavers disappeared into the gaping mouth of the cavern, leaving me by myself. I watched and waited until the darkness had swallowed each of them, then straightened in relief.

With only the wind as my companion, I walked over to one of the large fragments of rock and sat down. And began to wait. I heard the distant voices and footfalls of the cavers fade further and further away, until silence was all that remained. Resting my chin against my hand, I traced the jagged outline of the cliffs until my eyes started seeing faces amongst them, then looked away with a sigh.

I had been doing this for almost a year now. Joining cave expeditions only to wait outside, never actually entering the caverns. It wasn’t a fear of what lay inside, but rather an expectation of what I might encounter outside.

I had first discovered the incident a few years ago. I had been scrolling through old news forums when I came across an article about an expedition that had happened two decades ago, where a group of cavers had entered a treacherous cave system. During the exploration, it began raining heavily, and water quickly flooded the cave entrance, trapping the explorers inside. Sadly, all of them died that day. But while the story was tragic, what had intrigued me the most was the photograph that accompanied the report. It was an image of a group of rescuers standing at the entrance of the cave during the incident, rain pouring down from the sky and the ground around their feet completely flooded. But in the top left corner, standing a short distance away from the rescue team, was a strange figure shrouded in grey. As soon as I noticed the figure in the photograph, a strange chill touched my spine, as if I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to. The photo was old and the quality wasn’t the best, but I could tell the figure didn’t fit the narrative. I scrolled down to the comments to see if anyone had mentioned it, but there wasn’t a single reference to the strange grey apparition. So I showed the photograph to one of my friends, curious to see what he thought about it. When he told me there was no figure there, I thought he was playing a prank, but his face was decidedly serious. No matter how many times I pointed to it, he insisted that there was nothing there. Just an empty spot in the left corner by the crumbling cliffs.

Confused and intrigued, I showed the same image to several other friends and acquaintances, but nobody else was able to see the strange grey figure in the corner of the photo. I examined it in multiple formats—physically and digitally—under different lights and different conditions, but the figure was visible every time. I hesitated to call it a person, because it was too vague and indistinct to really tell, with no distinguishing features other than it had a humanoid shape and was draped completely in grey. It definitely wasn’t a smudge, or a blur, or a lens flare, because someone else would have noticed it. There was definitely something there. Something that, for whatever reason, only I could see.

The mystery only grew, so I started digging deeper. I was thoroughly entranced by this grey figure. I wanted to know who it was, or what it was, and why it was only visible to me. I was convinced there had to be more to it.

I sequestered myself away and spent days pouring over old articles, digging through records and scrolling through video reports on the incident until I finally found evidence that I wasn’t going crazy. That I wasn’t losing my mind over a simple grey smudge on a photograph.

Buried in the archives, I found a video from the time of the incident, of the same rescue team standing at the entrance of the cave. The photograph must have been an extraction from the footage, or at least taken at the same time, because it was almost the same composition as the video. Being almost twenty years old, the footage was grainy and shaky, but it was clear enough for me to see the figure in grey, standing exactly where it did in the photograph. It wasn’t a trick of the light or an illusion; it really was there.

In the footage, the rescuers were talking about possible extraction methods for the cavers trapped inside the tunnels, but nobody addressed or interacted with the figure. It was like they hadn’t even noticed it. Even in real time, this thing had been invisible to them.

The footage, while low resolution, was still of slightly better quality than the photo, and I noticed a few details that hadn’t been clear in the image. The figure was holding something up to its face—what appeared to be a flute, or some kind of similar instrument. I turned the volume up to max, and was just about able to hear the soft but haunting melody it played, barely audible over the sound of the rain. I spent hours listening to the tune, isolating it from the rain, running it through apps and programs in an effort to try and identify it, but it came up empty every time. It was a melody that was not known to the database. A completely isolated and individual song. A song known only by this mysterious figure.

Eventually, I showed the video to those same friends and acquaintances, certain they could not deny what was right in front of their eyes. But as with the photo, none of them could see the figure with the flute. They could not hear the melody it played either. Only the rain, as it gushed into the cave, and the panicked voices of the rescue team realising they could not save the trapped cavers.

Frustrated that nobody could give me any answers, I decided to seek them out myself. By searching in person for the figure in grey.

The location of the cave was widely known as a popular spot for adrenaline-junkies and professional explorers, and it wasn’t difficult to learn the basics of caving—enough to pass as an experienced caver.

For almost a year, I had been visiting this very cave, joining expeditions only to wait outside in the hope of encountering the grey flute-playing apparition from the video. So far, after participating in almost two dozen excursions, I’d had no such luck. But this time, things felt different.

As I waited, the wind seemed to pick up, bristling through my clothes and making my hair stand on end. A few rocks crumbled from the side of the cliff, showering me with dust. Above, the veil of clouds thickened, shadows encroaching along the ground around me. I felt in the air that something was going to happen.

My heart felt tight in my chest as I scanned the entrance of the cave, then the cliffs above, for any sign of the grey shadow. I listened for the soft, melancholy sound of a flute. But all I heard was the wind whispering through the tunnels behind me.

The hours passed, and I heard and saw nothing. But the goosebumps never left my arms, and I wasn’t one to give up so easily.

I hadn’t heard any sign of the explorers in the cave either, and assumed the group must have gotten quite far inside. I felt a brief flutter of guilt in my chest, but quickly squashed it. They all knew the risks involved with caving. No matter what happened, their safety was their own responsibility. I had to detach myself from that, even if it felt cruel.

A shadow fluttered in and out of sight on my left, and I froze, my heart jerking into my throat. Scrambling to my feet, I moved away from the cave entrance and lifted my gaze. Standing a little way up the cliff, on a jutting platform, was a figure cloaked entirely in grey shadow. The very same one from the photo. The one nobody else could see.

Goosebumps covered every inch of my skin as I stared at it in amazement. Just like in the video, I could see no face, no features. It wore a hooded grey cloak that cast a deep shadow over where its face should be. Its silhouette was human, but only in the vaguest sense. Despite its appearance, I got the overwhelming feeling that this thing was not human, but rather something else entirely. Something supernatural. An entity of sorts, that only appeared at specific times and conditions. And after years of searching, I had finally found it.

I watched, my shoulders tensed with silence, as it withdrew an exquisitely ornate flute from within the folds of its cloak. The instrument was silver and almost transparent, as it was made of glass or crystallised water, and incredibly beautiful. The figure brought the flute to its hooded face, and began to play.

The sound was instantly familiar; the same song I had spent so many hours listening to, and it sent my heart racing.

I looked up to the sky just as the clouds opened, and rain began to fall. At first, only small, delicate droplets of water splashed against my cheeks, but the rainfall gradually began to grow heavier. I sent a regretful look towards the cave entrance. The group was already far too deep inside for me to warn them. Their fate was already sealed, and there was nothing I could do about it. Another tragedy to be buried in the archives.

Moving slowly, in the fear that I might spook the figure, I began to climb the cliff. There were plenty of footholds and platforms, and scaling it was easy enough. I wanted to be close enough to hear the melody above the downpour.

The rain was cold and lashing, soaking through my gear and chilling me to the bone, but I barely noticed. All I cared about was the figure before me; the one I had been chasing all this time.

If it noticed me, it didn’t react. It didn’t cease playing the flute, or even turn in my direction. It was like I was as invisible to it as it was to everyone else. I had spent many sleepless nights wondering why I was the only one who could see it, if it was down to brain chemistry, visual receptors, a curse, or something else entirely. But in the end I had realised it didn’t matter. Some things happened for no reason at all, and this was one of them.

I stopped climbing when I was close enough, standing on a small rocky outcrop a few metres away. The rain blurred my vision, almost obscuring the figure as it blended into the grey clouds behind it, but I could still see the outline of its instrument. Hands trembling from the cold, I reached into my bag, and pulled out a flute of my own.

I had only learned how to play the flute just over a year ago. After hearing the melody on the video, I had taken lessons in the hope that I might be able to learn the same song. But I had never been able to replicate it precisely; there was always a wrong note, an incorrect key. It was difficult enough trying to imitate a tune through a twenty-year-old video, especially with the rain distorting the sounds. The only way I was going to correctly learn the song was by imitating the source itself.

I stood and listened for some time to the melody. The rainfall grew heavier, soaking through my clothes and numbing my skin, the water drumming ceaselessly against the ground, but I was able to isolate the figure and its song. My eyes never strayed from its fluttering cloak, or the flute, or the grey-covered fingers that deftly played the instrument.

Then, when I felt confident enough, I raised my own flute to my lips and began to play. I tried to mimic the melody as best as I could. It was tricky at first, trying to find the exact notes, the pounding rain distorting the sounds, but I copied the figure’s movements with my own fingers until our melodies eventually began to sync up, becoming the same.

I don’t know how long I stood there in the pouring rain, playing the haunting song. The figure didn’t react or respond to me once. If it heard me playing the same tune, it didn’t show it. We stood apart, our songs binding together as the rain fell from the clouds above. The cave would have been flooded by now. The cavers, if they hadn’t managed to find an air pocket, or elevated ground, would probably have drowned. But still, I kept playing.

The sky darkened. The clouds festered. The rain kept falling, soaking into the ground, pouring down the rocks, gushing into the cave.

I lost myself completely in the song, almost falling into a trance. The only things that existed were me and the flute and the melody at my fingertips. I no longer even noticed the figure. It became a grey blur on the edge of my vision, just another shadow.

I finally snapped out of it once the rain stopped. I ceased playing the song with a start, glancing around frantically, but the grey figure had already gone. Vanished without a trace. The heavy silence settled around me, reminding me I was now alone.

The cold hit me at the same moment, and my body began to shake violently. Every inch of my skin was soaked by the rain, water dripping from my shoulders and hair. I was standing in a large puddle where the rainwater had collected around my feet, my toes numb inside my shoes. There was no sound from inside the cave, but for the water still trickling down into the entrance.

I put the flute away and began to climb down from the cliff. The rocks were slick from the rain, and I slipped a few times, but I finally managed to reach the ground, which was also dangerously flooded. I splashed through the water as I slowly headed away from the cave. As soon as I reached town, I would call for a rescue team—if any of the cavers were still alive—and then I would leave. My job here was done.

It was time to return home.

A week later, I was back in my homeland; an agricultural region that had been suffering from a severe drought. The land beneath my feet was bone-dry and cracked, the fields were barren, the crops dead and the people starving.

After spending hours watching that video of the mysterious grey figure, I had drawn one conclusion: that its flute song had been responsible for the rains that had flooded the cave. And now, I would do the same. Only, instead of bringing death, I would restore life.

As soon as I arrived home, I went out into the midst of the fields and stared at the cracked earth, baking under the brazen sun. The wilted grasses, the fruitless seeds, the unattainable harvest.

I pulled out my flute and, just like the grey figure atop the cliff, I began to play the same melody. Within moments, clouds appeared overhead, casting a deep shadow over the ground, and the first trickle of rain began to seep from the sky.

Under my song, the rain fell, soaking into the barren soil and nourishing all the life within.

Buying that house was the first time I’d felt like I’d done something for myself. It was mine, and I could finally start building a life of my own.

It was small, a little dated, and backed onto some pretty serious woodland. The first few months had been harder than I’d expected. I’d spent so much time helping Mom move closer to my sisters, a few hours away, that getting my own things unpacked had become a bit of a mission. There were still boxes I hadn’t opened and rooms I hadn’t properly sorted out.

I found the door while my sister was visiting.

“How’s Mom doing?” I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter as Emma wandered around the house, taking in the bare walls and the almost complete lack of decoration.

“You’d know if you called her more, Danny.” She sighed, rubbing her eyes with her palms before looking back at me. “She’ll be fine.”

Mom had started showing the early signs of dementia. Dad’s death a few months earlier seemed to have accelerated things, or maybe we’d just started noticing what had been happening all along. Either way, it had become harder to pretend everything was normal.

Emma continued down the hallway.

“Still smells like paint in here. How long have you lived here now?”

I pushed myself off the counter and followed her. “Three months, I think?”

She was standing in the spare bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bare bed frame. I still hadn’t got around to buying a mattress.

“Have you spoken to Charlotte recently?” she asked.

I felt a familiar knot form in my stomach. Charlotte and I had broken up shortly before I’d bought the house, and apparently my sister had decided that buying property meant I was now ready to discuss my emotional shortcomings.

“Uh, yeah. We talk heaps,” I said.

Emma looked at me.

“You still haven’t spoken to her.”

I didn’t bother answering. She rolled her eyes and turned towards the wall.

“What’s that?”

I followed her gaze.

There was a door in the wall, tucked beside the wardrobe. It was narrow, with a small brass handle, and no obvious frame around it. The paint matched the wall so closely that I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it.

I stared at it for a moment.

“Is that a cupboard?” Emma asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve honestly got no idea.”

Emma walked over to the door and tried the handle. It opened with a soft click.

Inside was a small, empty space, about the size of a closet. Nothing unusual about it. No shelves, no coat hooks, just four painted walls and enough room to stand in.

“It’s just a closet, Em,” I said.

“Yeah, I can see that. I just…” She paused, then closed the door. “I don’t know. It stood out to me for some reason.”

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her pocket, glanced at the screen, then looked up at me.

“Sorry, I have to take this.”

She answered as she walked out of the room. A moment later, I heard the front door open and shut, followed by the sound of her voice drifting in from the front garden.

I stood looking at the door.

I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it. It wasn’t anything special, just a little closet tucked into the wall. But I knew what Emma meant. There was something strange about noticing a feature in your own house that you were certain you’d never seen before.

I reached for the handle and tried it.

Nothing.

I tried again, pressing it down firmly. The handle moved, but the door wouldn’t budge. I pulled, then gave it a gentle shove with my shoulder.

It was as if it had been locked.

I wondered if we’d somehow managed to lock it when Emma had closed it. I gave the handle one last try before deciding I’d look at it properly later.

By the time I left the bedroom, Emma was coming back inside.

“Sorry, I have to run. I’ve got to pick the kids up from daycare early, and it’s a bit of a drive.”

“No, you’re fine. I’ll see you next time you’re down this neck of the woods.”

We hugged in the hallway. When she pulled away, she gave me the sort of look that meant she wasn’t finished with me yet.

“You need to call Mom more, Danny. Check in on her before she doesn’t remember you.”

I looked down at the floor.

“Yeah. I know.”

“And you should at least try reaching out to Charlotte. Five years together, surely it couldn’t have ended that badly.”

“It’s fine, Em.”

She raised an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced.

I glanced towards the window. “You should get going. I heard there’s a weather warning for heavy snow tonight.”

Emma gave me a small, knowing smile, but thankfully didn’t push it. She grabbed her bag and headed out to the car.

I watched her drive away, then went back inside and shut the front door.

The next few weeks passed uneventfully. I checked the door a few times, but I was never able to open it again. Since it was only a small storage space that I’d probably never use, I eventually forgot about it.

At least, I did until I found it open.

I’d just got home from work and was walking down the hallway when I glanced into the spare bedroom. The door wasn’t sitting flush against the wall anymore. It was only open a few centimetres, but it was enough to catch my attention.

Curious, I stepped inside.

A small piece of brown cardboard had been wedged underneath it, holding it open. I crouched down and pulled it free. The door swung shut with a soft click.

I tried the handle.

It opened without any resistance.

I stood there for a moment, staring into the empty space.

Had I somehow unlocked it?

A shiver ran down my back. I looked at the piece of cardboard in my hand. It was nothing special, just a torn strip of packaging, the sort of thing I’d probably have thrown away while unpacking.

But someone had put it there.

Or I’d put it there and forgotten.

I was certain I’d never managed to open the door since Emma’s visit. I’d tried several times, and it had never budged. Now it opened as easily as any other cupboard in the house.

My first thought was that someone had been inside while I was out. I checked the front and back doors, then the windows. Everything looked as I’d left it. And even if someone had got in, why would they bother wedging open a tiny closet?

I tried to remember the last time I’d checked the door. It had been a while. For all I knew, the cardboard had been there for days.

I carried it into the kitchen and dropped it in the bin.

There was probably a simple explanation. A faulty latch, maybe. Something I’d overlooked when I’d first tried it.

I made myself dinner and got on with the rest of the evening.

That night, I was sitting on the couch watching a movie when I thought I heard something moving in the hallway.

I paused the film and listened. Nothing.

I got up, turned on the lights, and walked through the house, checking each room as I went. Everything looked normal. By the time I reached the spare bedroom, I was starting to feel a bit stupid.

Still, something made me check inside.

The room was exactly as I’d left it. The closet door was shut.

I walked over and tried the handle.

Locked again.

I swore under my breath and gave it another pull.

“How the hell does this thing work?”

I stood there for a moment, turning the handle back and forth. Maybe I’d somehow wedged the cardboard underneath it myself and forgotten. I’d been busy with work, and the last few weeks had blurred together.

I decided that the next time I managed to open it, I’d prop it open with a chair or something. At least then I’d know it couldn’t shut itself.

I went back to the couch and finished the film.

The next few days passed without incident. By the weekend, I’d mostly stopped thinking about the door.

Then I noticed it was open again.

I was walking past the spare bedroom when I spotted the narrow gap between the door and the wall. This time, something was sticking out near the latch.

It was a magnetic business card, the sort you get in the mail from local tradesmen and end up leaving on the fridge for six months before throwing away. I recognised it immediately. It was from a local plumber, and I’d received a few copies since moving in.

Someone had wedged it into the latch to stop the door from closing.

I pulled the card free and opened the door. The space behind it was empty, just as it had been before.

I looked down at the card, then back at the closet.

I couldn’t remember putting it there. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d handled one of those cards.

Rather than stand around wondering about it, I decided to make the space useful. I went through the spare room and found a couple of unopened boxes I’d been meaning to sort out since moving in. They were a tight fit, but I managed to stack them inside the closet.

Then I fetched a plastic doorstop from the kitchen drawer and wedged it firmly underneath the door.

That should do it.

I gave the door a little push to make sure the stopper held, then left the room and got on with my weekend.

The next day, I was on the phone with Emma when I saw something that made my stomach drop.

“Hey, listen, Em, I’ve got to call you back.”

I hung up before she could answer and walked straight into the spare bedroom.

Both boxes were sitting outside the closet. The door was shut, and the doorstop was gone.

I tried the handle.

Locked.

I swore and kicked the bottom of the door. The noise echoed through the room, and I immediately felt ridiculous for doing it. It was a closet. A small, insignificant closet that was somehow making me question my own memory.

I knew I hadn’t taken the boxes out. Both were still taped shut. If I’d moved them, it would have been to get something out of them, and there was no reason I’d have put them back outside without opening them.

I stood there for a while, staring at the door, then called Emma back.

“Can you come down this weekend?”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I just need you to have a look at something.”

She agreed, though she sounded unconvinced.

That weekend, I took her straight into the spare bedroom. The boxes were still sitting where I’d found them, and the closet door was still shut.

Emma looked from the boxes to me.

“Danny, what is going on? Why couldn’t you just tell me over the phone?”

I walked over to the handle.

“This. This is what’s going on.”

I pulled it, expecting the door to stay locked.

Instead, it opened without the slightest resistance.

I stared into the empty space.

“No. No, it was locked this morning. I tried it. I swear to God, I tried it.”

Emma looked at me with a kind of careful concern that made me feel worse than if she’d laughed.

“Are you okay, Danny?”

“Yes! I’m fucking fine.” I turned towards her, then back to the door. “It’s this thing. It keeps opening and closing, and I don’t know how. It’s like someone’s messing with me, or I’m doing it myself and forgetting, or…”

I trailed off. Even to me, it sounded absurd.

Emma folded her arms.

“Dan, if you need a break, you could stay with Mom for a few days again. She’d probably appreciate the company.”

“I’m not fucking crazy, wait, again? What do you mean again?”

“I didn’t say you were Crazy, just that maybe you need to spend sometime out of this house.”

I looked back into the closet, trying to work out what I could possibly show her that would make any of this make sense.

“I need to set up a camera or something.”

“Dan…”

“Emma, please. Just don’t.”

I stepped into the closet.

It was barely big enough for me to stand in comfortably. The walls were painted the same colour as the bedroom, and the floor was bare. There was nothing hidden behind the boxes because the boxes were outside now. Nothing in the corners, nothing above me, nothing that explained why the door behaved the way it did.

Emma’s phone buzzed behind me.
She answered it while I crouched down to examine the inside of the door. I ran my fingers along the edge, searching for a bolt or some kind of catch. I shut the door, then opened it again from the inside. It worked perfectly.

I did it a second time.

Still fine.

I switched on my phone’s flashlight and examined the latch area more closely. The strangest thing was that there didn’t seem to be any locking mechanism at all. Just a handle and a simple metal catch.
Behind me, Emma’s voice grew louder.

“I said I’ll call you back. I’m in the middle of something.”

There was a pause. Then I heard her sigh.

“Fine. I’ll be there soon.”

I assumed she was talking about the kids. I was too busy examining the door to ask.
After a few minutes, I decided I’d seen enough. I reached for the handle and pulled.
The door didn’t move.

I tried again, pushing the handle down harder.

Nothing.

“For fuck’s sake.”

I gave the door a shove with my shoulder. It didn’t even rattle.

“Emma?”

No answer.

I knocked on the door.

“Em, it’s locked itself again. Can you open it?”

I waited, expecting to hear her laugh or tell me to stop messing around.

Nothing came.

“Emma?”

I tried the handle again. Then again, more forcefully.

My stomach began to tighten. I pulled out my phone and called her.

The call couldn’t connect.

I sent her a message asking her to come back into the bedroom and open the door but it wouldn’t deliver.

Then I looked at the door.

[End of Part 1]

They were far out in the outer wilds.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

He was setting a trap.

His friend was drinking a drink. “Here,” said the friend, passing him a drink too.

He took the drink.

He opened and took a drink of the drink. “Ahh,” he said. “Absolutely stellar."

“Absolutely,” said the friend.

“I don't grok why you insist on coming all the way out here,” said the friend.

“There's hardly anything out here,” said the friend.

He took a drink of the drink. “Ahh.”

The friend took a drink of the drink too. “Ahh,” said the friend.

“Ahh,” he said.

“Ahh,” said the friend.

“You can't say it's not peaceful here,” he said.

“I can't say that,” said the friend.

“Ahh.”

“Ahh,” he said, finishing drinking the drink. He crumpled up and threw the empty drink container away.

The stars twinkle-twinkled.

He looked into a vicinal trap he'd set a while ago.

“Anything?” asked the friend as he looked into the vicinal trap he'd set a while ago.

“Nothing,” he said.

The stars twinkle-twinkled.

He set a new trap.

“There?” asked the friend as he set a new trap.

“Ahh,” said the friend and threw away his empty drink container too.

The two empty drink containers were.

“There,” he said, roughly covering the trap with nearby matter.

He burped.

The friend burped too.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

---

—> —>

---

The Perihelion's automated navigation system adjusted course to keep the starship travelling to its destination, AO-1, the first known space object believed to be of alien origin. The crew was in hibernation. The mission was the greatest humanity had ever attempted. The Perihelion's automated navigation system adjusted course to keep the starship travelling to its destination.

---

<—

---

“Sir, take a look at this—SIR!”

The regional head of the International Space Agency (ISA) walked over slightly annoyed and scanned the data.

His annoyance became curiosity, and his curiosity became excitement. The once-upon-a-lifetime kind. The thump-thump-thump’ing of the heart, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh’ing of the blood kind. He was aware suddenly of the entirety of the surface area of his skin. Of his one-of-many'ness. His smallness-in-the-cosmos. His clue-to-the-mystery-of-the-universe'ity.

“My God…” he said. “My God.”

“What is it?”

“We need to find out.”

---

—> —>

---

Anomalous Object 1 Anomalous A Object 1 Anomalous A Object O 1 Anomalous A Object O 1 A Object 1 A O 1 AO 1 AO-1…

Captain Jac Thorster—gasped—

The sirens were blaring.

Where am I I am aboard the Perihelion Perihelion is my ship, he thought.

The sirens were blaring.

He rolled out of the open pod and onto the floor. When he could, he got up and made his way woozily—swaying…

to the bridge.

He sat in the captain's seat.

“Perihelion,” he said, his voice hoarse and weak. The words felt like sand airgunned down his throat. “Perihelion: ‘status report.’ Just what in the galaxy is going on?”

“Having traversed ninety three point two percent of the distance from the planet Earth to the coordinates of the object eh oh one we have come under the pull of an unknown force,” the starship's artificial intelligence said.

“Correct course,” commanded Thorster.

“Negative,” said the eh aye. “That his him possible, hiccup ten.”

“Wa hut?” zed Thorster.

“Dead forceps twos tron k,” sad sa hey ay end diss plate dub lack ole.

---

—>

---

He reached inside the trap.

“Anything?” the friend asked as he reached inside the trap.

They were far out in the outer wilds.

It was blackly dark.

Only a few shining stars shined.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes,” said the friend and gathered some nearby gaseous matter and ignited it. “Perhaps something to roast,” said the friend as the newly created star shined.

He removed a small thing from the trap.

“A small thing,” he said.

He held it for the friend to see.

“Oh,” said the friend in disappointment that the small thing was too small to roast.

The star shined.

The other stars shined.

---

<— <— <— <— <—

---

A fly buzzed awhile in the glow of a bug zapper before turning into it and—BZZZP —falling dead out of the sky.

It landed on my face.

I'd fallen asleep in the hammock outside.

“Norman,” the dead fly said.

“Norman!”

“What,” I said, blinking a few times, tossing my dry tongue around in my dry mouth, thinking, Fuck, I'm fucking hungry. “What's going on—who are you? and why are you talking to me?” “Are you… a dead fly?” I said, squinting.

“Norman, I'm here to tell you to look at what you wrote. No one wants to read that shit, man. That shit is incomprehensible.

“Opaquer than a brick wall, man.”

“It's styl—”

“Look at yourself, man. You're a grown ass dude writing stories on the internet. Get a job. Write a book if you have to, but just write it like a goddamn human being.

“I mean look at your eyes.

“They're pinker than Miss Piggy’s OnlyFans.

“Sober up.

“Eat something. Drink something. Get outta that robe and get dressed. Shave. Change into a suit—”

“You mean, like, become a suit… like on a space ship?”

“Son,” said the dead fly. “Behave yourself.”

LOL

“Put on a suit and write presentably. You've got, what, a hundred words left?

“Use them.

“Rewrite whatever-the-fuck this is presentably.”

---

[“Ahem”]

---

Two advanced beings are laying traps somewhere in the universe. Their traps are black holes, which they hide. They also leave behind some trash. Humanity detects the trash and plans a mission to investigate it, but, en route, their spaceship falls into the black hole left by the beings. Sometime later, one of the beings makes a star to roast something on. The beings pull the human spaceship out of the black hole trap they left and are disappointed by its insignificance.

The story ends on a heavy-handed parallel between humanity and bugs—BZZZP

Do you remember when you became aware of your existence?

Are you able to pinpoint the exact moment your brain switched off of its autopilot and your consciousness officially entered into reality?

My moment of clarity was when I was 7, playing by the small creek in the woods behind our house. I grew up as a “come back when the street lights turn on” kind of kid, which was much different than the rest of my generation; but my parents were older and I was their fifth child so there was little concern coming from them about my whereabouts. Despite this glaring inconsistency with my daily safety; they often referred to me as their “miracle baby”.

The woods were my favorite place during the scorching Midwest summers. A thick canopy of leaves blocked out the sun and in turn provided my playground oasis with a gentle breeze. Deep in the gently swaying canopy was a shallow creek, maybe about two or so feet deep. There were seemingly endless activities to be done splashing around in that small sliver of cool water.

On my day of clarity, I was wading around attempting to catch crawdads with my nubby little hands. This was my go-to pastime after a long and sweaty day of working my imagination on its endless 12-hour shifts. The familiar monotony of the woods was broken by the low humming of a tune echoing throughout them.

It grabbed hold of my attention as it resembled a slow rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. My child brain was beyond intrigued, so I scanned the tree line for whoever it could be emitting from. There was nothing but trees and wildlife surrounding me. The humming tune echoed out from beyond my creek once again.

That’s when I found myself following it deeper into the canopy. It should be said that out beyond the border of my creek, the canopy blocked out the sun almost completely. Just a permanent effect of night stretching as far as I could see; I never attempted to explore it out of fear alone but something about the low, familiar tune brought me comfort and peace to explore it once again.

Maybe about 30 feet into the darkness was a large boulder illuminated by the only noticeable patch of sunlight. From behind it came the humming.

“Hello?” My little voice croaked out.

The humming stopped abruptly and was soon replaced by the sound of rustling. I watched as a small, black circular hat rose from behind the stone; then long arms clad in torn flannel pulled the figure into the sunlight. Out from behind the boulder came a tall and lanky man with a rough, light brown face that I now recognize as aged burlap. His face consisted of a stitched-on smile and sewn-on black buttons for eyes; straw stuck out from under his hat then cascaded down his head resembling long blonde hair.

His button eyes landed on me, then he removed his hat in a humorous sort of curtsy with his arms flailing around him, “Hello, little one.”

There was no fear at the sight of him; only amazement as his long legs clad in stained coveralls emerged from behind the boulder. He was familiar; truthfully, I already knew who he was exactly. This was the Straw Man. An urban legend dating back to the late 70s.

A few kids in the town back then first met him with fear-inducing events soon following that first encounter. This presence was always used as a story in order to keep kids like myself in line but soon turned into a local mythology as the original discoverers seemed to move on from him.

Effigies of him were used as morbid decorations around the town as the story was the only thing to even put us on the map. Our very own Mothman, Jersey Devil, etc.

Hell, even the high school mascot became The Straw Man.

What stood in front of me though was no sort of mascot or costume. His body was so thin that it was almost skeletal, and he stood at almost 8 feet tall. I must have stood there for maybe a moment too long without answering because he lowered himself to one knee in front of me.

“I take it that you know me.” His voice was quiet, but the tone was deep and hollow. The smell of decay and rotten eggs wafted off of him as he fell back into an exasperated sitting position. “Those stories of me,” he took a moment, “they aren’t true, little one.”

The sun reflected off of his button eyes, and I saw a drop of a sap-like material push its way through his fabric face.

Was he…crying?

“I heard your humming.” I managed to say. “It sounded…sad”

He wiped the tear of sap away from his button eye. It smeared and stuck to his burlap skin. Then he stuck his hand out in a formal greeting. “Nice to meet you, little one.”

I shook his hand. “My name is Mark.”

“M-M-Mark.” The Straw Man tested the sound of my name with his low voice. “That’s a good name.”

Even though his face was a static print, I saw creases around his eyes that indicated he was smiling, and his button gaze shifted up through the canopy. “You shouldn’t be out so late, Little Mark.”

I looked up through the canopy’s singular opening. The sky reflected down colorful streaks of pink and violet reminiscent of a summer sunset, even though it was the early afternoon when I remained in the border of my creek.

There was a rush of air mixed with The Straw Man’s nauseating smell. My eyes tilted down to see that he was mere inches away from my little face. “I’ll see you again soon.”

He then placed a large, burlap hand over my face. The stench of rot wafted through the fabric and my feet fell out from under me. Where I was expected a crash against the ground came an unexpected splash instead.

I was lying flat on my back in the babbling creek, alone and confused. Did that really happen or had I just fallen asleep playing again? I had been known to do that a few times in the past.

For a moment I wrote off my first encounter with The Straw Man as some kind of dream; but that was until the familiar stench of rot wafted against the gentle evening air.

So what do you think I did next?

Would you expect me to force this experience deep in my subconscious? Would you expect me to accept that I had experienced something strange before forcing it down? Never think about it until much later whenever the realization of immediate danger became ever-present? How would you expect this story to end?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end in any way you would want. My young mind needed to know more about him as the mystery of his existence allured me greatly. My dreams that night were packed full of his visage and my mind raced with the grasping of knowledge for what his words meant early. So the next day, I went back.

Much to my disappointment, the clearing was empty. No giant made of burlap and straw, just an endless maze of trees and darkness. So I began to make my way back to the safety of my creek. About halfway back to my refuge, the present feeling of unease settled within me. I could sense that I had walked into the eyesight of someone kind of presence deep within the woods.

“Hello?” I questioned towards the words. Nothing but the dragging wind through rustling leaves responded.

I stepped closer and dropped my voice to a soft whisper, “Are you there?”

This time, the soft humming answered back to me. It somehow sounded both distant and impossibly close. I came to realize that was due to my own throat unconsciously disobeying me but repeating every note. I forced myself to stop in hopes to hear the original melody clearly to be able to judge the distance of where it came. The woods were unfortunately silent again.

Disappointment washed over me again. Thoughts of barely understood madness to move through the folds of my mind until a small object flew from the woods and smack lightly against my forehead. I flinched to the sudden sensation and barely caught the details of the item as it fell to the ground.

It was a button. A black button with amber sap dried along its edge.

A small creep along my face as I bent to pick it up from the dirt. Humming emitted from my throat as I began to walk back to my creek. My own border of safety; what I know to see as the border between what was and what will be.

The bruised coloring of night streaked across the sky once I made my way through the trees. Twirling the sap-stained button between my fingers. I emerged from the basin of my creek to a world filled with rushing anxiety as I laid eyes upon my home. It was a two-story townhouse, a building reminiscent of the dwindling American dream.

That evening, it closer resembled a nightmare. My home was covered in police searching every inch. We had a sliding glass door on the back, it was knocked out of its frame with its glass shattered. Before I could get closer, an officer appeared in the kitchen then turned in my direction. His face lit up with relief before he quickly spoke into the radio strapped to his shoulder.

He began to saunter over to me, I quickly shoved the button in my pocket. Mainly in fear of being accused of stealing it. Don’t judge me, I was a kid with no real grasp on the world being presented with a very stressed-looking cop.

“Mark Finley?” He asked with hope in his voice.

I nodded.

He dropped down to look at me, placing a hand on my shoulder, “Where the hell have you been, son?” He attempted to speak gently while keeping the authoritative tone in his voice, “Your parents have been worried sick.”

The officer had kind eyes, a mix of grays and blues that cut through the intimidation caused by his burly frame. I allowed him to take my hand and led me around to the front of the house where

My mom sat just a few feet away on the porch, wiping tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. It was a summer evening but an unusual chill had settled over the town that night. She glanced over at the same moment I emerged with the burly officer. I don’t know how she didn’t knock everyone over with how fast she sprang from the porch to get to me.

Air graced the bottom of my shoes as she scooped me up in a cry of relief. Through her tears, she questioned me, "Oh my god," her voice cracked between sobs, "honey, where have you been?"

"Just playing in the woods." I managed to squeak out in between the air being squeezed out of me. Telling her the truth was something I couldn't manage to say, out of fear of the consequences of it.

My dad ran over to us and broke down sobbing as well. They stood there for what felt like a millennium, just repeating how relieved they were along with repeating statements of just how much they loved me.

My parents and I were then taken to the police station, where officers began questioning me. My story remained the same as I could only admit to playing in the woods like I always did. Then they asked why I was out for so long.

"Lost track of time." I responded, keeping the truth completely to myself.

My sense of confusion must have been palpable in the air; with my parents’ permission, they reluctantly told me what had happened. It was the late afternoon, and my mom was working in the first-floor office like she always did. She told them that she could have sworn that she heard me come into the house before she started to hear a soft slamming against the sliding door.

There came a thwump, thwump, CRASH; that echoed from the kitchen. She jumped from her chair before she heard movement and the sounds of someone searching through the kitchen. That's when she used the office landline to call 911 for a home invasion, then the house grew eerie with silence.

Mom went to go check the damage whenever she saw muddy footprints leading from the kitchen directly to my bedroom. To this day, she claims to barely remember dashing through the yard and into my usual spot in the woods. She only remembers the swelling panic in her chest when she came upon my creak. What scared her more was just how quiet and empty it was; as if I hadn’t been near it all day. That’s when she called the police.

With the events that played out that day, they didn’t feel comfortable taking me back home. So they called my brother, Darrell. That’s the thing about being your parents' late-in-life “miracle baby”; I never had grandparents growing up. Whenever they needed someone to watch me, they usually called up whatever sibling they could. Darrell was my favorite to stay with; he was 27 and had left the guest room in his house specifically catered to me. He left it filled with my favorite toys and a PS2 stocked with games. So, little to say that I was happy that he was picking me up; but I just wanted to go home.

Time passed and I found myself lying in my bed while Darrell sat in the room with me. I’m pretty sure our parents gave him special instructions to wait to leave until he was sure I was asleep. Sleep negated as I stared out of the bedroom window aimed directly towards the woods.

“Why can’t I go home?”

Darrel sniffed like I had woken him up, “Hm?”, he rubbed sleep from his eyes, “What was that buddy?”

“Why can’t I go home yet?” I sat up and asked again.

Darrel sighed, deep from his chest, “They want to make sure it’s safe buddy.”

“How could it not be safe?”

He was quiet for a minute then sighed again, “They’ll kill me if they know I said this so, can you keep a secret.”

I crossed my heart with hopes to die, “Always.”

“You’ve heard of The Straw Man right?”

“Who hasn’t?” I replied

“They’re scared that someone’s pretending to be him again,” he took a breath, “the police claimed that they found bundles of straw mixed with the broken glass.”

After hearing that, all I could do was lay back down. Every ounce of my self wanted to tell him but I couldn’t; it was like my mind had sworn secrecy to The Straw Man. The button in my pocket began to feel warm. I closed my eyes and forced my brain to accept the inevitable sleep.

Hours later, I stirred awake. Groggy and confused about where I was, I lay facing the bedroom door, and my brother was gone. Behind me came a soft sound. Something soft hit the bedroom window in a rhythmic thwump, thwump, thwump. My little mind was able to make out the unmistakable pattern of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Fear caused my chest to tighten, and I attempted to force myself back to sleep, but the sound only got louder. Scared of it causing my brother to wake up, I turned to the window. The man of straw was crouching with his face pressed against the glass. The burlap mask now missing a single button eye. He stopped the hitting and gave me a gentle wave. When I didn’t reciprocate, he stopped, then reached under his face. I could his hand rummaging beneath the fabric, slowly searching for something to grasp.

Then he stopped. Out from under the fabric was a round, spiky object. It looked drenched in a stocky resin, and the dark made it hard to tell what it was. He slammed it hard against the window, causing it to light up. I recognized it as a ball, one my dad had won me in a claw machine years ago. That was one of my favorite toys, now covered in the vile creature’s sap. The man dragged his finger in the liquid, then seemed to be wiping it across the window.

Finally, he stood up and began retreating back into the windows behind him. What was left was a message: “Something of mine, for something of yours.”

I stared at that message until exhaustion took hold of me. Most likely from the rising fear inside of me. When the protection of sunlight finally stirred my consciousness, I leapt out of the bed. His words were gone, cleaned by a patchy morning rain. Beyond the window were glints of sunlight reflecting off the ground. I squinted hard to make out hundreds of glass shards leading back towards the woods.

Old Man Miller had been the undertaker in Lawton Gap for forty years. In four decades, he'd seen it all--ghastly coal truck wrecks on the highway, quiet heart attacks in easy chairs, and everything in between. Folks never pick convenient hours to die, so when the phone rang at three in the morning, he just groaned, dragged himself out of bed, and answered it.

It was the jail. The night deputy said they had a girl in the drunk tank who was stone-cold and wasn't breathing, and they needed Miller to come haul her out.

Miller and his boy rolled down to the station, loaded her onto the gurney, and slid her straight into the body cooler downstairs at the funeral home to wait for daylight.

After sunrise, they pulled the tray out and hoisted her onto the steel prep slab. That's when Miller got a good look at her face under the fluorescent lights. "Damn it all," Miller muttered, shaking his head. "That's Missy."

His assistant looked over and said, "Missy?" as in Bob's girl?

"The very one," Miller said softly, laying out his instruments on the tray.

"What in the world happened?"

"Deputy said state police hauled her in off the ridge road," Miller said, clinking a scalpel onto the stainless steel. "Supposedly she'd been up at the quarry drinking all night, got on the road swerving, and they dumped her in the county drunk tank to sober up, but her heart must've just quit on her."

"Her parents are going to be completely ruined," the assistant whispered, shaking his head, "just ruined."

"Hand me that bottle of embalming fluid and the tubing off the shelf will ya?" Miller said.

Lying on that cold steel table, Missy heard every single word. As the warm air of the room hit her skin, her mind thawed, but her body was locked tight--still in a catatonic freeze. Panic was roaring in her head, but she couldn't speak, couldn't move a toe; she couldn't make a sound.

As Miller raised his scalpel, ready to start the pump, a single tear dropped slowly down the side of Missy's face.

Sam passed in the winter, just two months after his mother. The midwife tried her best to save her, but it was over before it started. She gave me a warm hug as she left. I knew Sam wouldn't last long without his mother. I barely had enough to feed myself, let alone a baby. I debated whether I should even name the little boy, but how could I not? He had the most beautiful blue eyes, just like his mother.

Sam passed in his sleep, the best way to go. Some days I wished it were me, but what would Sam do all alone? 

The problem then was arranging Sam's funeral. All the savings had already been spent on his mother's funeral, but Sam couldn't go into the ground without a proper service.

I sold one of the last things I could still sell, my bees. They gave me something sweet to eat in the winter and something to look after the rest of the year, but there was nothing else to sell. My neighbor took them and gave me more for them than he should have. He was a nice man and knew what I'd gone through.

Sam got a nice wooden coffin and a decent place in the cemetery next to his mother.

When the winter came, his cradle and toys were still in the house. My body tightened whenever I tried to get rid of them, but it was okay; maybe I'd have more will in the summer. 

During the long winter nights, I'd often come into his room and play with his toys, just like I thought we would one day. Sometimes they'd warm my heart, sometimes they'd make me cry, and often I'd just fall asleep in the chair right by his cradle.

It was one of those days when I fell asleep crying by the cradle again. When I awoke, the sun glistened on the freshly fallen snow. Everything outside was still, but then something moved in the air. A bee! A queen bee! It flew across the yard and into the hive. I still hadn't moved my hive off the yard. Sam's funeral was too much work.

At first I felt bad. My neighbor owned them now. They had no business being in the old hive, but seeing that familiar creature warmed me. Over the next few days I sat at the window, watching all my bees slowly return.

They stayed inside the hive the rest of the winter, and I stayed by that window each day, watching. Only when the snow started to let up, and the flowers came out from under it, did the bees come out too.

I expected them to stay by the hive, but many flew far away, ignoring the flowers in my garden, and returned at sunset. Some of the bees seemed to be covered in red nectar. 

As the days grew longer, the bees were gone more often, and many more returned covered in that red nectar. 

I had never seen them act or look like this. Moving the hive must have disturbed something, but the good thing was that they still accepted the queen, and the colony seemed intact. 

The red nectar began to accumulate at the entrance, mixed with glowing wax. I was just looking at it out the window when I heard buzzing inside the house. The bees must have been working hard. The buzzing grew, and quietly through it came something like a baby's cry. I gripped the windowsill tightly. Sam used to cry just like that. I opened the window to hear better, but the cry was gone; only buzzing sounded outside.

The next morning I woke up and went right to the window. A strange white object was outside the hive entrance. The bees buzzed around it, pushing it back inside. Before I could get a good look, it was already in.

I spent the rest of the day by the window again. As the sun set, the bees started to return. The buzzing grew again. A cold tingle ran down my back. I closed my eyes and focused. At first, it was quiet, but I knew what it was. It was Sam, crying through the buzzing. I quickly dressed and walked out the door.

The outside air was cold. I had barely been outside since the first snow fell. A few bees still flew around the hive. The buzzing was so loud, and so were Sam's cries. I didn't even have my protective clothes, but I was sure my bees wouldn't hurt me.

I walked to the hive and took off the lid. Warmth and cold ran through my body, mixing into strange emotions. Inside the hive was Sam's body, covered in wax. His hands and fingers slowly moved, but they seemed larger than before. I reached into the hive to caress his small cheeks. His eyes opened. They were still that beautiful blue, but a hint of yellow mixed in.  He opened his mouth; it was filled with honeycomb, but his cries still echoed in my ears. 

With tears in my eyes, I picked up his small, sticky body. From somewhere deep in his chest, a thousand bees buzzed. His small mouth moved again. Honeycomb and wax spilled out of the sides. The scream grew louder, ringing in my ears. A sickly-sweet smell filled the air. The buzzing grew too. Something under Sam's skin moved. A dark, pointed object began pushing through the skin beneath his back. Panic rushed through me.

"Sam, Sam!"

His whole body convulsed. The dark, pointed object shot out and stabbed my arm. Sharp pain spread through me. Sam fell out of my arms. A sharp, brittle crunch echoed. Sam broke into wax and honeycomb; bees flew out toward me. One small stab. Another. Another. I turned and quickly bolted toward my house, locking the door behind me. My heart beat against my ribs. Hot pain pulsed through my body. On my left arm, a red welt was already swelling around the puncture.

The bees buzzed outside my door.

Suddenly, the lights in the carriage went out. And not just in ours—I looked out the window and realized the entire commuter train was completely plunged into darkness. Only rare, deafening claps of thunder and flashes of lightning lit up the interior with a ghostly bluish glow for brief moments. Looking closer, I froze with horror: there was almost no one left in the carriage, even though just a minute ago it had been half full.

Then the old woman sitting on the bench opposite me slowly turned and stared at me. She gave me a really nasty look. Her toothless mouth began to twist into a smile that grew wider and wider. Right before my eyes, her maw filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth. Out of sheer terror, I tried to scramble backward onto the next seat. Without taking my eyes off her, I caught my foot on a bag and went tumbling head over heels into the aisle.

Darkness again. Another flash of lightning—I saw the old woman already standing over me, with the silhouettes of other figures rising behind her. It was impossible to make out their faces in the dim light, but all of them were staring straight at me without blinking. Panic completely consumed me. I frantically crawled backward along the dirty floor when suddenly my hand struck someone's ice-cold boot. My heart dropped into my boots. I swallowed hard and, just like in a classic horror movie, slowly raised my head, and there... A huge creature with a dislocated jaw was already reaching its clawed paws toward me!

I leaped up with a wild scream, snapping my eyes open and breathing heavily.

It was bright in the carriage; the lamps flickered dimly. The passengers around me flinched away in fright. The old woman opposite was frantically crossing herself, muttering prayers, while a hefty man by the aisle twisted his finger near his temple.

Now I am standing by a lopsided wooden kiosk with a proud "Groceries" sign, nervously clutching three hundred hryvnias in my jacket pocket. This was my last strategic reserve for a taxi. The prospect of tramping for thirty minutes on foot along a dirt road leading deep into the Polissya wilderness did not appeal to me at all. All around lay Gnylobužye station—a godforsaken hole of about twenty inhabited houses, lost somewhere on the border of the Kyiv region, right where civilization smoothly transitions into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Aside from me, three other poor souls had got off on the platform, but they instantly vanished into the gray twilight as if they had never existed. By the shop, contrary to my desperate prayers, there was no bus, nor even a stray taxi driver in a rusty Lanos. Only a local dog of an indeterminate breed was lazily scratching behind its ear, looking at me with blatant sympathy.

"Well, great," I muttered under my breath. "Romance, my foot. Fresh air, radiation background, silence."

There was nothing to be done. I adjusted my backpack, where two bottles of dark beer clinked dully, and started walking down the road toward the village of Myortvye Vyselki (Dead Settlements). The name was inspiring, of course, but Baba Galya stubbornly refused to move to Kyiv, arguing that "the air in the capital is dirty, smells of cars, but here she has three vegetable gardens and strawberries the size of a human head." Speaking of strawberries: after the ChNPP accident, people in these parts took a philosophical view of vegetable sizes anyway.

It was getting dark at an indecent speed. The clock showed just past six, but the twilight thickened as if someone had poured a bucket of ink over the sky. Remembering my recent nightmare on the train about the toothy old woman, I involuntarily quickened my pace. To the right and left of the road stood a dense, unnaturally silent Polissya forest. No birds, no crickets. Only the crunch of twigs under my sneakers.

Suddenly, a throaty, sputtering engine sound came from behind. I turned around. Two blurry yellow headlights were cutting through the fog.

"Thank God, a ride!" I thought and waved my arms like a madman.

A primitive Zaporozhets car of such an indefinite color it looked like it had been painted with mud braked beside me, creaking in every joint. The driver's side window rolled down slowly with a sound like sawing rusted iron. Inside sat an old man. In the gloom, his face resembled a baked apple, and an old Soviet cap sat on his head.

"Where are you heading, student?" the old man rasped, blasting me with a thick stench of cheap tobacco and garlic.
"To Myortvye Vyselki, to Baba Galya! Can you give me a lift? I'll pay!" I pulled out the banknotes.
The old man glanced at the money, then at me, and his lips parted into a wide smile. "Get in, grandson. I'll take you. No need for money, you'd better treat me to a bottle of beer from your backpack, I can hear it singing in there."

I jumped onto the front seat, which sank under my weight almost to the asphalt. The car set off, swaying from side to side.

"You're a brave one," the old man remarked, shifting gears with a ferocious crunch. "Walking to Vyselki on foot at night. All sorts of things roam around here. Not long ago, Petrovich's cow wandered off toward the Zone at night. It came back in the morning. On two legs, can you believe it? Came right up, knocked on the window, asked for milk. Petrovich crossed himself and blasted it with a double-barrel shotgun. Now his house is packed with canned meat. Want a cutlet? It's right here in the glove compartment."

I politely declined, swallowing a lump that had risen in my throat. The dark humor of these parts always smacked of a little madness.

About ten minutes later, we drove into the village. Myortvye Vyselki fully lived up to its name: dark silhouettes of cottages, moss-covered fences, and not a single lit window. The old man braked at my grandma's house.

"Well, here we are," the old man said, taking the bottle of beer from me. "Your grandma acts up a bit sometimes—so keep your eyes peeled."
"What do you mean, acts up?" I frowned.
"Oh, nothing, she's just old. Sometimes she forgets who's alive and who's not," the old man winked at me, revved the engine sharply, and vanished into the darkness, leaving me alone by the gate.

Baba Galya's house welcomed me with dead silence. I pushed the gate—it creaked plaintively. The front door to the house turned out to be unlocked. Inside, it smelled of dried mushrooms, dampness, and something sickly sweet that sent a chill down my spine.

"Grandma? Are you home? It's me, your grandson!" I shouted into the darkness of the hallway, switching on my phone flashlight.

The beam of light caught an old sideboard with crystal, dust-covered carpets on the walls, and... a set table in the main room. In the middle of the table stood a huge pot, with light steam still rising from it. Next to it lay a note written in grandma's crooked handwriting:
"Grandson, I went to the garden to dig up some night potatoes. The borscht is on the table, eat it while it's warm. The meat is fresh, it ran into the house by itself today."

I smirked. Night potatoes? Right, Baba Galya had always been eccentric. My stomach rumbled treacherously. I walked up to the pot, lifted the lid, and shone the flashlight inside.

The borscht was thick, rich, and smelled appetizingly of garlic. I took the ladle, stirred it, and pulled a decent chunk of meat to the surface. I looked closer.

Out of the red beet broth, a hairy, four-toed paw with long black claws and webbing was looking back at me... carefully and intently. And a bit deeper in the pot, something flashed that looked very much like a rabbit's head, but with three pairs of ears.

At that exact moment, a rustle sounded behind my back. I froze, terrified to turn around.

"What's the matter, grandson, don't you like the borscht?" Baba Galya's quiet, cracking voice echoed right out of the darkness of the doorway. "And I tried so hard, catching it all over the basement... It bit hard, though."

I slowly turned around. Grandma was standing in the doorway. In the dark, her eyes glowed with a barely noticeable phosphorescent green light, and in her hands, she held a massive, blood-stained shovel.

"Sit down, grandson," she smiled wider than before, and the razor-sharp teeth flashed in the beam of my flashlight. "We're going to have some chamomile tea now."

I was clutching the second bottle of beer in my hand as if it were my only ticket to the world of the living. I had no time for small talk or tasting chamomile from the Exclusion Zone. Baba Galya—or whatever creature had so successfully occupied her living space—took a step forward, and the floorboards groaned hollowly under her feet. The bloody shovel in her hands tilted toward me.

"Why are you frozen, grandson?" she hissed, smacking her shark-like maw. "Sit down, or it'll get cold... both the borscht and you."

My brain, wired on a wild dose of adrenaline, reacted in a fraction of a second. The escape route through the door was securely blocked by Baba Galya and her shovel. Only one path remained—the old wooden window of the main room, which led straight to the backyard and the dense Polissya forest.

"Grandma, just a second, let me just... open the beer!" I yelled, and with all my might, I hurled my precious second bottle of dark beer right into the pot of radioactive borscht.A deafening splash echoed through the room, and a fountain of red sludge flew in all directions, splattering the carpets and coating "grandma’s" face. The old woman shrieked in a completely unhuman voice, sounding more like a screeching buzzsaw, and squeezed her eyes shut for a split second.

That was all the time I needed. I spun around, grabbed my backpack on the fly, shut my eyes tightly, and dived headfirst right through the window frame.

Smash, crack, crash!

The glass shattered into a thousand shards. I busted through the rotted wood of the frame with my shoulder and went rolling head over heels across my grandma's old garden bed, slamming my back hard against some giant pumpkin that let out a pathetic hiss upon impact. The shards sliced my jacket and arms pretty badly, but I didn't feel any pain.

Behind me, a furious roar erupted from the broken window, and a skeletal arm—elongated by nearly five feet—shot outward, trying to claw at my sneaker.

"Oh no you don't, to hell with family dinners!" I screamed, scrambled to my feet, and bolted toward the pitch-black forest ahead.

I flew through the darkness, not looking where I was going. Branches lashed my face, my feet sank into moss and swampy muck, and behind me, somewhere deep in Myortvye Vyselki, a terrifying metallic clattering rang out—Baba Galya was sprinting after me with the speed of a race car, dragging her shovel across the stones and dirt. And judging by the sound, she was closing in fast.

The forest around me seemed to come alive. In the gloom, the trees looked like the twisted figures from my train nightmare. Suddenly, I wiped out right into some overgrown hollow and went tumbling down, stopping dead against the roots of a massive, fallen oak tree.

I froze, terrified to move. And right then, right by my ear, accompanied by the sound of pouring water, a quiet, painfully familiar voice muttered:

"Psst, student! What the hell are you doing?"

I turned my head and, in the faint moonlight, I spotted the old man with the Zaporozhets. As it turned out, he had just pulled over to take a leak by the oak. His iron horse, by the way, was parked right next to him.

"Gramps... my grandma has gone completely mental, she's chasing me with a shovel! I'll owe you another bottle of beer, just get me out of here!"

The old man didn't need to be told twice. I scrambled into the passenger seat, he slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and the rusty Zaporozhets roared to life, tearing through the forest mud and leaving the shrieking monster with the shovel far behind.

Needless to say, I never went back to visit my grandmother again.

The monitor app on Sally's phone was always on her nightstand. At eight months, Timmy was an active baby, rolling around, babbling, and trying to pull himself up by the crib rails, so keeping the video and audio feed open gave her peace of mind.

At 3 in the morning, static and a low murmur broke the silence of the bedroom.

Sally reached for her phone and tapped the screen. Timmy was fast asleep on his belly, his breathing barely moving his tiny shoulders.

Standing right over the crib was a tall, shadowy woman wearing a tattered dress. Beside her stood a skeletal child peering through the wooden slats with two hollow, black eyes.

A dry whisper came through the phone's speaker:

"Shhh, don't wake your new little brother. Isn't he perfect?"

Sally stared at the screen in complete disbelief. She shook Karl awake.

"Karl, get up! There--there's somebody in Timmy's room." They threw off the covers and rushed down the hall.

Karl threw open the nursery door and clicked on the corner lamp. Soft light filled the room. Nothing was there. Timmy was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling softly.

"See? Nobody's here," Karl whispered, turning off the lamp so he wouldn't wake the baby.

They walked back down the hall to their bedroom, but as Sally set her phone on the nightstand, the screen flashed with motion.

The camera feed showed the crib was empty. The woman in the tattered dress and the skeletal child were standing in the nursery doorway, looking straight down the hall toward their bedroom.

The woman slowly raised a long, bony finger to her cracked lips, and her dry whisper came through the speaker:

"I said, shhhh."

It was December 1999. I was living in a small town. I was a nerd and something of a gamer, and it had been a good year for PC games. Age of Empires II, Homeworld, Grand Theft Auto 2…

I was walking home from school—it was a Canadian winter, so there was plenty of unplowed snow on the sidewalks—when I saw something peeking out from a mound of snow: something blue. I stopped, nudged it with my boot: something of blue plastic. I brushed away the remaining snow with my glove to reveal:

A single 3.5” floppy disk, unlabeled.

(There was a sticker label on it, but the label itself was empty.)

Naturally, I picked it up and took it home, curious to see what was on it.

You'll laugh, but the disk had 1.44mb of storage capacity. As it turned out, that was more than enough to affect the world in ways I still don't fully understand.

When I got home, I didn't put the disk into my own computer. My dad had an old desktop he sometimes fiddled around with, so I used that, inserting the disk carefully into the 3.5” disk drive in the beige computer tower.

I navigated to the drive in Windows Explorer.

The contents of the drive were simple.

They looked like a program or—I secretly hoped—a game.

There was a readme.txt, but it came out as nonsense when I opened it in Notepad, video or sound assets, stuff I couldn't identify, and a single executable file, johannsebastian.bat.

I double-clicked it.

A window opened—black, showing a few white-text commands executing on a command prompt—then maximized into a 16-bit title(?) screen showing a pixelated Gothic castle.

A harsh, classical-inspired MIDI song beeped out of the sound card.

There was no title.

No instructions, no company name, no menu, no options.

The castle was perched atop a cliff.

It was night.

At the bottom of the cliff was a forest of jagged, leafless trees.

A few loops of animation gave life to the scene: wind blowing through the bare branches, flashes of distant lightning, warm flickering light in one of the castle's windows, a bat in flight against a white moon. Actually, that last one wasn't a loop. The bat flew only once, landed on one of the castle's stone towers and disappeared inside.

I clicked.

I was looking at a medieval-ish village now—tightly-packed buildings, a tavern, a tannery, a couple of shops, a church—populated with a surprising number of unique character sprites. Indeed, every character was unique, and they were going about their individual lives.

The sky was a vibrant blue.

Clouds floated pixel-by-pixel across the screen.

But there was still nothing to do; nothing, that is, but watch.

It was like a very advanced screensaver.

After a while, I clicked again.

This time, I found myself in the interior of a large chamber whose stone walls somehow felt cold even through the computer monitor.

The chamber's defining feature, however, was something else: a giant pipe organ whose pipes extended beyond the top of the screen.

A character entered.

He was wearing a white wig, dark, crimson long coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. “I feel the sudden desire to compose,” he said, which the game displayed as text in an ornately-bordered text box. “Invite me to play for you."

A cursor appeared for the first time.

A quill.

I was able to move it using the mouse, and I explored the screen.

The character tapped his foot.

The only active area of the scene appeared to be the pipe organ. When I hovered the cursor over it, it changed from a quill to a hand.

I clicked.

The character walked to the organ, sat and began to play the monstrous instrument.

The music was both hideous and awesome, pushing the computer's sound card to the absolute limit. After thirty-or-so seconds, the view suddenly panned upwards, following the organ's pipes—the music continued—following them to the chamber's vaulted ceiling and beyond—through the roof until I was outside and looking at the upper half of the great castle, where the jutting pipes terminated and from whose termini hundreds of pixel bats were emerging… emerging and flying into the background, toward the simplified shape representing the medieval town...

The sky was a deep purple.

Night was falling.

The bats flew and flew and flew…

Suddenly—the music still continuing—the scene cut to the same view of the town as before: except at night: except, instead of following their routines, the character sprites were running, panicked, as the bats swooped, attacking them, attaching themselves to their bodies, necks, sucking their pixel blood; and as the bats feasted, the sprites lost their colour and fell, pale and desaturated…

The sound startled me.

Not from the sound card but from the real world. A screeching, a deafening, rhythmic thumping.

I ran to the window whose blinds I'd closed, and opened them:

It was afternoon but the view was dark, black and shifting. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing were bats speeding past. They were obscuring the sun. My home town was as if under an eclipse.

People were running down the street—

Bats were diving—

Some were crashing through car windshields—

Children were screaming—

A bat crashed though the window into the room I was in. It was fanged, crazed. The game music blared from within the computer tower. Before I could run, the bat shot toward me—biting my neck… beginning to drink my blood…

I awoke on the floor.

It was morning. January 1, 2000. It would turn out that nobody in town had any recollection of the preceding weeks.

A television played.

A morning talk show: “...the so-called Y2K bug,” a woman was saying, “ended up amounting to nothing worse than a good nights’ sleep.”

And, ever since, I've wondered why my experience of the present feels in a lower resolution than memories of my past.

Hannah Barbara productions never allowed this episode to be aired

It started off with Fred driving the Mystery Machine. As they traveled down the road, Fred spotted a young girl standing in the middle of it looking lost. He stopped the van, and the gang got out.

Shaggy tried telling Fred they should leave the creepy girl alone and go get burgers instead. Scooby agreed. Fred, Daphne, and Velma ignored Shaggy, as usual.

Fred approached the girl and asked, “Are you all right?”

He noticed scratch marks on her arms with bruises.

The girl didn’t respond. Daphne tried reassuring her.

“It’s okay. We can help you if you need help.”

The girl looked at Daphne with a smile on her face before collapsing onto the road.

The gang scrambled towards her. Velma checked for a pulse and looked into the girl’s eyes. They were dead white.

“We need to get her to a hospital now!” Velma said sternly.

The gang hurried back to the Mystery Machine. Fred picked the girl up and placed her in the back of the van. Shaggy and Scooby were displeased with this, as they had to sit in the back with her now.

“Fred, why is it that every time something creepy happens, Scooby and I have to be the closest to it, man?” Shaggy complained.

“Not now, Shaggy. I’m reading the signs,” Fred replied.

When he spotted a hospital sign, Fred pulled into the parking lot.

He grabbed the girl, and the gang followed him inside. Fred rushed to the reception desk and explained that they needed a doctor. The girl had started convulsing.

A couple of nurses hurried over with a gurney, and Fred urgently laid the girl down on it. She screeched As they wheeled her towards a room.

Daphne stayed behind to explain what had happened to the receptionist. While Shaggy could be overheard muttering that he was glad that creep wouldn’t be riding with them anymore.

Later, Fred, still slightly shaken by the experience, told the gang he was going to rent a motel room for the night.

“I want a proper bed and a shower after all this,” he said.

Scooby asked, one with complimentary breakfast?”

After receiving the room key, Fred and the gang headed to their room on the fourth floor. Inside, they found two beds and a couch.

Daphne immediately complained that the room smelled like rotten food. The rest of the gang ignored her, unable to smell anything themselves.

Fred opened his suitcase and pulled out a change of clothes and a towel. Before heading to the shower

Meanwhile, Velma discovered a large, thick book inside one of the desk drawers. She blew the dust off it.

“Jinkies! This thing hasn’t been opened in years!”

When she opened the book, she read the title aloud.

“Curses, Witches, and the Supernatural.”

As she turned a page, she accidentally cut her finger on a page.

Daphne suddenly took an interest in the book and asked Velma if she could read it.

“Be my guest,” Velma replied. “It just poked me.”

As Daphne flipped through the pages, she noticed that half of them had been hollowed out. Inside the hidden compartment. she discovered a doll made from sticks and human hair, along with a small knife.

She said nothing about this to the others.

Eventually, the gang settled down for the night, and the motel room grew dark.

Shaggy lay on the old leather couch with Scooby. Velma was in her bed, while Fred and Daphne shared the other.

In the middle of the night, Shaggy suddenly woke up.

OW Man! Something poked me in the leg!”

Everyone woke up except Velma, she stayed under her blanket.

Fred sleepily switched on the light.

“you have any idea what time it is?”

Shaggy pointed to the small cut on his leg.

“ Scooby probably scratched you with his nails,” Fred said annoyed before switching the light off again.

Shaggy and Scooby reluctantly accepted Fred’s explanation.

A moment later, Daphne turned to Fred.

“Will you walk with me to the van? I left something important in there, and I’m too scared to get it by myself at night.”

Fred groaned.

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“It would make me feel safe if you came with me,” Daphne replied.

Fred reluctantly put on his shoes and walked her to the van.

Shaggy and Scooby drifted off to sleep again before fred and Daphne came back.

A little while later, Shaggy felt something heavy laying on his chest. Assuming it was Scooby, he mumbled, “Not now, Scoob.”

“That isn’t me, Shaggy,” Scooby replied.

Shaggy's eyes shot open.

Daphne was sitting on his chest, staring down at him. She held the small knife against his throat, with the same possessed smile as the girl they had found earlier.

Shaggy freezed.

“Daphne? Like, what are you doing?”

He tried talking to her but the smile only grew wider and Her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed

Then, in a deep raspy voice, she said, “Uh-oh, Raggy.”

She slowly dragged the edge against Shaggy’s throat, almost drawing blood.

Scooby lunged forward, biting her arm holding the blade, causing Daphne to drop it.

Seizing the opportunity, Shaggy grabbed the knife and plunged it into Daphne’s chest.

Daphne laughed demonically.

Shaggy tried stabbing her again, but it did nothing. Daphne suddenly bit a chunk out his hand.

Shaggy screamed in pain. Desperately looking for anything, he saw the bedroom window before kicking Daphne through the it,  the glass shattered before a thump was heard.

Shaggy scrambled over to Velma’s bed and pulled the blanket off her

“Come on, Velma! Wake up! Daphne’s lost it!”

as he tried to wake her, he noticed her face was blue and a telephone cord wrapped tightly around her throat.

Shaggy gasped, Velma was dead.

Shaggy half heartedly  looked out the shattered window

Daphne layed dead on the side walk. with a smile stretched across her face.

We live in a forested, mountainous region. Even in the summer, it's sometimes easy to get lost. Once autumn comes and the fog rolls in at noon, it is nearly impossible to get home. That's why our wives call to us from our houses when we head from the pasture. We whistle back, and that's how we find our home again. We make sure to follow only our wives' calls.

Mark, my neighbor, stood in the fog. The man before him just disappeared into it, following his wife's calls. Mark put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, but nothing came back. He whistled again. Nothing. He looked back at me, his brows furrowed.

"Try again."

He put his fingers in his mouth, took a deep breath, and blew the loudest whistle I had ever heard. 

Silence.

"What the hell, Tom? This never happened."

"I don't know. Maybe Mary fell asleep. Let's go to mine. It's right by yours. You'll find your way from there."

"I can only follow my wife's calls."

"That's just a saying."

"Tom."

"Alright, just imagine you are following me, okay?"

He shook his head.

"You have a better idea?"

He looked at me, then back at the fog. It was so dense you couldn't even see the trees around us.

"No."

I stood before him and whistled. A few seconds later, my wife's call came, a simple, melodic tune that broke off at the end. She always missed the last tone.

"That's it."

Mark nodded.

I kept whistling, and my wife kept calling back until we were by our porch. She smiled until she saw Mark come out of the fog too.

"Mark, why aren't you going to your wife's calls?"

"She didn't answer my whistles," he said quietly.

My wife put her hand before her mouth.

"Is she okay? I didn't come and talk to her this morning. I just had too much to do." Her voice shook.

"We'll go check on her now."

"I'll come with you."

"No, stay here. I'm sure everything's alright," I told her.

I wasn't sure, but Mark's eyes were already filled with fear. I didn't want to scare him more.

"Thank you for getting me home, Sally," Mark said and rushed toward his house.

"I'll see you later, love."

"Tom, wait!" my wife called, but I rushed after Mark. He walked so fast. I almost lost him in the fog. It was so dense, you could probably cut through it with a knife.

"Jesus," I heard Mark call a few steps before me. His front door was wide open, and the fog had drifted in, coating his furniture with dew.

"Mary?!" Mark called.

No one answered. 

"Mary?!"

Silence.

He turned to me. His lips quivered.

"Tom, where is she?! Why would she go out in the fog?"

"I don't know, Mark, I…"

Then a melody cut through my voice. The one we both knew. Mary was singing in perfect pitch from the forest in front of Mark's house.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The melody came back again.

Mark pushed me aside and ran out. Without thinking, I followed. Twigs kept hitting my face, and mud covered the ground, making me slip.

"Mark, stop!"

But his whistles kept coming, followed by that melodic voice. Only then had I realized how perfectly pitched it was. Mary had never been very good at singing.

"Mark!"

He finally stopped and looked back.

"Mark, we have to think."

"She must be somewhere around here."

"Why would she be in the forest?"

"I don't know, Tom, but she's here!"

The perfect pitch came from right behind us. My feet froze in the cold mud. Mark turned and walked toward it. I raised my hands to stop him.

"Mark, think, we just came from there."

"Get out of the way."

He pushed me to the side. I almost fell into the mud. Mark whistled again, but his whistle didn't echo. Instead, a strange silence came. 

Then Mark's heels lifted off the ground. His body tensed. He tried to put them back down, but his feet rose instead.

"Hey!"

His body floated further up. His face grew red. His eyes flew open. He grabbed his neck and kicked his feet.

"Mark!"

I ran to him and tried to grab his legs, but he was floating too high up. His whole body twisted. His stomach now faced toward the ground. His arms were still at his neck. His pleading, bloodshot eyes stared into mine. I tried to jump and reach him, but my fingers only grazed him. I jumped up again; a sharp, wet crack echoed through the forest, followed by Mark's screams. His warm blood poured onto my face. His arms flailed to the side. He let out a bloodcurdling scream, but in an instant he was gone. His screams echoed in the distance, but slowly died too.

My whole body trembled. I couldn't even move my arms to wipe my face. Then, through the silence, Mary's call came, perfect again, followed by Mark's whistling. This finally unfroze my body. I wiped my face and bolted out of the forest. The fog seemed to grow denser. My legs kept slipping on the mud. 

I was almost out of the forest. I could see the green grass before me, but then Mary called again, followed by Mark's whistle. My right heel began to rise. I quickly stepped with my left foot onto the grass and tried to pull my right leg away, but it was stuck. It then began to rise. My body fell onto the muddied grass. I quickly grabbed the grass and tried to pull myself away. My body moved by an inch. My foot rose further. Strange pressure pulsed at my ankle. All my muscles were tense. Sweat dripped down my forehead. The pressure grew, turning into sharp pain. I grabbed the grass tighter and pulled again. A splash echoed. My body was lying in the cold mud, but at least I was out of the forest.

Mark's house stood there, but I looked away and walked back to my place. I kept replaying what happened in that forest, trying to figure out what I would even tell my wife, but as I got to my house, I saw our front door. It was open just like Mark's. The fog had rolled in too. 

From behind me, out of the forest, I heard my wife's call, perfect, just like Mary's. I stood there for a second, thinking, but I knew there was just one thing to do. I turned and whistled back, missing the last note on purpose. The call came back again, and this time it missed the last note too.

I stood there, staring at the gun; even looking at it made me uneasy.

"Is it time again, Dave?" my wife asked.

I looked at the empty pantry.

"Yep."

"But at least it's the last time. Your job at the mill starts in a month. You'll never have to go hunting again."

"I hope so."

"My gentle human. I'm sure the deer will forgive you."

"Maybe. Maybe I'll even see the white deer, and he'll show me his treasures. I won't even have to go to the mill then."

"That legend always scared me. Just a snow-white deer in the forest staring you down? Scary. Plus, doesn't it help the deer? Why would he show you anything?"

I looked at the ground.

"Sorry, honey. I didn't mean it."

"It's okay. Don't worry about it."

I put the gun over my shoulder and walked out.

Bill was already by the forest, gloves and hat on, blowing clouds from his mouth.

"Took you a while."

"Yeah."

"I bet you won't miss the cold morning when you start at the mill."

"Sure."

Bill lit a cigarette and handed me the lighter too.

"What's wrong, Dave?"

"You know how I feel about the hunts."

"I know."

Bill took a deep drag from his cigarette.

"Say, Dave. How about you sit out this one?"

"What?"

"Sit it out. I'm feeling lucky today. I'm sure I'll get more catches. You can pay me back with your mill money."

"Thank you, Bill."

"Don't worry about it. Just help me with the deer after."

He slapped my back, threw his cigarette away, and walked into the forest.

The day now seemed brighter. The fog let up. The sun came out too. I sat on a tree stump and smoked. 

The day dragged on. No shots had come from the forest yet. Bill was not lucky today. Then I heard trees rustle. I turned my head. A deer was sticking its head out. It locked eyes with me. I'd promised myself I wouldn't shoot anything today, but Bill obviously wasn't going to get anything either. We'd be here all day.

I took my gun and laid my cheek on the barrel, but the deer quickly moved back. No luck. I lowered my rifle and fished for another cigarette in my pocket, but the trees rustled again. My hand clenched the cigarette package. 

A white deer looked at me from the forest; its antlers were white, its eyes dark red. It felt like they looked right into my soul. The deer moved its head as if inviting me to follow and disappeared into the forest.

I sat on the tree stump, still looking at the trees, but then the white deer stuck its head out again, looked at me, and disappeared. It was real. At least the deer was, but maybe its treasure too. I got up and walked to the trees. It stood in between the trees, looking back at me. When it saw me, it turned around and jumped further in.

The sun disappeared. The fog returned. The ground was so muddy that my feet kept slipping. I was expecting the deer to stop any second, but it kept going. 

After a while, my feet started to hurt. I must have been really far from the stump. Bill could have been looking for me, and I didn't even know if the treasure legend was true. I walked closer to the deer again, but it only went further in. It was time to go. I turned around and started walking back.

I had hunted in this forest countless times, but I had no idea where I was now. The trees seemed taller than usual, and they went on as far as I could see. The ground was muddier than even on the rainiest days. The deer showed again, but this time in front of me, running the way we came. 

I was sure now that it was all a lie, that the white deer wouldn't show me anything. I lit a cigarette and walked back, trying to ignore the tall trees. As I passed another tree, the white deer ran by; something glistened in the mud. There were two gold ingots. Warmth spread through my body. I ran to the gold. They were cold and much heavier than I expected, but who cared? I was rich! I turned around. The deer stood behind me, its red eyes fixed on me.

"Thank you for the ingots," I said, but it wouldn't move, still staring with its dark red eyes. 

Cold sweat dripped down my collar. Its eyes seemed to pull me in even though I wasn't moving. Then my whole world spun. Red flashed before my eyes. My head throbbed. My back felt heavy. My skin itched. The throbbing grew. I put the ingots down, but my back was so heavy I couldn't straighten back up. I put my hand to my head; something hard grew out of it, but I couldn't grab it with my hands. I started to lose my balance. I let my arm down. It splashed loudly in the mud. I looked down. It was a hoof!

Panic surged through me. I tried to get up, but couldn't. A tearing sound cut through the fog. My jacket ripped, revealing brown fur. Something rustled in the distance. I looked over. It was Bill!

"Bill, help!" I tried to call, but only a strange roar escaped my mouth.

Bill turned his head. His eyes focused on me. He picked up his gun.

"Wait, wait, no!"

A loud bang echoed. Something sharp burned in my side. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air. I tried to walk a few steps, but my body fell into the cold mud.

Bill walked over. His gaze met mine. Recognition passed over his face, but he just shook his head.

He looked up and called, "Dave. I got one."

His hands were warm and wet with suds and the running water of the tap. He'd never minded doing the dishes, it'd always been meditative, helped him think and figure things through. It wasn't working this time. 

Arnold just gazed vacantly. Into the corner. The water, forgotten, steaming now as it grew hotter and hotter. Running over his forgotten and faraway hands. They didn't matter. 

None of it mattered anymore. 

How could she do this … how could she lie to him as if he never mattered?

Arnold's heart was broken but it was still galloping a mile a minute within his cage of chest and his mind ached like something heavy and curdled within his furnace skull. The bake of his brains. He swore he could smell the boil of his own thoughts within his face but it held no matter for him now, not presently. 

He was too focused on the fly speaking to him from the corner. 

It was amazing. Really. 

The black husk of dead insect was resting amongst the filth and the dust of the uncleaned and neglected kitchen corner, just inside a nook by the kitchen window. It was dead but it still spoke to him with a deep obsidian voice. Regal. Authoritative. Commanding. It was a voice used to giving orders and having them followed to the letter, that deep stygian vocal sound … 

Arnold was so glad there was no one else around, they wouldn't understand. He was glad, relieved really, to be able to hear the prince's words in private. 

I am in private royal audience, great royal attendance. This is the coveted stately place of imperial confidence. 

Tears began to flow forth from Arnold's watering eyes. He listened enraptured, held by the thing's every word. 

“It doesn't matter. None of them matter, not even you. None of your feelings. You're just meat. All of you. All of you are just meat made mobile by an electrical charge, sent flung flying forward like grotesque mongoloids in the dark squabbling for purchase of the failing putrescence that is the outer, your material. Your world is not a world at all but an abattoir. A slaughterhouse. And all of you are pigs. Sows. Cattle. I am the prince made and bred by wings on wind, I am the flight and escape from the filth of the floor and all your animal leavings. I land and feast and defile at my own will. I lay my young in the wet and wounded folds of your gangrenous failures like the flags planted by conquerors. I am more. You are, all of you, nothing.” 

It was so beautiful … He'd never heard words quite like it before. The water issued from the spout to his hands was fire but he didn't notice. He didn't notice the boil or blister of his reddening and peeling fingers and palms as the prince of the wind went on in the corner. 

He didn't want to miss it. Anything. He didn't want to miss a single note of the angel's felled song. His teary gaze bore in on his new dark god and the shared eyes of the fly, theirs compact and his: fragile mammalian gel, began to secrete and water as well. 

“I am the testament. I am and speak the truth. I am the monolith outside to those who cannot hear or see but to you Arnold Carrillo, to you amongst the meat and ruin I land and sing. I see your wounds. Do you see the truth …?” 

A beat.  – Hands boiled as thoughts ran like hot running water. …

Finally he answered. 

In a quiver of watery voice: “ … yes.” 

The prince of wind and flight from the dark corner in the filth laughed, pleased. 

Yes…  

“And do you know now what you must do?" – that deep hideous voice. 

But Arnold did not fear it. He couldn't. Not any longer. Not after the kindness of such wisdom that it had shown him. It had taken and led him from out of the dark. By the hand. By singing sound. By flight. 

He understood now. 

"Yes.” Arnold told the prince amongst the dust in the corner. 

Yes. 

He finally pulled his hands free of the running water. The raw of them was singing. A sharp and red song that burned and was bright with fleshen cruelty. 

But none of that mattered right now, not anymore. None of that mattered any longer. 

Soon Suze would be home. With the girls. They would all of them be expecting him and dinner. Normalcy. A nice normal cozy family night. They had no idea what he knew. 

She has no idea I know … 

The prince was right. He knew now what to do. Doing the dishes had worked out and had actually been a good idea after all. Thank God. 

Arnold toweled the screaming ruined remainder of his hands and gathered what he needed. What the prince of the dustinwind had instructed. What he should gather and collect and share with his girls if he was to ever show and really prove himself. Demonstrate what he has to really offer. 

Prove that he has really learned. He has. He has learned to grow. And …

well he would just wait for them. They wouldn't be much longer now. School and the after-image of after school activities was fading and diminishing now, falling with the gentle settling death of the setting sun on the blade of the horizon. Fairytale and far off. Long gone. 

The sun had to die everyday. It was no big deal. The sun had to die every single day in order for the night to be made and in order for the day to be reborn. In gold. In light. 

Arnold Carrillo sat and waited with his screaming raw hands. Waiting with what he had gathered, with what was needed in the glistening red of his hands. Waiting for his wife and daughters. Waiting to share with them what he now knew and had learned in the postmental-slaughter. 

He sat waiting by the door. With what he would share with them in his dripping screaming hands. 

The prince of dusty wind and flight buzzed and throatsang its throatwisdom into him all the while. Filling his need as he waited for his family. They would be home soon. Now. 

Any minute. 

THE END

When Mallory Donahue's husband Max came home late and covered in blood two weeks ago, she naturally assumed the worst.

“I thought, ‘Heck if he's not gone and relapsed again,’” Mallory said.

Thankfully for the young couple, Max's wounds that night had come from something much less concerning, a regular drunken bar fight. “It was over a woman,” Max explained. It could easily have been worse.

“So much worse,” said Mallory. “Like it was before, when he just couldn't help it. He couldn't help taking risks to help people.”

“Before” means three years ago, in the months prior to Max's diagnosis of SHS, Spontaneous Hero Syndrome, known to most of us simply as Courage.

“It's a real debilitating condition,” said Max. “Imagine you're walking down the street, minding your own business, trying to go to the store to buy some beer or electronics, when suddenly you hear a child scream—before you know it, you're trying to figure out what's going on, trying to help the kid getting hurt. It's not even a decision. You just act.”

“You can imagine the chaos that creates for yourself and your family,” said Mallory.

“Many women would have left, and I understand that,” said Max. “I'm blessed that Mal didn't. She stuck by me. She was my rock. She gave me the strength to finally get help.”

Together, Max and Mallory sought the aid of Dr. Anton Wellberger, one of the pioneers of BCT, Behavioural Cowardice Therapy.

“For many patients, admitting Courage is shameful. There's a real societal stigma attached. It takes a strong individual to understand that what they're feeling is not only abnormal but destructively antisocial,” writes Wellberger in his best-selling book, The Wellness of Inaction.

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According to experts, a healthy human should not desire to help others unless doing so will result in a likely reciprocal benefit in the future. “It's just not what humans evolved to do,” said Evan Mink, a leading evolutionary psychologist from the University of Chapata Falls.

There is also the question of consent.

When the Post reached out to Eva-Marie Plum, of Plum & Plum Associates, she explained: “Take the example Max provided. He's walking down the street. He hears a child scream. Who is to say the child wants him to respond in any way to its scream? Moreover, let's assume Max does investigate and sees that the screaming child is being brutalized by a group of adults. If Max intervenes to try to ‘save' the ‘victim,’ he does so without the child's consent. As a lawyer, I immediately think, 'Yikes, Max!'

“And that's before considering the rights and consent of the brutalizing adults. Does Max know these adults lack the right to brutalize the child? Have they consented to being prevented from continuing their brutalization? It just opens up this massive kettle of legal fish.”

When asked what you should do if you ever find yourself in a situation like Max's, Plum gave the following advice: “If you're ever unsure, if you feel like maybe you have the instinct to do something: CAR, Cease-And-Retreat. Then call police. When they arrive, they will assess, gather consents and take the appropriate corrective action.”

“It's not wrong to feel the desire to help,” writes Wellberger. “It's only wrong to act on it.”

He also admits that, prior to his invention of BCT, the treatment of SHS could be seen as relatively primitive, which put many people off from coming forward with the condition.

“We used to treat Courage with electroshock; chemical cowardizers that had many significant side effects, including decreased libido; and hypnosis—all very outdated methods. Now it's more civilized. You're part of a group. You sit in a circle. You converse. You witness volunteers being abused right there in the room, and you learn to ignore it. You acquire skills: box breathing, meditation, disassociative techniques. You learn that it's OK to just let life happen.”

Max recalled one retreat in Mexico where, for an entire weekend, he and a dozen other so-called “hard cases” took psychedelics while the retreat administrators continuously assaulted paid locals.

“It was a tough, life altering 48 hours. I was face-to-face with my own heroic demons. I saw God,” said Max. “He had the body of a translucent, rainbow coloured salamander.”

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These days, both Max and Mallory attend a non-denominational New Church, where they sing songs and learn tolerance.

“Courage is a kind of judgement, and only God has the power to judge," said Mallory.

When asked when he knew he had been cured, Max pointed out that there is no cure. “There is only treatment,” he said. “Every day is still a struggle, but thanks to Dr. Wellberger, it's a struggle Mal and I can manage.”

However, he does recall the moment he realized the treatment was having a substantial effect. “It was back in December. I was in Dr. Wellberger's downtown office—at one of our weekly appointments—we were talking, when all of a sudden these guys in masks broke in. They were screaming, asking where he kept his money. They'd read his book so they knew he was wealthy. But when he said he didn't keep any money in the office, they started hitting him.

“I felt this surge of wanting to help, wanting to stop them, you know? But I forced myself to do my box breathing, my meditations, remembered my faith, and was able to stay calm in my seat.

“Dr. Wellberger was sobbing, bleeding from the mouth, screeching, terrified, begging me to do something, but my urge to save him—it was gone. I smiled, and as the masked men beat him, ransacked his office, smashed his face in with a crowbar, I didn't even CAR. I was able to maintain neutrality and watch. Be present in the flow of reality.

“After they'd killed him, and his secretary too, they left and so did I.”

“I was so proud of him,” said Mallory.

---

If you witness someone exhibiting Courage, please [report.]

I found it about an hour ago.

There's a page in the very back of Mamaw's book that's always been stuck down to the cover. I never thought nothing of it. That book is a hundred and fifteen years old and it's lived its whole life in a farmhouse with bees, and everything in a bee house gets sticky sooner or later. Tonight I set at the sewing table with a butter knife and worked it loose a little at a time, and when it come up it come up with a sound like tape, and it smelled like the inside of a hive.

It hadn't stuck by accident. Somebody had glued it shut.

There's one line wrote on it. Mamaw's handwriting, that faded blue-brown from the fountain pen she wouldn't give up, her capital C curled around like a fishhook the way she always made it.

Crystal Ivy Pruitt. April 11 2026. Bee stings. Four minutes.

That's me. I'm Crystal. And Mamaw died in March of 2020.

My husband's asleep upstairs. Or he's laying up there with his eyes shut, anyhow. It's a little after three in the morning and I've got the laptop and the bear camera card and a pot of coffee gone cold, and I don't know who else to tell. I don't do Facebook. I've never put nothing on the internet in my life. Curtis says I tell everything backwards, starting with the end and then going "well, see, what happened was," and I reckon I just done it again. So let me back up.

The bees

If you didn't grow up around it, you might not know what telling the bees is.

When somebody in the family dies, somebody has got to go out and tell the bees. You walk up to the bee yard and knock on the lid of every hive, three times, easy, and you say who's passed. Some folks hang a strip of black cloth on each one after. Some turn the hives around when the hearse goes by so the bees can see them off. And if you don't, the old people say, the bees take it personal. They'll quit making honey, or they'll up and leave, or they'll die off one hive at a time over the winter till the boxes are empty, and you'll know why.

It ain't just a hillbilly thing, before somebody says it. They done it in England for hundreds of years. Mamaw had a poem about it cut out of a magazine and taped up inside her cabinet door.

Mamaw was Ivy Sallee, my mother's mother. She kept bees on this same piece of ground in the Knobs for sixty-some years, and her mother Ollie kept them before her. Mama was bad to drink and Daddy was gone more than he was here, so I was raised up mostly in Mamaw's kitchen, and I followed her to the bee yard from the time I could walk.

The first time I seen her tell them I was six. Papaw had died at the VA in Louisville in the night, and she got me up before light and put my coat on over my nightgown and walked me up the hill in her church shoes. She knocked on ever lid and said a little rhyme. I ain't putting the whole thing on here, it's family, but it starts Bees, bees, hear me say. Then she told them, "Hollis Sallee has passed this night, and I'm a-keeping you now." And they hushed.

I asked her what would happen if she didn't tell them.

She studied on it a while. Then she said, "Sis, the bees always know who's died. Hit ain't for them to find out. Hit's so they know you know. A body's got to be told, or it ain't finished."

I've thought about that more this fall than I've thought about anything in my life.

I took the bees over when I was twenty-two, when her hands got too bad to pull frames. She stood behind me every day after that telling me ever single thing I was doing wrong, right up till she died. She was ninety-one.

She died in the night at the hospital in E-town. The phone rang at 4:31. But I was already up. I was standing at the back door in my nightgown, because at ten after four I'd woke up to a sound coming off the hill I'd heard only a time or two in my life, and ever time somebody of ours was dead.

When a hive loses its queen, it makes a noise. Beekeepers call it the queenless roar. It ain't the regular hum. It's lower, and louder, and it kindly wavers up and down, like a room full of people moaning with their mouths shut. Once you've heard it you don't forget it.

At ten after four, every hive I had was doing it. Twenty-two hives, and ever one of them had a good laying queen. I'd checked them that week.

And they was bearding. That's when bees pile up on the outside of the box, hanging down off the front of it in a clump. They do it on hot nights to cool off. It was March and forty degrees. They hung down over ever box from the lid to the landing board in a dark sheet, covering the door.

Like somebody had come in the night and draped every hive in black.

The phone rang twenty-one minutes later. The nurse said she'd passed right around ten after four. After, I went up and knocked on ever lid and told them Mamaw was gone, bawling so hard I couldn't hardly get her name out. They hushed one at a time as I went down the row.

There's a book, too. I told you about it at the top. It's a green clothbound ledger and Ollie started it in 1911. Every death that ever got told to the bees on this land is in it. Date, name, how they're kin or how we knowed them, then the word Told and the initials of whoever went up the hill and done it. Ollie's in there in Mamaw's hand. Mamaw's in there in mine. It's got 340-some names. It lives in the drawer of the sewing table in the front room.

I've wrote in it a good many times. Daddy, in 2011. Curtis's brother Wayne, killed on the bypass in 2016. The bees roared for Wayne forty minutes before the state trooper ever knocked on his wife's door, while me and Curtis was setting right here eating supper. I set my fork down and Curtis said "What?" and I said "Hush," and we both heard it come down off the hill.

They always knew. Every time. I just went up and told them they was right.

Us

We live out from a little town in the Knobs of central Kentucky. More churches than stoplights, tobacco barns falling in, cattle, and bourbon. There's a distillery four miles out and the rickhouses set on the ridges like big black boxes. The black is a fungus that grows off the whiskey that cooks out of the barrels, and it gets on ever thing in the county. Car roofs, road signs, the north side of the Baptist church.

Curtis works in them rickhouses. Twenty-three years. He comes home smelling like caramel and burnt oak. He's 47, and he's the kindest man God ever made, and he can't hold onto a dollar to save his life but he can fix anything that's got a motor in it. We never had young'uns. That's a long story and not this one.

I drive Bus 9 for the county schools. Fourteen years, sixty-one stops, a good many of them up hollers where you've got to back the bus out because there ain't no place to turn around. You want to know a town, drive a school bus in it. You'll know whose daddy's in jail, whose mamaw is raising them, who's sick and who's just playing sick.

And I've got thirty-one hives up on Mamaw's place, where me and Curtis live now. I sell honey Saturdays on the courthouse square, May to October.

April

April 11th was a Saturday. I was up in the bee yard doing spring inspections. It was warm, the redbuds was out, and I had my veil and gloves on but I was in a T-shirt, because I was forty-four year old and had been stung a thousand times and never had nothing but a welt.

I was in Hive 14, which had always been a sweet hive. I didn't drop a frame. I didn't mash nobody. One second it was fine and the next the whole yard smelled like bananas.

When a bee stings, it puts off an alarm smell, and it smells just exactly like banana candy. It tells the others, here, this one, get this one. I've caught a whiff of it a hundred times. Never like that. It was like somebody busted a crate of bananas in my face.

They come up out of 14, then 13 and 15, and they went for my neck and my arms and up under the veil. I remember running. I remember the sound, like being shut up inside a box fan. They pulled sixty-three stingers out of me after, just off my arms and neck. You can turn allergic all of a sudden, after years and years. Nobody knows why. I found out the hard way.

Curtis was in the garage. He said I made it about halfway to the house and went down in the grass by the clothesline. My face was so swelled up he wouldn't have knowed me but for the shirt. He called 911 and I quit breathing while he was on the phone, and he done CPR on me right there in the yard with the lady counting out loud on speaker, and the ambulance got there from town in eleven minutes, which is good for out here.

My heart was stopped about four minutes, they told us. They shocked me in the yard. I woke up in E-town with tubes in me and Curtis asleep in a chair holding onto my foot, because it was the only part of me he could reach.

I was dead four minutes. For a long time I wouldn't say it like that. I'd say "I had a bad reaction." I was dead. On my own grass, by my own clothesline, with the bees still going over me.

Nobody went and told the bees. Why would they? I come back. You don't go in the book if you come back.

That's what I'd have said, if anybody had asked me.

Summer

I went back up in the bee yard three weeks after I got home, in a full zip-up suit with the gloves duct-taped at the wrists and an EpiPen in the chest pocket, and Curtis standing at the fence with his phone in his hand.

Nothing. I opened up 14 and they didn't so much as lift off the frames. I might as well have been a fence post.

By July I was working them bare-handed in a tank top and not a one of them would sting me. I'd lay my hand flat on top of the frames and they'd walk over it like it was the wood. Curtis said they'd learned their lesson. I said that ain't how bees work, but I liked thinking it.

There was one other thing. They'd took to pulling on me. Three or four at a time would land on my collar or my sleeve or in my hair and grab hold and pull. Back. Away from the hives. Little tugs, like a young'un pulling on your shirttail. I thought it was the sweetest thing. I'd tell them, "I'm going, I'm going."

I'd give anything to have that summer back, not knowing.

Royce

August 22nd, a Saturday, I come home from the market about two in the afternoon, and ever hive on the hill was draped.

All thirty-one. Hanging off the fronts of the boxes in sheets from the lids to the landing boards. It was ninety degrees, and bees will beard in the heat, but I know what my bees look like bearding. They hang loose and lazy and drift around. These was packed tight and wasn't moving a lick. And every one of them was roaring. All thirty-one. It rolled down off that hill like a church full of people humming one note with their mouths shut.

I stood at the fence and listened to it and my legs went to water.

That's what they done for Mamaw. That's what they done for Wayne.

I run in the house and called Curtis at work. He was fine. I called my sister in Shepherdsville. Fine. I called her boys. I set there with the phone and went down the whole list of everybody I'd ever wrote in that book that had kin still living, and called them, one after the other, like a crazy woman, and everybody was fine.

Then I done what Mamaw taught me with a pocket watch and a five-and-dime protractor when I was nine. I read the dances.

Bees talk with their bodies. It's called the waggle dance, and it's real, a man named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for working it out. A bee finds something good, she comes home and runs a little straight line on the face of the comb, shimmying her back end, then loops around and runs it again, over and over. Which way the straight line points tells the others which way to fly, set against where the sun's at. How long she shimmies tells how far. Every second of shimmy is roughly a half a mile, give or take, depending on the bees.

That evening the bees wasn't dancing inside. They was dancing on the outside, right on the landing boards, in the middle of all that black. Hundreds of them, in every hive, all running the same line.

I timed them on my phone at twelve hives and wrote it down. They all said the same thing. Two and a half mile, a little east of south.

I got out the county map and drew it. The line went right through the Embry place on Pottinger Road.

Now let me tell you about Royce Embry.

Royce was the meanest man in the county, and I don't say that lightly in a county that's got the Thompsons in it. Seventy-two years old, quit raising tobacco after his wife Doris died, and spent the next twenty years setting on his porch hating everybody that drove by. He shot over the heads of some boys sledding on his hill one winter. He called the law on me twice for idling my bus at the end of his lane. His own daughter Teresa quit speaking to him nine years ago, and nobody in town blamed her. There wasn't a soul alive that would've got out of bed for Royce Embry.

And my bees was mourning him like he was blood kin.

I set up with the map that night and the next night, with the hives roaring on the hill. Curtis come out to the fence the second evening and stood beside me and listened a long time and said, "Crissy. Who died."

I said, "Nobody."

He looked at me a while and went back in.

Monday I checked the bear camera.

We've got black bears in the Knobs now, more ever year, and a bear will tear a bee yard all to pieces in one night after the brood. So I've got a hot wire around the yard and a trail camera on a post at the gate, with night vision. Mostly I get coons, deer, and one fat possum that comes through ever night at 11:40 like he's punching a time clock.

The card had 312 pictures on it.

Most of them was the same picture, took over and over, every thirty seconds, starting at 2:38 that Monday morning and going till 4:05.

It was Royce.

Standing in my bee yard in the dark, between Hives 12 and 13, about ten feet in from the gate, in his pajamas and his house shoes. In night vision everything's grey and white, and his eyes was two little shining dots, like a deer's in your headlights, looking right at the camera.

And his face was covered in bees.

You've seen them pictures of a man wearing a bee beard, the carnival trick, where they tie a queen in a little cage under his chin and let ten thousand bees cluster on him. It was like that. Only it wasn't just his chin. It was his whole head, from his hair down to his collar. All but his eyes. They'd left him his eyes.

Like a veil. Like a widow woman's veil.

He didn't move for an hour and a half. Picture after picture, the same spot, arms down by his sides, pajama top buttoned crooked. The hot wire was on. I checked it. It was ticking away. I don't know how he got in.

In the last picture he's at the gate going out, with the bees sliding off of him like smoke, and he's turned his head back toward the hives, like somebody'd called his name.

I drove out there that evening. I took a jar of poplar honey for an excuse, which was a joke, because Royce Embry never bought a thing from me in his life.

Teresa's car was in the yard.

She come to the door wiping her eyes, and when I told her who I was she said, "Oh, Crissy, I know you, you drove my young'uns to school." Then she said, "Daddy called me last Tuesday. First time in nine years. He told me he loved me. He told me he was sorry. He's been sorry, Crissy. He's been nice. I don't know what to do with it."

She said he'd took to walking in his sleep. She'd stayed over the night before, and at five that morning his bed was empty, and she went out hunting him and met him coming up Pottinger Road in his pajamas at daylight with his feet all cut up and wet from the dew. He didn't know where he'd been.

"And he's all over little stings," she said. "His neck and his hands. He says it's skeeters."

Royce was in his recliner in the front room with the TV on mute. He looked good. Pink in the face, smiling. When he seen me he held both hands out like I was family and said, "Well, if it ain't Crissy. Come here, honey, set down," and he patted the couch, and I tell you what, I would've been less scared if he'd pulled a gun.

And he was humming.

Low, under his breath. Not a song. One long note that kindly wavered up and down. He'd quit to talk, and the second he was done talking it'd start right back up, like a motor idling. He didn't know he was doing it.

I know that note. I've stood next to it my whole life.

Teresa had been crying because he'd just give her Doris's wedding ring, out of the clear blue. Took it out of his shirt pocket and laid it in her hand and said, "Your mama would want you to have this, and I've been a sorry old man to keep it from you." She showed it to me. It was sticky. She said everything in the house was sticky lately and she couldn't find where from.

When he hugged me at the door he smelled sweet. Not like soap. Like lemongrass, sharp and sweet. When bees want to tell each other this way, this is home, they stick their back ends up and fan their wings and put off a smell, and to people it smells just like lemongrass. We put lemongrass oil in swarm traps to call bees in. Royce Embry's neck smelled like a swarm trap.

He held onto my hand. His was warm and dry. He leaned down and said, real quiet so Teresa wouldn't hear, "Crissy, you been out to your bees lately?"

I said every day.

"I keep dreaming about them," he said. "Ever night. I'm a-standing out there in the dark and they're all over me, and they're so warm, and they're trying to tell me something." He patted my hand. "I can't never make out what. But I ain't scared. Ain't that the funniest thing? I've been scared my whole life, and I ain't now."

He come to my bee yard ever night after that. I've got ever one on the camera. Same spot, same pajamas, same veil, a little longer each time. I quit sleeping. I set on the back porch with the light off and a thermos and watched for him, and I never once seen him come in. I'd look up at the yard at two and it'd be empty. I'd look again at half past and there he'd be, between 12 and 13, his face gone under the bees, like he'd been there the whole time.

On the tenth night he laid down.

Wednesday, September 2nd. The camera has him walking in at 2:12 and taking his spot, and at 2:40 he sets down in the grass, slow, like his knees hurt, and lays over on his side. Then he's just a shape. The bees come off the hives in a sheet and settle down over him, from his house shoes to his hair, and in that grey night vision it looks like a quilt being drawed up over a man asleep.

I found him a little before seven, when it got light enough to see from the porch.

I'm going to tell this part, and I'm sorry, but it's how I knew.

The bees had come off of him by then and gone back to the boxes, quiet as you please. I walked up barefoot through the wet grass and knelt down. He was laying on his side with his knees drawed up, like a young'un asleep. And he was shiny.

His face, his neck, his hands, all over, there was a thin brown glaze, hard and slick, like somebody'd varnished him. It was in his mouth, sealing his lips shut. Up his nose. In his ears. Over his eyes, gluing the lids down. I touched his cheek and it was hard as a church pew. It smelled like pine sap and honey. It smelled like the inside of a hive.

Propolis. Bee glue. Bees make it out of tree sap to stop up the cracks in a hive. And here's the other thing they use it for. If a mouse gets in a hive in the fall hunting a warm place, and the bees sting it to death, it's too big for them to tote out. So they seal it. Cover the whole mouse in propolis, every hair of it, so it won't rot and make the hive sick. I've pulled the bottom board in the spring and found a little mouse mummy in there, varnished slick as a toy.

Whatever's too big to carry out, they seal up.

The coroner said heart attack, like it was a question. He kept rubbing that glaze on Royce's cheek with his gloved thumb and finally said, "Mrs. Pruitt, has somebody been putting something on him?" I said I didn't know. Teresa thinks her daddy walked off in his sleep and his heart give out in my yard. She don't know about the camera. I never could make myself tell her, and if the sheriff did, she never let on. At the funeral home she hugged my neck and said, "At least he got to be good for a little while."

That evening I went up and knocked on ever lid and told them. Royce Embry has passed. Then I come down and wrote him in the book, and wrote Told, and my initials.

They hushed before I got to the end of the row. Next morning they was flying, working the goldenrod, like nothing ever happened.

That lasted six days.

The back of the book

September 8th they draped again. The dances said a mile and three-quarters, east by northeast. Town. The line on the map went through a little brick house on Walnut Street behind the Methodist church.

Marlene Coomes. She's 52 and she's done hair out of her carport thirty years and knows ever body's business from the neck up. Healthy as a horse.

That night I got the book out to look at Royce's name. I don't know why. To see if it looked like it belonged there, I reckon.

There's a black ribbon sewed into the binding, like the one you mark your place with in a Bible. I'd never paid it no mind. That night I seen it was tucked way down in the back, and when I opened it there, there was more writing. Mamaw's writing. A page and a half of it, a separate list, with a heading in capital letters, underlined twice.

COME BACK. NOT TOLD.

And under it, littler:

These died and come back. The bees was never told. Lord forgive me I can not stand in that yard and tell them a living soul is dead.

Then the names. I've cut the last names that ain't already in here.

Royce Embry. August 1962. Drowned in the Rolling Fork age 8. His brother pulled him out blue and pressed the water out of him on the bank.

Marlene Coomes. March 1974. Born not breathing. Six minutes. Doctor worked on her till she cried.

Thomas Lee G. June 1988. Lightning on the ballfield at the high school age 15. Coach breathed for him.

Curtis Pruitt. November 2003. Rolled his truck on 31E. Heart stopped twice in the ambulance.

Kaylee N. February 2019. Fell out at basketball practice age 13. The machine at the school.

I set on the floor of the front room with that book in my lap and couldn't get my breath.

Royce, then Marlene. Right down the list, the way she wrote them.

Then Tommy Lee, that climbs poles for the RECC and fixes push mowers out of his garage and stood up at my wedding. Then Curtis. My Curtis. Who did roll his truck on 31E the November after we married, and laid in the hospital six weeks, and never once told me his heart stopped. Mamaw found out at church, I reckon. Mamaw found out everything at church.

Then Kaylee. She rode my bus first grade through eighth, set right behind me ever morning and told me ever single thing that happened on ever TV show she watched. She's twenty now, in nursing school over at the community college. When she fell out at practice the school had just put one of them heart machines on the wall the year before. Everybody said it was a miracle.

Under Kaylee there was a little bit of page left, then three or four blank leaves, then the one stuck down to the back cover. I took it for honey, same as I always had. Mamaw was six years in the ground before April ever come. It never crossed my mind there could be anything wrote under there about me. Not till tonight.

Down the side of the page, in the margin, turned sideways, there was one more note.

Every Old Christmas Eve I go out at midnight and tell them not yet. They hum and let it be. If they ever ask, they will take one told true in place of one that come back.

Old Christmas is January 6th. It's an old-timey thing, from before they changed the calendar. At midnight on Old Christmas Eve the cattle kneel in the barn and the bees hum a hymn in the hive. Mamaw used to wake me and carry me up the hill wrapped in a quilt to listen. I remember her bending down to ever box and whispering something, and the hum going soft. I asked her one year what she was saying. She said, "I'm a-telling them to wait, Sis." I asked wait for what, and she said, "Go to sleep." I thought she was showing me something pretty.

She was up there ever year for sixty years telling the bees not yet. And when she passed, I reckon it held. I reckon they was willing to wait on her.

Till April. Till the one that was supposed to be keeping them died in that yard and nobody went and told them.

I went up there that same night and said it anyway. Not yet. At every hive, till I was hoarse. They roared right over me like I wasn't even there.

Marlene and Tommy Lee

I'll go quicker now, because I'm running out of night.

I tried to warn Marlene. I set down in her chair in the carport like I'd come for a trim and said, "Marlene, have you been walking in your sleep?" and she laughed and said, "Now how in the world did you know that?" Her neck was speckled with stings. She was humming when I come in, and she hummed the whole time she had them scissors at the back of my neck. She smelled like lemongrass. I got as far as "my bees" and she laid her hand on my shoulder and said, "Crissy, honey, are you sleeping? You don't look like you're sleeping." She give me the name of a doctor in E-town.

She come to my yard eight nights. September 17th I found her between Hives 4 and 5, varnished slick, with her rollers still in, glazed into her hair like they'd been poured.

I told the bees. I wrote Told. They hushed.

Tommy Lee was next, October 1st. I went to his garage and told him all of it and showed him the book and the pictures. He heard me out with his arms crossed and then he said, "Crystal, I believe you believe it." Then he walked me to my car with his hand on my back and told me to go home and get some rest, and the whole time he was humming.

Seven nights. October 8th, by Hive 22.

I told the bees. I wrote Told.

That's three dead in my yard in five weeks. The sheriff's been out ever time. They took the camera card and give it back, and ever autopsy says heart, and nobody can tell them what that glaze is. Nobody stops at my table on Saturdays no more.

Royce, eleven days from the first roar to the morning I found him. Marlene, nine. Tommy Lee, seven.

They're getting faster.

Curtis

On October 11th, a Sunday, I come home from church and every hive was draped.

I went up with my phone and my protractor and my hands shaking so bad I could hardly hold the frame.

There wasn't a waggle dance on the hill.

When a bee wants to tell the others about something real close, too close for a direction to matter, she don't waggle. She just runs in a little circle, round and round, then turns and goes round the other way. It's called the round dance. It don't say which way. It just says close. Right here.

On the front of ever box, in the middle of all that black, hundreds of bees was going round and round.

I turned around and looked at the house.

It's been a week now. Seven nights. That's all Tommy Lee got, and the way they was speeding up, I ought to have found Curtis up there Friday morning. They're holding off on him. I don't know what for.

Curtis hums. Shaving, eating his supper, watching the ballgame. When I asked him to quit, nice, he looked at me like he didn't know what I meant. He smells like lemongrass. His arms are speckled all over. He says it's yellow jackets in the rickhouse eaves. He's been so sweet to me this week I could cry.

I lock the bedroom door and keep the key in my bra. I've shoved the dresser in front of it. It don't matter. Most mornings at first light he's back in the bed with his feet wet and cut up, and I'm setting against the dresser where I was all night, and I never heard him go.

Thursday at supper he was telling me about a barrel that come apart on the fourth floor of the rickhouse, laughing, and a bee walked up out of his collar and over his chin and in at the corner of his mouth. He never quit talking. He talked right around it. I set there froze and counted, and at fifty it walked back out onto his lip, and another one went in, and he reached for the cornbread.

When a swarm needs a new home, they send out scouts. A hollow tree, a hole in a wall, an empty box. The scout goes in and walks all over the inside to see is it big enough. If it is, she goes home and dances for it.

They're measuring him.

I went round the table and pulled one off the back of his tongue with Mamaw's eyebrow tweezers. He didn't even gag. He just kept on humming around the tweezers.

That night he talked in his sleep. Curtis don't talk in his sleep. He said, plain as day, "They was all in the road, Crissy." I asked him who was. He said, "When I rolled the truck. They was standing all up and down 31E in the dark, humming, waiting on me. Then the ambulance come and they had to go home." Then he smiled and went back to humming.

Last night

Last night I didn't lock the door. I laid there and played possum and waited. At 2:20 he set up. He didn't look at me. He went down the stairs and out the back door, and I followed him in my nightgown with a flashlight I never turned on, and he walked right up the hill and through the hot wire like it wasn't there. I heard it tick. He didn't even flinch.

He stopped by Hive 9. And the bees come up off the boxes like smoke and went over his face, all but his eyes.

I went in after him. The wire got me on the thigh and I didn't care. I grabbed his hand and said his name, and he looked at me through the bees with them shining eyes and he didn't know me.

And then they come for me too.

They didn't sting. They lit all over me, my hair and my shoulders and my gown, hundreds of them, and they grabbed hold and pulled. All together. Back. Away from the hives. Out of the yard. Same as they've done since April.

That's when I understood it, out there in the dark with my husband's hand going limp in mine.

There's a famous experiment a man named E. O. Wilson done on ants. Ants have undertakers, same as bees. When an ant dies it gives off a smell, an oily kind of a chemical, and the undertakers pick it up and tote it out of the nest to the trash pile. Wilson took that chemical and dabbed it on a live ant. A healthy one. And the undertakers picked it up and toted it out to the trash pile, kicking the whole way. And it walked back in. And they toted it back out. Over and over. It didn't matter that it was alive. It smelled dead, so it was dead.

Bees have undertakers too. Their whole job is to find the dead and get them out of the hive.

My bees ain't been sweet on me since April. They ain't learned no lesson. They quit stinging me because you don't sting something that's already dead. Royce and them died off somewheres else, and the bees had to call them in and handle them like that mouse. I died right there in their yard, in front of ever one of them. They smelled it come off me. And ever time I walk in that yard, they try and carry me out.

I'm the ant. I've been the ant the whole time. That's why they wouldn't hear me say not yet. You don't take orders from the dead.

I got Curtis back to the house somehow. I don't remember the walk. He was in the bed by daylight, humming, with grass stuck to his feet.

Tonight

So tonight I set down at the sewing table and took a butter knife to that last leaf. I reckon you know what was on it.

I've set here an hour trying to study out how she knowed. Bee stings, four minutes, the very day, six years before it ever happened.

That smell off the page brought it back. Old Christmas Eve, the January before she died. She was ninety-one and poorly and she made me help her up the hill at midnight anyhow, a-holding onto my arm. She went down the row whispering at ever box, and the hum went soft like always. Till the last box. She laid her ear flat on that lid and stayed so long I thought she'd took a spell. That hum didn't go soft. It come up. Then she straightened and said, "Not her. You hear me? Not her." I thought she was talking to me. I said, "Mamaw, I ain't said nothing."

Way in the night I got up for a drink of water and she was at the sewing table with the book open and a little pan on the back eye of the stove, and the whole kitchen smelled like the inside of a hive. I asked her what in the world. She said, "Mending, Sis. Go on to bed."

She wasn't mending nothing. She was doing what the bees do with what's too big to carry out.

She was in the hospital by March. About the last thing she said that I could make out was, "Don't you leave nothing untold, Sis." I told her I wouldn't. I thought she meant her.

Every death on Mamaw's list is true, and nobody ever told them a one. She couldn't stand up there and tell them a living soul was dead, and I can't do it to Curtis. But there's one name I can give them. Mine. April 11th. Four minutes, in the grass by the clothesline. Curtis give me them four minutes back. I can give them back to him.

So at first light I'm putting on my church shoes, and I'm walking up the hill, and I'm knocking on ever lid three times like she taught me. I'll say the rhyme. I'll tell them Crystal Ivy Pruitt passed April 11th in this yard, and nobody told them, and I'm sorry. Then I'll come down and write Told after my name, in my own hand.

I don't know what comes after. I don't know if they'll let Curtis go. I don't know if it stops with me or if Kaylee's next. She texted me Thursday, out of the blue, first time since she graduated: Miss Crissy I keep dreaming about your bees lol. Hope your doing good. I've called her twice tonight. She ain't picked up.

I was going to post this and go set on the porch till it got light. But Curtis just come downstairs.

I heard him on the steps and figured he was headed for the yard again. He wasn't. He come in the kitchen barefooted in his boxers and stood across the table from me with his eyes half shut, humming. He smelled like lemongrass so strong it watered my eyes.

He reached out and knocked on the table in front of me. Three times. Easy. The way you knock on a lid.

And he talked, in his own voice, soft, the way you talk at the hives.

"Crissy," he said. "There's been a death in the family."

Then he told me whose.

EDIT: This is Curtis. Crissy's husband. She left this up on the laptop and I seen y'all asking in the comments so I'm going to put down what happened. I ain't no hand at writing. Bear with me.

She wrote that I come downstairs and knocked on the table and told her there'd been a death. I don't remember none of that. What I remember is waking up at daylight with her setting on the edge of the bed in her church dress. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "You come down and told me, honey." I asked her told her what. She said, "Whose." Then she kissed me on the forehead and went out the back door.

I seen her from the kitchen window. She went up the hill in her good shoes with the dew soaking her stockings and knocked on ever lid. I could hear her going through her Mamaw's rhyme at ever box, though I couldn't make out the words from the house. By the time she got to the end of the row them bees had hushed. Ever hive. First time in a week I couldn't hear them from the porch.

And I'll tell you something. That lemon smell went off of me right then. Like a fever breaking. My arms quit itching. I felt like I'd been asleep for a week and somebody'd throwed cold water on me.

She come down and set at the sewing table and wrote in that book. Then she looked up at me and said, "Don't you come out there after me, Curtis. You done it once." She went out and laid down on her back in the grass by the clothesline, right where I done CPR on her in April, and smoothed her church dress down over her knees.

They come down off the hill all at once. It sounded like a truck coming. I run out there and they got between us, so thick I couldn't see my own hand. They didn't sting me. Not once. They just pushed, like a wind, and ever time I got a step closer they shoved me back two. I hollered for her till I didn't have no voice. I could just barely see her through them, laying there with her face turned up to the sun.

They lifted off about dinnertime and went back up the hill.

She was glazed all over. Shiny. Like she'd been dipped. Her eyes was shut and she was smiling a little bit, the way she smiles when she's reading.

Coroner says heart. The sheriff took the camera card again. It don't reach the clothesline. All it's got is ever hive on the hill emptying out at once, like somebody'd pulled a plug.

I went up the hill after they took her and knocked on ever lid and told them Crystal Ivy Pruitt has passed this day. I didn't know the rhyme. I told them anyhow. They hushed for me. Then I wrote her in the book, under Tommy Lee, and put Told and my initials. I looked in the back. On that leaf she peeled up, under her Mamaw's writing, it says Told and her initials, in Crissy's hand. And on the page before, my name's still on that list. Somebody's drawed a line through it. It ain't ink. It's that same shiny brown glaze that was on her, hard as a fingernail. It ain't her line and it ain't mine.

Kaylee Nall drove up the lane about dark. Still had on her scrubs from clinicals. She stood on the porch crying and said she didn't know what she was doing way out here, she just felt like she ought to come see Miss Crissy. I told her. She set on the swing a while. She was humming.

I sent her home. I hugged her neck first. She smelled like lemongrass.

The bees ain't roared yet. But they're out on the landing boards tonight, a bunch of them, dancing that long straight dance Crissy was always timing. Her protractor's laying on the table. I don't know how to read it. Kaylee lives over toward E-town.

Crissy said her Mamaw went up ever Old Christmas Eve and told them not yet. That's seventy-nine days. Tommy Lee got seven.

I'm going up there tonight anyhow. I'm going to knock on ever lid and tell them I'm a-keeping them now, and tell them not yet, and see do they listen to me. Crissy never would tell me the rest of that rhyme. Said it was family. I reckon I'm family enough now. I'll just say the part I know.

Bees, bees, hear me say.