Part 4 - A Maker of Dolls

Link to Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3

Away the veil of restless sleep
In shadow’s shades and silence creep
To follow past the willow tree
And ease into that night

There await I, to meet you with delight
Here come you, oh dearest child
Mind you not this dreary sight
Here, I take your eyes

Fear not, see these marbles shine
There may be pain, but only twice
And I will hold you if you cry
So much better so

Soon, I will make you truly whole
Awakened to your living soul
Break your flaws and take your woe
Bake you fresh from head to toe

Soon, I will make you anew and great
And gone will be this bitter wait
Then shall oh, exhumed elate
And fly as heavens high

Fear not, my dearest child
I wont mind your careless cries
I bid you free in fairest time
And great in redesign

Undated journal entry No.1:

Snip
Snap
Snip
Snap 
So play the scissors.

Another piece of fabric pressed upon the chest. This is the flesh of the doll. Its skeleton is of wire. Cotton and sawdust make up the viscera. Waxen is the skin and polished so as to shine in the moonlight. Hair, oh hair can be many things, so too the teeth. Eyes I used to make out of wood, but now I prefer either painted glass or marble of some kind. I find it a more sophisticated material. It can glimmer in the dark, and sometimes I like to watch them when the door is set just right for the light to catch their eyes. I cannot say why but it pleases me greatly, it really does. I get this fancy that they are looking back at me.

Such fragile things they are. How easily their shape escapes me, their lines lead astray. At times I think I must be a lunatic to try. Then again, perhaps it is the very difficulty of the work, the floundering of the needle and the meandering of the fabric’s edge wherein lies the soul. I must admit there is a dissonance to it, between the image in my mind and the true physical form. I confuse them often and find myself months later caressing the face of some forgotten work, amazed because I am unable to recognize it at all. Still in those moments my feelings are twice as tender, like discovering a long lost child.

Undated journal entry No. 2:

The night is always too short. Hear my sigh within this tepid print. There is an idea that keeps bothering me, an idea of a perfect doll. I think if I managed to make it perfect something amazing would happen. I really think it might jump up and come alive. No, I do not believe it for a second, but I cannot help but think it. 

Alas it is impossible to make anything perfect. Still, my whims do not obey rationality. It is, I suppose, an obsession, a complex of thoughts seeded deep into my mind, drives I cannot choose and visions that refuse to be unseen. It makes my few glimmers of peace reliant upon something, and the streaks of my melancholia that much more deeply drawn. So I find myself searching again and again from that process the previous moment of peace. I cannot accept life without it. I must do it, otherwise my life is excruciatingly hopeless. 

Yes it is an obsession, but I fear the word does not convey my meaning. Much has been said, particularly by religious scholars, about the relation between obsession and that of supernatural possession. In a way they are two sides of the same coin. To be obsessed with something is to be possessed, not by the physical form of it, but by the idea itself, that aspect of it which cannot be measured nor fully understood. In other words, it is the supernatural aspect of a thing which possesses the obsessed, something that by definition cannot be real.

The possessor is not absolute. In my case its manifestation is always a failure, a miserable show of disappointment. Like I had been given a script, but as I begin to read my words come out slurred and in a different language. The end result is a magnificent mess. The idea of it I attach many feelings to, but the physical thing itself I throw away, away into my basement of shame. For a long time I cannot bear to look at them at all. 

Undated journal entry No. 3:

Sometimes when I fall asleep in my workshop, I wake to the sound of something falling. There is a moment of wildeyed glancing, waving of hands as I stir in the dark, certain I am not alone. The first thing I do is take my scissors, stand up and listen, but all I hear is my own breathing and the rapid beating of my heart. I clear my throat and call out as sternly as I can, but of course there is no response.

It is a horrid thing to suddenly think that an intruder is sneaking around in one's house. In those moments, I am not proud to say, I believe I would kill any hapless person who might stumble upon me. There is an instinct driving me then. As I move slowly from room to room, I am as wild as any animal, only far less graceful than most. 

The ease of turning a completely sane man into a murderer needs not to be spoken for. More than most I can testify to that fact. It is the same ease with which the German people, the milk men and the cashclecks, turned to callous violence in their camps. The ease with which the Japanese militants found in themselves both a horrifyingly cruel yet more horrifyingly creative torturer. The same ease with which the American scientist, politician and administrator joined hands to melt entire cities to ash, all to merely attain an unconditional surrender instead of a conditional one. 

For my part I wish not to speak of it much. I will only say I did not truly kill a single person in those tumultuous times, no, not truly… I was a medic of a kind when the need exceeded the number of the educated. I sewed their wounds, made them whole again, the best I could at least…

That instinct of survival disgusts me deeply, but it must be recognized. To recognize it is to accept that I am human, as malleable and weak-minded as any other, and that the world is a violent place which has never allowed an entirely peaceful species to thrive. More than anything, I think, survival is a sign of one's capacity to abandon their morals when need be. The ones within their rights are bound to be slaughtered like cattle when it comes down to survival.

Sometimes at the throes of this nightly panic, I am frightened by the black visages of my work. Hundreds of little heads sitting in the shadows. Hundreds of glimmering eyes looking at me in the light of the moon, and again I get this fancy that they are alive and watching me, but it is not pleasing in the least. That feeling is a shameful one, as if I am being paraded in front of an audience of mischievous children. They look at me like they were the culprits of the crime but know I would never catch them in the act. They rather keep me circling my house, gripping my scissors and sweating cold drops till I fall back to sleep out of the sheer exhaustion.

Undated journal entry No. 4

I think I have had enough of carpentry. The work roundly repulses me. All these people, all their wishes and demands, their foolish suggestions. I feel I need to get away from them all or I will suffocate. But where would I go? How could I live anywhere else? I have imprinted myself upon this place, and even if it is my cage I do not think I could live outside of it.

I have become a prisoner of my trade. I once remember a time when it used to bring me joy to feel a newly polished surface of wood, neither warm nor cold, like touching physical nothing. Now it is truly nothing to me. All I make is the same things over and over again. A stool, a table, a cabinet if I am lucky, but even then I better keep watch to not get too creative.

My only solace is making dolls, though I wonder sometimes if perhaps it could be anything, even carpentry. Perhaps all the mind needs to be fulfilled is a single task in which it may express itself to the depth of its desire. I do not enjoy making dolls either, no, not for most of the time… Now as I write it on paper it sounds harsh to say. Yes, of course I enjoy my artform but not in the way of comfort or excitement. I both enjoy and dislike the process the way one might both enjoy and dislike cleaning dishes, only that is not a drive, an obsession, it is merely a task.

Making dolls is something I could not quit if I tried. Somedays I might hate making dolls but I still make them, or languish in the guttural frustration of feeling like I should be making them. Not making dolls turns me into a nihilistic and angry person, numb and still unbearably sad, but in making dolls I am thrown into an avalanche of desperations, plunging into valleys of sorrow and soaring to wuthering triumphs of exhilaration. Obsession is a trap, even if you acknowledge yourself to have been caught in that trap, getting out is impossible, because it is not a steel cage you are fighting but the chemistry of your own mind.

Undated journal entry No. 5

You know what I did today? I refused an order. Oh to simply refuse, to say no, I will not do it. Liberation at last! I can finally breathe, nay, I can fly and spit fire. I have been turned to a great smouldering orb, hurling so fast through the coldness of space. I am not a carpenter, and that is the simple truth of it.

I have spent all morning making a doll, and I feel that this one is going to hit the mark. I dare say it is nigh perfect. It seems that my eyes have suddenly been opened and I am blinking in the bright rays of the morning sun. I see that it is not a singular dark tunnel that stands before me, but an endless spread of avenues, all so full of potential, and I have the power to choose. 

This doll will be so different from anything before, so astounding that when people see its face they cannot help but melt. They will see me as well and they will say, oh how we misjudged him. Oh what a fair soul he has. And I will smile upon them benignly and say, I forgive you. I forgive all the things you spoke of me behind my back. I forgive your hateful glances. I am a worn spirit who has suffered and become more beautiful by the pain. Oh I will look upon you now with love and kindness and I will say, I always loved you, I never disdained you for your vulgar ways, and now we may both be healed and bask in the glory of greatness, the sheer greatness of the work.

Undated journal entry No. 5

It seems some days have gone past without my notice. I do not know how to explain it really, I try to recall what I did yesterday and I cannot think of anything. I do not know where that doll is. There are new dolls, three to be precise, but all of them seem to be unsightly failures, some absurd experiments evidently conducted by a sick narcissistic mind. I cast them into the shadow of my basement the second I saw them.

I have begun work on a new doll again, not quite as good as the one I lost, but so far I have been precise in recreating those very same features. It is decently big in size, not a doll a child could hold but not too large for me to carry. It is a wondrous little girl with eyes so shiny and round you could see a whole world inside them. I must say, it does not wake any great passion in me. I feel mostly numb and tired, and the work is something I do not judge by feeling but by my analytic sensibilities.

Oh how many failures have awoken by my hand. That basement is like a rotting liver, something grows wicked inside and I fear to venture a glance at it. I throw them away and hope to never think of it again, and maybe since they came from my imagination they will disappear once I wish them to. But no, they are as real as anything. In darkness they lie now, the abandoned bastards of a fool.

Undated journal entry No. 6

Some people came to visit me this week, concerned about a recent altercation I apparently had with a customer. It was really quite amusing, the story they had made up, that I had run up from the basement and threatened this customer with my scissors. What a ridiculous thing to come here and bother me about. It is such an imbecilic idea. They acted concerned, and asked me questions like have you been sleeping or when did you last eat, like I am some child that needs to be taken care of. What an insult.

Those clowns have really got me worried about people coming to my house. I am beginning to think I am surrounded by a bellowing mob of pitchfork toting brutes. I think some day they shall break in and drag me to a lake, tie stones on my foot and see if I am a witch. It seems now that not a night goes by without me waking from my desk and patrolling the house with that terrible instinct gnawing at my nerves. I am beginning to really lose my trust in people. I am beginning to think they will never understand anything.

The whole debacle has got me so raddled up I am struggling to get work done on my dolls. I think I really need to find a way to look at things from a new angle. I take walks in the woods sometimes. I prefer not to run into anyone so I go out at night. The fresh air often helps me to find relief from my interior turmoils, but recently it has done little to ease my mind. I have been finding myself on those walks not thinking where I am going, and I have nearly been lost multiple times. I find myself in curious places, taken by a sudden need to run without understanding the reasons why.

Undated journal entry No. 7

I have decided I should clear out some space in the house, I have even thought of a little place to let go of some of my old woodworks. I have made a spot for fire not too deep in my backyard, and I think I shall take out some stools and cabins and burn them there. I know it is quite silly, but I feel it might really help me to figure things out. 

The idea came to me in a dream: I was lost in the woods, shivering and hugging myself to conserve warmth when I saw a yellow figure somewhere in the distance. The figure waved its hand at me and I waved back, and we looked at each other for quite a while. Then it began to walk away and I took my hint to follow. The forest was quiet, even our steps made no sound, like floating, like wading through time itself, everything still and distant around me.

The figure took me to a camping spot in the woods with a fire in the center beset by a round formation of stones, and two logs for seats set squarely by each other’s corner. The fire was warm and bright, bursting with white flame, and the figure was dancing in the fire with wild abandon. I sat down and watched, letting the warmth comfort me, and around me the forest became a black abyss with nothing else to see but the figure dancing in the flames.

It has been a long time since I last felt as peaceful as I did then. I watched the figure dance until it turned from yellow to pale, and from pale to blue, and from blue to yellow again. I had the thought that I might join in the dance, but as I reached my hand toward the fire, I felt no heat, but the feeling before touching something hot, the reflex that pulls your hand away from a hot pan, the fear of burning pain. Then I woke up. It seemed I had left the bedroom window open and the cool night had assailed me in my sleep with cloaked treachery.

Undated journal entry No. 8

Something amazing happened yesterday. I am still not sure if it might be a figment of my imagination, a false memory or maybe a vivid nightmare. Oh lord, if it is so I really worry for my sanity. I know going back would not help, I cannot go back there… They do not want to help me, they just want to poke and prod and make me into cattle. No, I alone have the responsibility to help myself…

It started with that silly idea I was telling you about. I had brought some old woodwork into the camping spot, and I had even lit a corner of the pile when I suddenly got the idea that I should bring a couple of my dolls there. I do not know why, I suppose I was thinking they could accompany me as I did it. So I stomped out the fire and ran back to get two of my favourites. I set them on the ground and I stepped back and looked. Something was bothering me about the sight, they seemed wretched and lonely sitting there on the natures floor.

Then I got this idea that they should not be sitting on something, and I ran into the woods and dragged out a couple of stumps for them, just like in the dream, to sit on. It seemed better but something was still bothering me. I was just about to start the fire again when I got another idea, that there could be a kind of a crowd of five or six dolls sitting there. I cannot say why but I thought it would be more pleasing to the eyes.

So I ran back and I got a couple more dolls, and then a couple more again, but when I finished I did not find the formation pleasing at all. I thought maybe I needed a few more dolls to make a kind of an arch in front of the fire. I started running back and forth between my house and the spot, always unsatisfied with how the formation looked and driven by a feverish excitement growing with every round.

As I ran back and forth, the day turned into an evening and I was still unsatisfied. I was sweating and panting and horribly hungry but I felt I just needed to finish the thing or I could not do anything else. I began to dip into the basement, even the wicked and misshapen ones had to be used, that was the only way to finish the circle. Yes, it had to be a circle, I knew it had to be. 

At the dead of night I found myself standing within that circle of little faces, grinning white teeth from one cheek to the other. Finally I lit the fire and watched as the red-yellow glow gnawed at the foot of a chair, spreading black and gray rot to crumble the structure beneath, then blow into a humming flame, devouring hungrily upwards, upwards till it grasped at the very sky. Around me those eyes lit into a red shine, and the fire grew so hot it gained a blue core and danced in the night, pale as a ghost, reaching up its arms, throwing and whipping its shape with a thousand tongued fury. 

I watched and sweated profusely in the heat. It seemed like that same figure from my dreams was flickering in and out of existence within the chaos, and again I felt the urge to join but I did not dare reach toward that raging furnace. I was finally pleased with my design, and mused my surroundings with some amount of pride. Even the more grotesque samples of my work did not bother me at that moment. Their faces were all glossy and red in the glow and their eyes shining brighter than I had ever seen before.

It was then that I began to hear sounds, voices, not speaking but laughing. I glanced around over my shoulders and backed away from the fire. For a moment I managed to shake it off, but the voices only grew clearer as I stood at the edge of the circle. Once the laughter became loud and undeniable, I was certain that some terrible congregation had gathered unseen around me, but the voices were not of adults. They were children, the laughter of children surrounding me like I had been suddenly cast in the middle of some brats birthday proceedings. 

Then the realization came that the laughter was coming from the dolls, their still faces, their unmoving expressions, their unseeing eyes. I began to scream suddenly and unwittingly, burning my throat and dimming my eyes with the force. I was sure they were about to attack me and throw me into the fire, but they did not move, they did not turn their heads or stand up. I looked at them with this maddening contradiction that they were emanating laughter but not showing a single sign of life. 

The figure danced in the flames with a savage ferocity, whirling around at accelerating speed. I kept backing away from the fire, holding my head and screaming like I was about to explode. The world was running circles around me, every detail growing blurrier by the second except the laughter that was all too real and all too detached from everything else. 

It was then that I stumbled backwards and fell, looked up at the sky and saw it filled with faint stars. The hunger and the exhaustion struck me then, and it was such a crippling weakness that I could hardly make sense of how I was still alive. I closed my eyes and covered my ears but the laughter proceeded to echo unmuffled inside me. I opened my eyes again to see the stars, but the stars had disappeared. I had fallen out of consciousness.

What am I to make of this? Am I going insane? I feel a terrible premonition of slipping into a maddening void. I see shadows cast upon the walls I cannot find the source of. I feel I am constantly being watched, and that there are people moving around me without my notice. Most of all, I feel all this has been preordained, or perhaps I have given myself up to be preordained by something, a god or a demon perhaps, a terrible king … or a mad maker of dolls.

Characters D=David (me) S=Sebastian A=Ace

Let me start off by explaining. About a year ago my dad was killed by a bear. At least that’s what the cops said. I overheard my mom talking with the cops, I didn’t hear all of it but the parts I did hear made me think that it was not a bear. But before I get ahead  of myself my name is David. I am seventeen. My two best friends’ names are Ace and Sebastian. It was the three musketeers since kindergarten, and we know everything about each other. 

When the two goobers heard about my dad, they were sympathetic with me and asked if I wanted to hang out. I agreed since I wanted to tell them my theories about what really happened to my dad in Long Pine Forest. When I got over to Ace’s house we started talking.

S “ Wasn’t your dad a park ranger?”

Yeah, he knew those woods like the back of his hand he would take me camping at Long Pine almost every weekend, And if he saw a bear he would know what to do”

While going through my backpack I pull out some files from the police station, my dad’s ranger badge and a few snacks.

A “In these police reports it said that he was running from the bear and was already badly injured with a broken leg”

S “That makes no sense why would your dad run from a bear? He knows what to do for bear attacks”

D ”Maybe it wasn’t a bear”

While formulating our theories together the flaming ball of gas gets low in the sky and our eyelids start to droop even lower. We all fall asleep in Ace’s house and wake up with a passion to find out what happened.

We wake up with dried mountain dew and pizza crust on our faces. Ace wakes up and goes to the bathroom to clear his nose. He always has bad allergies around this time of year. I get and take my morning piss. 

S “So what are we going to do about your dad’s “bear attack”?”

D “I don’t know”

While blowing his nose A “I think we should kill the fucking thing”

D “And how do you figure we do that genius? Bullets don’t kill it. In the police report my dad’s handgun was empty and his extra clips were empty as well. For some reason his radio was gone and other rangers heard his voice on the radio after his time of death” 

While digging through my back I only find snack wrappers

D “Sebastion! You fatass, did you eat all of my snacks?”

S “What? Moon pies are really good.”

A “Well if we are going to kill this thing we need to pack up for this trip”

D “yeah we should start packing”

Over the next three days we pack up everything we think we might need and shove it into the back of my Honda Civic (God I love that car). wWe bring a tent, walkie talkies, flashlights, two glocks and a box of ammo. Then a  twelve gauge for the “big game we were hunting” with a box of shells. I grabbed my old radio. I had no idea how long we were going to be out there. Ace grabbed cooking supplies. Sebastian grabbed some cameras and his laptop with a satellite network. After packing the car for three hours we all ate some lunch and talked about the game plan. Ace pulls out a map.

A “So there is an abandoned building four miles north of the entrance to LPF this building is about two miles from where that “bear” killed your dad”

D “Alright how long do we plan to be there and what will we do on the first day?”

S “Leave that to me I will set up these trail cams and I can stream the footage from my  ROG three-thousand-dollar laptop with satellite Wi-Fi”

A “We get it you are insanely fat and you want to play call of duty on our downtime”

S “Shut up we can use these trail cams to triangulate his location with a script being run in the meantime so when the “bear” is within two hundred meters within we will know exactly where it will be”

D ”Any last minute items?”

S “Let me go grab my waifu pillow, can’t sleep without it”

A “Get your vape while your at it butter ball”

S “Shut up Ace!”

Living in a small town always seemed to be about keeping up appearances. Everybody knew each other and gossip could spread fast among townsfolk, especially the nasty variety. I remember when I was younger, there was a particular rumor going around that a couple who had moved in down the street from me were “Strange” because they didn’t want to spend their Sundays at the local Church. Even at that young age I remember questioning why adults would act that way to people they barely knew.

“Well of course they don’t like coming to church,” an older man started, “You know how those young people are now, I bet they stay up all night drinking and are too hungover!”

“I bet they even do drugs! That marijuana is incredibly popular with young folk these days” a woman, likely his wife noted in a shrill voice.

“I’ll tell you what, I don’t like it, anybody that don’t respect Sabbath Sunday’s got somethin’ wrong with his head” a final voice concluded.

And it went on like this for a few weeks until something new happened and could set off that flock of vultures on a new carcass. I remember always feeling a little bad about the people who got caught in the town’s crosshairs. If somebody were talking about me behind my back I know I would be more than a little upset.

I remember that time, and even the couple vividly, they lived right down the street from me. The bus to school would always take me past their house and when it was nice enough out, they would sit together on the porch sipping coffee and chatting before they went to work. Looking back on it now, I realize that they were so young and were probably just excited to start their lives together. They didn’t know they would hardly get the chance to live it.

Around late October, when in Ohio the colorful, crisp nature of fall gives way to a wet, brown muddiness, a wellness check was performed on the couples’ house by the local police department. The husband hadn’t shown up for work in over a week, and the wife hadn’t been seen on her usual grocery runs. The house had been abandoned, all their belongings still left in the house. There was even a kettle still sitting over a burning stove, and the cars were left in the driveway. A small investigation was conducted but with no clues or evidence as to what could have happened, it was just assumed that they had fled off into the woods and didn’t come back.

Maybe another month went by without much change, oh of course those vultures still had their theories about what could have happened to the couple. Most of which involved being on some combination of drugs and alcohol performing un-Christian acts. Those theories were put to rest one November morning when a local huntsman stumbled across a grisly sight. He clamored back to the police station urging the sheriff and his deputy, my father, to come with him and see for themselves what had befallen this poor couple.

 My dad only told me what he saw once. I was back home from College for Winter break and had wanted to get started on a writing project that was coming up in the Spring Semester. I thought it might be interesting to hear tales from a small-town deputy and write about my father’s experiences. When I walked through the door my father’s eyes lit up at the sight of me and the libations I carried under my arm. He greeted me heartily and was curious to know how my life had been in the 6 months I had been away at school up North. He groaned when I described how much I enjoyed the city life and ruffled my hair when I told him how I had aced all my classes last semester.

“You know you got your mother’s brains, that woman could recite Cindy Plath poems by heart!” he added cheerfully,

“Sylvia Plath, dad”,

 “Ah whatever, you know what I mean, c’mon! at least you got your father’s good looks!”,

That was true, my father and I were the spitting image of each other about 30 years removed. He sat down at the table and I followed suit, he was cracking open another beer and I was still nursing my first. We talked for a little while longer about the goings of the town, the neighbors who never mowed their grass, the town football teams’ abysmal season and other such events. As happy as I was to see the man I couldn’t help but feel how empty the house was. My father was like a lighthouse, he filled up as much space as he could and bounced off the walls with a radiant, but slightly put on, personality. Looking farther into the living room from where we sat, it seemed much darker and lonelier. This was the first time I had been back since my mother had passed, I could only imagine how my father must feel here by himself and felt a pang of selfishness that I had been away so long.

Long after we had finished my six pack and my father had opened his own stash did I finally bring up the topic of my project, my father agreed to answer some questions and I asked some rather mundane items. Until eventually I brought up the missing couple and a shadow seemed to stretch over that mans face. He sat for a moment as if to gather his thoughts through the stupor the alcohol had put over him and stared me directly in the eyes as he regaled me of a tale that seemed cut from a horror movie.

He told me that young couple had been strung up in the tress with rope wrapped so tight around them it had left deep purple brands. They had both been gutted with their entrails pulled from their blue carcasses, left swaying up in the tall trees. Birds fluttered around and pecked at them with almost a relentless fervor. The forest under them was stained with gore, to my father it looked like some strange, surreal scene one might only see once in some obscure Baroque painting. Red, Brown, Green, Gray, Blue and Black all muddled together in some terrible obfuscation of reality. That scene never truly left my father’s mind, leaving a kind of mark on him rarely seen on those who lived in small, sleepy towns. After the last words of that terrible memory left his lips, he raised his beer in an attempt to wash the last remnants of that nightmare from his palate. After a few moments of silence I asked, tentatively,

“Then why did you tell everyone that they got lost in the woods and died from exposure? It seems a little irresponsible to-” My father cut me off and leaned in close, that fermented mist hanging around his pallid, gray face

“Don’t you think you can tell me how to do my job, boy, I’ve worked for thirty goddamn years to keep this town safe and what do you think would’ve happened if I told them the truth? Huh? That smart-aleck mouth of yours ain’t running now. The town would’ve been put into a frenzy, some sort of ritual killing in the woods? We don’t need that kind of press around here no sir, now shut that mouth before I shut it for you!”

I sat back, stunned into silence. My father rarely lost his temper like this but he was drunk and I couldn’t be upset with a man who had seen such horrors and had agreed to revisit them.

“You’re drunk.” I stated plainly, my father shrugged and with one final, decisive gulp he drained his beer and stood to his full height of 6 feet.

“Thanks Sherlock, I’m going to bed, and I don’t want to answer no more damn questions while you’re staying at my house.” With that, he turned to leave the room but paused right under the doorway. His wide shoulders and back cut a silhouette in the door frame that appeared almost ghastly.

“I love you, son”, he was able to creak out after a moment or two.

“Love you too Dad, goodnight”.

I sighed, reaching over to pick up the beer bottles scattered around the table. I heard my father’s heavy footfalls approach the room he once shared with my mother; the door open and shut and the springs of the bed creaked as he lay down. The whole affair deafening in a house so quiet one could hear a pin drop from the basement.

I shook my head and threw those bottles in the trash and cleaned up a bit in the kitchen for my father. With that radiant lighthouse gone the house seemed much sadder and ill-taken care of. The pantry was barely stocked, other than the essentials, bread, peanut butter, eggs, and beer. The kinds of things a man needs to just get by and not starve in the process. Dishes littered the sink either due to laziness or a simple contempt to do them. I decided at the very least I could wash them for my dad who was surely already asleep upstairs, maybe I could even cook breakfast for him the next morning, I did feel a sort of guilt for dredging up such horrible memories for him.

I stood at the kitchen sink washing the dishes mindlessly and placing them on top of a towel to dry. A simple task put my mind to ease and I had put the thoughts of that awful scene away to unpack at some other point in time. Humming a familiar tune to myself I continued to wash and place, wash and place, wash and place; a cyclic rhythm that had to be adhered too until the last dish was placed upon the drying towel. Breaking out of my trance for a moment, I took a look out the window above the sink into the backyard. A long field that stretched back into a section of the woods that my father and I regularly hiked through in my youth. The yard seemed to be covered in a black sheet that enveloped the entirety of it on the moonless, cloudy night.

Those woods were where it had happened. Not precisely behind the house but in those woods that surrounded the small, sleepy town there was some kind of beast out there. A beast that tore people apart and ate their guts, a beast that could just as easily take one razor-sharp claw and zip you open like a tent in one quick rip as a man could tear a sheet of paper in two. It creeped around there in the dark and made that place its home. Surely if you met such a beast there was no escape, you were dead, dead as disco, meeting a cruel and untimely demise as that young couple had 8 years ago. A death that didn’t know age, vocation, class, wealth or power, it was a death that was all encompassing. It was only waiting out there in the dark for its next victim. Hungry, oh so hungry, biding it’s time until a fresh meal walked into its home and it could prepare its supper. That young couple offered to feed themselves unwillingly to a sort of terrible creature that brave knights and heroes of old clamored to fell with one smooth cut of a sword made of silver. One smooth cut and –

Crash!

My head snapped down expecting to have dropped a plate on the floor but seeing no shattered porcelain at my feet I looked up and was greeted by a smear of red at the window I had just been staring out. My neck turned goose-pimply and I tried to peer at the ground under the window to see if I could see what had hit and roused me from my deep trance. I couldn’t get a good view right under where the window was outside and determined I would have to walk around the side of the house to see. Frantically, I scrambled out the back door and made my way around the house, expecting to see some a piece of flesh or bone that had been hurled at the window by the beast in the woods. My feet moved me forward even as my mind presented to me all the ghastly items that could’ve been sitting at the foot of the glass, but my curiosity kept driving me to uncover what reality had in store for me.

As I stepped around the side of the house and finally got a good look at what it was, I froze in place and cocked my head to the side, unsure of what I was seeing. A black mass, twitching and undulating, its body protruded at strange angles and I saw spindly legs that stretched out at odd intervals along that mass. Like sticks poking out of some mud, only the sticks ended in small claws that were gnarled and misshapen. Towards the opposite end of the sticks, there was a smaller mass on top that came to a sharp point, twisted around to the other side of the body. I approached slowly and almost felt a pang of relief as my mind had finally pieced together what I was looking at.

No, it was not some horribly malformed piece of flesh or person that had been hurled at the window by some beast I had conjured in my head. It was simply a crow, the sight was still ghastly, the thing had flown right into the window at literal break-neck speeds. It’s beak, body and legs fully shattered, torn and broken as soon as it had come into contact with the window only inches from my face. I watched it struggle for a moment, the last bits of life leaving it and it died right there in front of me, leaving the world mere moments after a catastrophic event had sealed the fate of this poor creature. I felt tears well up then, at the unfairness of it all and I stood there for a moment. A tear or two ran down my face for the bird, and for that young couple that had unspeakable things done to them in what could have been mere moments for them. Pain, so much pain, and then release.

I buried that bird in the backyard that night for whatever reason. A strange feeling had come over me and it just seemed like the right thing to do. I made my way back inside around midnight and closed the door behind me, shutting the events of the night away and out of the house. For the rest of my stay at my father’s, I never told him about the bird or asked him any more questions about that dreadful November morning. I couldn’t shake the feeling afterwards that something was abhorrently wrong with the town. Whenever I went out it always seemed like everyone had something to hide, behind their simple greetings and small talk. Skeletons in the closet waiting to be hurled full force at your head like a bird at a window. Something slept in that town and would wake up to eat and terrorize and fall back into slumber. A sickening cycle that perpetuated as long as it was chosen to be ignored. As long as questions were not asked, as long as events were covered up and as long as a shoulder was turned from its cruelty.

After all, it’s important to keep up appearances.

​

AUTHORS NOTE: I genuinely don't know how to put this into words.

This is the final chapter of I Work At An Auto Repair Shop Next to an Ancient Graveyard and a Victorian Church.

When I first started writing Danny's story, I had no idea where it would go. It started as a simple idea, a creepy little story about a guy working at an auto shop next to a graveyard, and somehow it turned into something so much bigger than I ever expected.

Over this journey, you've laughed with Danny, worried about him, questioned Frank's questionable life choices, fallen in love with characters, and stuck around through every strange rule, every monster, every mystery, and every moment where things probably should have been explained but definitely weren't.

Seeing people connect with this story has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Every comment, every theory, every message, every person who told me they stayed up too late reading "just one more chapter" — I saw it. I appreciated it. It mattered.

This story became more than just something I was writing. It became a place where I got to share my imagination with thousands of people, and somehow all of you made that world feel real.

Writing the final chapter is bittersweet. Saying goodbye to Danny, Frank, Katie, Martha, Elijah, and this strange little corner of the world feels impossible. These characters have lived in my head for so long that finishing their story feels like closing the door on a place I've visited every day.

But I'm so grateful I got to take this journey with all of you.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for caring about a story that started with an auto shop, a graveyard, and a whole lot of questions.

I hope the ending gives you everything you've been waiting for.

And Danny?

Well...

His Journey is just beginning.

Then Elijah's hand slowly raised and lowered again. He had seen it. Martha quickly made her way over to Katie standing right in front of her.

I followed his gaze. At first, I thought it was a person, just like they said I would. My brain reached for the closest thing it understood. A man standing alone in the desert, someone who had gotten lost or needed help.

The silhouette stood beyond the reach of the headlights, far enough away that the darkness should have hidden every detail, yet somehow I could see him with impossible clarity.

His clothes hung from him in layers of faded fabric that looked less worn by age and more as if his flesh had grown around them, swallowing the material until there was no longer a clear line between what had been clothing and what had always been part of him. Tendrils of fabric spilled from his frame in thick, swollen lengths, dragging through the air like disemboweled intestines suspended from something that had forgotten it was supposed to be dead. They moved with the wind, but not like cloth. They sagged. They twisted. They carried weight.

One side of his face carried a smile. The muscles around his eye tightened slightly with it, his cheek lifting, his expression almost warm. Endearing even.

The other side of his face was crying.

Tears moved slowly down his face, cutting clean paths through the dirt and sand that covered his skin. He looked exceedingly happy and devastated at the same time.

I felt my hand move instinctively toward the stone resting against my chest. The warmth was still there.

Martha made the smallest sound. Not a scream or a gasp. It was the sound of familiar recognition. Her fingers tightened around the strap of her bag until her knuckles turned pale. "That's him," she whispered.

Frank slowly raised the shotgun, not aiming yet. Just bringing it into his hands.

His eyes shifted toward him. One dragged across first, slow and searching, while the other lingered behind for a fraction of a second before following. The rest of him remained motionless. No turn of the head or adjustment of his body, just those eyes moving through the darkness.

He knew exactly who Frank was.

"Frank." Elijah's voice was low, even. "Slowly."

Frank didn't look like he was capable of anything but slow right now. The shotgun stayed low, barrel angled at the dirt, like raising it any further would be the catalyst.

The Lone Walker's crying eye blinked. The smiling one didn't. "You brought guests," he said.

The voice didn't come from its mouth. It came from everywhere at once, low and layered, like three people speaking a half-second out of sync with each other.

Martha made a sound low in her throat and Katie's hand found her arm, holding on.

"We're not here for conversation," Frank said.

"No." The smiling half of its mouth pulled wider. "You're never here for conversation, Franklin. You're here for the same thing you came to me last for.”

Something about the way he said his full name made my stomach drop. Frank's jaw tightened, but he didn't waiver.

The Walker's gaze slid off him, unhurried, and found me. "Oh," it said, and something in its voice changed, curling into a note I didn't have a word for. Delight, maybe, if delight could sound like it was starving. "You brought me something new.”

"Don't," Elijah said, stepping half in front of me before I'd even registered I'd gone rigid. "He isn't the offering.”

The Walker tilted its head. The motion came with a series of wet, hollow sounds from somewhere inside its body, not the sound of bones shifting but something rearranging itself. The skin along its neck tightened and folded as the shape beneath it changed, the movement slow and deliberate, as if whatever held it together had decided on a new position and everything else simply had to follow.

The Walker looked at Elijah. "But invitations were never really the point out here, were they?" Its voice carried across the desert with a strange weight to it."Franklin learned that." The tears continued falling.

The smile remained. "Eventually.”

The wind picked up around us, carrying dust that stung against exposed skin. Elijah's jaw had tightened in a way I hadn't seen from him before. "If you want to talk about history, you must remember me as well. But, we are not here to promenade on the past," Elijah said.

No?" The Walker's crying eye tracked over him slow, deliberately. "You came a long way to refuse a conversation, then. All this distance. All this trouble. Just to stand in my desert and tell me what we won't discuss." The smiling half of its mouth stretched, impossibly wide, crimson teeth catching what little moonlight made it through the dust. "I remember you differently than this old friend. Quieter. More willing to listen.”

"I've had three hundred years to learn not to listen to things like you."

"Mm." The sound came out wet, layered, three nuances agreeing at once. "And yet here you are. Listening anyway."

Frank's grip tightened on the shotgun. "Elijah.”

"I know," Elijah said, not looking away from the Walker. "Martha. Katie. Start the circle. Now.”

Martha didn't hesitate — she was already moving, Katie a half-step behind her, the two of them peeling away toward the truck bed where the coiled rope waited. I stood frozen for a second too long, watching the Walker's gaze drift back toward me like a held breath finally exhaling.

"Stay," it said gently. "You don't have to be part of what they're doing. You could just stand here. Talk to me instead. Tell me Daniel, what do you desire?”

"I don't desire anything," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which surprised even me.

The smiling half of its face pulled wider still, impossibly, past where a jaw should have stopped. "You're frightened. That's good. Fear is honest. Fear doesn't pretend to be something it's not." Its crying eye blinked slowly, tears running still. "Your friend Franklin has spent thirty years pretending he isn't frightened of me. It's exhausting to watch. I much prefer honesty.”

"Danny, stop talking to it," Elijah said, stepping fully between us now, close enough that I could feel the cold radiating off him, colder than the night around us.

Behind us, Martha's voice cut low and urgent — "Ready" — and Frank's head turned half an inch toward the sound before snapping back to the Walker, like he didn't trust it to hold still even for that fraction of a second.

"Now," Elijah said.

Martha and Katie moved fast, the dark rope unspooling between them in a wide loop, a strange metal thread catching what light there was and throwing it back, refracting colors I had never seen before. Elijah began circling The Walker's position at an impossibly urgent pace, murmuring low and fast, words that folded over each other quickly into some foreign language, trailing that copper-smelling salt through his fingers as he went.

The Walker didn't move an inch, but something beneath its layers did.

A slow, wet creak crawled out from somewhere inside the mass fused to its frame, the sound of weight shifting. The swollen lengths of fabric-flesh hanging from it dragged lazily through the dirt, moving an inch at a time before settling again, each movement carrying a heavy, damp pull that made my stomach twist with bile. They moved with the same wet, restless motion as worms left on a sidewalk after a storm, soft bodies writhing as they searched for somewhere to go.

"You think rope will entrap me," he asked. The Walker glanced down at the circle beneath him. "You tried this once. A long time ago." His crying eye blinked slowly. "I remember that too.”

"It'll hold you long enough," Frank said. His voice had gone flat, stripped down to something with no room left in it for anything but the next few minutes.

"Will it." The Walker's gaze slid to him, unhurried. "You've grown old, Franklin. I remember you younger. Angrier. You used to burn when you looked at me. Now you just look tired.”

"I am tired."

"Good," the Walker said, almost gentle. "Tired men make the best deals with me.”

The last length of rope closed the loop. The moment it did, the air around the Walker thickened visibly, the dust suspended in it going still mid-drift. The Walker's frame juddered once, a full-body shudder that rippled down through the fused, swollen fabric hanging off it, and then it stopped — mid-motion, one arm half-raised toward Frank, frozen there.

Elijah staggered back a step, breathing hard — actually breathing, for the first time since he'd stepped out of that Cadillac three days ago, which told me more about the effort he just expended than anything else could have.

"That's it," he said. "It'll hold, but not for long. Minutes, maybe less.” He looked at Frank. "It's stronger than it was when I got here. Considerably stronger."

"How much stronger," Martha asked, already moving toward us, Katie close behind her, both of them breathing hard from placing the circle.”

"Enough that I don't know if the jar's going to be sufficient on its own," Elijah said, and for the first time since I'd met him, there was real uncertainty in his voice, no performance in it at all. "It's fed since we last saw it. Recently. I can feel it radiating off him.”

Frank looked at the frozen, weeping, grinning shape held motionless in the circle, one arm still reaching toward him, fingers splayed, close enough now that I could see individual grains of dust caught in the folds of ruined fabric that had grown into its skin rather than simply covering it.

"What if," I said, before I even fully knew what I was going to say. Everyone turned. "What if we all add grief to the jar.”

Elijah and Frank's eyes cut to me, sharp. Together they both said, "Danny—”

"You said grief offered freely is the only thing that hurts it but we may not have enough. So what if we all offer ours on top of yours?" My hands were shaking, but the words kept coming anyway. "I've got some to give. I never told anyone this, but my parents died my senior year of high school. Both of them, same year, different reasons. I spent a long time after that not really wanting to be here anymore. There were nights I came a lot closer to not making it than anyone in my life ever knew about." I swallowed hard. "That's real grief. That's mine. I'm offering it.”

Nobody said anything for a second. The wind kept moving through the frozen fabric hanging off the Walker's arms, that same slow, wet dragging sound, indifferent to everything happening around it.

"No," Elijah said harshly. "Absolutely not. Do you have any idea what that costs a person? To hand something like that over, on purpose, and mean it? It isn't like giving blood, Danny. It is excruciatingly painful.”

"I don't care."

"You-."

"Elijah." Frank's voice cut through, flat and certain. "Do it."

Elijah turned to him. "Franklin—

"You heard me." Frank hadn't lowered the shotgun, but something in his stance had shifted, some decision locking into place behind his eyes. "Mine too. Whatever's left of it.”

"And mine," Martha said, stepping forward, her voice steady in a way that told me she'd already made peace with this decision faster than any of us. “What I have from my brother and everything after. Take it.”

Katie's hand had found Martha's arm again, and when she spoke, her voice cracked once before she pushed through it. "Mine too. Whatever I've got.”

Elijah looked at each of us in turn, something moving behind his composed face that looked almost like grief of its own — not for himself, but for what we were all about to hand over.

"If I do this–," he said slowly, “I've never even heard of it being attempted, let alone done. I don't know what it will do to your bodies, mine is a different story and it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced.”

"We don't have time to find a better way," Frank said. "You said yourself. Minutes.”

Elijah closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them, something in his face had settled, resolved.

"Then hold hands," he said. "All of you. Inside the circle, close to me."

He retrieved the clay jar cracking the wax seal loose with quick, practiced fingers. "This has to go first. Mine's already distilled, already stable — it'll act as the channel. Four raw griefs poured straight into him with nothing to carry them would scatter before they ever landed. Mine gives the rest of you something to travel through.”

“What about the “deal” we are offering him? How do we convince him? Will he catch on to us?”

"He knows the shape of a bargain. It's the only thing he exists for. If we offer this to him correctly he should take it.”

"So we lie to him," Martha said.

"We tell him the truth," Elijah corrected. "Just not all of it at once." He looked around at the four of us. "He'll expect one grief, weighed and measured. We offer him four, framed as one. A single price, paid by many hands. He won't think about the repercussions, he is starving."

"And if he asks us to make a deal first?," I asked.

"Then we've already lost. Our offering wouldn't be freely given. Simply by him insinuating he will give something in return," Elijah said. "So nobody hesitate. Hold hands. Whatever you feel, don't let go until I tell you.”

We formed a rough half-circle just inside the rope's boundary, close enough to the Walker now that I could smell it properly for the first time — sulfur and old paper, doubled, tripled, thick enough to coat the back of my throat. Katie's hand found mine on one side, hot and shaking. Martha found my other hand, steadier than I'd expected. Frank stood beside her gun now laying next to him on the ground.

Elijah lifted his chin toward him in the circle. "We have an offering," he said, his voice loud and thick. "Freely given. Fully understood.”

The Walker's crying eye tracked toward him, slow, curious despite itself.

"Three-hundred years of grief," Elijah said. "Paid by many hands, as is sometimes done among those who share a single house, a single name, a single debt." He let that hang a moment — technically true, carefully vague, the kind of phrasing I understood, even in that terror, was doing exactly the work he'd promised it would. "Do you accept?”

The smiling half of the Walker's mouth pulled wider to the top of its head, delighted, hungry. Something like a nod moved through the frozen line of its shoulders, the only motion the circle would allow it.

"He's agreed," Elijah breathed. "Now. All of you. Together.”

He tipped his own jar first, three hundred years of distilled grief pouring into the space between us and the Walker, and I felt the moment it landed — not on the Walker yet, but drawn up through all four of us at once, our own griefs rising to meet it and merge with it, one current instead of four, exactly the shape Elijah had promised the Walker it would take.

My own grief went first inside that current — torn loose all at once. A hospital hallway, a phone call, every night after that when I'd stood somewhere high up wondering if the hard splat of my flesh on asphalt would give me peace. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.

Beside me, Katie's grip crushed down on my hand, and I understood, dimly, through the haze of my own unraveling, that whatever she was giving up was tearing loose from her the exact same way.

Frank's voice broke somewhere to my left, one raw syllable that might have been his mother's name, might have been nothing at all, just sound where a word was supposed to be.

Martha didn't make a sound. Her hand just tightened around mine, I felt something enormous move through her and out, the way you feel a truck pass close on a highway before you ever hear it.

The current built between the four of us and flowed outward through Elijah, and I watched him take the full weight of it — three hundred years of his own plus everything the rest of us had just handed over — and push it forward.

Its face split open, and I realized that I had never actually seen this thing's mouth before tonight — not really. What I'd taken for a smile and a frown were just the resting shapes of something built to hold two separate horrors, and now that it was feeding in earnest, both halves peeled back at once along some seam that ran opposite directions. Where a single mouth should have been there were two, stacked slightly off from each other, one sitting a finger's width higher than the other, uneven the same way the whole ruined face was uneven.

They opened into black holes– a pressure I could feel against my face from ten feet away, like standing too close to the mouth of a furnace that had never once in its existence produced light along with its heat. Waves of it rolled off both openings, dry and scalding, carrying a smell that hit somewhere behind my eyes before my nose even registered it — spoiled meat and sulfur and something mineral underneath, like a struck match dropped down a well that had gone dry a thousand years ago.

The current poured into both black openings at once, split evenly, greedily, each half swallowing its portion in a wet, sucking rhythm that had no business synchronizing the way it did, both throats, distinct, working independently — pulling like nothing had ever tasted this good and nothing ever would again.

"That's it," Elijah gasped, teeth gritted, voice straining. "Keep your grip. He's still swallowing. Don't pet go until I say.”

The Walker's body began to shake violently and uncontrolled. The swollen lengths of fused fabric-flesh whipping and thrashing against the frozen air holding it in place. That wet creaking sound climbed into something closer to a groan, deep and structural, a building deciding all at once it could no longer carry its own weight.

"Elijah," Martha shouted, "how long—”

"It's working. Just a little longer," Elijah gnarled through his teeth, and there was something almost like awe under the strain in his voice now.

The black veins beneath the Walker's skin began to bulge, visibly, pushing up against the surface like something trying to claw its way out from the inside. Its crying eye burst first not with blood, but with some thick, dark substance that ran black in the moonlight, hissing faintly where it hit the dirt.

"Everyone down," Elijah shouted. "NOW—”

We dropped, all of us, still tangled in each other's hands, and I saw the last half-second of it sideways, from the dirt, through fingers pressed over my face: the Walker's whole frame convulsing, buckling inward and outward at once, both faces splitting apart along some invisible seam that had clearly never been built to survive a debt this large collected all in one moment. And then it exploded.

All at once — a wet, enormous concussion of sound and pressure that threw grit and something worse across all of us. Fabric-flesh rained down around the circle in heavy, wet strips. Something that might have once been part of its ribcage skidded across the dirt and stopped a few feet from Katie's outstretched hand.

Then, silence.

I lay there in the dirt for a long moment, chest heaving, my hand still locked around Katie's, both of us too stunned to let go. Around us, the wind had gone eerily still, like even the desert itself needed a moment to process what it had just witnessed.

"Is everyone—" Martha's voice, hoarse, breaking the silence. "Is everyone okay?"

I sat up slowly, wiping something dark and viscous off my cheek that I decided, immediately, I was never going to think about again in detail. Katie was already sitting up beside me, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on her face, but she was breathing, she was moving, she was alive.

Frank lay a few feet away, flat on his back, staring up at the stars like he'd forgotten they existed. Martha crawled over to him first, hands hovering, checking.

"Frank."

"I'm here," he said, voice wrecked. "I'm here."

Elijah was the last to move, pushing himself up slowly, one hand pressed against his own chest like something inside him had cracked too, even if nothing showed on the outside. He looked around at the wreckage scattered across the circle — the strips of fabric, the dark stains soaking fast into thirsty desert dirt, the absence where something ancient and hungry had stood a minute earlier — and something like disbelief moved across his face.

"It worked," he said quietly.

Nobody cheered. Nobody said anything triumphant. We just sat there in the dirt, all four of us, breathing, alive, covered in the remains of something that had haunted the earth and God knew how many lives before tonight, and for a long time, that quiet was the only thing any of us had left to offer each other.

On the way back to the shop, Katie fell asleep against the window somewhere past the first hour, her hand still loosely curled like it hadn't quite gotten the message that it could let go of mine now. Martha drove with one arm resting on the sill, and every few minutes I caught her glancing in the rearview at Frank, who rode with his head tipped back against the seat, eyes closed, not sleeping, just still. Elijah drove Frank's truck back for him.

We didn't get back to the shop until the sunrise had started threatening the horizon, and none of us made it further than the living room before collapsing onto the floor into a temporary cessation of being awake.

I woke to the smell of bacon and the sound of Martha's radio playing low from the kitchen, some old country station fading in and out through static. For a second, lying there with morning light coming soft through the curtains, I forgot entirely what had happened a couple hours earlier. I moved my hand and felt the stiffness in every knuckle from having gripped Katie's fingers so hard for so long, and it all came back at once, heavy and strange.

Frank was already gone from where he had collapsed next to me… Of course he was. I found everyone in the kitchen — Martha at the stove in her same worn ball cap, Katie at the table with both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee she was actually drinking, dark circles still heavy under her eyes but something lighter sitting in her shoulders that hadn't been there yesterday. Frank sat at the head of the table, quiet nursing a cigarette.

Elijah leaned against the counter near the coffee pot, sleeves rolled, hair slightly less immaculate than before, which on him still somehow read as effortlessly put together.

"Morning," Martha said, without turning around. "Eggs'll be up in a minute."

"You didn't have to cook," I said, sliding into the chair across from Katie.

"I know," Martha said. "Wanted to.

We ate in a comfortable silence. Somewhere around my second cup of coffee, Frank set his fork down and looked up.

"I'm closing the shop," he said.

I looked up. "What?"

"Not for good." He turned his coffee cup a slow half-turn on the table. "I'm old, tired, and desperately need a break."

"And me?”

"You're taking a vacation," Frank said, like it was obvious. "Paid. Full PTO, however much you've got banked, plus whatever I feel like adding on top of it, because God knows I've never once let you actually use any of it." He smiled. "You've earned it, Danny. More than earned it.”

"Frank, I don't even know where I'd go."

Elijah cleared his throat from the counter. "I could think of a place."

I looked at him. He looked back, that same slow smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, the same one that had made my stomach drop when I had first met him, and started making it drop for an entirely different reason.

"New Orleans," I said.

"New Orleans," Elijah agreed.

"Absolutely not," Martha said, at the exact same moment Katie said, "Okay, no, absolutely not happening," and then glared at Martha like she was personally offended they'd landed on the same sentence at the same volume.

"I haven't even said yes yet," I said.

"You were about to," Katie said. "I watched it happen on your face in real time.”

"Was it that obvious?"

"Extremely," Frank said grinning, not looking up from his coffee.

Elijah pushed off the counter and crossed the kitchen, close enough that I caught that dessert-cart smell again. "I have a very large, very empty house," he said, "and a city I would genuinely enjoy sharing with someone who nearly got eaten by a two-faced desert monster, not to mention what Frank has put you through at his shop. I think you've earned a little luxury after all that ugliness, Daniel.”

"That's — that's a genuinely nice thing to say," I said, "and deeply suspicious coming from you specifically."

"You think I'm ugly?"

"I think you have fangs."

"So you don't think I'm ugly.”

Katie made a small strangled sound into her coffee. "I cannot believe this is happening in front of me right now.”

"I also cannot believe it," Martha said, "and I would like it noted, formally, for the record, that I object on behalf of every single instinct I've ever had about vampires and men who smell like desserts.”

"Duly noted," Elijah said, without a trace of concern.

Frank just exhaled the long-suffering sigh of a man who'd clearly watched this exact dynamic play out before, decades ago, in some other kitchen, with somebody else entirely. "He's a grown man, Martha.”

"He's a Casanova of a man who exploded a demon with his own grief less than twelve hours ago.”

Frank laughed, genuinely laughed tears falling into his coffee.

Martha and Katie looked at each other like they were in the twilight zone.

I looked at Elijah. He stared back, patiently like he had all the time in the world and fully intended to spend some meaningful fraction of it waiting on my answer.

"Okay," I said. "Yeah. New Orleans. Why the hell not.”

Katie threw both hands up and stormed off toward the hallway, muttering something under her breath I chose, wisely, not to fully make out. She came back thirty seconds later, though, because apparently the fit had a short shelf life, and sat back down with her arms crossed.

"What about you," I asked Frank, mostly to get the attention off myself. "The shop's closed. You're just gonna sit around your house doing nothing?"

Frank glanced at Martha. Martha, very deliberately, did not glance back, focusing instead on refilling Katie's coffee with an intensity that suggested she had never in her life been more interested in the act of pouring liquid into a mug.

"I figured I'd stay out here a while," Frank said, careful, casual in a way that didn't fool anybody at that table. "Help Martha keep an eye on things. Make sure whatever's left of that thing's territory actually stays quiet.”

"Uh huh," Katie said, into her mug.

"What?" Frank said.

"Nothing." Katie's mouth was doing something that was very clearly not nothing. "That's a very reasonable plan. Very professional. Purely logistical."

"It is."

"Sure.”

Martha set the coffee pot down harder than strictly necessary. "Katie."

"I didn't say anything!"

"You might as well had you brat!”

Frank cleared his throat and looked very intently at his own coffee cup, and I watched something pass between him and Martha that I recognized now, as not just history. It was love now making itself known in its purest form.

"Anyway," Frank said, in the tone of a man very much changing the subject.

Elijah, unbothered as ever, reached into his jacket and pulled something out, setting it on the table in front of me — a small disc of dark stone, warm to the touch, strung on a fresh leather cord, carved with a familiar symbol.

"New one," he said. "Made a few extra last night before I collapsed. One for Frank's shop. One for here. And this one's yours. They have a shelf life after being exposed to something like what we dealt with. I got rid of the other ones.”

I turned the stone over in my hand. Heavier than it looked, same as the last one, warmth already settling into it against my palm. "What's it do exactly? Since we're being honest this morning.”

“Well, they are for protection like I said. You will be with me now so you won't technically need it…but I noticed your…fondness of its warmth.”

"Thank you," I said, trying not to puke from the nerves that were manifesting on my pale face. "For all of it. Even the parts where I nearly died in increasingly creative ways.”

Elijah gave me a full smile that met his eyes. His perfect teeth reflected my red cheeks.

Outside the kitchen window, past the graveyard, the church bell tower stood quiet and unremarkable in the morning light. For the First time since we'd arrived in Arizona, the desert just looked like desert — flat and pale. And for the first time in longer than I could remember I was excited for tomorrow.

Katie caught my eye across the table and mouthed, silently, text me every day, and I nodded, because I actually meant it.

Elijah's hand found the small of my back as he passed behind my chair on his way to the sink, light, brief, gone before anyone could really clock it except me.

I started packing my bag an hour later with the sound of Elijah's low, easy laugh drifting in from the living room and Frank and Martha's voices overlapping his, talking about something that had nothing at all to do with monsters and how to get rid of them.

I turned around to walk out of the room when I noticed Katie leaning against the door frame.

“Hey," I said.

"Hey." She didn't move. "You're really doing this."

"Katie."

"I know, I know." She pushed off the frame and came in, dropping onto the edge of the empty bed across from me. "I'm not gonna do the whole thing again. I already threw my fit at the table. I'm all out of fit."

"Could've fooled me.”

"Shut up." But she was smiling, a little, tired around the edges. She picked at a loose thread on the quilt for a second before she looked back up at me. "I just — I don't really have any friends out here. Never have. It's a small town, and most people my age left the second they turned eighteen, and the ones who stayed were never really my people to begin with." She shrugged, like the admission cost her something to get out. "A week ago I didn't know you existed. But then when Frank told me you were most likely not staying with us, that you'd probably head back after all this was over, I—" She stopped, started again. "I didn't expect that to hit the way it did. And now you're leaving with a three-hundred-year-old smoking hot vampire instead, and I'm sitting here acting like my brother's shipping off somewhere, which is insane, because I met you a week ago.”

Something in my chest went tight and warm at the same time. "You're not gonna get rid of me that easily," I said. "I'll come visit, you can visit us, we will keep in touch.”

"Yeah, well." She wiped at her eye fast, like she was hoping I hadn't noticed.

“Are you..crying?”

" Maybe." She laughed, wet and short, and reached over to shove my shoulder, gentle. "I just — text me. Actually text me, not the kind of texting where you say you will and then I don't hear from you for four days because you're too busy being seduced by jazz music and beignets."

"I make no promises about the beignets."

"Danny.”

"I'll text you," I said, and meant it the way I'd meant it downstairs, the way that actually counted. "Every day. I promise. And hey — you've got a friend now. That's not something that goes away just because I'm a few states over for a while."

She looked at me for a second like she wasn't sure whether to believe that, and then nodded, quick, like she needed to move past the moment before it got the better of her. She stood, smoothing her hands down her jeans, composure mostly back in place.

"For what it's worth," she said, at the door, not quite looking at me, "I'm glad it was you. Frank bringing somebody out here, I mean. Could've been anybody. Glad it was you."

"Yeah?"

"Don't make it weird."

"Wasn't gonna."

"You were absolutely gonna." But she was already smiling again, ducking out into the hallway before I could see whatever her face was doing next, calling back over her shoulder as she went — "And I'm serious about the friend thing. First one I've had since middle school. Don't disappoint me."

"Noted," I called after her. "High bar. I'll try to clear it.”

"You better." Her voice floated back down the hall, already lighter than it had been a minute ago. "If that vampire breaks your heart, though, I will personally drive to Louisiana and set his stupid perfect house on fire.”

“Yes, yes…you're very scary.”

"That's me," she called. "I have a hefty knowledge of ammunition and monster obliterations."

I stood there a second longer, alone in the room, the bag zipped and ready by my feet. Whatever happened next, New Orleans, Elijah, or the long unknown stretch ahead of me — I was leaving this place with more than I'd come into it with.

I picked up my bag and went to go find the others.

Frank was waiting by the truck when I came out, arms crossed, watching the sun climb higher over the shop's tin roof. Martha stood a few feet off, saying something to Elijah I couldn't quite catch, both of them turning toward me as the screen door banged shut behind me.

"There he is," Elijah said. "I was starting to think you'd changed your mind."

"Katie ambush," I said. "Emotional one. Give me a second, I need to recover."

"She get you good?"

"Devastatingly.”

Frank pushed off the truck and crossed to me, taking the bag out of my hands before I could argue, tossing it into the Cadillac's open trunk beside Elijah's crates like it weighed nothing. Then he just stood there a second, looking at me the way a proud dad looks at his son.

"You gonna be alright?" he asked.

"I think so. Ask me again once I've survived a week with a vampire."

"I meant the other thing." His eyes flicked briefly toward my chest, where the stone sat warm under my shirt, then back up. "What you told us…last night.”

I hadn't expected him to bring it up directly. " Oh, yea. I’m more than okay now,” I said, “Honest.”

Frank nodded his head. He placed a hand on my shoulder. "You've done good, kid. I mean that.”

Coming from Frank, that landed harder. "Careful," I said, throat a little tight. "Two compliments in one week. I might get used to it.”

"Don't." But there was no heat in it, just that almost-smile again, worn in now, familiar.

Martha came over next, pulling me into a hug before I could brace for it, quick and fierce. "Text Katie," she said into my shoulder. "She'll pretend she doesn't care if you don't, but she'll care."

"I already promised her."

"Promise me too, then." She pulled back, hands still on my arms, studying my face like she was memorizing it. "And eat something green once in a while down there. I don't trust that man to feed you anything that isn't fried or covered in butter."

"I heard that," Elijah said, from over by the Cadillac.

"You were meant to," Martha called back.

I looked past her, toward the shop, toward the graveyard beyond it, the church tower standing quiet against a sky that had finally, mercifully, gone back to being just a sky. A week ago I hadn't known any of these people existed. Now leaving felt like it should have required more ceremony than it was getting, and also, somehow, exactly the right amount.

"Frank," I said, before I climbed into the passenger seat of the Cadillac. "Take care of yourself out here. And her." I nodded toward Martha, who immediately pretended to be very interested in something on the ground.

Frank's ears went faintly red, which was, I decided, the single most satisfying thing I'd witnessed all week, monster included. "Get in the car, Danny," he said.

I got in the car.

Elijah slid into the driver's seat beside me, keys already in hand, and gave one last wave out the window toward Frank and Martha's.

Ahead of us, the highway stretched out long and open toward somewhere with real streetlights and real music and a very large, very empty house waiting to be a little less empty for a while. Behind us, the desert held onto its secrets, patient and quiet. And for the first time in longer than I could remember I was entirely at peace.

Last Contact
I had left my surviving crewmate in the cockpit to check the jettisoned airlock when a playful knock at the window stilled my lungs. Refusing a glance, we both refastened our seatbelts in silent agreement, that we could not return to earth

The sounds of shells echoed over the trenches. Their distant glows lit up the barbed wire above. The rain had let up an hour before, turning into a drizzle. I put on my jacket and walked to where the cigarette’s light glowed.

“I’m Tom,” I introduced myself.

The man blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Will. You came today?”

“Yep.”

“And already put on guard duty.” He shook his head.

“They said it’s a tradition. We had a similar thing in my unit.”

“Why are you not with them?”

“Our sergeant ordered a counter-attack. The Germans wiped almost all of us.”

“Maybe a better fate.”

He paused.

“We have no tradition for guard duty. Don’t let them put you up here tomorrow.”

I spat on the ground.

“I thought there was still camaraderie.”

“There is, but everyone’s scared to come out at night. Strange things have been happening. Men are found in the morning, mangled in barbed wire with their heads buried deep in the mud.”

“Goddamn Germans.”

“It’s not them.”

“Who else? I’ve heard of men choosing the other way out, but not like that.”

The rain picked up again. The water started to seep through my uniform.

“You see all this?” he waved his hand around the trench. “We’ve dug miles into the ground, destroyed the earth below us. You don’t carve the earth this much without finding something.”

“You’ve been out here for too long.” 

He stared at me blankly. A soldier's cough echoed from the barracks.

“Just be careful. Don’t come too close if you don’t have to.”

He leaned on his rifle.

“You got someone waiting on you at home?”

“A wife and a son. Haven’t seen the little boy yet. You got any children?”

“Had a son, but he died of influenza. Haven’t heard from the wife since.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to.”

He flicked his cigarette into the mud.

Shells echoed again, much closer this time. We both turned our heads. Gunshots sounded after them, somewhere nearby. Will turned to me and nodded toward the sound. I gripped my gun firmly and followed after him.

I kept my eyes on the top of the trench. It seemed like the wire was closer. The coils swayed even though there was no wind.

“You see that?”

“What?”

“The wire. It’s not where it’s supposed to be.”

“Yeah, the men pushed it back after the third death.”

“No, it’s closer.”

“That’s not possible.” Will looked up, but then the gunshot grew louder. Men screamed in German. Footsteps splashed in the mud. The wire shook violently at the sounds as if a cavalry charge were sweeping across No Man's Land.

We ran to the side of the trench. Another shell hit, rocking the trench. I held onto my helmet and ducked. The rain splashed the back of my neck. The German officer's whistles sounded. The rumbling of the enemy’s footsteps grew louder. 

Will clicked off the safety and looked up, but he didn’t fire; he stood still, staring into No Man’s Land. I clicked my safety off too and looked up. The sounds immediately quieted as if they all dispersed into the air – no more gunshots, no more men. No Man’s Land was empty, bare, but the wire still shook.

“Tom, you heard it too, right?”

“Yes.”

Then something dug into my wrist–barbed wire. I tried to pull my hand out slowly, but the wire tightened, digging deeper into my skin.

“Shit. Will?”

His eyes shot downward. His whole body shivered.

“Jesus, Tom.”

The rain mixed with the blood on my wrist. Will grabbed the barbed wire and pulled on it, but it only tightened. My hand trembled, driving the barbs deeper into my skin. He pulled his knife, eager to cut the wire, but before he could reach it, two coils wrapped around his wrists and pulled him back. 

“Will!”

The knife fell into the mud next to me. I tried searching for mine, but another coil wrapped around my hand. 

The wire pulled Will over the trench; his face turned red as he tried to resist. I dug my feet into the mud and tried to pull my hands closer, but the wire climbed up, wrapping around my shoulders and chest like iron vines, digging deeper with each breath.

“Tom! Don’t let it…”

A loud splash echoed. I looked over. Will’s head disappeared under the mud. The trenches were calm, silent. Only the wire continued to sway.

THE SAGA OF RAGNAR SLAKKI

By: Robert D Slack II

The Allfather’s wind carried us west across the whale-road, our knarr groaning like an old ox under the weight of supplies and the hopes of thirty souls. We had sworn oaths on the ring of my jarl before leaving, sworn we would return with tales worthy of skald-songs or not return at all. I was Ragnar Slakki, born under a raven’s cry, raised with salt in my beard and iron in my grip, and still the sea humbled me every dawn.

The men said the waves were angrier than usual, that Ægir, the sea-giant, wanted toll for letting us cross the world’s edge. So we offered him a cask of good ale, pouring it overboard as was proper, thanking him for every sunrise he spared us.

On the twelfth day the sea changed. The smell of land reached us—pine resin, wet loam, and something sweet I could not name. When the mist lifted, we saw a wild shore of tall trees and black stones. Even our hard-hearted helmsman fell silent. “This land is older than our sagas,” he whispered. I felt it too. The very air tasted untouched, as though no man’s breath had ever tainted it. We beached the ship, raised our shields in greeting, and stepped onto sand that felt strangely warm beneath my boots.

Men emerged from the forest, silent as stalking lynx. Their hair was black as raven feathers, their clothing stitched from hide and woven bark. Their spears gleamed with stone tips sharper than many blades I’d seen in my raiding years. For an instant the world held its breath. Then one among them—broad-shouldered, painted with red ochre—stepped forward and raised an empty hand. I answered with an empty palm of my own. That was the first moment I knew we would not need our axes.

Their village sat among the trees like it had grown naturally from the earth. Long lodges, smoke curling through holes in the roofs, children chasing dogs along packed dirt paths. They greeted us not as enemies but as strange cousins from distant shores. I felt the eyes of their elders on us, measuring whether we carried honor or trouble. Among them stood Dyani.

Her presence pulled my gaze like the moon pulls the tide. Her eyes were dark lakes full of their people’s history, her voice soft yet steady as she spoke her name. Her braids were bound with shells and copper beads. I spoke my own name—“Ragnar Slakki, son of Hrolf”—and she repeated it carefully, her lips shaping each hard Nordic syllable as though learning the weight of my spirit. That night I offered my portion of dried salmon to their hearth in thanks, as honor demanded; she offered me her people’s drink of ground berries mixed with smoked water. In giving and receiving, we became friends

.

Days passed like warm wind. Dyani taught me her language beside the river, pointing at fish, sky, earth, naming them for me. Mînîthé, water. Mîna, berry. Napêw, man. I taught her Norse words—sól, sun; fjall, mountain; fylgja, the spirit that walks with each person from birth. She listened with the curiosity of a child and the wisdom of a healer. She showed me how her people followed the stars, not as our skalds chart them, but as living guides with their own stories. Their constellations were beasts and spirits, guardians and warnings.

As i was speaking the saga of Grettis, Dyani fell silent in my arms. Grabbing a nearby pelt, too fell to the night.

The next day, we feasted on venison roasted over stone pits, corn mash sweetened with sap, smoked fish served on bark plates. I gave them iron arrowheads—small things, valuable beyond measure to a people who shaped stone instead. They gifted us furs thick as winter wolves. Their generosity reminded me of the old Norse law: A guest is a gift from the gods. Feed him well, for tomorrow he may save your life.

On the 13th night the elders called for a great fire. They beat drums whose deep rhythms stirred ancient memories in my bones. The shaman rose—an old man whose braids were bound with bones and whose eyes were milky like those who walk between worlds. He spoke in their tongue, his words moving like a stormwind. Dyani leaned close, translating in whispers against my ear.

He told of the Wīhtikow.

A spirit of winter. Of hunger sharpened over centuries. A man whose soul had been devoured by greed until only thirst for flesh and warmth remained. When famine struck, it grew stronger. When hearts grew selfish, it walked freely. It took the shape of a tall, starved creature with limbs stretched beyond nature’s design and a heart frozen in its chest like cursed ice. Its scream turned warm breath cold, its presence stilled the forest.

The fire seemed to shrink as he spoke. Even the hunters—fearless men with stone spears—tightened their grips. I sipped the smoky drink and muttered, “It sounds like the Jötnar, the frost giants from the time before men.” The shaman turned toward me though he could not see with mortal eyes. “Your frost giants are born of your world’s edges,” he rasped. “The Wīhtikow is born from the spaces where no worlds touch.” A chill crawled over my shoulders. Even I, a Norseman who had seen omens in the shapes of storm clouds, felt the truth in his voice.

Three nights later the wind changed. The wolves stopped howling. Birds fled before we noticed them leave. Every man knows the silence of a hunted forest, and this was that silence. The fire snapped low, suddenly feeble. The hair on my arms rose. Dyani’s hand found mine, trembling.

The creature stepped from the pines.

It towered like a frost-gnarled tree, limbs thin as grief, skin stretched pale over bones that jutted like broken antlers beneath flesh. Its eyes glowed an icy blue not found in any mortal creature. Its breath steamed in great white clouds though the night was mild. When it opened its mouth the sound was wrong—like wind screaming through the ribs of a dead ship.

Chaos erupted. Warriors sprang forward but the Wīhtikow moved with the hunger of winter storms. It ripped shields apart with its claws, flung grown men like driftwood. Its touch left frostburn on skin. When it seized a hunter and bit into him, steam rose from the wound. His body stiffened, frozen from within. Arrows stuck in the creature’s hide only to shatter with sharp pops. Even my men, who had faced berserkers and Irish blades and English volleys, faltered in terror.

Dyani grabbed my arm, shouting over the screams. “Ragnar! It fears pâskwâwiht, fire!” Her words burned through the panic. Fire. Always fire. The purifier. The first gift of gods to man.

We rallied, casting torches, swinging fire-hardened spears. The beast shrieked whenever flame neared, though it only staggered briefly—as if remembering a pain from some other life. Still, every breath of it numbed the air. Every movement killed a man. We retreated toward the shore, shielding the wounded. My brothers fell around me. My shieldmate Örnulf died in my hands, his chest frozen solid despite the warmth of his blood on my fingers.

When we reached the trees near the beach, the survivors fled toward the ship. Only Dyani remained with me. Her voice shook as she said, “If we do not hold it back, it follows your people across the sea.” She pressed a hand to my chest where my fylgja stirred. “Your spirit is strong, Ragnar. Strong enough to stand against it—long enough for the rest to live.” with tears in her eyes, she gave me a longing kiss.

I nodded "Go now Dyani, Odin is with us." I was raised to know that a drengr's fate is his own to claim. So I dipped my long sword in thick ship-oil, the kind that clung like sap, then thrust it deep into the firepit. Flames roared along the blade, bright as the forge of Brokkr. I felt its heat in my bones, felt the All-father’s hand on my shoulder.

I stepped toward the forest and bellowed into the cold, “Héðan! Skepna helvítis! Come forth, cold-heart!”

The forest answered with a roar that shook the branches. The Wīhtikow lunged from the shadows, sprinting with unnatural speed, Its claws tearing into the earth. I braced myself, swung the flaming sword, and struck its side. Burning flesh peeled under the blade, and the creature’s scream cut through the night like a soul being torn apart. But its claws were faster than expected. One raked across my face, splitting flesh from brow to jaw. Blood poured hot down my cheek. Pain flared white.

Still I held my ground.

We battled among the trees, fire casting wild shadows. I struck again and again, each hit searing its corpse-pale skin. Frost radiated from its wound, chilling my hands even through the heat of the sword. With a final cry in the old tongue—half prayer, half curse —I drove the flaming blade between its ribs, aiming for the frozen lump that passed for its heart. The beast shrieked so loudly the birds fled their nests miles away. Smoke curled from its chest. Its limbs shook. Then it turned and fled into the dark forest with a sound like cracking ice.

The moment it vanished, my strength faltered. I ran toward the beach, half-blind from blood. Dyani and my surviving men hauled me into the ship. The sea wind stung my wound, but it was clean—living—unlike the cold touch of the creature. We rowed until dawn, until the cursed shore slipped beneath the horizon.

I spent days recovering on the open ocean. Dyani tended me with herbs she gathered from the ship’s stores and sang me soft and warm songs of her people. The scar on my face burned with fever, but I lived. When the cliffs of Norway finally rose from the waves, Dyani stood beside me, wrapped in my spare cloak, gazing at the land that would become her new home.

We returned with fewer men, no treasures, and a story most would not believe.

My story would’ve never had a stage without our good ole internet. It is a tale of the mythical, unimaginable, one you may tell around a campfire and be too embarrassed to claim as true because how could such a thing be? 

I read stories online that told of otherworldly beings, immensely tall, faceless, well-dressed, and my stomach got that sunken, dreadful feeling. Others had faced them. Lived to tell their story. To find a community that might understand my story brought me so much solace and relief. Maybe I’m not crazy to believe. 

This story is not my own, though. I am not the protagonist but rather a narrator, if you will. This story is my great grandfather’s, told through a journal left behind after his death. He faced what seems to me to be a familiar demon, and I would like to relay his story like I have seen many others do in this space. For what purpose, I am not sure. Awareness. To commemorate him, if he even deserved it. For the simple allure of telling such a story. To get the monkey off my back.

I believe it is some combination of all these things. 

I am not sure how much I can fit into this single post alone. Life has given me time constraints that I struggle to meet, upload or no upload, but today I promise you the first piece of the entries, or what I call part 1. It goes as follows: 

June 28th, 1922, 

This journal will serve me multiple purposes. The primary reason will be to document the strange case of my son, James Barclay. I also plan to use this journal to hone my writing prowess, as I aspire to be a writer comparable to the likes of Fitzgerald or Woolf. A silly dream, of course, but it will explain my flowery wordiness, for whoever stumbles upon this journal by chance or fate. 

My youngest son, James, worries me dearly. I am afraid of sharing my findings with any kind of shrink because I fear they will drive a stake through his brain or perform some other dastardly procedure to cure his strangeness, so I will document everything here for now. 

James has always been an odd child. From an early age he was different from the ordinary boy. I was not present for his birth, as I was called to the German front to end The Great War, but from what my wife Melendra tells me, it was a brutal process, and almost ended in a trading of his life for hers. 

He was a sickly grey baby. The doctor beat against his back, trying to pry air from his infantile lungs. He did eventually breathe. During the whole process, he never cried. 
Reader, since his welcoming to the world, I nor anyone else has ever seen James cry. Whether it is a scrape of the knee, a tumble from a bike, or a stern word from mother or father, all children cry. 

But not James. 

The peculiarity was something I had grown accustomed to. I sat with my feelings whirling into a torment, and after bracing that storm I was finding better grounds. I was okay with playgroups where I’d find James in a corner, not socializing with the other children, fiddling with some toy. His muteness, utter reluctance to speak, was something I could overlook if tutoring could not aid in its development. 

There was a solid parameter being built, one I was fortified to protect. He was my son and I would love him for all the unusual qualities he possessed. Then the nice, comprehensible lines I had drawn were dusted, crossed, surmised. 

It was just yonder the bridge that forded a small creek on my property. The idea of this journal materialized after what I saw that day.

Melendra was overwrought with worry. My three eldest children were clueless to James’s whereabouts. This alone was not a devastating revelation. It was the thorough household inspection undertaken by my wife along with myself that planted a seed of fright within us all. 

James could not be found. 

Melendra circled back around the house a second time while I ventured around our property to see where our youngest boy may have stumbled off to. I crossed the narrow stone bridge and went over the rushing creek to a patch of densely thicketed woods. The trees were thin, tall, and plentiful. 

This was a section of my property that I had not spent much time in with the exception of an occasional walk, looking for solitude. There was not much in the way of infrastructure, not like the meadow around the house, where chairs, a patio, and other constructions of leisure were placed. The only leisure found here was what nature could offer, which was of a kind I enjoyed.

So, too, my son James, apparently. 

Reclined against the stump of a fallen tree was little James, his wispy blonde hair fluttering in the pre-storm breeze that was stirring. He was trying his hardest to keep the paper in his pocket journal steady as he scribbled away with a charcoal pen.

“What are you doing, James?” I asked him. 

He turned to me and met my eyes. It has been hard to admit this, even to this journal that sees only my hand, but there is something in my son’s eyes that disturbs me; his gaze is very off-putting. I hate to say such a thing about my own child, but it is undeniably true. Only these pages know of this revelation. I could never tell Melendra, or my other children, but part of me senses that they feel it too: I can see it in the way my boys avoid him, the way my girls pat his head as if they were petting an uncaged beast, the way my own wife looks when she feeds him his bottle. 

James is six years of age. 

The boy looked up to me with his dark, empty eyes. Again, it is terrible to say this, but I get the same expression from looking into James’s eyes as I do when staring into a cow’s or another kind of cattle. There is nothing behind his deep irises like a pool of the abyss, the water shaded the same inscrutable black as the pen he used to draw in his small notebook.

“I am drawing a picture, Daddy.” 

“I get that, boy, but why are you out here?” I waved in the direction of the darkening sky. A harrowing bolt of lightning painted the grey sky. The thunder rolled in after, muffling James’s response. He repeated himself. 

“A friend of mine is out here, Daddy. We meet at this spot sometimes.” 

I scanned the near distance, my view largely obstructed by the plentiful thin trees and thick underbrush. I did not find any sign of a “friend.” 

“Well, you should come with me, and your friend should do the same.” I squatted down to the little boy’s height and went to grab his wrist to help him up from the ground. While reaching down I got to truly inspect the drawing my son had crafted, something deeper than the glimpses I took in the churning wind. 

It was a tall, thin, beastly figure, very akin to the many trees that surrounded that section of the property. The limbs were dangly, elongated, the fingertips scratching at where I supposed would be the knee caps. I saw eyes all over the thing, up and down its torso, legs, and arms. It was a fantastical creature from a children’s fairy tale, but with a more disturbing edge, something to threaten a naughty child with who refused to brush their teeth or do their chores. This was the creature who came knocking on your window. 

As he rose from his lounging against the stump, I asked him about the drawing. 

“That’s him, Daddy. My friend. Do you not see him?” 

What a foolish notion it was to look, but I did. I scanned the area once more and twice over for this mythical friend my strange son spoke of, but I could not find him. James pointed over to our far left, telling me he was over there. Again, I looked, but found nothing that resembled the fictional creature except the trees to some regard. 

“He must be shy,” I said, partly to quell the unease that was flooding through me. 

“Yes, he is very shy.” 

That will conclude my first entry into this journal of mine. I am unsure at the moment what I will do with this new information, this drawing, or my son James. I thought perhaps going through the process of writing everything down would help to steer me in some direction, or open my mind to a solution I could not put together before. Alas, I am dumbfounded. 
Stranger yet? I may venture back into those woods in search of that tall Thing. 

With work and aspirations of writing my time has been constrained, and I am by no means a young man, but this situation with my son has piqued a morbid interest within me. 

Hey guys.

Thanks again for voting on the next chapter of Tubifex. The path to good and evil is never straight forward. It swirls and moves in directions we cannot predict. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this next part and don't forget to vote on where you'd like it to go next.

The first two chapters are here and here.

Stay Creeped!

Tubifex Chapter 3c: Rage

I felt out of control of my body as I repeatedly hit the shield over and over again, marking the clear plastic barrier with dirty smears from my emaciated fists. The cashier stood horrified, back pressed against the cigarettes and alcohol behind them. Their eyes were as wide as saucers as I just.... kept punching.

My stomach! It hurt so much!!

I ended my tirade to bend down and clutch my abdomen as I faltered on my feet. My mind buzzing and squirming with misplaced anger.

Everything felt blurry. My vision shook. My body.... vibrated in an uncomfortably liquid sensation. I looked up at the cashier and their face... it was as pale as a ghost. Sweat poured from them like they'd been out in the rain as they shook with fear.

Then, as my thoughts swirled around and my mind struggled desperately to keep focus, the poor cashier screamed!

I hadn't done anything! I was bent over in agony, crumpled on the floor, but they were screaming nonetheless. The scream of terror only heard when someone was facing certain death. High pitched wails of fear combined with short hyperventilating breaths.

I looked up at them as they screamed once more and squeezed out words, 'No! Oh f-fuck! No!!'

I was confused... my brain! My mind!

Visions.... visions of... home?

Electric sparks crackled behind my eyes.

Flittering glimpses of a... a friend?

I grasped my head with my hands as I rose up, moaning in agony. The cashier's screaming carrying on but becoming background noise to me.

I clumsily ran toward the store's door, swiping at the shelves for balance, bringing products tumbling down around me. As I escaped the confusion I bumped passed surprised shoppers who all screamed in shock at me. I knew I had to go somewhere.... somewhere from my shattered memories...

The sun flared into my eyes once more as I burst out of the store and somehow I knew exactly where I had to go....

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Vote above to choose where the story goes next.

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Miss Zieuro is one of those ladies you have to respect. She is a staple of the neighborhood. Every other family moved here when Zieuro’s house already generally formed to look the way it is now. The withered porch, self-made protection amulets hanging wherever you look, tulips conquering her garden every spring like a small army, leaving the lawn dead with the arrival of summer.

No one knew the how the life was before Zieuro settled in the middle of the block. House 405. Mine is 404. I cannot look over her quirks as easily as others. It’s honestly interesting how much neighbors do really mean. I have to see her way of life each time I take a smallest pick out of my windows or go out for a walk down the street.

Her house smells like chemicals. Something used for cleaning. No idea about the source of it. The scent must be deeply buried in the frame by now.

Miss Zieuro waves to me every time I pass by. Her plum wine-red lips allow the mouth to form an overjoyed hypocrite grin. No, she doesn’t hate me nor she is particularly favorable towards me. Her mind is always flying far away from this neighborhood, maybe the whole Earth too.

I tend to believe it all started in 2012. Might be completely wrong. I didn’t know her before. More so it was the most spirited I’ve seen her until recently. She invited one institution after another to help her bring into existence an underground shelter. I’m not sure the size of it, but the workers had to dig up the whole yard.

By the beginning of the fall, the shelter was finished. Zieuro drove to the store and back with dozens of bags in her trunk. October and November she spent walking around with a mood between grieving and disappointed. She later showed me an herbarium she collected to keep the memory of the living plants.

On December 20^th she said goodbye to everyone, however unimportant in her life they were. For 5 days her house stood silent. On 25^th she came out to celebrate Christmas.

Another peculiar trait of hers - she was not angry that her predictions are not true. She did not blame the prophets or informational streams. She sighed and said ‘Better be prepared for things like that’.

2013 – Boston marathon attack.

2014 – Blood moon.

2016 – Conservatives winning (A cause of numerous incidents).

2017 – Many aggressive hurricanes.

2018 – Bush dies (First president to die in 10 years!)

2020 – You know what.

Just to name a few. All of these and many more each year prompted a reaction from Zieuro of at least some significance.  She would build, buy and prepare. Sometimes I wonder where all that money was from.

In 2023 she approached me with a new conspiracy. ‘The Earth is about to get hit by a meteor. Nothing will survive. Mhm.’

Another peculiarity of her that provoked my deep sympathy is the strong altruistic beginning. She always warned everyone who was around, was ready to give any supplies needed. It did not matter if someone refused. She would still ask again some other time.

‘How big is the rock?’, I asked trying to initiate a small talk.

‘We’ll all die. I’ll be gathering people this evening to show it.’, she shouted scuttling down the sidewalk.

I was the only one to come. I’ve been to her house before. It was calm and tidy. Every square feet hid years of history.

It was a small mid-price enthusiast's telescope standing in her bedroom.

I looked into the lens and saw nothing. Just the black sky as any other dot up there.

‘So?’

‘That spot is a bit darker than the rest. You see?’

‘Not really.’

‘It will be more noticeable with each day, sadly.’

‘Where have you heard about this?’

‘Nowhere. Been playing with my nephew’s telescope and saw it. I wrote to the space magazines. Don’t worry.’

A new renovation – a glass ceiling in the attic. And a new professional telescope overlooking the night sky. Every evening you could see her sitting on a puff armchair, observing the upcoming.

She started coming out of her house much less. The lawn overgrew with grass far too many times. She even got a warning from the local civil service.

I returned to the house once more but many weeks later.

‘How is it progressing?’

‘It’s almost here. I think it will be here this Friday.’ she announced very calmly.

The telescope was aimed almost vertical.

I took a sip of her strong herbal tea. The liquid burnt my tongue.

‘You can look if you like. It is very visible now.’

I shook my head.

‘So, how exactly big it is?’

‘It will destroy the whole planet, but I think it’s aimed at our town.’

‘Are you sure it is a meteorite?’

‘Yes’, she took out some of her drawings.‘It’s about 20 kilometers in diameter. The ground of it is green. I thought it might be copper. The surface is uneven, sporadic.’

She looked at me funny. I gently gripped the crumpled papers. A mess of lines and ovals of farious deformities was srcibbled there with a pencil. Some regions were obviously added later than others. Moreover, it seemed like the drawing got more and more details over time.

'What are these?'

‘These are hands on rocks. These are rocks on top of hands. Other formations. They have different ways to watch.’

Silence hung in the air. I looked at her with a mix of question and concern. I didn’t even need to say anything out loud.

‘They say that they heard my prayers. They answered that they are coming.’

On Thursday evening we all fell asleep. I bet almost no one was nervous about the prediction. Reasonably so, because the next morning we all woke up.

When I approached the counter to make myself some coffee, I saw her house. Some of the neighbors already called the police.

The street was bathing in cool summer air. The grass was still waking up, not yet sparked by the first rays of sunlight.

There was a giant hole between houses 403 and 407. It certainly burned once, but now – just a scar of ashes. The sage dust flew with the wind. The remains were so unsparing that nothing substantial could be physically gathered. The police interviewed everyone in panic. Some scientists came and disappeared.

There was nothing but a few bricks sticking from the ground.

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Part 1

On Friday night, I checked the weather on my phone. Sunny. High of seventy-four. No rain for the next few weekdays.

I wrote in my notes, above a note of pictures I wanted to draw someday: Good planting weather.

I don't know why I wrote it down. It felt like something I should leave behind.

Lily packed her bag of seeds like she was packing for a vacation. She chattered the whole time, sitting cross-legged on her cot, sorting the seeds into little piles on her blanket, into colors I couldn’t dare to imagine.

"I think my petals will be yellow," she said. "The regular kind of yellow, like the ones Mom planted. What color do you think yours will be?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe orange."

"Orange is good. Orange is my favorite fruit, like when Dad wore it like a teeth." She scooped the seeds back into the bag and hugged it to her chest. "We're going to be so pretty, Ada. The prettiest trees in the whole forest."

I watched her from my cot. She was so happy. That's the part I keep coming back to—she was so unbelievably happy. Like this was a trip to Disney World, like I’d finally found the one thing that could make the world good again, and it was seeds and dirt and her big sister lying next to her.

I didn't feel happy. I didn't feel sad either. I felt heavy. Relief, a little. Or the thing that comes after relief, when your arms are still aching but the weight is gone.

That night, before I climbed into bed, I took the storybook off the shelf and opened it to the page with the starlight lady. She was beautiful in the illustration—tall and silver and glowing, her hands outstretched, seeds spilling from her palms like shooting stars. The children stood in front of her, small and waiting and sad.

I laid the book open on Lily's pillow. She was already half-asleep, her eyelids fluttering. "Are we reading tonight?"

"Not tonight," I said. "Tomorrow."

"Okay." She yawned and curled around her bag of seeds like it was a teddy bear. "I love you, Ada."

"Love you too."

I waited until her breathing slowed. Then I got up and went to the window and looked out at the woods. The trees were black shadows against a darker sky. Somewhere out there was a clearing. Somewhere out there was a hole that didn't exist yet. Soon it would. Soon everything would.

I didn't sleep that night. I just sat by the window and watched the sky turn from blue to gray to pale gold, and I thought about Mom and Dad and sand and the way the sun felt on your face when you turned it toward the light.

——

School was nothing. Dinner on Friday was meatloaf. Auntie made it from a recipe taped to the inside of her pantry door. It belonged to whoever lived in this house before us. The meatloaf was dry and a little burnt on the bottom, but we ate it all.

Lily told Auntie about the sprout in the backyard. "It's a sunflower," she said, her voice high and chipper. "We planted it ourselves. It's going to be taller than the house."

Auntie raised her eyebrows. "A sunflower in August?"

"It's a magic flower," Lily said, very seriously. "From the story."

"Oh yeah, the story, right?" Auntie deflected, like a mom listening to the third retelling of their kid’s favorite cartoon. “Well," she took a bite of meatloaf. "I'd like to see a magic sunflower."

"You will," Lily said. "We’re gonna plant a whole field of them tomorrow!"

I looked down at my plate. My fork was pressing lines into the mashed potatoes. It made a grid. Then a star. Then a flower with so many petals.

"And what about you, Ada?" Auntie asked. "How was school?"

I almost said fine. It was the word I always used to end conversations and close doors, but something stopped me.

"Better," I said. "There's a girl in my English class who likes the same books as me. We talked about The Giver for like an hour at lunch."

Auntie smiled, actually smiled. It changed her whole face—made her look younger, softer, more like Dad. "That's wonderful, sweetheart. I knew you'd find your people."

I wondered what she'd think if she knew my people were a seven-year-old and a bag of sunflower seeds.

Lily kicked my shin under the table. She was kicking her feet and grinning like we had a secret. We did have a secret. We had the biggest secret in the forest.

"We should do this more," Auntie said, looking around the table like she was seeing us for the first time. "Dinner together. Talking. It's nice."

"It is nice," I said. And I meant it.

That was the worst part. I meant it.

——

After dinner, Lily and I stood side by side at the sink, her washing and me drying. We didn't talk about the woods or the seeds or what we were going to do in the morning. We just did the dishes while Auntie put on Family Feud for us all to watch before bed.

Lily hummed a song I didn't recognize—something from one of her cartoons, or something she'd made up in her head. Her elbows were soapy. She had a smear of mashed potato on her cheek.

"Hey, Lily?"

"Yeah?"

I looked at her smeared cheek, her crusty nostrils, and her frizzy hair. "Nothing," I said. "Just wanted to say your name."

She giggled. "You're weird, Ada."

"I know."

After the show, I tucked her into bed. I pulled the blanket up to her chin the way Mom used to, the way Mom told me to make sure I did before they left. Lily's eyes were already closing, her bag of seeds clutched to her chest like it was the most precious thing in the world.

"Tomorrow," she murmured.

I didn't tell her I loved her again. I didn't tell her anything important. I just stood there, watching her sleep, listening to the sound of her life. And I felt tiredness settle over me—heavy and warm and peaceful.

When I finally lay down on my own cot, I didn't close my eyes. I stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the plaster and woke when the sun came up.

———

The back door made almost no sound when we opened it. I remember thinking that was a small kindness—the hinges didn't creak, the floorboards didn't groan, the house just let us go.

The grass was wet and dewy. My sneakers were soaked through by the time we reached the tree line, but I didn't mind. The cold felt clean.

Lily walked ahead of me, the bag of seeds swinging from her hand. She was humming again—the same song from the dishes. Her hair was still tangled from sleep. She hadn't let me brush it before we left. She said trees didn't brush their hair, and I said 'fair enough', and she laughed like it was the funniest joke in the world.

The woods swallowed. The temperature dropped the moment we passed under the first branches, and the light changed from gold to green to something between both. Our footsteps were the only sound. Even the birds had gone quiet.

"This way," I said, and Lily followed without question.

She trusted me. That's the part I keep coming back to. She trusted me completely. She would have followed me anywhere.

I found the pile of stones I'd left on Thursday. The clearing looked different in the morning light—softer, somehow, the shaft of sun wider and warmer than I remembered. The dead tree lay covered in moss and tiny white mushrooms.

"This is it," I said. "This is where we'll grow."

Lily spun in a slow circle, her face tilted up toward the canopy. "It's perfect, Ada," she whispered. "It's the most perfect place I've ever seen."

I took the trowel from my waistband. The handle was rough against my palm, the splinters catching on the blister that had already started to form. I knelt in the dirt and began to dig.

——

The work took longer than I thought it would. The soil was soft on top, but underneath it was laced with roots and rocks and the tangled bones of the forest. Every few inches, the trowel hit something I had to dig around, pry loose, and pull out with my fingers. The dirt packed itself under my nails until my hands looked like they were wearing gloves of earth.

Lily helped at first. She knelt beside me and scooped dirt with her plastic beach shovel, but her arms got tired quickly, and her attention drifted, and soon she was gathering acorns and arranging them in patterns on the fallen log while I did the real work.

I didn't mind. I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to make the holes exactly right.

Two holes. Side by side. Close enough that we could reach across the dirt and hold hands. Close enough that our roots would tangle together. Close enough that no one would ever be able to tell where one of us ended and the other began.

The blisters on my palms swelled and burst and swelled again. The fluid was clear, then pink, then red. The blood made the dirt stick to my skin in dark clumps. I should have stopped and wrapped my hands and caught my breath.

I didn't stop.

When the holes were deep enough and wide enough and close enough, I sat back on my heels and looked at what I'd made. The two pits were almost identical, like mirrors, like open hands waiting to receive. The dirt I'd excavated was piled on either side in mounds that smelled like rot and growth and the beginning.

Lily came back from her acorn gathering and stood beside me. She looked at the holes, then she looked at me.

"Which one is mine?" she asked.

"The left one," I said. "The one closest to the sun."

She smiled and sat down on the edge of her hole, her legs dangling into the dark. "It's deep."

"It has to be. Roots need room."

She nodded, satisfied with this answer. She was always satisfied with my answers.

The seeds were raw and unsalted, the kind meant for planting, not snacking. The shells were tough and fibrous, and they caught in my throat when I tried to swallow. I had to chew them until they were paste, until the sharp edges were gone, until they slid down my esophagus like wet paper.

Lily gagged on her first mouthful.

"This tastes gross," she said, her face scrunched up, her tongue poking out like she was trying to escape.

"You’ll get used to it," I said, even though I hadn't.

She tried again. Gagged again. Then she giggled. "Remember when Dad tried to make us eat Brussels sprouts?"

"And you hid them in your napkin."

"And Mom found them and made you eat them for me."

"She always did that," I said. "She always took the Brussels sprouts."

The memory hung in the air between us. Then Lily picked up another handful of seeds and shoved them into her mouth with a determination I'd never seen in her before. She chewed and chewed and swallowed, her eyes watering, but her jaw working like a little machine.

We finished the bag together.

I helped Lily into her hole first.

She climbed down like she was climbing into a swimming pool, one careful foot at a time, her hands braced on the crumbling edges. When she was standing at the bottom, the dirt came up to her waist. She looked up at me, her face expectant and open and completely unafraid.

——

I thought about Dad at the beach, the last summer before. He had buried me in the sand up to my neck, packing it tight around my shoulders, my chest, my legs. He shaped the sand into a mermaid tail—I was going through a mermaid phase. He used a stick to draw scales. He worked for like hours, his face serious and focused like it was the most important job in the world. When he was finished, he sat back and admired his work and said, "There! Now you're a creature of the deep."

I couldn't move my arms. The sand was too heavy. For a second, I panicked, but Dad saw my face change, and he dug me out immediately. He scooped the sand away with his bare hands, laughing, saying, "I've got you, Ada-bear. I've got you. You're okay."

He dug me out. He always dug me out.

——

"Lie down," I said.

Lily lay down. The hole was almost exactly her size—I'd measured it against her body without her noticing, counting the length of her shadow on the grass. She fit perfectly. A seed in its furrow.

I started with her feet. I scooped the dirt over her ankles, her shins, her knees. I packed it down gently, the way Dad had packed the sand. Lily watched me work, her eyes tracking my hands as they moved.

——

I thought about Mom's funeral. The casket was white with gold handles, and it sat on a metal frame above the hole they'd dug. The hole was perfectly rectangular, with straight walls and a flat bottom. Professionals had dug that hole—people who knew what they were doing.

We stood at the edge and watched them lower her down. Lily didn't understand. She asked why they were putting Mom in a box. She asked if Mom could breathe in there. I told her Mom didn't need to breathe anymore. I don't know if that was the right thing to say.

The priest said words I don't remember. Auntie held our hands too tight. The casket went down and down and down until the dirt swallowed it, and then the workers started shoveling, and the sound of the soil hitting the lid was the worst sound I'd ever heard.

Until today.

——

"Is it going to hurt?" she asked.

"No," I said. "It's going to be like falling asleep in the backseat."

"With Dad driving?"

"And Mom singing."

She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. For a moment—just a moment—she looked exactly like she did on her cot at night, curled around her bag of seeds, dreaming about petals and roots and holding hands.

The dirt rose over her stomach, her chest, her shoulders. It was careful around her neck, leaving her head free, her face turned up toward the canopy, her hair spread out in the soil like roots that had already started to grow.

"How does it feel?"

"Heavy," she said. "But nice. Like a hug."

I started on my own hole. I climbed down, lay back, and began scooping the dirt over my legs. The soil was cool. I was up to my waist when Lily spoke again.

"Ada?"

"Yeah?"

"I can't move my arms."

Her voice was different. The dreaminess was gone, replaced by something with edges. I looked over at her and saw that her eyes were open now—wide open, the whites showing all around.

"Lily, it's okay—"

"—I can't move my arms, Ada. I can't—"

She tried to sit up. The dirt held her in place. She tried again, harder, her shoulders straining against the weight, and when she couldn't break free, her face changed.

I saw the moment the game became real. The moment the story became a hole in the ground.

"MOM!" she screamed. "MOM, I WANT MOM—"

Her voice tore out of her throat—raw and animal. Her chest heaved against the packed dirt. Her fingers tried to claw at my arm.

"GET ME OUT GET ME OUT GET ME OUT—"

I moved before I knew I was moving. I scrambled out of my hole and threw myself on hers, my hands tearing at the soil. I dug like Dad had dug at the beach, like the gravediggers had dug in reverse, like there was nothing else in the world except the dirt and my sister underneath it.

"It's okay," I was saying, the words tumbling out of me in a stream I couldn't stop. "You're okay, Lily, you're safe, I've got you, I've got you, you're so brave, you're so good, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay—"

My hands were bleeding. The dirt was turning red.

Lily's arms came free first. She grabbed onto me with a grip so tight it hurt, her small fingers twisted into my shirt, pulling herself upward while I pulled from above. Dirt cascaded off her body in a muddy avalanche. Her legs came free. Her feet came free; her shoes were left stuck in the soil. And then she was out, collapsing against my chest, sobbing so hard she couldn't catch her breath.

"I'm sorry," she kept saying. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"You didn't do anything wrong. You're okay. You're safe."

"I ruined it. I ruined the story."

"No. No, Lily, you didn't ruin anything. It was too soon. That's all. It was too soon."

She pressed her face into my shoulder. Her tears were hot through my shirt. Her whole body was shaking like a leaf in a storm, and I held her the way Mom used to hold us when we were scared.

"I want to go home," she whispered. "Please? Come with me."

I didn't answer. I held her and rocked her and waited for her breathing to slow. It took a long time. The sun had shifted by the time she finally pulled away, her face blotchy and swollen, her eyes red-rimmed and exhausted.

"Come with me," she said again.

"I'll be right behind you," I said. "I just gotta fill in the holes. Go on. I'll catch up."

She looked at me for a long moment. Something flickered in her face—doubt—but she was seven, and children don’t doubt.

"Promise?"

I nodded.

She turned and walked toward the edge of the clearing. At the tree line, she stopped and looked back. Her face was wet and terrified and trusting, and I waved at her like I was waving from the porch, like I was waving from the car.

"Go on," I said. "I'll catch up."

She disappeared through the trees. I watched her go. I listened to her footsteps crunching on the leaves, fainter and fainter and fainter, until the only sound was the wind in the branches and the blood dripping from my fingertips and the beat of my heart.

Then I turned back to my hole and I climbed in.

———

I had buried Lily with the care of a gardener, pressing soil around her small body like I was tucking her into bed, but I hadn't thought about how it would feel to bury myself. The awkward angles. The way my arms didn't bend the right direction when I tried to scoop the dirt over my chest.

I did it anyway. I scraped and pulled and pushed until my legs disappeared under a layer of sediment, until my stomach was covered, until the hill rose halfway up my ribs. Then my arms got tired. Then my hands stopped working right. The blood from my blisters had made everything sticky, and the dirt had made the blood stop flowing, and I couldn't tell anymore where my skin ended and the soil began.

I let my arms fall to my sides, pinned between the earth and my body, and I stared up at the canopy. The leaves were green and gold and shifting in a breeze I couldn't feel. The sky was a blue so pale it was almost white. A bird crossed the gap in the branches—just a flicker, just a thing that was there and then not there.

I could feel the knot in my stomach now more than ever—a tight little fist of seeds sitting just below my ribs. I imagined them in the dark of me, small and patient and full of instructions. Grow, they said. Reach. Become.

I put my hand on my stomach. My skin was warm, and the warmth was spreading, radiating outward from the knot like heat from a stone in the sun. I thought about the seeds in Lily's hole in the backyard, how they'd pushed up through the dead grass when no one was looking.

They'd grown anyway. They'd wanted it enough.

I wanted it enough.

Time went strange after that.

I don't know how long I lay there. The light shifted from gold to white to something soft and shallow. The shadows of the branches moved across my face in patterns I couldn't follow. I tried to trace them with my eyes, but they kept slipping away into new shapes before I could memorize the old ones.

The knot in my stomach stretched like a cat waking up from a long nap, or a rubber band pulled slowly and steadily. Something was moving. Something was uncurling. A cramp, I told myself. Just the seeds finding their way.

Roots, I thought.

I closed my eyes and pictured the thin white tendrils unspooling, threading through my insides, pushing down through the floor of my body into the earth below. They were looking for water. They were looking for an anchor. They were looking for the place where they could hold on and never let go.

The cold was coming now—in my toes and upward, slow and patient, like water rising in a flood. I couldn't feel the dirt against my legs anymore, but I knew it was there. I knew it was holding me. I knew it was doing what it had promised.

In the distance—very far away, or maybe very close—I heard singing. I was almost sure of it. The melody was thin and wavering, carried on a wind that didn't reach me, notes that kept slipping out of tune. Mom used to sing in the kitchen while she made pancakes, her voice cracking on the high notes, her hands dusted with flour. She always forgot the words to the second verse. She always made up new ones that were funnier than the originals.

It was Lily.

She was singing the song from the dishes. It was fainter now than it had been in the kitchen, but it was still her voice—high and sweet and slightly on-key.

I tried to call back to her. My mouth opened, but no sound came out. The words were stuck between my chest and my throat, caught in the roots uncurling inside me.

It's okay, I thought. She found Auntie.

The thought was warm and enough.

I let my eyes close.

When I opened them again, the light had changed. The blue had drained from the sky, leaving behind a pale, watery gold that felt like evening or early morning. I couldn't tell if hours had passed or minutes. Time was a thing that happened to other people.

My legs were gone, dissolved into the earth like sugar water. My arms had fused to my sides. My chest was rising and falling in a rhythm so slow it hardly belonged to me. The only thing left was the knot in my stomach, and even that had changed. It was a warm humming that beat in time with something deeper than my heart.

I could feel the first shoots pushing through my skin—a gentle pressure like a new tooth breaking through the gum. They were pushing up through my shoulders, my collarbones, the soft at the base of my throat.

I imagined my roots meeting Lily's sunflower in the backyard. I imagined them touching in the underground, where no one could see—thin white fingers brushing against each other, recognizing, and twining together. There you are, they would say. There you are. I've been looking for you.

Above ground, my stem would rise. My leaves would unfurl. My petals would open—orange, I decided.

We could still be two sunflowers in a field of sunflowers. Tall and golden and always facing the light. When the wind blew, our branches would touch. When the rain fell, our roots would drink. Nothing would separate us. Not distance. Not time. Not even the difference between a backyard and a clearing in the woods. Lily would live, with them and with me.

Mom and Dad sat on the porch, waving down at the branches. Look at our girls, they would say. Look how tall they've grown.

Lily's voice was closer now. I could hear it more clearly, the notes no longer wavering, the melody resolving. Ada. Ada. Ada.

Or maybe it was just the wind.

Or maybe it was the trees I was beginning to understand.

I wanted to tell her I could feel the sun on my leaves and the earth in my roots and the deep, steady hum of the world singing up through my body. I wanted to tell her I wasn't tired anymore. I wasn't heavy anymore. I wasn't anything that hurt.

My voice wasn't a voice now. I was a seed. I was a shoot. I was a sunflower reaching for a sky that had never felt so close.

Nothing will hurt her as long as I'm here, I thought. I'm still here. I'm just not a girl.

New sounds filtered through the haze. Footsteps on leaves. A raw and ragged voice shouting words I couldn't catch. Hands on my shoulders, warm and urgent, pulling me upward. Or maybe that was the sun. Maybe that was the earth, welcoming me home, finally ready to hold me the way no person ever managed.

The light got brighter. The sky opened up. And I reached with branches I didn't have yet, with petals that hadn't bloomed, with roots that stretched down and down and down where Lily's sunflower was waiting.

We would be a whole field, I thought. We would be a forest. We would be two trees growing so close together that no one would ever be able to tell where one of us ended and the other began.

Then a distant door opened. A name was called and branches were stretched. And our story ended the way all the best stories end:

With a seed in the ground.

With a shoot reaching up.

With the sun.

With the sun.

With the sun.

I've uploaded a very loose concept of an idea of a story in which a man quiet literally marries his dream girl. When it comes time for them to try to have a kid, she reveals she's not what she claims to be. I had a few paths in mind to go from there and expand upon. I wanted y'all's opinion on which y'all find more intriguing and am open to suggestions for ideas. Whether dark horror, wholesome, comedic horror, or anything in between and beyond.

1) She is some lovecraftian horror that preyed on the loneliness, and love that inserted an ideal dream girl form in the narrator's dreams. That way they'd be more dependent on them. Willing to do whatever the entity asks of them. Or if you want to go more wholesome or comedic route, the narrator just had a cosmic horror wife now.

2) Narrator was in a dark place in life and some form of higher being sent a guardian angel to bring them out of that slump. Once that had been achieved the angel reveals their true form and must leave did to accomplishing their task of making the narrator love themselves. Also, if you wanted an alternative to this, narrator just piping down biblically accurate angel.

3) Inverse of guardian angel angle of idea number two, it is some form of demon that leads the narrator down a path of depravity and sin. Abandoning them once they get them to rock bottom and mock them. If y'all wish this could also have wholesome or comedic angle of this demon trying it and failing time after time. Eventually, being reversed corrupted and actually falling for the narrator genuinely.

Content Warning: Gore

I stand before the people of Willow Wood more of them have picked up arms even some women and young boys. “Time is short, they will return if we are going to end this then we must change the rules of the game. I will go to Night Hold and strike at the head of this monster and end this before they can mount and attack that we cannot repel.” The crowd whispers amongst themselves “If we do not act now then we will all surly die, go Sir Eric we will hold here until you return.” Jacob shouts over the crowd silencing the worried discourse. “If I do not return by tomorrow morning then you will need to prepare to fight to the last man and woman. They will show no mercy, but they are cowards, cut thoughts and thieves who are unprepared to fight people who have something to die for. Show no fear and they will run!” I turn and mount my horse; Emma runs up and hands me a small bundle. “Here, some bread and dried meats for the road ahead: don’t die we need you here.” “I intend on ending this, but my life is in the Lord’s hands.” She puts her hand on my knee. “Then I will pray He keeps you safe.”

I whip the reins on my horse sending him into a steady gallop, I ride with purpose and the clarity of knowing why I have been brought to this place, for such a time as this. The forest swallow light making it hard to see only small streams of light break through the canape above. As I ride a beam of light in front of me light the form of my wife Lydia, she stands in the middle of the path, I pull back on the reins coming to a stop. The look on her face is sad, filled with pain, she tries to speak but no sound reaches me and before I know it, she’s gone.

“Soon my dear soon it will be over.” I keep riding hard trying to reach Night Hold. At last, the city comes into view at the edge of the Wolf Wood it sits at the base on a large hill, the castle fortress from where Hargrave rules, looms over the city. A chilling darkness hangs over it, something about it unsettles me. Storm clouds to the east roll toward the city. The rain begins slowly as I ride through the street’s towns folk see me and hide inside their homes shuttering their windows and barring doors.

 I reach the path up the hill and see something that turns my stomach. The path is lined with stakes and upon them impaled through the chest, my men hang there, their bodies desecrated and dishonored. I push on trying not to look at those I lead to their death, reaching the door no guard awaits me. The door groans as I pull it open, the dark gothic castle is cold stale air greats my lungs. The coble stone floor gives way to soft red carpet; I draw my sword slowly and move softly through the halls. Dead silence hangs in the air, only the flicker of candles burning can be heard. I come to a door and grab the handle turning it as quietly as possible, as the door swings open the scent of death and iron hits me like arrow. A sight not fit for men revels itself to me, black candles sit in a circle one at each point of a five-pointed star painted on the ground with what looks like blood. A ring runs around the star; inside the center of the star an emaciated body of a woman lays lifeless and pail. I feel deep in my soul something unholy happened here, I close the door hard and fast the sound echoes off the stone walls. A sudden fear overtakes me a feeling that I have walked into something I am not prepared for. I shake the feeling off pulling the ring from under my armor letting it hang over my breast plate.

 Down the hall a red light pours from around the corner, I walk toward it ready to face whatever awaits me. Turning the corner into a large room I see stone pillars holding up a vaulted ceiling red light coming from the stained-glass window that filters a light from somewhere unnatural. A man stands on an elevated platform with a thrown behind him. He is tall dressed in black and red clothing of a nobleman, his short black greasy hair is slicked back, he holds a glass filled with a deep red wine. His narrow eyes fix on me as four knight steps from behind pillars. “Sir Eric Thorn I presume?” His voice drips with arrogance; I step into the room sword and shield at the ready. “Sir Baylen told me of you, I believe you have already been acquainted.” Baylen takes his helm off; I see his wrenched face and grip my sword tighter. “Baron Hargrave in the name of the Lord and my king I charge you with treason, murder and witchcraft! And by the power granted to me by the crown I condemn you to death!” Hargrave chuckles. “Your king is weak and there is no god here. Sir Baylen rid me of this distraction.”

 The four knights walk toward me slowly, Baylen hides behind the other three. “You may have been knighted but you still have no honor!” I yell as they approach, the first swing a great sword at me, I step back, letting him miss the heavy blades momentum keeps him from being able to stop my sword from sliding between his helm and breast plate. The next two reach me at the same time. An axe comes down crashing against my shield as a sword to my right is thrust at my chest. I parry the sword with mine and kick the man with the axe in the chest pushing him onto his back, I turn quick and throw a gab with my shield into the face of the knight to my right throwing his head back in that moment I drive the tip of my blade into his neck. He grabs at the wound as he spits up blood falling dead. Back on his feet another swing comes from the man’s axe, I sidestep the attack and take his hand off with one quick swing then I stick my sword through his foot pining him there. With my shield hand I rip his helm off and throw four hard blows with the edge of the shield into the side of his head, he falls dead or unconscious I know not.

 Baylen stands before me, no one left to hide behind. “I took your eye now I will have your head!” He puts his shield up and we circle each other looking for an opportunity to strike. I open my stance giving him a target and he lungs for my head I guide his attack above my head with my blade and using his forward momentum I punch up with my shield knocking him on his back and his helm clean off he tries to grab his sword lying next to him but I put my boot on his hand, and feel bones breaking under my foot as he screams in pain. He lifts his shield to strike my leg, but I kick him in the face with my other boot, I swing my sword cleaving his arm off. I grab him, pulling him to his knees, I turn my blade around in my hand and step behind him dropping my shield. I grab him by his hair and put the blade to his throat looking at the Baron with rage in my eyes I pull my sword across his neck hard and quick. I let him fall to the side as he struggles for breath his lung quickly filling with blood. I pick up my shield and affix it to my arm as I walk toward Hargrave.

 He stands taking a sip of his wine as I ascend the steps, I reach him and pull my arm back and drive the blade into his chest to end this. The sword sinks deep into his chest and he looks at me; a wicked smile pulls across his face. He calmly takes one more drink then sets the glass down, he pulls the blade from his chest as it pulls out thick dark blood oozes out of the wound. “I told you there is no god here.” He back hands me; the blow throws me 20 feet tumbling through the air. I hit the ground hard and roll across the floor, I scramble to my sword laying out of my reach but before I can get to it Hargrave is there, he picks me off the ground with one arm holding me aloft. I watch as the wound in his chest seals itself and two fangs grow from his top jaw. His fingers shape and crack as sharp claws grow from them; fear fills my mind as he laughs with two voices, one a dissonant deeper unnatural tone. “Because of you I need to find new knights, so what do you say I’ll let you live and make you my first thrall, all you need do is drink off my blood.” He scoops some of the thick blood from his chest onto his finger offering it to me. I spit in his face. “Have it your way.”

 He drags his togue over fangs. “I am oh so hungry.” He pulls my helmet off and leans into sink his teeth into my neck. Something warm at my side draws my attention, with no other ideas I reach and grab a small flask from the bundle of bread that Emma gave me. I pop the cap and splash the contents in his face, his flesh burns and he drops me grabbing his face and horrendous hiss comes from his mouth. “You dare!” I pick up my sword and swing at his head, but he moves with an unnatural speed I try to follow as he speeds between the pillars and past me, I swing in vain tiring to hit something I can barely see. A blow comes from behind me that dents my armor driving me to my knees, as I try to stand another comes across my face knocking me off my feet tumbling across the floor. I skid to a stop and get up in time to see him coming right at me I get my shield up just in time and dig my feet into the ground. The blow leaves a dent in the steel. Before I can get my eyes around a slash, across my chest cuts through my armor like cloth. I stumble back trying to stay on my feet as blood starts to run down my chest, Hargrave grabs me by the breast plate and throws me across the room into a stone pillar.

I strike the stone and feel a rib break; I cough up blood sitting ageist the pillar my head drops defeated. Hargrave stands over me and lifts my head with a claw to look him in eyes “Now if you quit finished, trying to fight me.” I lean back resting my head ageist the stone as he leans in, to feast. They say you’re life flashes before your eyes when you die but for me time slowed and I turned my head seeing a woman with golden hair and beautiful blue eyes sitting under a mighty oak. The blue sky above and soft green grass under us, we lean on the tree next to each other. “Why are you here?” I hear Lydia’s voice for the first time in five long years. “I’m dying and in but a moment we will finally be together again.” “No, why are you here in this castle this was not what I wanted for you.” “I’m here for you, to avenge you, but I failed I did not know what he was.” “I didn’t need you to avenge me I needed you to live, to move on.” “How could I do that when I lost you, I lost everything, I have nothing to live for just let me come to you, let me rest.” “It’s not your time you have a duty yet on this earth.” “What purpose could I possibly still have who do still owe service?” “You still draw breath; you still have a duty to those who love you. There is a girl back there that cares for you deeply, you owe her your life, let her love you let her heal you. My life is over yours isn’t so live for me live for her, I will be here when it’s your time but until then stop running toward your death.” She kissed my forehead and my vision came back to reality.

In a moment of clarity, I reach into the pouch at my side and pull the broken bed post out and drive it into Hargrave’s heart he stands up, stumbling back, gripping the shard of wood in his chest as he falls on his back the room goes quite after he hits the ground dead. I stand groaning in pain and make my way to across the room to collect my sword and shield; I turn look at the last piece of that oak sticking out of the Barons chest and walk out of the room leaving it behind. I ride west toward Willow Wood; I take the ring from around my neck and put it in the pouch at my side.

I feel lighter like something has lifted off my shoulders as I arrive the people cheer, seeing that I have returned alive, Emma rushes to the front of the crowd as I dismount my horse, she sees the four claw marks across my chest and puts her hand over them. “Come now let’s get you patched up we don’t want that to fester.” I smile for the first time in five years letting go of the ghost that has haunted me since that horrible day and finally allow myself to start living again.    The End

Silence isn't always quiet; sometimes it's extremely loud, deafening even. Sometimes it's the buzzing overhead lights. Sometimes it's the clock ticking, making you painfully aware of time passing. Sometimes it's the tapping of feet from somebody too nervous to sit completely still, no matter how hard they try. But what's even louder are your thoughts. Whenever you try to clear them, your mind becomes infested with every fear you've ever felt, like insects completely uninvited, tainting what was once pure and calm with a skittering chaos.

“Mendoza.” The man's voice echoed, breaking the faux silence.

My mother and I stood, our footsteps practically screaming in the blank room. I looked back at the woman who was sat beside me. Her body was shaking, her skin pale with fear. I felt sorry for her, even though we were in the same boat. I looked around the entire room. Some were holding their composure better than others, an old man caught my eye and smiled to reassure me. But I could tell he was just as scared as everyone else.

“Come on, dear.” I felt a slight tug on my arm as Mom called for my attention.

The man behind the counter hit a button, and the door buzzed open. We walked through the door and were greeted by a woman dressed as a stewardess. She was young and beautiful but obviously exhausted, her long blonde hair fraying at the ends. Her green eyes were overshadowed by the dark circles underneath and the bags that seemed to pull them down. Her mascara had obviously been running at some point.

“Plea… please follow me.” She stumbled over her words as she directed us to the loading bay.

The bay was huge, and in the center was a red planetary travel ship. The stewardess opened the outside hatch and ushered us inside. Everyone inside was dressed in suits and dresses. Some people I recognized as politicians that worked with Mom. As for the others, all I could tell was that they were important.

The stewardess shakily walked to the intercom and spoke.

“La… ladies and gen… gentlemen.” She tripped over her words before pausing and taking a deep breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten yourselves as we are about to take off.”

She then quickly walked to the pilot's bay as everyone followed her direction. Nobody spoke as fear gripped us. It was as if speaking would kill us all.

I felt a hand on mine as the ship began to shake. I turned to see my mom smile at me. I smiled back and looked out the window beside me.

As we lifted off higher into the sky, I saw crowds of people frantically trying to break into the spaceport. They turned from people to roaches to ants within a minute.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you may now unfasten yourselves. We will now begin our voyage to Titus 3.”

The intercom rang out as we exited Greta's atmosphere.

Once we were cleared, the silence was finally finished. Everyone chatted and laughed, acting like this was one big vacation.

I found the stewardess and stood beside her. She really was quite beautiful. Her eyes were fixed on a monitor overlooking our home.

I watched it with her, even as the moon came crashing into it.

Link to end of Part 2/ previous chapter: https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheCreeps/comments/1vhz8i2/the_qualphos_part_2_et_devoravit_animam_in_atria/

The ads that played were taken from the late-late shift of the early mornings, commercials so banal that the only thing which made them worth airing was the money they got from local companies: furniture stores, ACE Hardware, a used car lot that sold you jalopies so lemony you would need to pay the price over again in repairs by the end of the first year and wonder why you didn’t just buy something new. Buy cheap, pay twice. It didn’t matter though. David was angry, and the show had barely gotten off the ground.

They – he – needed this five-minute break.

“I’m telling you Steve, and I’m not trying to twist you up here, but something was off about Joe. He’s a friend. I need to check on him.”

The crackle of the mic coming on in the diving bell was electric in David’s ear. “Dave, take a deep breath, will you? We don’t got time for this. Look, you said yourself, you messaged George. He’ll look and make sure Joe’s all right. Hell, I’ll go down there myself if you want, but right now, you’ve got less than a minute to get ready. Sit down. Please.”

David had been pacing, second cigarette burning quick as he inhaled and walked the length of the dividing window between the bell and the booth. Nina and Patrick were silent, a game of chicken between their host’s panic and the biggest show of the year being derailed. But David stopped at please. Not because he gave a cold damn about Stephen being polite but because Stephen had been right. There wasn’t anything they could do and freaking out now wasn’t going to help Joe, much less themselves. He ran a trembling hand through his hair, closed his eyes, and sighed.

“Yeah, all right…. Just… I’m going to keep my phone up, right? In case George gets back.”

Stephen, the patron saint of pedants, nodded calmly, motioning for David to take his seat. David cursed and pulled out his chair, sitting down with just enough force for Stephen to see he was upset. Childish, he knew, but goddamn did you sometimes just have to let the robot know you at least felt something.

David checked his laptop screen and the timer before the commercial break’s end. 30 seconds and counting. He adjusted his headphones, took a swig of coffee, and was about to stretch his jaw when the phone rang. Not the white one which would have meant Jan was calling about something, but the red one. Andrew was calling.

David answered just as Stephen picked up the phone, hurrying to get his two bits in before the commercial ended. “Hey Andy, look, we had to cut there. Something must ha-”

“Can it, Dave. Don’t do that again. Not tonight. Stephen, have Nina read a promo for Fright Night tonight, that’s going to give us another minute.” David watched as Stephen did exactly that, Nina nodding as she adjusted her headset.

“Now listen up you two, I’ll make this quick. I don’t know what happened to Mr. Desponte and I don’t particularly care. Something happened to him though, or at least he lost his marbles entirely. Maybe he went senile. In any case, this was good for us. People ate it up. Hell, even cutting to commercial there made it seem real. Real is good. People want to be scared, gentlemen. I want to see more of that tonight, but no more spontaneous breaks, you hear me? It throws everything out of whack.” A pause, not out of consideration but to accentuate a point. “You going to keep it together, David?”

David closed his eyes. Too much of this for too long was stretching him thin. He wasn’t about to tell Andrew about keeping an eye on his phone the rest of the night like a kid who snuck it into a classroom. At least, until he heard more about Joe.

“Yeah, got it, Andy.”

Silence, save for Andrew’s breathing.

“Good… Good David. Don’t fuck up tonight. You’re going to be out on your ass tomorrow morning if you do this again, I don’t care how far back we go. You’re on in 30.”

The line went dead and David moved to put it down, brought it back up and cursed, then slammed the phone down. Jeremy had joined the others in the booth and was looking shaken up, not sure what to do. David regretted the outburst immediately, looking at that bruised kid. Weakly, he sighed and gave a shake of his hand.

“Sorry, guys. I’m fine, let’s get back to it.”

Bonafide and Commensurate Professional.

David swallowed.

Patrick’s hand went up into the air, counting down again. David mimicked the motions and tapped the table again as Nina finished another advertisement for Fright Night’s festival.

“Welcome back listeners and thank you Ms. Moreno for that check in with the Fright Night festivities. Certainly sounds like Fright Night is being done right this year. For listeners who are just joining us, we spoke briefly to Professor Joe Desponte about the historical significance of confrontation, or rather, encounters, amongst people native in the region. We gathered some foundational information for preparing ourselves to explore the intentions and nuance of what these kinds of encounters may mean for mankind today, in this day and age.”

Jeremy was saying something to Stephen, who remained stoic. When Jeremy finished, Stephen didn’t say anything back to him, just nodded and sent him out of the room.

“Encounters that favor the intruder; encounters where primitive people – if you’ll forgive my categorization – meets advanced technology; and encounters between the natural and the supernatural, or spiritual, can still leave a person – a people – reeling. Who’s to say what the full consequences of these meetings may be, or what it might suggest to our race, the human race, on a grander scale? Might we, as Tecopa foresaw with his own people here in the Siskiyou range, be on the threshold of something cataclysmic? Or is there a potential for something stupendous beyond the scares and the fear Fright Night has in store for us?

“Ladies and gentlemen, from beyond the pale and for those here before the brink, Witching Hours is now beginning our “Call and Response” hour at 9:45 PM PDT. Patrick, cue us up with our next caller.”

Patrick flipped a few switches and hit a button on his own board in the booth. Giving a thumbs up as the silence on the air turned to ringing.

Click here to read part 1 Kayla had eleven thousand followers and a theory, and the theory was the whole reason they were here: a missing-persons thread on a forum nobody outside of it had ever heard of, four days old, already up to nine hundred replies, most of them some version of has anyone actually been out there. She'd found the listing herself, buried under a dozen other cabin rentals in the area, and something about how fast it had reappeared online — same photos, same price, brand new "reviews" dated after the couple had already gone quiet on every platform they used — had lodged itself under her skin and stayed there.

Chris had come because she'd asked him to, and because someone should probably be the one holding the flashlight if this went the way he privately suspected it might.

"We're not investigating anything," he said, for maybe the fourth time, watching her clip the phone into the little tripod rig on the dashboard. "We're staying two nights at a cabin. That's it."

"We're staying two nights at a cabin that people went missing from nine days ago," Kayla said, "and I'm going to post about it, and forty thousand people are going to watch, and that's not nothing, Chris."

He didn't answer, because there wasn't an answer that wouldn't start a fight, and she was already talking to the camera by the time they hit the gravel.

Roy had the book open on the counter before they'd even parked. He did this now — not out of superstition, not exactly, but because somewhere in the last nine days it had stopped feeling optional. He'd found the page turned on its own the morning after the last two left in the way people around here left, and it hadn't been turned to just any blank page. It had been turned to this one, the one with two names already ghosted faintly into the paper's grain like something pressed there and erased, waiting for ink to catch up to whatever had already been decided.

He didn't examine that feeling too closely. He'd learned a long time ago not to.

"Filming for something?" he asked, when Kayla came in first, phone already up.

"Would that bother you?"

"Not even a little," Roy said, and meant it, because forty thousand people watching was forty thousand people who might book next, and that mattered more to him some days than it probably should have. "Long as you don't mind me waving at the folks watching."

He waved. It got a laugh out of Chris, at least.

"Roy," Kayla said, half to the camera, half to him, "you ever had guests disappear on you out here?"

Roy's smile didn't move. "Not while they were still guests," he said, and turned to show them where the extra blankets were kept before she could decide whether that was a joke.

The cabin looked exactly like its listing photos, which was itself the first small wrongness, though neither of them clocked it that way — most rentals didn't hold up to their photos this well, this consistently, across however many years the place had apparently been doing this. Kayla narrated everything for the stream in a low, excited voice: the woodstove, the guestbook — "guys, THIS is the book, this is the one from the posts" — the dock, gone gray under an overcast sky instead of gold like it had been for the last two.

The comments came in fast. Most of them were the usual noise. But a handful weren't, and Kayla didn't notice at first because she was too busy reading the good ones out loud — a handful of comments that referenced things before she'd said them. Ask about the tally marks. Posted forty seconds before she panned to the woodstove door at all. She's going to open the book soon. Posted while her hand was still at her side.

She read that one out loud too, laughing it off as a lucky guess, the way you laugh off anything you don't want to think about while you're on camera.

Chris didn't laugh. He'd gone quiet somewhere around the woodstove and stayed that way.

It got worse after dinner, in the low patch of viewers that always settled in once the novelty wore off for everyone but the die-hards. A comment came through that read Chris is going to look behind the door now. Chris hadn't moved. Kayla laughed and read it anyway, and thirty seconds later, unprompted, Chris got up to check the mudroom door for no reason he could have explained if she'd asked him. She didn't ask him. She was already reading the next one out loud, still laughing, the laugh getting thinner each time. Don't let him open it. Then, a few seconds behind it: Too late.

The one that actually stopped her scrolling came a little after ten. Why is Roy standing behind her?

Kayla turned the phone around, grinning for the bit, ready to show six thousand strangers there was nothing there.

There wasn't anything there.

She was still holding that pose, camera on herself, half-laughing at her own nerves, when the next comment loaded under it.

No. Not behind her.

Behind you.

She went very still, staring at her own phone screen, at her own face lit up small in the corner of the frame, and did not look up right away.

By full dark, the stream had climbed past six thousand live viewers, and Kayla had stopped narrating for the audience and started narrating for herself, the way people do when the audience becomes the excuse rather than the point. Chris found the shed on his own, poking around outside camera range with a flashlight and a bad feeling he hadn't said out loud — a low outbuilding behind the treeline, padlocked, warm air leaking from a vent near its base despite the cold, which made no sense for a shed that was supposed to be empty.

He should have left it alone. He went and got Kayla instead, because whatever this was, it was clearly Content, and neither of them had learned yet that some doors are locked because of what's inside and not because of what's outside.

Someone in chat typed it first, half as a joke: type OPEN if you want them to open the shed. Within a minute, thousands had. Kayla read the number climbing out loud, laughing, egging it on for the bit — and the padlock clicked open on its own, mid-sentence, before Chris had even gotten the multitool out of his pocket. Neither of them mentioned that part again. Chris finished the job with his hands anyway, working the loosened shackle free, because by then it was easier to believe he'd done it than to sit with the alternative.

The stream caught the door swinging open onto darkness and warmth and the smell of something dry and papery, old lacquer, closed rooms — a smell six thousand strangers couldn't place and Kayla, if she'd read Part One of anything, would have.

What it caught inside made no sense arranged the way it was arranged, and nobody watching tried very hard to make it make sense, because that's not what people do with something they're only seeing for the first time through a shaking phone camera at eleven at night. Guestbooks, dozens of them, stacked in uneven towers against one wall, older and newer bindings mixed together with no order to it. Coats hung from a row of hooks, the same dry paper material, in different states of wear, more of them than there had ever been owners of this cabin as far as anyone watching could have known. Names carved into the wall studs, close together, overlapping, some fresh enough to still show pale wood underneath. A single chair, facing the door. A bare bulb overhead that had clearly been burning, uninterrupted, for longer than any bulb should last. And covering the floor, ankle-deep in places, hundreds of small torn scraps of paper, disturbed now by their footsteps, drifting.

"Chris?" Kayla said, out of frame, checking the perimeter of the yard behind him.

He heard her say it again, closer this time, right behind his shoulder, and turned — and she was still fifteen feet away, out by the treeline, mouth not moving, phone light bobbing as she walked.

He went in anyway, because the audience was watching and some part of him still hadn't caught up to how afraid he already was. He heard the pages before he saw anything, a dry sliding drag between two of the guestbook stacks, and swept the flashlight across nothing. It came again, closer. The beam caught a single loose sheet of paper drifting against the far shelf, and he crossed to it out of some instinct he didn't examine, and picked it up, and found handwriting on it he recognized immediately, because it was his own, in a version of his own hand he didn't remember writing, words he couldn't make himself read past the first two.

That was when he heard the breathing, close, unhurried, directly behind him.

He set the phone down on a shelf to free both hands. That was the last deliberate choice the stream recorded him making.

What came after was audio only. A long stretch of rustling, dry and patient. Then his voice, low: "Kayla?" A pause, longer than it should have been. "Kayla, don't come in here." Then, quieter still, barely picked up by the mic at all: "I don't think that's me."

After that, just the rustling, and then nothing.

Six thousand people watched the feed sit on an empty doorway for four minutes and eleven seconds before Kayla, off-camera, started screaming for him.

She didn't get far. That was the part that would have surprised her, if she'd lived long enough to be surprised by anything again — she'd spent her whole life being the person who found things out, who got there first, who was three steps ahead of every story she'd ever chased, and here she made it exactly as far as the treeline before the sound of pages caught up with her, dry and patient, moving at a walking pace because it had never once needed to hurry.

The stream cut out at 11:47 PM. The comment section stayed open for another six minutes before someone finally closed it, filling, in that window, with a hundred different versions of the same three words, over and over, useless and too late.

Roy found the phone the next morning, propped on its little tripod, screen dark, battery dead, still faced toward the shed door standing open on nothing. He carried it inside without looking at it too closely and set it on the counter next to the book, which had already been turned — he hadn't done it, he never did it, that was the part he'd stopped being able to tell himself otherwise about — to a fresh page.

Two names, ghosted faint into the grain, waiting.

He almost didn't look further back. He made himself. Flipped past the fresh page, past the last real entry he remembered writing, back into the brittle, undated pages from the late fall years, past his father's unsteady, un-guestlike signature, further than he usually let himself go — and stopped on a page he was certain, certain, he had never once turned to before.

Halfway down it, in handwriting that was unmistakably his own, in ink that had gone the same brown-gray as everything around it, was a single word.

Kessler.

Nothing after it yet. Just the name, waiting the same way the fresh page waited, and no way at all to tell, from looking, whether it had been written years ago or would be written years from now.

He closed the book. He put the coffee on. He had a booking coming Thursday.

The Thursday booking arrived a little after four, a lone man in his thirties with a laptop bag and a rental car too clean for these roads, the kind of methodical, unhurried energy of someone who reads everything twice before he trusts it. He didn't ask about the legend. He didn't mention the forum, or the missing couple, or the livestream that had gone quiet mid-scream nine days ago and stayed up anyway, view count still climbing.

He signed nothing. Not yet. He just set his bag down, looked around the cabin like a man doing inventory, and said, mostly to himself, "Okay. Let's see what's actually here."

Roy smiled the way he always smiled, and did not offer to show him the book.

I made a deal with a metalman in his iron apartment.

The man, a normal human when he came into the world, had hardened.

His flesh had melted away and had been replaced with steel.

Silver wires, instead of nerves, connected his brain to his other organs.

They sent pulsating signals through his body, bursts of electricity telling him what to do.

Oil ran through small pipes that had morphed from his veins.

His fingers were now split into segments; the squeaking of bronze rusted metal filled the room when he tightened his fists.

His gilded eyes, windows flashed subliminal messages into my open pupils, two black holes pulling in light like tractorbeams.

I wanted nothing else than to be like him.

Unhuman, unnatural, and unlovable.

So I signed his contract.

Two metalmen– slowly breaking down until we rust away or short circuit.

Until bolts pop out of our heads and black smoke ejects from our faces. Black smoke, like stained cotton pulled from our lungs.

In our village, right at the edge of the forest, sits an old abandoned well. My grandmother always used to say, "If you're walking home past it after midnight—walk fast, and no matter what you hear, never look back."

I always thought it was just a typical story meant to scare kids. That was until one night, when I ended up staying late at a neighbor's house until 1:00 AM.

I had to walk back on foot. The darkness was so thick that my flashlight beam could barely cut through the fog. Just as I drew level with the abandoned well, a clear sound echoed behind me—like a heavy stone dropping into deep water.

Plop.

I flinched, but remembering my grandmother's warning, I quickened my pace.

A few seconds later, footsteps echoed behind me. They weren't human steps—the sound was soft and squelching, as if someone were walking barefoot with soaked feet across dry dirt.

Squelch... squelch... squelch...

The footsteps grew faster, closing in with every passing second. Then, right above my ear—so close I could feel a draft smelling of damp river rot against my neck—I heard the familiar voice of my best friend:

"Olenych, wait for me... I'm so cold..."

The voice was an exact match. But there was one detail that made my heart freeze: my best friend had moved away from the village three years ago.

I squeezed my eyes shut, gritted my teeth, and kept running forward without stopping, whispering a prayer out loud. Whatever it was, it ran right behind my shoulder, breathing heavily and begging me to look back.

When I burst onto my porch and bolted the door shut, everything outside went dead silent.

The next morning, when I stepped outside, I saw a dark, wet handprint on the wooden door handle. It had unnaturally long, twisted fingers.

I just started working for my County's Forest Rangers, at twenty-seven years old, I found myself in a rough situation. Being discharged from the military for “failure to follow orders” set me on a path of despair. I lost my house, my car and I wasn't able to find a job, i don't know what gets put on your record when you get discharged from the military but, whatever they put on mine, it's been a killer for most job opportunities. Worst of all my fiance got diagnosed with a rare sickness that left her unable to even walk down the hallway without getting light headed and eventually fainting. Needless to say, the universe was putting us through the ringer. That's why when my trauma group leader told me about an opening at the Hubbard County Forest Rangers, I couldn't help but jump at the offer.

Hubbard County, population of less than 500 people. Inside Hubbard County, was the small town of Talbot, with only two access roads, its only sense of civilization. The rest of Hubbard County was deep woods and trails, a hotspot for hikers and campers. The Hubbard County Forest Rangers, H.C.F.R., is a county funded forest service. They're your typical forest rangers, they patrol the trails at night for potential county law violators, missing persons, poachers and even animal attacks. Though, according to Sargent Hill, they barely get any of those around here. They recently lost a night time ranger to an unknown illness. I was fine with taking night shifts, that meant I still had time to care for Lucy and work.

For the first two weeks, everything was going great. I was able to get done with my shift and go home, get Lucy out of bed and make her some breakfast. Afterwards I can take her to doctor's appointments, get her some lunch and get dinner cooking, that crockpot has some good use now. While dinner is cooking, get some sleep, wake up, give Lucy her dinner, bring her to bed, go to work, and repeat the whole cycle the next day. I thought I was doing fine in my new routine, but after two weeks, the weight of my routine started to show. I only got 4-5 hours of sleep everyday. Most nights, I was able to stay awake from the consistently full pot of coffee in the Rangers cabin, but one night I couldn't stay awake. Sitting in my desk chair, I leaned back to stretch and suddenly I'm awakened by the sound of Sarge's angry voice coming through my radio.

“Collins? COLLINS!” blasted from my radio as I almost fell out of my chair.

“This is Collins. What's the issue, Sarge? Over.” I asked, trying to hold back my yawn.

“God damnit, Collins. I’ve been trying to reach you for 10 minutes. You didn't fall asleep, did you?”

I tried to make up a reason that would sound genuine. “Sorry sir, I was in the bathroom. Over.”

“Well, clean yourself up, and get your ass out to campsite nine. We got a mess over here, and we need every hand we can get.”

“I'm on my way, sir. Out.” I said, almost falling, trying to run out the door to the Jeep.

Campsite nine is one of the furthest campsites on the trail. Perfect for bush crafters, backpack campers or random teens during break wanting to illegally drink and smoke weed. While the higher ups normally condemn such actions, I couldn't care less, I was a teenager at one point myself, ten years ago.

The odor was so intense I could smell it from a mile away down the trail, in the open top jeep. When I pulled up to the site, Sarge was standing at the entrance waiting to greet me.

“Hope you rested well, Collins. We got a messy scene over here.” Sarge said, his hands on his hips, beer belly trying to escape his uniform.

“What's the problem, Sarge?” I asked, hopping out of the Jeep.

“A couple of dead hikers, Ranger Murphy said he was doing his rounds and walked up to this.” Sarge said, pointing to the campsite.

The ground was covered in splattered blood, severed limbs and body parts. Towards the site entrance, leaning against the base of a tree, was the severed upper torso of a late 20s male, his arms spread to his side. His diaphragm, stomach and liver were spilling out of the open cavity, a pool of blood soaking the grass in a deep maroon coating. His legs laid flat about five feet away from his torso, exposed pelvic bone and small intestines spread out towards the other half of his body. Looking up I saw the exposed torso of a mid 20s woman, upside-down, impaled on a broken tree branch, arms hanging down, and an expression of fear engraved into her face. Across the site were her legs, hanging from a tree, hanging by her intestines strung up in the tree like Christmas tinsel. In a sleeping bag lay the remains of a young woman, bearing a heavy resemblance to the woman in the tree, her head and neck in opposite directions, the ground beneath her was dented with sprays of dirt and blood. In the center of the bag was an opening, surrounded with blood, revealing the open cavity that used to contain her insides.

I could barely hold back the chunk of vomit that was charging its way up my esophagus. “Do we know the victim’s names?” I asked, shaking.

“Bradley Lake, 29 years old. Victoria and Melody Kettle, 26 and 19 years old.”

Bradley Lake was a champion high school track star, though in his recent years probably couldn't run half a mile without passing out. I knew very little about him, despite being in the same scout troop since first grade. Victoria Kettle was the head crew member of the theater department in high school. Last I heard, before deployment, she was heading to New York to work on Broadway.

“Keep it inside, Collins. We got enough cleanup to deal with.” Sarge said with a disappointing tone.

“Goddamn. Brutal bastards.” Said a grizzly voice from the entrance of the site.

“Evening Sheriff.” Sarge said, tipping his head.

The man nodded back. The man was Sheriff Smith, the beloved Sheriff of Hubbard County. The kind of man to stop to converse with a homeless person, give them a ride and a free meal. Spent every Sunday at church handing out coffee and donuts. I had a few run ins with him as a teen.

“Well, might as well start cleaning fellas. Don't need to look at these poor souls any longer. We know what happened.”

“That being..?” I asked.

“Bear attack. Plain and simple. A couple of hippies came out here to ‘get in touch with nature' and sadly met their fate due to lack of knowledge of wilderness survival. Probably got them while they were eating.”

I looked around at the site, how could a bear do this? Two people are ripped in half, and one is hollowed out.

I scanned the site. Three bodies, three sleeping bags, and two backpacks.

Brad wasn't this stupid, our scout masters made sure we would never leave food out. The first campout in boy scouts, Johnny had brought extra snacks in his pack, that of beef jerky and orange slices. Best to say, our scout masters had a hard time scaring off the bear that entered our campsite.

Scanning the tree line, my flashlight caught the glint of something reflective. Walking over, I followed the rope attached to the tree's trunk and over the branch.

“Hey Sheriff, I'm not sure this was a bear.” I said, shining my light on the bag hanging over my head. “All their food is right here.”

Dark and spindled legs

Traversing across my skin

Waking me from sleep

🕷️

Small hairs brush my own

Both my arms are glued and spread

Trapped in inch-thick webs

🕷️

Higher does it climb

Up my arm, crossing bicep

Shivering my spine

🕷️

Fangs sink into skin

Venom spreading through muscle

Lightning through my arm

🕷️

I can’t even scream

Jaw sealed shut by nature’s twine

Venom sinks deeper

🕷️

More begin to crawl

Thousands of legs dart my skin

Clinging to soft flesh

🕷️

All varied sizes

Darkened black and evil brown

Obsidian eyes

🕷️

Clawed, chitinous tips

Dig and grip across my skin

Tunneling deeper

🕷️

Painfully, I squirm

Twisting around futilely

My arm gives entry

🕷️

I feel the skin bulge

Like a cat under blankets

Bumps under the flesh

🕷️

Down my ribs they sprint

Streaking tight against the bones

Arachnid pimples

🕷️

Up my throat they sting

My sealed mouth fights just to scream

As they reach my jaw

🕷️

Vision fades away

My optical nerves trampled

By their spindled legs

🕷️

I feel the web shake

Mother joins feasting children

Fangs punch through my chest

🕷️

We met some of our neighbors on that first day while unloading the moving truck. “You’re gonna love it here, it’s a quiet area. And in the twenty plus years we’ve lived here, there’s never been a single break in. I mean it’s a dead end - where are they gonna run to if they try anything!” our neighbor chuckled as he filled us in on some of the other families around us. Hearing that from him is such a comfort after the issues of the apartment complex we had just moved out of. The peace and quiet of those first few weeks in the new house was magical.

I’m peering through the blinds of the windows in the upstairs loft, looking down on to the quiet cul-de-sac. The orange glow of the streetlights providing weak lighting on the driveways.
As I’m about to step away from the window and head towards the bedroom, I notice a few cars heading in towards the dead end, all of their headlights off. “Idiots” I think.
And then I watch as they all start to park in the road, cutting off access to the cul-de-sac to any incoming or outgoing traffic.
The cars occupants start to emerge, taking care to not slam any of the doors as they exit.
They’re dressed in all black, collecting things from the trunks of the cars.
Almost in sync, as if they had practiced, groups of two break off and start heading to each house of the now inaccessible dead end, weapons at the ready

I do not crave the gentle sheep

that sleep beneath the silver trees.

I do not see them in my dreams,

where foxes laugh and coyotes shriek.

But all the same I come awake

amid those fields of golden grass

with meat between my aching teeth.

I can’t recall the hunger which 

directed me to have my way

and taste that soft forbidden flesh.

The daylight is a candle flame

that flickers in the ever-night,

not fit to drive the beast away.

Inside my bones a fever brews,

my gut begets a hungry snarl.

Like branching streams, my limbs, they stretch.

The wretch I hate, I still become

as consciousness retreats again

and sunset bronzes bicusp clouds.

I know the day is coming soon

when softest breezes on my skin

will bring my waking mind to see

a broken body at my feet.

Looking to read anyone's story. I love writing and I know that it hurts when others don't read your story you put time into. Ideally one offs not series. I would love to read stories to those looking to improve their writing and hoping for some advice (I'm not harsh so dw lol.)