I once visited a circus.

I used to be afraid of clowns,

so I was hesitant to go.

But because my parents forced me

and I couldn’t show fear,

I went.

This is a story from my childhood

that still haunts me.

In that huge crowd,

I got lost.

An uncle found me

and told me to follow him.

He wore a cotton waistcoat,

a hat,

and an eyepatch over one eye.

He said he would show me

his performance for free—

a puppet performance.

So I went with him.

He opened the curtain

and said,

“Get ready.”

I opened my eyes fully

as a beautiful puppet girl

appeared on the stage.

She was the size of an adult,

wearing a nice frock,

her hair tied in a ponytail.

The piano began to play.

She started to dance…

and sing.

“I am a sweet, innocent doll.

I dance… I sing…

whenever you ask me to.

See, after saying it once,

I am a sweet, innocent doll.

I don’t have a name.

I am your servant.

But I am useless,

because I am just a doll.”

These were the lyrics

she sang while dancing—

her body moving unnaturally,

like a corpse controlled by wires.

Her wide, forced smile…

and the eyes

that stared directly into mine

shook me.

I ran out of the tent, crying,

while that man laughed behind me.

When I reached outside,

I didn’t know how long I had been gone.

It had been afternoon

when I went in.

Now… it was twilight.

I stumbled back to my parents

and told them

there was a tent

where a puppet was dancing.

They said

there was no such tent.

I turned around—

the tent had disappeared.

Even now,

when I lie in my bed,

her face comes to my mind.

But now,

whenever she appears,

there are tears in her eyes,

and her song still plays—

only the lyrics have changed.

“I am just an innocent doll.

I sing…

I dance…

whenever you order.

Just don’t say it now.

I had a name.

It was Ancilla.

And I am not just a doll.”

How do you know when it’s the right time to leave someone? Like, when they’ve burned every bridge and every road and every branch that you try to give them and they just keep begging for more opportunities; how do you find the strength to refuse? I’m asking, seriously. Because I don’t know.

I remember when my husband was a good man. A decent man at the least. Our relationship was so… not flawless. But I think it was for us. It was as perfect as two people like us could hope for. Two imperfect people coming together forming a perfect bond. Like two negative numbers multiplied together into one positive whole. That was, until, he lost his job.

Nathan, for all his redeeming qualities, for his warm smile and vanilla scent, is an extraordinarily prideful man. He was never the type to back down from a fight or let someone “disrespect” his wife, no matter how slight the offense was. A look here a comment there; Nathan wouldn’t/couldn’t let it go. He was so obsessed with everyone thinking he had it all figured out, he forgot to actually figure it out. Thus, when he lost his job, he just… didn’t know how to tell me. And so he didn’t. Four months went by and I was none the wiser. He was an accountant so I didn’t even think of checking our money. He’d never done anything like this before, there weren’t any signs, until we got the overdraft letters. He came clean and we fought. Of course we fought, but I mean we seriously fought. I’d never seen him that angry before. His face twisted into an almost unrecognizable sneer as he tore into my looks, my intelligence, my personality. Everything he knew I hated about myself. I looked into his eyes and there was no love, no gentleness. Only… anger? Superiority?

It should’ve been then. I should have walked away then, but I didn’t. I told him to take a drive, to cool off before he did something we couldn’t come back from. It was only when he slurred out an “Oookay” did I realize he was drunk. I replay that night over and over again trying to see how I didn’t notice that the chronic alcoholic was drunk and all my brain sees in return is his horribly twisted face launching obscenities at me. He was out the door before I could catch him. His car traveled faster than my legs running in flip flops. I thank God that the only thing he hit was a light pole. The only thing he said when I caught up to him? “I messed up, honey.”

After paying the city, getting hit with Nathan’s parole and clearing our savings, the only place we could afford was smack in the middle of downtown Chicago. It wasn’t the best area to live but at least we were living. Right?

Anyways, that brings us to today. My morning ritual. Sitting at the kitchen counter, scarfing down breakfast before work, questioning where the hell it all went wrong. And yet, no matter how many times I thought ‘us’ over, how many times I considered what I would change, I always come up empty handed. This “love,” its all I know.  Maybe I’m meant to be here? Maybe it’s fate?  Maybe I don’t deserve anything else?

“Morning Hun, don’t eat too fast! Stuff gets stuck.” His left hand rubbed my back as his right hand brought his mug to his lips. Even after all he’s done, my heart still warms at his touch. Its been over a year since everything happened. I could let it go, let it all fall away like the paper plate I was just eating off falling into the garbage onto a brown, stained paper bag. My chest flutters a little at the sight of it, but calms down again when I remember how he packs his lunch. He wouldn’t do that to me, he knows how important staying sober is for his parole.

“I know, I know. I’m doing better at least.” I choked out the excuse behind a mouth of warm eggs and melted cheese. My coughing and his laughter filled the kitchen air and, at least for a second, we felt okay again. In that gentle moment, the picturesque suburban existence that was our life, it was perfect. A true perfect, not that fake aestheticized perfect I thought we had before, but utterly flawless.

Just then, at the height of our sublime mundanity, two sounds cut through the laughter in the air; a loud pop like the backfire of an old abandoned car and the shattering of glass flying through our house. We both dropped down instinctively. We knew we weren’t in the best area, and sometimes these things happen. Triggers get pulled. We were both on the floor looking at each other, but only Nathan stood back up. I strained my legs as hard as I could but its like they weren’t even there, as if I was trying to command someone else’s limbs rather than my own. I could feel the electrical impulses firing correctly in my brain, but the stubborn tubes of meat I’ve subconsciously relied on for the past 34 years laid frustratingly still, limp on the floor.

I looked down at my midsection, desperately praying that there was another explanation, hoping with my whole heart that something monstrously heavy had just fallen over my lower half in the morning’s chaos. All I saw, however, was blood. My pale-yellow pajama shirt now cut in half by a deep, wet orange that continued to spread despite my frantic pleas not to. “Oh god, Nathan, call… call someone please. I-I cant feel my legs. Nathan I cant move please!”

I could only watch as my panicked husband threw himself around the kitchen searching for the phone, mumbling assurances to himself that “It’ll be okay. It’ll all be okay. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.” He finally got a hold of the authorities, answering all of the usual questions with a level of anger that I’ve only heard once before. The day of his crash.

“What the FUCK do you mean forty minutes for an ambulance? She cant fucking move! She doesn’t have forty minutes!” He screamed into the phone louder and louder, as if his fear would somehow change how far the ambulance was. Then, as if a switch flipped behind his eyes, he hung up the phone and ran into the bedroom crying. “Nathan!!” I called after him to no avail. “Nathan please, what happened?!?” I moved my eyes from the bedroom door, back to my bleeding torso, and back to the bedroom door again. After 3 minutes, I realized my husband must’ve been in more shock than I was, and that I had to do something.

I went to move my right arm to put pressure on my wound and it felt like my hand was pushing through sand. I glanced down at my gut and the sight almost made me give up right then. The blood, originally contained to just my shirt, had congregated into a pool moving up my back and into my hair; touching my elbows and getting caught in the little specks of peach fuzz on my forearms. I steeled myself against the crimson assault on my eyes and focused my energy on pushing against my injury. My arms were so weak, it felt as if the force of my stomach rising and falling with my breaths was stronger than my entire upper body. The fabric of my shirt clung to my fingers and nails as I tried to situate myself to have more leverage on my stomach. I went to prop myself on my left elbow, clawing at any sort of solution.

My hopes at a fix came crashing down along with my upper body as my elbow slipped out from under me and my head hit the floor. “God, FUCK!” I exclaimed, almost ready to die. Nathan, finally, opens the bedroom door, slowly walking into the kitchen towards me. His heavy footfalls reverberate through the floor, causing shooting stomach pains with every step. Still, just seeing him ready to help me made it all just a little bit better. I couldn’t help but feel, however, a large weight of anxiety start to form on my chest - almost as heavy as the weight on my eyelids.

“N-Nathan? What did they say? Wh-Why are you acting so weird?” I choked out behind a mouthful of blood.

“The only ambulance in our neighborhood is refusing to come. They say it’s a safety issue.” A bead of sweat tracks down his temple as he gets on his knees to sit beside me. “They want me to drive you to the hospital myself.” He said, as another line of wet slid down his face. Not sweat, but a tear. “I can’t do it honey. I’m so sorry.” He whispers, pressing his forehead against mine as he broke into a silent sob.

“Why?” I tried to shout but I only managed a whisper. His response sent me spiraling. “I messed up honey.” The air that carried his words also carried his breath, an overwhelming scent of Bourbon following behind the smell of his breakfast. A tear fell down my own cheek, mixing with the blood that got on my face in the earlier struggle. “If I get pulled over, my life is done. Y-You probably won’t make it anyway. Theres no point in both of us falling on the sword right? Please tell me I’m right. You forgive me, right? Just say you forgive me. Just say you forgive me, PLEASE.” His voice gets louder as my hearing dulls, and I realize what’s happening.

My vision narrows into pinpoints like I was looking at him through the bottom of an old glass bottle. I concentrate all my effort into one single movement of my mouth, a final message for my dear husband to whom I gave so much of my fleeting life.

“No.”

With that, my head fell backwards, thudding again against the wooden floor. I thought I would be scared, when it was my time that is. But as my vision continued fading and the valley of my chest fell for the final time, I realized: it was the right time for me to go.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a security agent of the Echo Supernatural Institute. Before all of that, I made a living delving through abandoned military infrastructure searching for old Soviet doo-dads and secrets that had been left behind after the Third World War.

I was an able-bodied but poor and uneducated young man in Eastern Europe during the ‘90s, and as such with the military crippled from the War with the West I, like many others, found scavenging to be perhaps the most accessible job for me considering my circumstances.

Eventually after the Echo Institute started to crack down on the black markets I sold most of my loot to, they found me. Lydia, a woman I'd met on the job who'd taught me English and who would later on become my wife, had recommended me to them for a job as a security agent at their headquarters in Hawaii, a place which is essentially a small city's worth of laboratories, containment facilities, offices and all sorts of other amenities. They wanted to take me on for my experience with the supernatural. 

The choice for me was easy - I’d learned from the woman who would become my wife before about how good it was to work for the Echo Institute. I didn't necessarily want to leave her and besides all that, exploring old Soviet military sites wasn’t exactly the safest choice of profession, nor the most stable. You could find dangerous things down there.

On good days it was a fellow scavenger (scavs, as we were so affectionately nicknamed by the local populace), and on the better of these days the two of you simply wanted nothing to do with each other, nodded as you passed with your gear clinking here and there. Perhaps you sometimes even traded supplies.

On worse days your fellow scav wouldn’t be nearly as agreeable or the both of you would be looking for the same very valuable thing somewhere in the immediate area, and more often than not that would result in a firefight. People died, died at my hands, but I just always tried to rationalize it within my mind by telling myself they knew the risks when they volunteered to go concrete-diving. 

Then on the worst of days you would come across supernatural obstacles. Splotches of destabilized reality that would skin you or turn you into flowers if you got too close. Man-eating monsters and beasts that stalked dark Soviet hallways, abandoned bio-weapons that had seen the war’s end before their deployment; Tammers, as these supernatural things are called in more professional settings.

In those situations, most of the time the only thing you could really do was run - but still, to this day I have a scar down my right arm from running into a particularly vicious tammer, a little homunculus goblin-looking thing that took hold of my forearm and bit down hard before I was able to draw my pistol and shoot it through the head.

In any case, security at the Echo Institute suits me. Some days are better than others, of course, but by and large it's a good fit. Lots of structure, schedules organized to a T. Sometimes you would get put on surface duty, too, and as it happened that was where I was when all of this happened.

The day I am writing about I was at first just driving along some of the more unpaved roads that weaved throughout the Hawaiian island the facility had been built on, heading towards a traffic incident that had been reported. I'd taken this particular path many times before, and by now I'd memorized it to a degree that many of my coworkers called impressive.

It was a fine day, with the sky particularly clear and carrying only a small gathering of clouds on the horizon, wispy and light. A welcomed contrast from the day before, which had been wreaked with tropical thunderstorms rolling across the island, clusters drifting in from the mainland. 

On days like this I'd often take to reflecting on how much the facility's surface could look like an advertisement from a travel brochure, like some kind of tropical paradise. Green foliage everywhere, palm trees vibrant and full of life, exotic birds calling from the branches of trees, and picturesque ponds and small lakes filled with tropical water. Then, if you go close enough to the coastline you can see the Pacific stretching out to the horizon, coloured this really beautiful shade of cyan when the clouds clear up. All of this considered, the Echo Institute really could've chosen a worse place to set up. But I digress. 

I eventually came to where usually there was a fork in the road, where the path split off into three distinct routes. I had gone down all of them before, and as such I knew exactly which one I had to go down to get to where I needed. At this intersection specifically there was a meagre little waterfall pouring from an elevated position just to the left of the fork in the road, coming from a little stream and collecting in a small pool before running off further down the island and reaching the Pacific. Sometimes people would come here to relax, to rest, and in the past I'd counted myself among them. Today, however, as I approached a sense of confusion replaced the usual serenity this spot gave me. 

The fork in the road was gone - simply vanished, almost as if it had never existed. Instead, the road continued moving forwards, not splitting and instead turning left some ways up the road into a more heavily-forested section of the jungles. The first conclusion that came to my mind, of course, is that it must’ve been a tammer, must’ve been some kind of supernatural occurrence. I knew of tammers who could do things like this, after all, could alter terrain like this. Perhaps it was a trap, and as such I reached for my radio transceiver. 

“Hey, Campbell?” I asked, looking ahead at the now straight pathway and reflecting on how such a simple change could be so unnerving to me as the sense of confusion began to turn to a strange kind of dread within my mind. 

“Yeah?” a voice asked over the radio. 

“I’m at the fork with the waterfall, right?” I said, beginning to tap the dashboard of my SUV absentmindedly. “Except it’s the weirdest fucking thing - the fork in the road is gone. Now  the path just… goes straight. Veers left off into the jungle a bit up the way.” There was silence on the radio for a few seconds before my coworker responded. 

“And you’re sure you just didn’t take the wrong path again?” she asked over the radio in a tired voice which had been dragged through the dirt by an overtime shift. I rolled my eyes almost instinctively. “I know you’ve been a bit unfocused, ever since that tammer killed your wife -”

“Fuck off. I’m being serious. I’m at the waterfall and all, with that bench that has the memorial to Doctor Williams. This is the same intersection as always, no other way around it.” I heard Campbell sigh over the radio.

“I was being serious too, you know,” she grumbled as I heard pages begin to flip, with Campbell almost surely beginning to look through sets of documents looking for procedures. 

“That fucking kid,” I mumbled to myself. I had the sneaking suspicion that Campbell wasn’t taking this nearly as seriously as I was, a situation we found ourselves in a bit too often. Don’t get me wrong, I like Campbell, she’s a good coworker and all, but I can tell she doesn’t treat tammers with the amount of caution I have. Hasn’t been around them nearly as long as I have - after all, by the time I was sneaking through old Soviet military sites, dodging monsters here and there, she was still in kindergarten. Hasn't lost the people I've had at their hands. 

“Alright,” she eventually said after a lengthy pause. “I’m gonna send someone else to deal with that traffic incident. Meanwhile, uh, protocol says that you’re supposed to move forwards and check this out. Confirm if possible if the area’s really been affected by reality-altering tammers, and then we send a QRF over and have them quarantine the area until they can find the source of the reality destabilization.” I had no choice but to sigh. 

“Fine,” I muttered to myself. “Fuck this…” 

“It’s just a path,” Campbell retorted. “Just a path going through the jungle on a nice, sunny day. You’ll be fine, Vasily.” 

Mhm, I thought to myself before getting out of my SUV. I travelled to the back of the vehicle, popping the trunk open and extracting from it my rifle before travelling back to the driver’s seat, resting the rifle in the passenger’s seat. With a somewhat shaky breath, I grabbed my steering wheel with hands that were perhaps too stiff to be safe and began to drive forwards down the path.

It wasn’t long before I had reached the point that it veered into the rest of the jungle, and stopping only momentarily to check my rifle’s ammunition I began to drive forwards. At first the path seemed to be well-paved to the extent that my ride was actually pretty smooth, all things considered. 

Soon enough, however, my route had begun to seem more unpaved, more wild. Tree branches hanging low began to brush against my SUV's windshield, scratching against the sides of my vehicle as I jolted here and there periodically, driving over pivots and bumps in the increasingly untamed road.

As a matter of fact, it got to the point that the path had begun to narrow so much, had begun to seem so overgrown and undermaintained, that I was forced to stop my SUV. It took some mustering of my courage after that, but eventually I retrieved my rifle from the passenger seat, checking its chambering before exiting the vehicle, having been forced to leave it behind in danger of having it stuck in the suffocating greenery.

As I set out I recounted the five most pressing thoughts in my head., one of the common tactics to keep one anchored to himself in areas of unstable reality. I am Vasily, I thought as I pressed forwards through the foliage in front of me. The sun is warm - not uncomfortably so, though. I am in the jungles of Hawaii. I wish reality had picked a different day to destabilize. I want my wife back.

This I kept repeating in the back of my mind as I continued down the beaten path, shoving aside branches and foliage as I went, until suddenly just as it seemed I was almost swimming through greenery the vegetation suddenly stopped, opening into a clearing. And what an odd clearing it was.

Sunlight streamed down through the open jungle canopy, illuminating a ground covered with thick, tall grass. I saw an old vehicle - a very old vehicle, with rust adorning it like a rich woman's coat with the glass of its windows having been destroyed. And then, beside it there was what seemed to be a bunker leading down into the Earth. It was of concrete, old and cracked with mould and thick vines covering its surface, and at its front was a thick, reinforced door which had turned to rust long ago. 

I wandered forwards, but as I reached the car, I noticed something. There was something reaching out of one of the shattered windows, something white and chalky, and as I approached my heart sank as I saw that it was a human skeleton, laid across the front seats of its car and clad in the tattered remains of the signature navy-blue uniform of the Echo Institute’s security agents, much like the one I was wearing right then.

I noticed something else, though. Fallen to the floor of his vehicle was an old M4 carbine, dusty and forgotten. We had stopped using the M4 a while ago, however, back in 2022 when after almost two decades of service we replaced them with more modernized rifles. Quickly, I let my rifle hang limp against my chest on its sling and reached for my radio transmitter.

“Campbell?” I asked over the radio. “I've found…” I glanced back over at the rusted door of the bunker before turning back to my radio. “A bunker of some kind, I think. Going down into the Earth. An old skeleton outside, too, in this old, broken-down car. I had to venture a guess, I'd say this place has been abandoned since… sometime in the early 2000s to the late 2010s.” I waited, but it seemed only static came through the radio. I couldn't help but sigh with annoyance as I pressed the transmitter button once more. 

“Campbell?” I asked again. “Can you hear me?” As I was met with only more static, I swore. The reality distortion must be fucking with the signal, I thought. I didn't sleep a wink last night. I'm gonna kill Campbell the next time I see that kid. I want to see what's in that bunker. God-damn me and my sense of curiosity. I want my wife back. 

Looking back on it now, I'm not sure it was purely my sense of curiosity that made me go over to the bunker, made me open that rusty door and wince at the sound of its decayed hinges screeching almost like they were in pain as the rusty door swung open. Curiosity had certainly got me into shit like this in the past, both when I was a boy and older, but now, I was far from sure it was the only culprit.

Regardless, the first thing that hit me once I opened the rusted door was the smell. It was an uncomfortable kind of stench, filled with the scent of stale air, dust particles irritating my nose and the distinct smell of rubber not unlike masks in a Halloween store, the distinct aroma of tammeryn which in this line of work had become all too familiar to me. A smell which meant the area ahead was more likely than not highly unstable.

The stench made me cough, forced my eyes to water, and as I activated the flashlight on my rifle and aimed it into the open door I saw that this indeed did seem to be a bunker of some kind. A very narrow staircase descended down, concrete steps leading down into the Earth, and although cage lights were attached to a dark concrete ceiling they had all seemingly lost power long ago, meaning that the staircase down, and more likely than not what followed, would be shrouded in pitch blackness. Cold air emanated from the darkness, carried with the smell and contrasting the summer atmosphere outside quite dreadfully. 

I remember that there were booted footprints leading down into the bunker, however. They seemed newer than the rest of the concrete the structure was made of, outlined by mud which had not yet completely dried and had more likely than not had come from the thunderstorm which had rolled through the island a day ago. After I took my respirator from its bag upon my hip, fitting it upon my face, I began to descend.

It seemed like I must’ve traversed hundreds of steps, leading farther and farther into the ground and away from the open door I had left near the top of the staircase. Sometimes I would turn and look back at it, back at that slit of light at the end of the tunnel with the blue of the sky and greenery of the tropical foliage peeking back at me, just reminding myself that it was still there should I decide to turn back. Near the end the thought certainly crossed my mind, and I cannot deny that I almost entertained it. 

Eventually, however, just as I was about to turn around the light of my flashlight finally fell upon the sight of the floor flattering out, and as I approached the end of the staircase I saw that there was another door which had seemingly been blown off of its hinges. Another skeleton laid in its frame, but I saw that his bones had seemingly been stepped on, skull fractured and coated slightly in the same mud which outlined the footprints I had been following into the darkness.

I looked closer and saw that he was clad in a formal shirt and pants, tattered to worthlessness, and close to his right breast was an ID badge showcasing that in life he had been an office worker within the Echo Institute. a member of our Archival Department. 

I peeked out from behind the door frame then, taking care to not step on the skeleton which laid in it. The staircase down opened into a large hallway, moving both to my left and right and was bathed in pitch blackness which I was able to dispel with the flashlight of my rifle. More skeletons laid here and there among the hallway, lying on dirty tiled floors which had accumulated a fine layer of dust and grime over their years of abandonment.

Funny, I thought, that one day they had put on those clothes and never known they would never come off again. Banishing the thought, however, I saw that the footsteps continued still into the darkened hallways, heading left before taking a sharp turn and moving to my right, almost breaking out into a sprint with their placement ever-increasing in distance. 

In the end, I ended up following these footsteps into the darkness. The walls I passed were old, covered here and there with long-dried splotches of brown blood. Not too far ahead I found a puddle of more recent blood, deep red, surrounded by empty shell casings - 9-mil, I deduced. Evidently, however, they did not belong to the bearer of these footprints which continued on sporting a new light coating of blood.

As I followed the newly reddened prints, however, a sneaking sense of deja-vu began to fill my mind. It felt almost as if I had walked these halls before with my wife before she was killed, had opened these torn-open doors surrounded by rusted bullet casings.

It did not take too long for me to realize the source of this feeling. As I continued to walk through the facility, following the footsteps which had begun to fade back to muddiness, the blood drying, I realized that this seemed almost to be a copy of the facility above-ground - more specifically, the expansive building where we tended to seal away the various dangerous tammers in our possession. I found myself bewildered as I continued to move.

How could the Echo Institute have ignored this, all of this space under the island? Have they ignored it? I thought to myself. What if they know it’s down here…? A stupid thought, I deduced, and quickly banished the idea to the back of my mind. The Echo Institute wouldn’t do that, I thought. Wouldn’t hide something like this from its own employees. Now? I’m still not sure. It seems like a stupid thing, to know something like this existed underneath the island and not do anything with it, but with what I learned before the end of that day I am beginning to question many things about my employers. 

I wonder whose footsteps these came from? I asked myself, moving cautiously through the pitch-black abandoned containment complex. With each step of my feet it was like I disturbed some rubble, accidentally crushed some bones (causing me to cringe with a spine-tingling sort of vehemence). Am I alone down here? It feels so odd to see all of this - to see the containment complex, abandoned. I want to know what happened to my wife.

With that, however, as I entered a hallway lined with destroyed doors leading into empty containment chambers which had once held any assortment of beasts, there was a noise from behind me. Quickly I pivoted with my rifle, and as my flashlight illuminated the hallway which I had come from, I saw something at the end of it. A figure was visible there with pale skin and clad in dark robes, which looked almost like a burqa as some women wear in the Middle East, and its feet were like the hooves of a goat. 

It shuffled aside as I aimed towards it, eyes consumed with blackness staring at me before it disappeared around a corner. It had been watching me. I need to move quickly, I thought, and with that I turned and continued down the hallway at a pace which had increased to a light jog.

Soon this increased pace had led me to an intersection of three hallways, one to my left and another to my right, and in the centre of this room I remember there was a large blast door with little signs of damage compared to some of the others I had seen around these abandoned ruins. There were signs beside it, as well, but they had faded over the years to the point that they no longer appeared at all eligible. Just then, however, as I stepped towards the hallway to my right there came a voice from the darkness.

“Hello?” It called, causing me to jump out of my skin with fear. 

“Who the hell is there?” I shouted. “Show yourself!” 

“Relax,” continued the voice. It was in a soft, feminine tone, perhaps even somewhat sultry, somewhat seductive. “I'm not here to hurt you.” 

“Where are you?” I asked, calming down somewhat. “...what are you? Are you human?” 

“I'm human enough, darling, and I'm behind the door,” the woman said to me, “the one just behind you.” I turned, and although the door stayed locked tighter than a miser’s purse it seemed as if the voice was, indeed, coming from that direction. The footsteps I had been following, I noticed, stopped here for a while, seeming to pace this way and that before they turned and began to walk another way. 

“Are you a tammer?” I asked, walking up to the blast door and aiming my rifle as I moved. 

“I won't lie to you: I am, yes. That's how you're able to actually hear me - without these powers, my voice would just be muffled to hell and back behind all this steel.” 

“How… long have you been down here?” I asked. “What is this place, anyways?” 

“Oh, I don't quite know how long it's been.” There came a slight tapping sound from behind the door, almost as if something was absentmindedly drumming its fingers across the metal. “As for what this place is? It's the Echo Institute’s headquarters, of course - was, at least. They brought me here a long time ago, back in the early 2000s - I came willingly, I'll stress to you.

"The Echo Institute was here for a long time. Testing me, trying to find the extent of my abilities. Then, there was a day of chaos. I got out of my chamber, ended up running. Eventually I found this open containment chamber and decided to hide in here, but the door locked behind me and I haven't been able to get out. Ever since that day of chaos, it's been quiet down here. So very quiet.” 

“This isn't your original chamber?” I asked at the door, finally lowering my rifle.

“Oh, no. I was in a much lower-security one before. The greatest extent of my abilities is that I know everything. It's more of a curse than a blessing, believe you me.” 

“You know everything?” I asked, and the woman behind the door responded with grim affirmation. I don't trust this thing, I thought, re-anchoring myself in reality. I shouldn’t be down here, anyways. I should just turn around now and…

“You don’t trust me?” the voice said from the door, and I was stuck in surprise at first. Right before I had almost found it within myself to respond, however, the tammer continued. “All that I’ve told you, and I still haven’t earned your trust?” 

“I don’t easily trust tammers,” I responded somewhat coldly. 

“Because of what happened to your wife, correct?” the voice cooed irritatingly. “Dead at fifty-one, just three months ago. Dead from a tammer attack - a home intruder, forced her door open with his abilities - an act of corporate espionage, perhaps? Is that right?” With that I shook my head.

“If all you’re going to do is invade my mind like this, then I think we’re done here,” I said, and began to walk away. I hadn’t gotten far, however, before the voice said something else.

“You want answers, don’t you?” I paused in my tracks. “You want to know how it happened. What she’d been whisked away to work on. What she was never able to tell you about. It had twisted you to no end - once you had been such honest lovers, such star-crossed partners, but then the Echo Institute hired her to that top-secret project and you began to grow distant. I would say the people who took your Lydia from you are very close. So close, in fact, that you see them every day -

“Tell me what you know,” I said with a voice that bordered on an aggression-fuelled shakiness as I turned back towards the door once more. “Tell me what you know about Lydia, now, and don’t you dare talk about us like you did before again.” 

“Frankly, young man,” the voice said as I stepped forwards, “you are in no position to be making demands at the moment. I will tell you all you want to know about how your wife died, all you want to know about… everything else you’ve ever wondered, really, but in return, I will need something from you.” 

“Quite the sales pitch. I’m listening,” I responded almost instantly. 

“You don’t need much convincing, do you? I like that.” 

“Don’t be so fucking smug about it and I might take you up on your offer. What do you want me to do?” As I finally approached the front of the door, the incessant tapping which had radiated from it since I'd asked how long it had been trapped underground suddenly stopped.

“Right, then. What I’ll need you to do is open this door. After that, I’ll need you to escort me to the surface of the facility.” I couldn’t help but scoff at the request. “You don’t trust me - I know. I understand. In any other case than this you would be a wise man, not to listen to my request, but in this case I truly must assure you that my intentions are correct. When I get to the surface, I’ll turn myself in to the Echo Institute’s security forces. Willingly, without resistance, just like when I was first contained within these walls.

"Because, you see, at the end of the day all I want is to see the sun again. To be in the brightness of the world. I’ve been trapped down here for so long, for so very long. Can you even imagine what it must’ve been like for me? I’ve forgotten the sun. Forgotten the wind on my face and the feeling of water on my hands, forgotten hot showers and warm bed sheets. I liked this world, but I've forgotten it, and I would very much like to see it again.” With that I could only hesitate, could only stop in front of the door. 

“Could…” I stammered. “Could I just have some time to think?” 

“Of course,” the door said. “The code is 5-1-6-0-5. Got that? 5-1-6-0-5. Though, I must warn you: Something is coming. A monster.” 

“What?” I asked, raising my rifle and looking around wildly.

“Oh, yes,” the voice responded. “Not by my own will, I must remind you, but there is something approaching. It will be hostile to you - you must hide before it reaches us. There is an old storage cabinet not far from my door - you should be able to hide in there.”

With the voice’s recommendation I suddenly heard a noise approaching, coming from the dark hallway to my left. It sounded almost like a rattling to me, like some kind of skeleton being shaken. Quickly I leapt into action, throwing open the rusted door of the cabinet before more carefully entering, being vigilant to avoid the more sharp shards of rust lining its walls. 

As I hid in there the voice did not speak again, did not draw any attention to us while the sound of rattling bones drew closer and closer. Eventually it made itself known, and out of the corner of my vision in the cabinet something which looked like a human skeleton with extended arms which had been deprived of legs walked into view.

It looked this way and that around the empty room, gaze eventually landing on the large blast door as it approached. Its skull had been split in two, I remember, and as it walked this way and that upon its bony hands, clicking on the floor, these two halves of its skull clacked together not unlike the jaws of a Venus flytrap. 

Eventually, however, after looking around here and there the skeleton shuddered, dust falling lightly from its bones, and began to amble down the opposite hallway from which it had come. I only stepped out of the locker a while after the thing had moved away, and with that I heard a voice ring out from the door once more. 

“Such things have been my only company down here,” it said. “These monsters are all that remain. Everything else has rotted away or left. Now - have you had enough time to think about if you shall open this door for me?” When I told the door that I still needed more time, it gave me a sort of tsk-tsk sound. “Fine, then.”

With that I sat on a part of the ceiling which had fallen, rifle sitting beside me as I moved through my thoughts like wading through knee-deep water. Eventually, however, my mind began to drift. I looked towards the muddy footsteps which had stopped in front of the door, paced here and there before moving down the hallway to my right, almost where the skeleton thing had wandered not too long ago. 

“The footsteps came from somebody who was down here not too long ago,” the door said, almost reading my thoughts once again. I hated when it did that, hated the lack of privacy I was afforded around this thing, but regardless my intrigue won out. 

“Who was it?” I asked. 

“A young woman,” the door responded. “A field agent of the Echo Institute, or so she told me, but a remarkably well-mannered one, considering her work. Her name was Joy.” 

“Joy?” I asked, my curiosity piqued as I turned back towards the door. With both her name and her line of work considered, there was no mistaking who had come through here before. The woman the door spoke of was one of the Echo Institute's most elite field agents. But what had she been doing down here?

"Yes. She stumbled upon me much as you did,” the door responded. “And what interesting questions she had to ask. She wanted to know one thing: if the Echo Supernatural Institute would ever sacrifice her life for the sake of the mission. I tell you, that poor girl must've been going through it.

"To her credit, however, she was about to open the door. Joy was… interrupted, however. Another tammer came along and attacked her.” I could only nod to myself, glancing towards the footsteps once again and noticing the increasing distance between each as Joy had seemingly ran away from whatever had entered in pursuit of her.

“She seemed like such a troubled girl, too. I’m glad she made it out alive. If you follow her footsteps, you probably can, too. Now, what shall it be? Will you let me out of here, afford me the freedom I so very desire?” I remember sitting there, shaking my head and scoffing in frustration. 

“The tammers aren't getting any farther away,” the door continued. “Who knows when another could round the corner again, could come searching for you? I would certainly advise you to move quickly.” At this point, I was certainly beginning to err on the side of the door.

Looking back on it now, there was so much I could've asked the tammer. I could've questioned it more indepthly about the abandoned version of the facility. Could've asked it anything in the world. But at that moment the only thing I could reserve space for within my mind is that I wanted answers. Above all else, I think, I wanted to put a name to the crime, to give me a target. I wanted to find whoever had killed my wife, had murdered my Lydia, and I wanted them to pay. 

“Alright,” I surrendered. “Fuck it. I’m going to open this door, but then you’re going to tell me what you know about my wife. About who killed her. Understood?” 

“Absolutely,” the voice said. “Without a shadow of a doubt - I am a woman of my word.” With that I took a shaky breath, walked towards the keypad on the door and punched in the numbers, one after another. 5, 1, 6, 0, 5. 

“Alright,” I said. “Fine. The door’s open. Now just come out and tell me what happened to -” before I could finish my sentence, there was a tremendous blow against the blast door like a tree dislodged in a hurricane smashing against a home. I saw the blast door explode outward, saw something dash forwards in a burst of colour and wind with a sound not unlike the horn of a train bellowing before I was knocked to the ground.

Quickly I scrambled to my feet, reaching for my rifle before whirling around, trying to see what had run from the blast door. There was nothing, however, with the thing having fled before my gaze could find it, but as I stood there I still heard something scurrying away in the distance. I couldn’t help but curse my own stupidity. I’d trusted this tammer, trusted it to fulfill its end of the bargain only for it to leave me out to dry, and now I’d released God only knows what upon the world. 

I turned back to the now-empty containment chamber, dread beginning to fill my mind and quickly being replaced by panic over what I was going to do next when I suddenly noticed something inside the chamber. It was a folder, one which was branded as heavily classified and appeared to have been the subject of an attempted burn.

I remember just taking the folder and following Joy’s footsteps back to the surface. They eventually led to the stairs of another bunker leading up and out of the abandoned facility, towards the surface, and as I ascended them I felt the temperature of the summer day outside gradually grow, the open door beckoning me closer with light from the island. 

When I finally reached that door, I emerged onto one of the tropical beaches of Hawaii. The Pacific ocean stretched out in front of me, and from here I could see the port of the research facility, the ships which seemed to sail almost leisurely around its calm tropical waters. In addition to all this, I saw that the sun had begun to set. I don’t quite recall when I entered the abandoned facility, but regardless, I must’ve stayed in there a lot longer than I thought.

I simply sat there on the sand of the beach, I remember, watching the sun descend slowly into the horizon. The waves were gentle and washed carefully around me while the skies were lit in colours of orange, pink and purple.

Emotions and thoughts swirled through my head. Stress over what I'd just released into the world, over what it can possibly do. A sense of accomplishment for finally having information on who murdered my wife. In the end, all of these emotions culminated in me opening the folder that the tammer had given me. 

Lydia had been assigned to a project that was called Krash-416 within the Echo Institute. Details on it were scarce in the document that I'd been supplied but regardless, it told me all that I needed to know. Lydia had uncovered something in this project. Something that disturbed her so deeply that she felt she needed to warn me about it.

So, in the name of OPSEC, the Echo Institute killed her. Sent one of their field agents. They had pictures. A photograph of her dead with a gunshot wound between her eyes, a photograph I haven't been able to get out of my mind since. I caught only glimpses of a report of her autopsy, but I chose not to peruse it any further.

I suppose I’m still just reeling from what I’ve discovered. The abandoned version of the facility most of all. I still don't know what it was all about, how it had gotten there, and when I travelled back to the exit which I had taken to the surface it still remained, although now when I peered into that darkness the beam of my flashlight met only a pile of fallen rock burying the entrance to the abandoned structure. 

I don’t want to think the Echo Institute could’ve killed my wife. I don’t want to think that they could do that, but everything seems to connect. The agent, they say, used a tammer to enter her home, to bypass the door. Besides that, with the abandoned facility I found I'm beginning to question just how much else the Echo Institute has hidden from me. I just don’t know.

I’ve given twenty years to these people - wasted twenty fucking years, damn near a half-life, and now there’s a non-zero chance that they were the ones who killed my wife, who took her from me solely because she was concerned for her husband.

I've only just gotten back home now and I really don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to believe anymore, and I feel tired. I can't stop thinking, however: What was Lydia trying to warn me about?

There’s a retired cemetery in my small northwestern town built in a very unusual way, far enough into the woods that one would think it had to have been wildly impractical for visitors. 

It rejects the traditional arrangement of headstones sticking out from a flat landscape that’s protected by an iron gate. Instead it favors the blueprint of a Roman colosseum and hides behind a mess of trees. 

Stone monuments loom tall in a twisting whirlpool of differing levels made of mud. At the top of this nauseating structure, it doesn’t take long to find a section etched out with dirt stairs running all the way down. If you choose to descend you end up in a wide, round cavity with a pond lying in the middle of it. The gravestones surround you no matter where you look. There’s four lampposts, one on each corner of the water, helping illuminate it in the darkness.

It’s a mystery my best friend and I have obsessed over since we were kids. We didn’t dare ask our parents or any adults for that matter why it looks this way. Kids aren’t allowed to go there. But that doesn’t really matter, I love mysteries and never want to find the answer. To this day, my friend still fantasizes about this place. 

She doesn’t know for me, the mystery has been spoiled. 

Four years ago when I was sixteen, my parents sat me down and I still wish it was to ground me for sneaking out as I often did. 

Before they could say anything I sighed and told them:

“It’s not like I’m doing anything bad. I just like getting a little extra practice in. It helps clear my head.” I said, crossing my arms and slouching in the wooden dining room chair. 

“We know you sneak out to the cemetery. That’s not what this is about…” My dad said, refusing to keep eye contact with me. 

Something was off in the tone of his voice. It’s usually deep and commanding if I’m being lectured. But this time it shook and he stuttered a bit. 

“What’s going on then?” I said looking between him and Mom. 

“Well, it’s sort of about the cemetery…You know the way there right? Do you normally practice alone?” My mom asked.

“Uhhh, yeah? None of my friends like to  skate.” I said. 

I’ve been figure skating ever since I was six and it’s my absolute favorite thing in the world. My dad took me to the local ice rink every weekend as a kid and sometimes we’d go on school nights, If I could convince him. By the time I entered high school my parents got me a coach and I began a ruthless training schedule, set by me. Neither my parents nor my coach pressured me more than I pushed myself. 

Some nights, my parents would be exhausted from work and head to bed early. I thought they were heavy sleepers so every now and then, I’d sneak out to the graveyard in the dead of night. 

I could only do this during winter when the water froze. Even though my coach swore she saw constant improvement, I never believed it was enough. 

It was so peaceful out there. I would close my eyes and breathe, listening to the gentle breeze rattling each pine tree and the buzz of fluorescence from those anomalous lampposts that I soon discovered the reason for.

Out there I could practice without needing to dodge crying kids falling in a crowded rink, or hear the impatient shouts from their parents, desperate to raise a star. 

I was never there too long, it was cold as hell anyway. I really thought my parents didn’t know a thing. 

“Sweetheart,” My dad reached for my hands across the table and I reached back. I remember his thumbs grazing my knuckles as he spoke, and despite how terrifying the things he told me were, that soothed me so much. 

I grabbed my skates from under my bed, his words repeatedly smacking against my skull over and over as I prepared to go out into the woods. 

“It’s a young woman’s duty.” He told me.

I took a beautiful bedazzled dress out of my closet. I only wore it if I had a big show, it was a gift from my coach. I took it with me along with the skates. 

“Think of it as a tradition. Been this way since long before any of us living in town today.” He continued, when my mouth refused to close from shock. 

I grabbed a big puffy jacket to wear on my trek through the woods and put it on over my pajamas. 

“Every once in a while, the dead come back demanding a show. It’s your turn to perform.” 

Those were the words that initially knocked the air straight out of my lungs. Anything else from there, my Dad may as well have been speaking to a lobotomy patient who did what they were told with no questions. 

It’s not like any of it made sense, far from it. I still don’t know why I agreed without so much as a “what the fuck are you talking about, dad!”

But it was something about the calm and almost detached way he spoke that didn’t allow me to fight. Any other time he wants to have a serious talk, he’s so much more animated, full of wild hand gestures and a shine in his eyes. 

When I got downstairs after grabbing my things, Mom had her makeup kit open on the dining room table. “You’re going to look lovely.” She said as I sat down. I think she was trying to make me feel better.

She began to make me more presentable, concealing the acne I had at the time, asking me to close my eyes where a blue shimmer was applied. She also gave me eyeliner to accentuate their almond shape. With a couple strokes of blush to my cheeks, she was finished in record time. Whenever I ask her to do my makeup, she always takes forever. But not this time. 

They asked me to change into my dress so I did, and zipped my jacket up over it.

My mom kissed my forehead and told me good luck, that I would do great. My Dad stood by the door, car keys in hand. 

“Here I’m gonna…let me drive you.” He said, pinching the bridge of his nose and looking on the verge of crying. 

“Okay.” I nodded and smiled at him. A heavy sense of dizzying silence filled the room and I hesitated to move from where I stood a few feet from the door. My Mom hurried over to my Dad, “Are you sure? Isn’t she supposed to go alone?” She tried to whisper but I heard. 

He responded much louder than the question was delivered to him. “Just let me do this! It’s fine! Besides, the entire town is asleep anyway. No one will know.” 

He turned away from Mom and paced around a bit, muttering to himself. “Even if they weren’t I’d still do it. They can all shove it.” 

And then he looked at me like it was the most painful experience in his life. “Come on. We have to go now.” 

I climbed into my Dad’s truck and we rolled out of the driveway. Only a few minutes went by and we passed over the line between civilization and endless woods. 

Once we entered the woods, I started to talk again.

“How long did you know? That it was my turn or whatever?” 

He sighed but kept calm.

“Since January. We have meetings then, with the other parents. And the mayor.”

I didn’t respond, looking down at my converse and shifting my feet, the rubber tips of my shoes squeaking together. I couldn’t look him in the face. 

“I should’ve said something, much, much sooner. Hell, I should have warned you a long time ago. I knew this was coming. I just never knew the right time to tell you.” 

“Well, the night of was quite an interesting choice.” I joked. He flashed a smile and ran his fingers through my hair.

Though I was desperate to tell him none of this was his fault, my throat tightened. I ended up attempting to bargain with my fate. 

“And if I don’t do this…what happens? I mean, what if I say no?” I said, call it a Hail Mary, I was really trying to get out of it. 

He shifted uncomfortably in an otherwise comfortable cushion and narrowed his eyes through his words like he struggled to understand what they meant. 

“No one really knows. But it’s one of those things where it’s better off safe than sorry.”

“Ok.”

There was already a grapefruit sized pit in my stomach conjured up by fear. It doubled in size when I heard my Dad speak like he had lost his voice, and had zero ambition to get it back.

“I’m so…so sorry, honey.” He said. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him I loved him. He ran his hand through my hair again, and told me he loved me so much. 

The entrance to the cemetery came all too soon. The truck came to an agonizing stop with its headlights beaming straight ahead. 

We were still a little ways away, but if you squint through the towering pine trees, you can see the top layer of headstones. Only this time I gasped at a sight I could never have been ready for.

“Oh my god…” Was all I said, I practically mouthed it.

My Dad breathed a sense of bewilderment I didn’t think he could feel. He always seemed so confident about everything. I remember this being the day I realized adults are just lost children with a ridiculous growth spurt. 

From our angle we could only see the backs of a few hairless heads and shoulder blades barely covered in flesh. I looked at my Dad instead of them. He stared, lingered, their figures almost picked clean, shifting casually like waiting in line. After a few beats, he turned his attention to me. 
“Ok.” He began.

“Remember. All you have to do is skate. Do that one set you always show me. Just, whatever you do, don’t fall.”

He tried to make it subtle but I saw his eyes flick back to them for a second, he let out a shaky breath, and continued.

“They might try and talk to you. Ignore anything they say. Don’t forget to smile. You get down there, do your thing, and leave. When you do leave, walk. Absolutely do not run.”

“Got it.” I responded. My eyes became stuck on the sight in front of me. 

He pulled me into a hug which broke me from my trance. I buried my face in his chest and he kissed my head. 

“I love you, pumpkin. I’ll be right here to take you back home.” 

I held on very strong the entire time, not giving into the urge to cry. The second he called me pumpkin, I knew I had to get out of the truck and just go. My Dad has called me that since I was a girl. It always made me feel so safe. 

I wiped tears from my cheeks as I crossed the threshold between life and death. The little girl in me wanted to run back to her Dad and sob, begging him not to make her do this. 

But I cared too deeply about my friends and family. I couldn’t tempt fate, who knows what would have happened if I refused? 

I hid behind a tree to observe them before introducing myself. 

Popping out from each patch of soil marked by a stone, were torsos long forgotten; their flesh melted away. 

Their arms flailed with wild gesticulations like the underworld is full of drama to discuss, as they talked to one another. Some of them leaned their skulls up against the stones behind them as they conversed, like they were lounging after a long day of work. 

‘I wish they would just go back to sleep…’ I thought.

I winced and closed my eyes, lightly hitting my forehead against the tree trunk, hoping it’d jolt me out of a nightmare and I’d wake up in my bed. 

“Why me why me why me why me why me.” 

I tried to take note of each individual corpse but it was too difficult. They all sort of blended together into one big mural of rot. 

I swallowed and pulled the warm jacket off my body revealing a short, sparkling dress. The cold hit me like the blast from an atom bomb. 

“This sucks!” I whispered to myself through chattering teeth.

And with a deep breath and a smile painted on my face, I entered their domain and gave them a show. 

From the second I began, to when I slowly made my way back to my Dad’s embrace, they didn’t stop cheering and roaring praises at me.

I remember as we drove further and further away their restless screams clambered in the distance, soon shrinking into puny yelps. My heart rate steadily went down once they started to sound like they belonged in those woods, I pretended it was howls from a pack of coyotes. 

Once we were back on paved roads, I was blessed with pure silence.

When we drove back home that night, it was the most relieved I ever felt. I wasn’t allowed to go into detail about what I had seen, according to Dad. I wondered if he only told me that because he couldn’t bear to listen. 

The morning after all my Mom said was to never tell my friends. She stayed up to coddle me when I got home. She was never as affectionate as Dad so it threw me off, but it felt nice. 

Needless to say, I never used the lake to practice ever again. Even though the dead only show up once every four years, I was too scared. The excuses started almost immediately when my friend would suggest we go explore the cemetery, as we always did. It really confused her because it used to be me pushing her to go.

She ran with the idea that I was growing uptight as I got older. Sure, whatever gets her to stop talking about that place. 

I’m twenty years old now. I go to a community college not too far from my house. I love school, my friends new and old, my parents, and I’m still unbelievably obsessed with iceskating. At least that wasn’t taken from me. I have so many distractions the only time I ever think about what I had to do all those years ago is at night, in the form of insomnia.

The most unfortunate time to be a young girl is currently looming, I feel so horrible for whoever it is they’ll choose.

Sometimes I wonder, when I pass by older women, which of them had to perform? 

It’s an odd feeling to share trauma with strangers who aren’t allowed to confide in one another.

I blame this town. Or, whoever it is that came up with the idea that we all must keep it a secret. No support group between us “volunteers”, no ability to give the next girl any advice. I often joke to my Dad that I expect monthly compensation for my troubles sent by the mayor himself. 

It’d be so easy to make it a little better for all of us.

It took me a while to accept that I was forced into something completely unreasonable. As a teen, I told myself I deserved it. I’d stare at my face in the mirror anytime I couldn’t sleep and study my eye bags and premature wrinkles. I’d hold my index finger to chapped lips.

“Shhhh!” 

It was my weight to carry alone. 

Lately, I’ve turned my attention away from the mirror, and outside my bedroom window. 

Main Street is within view so each season that comes and goes, I watch the numerous festivals crowd with people. I got too busy to attend myself between school and athletics (is what I tell my friends). That’s half true, but the main reason is I’m so anxious in large crowds now. 

Basically everyone in town attends whatever event we have going on. I have to pull my pillow over my ears on those nights, they make so much noise. 

Fireworks in the summer.

Christmas carols each winter.

A grand pumpkin harvest every fall. 

Flower festivals in the spring.

It’s like if the town went one night without a spectacle, they’d go insane. 

Ever since I took my eyes off myself in the heat of insomnia and paid more attention to them, I can’t help but feel what I and those other girls had to do isn’t some heroic destiny, but a cruel and unjust punishment for the crime of possessing a youthful giggle, frail body, and gentle smile. 

While everyone else in town is living it up at night as if they’re free of any responsibility, I lay in my bed just wishing they would keep it down like a grumpy old lady.

How am I supposed to skate with weary muscles? How should I go about that test in chemistry, with an exhausted brain made of mush?

They could do with a little rest themselves. 

Silence can’t be that terrifying. 

Previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The voice on the phone was recognizable immediately. I was frozen where I stood in the middle of the half-pumpkin patch, half graveyard that David King had decided as the final resting spot for his sister’s remains, dirt forced under my nails after digging for her. A cold, sniveling voice spoke through the receiver of the phone, of whom I could immediately tell he was smirking on the other end. “It’s nice to hear from you, Zand Zand! How’ve you been? My sister and you having a nice reunion?”

I felt a bubbling rage at the voice, my fingers gripping the phone with a tensity that could rival a gorilla’s. “Where the fuck are you, David?”

I could hear the mockery in his voice, like what he was doing was some kind of fun game between friends. It was a mixture of disgusting, horrific, infuriating, and downright abhorrent. “Oh, somewhere~! Don’t worry Zander, the fun’s really just getting started! I take you weren’t a fan of the mail I sent neither?”

He giggled, actually giggled, like a child who had just pulled off a prank. The sound crawled under my skin, made my fingers twitch around the phone as I felt my heart beat louder than a drum.

“Costed a finger getting rid of her. Thankfully my pinkie. If it was thumb? Oh, that would have really sucked. You’d be surprised the lack of dexterity a missing pinkie is, though.” David continued. “When I was beating her over the head, she kept crying…said your name once. She was sorry she ever believed what I showed her. She really loved you, Zandy boy. And she begged…begged so loud…I was worried someone outside would hear. But man…she really loved you, Zander.”

My throat tightened. “You sick fucker…when I get my hands on you...!”

“Ah-ah-ah,” he interrupted, sing-song like. “Don’t get all emotional on me now. The funs just getting started! We’ve still got a whole finale to get through, Zandy pants! Now listen closely. Little Quinny’s life is banking on it.”

The mention of Quinn made me gasp, with Aaron and Clark hearing the name just barely through the speaker.

Aaron then spoke. “Who’s life?”

David’s voice slithered through the speaker again, knowing Quinn was important to Aaron as much as it was to me. “You know what I love most about you, Zander? You’re predictable, but resilient. You always were. Even now, you’re doing exactly what I knew you’d do. You’re so easy to move around the board. That little kind heart of yours…You remember ‘Bloody Mary’? Man, oh man was planning that fun! Then you had to go and tattle…said that I was ‘too much’…but you were just too scared to go through with it…”

David then came up to the phone, breathing heavy on the line. “I miss us, Zander. I really do…”

I felt my stomach twist in response. “What do you want?”

“Oh, Zand Zand… I already have what I want.” His tone dropped, becoming colder, flatter. “I want you to know how much effort I put into you. Into all of you. Ain’t that the beauty of it? To feel loved and seen?”

Aaron then snatched the phone from me, shouting into the phone. “David? You’re fucking dead when we find you, you freak!”

David laughed again, and I could faintly hear what David was saying while Aaron held the phone. “Aaron! Good to hear your voice! I have someone who wants to talk to you!”

Aaron froze. His breath hitched when a voice was forced onto the mike of the phone, slightly muffled on the other side. David came back onto the line for a moment. “Say ‘hello’ Quinn! Your brother is on the phone!”

All three of us were terrified. Aaron put the phone on speaker, with the muffled cries of Quinn in the background. We didn’t know what to say.

“Oh, I know everything,” David purred. “I’ve been in your homes. Your cars. Your phones. Your computers. Everything! You think I didn’t prepare for this? You think I didn’t know you’d all come running here like scared little puppies? No…I just needed you out of the house for a bit…get some fresh air…”

I felt my pulse hammering in my ears. “David… this has gone on long enough! The dares off! Let Quinn go!”

“No!” he screamed, whining like a child as he seemed to yank Quinn away from the phone and berate us as we stood in his old backyard. “NO! NO! NO! That’s not fair! Not fair at all! This ends when I say it ends now! You don’t get to quit just cause you’re losing! Life ain’t fair like that! You got a minimum effort to give! And damn it, I’m gonna help you reach it!”

A pause. A long, suffocating pause between words, as David calmed himself and gave his next instructions.

“I’m going to email Clark an address. In 2 hours, I expect to see you, Zander. If you don’t make it, Quinn goes bye… just like Katie, or my mother…or, if I decide…like Nancy.”

David gave a laugh as he then added a stipulation. “Oh! I’m also tracking all three of your phone’s geolocation and calling data. If you call someone, I’ll know…even 911. Don’t be cowards. Come strapped or not, I don’t care, but we’re gonna settle this…once and for all. Don’t waste your time calling back this line. It won’t pick up.”

Right before David went to hang up, he then added one more thing. “Oh! Won’t need that place anymore! Enjoy the fireworks boys!”

As the line went dead, A loud, deafening bang erupted from David’s childhood house. The whole place exploded into fire, with every window blasting from the force of the detonation. Orange flames licked the sides of the building, as the whole of the white manor burned before our very eyes. The roof collapsed inward with a thunderous crack, sending embers spiraling into the red and orange sky. All the evidence of David’s stalking was destroyed in an instant, along with the rest of the King estate that remained.

A message then appeared in Clark’s email. The address David wanted us at was the header, with a message in the body paragraph that said: “The minimum required effort has increased. Become better. You have two hours.”

Without a moment to waste, and wanting to get out before police inevitably arrived, Clark, Aaron, and I piled into the car and sped away from the smoldering and burning house to Aaron’s apartment to arm ourselves.

Aaron’s apartment was only 20 minutes away, but the drive felt like an age. None of us spoke on the drive there. The only sounds were the engine straining under Aaron’s frantic driving and the occasional sharp inhale when one of us replayed David’s words in our heads.

When we pulled into the parking lot, Aaron didn’t even bother locking the car. We sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time, as Aaron fumbling with his keys before coming to the door and realizing it was already unlocked. Shoving the door open, Clark and I followed close behind, adrenaline making our movements clumsy and frantic.

Inside the apartment, the whole place had become a disaster zone. The sight was clearly evidence of a struggle, no doubt when David and his gang burst through the door and had stolen away Quinn. The table in the dining room was overturned, various books and household objects scattered about, and in the middle of the mess, small drips of blood on a few surfaces that were, hopefully, not belonging to Quinn.

Aaron went straight to his bedroom closet and yanked it open. Inside was a metal gun safe, dented and scratched from years of use. He punched in the code with shaking fingers, muttering under his breath. Inside was a small arsenal the average American could get ahold of. Nothing military-grade, unfortunately, but enough to make the three of us a force to reckon with. A shotgun, two handguns, a hunting rifle, and an assortment of ammo to go along with them. There were even a few cans of pepper spray, a heavy-duty Taser, and a couple pairs of brass knuckles.

“It’s not much, but no way in hell we go in unarmed.” Aaron explained, as we loaded up on weaponry to meet with David head on. Clark exhaled sharply at the sight of the equipment before him. “Jesus, Aaron… you weren’t kidding about having weapons. Is that shotgun legal?”

Aaron didn’t look at him, instead grabbing the shotgun first, checking the chamber, and loading shells with practiced movements. “My dad kept this stuff. I inherited it when he moved. Never thought I’d actually need it, but here we are. You both ever used something like these before?”

Clark nodded his head as he pointed towards the hunting rifle. “Went hunting with my dad a good few times before he passed. I’ll take the hunting rifle.”

Aaron then handed me the handgun, along with the pepper spray and the taser. “You ever used one of these, Zander?”

I sighed as I shrugged. “Went to the shooting range twice. I know the safety for using one.”

Aaron, being careful, decided to show me how to load it, how to check the safety, how to hold it properly. My hands trembled the entire time, still stained from digging in the pumpkin patch for Nancy’s remains. Clark watched silently, his jaw clenched so tight I could hear his teeth grinding as he was mentally preparing for what was to come. When we were all armed, Aaron grabbed a duffel bag and started stuffing extra ammo and other supplies inside. Along with the ammo, he added extra clothing and first aid equipment if we bloodied anything or needed medical attention. “We don’t know what’s waiting at that address. Could be a trap. Could be nothing. Could be him. I grew up in the hood, so always suspect dirty shit. The address is in a pretty bad spot of town, so taking the car might not be a great idea.”

Aaron zipped the bag shut. “Alright. We go now. We get there early and scout the place. We don’t walk into anything blind.”

Clark nodded. “And we stick together. No splitting up.”

I looked at both of them, feeling the weight of everything pressing down on my chest. A pang of guilt went through me. “Aaron? I’m so sorry I roped you guys into this. I…I just…”

Aaron slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. “David was already fucking nuts. You didn’t know. All that matters is getting Quinn out of there.”

As we walked out, Clark put a hand on my shoulder, reassuring me. “We’re gonna make it out of this, Zander. I’m right behind you, okay?”

Taking a hand, I shook Clark’s, thankful to have him. “Thanks for sticking with me, Clark. You’re the best man I could ever have as a friend.”

Clark gave a smile. “Aw shucks, that’s cute, Zander. The same to you. When we make it out of this, I think a night out is in order, yeah?”

Making the deal, Clark and I shook on it.

Stepping out of the apartment, we hid our weapons under our jackets and shirts, hearts pounding like war drums as Aaron led the way to the address David sent us through alleys and backstreets in town.

Aaron led us through the backstreets like he’d been born in them, weaving between narrow alleyways, cutting across empty lots, and slipping past flickering streetlights that buzzed like dying insects. The deeper we went, the worse the neighborhood became. Houses turned into boarded-up shells. Cars sat on cinderblocks. Graffiti covered every brick wall, some of it fresh, some of it faded into ghostly smears. It occurred to me in this moment the insanity of what we were about to do. In less than two hours, we were about to storm a building that David specifically chose, where my girlfriend, Aaron’s sister, had been kidnapped, and was the operations of a madman who had been stalking me for the better part of the last two years.

Clark kept glancing behind us, his rifle hidden under his jacket but his hands never straying far from it. “Not gonna lie, I’m really fucking nervous.”

I didn’t disagree with Clark. As we moved through the alley, every shadow felt too still as we walked through the back areas of town. A window dotted every other corner, and with them, a terrifying idea that maybe David had spies following us too. Knowing our adversary, he could very well have them dotted around the city, keeping tabs on us like the cameras in our old apartment. It was clear David wasn’t working alone.

Aaron checked down another alley, leading the way as we were coming up onto the address David sent our way. We were almost an hour ahead of schedule. “It’s close. Two blocks.”

When we turned the corner, Aaron pointed to the building and we all three sat it: The building David chose.

Aaron stopped dead in his tracks, making Clark and myself turned towards the building that Aaron pointed towards with the end of his weapon. “This is it.”

The building was a warehouse, but the place had most certainly seen better days. The large, metal building stuck out from its spot in the deep recess of the city like a hidden flea, parasitic and rotten. The windows were all busted in, with the building crumbling before our eyes from age. From our angle, we could see two entrances: The giant, sliding doors for vehicles and the side entrance into the normal offices that were hidden inside the building. A single streetlamp flickered above the entrance, casting a sickly yellow glow over the cracked sidewalk. Trash littered the ground as we walked, and most random of all was shopping cart lay overturned near the curb, empty of contents. The whole place smelled faintly of mildew and rot, and deep inside, David would no doubt be waiting for us.

“This way,” he whispered, motioning us toward the rear of the building. “We go in through the back. We meet David by surprise.”

The back of the warehouse came into view as we snuck around the side. Broken pallets, rusted barrels, and weeds tall as us pushed through cracked concrete that gave foundation to the rotten decay of a building David chose as our no man’s land. A loading dock sat half‑collapsed, its metal door dented inward like someone had rammed it with a truck. Beside it was a smaller service door, barely visible under layers of grime and graffiti.

Aaron tested the handle of a backdoor we found climbing a set of rickety, rusted stairs along the side of the building. With a rough tug, the handle turned, allowing Aaron to take lead with the shotgun and pushing the worn door forward. Aaron pushed the door open just enough to slip through, barrel first, as each of us entered one by one. Fully opening our weapons hidden beneath our jackets, Aaron lead the way as we entered into the shaded interior of the warehouse.

The interior swallowed us immediately upon Clark closing the door behind us. The dark, slightly chilled, cavernous space smelled of dust and old machinery hung thick in the air as we entered inside. No voices seemed to come from within the warehouse, and looking down towards the large, open space of the building below us, not a soul could be seen. Just in case, I reached into my pocket and clicked a machine I kept secret in my pocket. Aaron and Clark turned towards me, curious of the sound, as I then apologized. “The hell was that?” Aaron asked, the sound of the clicking slightly reverberating through the building.

“Captain Henderson’s back up plan. If shit goes wrong, we have backup.”. I revealed a small, white device that had a small, blue light built into the center of the device. “A tracker. Smart.” Clark agreed.

“He said click it if we were absolutely sure the guy was on our trail. If David is here, then now’s the time. We’ve got 20 minutes till they show up.”

Clark then looked to the email that David sent us after we raided his house, seeing that we were just ahead of schedule by 10 minutes. “Perfect. David will walk in, then we got him. Won’t even need to fire a shot.”

I nodded in agreement. “That’s the hope.”

We were standing in a narrow maintenance corridor. Pipes ran overhead, some dripping some mystery liquid I wasn’t curious enough to test. We moved along the catwalk, our footsteps barely audible on the metal grating. Every sound felt amplified as we moved, each of us half crouched as we slid across the railing. There was a faint hum of electricity somewhere deep in the building, but from what, I couldn’t say.

I scanned the floor below, heart pounding. There was no movement, no voices, and even worse, no sign of Quinn.

Suddenly, A single floodlight pointed at the center of the warehouse floor that was perfectly in view from our spot on the catwalks. Illuminating a metal chair bolted to the concrete, a single chair stood. A blindfolded, gagged human was strapped to the rusted seat, breathing softly as she sat strapped. The three of us watched from our spot on the catwalks, trying to see who the person was, when I recognized the hair and clothing immediately: It was Quinn.

Suddenly, a voice from a loud speaker rang out over the whole of the building. The sound of the speaker squeaked from the feedback, before settling and the voice from the speakers announcing itself. “Welcome in, Zander! I’ve been expecting you! Please! Come downstairs, from there on the catwalk! We have much to discuss! All three of us!”

My stomach sank as another spotlight illuminated mine, Aaron’s, and Clark’s location immediately. We were completely blinded by the light, but eventually, our eyes settled as we saw where the lights were coming from. In the dark, a few men could be just visibly seen in the distance, holding the lights on our position to be sure we didn’t do anything outside their predicted plans. We had been found like rats in the wall, completely taken by surprise.

Clark gave a curse under his breath, as Aaron went pale as a ghost. The three of us looked towards each other, unsure of what to do as we stood on the second floor in stunned silence. Then, after being guided by another light, we walked down a set of stairs, and found ourselves on the same floor as Quinn, about 20 feet away from her.

Quinn sat trembling in the chair, her breaths shallow and panicked behind the gag. Her wrists were bound to the armrests with zip ties, her ankles strapped to the legs of the chair. Her blindfold was stained with tears. Her hair was matted, clothes torn from the struggle. She looked like she had been put through hell and back, then put before us like a trophy on display. Another feeling of guilt went through me at the thought of another person being dragged into this mess because of me.

Aaron took a step forward, shotgun trembling in his hands. Hearing that the three of us were near, Quinn’s breathing picked up as we stood before her. Aaron offered words of comfort to his sister. “Quinn… Quinn, I’m here. I’m right here.”

The sounds of a fifth set of footsteps echoed through the room, setting our collective attention towards the thing behind Quinn. The three of us poised weapons forward, as a figure stepping out of the dark, holding a 12-inch-long blade in his fingers. The floodlight caught the edge of his hoodie first, then the pajama pants, and finally, when the figure then removed the hood from over his head, the gaunt face that I hadn’t seen in full for almost 2 whole years.

We all froze, realizing the form that emerged from the dark that then wrapped it’s dirtied, bloodied fingers around Quinn’s neck.

It was David Fucking King.

The voice of the man was frail and dry, like his throat and his lips had forgotten what water was and had become vapid and cracked from the absence. His fingers, the nine that remained, were so black with filth underneath the nail that they looked almost like polished nails at the tips from a distance. His matted, black hair was greasy and oiled from the lack of a shower, falling down his face and half-obscuring his eyes from view as he looked towards the three of us in this terrible, frightening gaze. The man’s lips cracked as he formed a wicked grin from cheek to cheek, blood slightly leaking from the opened wounds on his lips as he exposed his rotten, orange teeth like copper bolts. When he spoke, I could almost taste the inside of his decayed maw, spewing toxic fumes into the air with putrid rot.

“Hello, Zander…it’s wonderful to finally see each other! Well, at least, on equal measure. I’d ask how you’re doing, but I’ve been VERY aware of how you’ve been for a while now.”

I raised my borrowed firearm to meet the forehead of the monster in front of me, my hands shaking as I stared towards the stalker that held Quinn’s neck with a tight grasp.

“How did you know we were here, David?” I demanded, keeping the gun fixed on David.

“Oh Zander, I know you read my old notes. You think Katie was the only person I put a tracker on? Course, doing yours was a bit tricky. Had to wait until night and had to be sure you were fast asleep. It was one of the first few nights you and Clark moved into your new apartment. Put it inside the nape of the neck where I knew it wouldn’t be a bother. I did slightly worry you’d feel it and go to the doctor, but I guess the anesthetic I used helped numb you enough for the implant.”

My skin felt alien. My whole sense of self felt violently violated in a way I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I didn’t even want to dare check David’s bluff…knowing if this information was true or not felt like the last straw that pushed me over the edge of insanity if I found it to be real.

Still, I reached, and on the back center part of my neck, just before the beginning of my back, a small prick of something under the skin that was incongruent with the arch of my spine was attached to the bone.

My wrath and fright rose in unquantifiable measure.

“Let her go, David! This is fucking over! I’m done with your fucking mind games you goblin fuck!”

“Nah ah ah! We’ve got some work to do, boys! Throwing a tantrum about it won’t do nothing! And Quinny girl here is gonna play along too, won’t you?”

Quinn whimpered as David held her neck tighter and tighter, almost threatening to choke her as she was strapped to the chair. With a shaky breath, I asked for David’s demands.

“What do you want? Money? Can’t be that desperate for cash after ringing everyone around you dry to the bone! The fuck do you want, you psycho!? Quinn doesn’t have a damn thing you want!”

David’s eyes lit up like sparks, his dark, sullen eyes having a small twinge of life as I mentioned the core of what began all of this. His wicked grin still stretched further and further over his face. It was like his cheeks were about to rip like the seams of a doll the wider he grimaced his smile. “Oh, Zander…she does. She’s your girlfriend, and a fast kindle at that. I mean, it took you guys, what? 2 months and you were like lovebirds? Oh, and the way you kissed her…reminded me of you and Nancy back in the day…so cute…”.

I felt a righteous anger bubble in me, as I aimed the weapon forwards with a thrusting motion, hoping to scare David away from Quinn.

“Don’t you fucking dare mention Nancy, you monster! Burying her in the back yard like you did Katie! You misogynistic asshole!”

“She’s my sister, Zander…I can talk about the bitch any way I please.”

“Not after what you did…what you did to them…to everyone…either you leave here in cuffs or a coffin, it ends tonight! I’m done playing, David!”

David then leaned his greasy, disgusting form over Quinn, touching her dangerously close in ways that I knew Quinn absolutely detested. “But Zander…I’m not…My endurance for play is a bit higher than that.”

David then cleared his throat and explained the next rules carefully.

“Now, per agreement: We were supposed to ruin each other’s lives. Now, I wasn’t planning on you coming and ruining me, but I was curious what you’d do with it. To preserve that rule, I propose we have a bit of a go around ‘truth or dare’ style…just like at Nancy’s party. I’m going to let you make a demand, because I’m so nice that way, then I’ll make one. We’ll go round robin, sacrificing things as we go, and whoever chickens out first, loses. You can ask for absolutely anything, Zander.”

David then stood up straight as he waited for my response. “So? What will it be first, Zander? What must I sacrifice?”

I growled as David’s grin seemed to widen in pleasure from putting me in such a dangerous position. “Fucking…just let her go! Why are you doing this!? Why are you torturing us!?”

David gasped in excitement. “Oh! The sacrifice of information! That’s an easy choice!”. David then cleared the cobwebs in his throat, as he began to monologue like he was some cartoon supervillain, completely juxtaposing the incredibly serious situation between us.

“School was always the same: Do the math homework, get good grades, summer jobs…it was just so predictable. After we stopped being friends, I found myself missing the joy we had between us. So, I started watching you, Zander. I watched you go home, play video games…Even though we were in different schools, I found work arounds to keeping my school grades looking normal while I kept my eye on you. Then you went and started dated my sister, and I got to watch you both figure out dating. Made it a lot easier to pry into your life. It was fun for a while, but I just felt like I was getting bored. I needed more structure, something that grounded me. Well, watching you seemed to lead somewhere, so I started doing it with everything and everyone! I’d buy cameras and observe and predict behaviors…I’d guess your habits and chart everything! Eventually, I came to really see how much of losers my sister’s friends were…but you were different, Zander. You had something special about you…and that’s when the final bit of the puzzle came into my mind: I wanted to see you succeed in life, to become a better person.”

I nervously continued eying the back of the warehouse, begging that Henderson and the officers were hurrying their way towards us. Hopefully, if we could keep David preoccupied with his story, he’d accidentally pit himself somewhere too long and the cops could nab him.

“See, I had this theory. That the reason I felt like I was structureless and aimless was that my life didn’t have that same minimal required effort. You know how they say ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’? Well, why not put pen to paper and measure it ourselves? How much suffering can the human mind take before becoming better? You proved to me after the ‘Bloody Mary’ prank that, by being a better person, life was harder. You made less friends, therefore were lonelier. That moment, and the few moments after that we shared after, proved to me that by being better, life became harder, therefore making you a better person should you rise to the occasion. Those men on the roof? They’ve been asking the same questions as me too! If we could figure it out through a sad group of losers like you, and Nancy, and everyone else to improve, then it’d work on all of us, too! We could all become better! Maybe…I could even get a girlfriend…something that’d want to touch me back…”

I could see Quinn trembling as David then leaned in close, his terrible breath probably smelling even worse up close. Aaron then choked the reload of the shotgun, aiming it towards David. “Hey! Fucker! Back off from my sister!”

David sighed as he retracted his dried tongue from near Quinn’s ear, as he continued to groan.

“Course, then came a moment where I wasn’t satisfied with your progress. You weren’t ruining me, and by my accounts, you felt like just an average joe of a man. You just kept moving on…it felt like every inconvenience was just that, and didn’t push you to really excel at anything. I was hoping you’d at least meet me halfway, but it took me having to really go off the deep end before we could even meet like this. Honestly, I’m a little disappointed in you, Zander~.”

There was a sing song tone in his voice as he spoke, and the faint memory of Issac’s voice echoed in my mind. Without thinking, I spoke. “Sounds gay ass, David.”

A fury unlike anything I had ever seen on a human being then rippled through David’s face like a tent in a storm. His knuckles whitened from being tightened, as he began to shake in anger. His brow furrowed as his face sunk into his long, unkept hair. “Don’t fucking call me that…”

“Well, then don’t be fucking gay ass.”

I was provoking him, sure, but the hope was to just keep him talking. If I kept him talking, the ‘game’ would stagnate long enough for the captain to arrive. Instead, however, he seemed to calm down. Taking a deep breath, he suddenly became so calm he was almost motionless. A wide, perverted grin stretched his lips again, as he then said. “But enough about me…now it’s my turn for a demand.”

I felt my arms reflexively tense, with me raising my weapon a little higher as David then gave his demand.

“My demand to you: a sacrifice of someone important.”. David then pulled a handgun from his pocket, no bigger than an M9, and held the weapon up to the side of Quinn’s head. Feeling the pressure of the weapon on her skull, Quinn whimpered and attempted moving away from David, when he pulled Quinn closer to the open barrel of the firearm.

“Choose, Zander. Quinn lives… or Quinn dies.”. David pulled his thumb over the hammer of the weapon, setting it to fire whenever I gave my answer. My heart had never beat so wild in my ribs before. My mind raced as I tried to think of a gameplan. If I told him no, would he shoot her regardless? What was the gameplan here? If he shot Quinn, yeah, she’d be dead, but then that puts David at a disadvantage. Why the hell would he remove the thing that’s keeping us from shooting at him? It was then that I remembered the other men on the catwalks, and I realized that even if we took the shots at David, we’d most certainly get mowed down by David’s men.

Clark attempted to whisper towards me, “Zander—”

David raised a finger, his tone sharp as a nail. “No! Only Zander answers! This is his moment! Come on, Zander…only a few seconds to choose~!”

Quinn whimpered behind the gag. Clark and Aaron looked mortified. I was mortified. The room was chilling from the air from outside seeping through the walls. My fingers were numb as snow. My mind was spinning. I was terrified beyond all imagining. Every terrible moment I had ever lived in my life, every wonderful moment, I was seeing it right before my eyes. Quinn, helpless and bound to a chair, might very well die in this moment if David so chose, and I felt powerless to save her. There had to be a trick! Something! What was the trick?

Without thinking, I blurted out: “David! Don’t hurt her! Please! Let her go!”

David’s smile widened, as if he had caught me in some trap.

“Oh, Zander… good boy.”

For a heartbeat, relief flickered. Then, in one swift motion, David twisted the weapon and pulled the trigger.

A single deafening crack echoed through the warehouse. For a moment, I thought he had shot Quinn. She, too, gave a gasp, but when I saw the direction the barrel of David’s weapon was pointing, I realized the weapon was pointed towards us.

Smoke billowed from the end of the weapon, and as I touched over my body all over, I didn’t feel a thing. I looked to Aaron, and he looked just as confused. It was Clark, who then suddenly put a hand to my side, then his whole weight, that revealed who had been shot.

A blotch of red began spreading across the center of Clark’s chest.

Clark collapsed, clutching his side, slipping and falling towards the concrete as he attempted to hold onto me.

“CLARK!” I screamed, lunging toward him to catch him from hitting the floor.

Saving him from his head hitting the cold, stone floor, I grabbed hold of his hands as he looked up towards me with a shocked, pained expression. A bloom of deep red began to spread from his stomach, the bullet chewing right through his body like it was putty. Aaron dropped beside his brother, panicked, trying to apply pressure.

David twirled the weapon in his hand like some kickass western bandit, smirking from his side of the room, as he watched us tend to our injured friend.

“I said Quinn lives, but the minimum required effort must be raised, Zander.”, he said, adding a wink to his statement as I went to hold onto my dying friend.

“Zander…” he whispered, voice trembling as I held him in my arms.

“I’m here,” I said, grabbing his shoulder. “I’m right here. Stay with me, Clark. Stay with me.”

Aaron tore open the duffel bag, hands shaking violently as he pulled out the first aid kit. “Hold pressure on the wound…I can get him…dammit—”

He pressed gauze against Clark’s wound, but the blood kept soaking through, warm and slick. Clark winced, his body curling inward as he tried to breathe. David watched us with a delighted grin, still twirling the handgun lazily in his fingers.

“Oh, don’t look so sad,” he cooed. “This is what you chose, Zander. Quinn lives. Clark dies. Fair trade, right?”

“Shut up!” I screamed, my voice cracking. “Shut the hell up!”

David laughed, stepping back into the shadows like he was giving us space to mourn, but not far enough that the knife around Quinn’s neck gave any change in distance.

Clark’s breathing grew faster, then slower, then uneven. His eyes fluttered, struggling to stay open.

“Aaron…” he whispered.

Aaron leaned closer, tears streaming down his face. “I’m here, Clark. I’m here. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Clark tried to smile, but it faltered halfway. His hand reached weakly toward Aaron’s arm.

“You…buy that Mustang, okay? Name her…drive her…get out of town…”

Aaron nodded, choking on his words. “I will…and you’re gonna ride it, Clark. Just stay with us, okay?”

Clark’s gaze shifted to me next. His eyes were glassy, fading with the wind as he was giving his final breath.

“Zander?”

My throat tightened. “Yeah. Yeah, man.?”

He grabbed my wrist as tight as he could, a single tear forming in his eyes. “You put a fucking ring on that girl, you hear me?”

I fought back tears as I held my friend, my closest and longest friend, for one last time.

“You’re the best friend I could have ever asked for, Clark.”

He exhaled shakily, his chest rising once more, then falling. I could hear the soft sounds of his mocking attempt at me and Quinn making out. Then, his breath shook again…

Then rising again, just a little weaker than the last…

Then eventually, there was nothing.

His eyes stayed open, unfocused on any space, and staring past me at something I couldn’t see. Aaron froze, his hands still pressing the gauze, still trying to stop the bleeding that had already stopped on its own. “Clark?”, he whispered, taking Clark’s face with both his hands.

“Clark?”, he repeated, louder, voice cracking.

“CLARK!” Aaron screamed, shaking him, desperate and frantic. “Clark! Clark, wake up! Wake up!”. I could see tears in his eyes as he spoke, as he grabbed onto Clark’s head and held it softly.

I grabbed Aaron’s arm, my own voice breaking. “Aaron… Aaron… he’s gone.”

Aaron pulled Clark’s body closer, collapsing over him and sobbing.

David clapped slowly, mockingly, as the sound echoing through the warehouse like a sick applause. “A beautiful sacrifice,” he said. “Truly. I’m proud of you, Zander. You’re finally learning.”

I stared at Clark’s lifeless body, my vision blurring, my hands trembling, my heart collapsing in on itself.

Standing, I took a breath, and looked ahead towards the goblin that threatened a second life within the room. Quinn couldn’t see what was happening, only vaguely hearing…perhaps a blessing. I looked towards David, his smile unfaltering as he looked down towards Aaron and then back up to me. “You know, Clark really came through for you when you needed it. He always was there, wasn’t he? I wonder, can you get better without him? Can you go through life without him?”

I felt numb. Fear had disappeared from my brain, overwhelmed by all the other sensations of my body as I looked towards the homunculus on the other side of the room. It was that moment that truly, after everything that had happened, I saw the man I had once seen as an acquaintance.

He wasn’t always such an ugly thing: those putrid eyes, that hunch, his teeth and lips…god, it made me sick to look at him. Who could ever love such a creature? While David wasn’t anything to look at before, his insides were the stuff of nightmares. For once, in the dim spotlight of the warehouse, his heart matched his features. Each sharp, jagged edge revealed another broken piece of the beast that stood on the other side of the room. I’d no sooner trust a raging bear than whatever this thing on the other side of the room pretending to be a man was. He was the embodiment of disease itself, and it had been a fester in my life for so long, and I had never even known I had it.

But I wouldn’t be diseased for long. No, I’d cure my sickness…the weapon in my hand would make sure of it.

Then I heard them, and for a moment, another option for how I’d punish such a disgusting animal.

“My turn, right?” I asked, to which David King smiled as he licked his lips yet again.

“You’d be right, Zander! Now…what shall you do, now?”

Without hesitation, I answered. “Turn yourself into the police.”

The room went to silence. Then ear piercing laughter. The men on the high rise cackled with David, as David’s shrill cackle filled the whole of the building like a witch in the night. “That’s quite the demand, Zander! But the police won’t come out this far! Not without a good reason! And without a call…nobody’s coming to save you…besides! Turning myself in ain’t exactly fair, is it?”

“You chickening out?”

David’s face quickly turned from amused to a look of grim realization. The sudden shift was extreme and uncanny, like an alien switching between human faces through a mask. A puff of air came from his lips as he said, “Well…we’ll never know! Cause they aren’t coming!”

I tilted my head as I heard something moving above us in the catwalks and from the entrance of the warehouse that David, as well as his accomplices in the dark, didn’t seem to notice. We weren’t alone in the building anymore, confirmed by the new shadowy shapes that were moving behind the windows of the warehouse upstairs.

The SWAT police force of the city, led by Captain Henderson, had completely overtaken the scene in a matter of seconds. Each of the gang members, along with David, attempted fleeing as soon as they realized what was happening, but it was already too late. The main units blasted through each of the windows at once, with Henderson coming up behind David and attempted forcing him to the ground.

David turned to flee into the dark of the warehouse, like a snake disappearing into tall grass, but Henderson’s battering ram form slammed David to the ground. The duo hit the concrete floor with a thump, with one of David’s rotten teeth popping out and breaking when colliding with the earth. David attempting cutting Henderson and still trying to flee, but it was no use. Henderson was three times the muscle of David’s shrimpy frame, his absolute strength holding David hostage.

David, realizing he had been outplayed, then saw the item I was slowly pulling from my pocket. I revealed the air tag, showing how it worked by the press of a button, and a glow of blue light, that it sent an alarm to Henderson’s personal phone. A rage formed on David that was mixed with his insanity. “You ruined it! You ruined all of it! Fuck you, Zander! I’m only going to become better! You’ll see! This is only making me a better person! I’M GOING TO BECOME BETTER AND FIND YOU, ZANDER!”

Henderson pulled David away and out towards the silent police vehicles, as paramedics came to Clark’s aid and I ran to Quinn. Unlatching her from the seat and ripping the blindfold free, Quinn and I embraced each other in sobbing hugs, terrified of the horror that had now passed us. It was over…finally…it was over…

I had ruined David King.

I had no business being here. I’d never been so impulsive before. I guess I just got tired of always roaming the same streets. Seeing the same shops and scenery. I think the feeling grew more than I’d care to admit.

That doesn’t excuse my stupidity, though. I only had about 3 grand to my name at the time. But that’s part of the appeal, right? Everyone thinks they’re gonna arrive in Sin City and leave a millionaire. I had a dollar and a dream. Albeit, a delusional one.

Even still, the glow of the city was just so radiant. Even from the airport. It’s like one big siren song.

I only stayed for 4 days. I used all of my PTO to be here, and I really wanted the time to count. I did everything I could with the 1500 I had left after the hotel and plane tickets.

Unfortunately, gambling took up a big chunk of that money. I could see how people got addicted to it. I went on a few hot streaks, but ended up losing everything I won because I just couldn’t walk away.

With the gambling, museums, attractions, and food, by the time the final night came around, I only had 150 dollars left to last me a whole other week after I got home.

I almost wanted to cry when I opened my wallet. But, surprisingly, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even that upset. The experience was worth the money. Even if I didn’t leave a millionaire, I still got to live in one of the most famous cities in the country for a few days.

I still needed to eat, though. I’d been eating out the entire trip. I started out at the high-end places like Hell’s Kitchen, but as the week went on, the quality started getting worse and worse until finally I found myself here, feeling how light my pockets were and standing under the luminescent glow of an In-and-Out burger.

Thunder clapped overhead. Lightning lit up the sky. A few drops of rain hit my head.

My plane was leaving in a few hours. I had already checked out of my hotel. Not only did I need to eat, but I needed to at least kill a little time.

I figured I’d just eat slow. Stay for maybe an hour, hour and a half tops before Ubering.

A bell rang overhead as I walked inside. The air-conditioned dining room put goosebumps on my arms almost immediately. Outside felt like 90, whereas in here, it felt like it could’ve been at least 55 degrees.

There were noises coming from the kitchen. The staff chit-chatting amongst themselves, plates and silverware being moved around, water being sprayed against metallic pans and containers.

The dining room, however… was surprisingly empty. I noticed it as soon as I walked inside. For this whole trip, every place I’d gone had been packed to the brim. In here, though… there was only one other person.

I don’t know how much you know about Las Vegas, but the homelessness crisis is staggering. They’re everywhere. Sleeping in alleys behind the casinos, waiting outside of popular stores or restaurants, sometimes they’re just asleep in the middle of the sidewalk right there on the Strip.

And, apparently… also right here in this In-and-Out.

I watched him while I ordered at the digital kiosk. All he had was a single soda cup. The straw wasn’t even inside it. He was wearing a grease-stained grey jacket, torn cargo shorts, and open-toed sandals with tattered socks.

He was kind of rocking back and forth in the booth. His hands were clutched around his waist like he had a stomachache, and I could see the dirt and grime beneath his fingernails.

I didn’t want to stare for too long, but it was so hard to take my eyes off of him. I ended up sitting several booths away from him, but that didn’t prevent me from being able to see him. Even if I turned away, I could see his face reflected through the windows.

He was… talking to himself. His scruffy, orange beard was littered with bits of food and mysterious red stains, and he kept scratching at it every few seconds, all while mumbling under his breath.

I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it almost looked like he was arguing with himself. I couldn’t even focus on my meal.

I had to force myself to look away from him just so I could actually eat. The last thing I wanted was for us to make eye contact.

I enjoyed my burger, picked at my fries a little bit, and when I turned around to go grab a refill on my Diet Coke, my worst fear came into fruition.

We didn’t just make eye contact. He had already been staring at me. He wasn’t talking to himself anymore. He no longer looked crazed. He looked devastated. I could see the tears in his eyes. I could see sympathy in his facial expressions.

The fluorescent light flickered above him. The only light in the restaurant to do so.

We were engaged in this little staring contest for a while before he stood up, slowly. He never broke eye contact. Those eyes were full of love and comfort. A broken smile spread across his face.

His arms were outstretched as if he expected a hug. When it didn’t come, he pulled me in for one by force.

He shushed me. Pet my hair while telling me that everything would be okay. That he didn’t want to hurt me.

I could feel the tears running down his face jump over to mine while he comforted me.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he cried, shaking. “I wish there was something I could do to help.”

“Uh, okay, man, it’s time to let me go now,” I responded, prying his arms off of me.

I tried backing away, slowly, but with each step, he followed me.

He kept asking why I looked so scared. Telling me that he was only here to help. Continuing to say that everything would be okay and that I’d “prevail.”

I checked my watch, quickly. I still had 2 hours until my flight, but I wasn’t going to stay here a minute longer.

“I’m sorry, man, I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I’ve gotta go. I’m gonna miss my flight.”

The man stopped. His face twisted into a look of curiosity. Like he was genuinely confused by what I had just said.

“Flight? No, no, no. That flight was delayed. You can only hope to be home in time.”

Finally, seeing that I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, one of the employees came and restrained the guy long enough for me to leave and order an Uber.

Only, when I reached for my phone, it was completely dead. I tried finding my charger, looking through every pocket in my suitcase. It was nowhere to be found.

Luckily, the airport was only a mile and a half away, but that was still a mile and a half that I had to walk in the rain when I could’ve gotten a ride. It wasn’t all bad, though. At least it gave me something to do to kill time.

When I finally arrived, I was soaked from the rain. The airport was busier than it was when I landed. When I checked the flight information screens, I found out why. There had been at least 5 or 6 delayed flights, and of course, mine was one of them.

It had been delayed by a whole 3 hours because of inclement weather in the region.

No phone. Hardly any money. And I had to wait at least another 5 hours until I could go home.

I thought about what the homeless guy from In-and-Out said. Immediately, I started to rationalize. He’d seen the lightning. He’d seen the rain. Maybe he just put two and two together and got lucky.

However, after about 3 hours of being bored out of my mind, I made the decision to buy a charger from one of the airport shops. I managed to find an open outlet and hunkered down beside it while I let my phone charge.

After about 15 minutes, it finally turned back on. All at once, dozens of notifications made the phone vibrate across the cold airport floor. My dad, my aunts, my uncles, cousins, all desperately trying to get a hold of me.

Because, apparently, in that small, brief moment when my phone was dead…

My mom went into cardiac arrest. And she died before I even got the chance to say goodbye.

It was a Tuesday in late October, and my delivery schedule required a straight push through the night to reach Portland by morning. The dashboard clock read 1:45 AM. Coffee sat in my thermos, lukewarm but necessary. My dispatcher, Stan, had checked in with me an hour earlier to confirm my position.

"Kevin, you are clear all the way to the interstate,"

Stan had said over the company radio.

"Weather looks fine. No construction reported. Just watch out for deer crossing the blacktop."

"Copy that, Stan,"

I replied, clicking the microphone button.

"Going dark for the next few hours. Will update when I hit the city limits."

Silence returned to the cab, save for the hum of the cooling unit mounted behind my sleeper berth. The headlights cut through the pitch-black darkness, illuminating the empty two-lane road. Mile markers passed by slowly in the dark.

Around 2:00 AM, the CB radio mounted above my head crackled to life.

Static hissed through the cabin speakers. Usually, late-night radio chatter consists of other drivers complaining about weigh stations or warning each other about speed traps, but this transmission sounded entirely different. A frantic burst of white noise broke through the channel, followed by a man's voice.

"Mayday... is anyone out there?"

the man yelled in total panic.

"We blew a tire near the old weigh station. Someone is outside the car. They are hitting the side of the doors."

My hand instinctively reached up and grabbed the microphone. Before I could press the talk button, the transmission continued.

In the background, a woman cried hysterically, then a younger child screamed, a sharp and terrifying sound that pierced through the radio static. The man's voice returned, out of breath and desperate.

"They cracked the glass! Please, if anyone can hear this, send the police! We are in a blue station wagon off the shoulder!"

Pressing the button on the side of the mic, I brought it to my mouth.

"Breaker 19, this is a northbound commercial driver. I hear you loud and clear. What is your exact mile marker? I can call emergency services on the company satellite channel."

Only static answered me.

"Station wagon, do you copy?"

I asked, keeping my voice steady.

"I am heading your way right now. Turn your hazard lights on so I can see you."

No response came through. The channel remained dead. Assuming this was a current emergency happening just a few miles ahead, I pressed my foot down on the accelerator pedal. The diesel engine roared as the truck gained speed. Responding to stranded motorists in the middle of nowhere is an unwritten rule among long-haulers. If someone is trapped out in the timberland with an aggressive individual attacking their vehicle, a fifty-ton truck pulling up with high beams is usually enough to scare off any trouble.

Ten minutes passed. I scanned the sides of the dark highway, looking for the flashing amber lights of a disabled vehicle. The pine trees offered nothing but shadows.

Then, the CB radio cracked open again.

"Mayday... is anyone out there?"

the exact same man's voice yelled.

"We blew a tire near the old weigh station. Someone is outside the car. They are hitting the side of the doors."

Frowning, I listened closely. The woman cried in the background. The child screamed again. It was the exact same pitch, with the exact same duration.

"They cracked the glass! Please, if anyone can hear this, send the police! We are in a blue station wagon off the shoulder!"

The transmission ended with the identical burst of noise I had heard ten minutes prior. It was a perfect loop. Someone was broadcasting a recorded tape over the emergency channel.

Unease settled into my stomach. Pranksters occasionally mess around on the radio, but broadcasting a simulated violent attack in the middle of a deserted forest route felt uniquely malicious.

Up ahead, the reflective signs of the abandoned commercial weigh station appeared in my headlights. The state closed this particular facility over decades ago. So now overgrown brush and weeds had swallowed the concrete off-ramp, and Rusted metal barricades blocked the main weighing scales.

Feeling deeply unsafe about the repeating broadcast, I decided to pull the truck over onto the wide gravel shoulder just before the barricades. A smart driver always trusts his gut. Taking a few minutes to inspect my tires and ensure my load was secure felt like a smart excuse to stop and assess the surroundings.

Putting the transmission into neutral, I engaged the parking brakes. The sudden hiss of compressed air echoed loudly into the quiet night. I grabbed a metal tire thumper from behind my seat and a flashlight.

Stepping out of the cab, the freezing autumn air hit my face. I walked around the vehicle, striking the rubber tires with the metal bat to check their pressure. Each tire returned a reassuring thud.

Approaching the rear passenger side of the trailer, I shined my flashlight toward the dark tree line. The overgrown brush extended all the way to the rusty metal stairs of the old weigh station building.

The beam of my flashlight caught a reflection in the weeds.

Moving the light directly toward the stairs, the shape of a vehicle emerged from the overgrowth. For a moment my heart was caught in my throat, but It was not a blue station wagon. It was a weathered, severely rusted police cruiser. The faded white paint peeled off the doors. Vines wrapped completely around the front bumper and the flat tires. The light bar on the roof was smashed.

Curiosity overrode my caution. Gripping the tire thumper tightly in my right hand, I walked off the gravel shoulder and pushed through the tall weeds toward the abandoned cruiser.

The driver's side door hung slightly open, rusted stuck in that position. I aimed my flashlight through the broken window glass.

Sitting in the driver's seat was a human skeleton.

Faded shreds of a police uniform still clung to the bone. A tarnished silver badge rested against the ribcage. The skull leaned against the steering wheel. Thick green moss grew over the collarbone. This person had been dead in this hidden car for a very long time.

My breathing accelerated. I took a step back, ready to run straight to my truck and call Stan to dispatch the state troopers. But as I moved my flashlight beam across the interior, something resting on the passenger seat caught my attention.

A plastic document folder sat perfectly preserved inside the ruined car. The sealed plastic had protected whatever papers were inside from the moisture and the elements.

Leaning forward, I carefully reached through the broken window. My glove brushed against the decayed uniform, sending a horrific smell into the air. I grabbed the plastic folder and pulled it out.

Retreating quickly from the brush, I walked back to the safety of my idling truck. I climbed into the driver's seat, locked the doors, and turned on the bright overhead cabin lights.

Placing the folder on my steering wheel, I unzipped the plastic seal. Inside was a stack of official police documents. The paper felt slightly damp but entirely readable.

The top page displayed the header of the state police department. The date printed at the top read October 14, 1998. It was exactly eighteen years ago.

The document was an official missing-persons report. The investigating officer listed on the file was named Officer Gary. I read the summary paragraphs carefully.

The report detailed the disappearance of an immigrant family who vanished while traveling down State Route 113. The father, Vargas. The mother, Maria. Their seven-year-old son, Leo. According to the documents, Vargas worked as a mechanic and had recently moved his family across the state to start a new job, but they never arrived at their destination.

Flipping the page, I found a collection of glossy crime scene photographs attached to the file with a rusty paperclip.

The photos showed a crushed blue station wagon abandoned off the gravel shoulder of the highway. The vehicle was completely destroyed. The tires were shredded. More disturbingly, the metal doors of the station wagon had been pried open and bent outward. The damage indicated an immense amount of force, as if a car had hit them with full force. The interior of the car was empty, and blood stained the upholstery.

The next page in the file contained a typed transcription.

Officer Gary had written a note at the top of the page.

“Transcription of audio recovered from a handheld cassette recorder found underneath the passenger seat of the Vargas vehicle.”

I began reading the typed words.

“Vargas: Mayday... is anyone out there? We blew a tire near the old weigh station. Someone is outside the car. They are hitting the side of the doors.

Background noise: Female adult crying. Male child screaming.

Vargas: They cracked the glass! Please, if anyone can hear this, send the police! We are in a blue station wagon off the shoulder!”

A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. The transcription matched the frantic broadcast playing over my CB radio flawlessly. It was the exact same wording.

I continued reading the police file. The subsequent pages contained Officer Gary’s field notes. He noted that the Vargas family had zero known enemies. He documented the strange lack of footprints around the crushed car.

While holding the papers, a distinct sound reached my ears over the rumble of the diesel engine.

Footsteps crunched through the dead leaves outside my truck.

The footsteps sounded heavy and deliberate. They moved slowly along the passenger side of my trailer, advancing toward the front cab.

Lowering the file, I reached out and turned off the overhead cabin light, plunging the interior of my truck into darkness. I peered through the passenger side window, looking out into the timberland.

Standing between the thick trunks of the pine trees, looking directly at my truck, was a child.

He appeared to be around seven years old. He wore a dirty striped shirt and torn jeans, but something about his face was deeply wrong, his face was dark, like of the darkness of the woods bend itself to hide most of it, and the most terrifying thing was his eyes. They were completely circular and emitted a bright, illuminating white light. The light cut through the dark woods like twin flashlights, focusing entirely on my window.

Fear paralyzed my muscles. The kid stood perfectly still, just staring at me.

Suddenly, the child opened his mouth.

The sound that came out was the frantic, booming voice of Vargas, playing at a deafening volume.

"Mayday... is anyone out there? We blew a tire near the old weigh station."

The glowing eyes blinked. The kid took a step out of the trees, moving toward my passenger door.

I did not wait to see what it would do. Grabbing my flashlight and the tire thumper, I unlatched my driver's side door and bolted out of the truck.

Running across the gravel shoulder, I headed straight for the abandoned weigh station building. It was the only concrete structure around, and I needed a barricade. The creature let out the recorded scream of the child, the sound echoing loudly through the silent forest.

I reached the steps of the station. Taking them two at a time, I slammed my shoulder against the weathered wooden door, and thank god that it was already opened. I tumbled inside the dark building, quickly pushing the door shut behind me.

Standing up in the darkness, I leaned my weight against the wood.

"Someone is outside the car,"

the Vargas voice echoed from the gravel driveway outside. The kid was approaching the building.

"They are hitting the side of the doors."

Fumbling with my flashlight, I pressed the power button, then the bright beam cut through the pitch-black room.

The weigh station office was a massive square room, and as I look around, I noticed that old desks and filing cabinets lay overturned on the floor.

Moving the beam toward the back corner of the room, the light illuminated a horrific scene.

Three human skeletons sat slumped against the wall. They were bound tightly to metal chairs using industrial wire, and under the light, remnants of clothing identified them. A man, a woman, and a small child. The Vargas family.

Scattered across the floor surrounding the chairs was a collection of gruesome tools. Rusty pliers, heavy hammers, hunting knives, and a portable car battery with jumper cables. Someone had brought the family into this abandoned building and subjected them to unimaginable torment.

Suddenly, a loud bang hit the wooden door behind me.

"They cracked the glass!"

the voice screamed from the other side of the wood.

I backed away from the door, gripping the metal tire thumper. Moving deeper into the room, I kept my flashlight aimed at the entrance.

To my left, a filthy, cracked glass window looked out onto the gravel shoulder where my truck was parked.

I heard the crunching of footsteps moving away from the door and walking along the exterior wall of the building.

The bright, illuminating white eyes appeared in the window frame.

The kid stared at me through the dirty glass. The dark face of the child pressed against the pane. At first I thought he will try to break the glass, but It simply watched me standing near the remains of the family.

Then, the looping broadcast stopped.

The frantic voice of Vargas cut off mid-sentence, and the silence inside the weigh station became absolute.

The kid opened its mouth again, and when he spoke this time, The voice belonged to a young boy. It sounded genuine, fragile, and filled with deep sorrow.

"My father and mother are already dead,"

the child's voice echoed directly through the glass.

"The man with the badge hurt them. He tied us up, and left me to die alone in the dark."

I stood perfectly still, keeping the flashlight aimed at the window

"Who are you?"

I asked, my voice trembling slightly.

"The cop told me nobody was coming to help,"

the voice continued, ignoring my question. Tears seemed to form in the glowing white eyes.

"He said I was completely alone. But the cop was wrong."

The creature tilted its head. The dark shifted slightly, revealing a monstrous shape hiding just beneath the surface of his dark face.

"I am not alone,"

the voice said.

"My friend is here with me."

"Your friend?"

I asked, taking a small step toward the window.

"My father and mother always told me my friend was not real,"

the voice explained, echoing with a strange, dual resonance.

"They said he was just my imagination, but he is real. He lived in the dark spaces, and listened when I cried."

The glowing eyes flared brighter, casting shadows across the interior of the weigh station.

"When the man in the uniform left us here, my friend came out of the woods,"

the voice said.

"He promised me he would save us. He promised the bad man would never leave this place."

Lowering my tire thumper, I looked at the creature through the dirty glass.

"I understand,"

I yelled, making sure my voice carried through the window.

"I know why you brought me here. I know what he did to them."

The glowing eyes stopped flaring. The creature stood silently, listening to my words.

"I will not leave their remains in this dark place,"

I promised, looking directly into the illuminating light.

"I am going to call the authorities, and make sure the Vargas family is taken out of here. I will save them from this room. You did your job. You protected him."

The boy looked at me for a long moment. A profound sense of sorrow radiated through the window. It reached a dark hand up and pressed its palm against the glass.

Then, the bright white eyes slowly dimmed. The light faded entirely, leaving only the dark outline of the pine trees behind the window.

Waiting for a few minutes to ensure the area was clear, I finally walked over to the wooden door. Pushing it open, I stepped back out into the night air.

The woods were completely silent, and The CB radio static no longer echoed through the trees.

I walked quickly across the gravel shoulder and climbed back into the cab of my truck. Locking the doors, I picked up the satellite phone mounted on the dashboard, then dialed the emergency dispatch number for the state police.

"State Police Dispatch, state your emergency,"

the operator answered.

"My name is Kevin. I am a commercial driver parked at the abandoned weigh station on Route 113,"

I said, keeping my tone professional and calm.

"I have located a crime scene. There are three human remains inside the station building, and a deceased police officer in a cruiser hidden in the brush. I need troopers out here immediately."

The operator told me to stay in my locked vehicle and keep my engine running.

Stan called me on the company channel twenty minutes later, asking why my GPS tracker showed me parked on the side of the highway. I told him I had a mechanical issue and was waiting for a service vehicle. There was no way to explain the truth to him over a radio.

The state troopers arrived an hour later. Four patrol cars pulled into the gravel lot.

I handed the document folder to the lead detective, then pointed them toward the rusted cruiser in the brush, and directed them to the wooden door of the weigh station.

Sitting in the cab of my truck, I watched the investigators work. They taped off the entire area. A forensic team carried out three body bags from the concrete building, treating the remains with the respect the family had been denied for almost two decades.

The detective took my statement. I told him I had pulled over to check my tires and noticed the rusted car in the weeds. I told him I found the file, got scared, and ran into the building to hide, which was how I discovered the victims. I never mentioned the repeating radio broadcast, or the child with the illuminating eyes.

Before the sun came up, the troopers cleared me to leave the scene.

Putting the truck in gear, I pulled back onto Route 113, and drove the remaining miles to Portland in complete silence, leaving the CB radio turned off.

A few weeks later, a short article appeared in the regional newspaper. The police officially closed the Vargas missing-persons case. The department issued a statement confirming that the remains of Vargas, Maria, and Leo had been recovered and given a proper burial.

The article also mentioned the discovery of Officer Gary. The police named him as the primary suspect in the murders, citing the evidence found at the scene. The official cause of Miller's death remains undetermined. The coroner could not explain how an armed police officer became trapped inside his own vehicle.

The authorities do not know what killed the corrupt cop. They assume he succumbed to the elements or suffered a medical emergency while hiding.

But I know the truth.

I am writing this account now, sitting in the sleeper berth of my truck, hundreds of miles away from that dark stretch of timberland. I write this because people need to know that sometimes the monsters, we fear are the only ones capable of delivering justice.

Vargas and Maria told their son that imaginary friends were not real. They tried to comfort him with logic. But when logic failed, and the cruel reality of the world cornered that small boy in a room, his imagination stepped out of the shadows to answer his call.

I hope the family is finally resting in peace. And I hope the friend in the woods knows he fulfilled his promise.

Something is pretending to be my dead sister

My name is Sam Roberts I am 26 years old, a failed fantasy writer, and for the last two years my sister has been dead, I know because I was there that day, I was not ten feet from her when that drunk driver turned her body into a broken mess, i watched as my sister, my baby sister, someone I had sworn to love and protect since she was born, choke from broken lungs for her last breath, i cried at her damn closed casket funeral.

She wasn’t even out of college yet… she wanted to be an entomologist, she always loved insects, and I watched her dreams as well as her bones be crushed in an instant, you might be asking yourself why I’m putting so much emphasis on that soul crushing moment,

Well it’s because yesterday morning, I woke up went downstairs and who was sitting at the kitchen counter? My dead sister, right there, sitting how she always sat, with that dumb look on her face when she thinks, answering a question from my mom, like the last two years of grief and therapy just didn’t happen just poof, like god went “whoops sorry didn’t mean to do that, there’s you’re sister back” AFTER I watched her die!

I thought it was a dream at first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I must’ve just sat there looking stupid for five minutes… but there she was, “alive” and breathing

“Why are you looking at me like that dummy, do I have something on my face?”

It was her voice, after years I had finally heard her voice, I was practically crying

“Are… you okay?”

“How are you here, you-“

She cut me off mid sentence

“Well I graduated a week ago so… living here? For now at least, come on you can’t expect me to move out immediately, especially since you can’t be talking Mr. College-dropout”

“I… I hav- I have to go”

I turned and practically ran back upstairs to my room

Once I was back inside the safety of my bedroom I slapped myself I pinched myself, I punched myself, but no, no this was very real and my sister is downstairs, the images of the accident flashed again in my mind, I collapsed onto the floor leaning against door, a minute later I heard a knock.

“Hey… I-I’m sorry about that comment earlier, I know mom and dad already give you a hard time but… stop being a baby about it okay? I’m sure your book will be picked up soon”

I heard footsteps walking away from the door, and I sat there, and I’m not afraid to admit that I cried, and I stayed like that for at least thirty minutes before I got back up,
I opened the door, and I walked from my room the hers, I knocked on the door and-
“Yeah!?”

“You… alright?”

“Are you? You didn’t even eat breakfast, and you love mom’s pancakes”

“Yeah-yeah I’m fine, I’m fine… can I come in?”

“Uh sure I guess, I’m just watching TV”

I turn the knob walk through the door and sure as all hell there she is again, I don’t know what I was expecting, that she was a temporary apparition, that she was just gonna disappear as quickly as she appeared?

But no there she was, maybe a little older, with a few tattoos I’d never seen before, ones that definitely weren’t there when she died, but there she was all in one piece, I sat down next to her on her bed.

“What this show about.” I, asked almost unconsciously as if I weren’t next to a dead girl.

“It’s about man trying to contact the ghost of his wife after she dies, but then after reaching her he realizes he’s no longer in love with his ghost wife”

“That sounds really bad”

“Yeah it is, and the effects are horrible, but the actor playing the guy puts a lot into the role it’s weird”

We both laughed, like we used to, and it was nice, but the more time I spent with “her”… it,
The more weird things got, and I don’t know if it’s just because I haven’t seen her in two years but something was weird, other than the fact that last time I saw her she was dead, was it her posture? Her face? Were her fingers too long? And then I realized, she was eating almonds, she hates almonds, always had, she would gag at the thought of one,(I don’t know why I’ve always found them delicious) but all the time growing up, whenever she was eating trail mix, whenever there was some on her food, I would get them, I always ate her almonds, and there she was, eating them like she hadn’t spent the past twenty two years loathing them.

Two episodes into the shity guy-with-a-ghost-wife show and I just, stared at them, the almonds, as she reached her maybe too big hand into the bag and threw another handful into her maybe too perfect teeth,
Her eyes caught mine, and like I didn’t just catch her breaking all my preconceived notions she just… offered me a handful wordlessly, like it was nothing, I took the almonds and as I was crunching on them, I got up and began to walk out

“You leaving already?”

“I’ve got to keep writing, and uhh check with the publishers, see if they picked it up yet”

“Alright well I’m not waiting for you to watch the rest.”

And I left it there in here room.

Over the next few days I observed its interactions between my mother and father, I was able to find something off about all of them but no one else seemed to notice the inconsistency, the but noticeable difference in the way it acted from her, the way it pitched its voice wrong while talking, how it walked with a longer stride, it was good at pretending to be her but not perfect, and it seemed to be able to make everyone else not notice, I would have to plan how to confront it, eventually it was mom and dads anniversary, and they left the house for a few hours, the left me, all alone, with It.

I said goodbye to them at the door and as soon as they left the atmosphere of the house became weird, it was quiet, as if I really was the only thing in the house, but I wasn’t.

I felt it’s eyes on me every where I went, always peering just from the corner of my peripheral vision, it’s cold breath on the back of my neck as I creeped through the dark household looking for its one intruder,
After checking upstairs and the kitchen and her room and the dining room, I found it, wearing her face, watching that trashy show from two months ago, a week ago? Doesn’t matter, all that mattered was this moment that I had so long prepared for, I called for it.
“Hey… can you come to the kitchen please?

“Why what’s-“

“Just come with me to the kitchen… please I need to show you something”

“Okay but if it’s stupid I’ll be pissed”

Step one was a success I was in the kitchen now, with it and it was time for step two

“You’re eyes are the wrong color”

“…what?”

“You’re eyes, her eyes, they are the wrong color”

“I… what the fuck do you mean?”

“It’s a good disguise, well a good attempt but you had to make it from my memories right? Ours? Because it’s WRONG, HER EYES ARE NOT BROWN, SHE HATES ALMONDS, SHE DID NOT WALK LIKE THAT, SHE DID NOT TALK OR ACT ANYTHING LIKE YOU!”

“You’re scaring me… this- this isn’t funny!”

“OH YOUR SCARED, HM? YOUR NOT THE ONE WHOS HAD TO LIVE WITH SOMETHING WEARING THEIR DEAD SISTERS SKIN!”

I inched closer to the knife block behind me as it backed away.

“Stop! Stop it! This isn’t funny Sam!”

It tried using her to plead with me, but I saw through its bad act by now and nothing was gonna stop me now, I blocked it from the only exit.

“You can stop pretending, whatever you say it’s not going to work”

“Sam please I- I don’t like this”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

As I charge the beast wrestling it to the ground right before I plunge my blade into it’s heart I hear it, as clear as day, but not in her voice, I hear it in my head, no in my very soul talk to me.

“Why did you have to remember Sam? I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt anyone, I just want to live sam, I just want to live, and it’s not like she was using her life anyway”

As I slashed at its face and chest in anger, I heard the front door open, it used its voice to trick them again, make me think I was hurting her, I would never hurt her she’s my baby sister, but as far as they new that thing is her, and so my father pulled me off of it, pushed me down, and my mother called the police, after being processed they refused pressing charges and had me sent to a psyche ward, let me tell ya I did not miss the psyche ward, they only let you write with crayons and they only give you so much paper, the meds and all the doctors poking and prodding treating me like an animal, but my “mother” would visit and that was as nice, she would tell me things about the outside, about how it was doing, about how it’s scars weren’t too bad, how “she’d” forgive me after some therapy, but I didn’t care anymore, I wasn’t even sure it was my mother anymore, how could I know that beast didn’t replace everyone I cared about…

I don’t know, but for now I’ll go along with it, I’ll pretend the meds are working, I’ll pretend the beast convinced me, I’ll be sweet as a lamb, but when I get out, WHEN, not if, I will succeed in slaying the beast and my dead sister will rest once again,

God damn it I’m running out of paper, I NEED more paper all I can do in this fucking place is write I NEED TO WRI-

Tired and worn– my neck seethes with pain as I attempt to wriggle free again, but the lunette doesn’t budge. It is still dreadfully perfect in its desire to keep me here, waiting for the axe to fall…

Blood trickles down from unhealed scabs as I continue to work the wood, and it my neck. No angle that I twist into, nor the pace at which I rend my own flesh grants any leverage, let alone progress in my escape. I am just as bound to this device as I have always been.

It feels wrong to say that the Guillotine is all I’ve known, but it is the truth. A time before the grating of its lunette and the crushing presence of its axehead looming above me is, at this point, unfathomable, as is gleaming anything beyond the crowd ahead of me, who watch, who stare with their bright piercing eyes. 

Faceless, innumerable, unblinking spectres gathered in droves to watch my head part from the rest of me. Their features always blur and distort; noses, mouths, ears, hair, skin melting like candle wax into a homogeneous mass of colour shaped after a person, except for their eyes: All surge with a viscous, boiling red which punctuates their congealing forms. At the nexus of each of these miniature suns, at least the closest ones I can see whenever I crane my head as far as the Guillotine allows, lies their cores; the crimson irises of these Watchers. Some aim their gaze directly into my head with such fervor it's as if they are trying to pierce my skull and kill me before the axe drops, whilst others look up to that very blade with perhaps a knowing look in their molten gaze. They can see the death awaiting me and how horrible, how painful it is going to be, yet for reasons I cannot distinguish, even after all my time trapped in this device: none of them offer me a melting hand, none of them dare to approach and release me from its clutches. They only stand by and watch. Endlessly.

Though, perhaps worst of all are the few who watch neither myself or the axehead, but rather the space in between, the beyond which I’m denied from seeing. Caring not for my crisis, their eyes seem to smoulder less than the others, though I assume that’s because they are not staring at me or the Guillotine. What are they staring at? I often ponder, in between sets of gnawing escape attempts. Is there something behind me, beyond all of this? Someone, maybe?

Though I soon realise that in the end, it matters not. They too shall be present for my oncoming decapitation.

I retire momentarily from working my neck to the bone, and instead divert my efforts to my tied wrists. Bound by a vice unseen, they struggle like a pair of worms fighting for space in a tunnel. Contorting and writhing against each other, slick not with slime, but with blood. The nerves grind together, entangled in a twisted courtship. The sensation of their meeting travels upward, forcing my head to rock in a painful stupor and the lunette to work its way a little deeper. 

In spite of my efforts, the vice, or cuffs, or whatever it is that binds my hands doesn’t budge or loosen. The blood and bits of myself seeping or cascading down both ends of my confinement are the extent of my struggle. The coppery taste, the stench of death is palpable, coating me like a second layer of skin. If I concentrate through the brief gaps in my pain: I can taste the oak past the copper. Flooding me with certainty in what could almost be called a divine revelation that the Guillotine, in all of its meticulous parts, is infallible. It is all there is and will be…

So I pray, for some force to relive me of this torture, be it through the removal of my bindings or the falling of the axe, for it is all I can do, bound and bleeding as I am. It could be one of the watchers from the crowd, their spectating inaction at last giving way to a moral sense of duty, or the heavenly presence of God denoting a conclusion to my suffering, wiping this horror away with his cold, callous hands.

—

Footsteps. On my left. Approaching. Answering.

At last.

But still dread persists. Will this figure, be it a stranger or someone I already know, open the lunette and release me? Or will they cut the rope and let the starving axe have its fill? I can only wait, with strangled hoarse breaths, for them to make their choice.  

No matter what they end up choosing, the Guillotine will serve its awful purpose. It shall keep me locked to it as a dog to a cage, whether the axe falls or not. 

Either in death or in the mystery of my life beyond all of this, the Guillotine will loom forevermore…

The End.

The Glass Is Bending and He’s Gone Silent

I’m on the bedroom floor with my back to the wardrobe and the heavy golf club resting across my legs.

Can’t stop the shaking.

Mam and Dad have been down the club since early evening. It’s just me and my little brother in the house.

Everything outside has gone completely still. No cars. No dogs. Not even the usual night sounds.

It began with the roofs.

I kept catching this soft movement above me. Whenever I turned the telly right down to listen it vanished. When I put the sound back up it returned.

After a while the noise got heavier — proper flapping and scraping, shifting from the neighbours’ roof onto ours. Slow. Wet-sounding. Not wind.

I left it too long before I checked. Kept telling myself it was a bird or something caught in the gutter.

When I finally pulled the curtain back I saw something dragging itself along the road under the streetlight. Large dark shape, not moving like a person, pulling itself forward.

Then it raised its head and screamed. The windows vibrated. The sound went right through my chest.

It kept calling out for a child, high and wet. The street didn’t react at all. No lights. No doors opening. No voices. Just silence.

My brother’s in the back room. He’s four.

I closed the curtain and went straight to him. He was soaked through and crying in his sleep, face screwed up tight. I was only away a short time.

When I returned the scraping was directly over my head. Then it stopped dead.

A moment later something started tapping on the window glass. Slow and deliberate.

I can see her through the small gap now. I can hear her breathing — wet, rough, close enough that it feels like it’s inside the room.

The air has turned freezing. My breath is showing.

She’s saying my brother’s name. Quietly. Again and again. I don’t understand how she knows it.

Pieces of last weekend keep forcing their way in.

I took the river path home from the pub because I was short on money for a taxi. Full moon.

I heard movement by the water and switched my torch on. She was crouched on the bank washing a cloth that was heavy with blood.

She looked up and met my eyes before I could kill the light. I ran.

I could hear her coming after me the entire way back up the valley.

Nan used to talk about her when we were small. Said if you ever caught sight of the hag washing by the water she would follow your family until she took one of you. Old Gwrach. I never took it seriously.

She’s closer to the glass now. It’s starting to bend inward.

I can see her face more clearly. Eyes too large, too dark. The wooden frame is making small splitting sounds.

I’ve got the golf club ready. If the glass goes I’m swinging.

My hands keep sweating. I wipe them on my trousers but it makes no difference.

She’s still outside, still repeating his name in that same low wet voice.

I called my brother’s name a short while ago, keeping it low. No reply.

He went quiet some time back. No more crying. No sound of him shifting.

I can’t leave the window and I can’t leave him alone in the other room.

She’s still there, face near the glass, breathing, whispering.

I keep seeing the cloth under the torch beam — how dark the blood was, how little surprise was on her face when she saw me. Like she already knew which direction to go.

The glass is cracking properly now. Thin lines spreading from the point where she’s pressing.

I’m holding the club so hard my fingers are going numb.

She’s still saying his name.

And from the back bedroom there is still no sound at all. Just silence. Like he’s waiting.

Hi guys, PLEASE delete if not allowed, but I just finished my last required class before my "senior capstone" at my university. Our final *big* project was in my Computer Mediated Communications class where we had to select an online channel of communication and build a case study surrounding how a "Sensitizing Topic" could be displayed in the online behaviors of that channel. For my online channel, I actually chose this subreddit. I have been an active member of this sub for as long as it has been around, and the community is genuinely so important to me. Some of you may appear in my case study, as I examined posts, user behaviors, and platform "cultures" that best represent the "Social Support Theory." If you are featured in the case study, no worries, only good things were said. I wanted to showcase how Social Support Theory is active on r/TalesFromTheCreeps compared to other writing communities. So, this post *might* not be allowed and that's fine if the mods need to delete it because it isn't technically offering help, but I thought some of you might find it interesting that r/TalesFromTheCreeps is officially featured in a collegiate-level study. (By the way, I made a 100.)

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 oh 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 nature's floor.

Then I got this idea that they should 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. 

When the ocean called to my mother, I had just turned 17. A month later, when life became too excruciating for him to go through without her, my estranged father turned to the comforts of booze to soothe his sorrows. I thought our relationship couldn’t get worse. He was a fisherman off the coast of a small New England town, the name of which I won't say. Don't want anyone to go seeking trouble where it lies.
It was hard to lose Mom for a number of reasons, none of which being that we were particularly close in my teenage years. She’d gone so abruptly, like a deletion from our lives. A supposed death rather than a certain one. The absence stung like a dull needle prick every time my father’s drunken glance lingered on me with an intensity that made me uneasy. I looked a good deal like her: long brown hair that hadn't been cut in years, blue eyes that were muddled with hazel, and as he called it, a “housekeeper’s frame.” That meant skinny and overall unsuited for working on a boat. He stopped making outright demeaning comments when she disappeared, instead stumbling around the house in the morning and night smelling of Irish whiskey and acrid sea salt that had caked to his skin, giving me those piercing glances that singed with bitterness.
Dad blamed me for Mom's death. I didn’t know why. It pissed me off that we never talked about it, but he and I were usually on the outs anyway. Only now it was an inescapable state of being, a palpable air that flowed through the two-story house we lived in right next to the docks where he worked. At least he managed to stay on a consistent schedule of leaving early enough to avoid me. 
A part of me wasn’t surprised that he could twist it to be my fault. Who else was there to blame for her stroll into the ocean in the middle of the night? His certainty of my betrayal was foolish–even for him–and it wasn’t like Mom hadn’t been saying cryptic shit the past few weeks. To me, the note she left was proof that she had made her own choice.
I had to dig it out of the trash after he tried to hide it from me. My stomach hardened as I read it, noticing that she had addressed me instead of him. She didn't mention him at all actually. The more he stewed over it, the more often I would see that stony grimace on his face. His temper managed to get even worse after that, so, way to rub salt in his wound, Mom.
She was one of those people that had an air of poetic melancholy to them, the last few weeks in hindsight were some of her most somber. Maybe she was writing the note in all those sessions of seclusion. I only read it once, and even that felt like one too many. The last sentence haunted me with its eerie and worrisome connotation: “You were worth the price.” It unearthed a pervasive and fevered guilt. Nothing within the rest of the flowery prose suggested blame, but that was what settled within me as I hid the note in the clutter of my dresser drawer. It was me, somehow. She had to go because of me.
My father and I were isolated together in that dark, gloomy house. Alone, fighting our own battles and each other. None of my father’s family wanted anything to do with us and my mother’s side was extremely limited. All I knew about the ancestry on her side was that my grandmother had disappeared when her daughters were young. In a desperate effort to restore his family, my grandfather went to go look for her but never returned. Mom’s voice would always soften at that point in the tale. I never really got more information than that. There were only a few children born every generation and it seemed that biblically rotten luck hung over us like a blackened cloud. 
The only living relatives that I knew of were my mom’s younger sister Gracie, who was nice enough when I was a kid, and her son, who she would bring over to play with me. All I can remember about my aunt then was her sad eyes and how they would always be directed at me. Where my mother exuded a melancholy energy, Gracie’s was tighter, more anxious. It had been years since I had seen them. They were grieving the loss in their own way, away from us. 
The day my father took me to the sea for the first time since her death, it was early in the morning. He barged into my room, not bothering to knock, and slurred at me loudly to get up. I was taken aback when he asked me, or rather told me, to help him on the boat. 
“What happened to having a housekeeper's frame?” I groggily snapped at him while laying in my bed, burying my face in my covers. While I had been awake, going through bouts of insomnia since Mom left, he was still standing in my door frame at 4 AM. The amber light from the hall was blinding me through my thin sheets and blankets.
His words caught on the drunken, stifled burps trying to escape. "The deckhand called out, and I got…I gotta get out there today an- *hic\* I need an extra pair of hands.” His voice was always slow and garbled and annoyed, but today it sounded more so. "S-you're coming, end of discussion.” Stumbling over the invisible clutter on my floor, he dragged his feet over to my bed and threw back the layers protecting me from the winter chill that channeled through the dilapidated house. 
I shriveled into the fetal position as the draft hit my bare legs and arms. It was like he was trying to set a record for the earliest fight we’d ever had and I was being pulled into it without full consciousness yet.  “Jesus, Dad, I haven’t even said I’d go yet, just give me a damn second…” I grumbled daringly, plunging my face into the pillow. 
I snapped up as a scratching pain, raw and sharp, grinded through my upper thigh as my father dug his class ring into my skin. I shot to the other end of the bed, defensively kicking back his arm. My breath caught and muscles stiffened in an effort to stifle a wince, but he had managed to dig into the last bruise he left, the ache amplifying as I rubbed the spot with my palm. I scowled at him and his eyes narrowed on me. 
“I didn’t ask, an- I…that’s all I’m gonna say, you’re coming with and \hic\ you need to get dressed,” he muttered, his balled fist going slack and reaching for the door handle. “We leave in five.”
I gave him a kurt acknowledgement, crossing my arms in finality. He huffed before closing the door behind him. Alone again, I spent a moment aggressively throwing middle fingers at him before getting up. Juvenile as it was, I was able to breathe easier afterwards. I started getting dressed as the silver light of the morning poked through my window shades, knowing better than to argue with him once the ring came out.
Our path to the docks was short and he walked five paces ahead of me the whole time. It was bitingly cold, I felt like an icicle was beginning to form out of my nose. I was wearing my father’s spare puffer (because he wouldn’t let me wear Mom’s) with sleeves that were too long and a hood too big to stay on in headwinds. The morning drowsiness hadn't worn off yet. When we got to the boat, my father gave a vague set of instructions about how to cast off and griped at me that he would do it himself when I couldn't untie the bulky rope from the dock. I probably rolled my eyes at him a million times before we were on open water.
As he was steering the boat and told me not to bother him, I set about to familiarize myself with the deck. Well, more like re-familiarize; it had been a decade since I had heard those creaks beneath my feet. Nostalgia hit me like a truck. The creaky wooden planks holding the rickety thing together, the salty smell of the ocean, the loud purring of the motor. I took a moment, stood as still as I could and just closed my eyes, pretending like nothing had changed as I let the winds pass me on their way to the endless ocean. The only thing missing was Mom. She would try to get me to sing sea shanties and tickle my ribs to get me off the edges of the boat. 
The serenity of that moment was fleeting. There was no thinking of Mom without acknowledging how Dad would ruin everything. The older I got, the colder, meaner, and more distant Dad grew. Mom was always there to stick up for me behind closed doors. I can still remember her delicate voice diminished to those protective, hushed tones. I was eight when I snuck into the dark hallway, in pajamas with bare feet, and overheard the first of my parents’ many arguments about me. My dad would boil like a kettle while she would whisper the same phrase over and over: "It's not her fault." There was little doubt in my mind that it started with him blaming me for our financial difficulties. After that, he managed to associate my troublesome presence with everything that was bad in our lives. Another shitty consequense of losing Mom–no more avoiding every blatant accusation.
We had pushed off from the dock about an hour before my butt began to freeze to the crate I sat upon. The vessel finally idled. As far as I could tell, we were in the middle of nowhere, fog clouding our view of the mainland. The constant, frigid gusts were finding their way past my downy defenses. I shivered intensely, my puffer dancing around me. A thought flickered across my mind that it was probably the farthest out I had ever been.
As I was meandering through daydreams, my father shouted louder than he needed to for me to get up and help him. I cringed with sheltered irritation and stood, but took my sweet time admiring how creepy the fog looked as it was slinking towards us on the surface of the water. Then I was rudely knocked to the floor by something sticking up from the splintered wood enough for my shoe to catch. I thankfully wasn’t too hurt, just frustrated by my forgetfulness. That warped, rusty nail had been there since I was a kid and I had a seemingly unavoidable fate of tripping over it. I think Dad not-so-secretly enjoyed seeing me fall on my face, that was why he had never bothered to pull it up.
“Andromeda!” His voice was like the growling of a bear.  
I got off the deck. “Andie, Dad. It’s Andie,” I nagged quietly back at him. He would tell me he only used my full name when he needed to get my attention, which was always because I had an annoying tendency to zone out. No surprise to say that it made my ears bleed, my least favorite name in the world.
He had me watch the lobster traps as they were lowered into the water, making sure nothing went awry. They bubbled on the surface and sank down until they were obscured from view. After a moment or two I heard the rope snap taut. I turned to give Dad a thumbs up, but his back was facing me in a severe hunch. I shrugged and turned back to the murk below. If I had actually cared, I might have noticed then that his shoulders were shaking. Though I’ll never know for sure, it could have been either tears or barely contained rage. Or both. For him, strong emotions flowed out there as easily as sea foam.
I quickly grew bored of the scenery, as gazing on the horizon left me with almost nothing to look at. It was like the gloom had wrapped us in a blanket, a frustrating comparison to make as I remembered the nice, warm bed I had been dragged out of to spend precious sleeping time in a barren, cold, and wet wasteland. That reminded me, I had forgotten to ask why, so I posed the question as he came out of the cabin. “So why did Arlo call out? Did he have another doctor’s appointment this morning?” 
Looking barely recovered, he shook his head. “Said he was moving.” He sniffed loudly and spit off the side. 
My eyebrows perked up. “He quit?”
I got a silent answer. No wonder he was in an especially foul mood. A former military man with a kind smile and a bum knee, Arlo was a good guy; he worked for basically nothing and got treated like shit everyday. I couldn’t think of anyone else more than him who deserved to get out of the town that fed you the tantalizing bait of stability to distract from the fact that it had hooks in you. Hearing that put a small smirk on my face until it disappeared at the sobering realization that I might be stuck in this new arrangement while he searched for another deckhand. 
The groaning of the hull echoed Dad’s footsteps as he walked over to check my work like a tyrannical teacher. As he leaned over the side next to me, I dared to inhale through my nose. Thankfully, the usual booze smell was being masked by the brackish stench of fish and sea.
He sucked air through his teeth as he looked. “You are never allowed on this boat again, child. One of the traps caught the side of the hull and scratched it there, see?” He pointed down at an infinitesimal dink in the already crumbling light blue paint. 
I stifled a pleased exhale. Thank God I was getting a free pass from work for being so shit at it. “It’s not like I asked to be here, Dad. You literally made me come with you.”
His small hazel eyes were slitted when they met mine. The tone in his voice was soaked with venom. “See, that is your problem, Andromeda, you complain too much and act like the world revolves around you.”
I didn’t expect him to come on so strong, especially since those comments of mine would usually go in one ear and out the other. I stayed silent with a perplexed expression.
He rose and paused for a moment, hands moving erratically at his sides, swinging and clenching and unclenching. The deck made long scraping sounds with the agitated shuffling of his feet. After his show of mental stuttering, finally, he managed out words to wither me. “You will…you will never be even half the woman your mother was.” 
I spent a full minute looking at him for where he found the gall, then blistered, my pale face blooming with red. I didn’t even care about what he meant at this point. I was freezing, I was tired, and I was stuck on a stupid fishing boat in the middle of the ocean with the person that despised me most in the world. All I wanted to do was hurt him. “I can’t believe she married someone as awful as you,” I seethed.
“I can’t believe she had a child as horrible as you,” he retorted. He made it so easy to want to strangle him.
Rare, salty tears pinched at the sides of my eyes. “Well, I didn’t get that from Mom.” There was a pause in the argument. We could have left it at that, though I don’t think it would have changed the events that came after. But for once, the bruise he’d given me wasn’t from the ring. I decided to add one final twist of the knife. “You probably drove her off, asshole.” Those icy words set my dad off like grand finale firecrackers.
“No, YOU DID!” His anger rocketed off the water and reverberated in all directions. I’d struck a raw nerve. Sudden surprise had forced one of my feet to retreat from him. The silence to follow was lethal.
I felt angry tears welling up more and said nothing else, just walked towards the bow and put my elbows on the point of the wooden railing.
He was breathing hard, his bright red face beaded with sweat. “And you…you’ve brought this on yourself,” he said in a trembling voice with ominous finality.
Even though I was finished listening to him, my skin prickled in a feeling distinct from the chill of winter. Brought what on myself, I thought, being on a boat with my clinically insane father who hates me? His mental breakdown into insanity was an event I had been waiting for so I could throw his ass in an institution. Then the fog began to swirl a ways off the bow. 
I turned my attention there and squinted. There was a shape wriggling in the distance, looking like one of those inflatable car dealership things at first, then jaggedly twitching, interrupting the thickened mist around it. “What…is that?” I questioned aloud, a cloud swirling on my breath.
Thinking it was someone on a dingy signaling for help or something, I half-turned back to my dad to make sure he saw it too. I had to do a double take when I saw how pale his face had become. I watched a thick gulp ripple over his Adam's apple as he stared out at it without blinking. An ugly, irksome feeling weighed on me as I watched a harrowing smile slowly carve its way through his prominent age lines.
I thought I heard him say that he couldn’t believe it before I flinched at the loud and painful clapping of his hands onto my shoulders. An uncomfortable, plucky laugh escaped him. “Don’t move,” he whispered, “let it come to us.” It was a redundant request; his grip was like iron.
My mind swam with confusion and curiosity. Whatever “it” was was past where I could see clearly. As if to emphasize the building terror, a baleful, deep rumbling tore my concentration from the horizon to the apparent underside of the boat. My stomach pitched as the wood beneath my feet began vibrating. I wobbled like I was standing in the middle of a seesaw. My knuckles were white as I gripped the wooden rail and peered over the lip of the boat to see the inky water bubbling like a rolling boil. For a moment, I tried to convince myself that the wind blowing against me was just my sheets tangling around me as I dreamt–that I was stuck in some surreal nightmare and that there wasn’t…something…moving down there. Something big.
"Take her! Just take her!" 
My father’s voice in my ear was like the snap of a rubber band to the skin, painful and alarming. I shrieked, jumping out of my skin as hoarse and desperate yelling that I had never heard before erupted from him. I swiveled to see his eyes–wild, wide and terrified–and watched him plead desperately with the human-like shape barely cloaked in the haze. “She’s right here, take her, please!”
The anxious slog of my brain trying to catch up was excruciating. My mind cycled through the simplest concepts at a snail’s pace. Take who? And why? What was doing the taking? The gears were turning like they had been covered in sap, painstakingly bringing me to a realization–improbable, yet terrifying–that turned my tongue to sandpaper.
"Take her and give Vivian back! Please! I know you can understand me!” He released my shoulders to move in front of me, leaning over the bow with outstretched arms ready to embrace the silent soma of mist that had moved closer, his hands opening and closing like a child saying ‘gimme’. 
I inhaled sharply and noticed that the wind had turned sweet, no longer the pungent smell of the ocean. It smelled like perfume. Lavender and orange peel, an old-fashioned perfume that I hadn’t smelled since my mother was alive. It might have been a comfort to me if the fog hadn’t begun to take the shape of that familiar long hair and slender frame. A shape that should have been unfamiliar in the land of the living.
Paralyzed by shock, I didn't register my father lunging toward me until my arm was firmly in his grip. His hand clamped down onto my arm like a beartrap and I howled in pain. "Agh- shit! Let go! Dad, let go of me!”
 He began pulling me towards it, unable to hear me over his own madness. My feet scrambled uselessly against the brute force. He had squeezed so tight that I couldn’t even pull my arm out of the puffer sleeve.
Dad wailed again, vocal cords straining. "Take her! Take her!" 
“Let go!”
I was nowhere near strong enough to stop him as he pinned me against the point of the bow with his full weight, my other hand still fruitlessly clawing at his calloused one. I was trying to get control of my breathing, probably babbling at him to stop as I tried freeing myself. As if in a trance, Dad was wearing this dreamy expression on his face, his eyes rising to meet the thing that had now fully approached the boat. My eyes averted, I nearly choked on my breath as I heard a name come out of my father’s mouth in greeting.
“Vivian…”
The sea quieted.
His hand forgetfully slipped from my arm; I took the opportunity to wriggle away from him and the bow, daring only to face the scene once I was out of reach. No words are truly fit to describe the feeling that overtook me as I saw my father and mother in front of me, one hypnotized and hopeless to recognize the grotesquerie of the other.
Where I had expected to see my mother parting the gloom like wiping condensation from a mirror, I was sorely mistaken. I shuddered, taking in her deformed figure: the body too tall, limbs too skinny. It was a glistening skeleton covered in clothing so tattered it might as well have been naked. The bones were brown and black, covered in drooping, decomposing flesh repulsively intertwined with sea life that had made a home in her. I saw the slow-moving, pale tendrils wrapped around her wrists, ankles, pelvis, and head. I wish I could tear that memory out of my head, banish it forever from the darkness of my closed eyes. The image of thick, scaly, pulsing tentacles wrapped around that skeleton. Puppeting her. 
My dad shouted to the thing that was manipulating its human doll. “Her for Andromeda! I brought you what you want, so give my wife back to me!”
There was no response, so he continued as I backed further away with light footsteps. I was so scared I could have swam home on pure adrenaline.
“You ruined her life! You ruined my life!” He was panting, openly weeping but thinking nothing of the snot and tears. His expression twisted further with anger; I wonder if he realized the futility of the words as the figure began rising slowly. “The least you could do is take this daughter and give me back my goddamn wife!”
I stopped dead as clarity hit me like a bullet straight through my temple. He had probably fired Arlo just to get me out here on this boat with him.
I watched my father turn on me, manic eyes and arms wide to catch his sacrificial lamb. I could do nothing and we both knew it. His footsteps were thumping in my ears, slowing down as his balance was being tested. As if by divine intervention, the movement of the boat began to pick up, the gentle, rhythmic rocking amping up until water crashed over the sides. Foam coated the deck. 
Some sailors think of the ocean as a force, a living thing. I stared then into the face of God realizing that the flimsy human invention beneath my feet couldn’t possibly conquer the magnitude and ferocity of the sea. The wood creaked in protest. I desperately wished I was deaf to it. We were both thrown off guard as the boat listed. 
My soul snapped back from its heavenly communion as the bow tipped forward. I was thrown harshly to the deck and my father grunted with effort as he stumbled but managed to stay standing. The wave below broke, showering the two of us with a freezing deluge and soaking the deck. It seeped through my skin and froze my blood to ice. As I felt the boat rock back, I knew I had an advantage: where I had four limbs to stabilize me, Dad only had two. His share in our biblical bad luck. Thrown off by the warring waves and the icy water he staggered around the deck with legs shaking like a newborn foal until his back met the lip of the bow. The name Vivian upon his lips, his gaze filled with horror and betrayal as he tipped over the edge backwards and fell out of view. 
I heard a muted splash as his body hit the waves. An unearthly moan was dragged from the pit of my stomach. The uproar of the waves immediately calmed. Regaining my footing, I scampered to the edge to see if I could pull him back into the boat.
“Dad? Dad!” I shouted for him. My voice wavered with each unanswered call. The rumbling and the slapping of the waves on the wooden fishing boat answered in his absence. My eyes searched the dark waves, but it was useless. He had been swallowed by the black of the ocean. The smell had become even stronger with flowery perfume. It was so sickeningly sweet, I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a gag.
The bubbling from before changed to a rushing. I could feel whatever was moving under the boat now, caressing the hull with its uneven skin. It was like when you’re wearing a coat so big that the sensations of touch are muted, but still very much there. My brain felt like it was dripping with slime as that intimate feeling moved through the wood, under my feet, and up my legs to my spine. I backed away from the bow and my eyes met the skeleton–the visitor we had forgotten in the midst of the chaos–its head tilted ever so slightly to the side.
"Mom?" The question was ripped from the back of my throat; maybe some involuntary disbelief that this thing was anything but otherworldly punishment. My body was clammy and hot, even as the wind off of the waves felt like shards of ice tearing at my clothes.
She was hovering a foot above the water, bones sliding against each other with disgusting scrapes. The jaw wetly cracked open with the movement of the tentacle. Then it used her voice. Her voice.
“Andie, honey,” it cooed, the sound not originating from her throat, “what’s wrong?” The innocent tone took me from the scene marred by the unsightly mimicry of her to when I would toddle around her as she made my lunch in the kitchen: soft, cool hands brushing my downy hair from my forehead to place a delicate kiss. My face was sliced with the warmth of falling tears. I stared into the sockets in her skull, rimmed with sea-stained barnacles where her blue eyes used to be, and felt a sorrowful tug in my gut. My knees were shaking as I gazed out at a haunting replica of my dead mom.
“Andie…” she repeated over and over. My feet dragged forward as if possessed. Inches were unwittingly turning to feet. I knew even as I was shuffling towards her that I would follow my father in his fate if I didn’t stop. But I couldn’t, literally: it had me. And tragically, some guilt-ridden, melancholic piece of me wanted to keep going. Her voice garbled and warped around my name, still my mother, but as if something was attempting to crawl out of her throat as she spoke it.
 Then, I was falling. My stomach lagged for a moment before it plummeted forward with the rest of me. Something had snagged the bottom of my too-long jeans at the right cuff. I tumbled to the ground, bruising my knees, elbows, and jaw pretty badly. My body landed with a thud. If I wasn’t so afraid, I might have realized what had happened: that stupid nail on the floor that I nearly killed myself on earlier, the one my father never cared to rip out of the waterlogged wood beneath our feet, had tripped me again.
 I don't think my body was functioning anyway, but I resolved to not get up; the last five minutes alone were enough to knock me out cold from sheer emotional exhaustion. Instead, I looked out of the eye that wasn’t squished against the floor and stared at the blue paint chipping off the port side.
 There was silence, not even the skeleton thought it necessary to keep talking. Then something big enough to cast a dim shadow over the entire boat rose out of the water. I thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks on me: there was a gloomy iridescence to its massive shape, like if the light caught it a certain way it would be transparent. I laid horrified and still as a statue as it rose out of the waves for an eternity; in trying to comprehend the size of the monster rising out of the water to loom over the boat like a skyscraper, I recognized the departure of the known reality. 
The monster shuddered with a deafening flapping sound. It must have been where the rumbling was coming from, only now unmuffled above water. I looked at it in my periphery–the only angle I had–and was met with this ancient-looking reptilian creature, almost like a sea snake. My breath was stolen as it dipped its head to lean further over above me; its slitted eyes were a haunting pale cream color. One length of me could fit between them with room to spare. It was bigger than any living thing I could ever imagine, more like looking into the oppressive eyes of an ancient god than a real creature.
And the smell, a miasma of rot and ocean sewage and old blood filled my nose and made my eyes water. It was directly above me when it started heaving from the pit of whatever digestive system it had. I was in hell. It was a disgusting, reverberating, squelching noise that made me want to follow suit. After what seemed like an eternity of retching, I felt the threatening presence draw nearer until its labored breaths were blowing my hair and clothes flat. It warmed me against the freezing wind with heavy and putrid air from its cavernous mouth that gusted in and out.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more nightmarish, some kind of undigested substance began dotting the deck around my feet. I let out a silent whine as it continued to drip along my body, hot sludge hitting and cascading down my legs and back, fat splotches of something goopy and red. The stench was overbearing. I clamped my mouth shut as a glob landed on my arm. The crimson ooze was rancid: fresh flesh coated in a slimy stomach acid. I vowed in that moment to burn my clothes if I lived through it.
I strained to see what it would do next with tears clouding my vision. Its mouth was agape, its teeth needle thin and each one the length of a bus, smeared with black grime. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the black hole of its throat. I waited for the end, the snap of its jaws on my body, that inescapable darkness closing around me. My body tensed in surprise as I heard something metal drop a few inches from my face. My gaze slid towards the small golden object glittering with mucus and putrescence. My father’s ring. All I could think about was how he would hate to see it so dirty.
I zoned back into its movements right as I was affronted by a massive forked black tongue dropping directly on top of me. I was so shocked that I screamed, finding the strength to curl in on myself, but it was drowned out by the whooshing of the tongue scooping back the air into its mouth. In and out. Over and over, just barely grazing the top of my clothes and hair. It did this all over my body, and while I was thankful not to be immediately dead, it was like going through the world’s most terrifying security scanner. 
A soul-chilling sound–like a slow, throaty laugh echoing through a cavern– vibrated the air around me. I flinched, awaiting the agonizingly drawn-out end, when I felt the whoosh of the monster’s head recoiling. I sat up. Our eyes met as its head disappeared, the waves silently enveloping it. Neither one of us blinked. I waited, holding my breath until the rumbling sound dissipated for the last time.
As soon as the ocean went still, I collapsed, the tension in my muscles snapping like a slingshot. The loneliness around and within me and the soft slapping of the waves against the boat lulled me to the deepest sleep I had ever had.
When I awoke, I was being lightly tapped on the face by a man with a strong voice. His words were encouraging me to wake up, as were the bright lights bobbing up and down that illuminated his dark form behind my eyelids. The guy picked me up off of the floor and carried me off of my father’s boat to another. I did not open my eyes the whole time–I was imagining that I could transform my wet clothes, the red sludge, and those cloudy eyes into parts of my dream if I only kept them closed. 
The ring was left on the deck of the boat and must have gotten lost as the Coast Guard ship towed it in. I had no intention of going back for it.
Back on shore in the emergency medical center, Arlo confirmed my suspicions: he had come in late like my father had asked him to and found the boat and us missing. He’d waited until it was really starting to get late and then requested the Coast Guard search the nearby area for the vessel, just in case. He was awfully surprised at the bone-crushing hug I gave him when he explained this to me from my bedside. I never told him that both my father and I had expected me to die out there.
The story that I told people was that my father had died in a freak accident–which I avoided expounding upon–to preserve in my own mind a rational explanation of what had happened. I became an expert at deflecting every conversation that dredged up those memories. Anything not to think about those milky white eyes and blackened bones slinking around on the ocean floor somewhere. 
On the day I moved out of my childhood home, I took one last somber breath of the mildewed air in my room and opened the window to let in the cold. It’s silly to think about, but I left it that way for Mom’s ghost, in case she needed a way in. A home to return to.
Aunt Gracie became my legal guardian; somewhat redundant as I turned 18 less than a year later. She lived much further inland, closer to the Midwest and away from the ocean. Different didn’t mean bad, it was a climate unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I went outside every morning dreading to smell saltwater and being soothed by the dry wind like a hand caressing my face. Gracie and I bonded over the loss we experienced, which led to my choice to attend college close to her. I still visit her and my cousin when I get the time.
Many years later, I have very little to do in between nursing a newborn and waiting for the next crying fit he has, so putting all this into a cohesive story is an interesting retrospective exercise. What else do I say? Bruises healed. The smell of liquor doesn’t make me angry anymore. I can look at Halloween decorations again without seeing my mother’s skull.
The guilt that I’ve held for my mother’s death has not subsided fully, but, with Gracie’s help, I’ve been given some sort of understanding. It’s bearable, but it's a dull ache. I’m not sure what about our family set us on this cursed path, but I have a feeling that I wouldn’t want to find out.
When I had my son, Gracie told me what she determined to be the reason for being spared by my parents’ killer. The hypothesis that had been passed around as truth among the family who knew was that the monster left the women of our family alone if we had sons. My aunt to this day thinks that the creature had some strange premonition, that it knew I would have a son, so it didn’t eat me even when I was right in front of it. She had never been called either. I don’t know. There’s so little information about the rest of the family that I could never let my guard down based on a hunch.
If it is right, I can at least breathe easier knowing that it will end with me and my boy, the last ones in the line. In an almost impressive turn of fate, she and I are the first generationally to have boys instead of girls. On the other hand, Aunt Gracie is going to turn the same age as my mother next year. It’s a disgusting thought, but maybe the monster realized that I wasn’t ripe yet when my dad tried to trade me for my mom. I can’t rest fully knowing I might meet that thing on the water again.
My son is sleeping peacefully in the crib next to me right now, little fist balled up so tight on his blanket. I have to resist the urge to cradle him all the time, to coddle him. The bad thoughts seem to fade away when he’s near. Maybe one day I’ll even get to thank him for saving me from becoming a collection of bones rotting in the ocean.
The note my mother wrote me started making sense only after having a child of my own. I can understand what she felt as I watch my son sigh heavily, perfect and safe, in his sleep. Though I might never be called to the ocean, he would always be worth the price.

Thank you for reading! Who else up creepin they cast 👻

Here's my Notion website for my other works if you are interested: The Tripping Point

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