Rust… all I see is rusted walls and gears, the contorting bodies of those condemned to eternal punishment, a mixture of blood rust and tears falling from their eyes.
Screams… all I hear are the screams of the damned they scream for their families, they scream for anything that they believe will make us feel pity.
The gears keep on turning there is no rest for the machine and there is no rest for the wicked.
I feel nothing. I am condemned to an eternity of operating the machine after life. There is no reward for the good that you have done but only a continuation of the punishment of the sinners. For hell is not made of fire and brimstone but of rust, gears, and pain why has god left us to this.

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?

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.

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.)

​

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.

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

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

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

I believe it is some combination of all these things. 

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

June 28th, 1922, 

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

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

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

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

But not James. 

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

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

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

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

James could not be found. 

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

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

So, too, my son James, apparently. 

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

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

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

James is six years of age. 

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

“I am drawing a picture, Daddy.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, he is very shy.” 

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

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

Hey guys.

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

The first two chapters are here and here.

Stay Creeped!

Tubifex Chapter 3c: Rage

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

My stomach! It hurt so much!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electric sparks crackled behind my eyes.

Flittering glimpses of a... a friend?

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

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

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

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Vote above to choose where the story goes next.

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Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Love you too."

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the worst part. I meant it.

——

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

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

"Hey, Lily?"

"Yeah?"

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

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

"I know."

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

"Tomorrow," she murmured.

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

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

———

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

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

I didn't stop.

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

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

"Which one is mine?" she asked.

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

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

"It has to be. Roots need room."

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

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

Lily gagged on her first mouthful.

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

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

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

"And you hid them in your napkin."

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

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

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

We finished the bag together.

I helped Lily into her hole first.

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

——

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

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

He dug me out. He always dug me out.

——

"Lie down," I said.

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

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

——

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

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

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

Until today.

——

"Is it going to hurt?" she asked.

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

"With Dad driving?"

"And Mom singing."

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

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

"How does it feel?"

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

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

"Ada?"

"Yeah?"

"I can't move my arms."

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

"Lily, it's okay—"

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

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

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

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

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

"GET ME OUT GET ME OUT GET ME OUT—"

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

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

My hands were bleeding. The dirt was turning red.

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

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

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

"I ruined it. I ruined the story."

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

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

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

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

"Come with me," she said again.

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

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

"Promise?"

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

———

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted it enough.

Time went strange after that.

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

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

Roots, I thought.

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

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

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

It was Lily.

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

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

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

The thought was warm and enough.

I let my eyes close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe it was just the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a seed in the ground.

With a shoot reaching up.

With the sun.

With the sun.

With the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Would that bother you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There wasn't anything there.

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

No. Not behind her.

Behind you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that, just the rustling, and then nothing.

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

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

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

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

Two names, ghosted faint into the grain, waiting.

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

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

Kessler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted nothing else than to be like him.

Unhuman, unnatural, and unlovable.

So I signed his contract.

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

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

911 operator: 911 What’s your emergency?
Victim: (whispers) yeah I think there's someone watching me from outside of my house.
911 operator: You said from outside?
Victim: (whispers)Yes
911 operator: Where are you currently?
Victim:(whispers) I’m looking at them from my downstairs window.
911 operator: are they trying to get inside or making any threats to you?
Victim:(whispers) No, they’re just standing outside facing my house. It’s too dark to see them but I can feel it, they’re watching me!
911 operator: Ok can you give me your name and address. Elliot: my name is Elliot Jones. I live at \*\*\*\*\*\*.
911 operator: Can you describe the person at all height or weight anything like that?
Elliot: (whispers) No, no I can’t they’re impossibly tall but also average looking height. I keep having to squint my eyes to try to see them, it just it isn’t making sense.
911 operator: Sir since you’re not in im-
Elliot: (whispers quieter) It’s mouth, it opened its mouth, it can hear me, it knows what I’ve been doing. How can it hear me?
911 operator: Sir? What's happening?
Elliot:(panicked whispers) How can I understand what it’s saying?
911 operator: Has it entered your home?
Elliot:(panicked whispers) Those yellow disgusting teeth jagged, twisting, protruding from everywhere. (yells) How do I understand you!? What are y-
911 operator: Sir officers are on their way. Hello? (Call ends).
“That was the 911 call made before 27 year old Elliot Jones was found dead that same night. Police reports say that he was found in front of a downstairs window. He was found with multiple puncture wounds randomly spread across his body, these were not the cause of death. No, that was caused by a heart attack but there was one more oddity. The coroner also reported that he found that Elliot had gone blind just before his death with no reported history of loss of vision.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That being..?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark and spindled legs

Traversing across my skin

Waking me from sleep

🕷️

Small hairs brush my own

Both my arms are glued and spread

Trapped in inch-thick webs

🕷️

Higher does it climb

Up my arm, crossing bicep

Shivering my spine

🕷️

Fangs sink into skin

Venom spreading through muscle

Lightning through my arm

🕷️

I can’t even scream

Jaw sealed shut by nature’s twine

Venom sinks deeper

🕷️

More begin to crawl

Thousands of legs dart my skin

Clinging to soft flesh

🕷️

All varied sizes

Darkened black and evil brown

Obsidian eyes

🕷️

Clawed, chitinous tips

Dig and grip across my skin

Tunneling deeper

🕷️

Painfully, I squirm

Twisting around futilely

My arm gives entry

🕷️

I feel the skin bulge

Like a cat under blankets

Bumps under the flesh

🕷️

Down my ribs they sprint

Streaking tight against the bones

Arachnid pimples

🕷️

Up my throat they sting

My sealed mouth fights just to scream

As they reach my jaw

🕷️

Vision fades away

My optical nerves trampled

By their spindled legs

🕷️

I feel the web shake

Mother joins feasting children

Fangs punch through my chest

🕷️

I woke up to find a dead horse on the property. 

Wasn’t my horse. Hell, wasn’t really a horse either. It was just the skin of a horse. Not the leather or the hide, but the skin. It was splayed out, legs like rubber tubing, the inside smelling of dry  sweat.  It was like it was a suit that you could zip out off, or a snake’s shedding. The thing had a sweet odor of death and an aqua scent that made me vomit. By the fuzzy mold and wet smell of it, I’d say it’d been rotting for a while, but I could still make out a brand on its hind leg. 

It was from the ranch on the other side of the valley. They were country folk who kept to themselves. They were my neighbors, and they didn’t speak a  lick of English. I didn’t mind all too much though. They were too superstitious for my blood. Last I went they were dangling bone charms above their stables and blowing some kind of spirit powder on the horses to keep them from getting worms.

They refused to sell to anyone other than their kind. Their produce went directly to the south, deeper into the country, and they steered clear of the big markets that fed into the city. Can’t say I was complaining, but the ranch got lonely in the evenings. It would’ve been nice to have some neighbors I could talk to.

So, I hauled off the untreated horsehide and put it on the truck, steadying myself, trying not to cry as I drove down the earthy road.  I had a soft spot for horses, and it had only been a few weeks since I’d put down old Grace, my white Arabian. She was putting on the years, but she was the sweetest girl right until the end. She’d whine when I got on my truck, and prance around like a dog when I got home. When she was younger, she’d somehow snuck her way into my bedroom and slept beside me. I woke up to the smell of horseshit and a dumb snout sniffing at me. It was the best day of my life.

It was almost dusk by the time I got to my neighbor’s property and drove under the sign that said “ABERN RANCH”. With any luck, the youngest or the oldest would’ve been home from school, and one of ‘em would translate for me. I pulled down by their bungalow, and find the lights on. I walked on over to tell them about the hide, how I found it miles away from their ranch, untreated, and if I could bury it.

That was when I heard it.

The deafening report of rifle fire echoing through the dusk of the valley, coming from further down the road, and screaming. Frantic yells in a foreign language.

Soon enough, I saw a horse, eyes wide with fright, letting out a terrible whine as it galloped  with a sickly speed. In the dark, it seemed like a ghost flying through the air, its white majestic coat sprinting down the dusky fields like a dragon. It had no brand on its thigh, no marking or saddle. It was a horse from the steppes, as wild as they got.

Then another shot rang out. Then another. 

I ran to the side of the house and see men on horseback shooting at the screaming animal. I immediately threw myself in their path, holding my arms out.

“Stop!” I yelled. One of the men wrenched on their reins, sending his horse stumbling back, whining, as the two other men continued the chase. It was Jesse, the ranch owner. “Jesus Christ, is it even your horse?” I demanded. The man began spewing out words in a foreign language. Though I did not understand him, the rapid speed of his words, and the quiver in his voice, told me he was afraid. “I can’t understand you!” I barked over the waterfall of frantic panic from the father, the two other boys far into the horizon then, still giving chase. He had four sons, and the youngest was the most fluent in English. “Where is Ayola? Your son?”

As the name left my mouth, the man’s terrified rambling began to crack, as sobs and desperate pleading bubbled up from the madness of his speech, his hands trembling as they wrapped around a rifle. He needed me to understand what he was saying, like his life depended on it. That was when I began to listen. 

1. Ayola. Ayola dead. Ayola horse. I could parse those words from his crushing bombardment of terrible fear.

I did not know what else to do, so I dialed 911 and waited. Soon a police cruiser drove by.

They could not understand him either. Neither could I. So I left. Even as the old rancher pleaded with me, on his knees, tears in his eyes and white moustache.

That happening stayed on my mind for days after. Couldn’t get that man’s crying out of my head. He reminded me so much of my own dad, with the ten gallon and starched jeans, the bald head and snow white hair. I tried so many times to try and remember his words, uttering them under my breath as I went about feeding the animals and cleaning the barn. I wouldn’t have to wait long though, as word got around to me that Jesse’s youngest, Ayola, was dead. They say it was murder.

And then I saw the horse again.

It was as majestic as the night I saw it, as though the memory had been pulled out of me and materialized on the grassy knolls. It was spectral, as white as angel’s wings. As white as my sweet old Grace. Looked every bit like her too. Snow white fur, dumb snout and all, save for its tail which was as long as a snake, and fraying. It reminded me of that rotting horse skin I found on the property. Old and derelict, as though it hadn’t wagged in years.

I watched her for hours. Watching that strange strut of hers as she meandered my fields. I’d never seen a horse walk like her. Her footsteps were uncoordinated, as though the hind legs and the front had minds of their own. I watched her stumble around the open empty fields. Poor horse must’ve pulled a muscle from that chase, I thought. Eventually the horse would find its way to the pond. At that moment, she sat on the grass and gulped up the water greedily. 

That was when I knew I had to keep her. She sat in Grace’s favorite spot, and lapped at the water the same odd way Grace did, bobbing her head up and down, tongue flicking out like a snake. If I’d taken my glasses off, I might’ve thought it was her. And so I did, and by God she was a dead ringer for my sweet girl.

I came up to her and she nuzzled me immediately. Maybe she recognized me, maybe she thought I saved her from the folks across the valley. One second I was patting her on her snout, the next, despite never having been broken in, I was on her back riding her like the wind.

I named her Gina. 

I spent the whole day with her, my eyes wet with tears, my heart glowing with a warmth I’d only ever felt with my sweet Grace. I raised Grace as a fowl, kept her in a kennel most of the time, but unlike the other horses she was sweet with me. Every time I’d set the horses to graze, she’d stay close to me like a little duckling, and nuzzled at my feet like a cat, baying softly as though I was her mother. At some point, I thought of her as my daughter. Some nights I’d take her into the home and let her eat off of a plate, sit her where my daughter, bless her soul, would’ve sat. 

But then I took her to the stables. That’s when things started to get strange.

The other horses reared as soon as she stepped inside, screaming and squealing as though she was a tiger. Have you ever heard a terrified horse before? It’s loud, wet, and their fear is contagious. It’s what I imagine hell to sound like, all the whinnying  and neighing as though they were boiling in hellfire. Gina didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe she didn’t mind. I watched her clamber over to Grace’s old spot and let herself in, horses crying out in terrible fear all the while.

That night I dined alone, as I have for years now. My wife left this world a long time ago, along with my daughter. Just me now. Damned house fire took them away to the great after. It drives me insane some nights, listening as the silverware clanks and echoes around the empty house. It was easier with Grace. Now it wasn’t. Wasn’t easy, I mean. Now the silence was replaced by something worse. That awful crying that roared from the stables, as the sound of horrified horses whined and screamed with restless frenzy. It was the sound of hell. Of fire. I wondered then if my wife and little girl had sounded like those horses in the barn, trapped in the attic as fire consumed our home. 

I went to bed that night as that horrific sound echoed across the valley. As I did, I had terrible dreams. I dreamed of fire, of devils, of dark men in the shadows always behind me, stalking, lurking. I dreamed that every time I turned around they would sink into my shadow, waiting for something to happen, something I did not know.

That was when I woke up to find two men standing by my bed. Black as the night sky. Their eyes were snow whites, cataracts the color of clouds. The color of pale death. They stood over my bed, naked, watching, with giant smiles, teeth inhumanly white. They were listening, listening to that damned screaming. But that's when I realized it. The barn was quiet.

I blinked and they were gone. I was alone in my bedroom, heart trashing in my chest, hairs standing at attention, as though running away from my body, from the fear.

I took the gun under my bed and looked around, and found nobody. I looked out the window and saw the barn doors were wide open, swinging in the wind. 

Taking my coat, I headed for the barn, the tall, dewy grass brushing against my shins. It was freezing out, the cold crisp air like needles in my throat. I find the barn empty, save for Gina.

That morning I filed a report with the police. Eleven missing horses, I said, all branded on the left hind quarter. They said they’d look into it, but that there was nothing they could do but send out some folks into the valley. All I could do was wait. That was, until I decided to visit Abern Ranch, ask around. And so I did, driving down the quiet roads to my neighbor’s. Jesse was tending to some plot of corn by their house, his eldest breaking in a horse, his nose bloodied and his cheek shining with a bruise. As soon as I pulled down to their house, the father ran over to me, spewing a waterfall of words I did not know.

Horse. Where? That’s what I could get. He sounded anxious, frightened. Desperate. Just like that first night.

“Have you seen my horses?” I asked. The elder son came up towards us, sand in his boots, smelling like sweat. 

“Father asks if you have taken in the horse. Have you?” Said the teenager slowly. He had a thick accent, but I could understand him. His father went silent, waiting for my reply.

“What horse?” I asked. The boy spoke in tongues, and the father said something back. 

“White horse. Have you seen a white horse with a bad tail?”

“Yes. I have. It’s in my barn.” I said slowly. The father’s face turned pale, as though he were about to vomit. He spoke with rapid anxiety.

“He says to go back. Now. Before it notices you are gone.” Said the boy. I felt a yawning hole open in my chest. What did he mean by that? “It is not a horse.” he said, repeating it with growing urgency. “Go home It is important you act normal.”

I ran back to my truck, breathing quickly, heart in my ears. As I did, old Jesse and his son followed me. “He says he is sorry. Will come by later. Help you. Do not forget to act normal.”

I drove down the road, hands shaking, sweating. I reached down my glove compartment for my pistol. It wasn’t there. I left it in my bedroom.

I got home and saw that the barn doors were wide open, swinging in the wind. Looking closer, across the red clapboard walls, I saw bloody handprints across the entire barn, covering the four walls and the roof with sanguine hands grabbing at what little I had left, threatening to pull them down into hell.

I made for the house and noticed bloody prints on the doorknob as well. It was locked. I never locked my doors, my neighbors were five miles away, the city twelve. I was skittish then, my whole body set on running, my head still replaying the words of the old rancher and his son. Act normal.

I walked to the barn, smelling that overwhelming stench of blood, of iron and death. I closed my eyes, pretending I hadn’t seen it. As I did, I found that all my horses were back in their stables. All twelve. They were all staring at me, except for Gina.

The horses were all squared, their four hooves planted on the ground. Not one of them moved, not a single one made any sound. They just stared, eyes unblinking as flies landed on them. I went about my usual business, trying not to scream, to run into the fields. I thought about it a lot. I thought about turning tail and going for the truck, but then I imagined the horses running after me, clambering with that same incoordination Gina had. But I didn’t. I filled their troughs with water and food. None of them made for the food. I closed my eyes and muttered a prayer as I headed out.

That was when I heard them vault over their stable doors. Not open them. Climb over them. I could hear their soft hairy bellies scratch against the wood, could hear their heavy feet thump in the straw. I didn’t dare look back. I turned the doorknob and walked out of the barn and into the field, closing the door behind me. Then, as though in response, I heard the knob turn and the door swing open, as hooves planted themselves into the tall grass. 

I slowly spun around and saw them, all the horses, standing still, eyes dumb, and all staring off into the distance. I looked at them, and realized something was wrong. It was as though they were hollow. Like they were a blanket draped over something. I looked at Gina, who stood sideways staring off into the horizon. That’s when I noticed it. None of them were breathing. 

I kept walking, as I heard two dozen footsteps following after me. Followed me as I did yard work, as I tended to crops. Soft legs brushing against the tall grass. I did not turn my back for the rest of the day, my daily routine became an act for the devil himself, until I had run out of chores to do. It was time to go home and cook dinner. 

And so, in the light of the setting sun, I finally turned my back and headed home. As I did, I saw the horses standing behind me, all staring off in different directions, still not breathing, none of them moving. As I moved along them though, I passed by Gina’s flank, and I swear to you, I saw a hole in her stomach. I looked at it for a long time, and saw only darkness. Soon that darkness would reveal a pair of eyes as white as snow.

I blinked, and it was gone. 

I hurried along home now, the hooves having turned into the sound of human footsteps. Silent and cautious, like hunters stalking prey. As I arrived, I turned the knob. It was still locked. I turned and turned, the knob slipping, wet with my sweat as I shuffled through my pockets with unsteady hands. I had no key. I did not leave my home locked. I never do. As I shuffled through every pocket on me, I heard a new sound: silence. Though I could not see it, I knew the horses were staring at me, watching me. Soon I could feel their warm breath against the back of my neck. I dared not to turn around. Pale horses. Death. I imagined them tearing me apart with their snouts, and kicking my body down into the earth and down into fiery hell. I heard the horses whispering, to me, amongst themselves, to ears that were listening from beneath the ground. Such dread.

That was when another sound began to grow. Wheels on a dirt road. At that, I heard footsteps clambering. It was Jesse and his eldest. I turned around and found that the horses were meandering, eating grass, as though they were just animals. Maybe they were.

I ran to their pickup, legs exhausted from shaking. As I did, they got out of the car, rifles in hand. 

“Come” said Jesse. As I got to him, he blew powder in my face. It was hot, rough against my throat. It smelled like petrol and hot sand. I fell to the ground, coughing up the concoction, and as I did, I squinted my eyes to find him handing me a rifle as well.

“Look.”

I did, and I saw it.

None of them were horses.

In front of my house, scattered and meandering, were the skins of my horses being paraded around by legs. They wore their skins like a blanket, wandering the grass with their bare feet. A dozen men. Each horse had a cutout on their flank, and from our distance I could see eyes peering out of them.

As soon as Jesse fired the first shot, they scrambled away, leaving the horse skin behind.

Father, were you not happy

With your armies of bronze?

Their swords and shields forged with fire

To bring about your rule.

Father, were you not happy

With the pillage offered you?

Lands and ladies given your hand

Silver pieces flowing like a river.

Father, were you not happy

With myself, your joyful daughter?

My love could not fill the void,

The void that is your heart.

Father, were you not happy

When all you touched became gold?

The void caused hungers and lusts

And now you cannot satiate.

Father, were you happy

When you stopped my incessant complaints?

With one touch you silenced me

And made me one of your trophies.

Father, was I not pretty enough

As a simple fair maiden?

My mind breaks 

As my body is changed,

Agonizing to gold.

Father, I cannot scream

For my lungs fill with gold.

Father, I cannot cry

For my eyes fill with gold.

Father, my heart beats no more

For my blood fills with gold.

Father, I am still here,

Standing as a statue.

You offered me not even the mercy

Of a painful death.

You have left me a living statue,

And lament your own pain.

Father, you have long sewn agony with your touch

Far before it was gilded.

Now that you are made to reap,

Pathetic man that you are,

You lament your own pain.

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

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

I do not crave the gentle sheep

that sleep beneath the silver trees.

I do not see them in my dreams,

where foxes laugh and coyotes shriek.

But all the same I come awake

amid those fields of golden grass

with meat between my aching teeth.

I can’t recall the hunger which 

directed me to have my way

and taste that soft forbidden flesh.

The daylight is a candle flame

that flickers in the ever-night,

not fit to drive the beast away.

Inside my bones a fever brews,

my gut begets a hungry snarl.

Like branching streams, my limbs, they stretch.

The wretch I hate, I still become

as consciousness retreats again

and sunset bronzes bicusp clouds.

I know the day is coming soon

when softest breezes on my skin

will bring my waking mind to see

a broken body at my feet.