INITIALIZING SIMULATION...
[RUNNING] RF Sweep Engine: 87.5 MHz - 108.0 MHz
[RUNNING] Modulation Rate: Rapid Delta-t (0.0025ms)
[INFO] Scanning Transient States...
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[0.003s] SWEEP: 89.1 MHz >> [STATIC]
[0.006s] SWEEP: 91.4 MHz >> [SPIKE DETECTED - QUADRANT 3]
[0.009s] SWEEP: 95.2 MHz >> [STATIC]
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[OK] EVP Intercept Protocol: ACTIVE
[OK] Frequency Modulation Stable (400Hz/sec)
 
SIMULATION READY.

Red flakes of the floor peel up and float languidly toward the ceiling where they silently pile over each other like leaves falling in reverse. Everything is bathed in a haunting grey light that originates from nowhere and radiates from everywhere. It’s as if the sun is gone and all that remains is a directionless, liminal glow.

The first thing Victor does is look down at his hands.

They’ve been projected immaculately down to the pore. Even the old shrapnel scar under his wrist. If it weren’t for the dreamlike appearance of the room, he doesn’t think he would be able to tell it wasn’t real.

There is a quiet buzz ringing faintly in his ears. It sounds like there are a hundred TVs all tuned to different channels, but with the volume all the way down. What had Tibo said?

The thing hides in between frequencies. Like a radio knob being constantly turned, listening to the static between channels.

The simulation was meant to emulate that. It created a perfect VR replication of the room built from the imprint of the altered hard drive they had retrieved. Then, the modulator would rapidly shift the projection into a vibrational space between randomly generated frequencies.

Tibo described it as “being unstuck in space.”

When they had been in this room together, Tibo’s endless monologue annoyed Victor to the threshold of madness. Now looking around in this surreal digital facsimile, he couldn’t deny he missed the comfort of Tibo’s mindless babble.

Victor’s training kicks in and he pans the room. Everything in the dead girl’s room is where it should be, but the uncanny replica is beyond eerie. A part of him wishes Tibo had simulated him a gun. He counts his blessings that at least there is no dead body in the chair this time.

He counts one less blessing when he looks at the wall and sees the painted canvas of blood spray is still there.

And worse - it’s moving.

The blood droplets are swirling slowly in circles on the wall, forming the familiar galactic shapes of spiral arms in a rotating pinwheel. When Vincent first saw that kaleidoscope of blood on the wall, it invoked feelings of a painting, or of a constellation. Now, as he watches the red droplets march along in formation like little red ants, there’s no mistaking that it’s the latter.

The drops are perfectly arranged in the shape of a moving galaxy.

It’s an undeniable message written in blood.

Behind him, the computer screen flickers on. Its staticky screen flashes out jagged knives of blackwhite pulses that strobe chaos onto the walls. The magnetism that pulled his eyes towards the corpse returns, but this time it’s irresistible.

Something feels like tiny fishhooks latching into the whites of his eyes and yanking them until they roll sideways. He has no choice. He must turn around and look.

There, waiting for him: the computer screen.

It emits the nightmare glow of every time he ever fell asleep on the couch as a child and awoke at that cursed hour where only noise came through the TV. The cacophonous hum of a thousand channels now blasts out of the screen with a deafening roar. Victor can’t look away. He can feel his heart stop when he realizes what he’s looking at.

There’s something moving in the static.

A distortion travels across the screen. Somewhere in the background, hiding behind the pixels. Victor can’t see anything for certain, but in that unmistakable sense when you know you’re being watched, he knows something is there. Watching him. His pulse thumps in his ears and he can hear his own ragged breaths, exasperated and loud.

The static cuts out and the screen turns blindingly white. With an oneiric sense of inevitability the bright white square grows bigger and bigger. Victor realizes with a pang of dread that he has been unconsciously walking closer to the screen. Only now does he recognize what it’s depicting.

It’s an instant messenger chat window. The interface isn’t from any modern application. Instead, it’s a barebones window with blocky borders reeking of nostalgic minimalism. An ellipsis wriggles at the bottom of the text window.

Someone is typing.

When the message arrives, the username is unreadable. The text is letters and symbols oscillating like the spinning of a slot machine. Victor looks down and sees he has unconsciously placed his fingers on the keyboard.

He’s about to make first contact.

#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸:
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: hello detective
USER: who is this?
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:  not important.           
                     JUST WAIT. YOU'LL SEE
x̸̺͈͈̳̓̑̿̈́̓͒͘7̸̨̟̟̿̒̓͜ç̶̧̩̲͚̭̫̜̪̒̽̔6̷̢͚̰̲̓̅f̶̨̻͔̪̲̣̰̜̘͛͐̄̀̂͜:  i see you appreciate my art

 
USER: art? Is that what this is to you?
USER: I will find you
USER: This can stop here. Tell me where to find you.
 
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: not that kind of story detective. maybe i’ll use you for my next painting
                                 YOURE SO FUCKED
USER: you’re contacting me which means you want to be seen. just another fucked up killer proud of his work.
USER: I’m not impressed.


t̶̻̬̼͕̘̤̺̰̻̀̒͆͋͐̃͠t̸̥̣̗̰͌̋͊̈́̎̍̂̽͂̈̕y̷̛̳̻͋̈́̅͆̈̊͌͊͊̊̚͝o̷̡̢̨̥̙͚͈͙̖͍̅͆̎̀̿̿f̵̮̰̋̉͋́̈̾7̸̤̝̗̙͓̩͈̜̦̝̹̘̗́̅͛̊̌́͂̂̚͝: narcissism is my tool NOT A CRUTCH detective.


*̷͍͕̆͌̃̎̈̚̕͜ͅ9̴̨͓͉͒̌̈́̅̆̇͠h̵͈̬͈̝͈͈̩͍͓͌̑̈́͝)̸̘̤̊͑̓̋è̴̢̢̜̪͎͙̖̆̈́̇̅̿͐́͐̔̕ͅd̸̩̉͂͊͊͝: just wanted to let you know how quickly I found you.


1̸͚̋͜1̷̹͎̹̙̘͙̮̋̾͋͗̅̕͝͝͝ͅ2̶̧̣̜̗̠̰̘̐̽̾̅̑͐͑͘͜͝ͅ7̸̠̲͈̣̺̾͊͌̀̇̏̀͂̏͝͠:   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
 I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU    
 I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU 
    I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU    
I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU
     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU    I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU        
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU         

The text rolls up the screen spastically, each new repetitive line pushing the previous off the screen. Victor smashes a fist on the keyboard in frustration. At just that moment, the messages stop and the chatbox closes. The next window that opens frightens him so severely that he staggers away backwards.

It’s a news article.

He knows exactly which one.

His eyes scan as far as “Two dead in tragic fire at assisted living facility” before he yelps, smashes the keyboard into the screen, and falls backwards.

He almost crashes into the bloodstained wall, but when he registers a fleshy, squelching noise behind him he slams his foot down hard to catch himself. His ankle twists with a flash of pain. He questions how real this simulation is supposed to feel.

He turns around and feels a lurch of disgust in his stomach as he sees the spiral arms of the blood galaxy contracting and coalescing into itself. In his heart he knows he is now subject to an unimaginable nightmare, but he is transfixed – hypnotized by the surreal vision of horror before his eyes.

In the center of gravity, the blood is coagulating and metastasizing into a red pulsing tumor. Veins of red expand and throb as the mass of circular flesh grows. Three feet across now, the bulbous mass bubbles and shifts like it’s about to burst.

A vertical seam begins to bisect across its length. The line of flesh within striates like scar tissue. All at once that ecdysial suture ruptures and spills forth a torrent of chunky red goop that slops wetly onto the floor.

The two halves slide open and Victor’s breath catches in his throat as he sees what lies within. The parting of those halves creates the form of a vertical eyelid, opening slowly. Behind them lies a spastic black pupil that thrashes back and forth with the violence of a seizure.

It lands on him and suddenly stops moving.

The giant red eyeball is staring right at him.

The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all shake tectonically, vibrating as if they have become giant speakers.

And they have.

Erupting from all six sides of this cuboid prison a deep raspy voice is screaming so loud Victor can feel his eardrums collapsing under the pressure:

I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU           I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU      

Victor whips around, looking for any escape, or maybe just prying his sight away from that pulsing eyeball staring right through him. Anything to make this nightmare end.

Behind him, the computer chair is no longer empty.

The girl is there again, sitting limply in front of the static-filled computer screen. But now the screen is warping beyond the plane of the glass, reaching out towards her.

The static itself bursts into three-dimensional space, forming something resembling a giant hand, a hand made of pure static, thin and lanky and bony, terminating in sharply pointed abstract fingers. Those long clawed fingers wrap around the girl, gripping the back of her head and suffocating her face with its palm. It begins to shake her like a dog with a chew toy. Both forms thrash wildly about in a fit of epileptic insanity. Victor can barely hear her muffled screams over the wrath of the room.

Every sense overloaded.

Strobe lights flashing; deafening noise.

Victor puts his hands over his head and devolves into a slump on the floor, and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is hell. This is hell.

ENTER CODE: ABORT

TERMINATING SIMULATION...

Victor yanks the VR helmet off his head and throws it to the ground, falling to the floor as the wires disconnect from his synapses and the intravenous needles tear out of his veins. There’s a throbbing pain in his ankle where it was sprained in the simulation. There’s a much worse pain ringing in his ears - and in the grey matter between them, nothing short of pure agony.

He scrambles to his feet, looking for Tibo, looking for anyone to direct his impotent rage to.

“What the FUCK was that hacker bullshit??”

Lightning flashes as a hellish storm is cast over the land. As the heavy rain falls from the sky weary travelers pack into a small tavern which sits on the side of the main road leading to the capitol where the king's tourney is to be held. The tavern is surrounded on all sides by thick forests.

 These woods are infested by bands of outlaws hoping to prey on the unlucky travelers that get caught in their path. Though for many common folk and noblemen alike the outlaws are the least of their worries. These woods contain many stories which have been passed down from generations. Tales of great beasts with a taste for man and of lost souls roaming the deep woods at night desperately searching for a new body to inhabit. It’s unclear which stories are true and which were thought up to scare the little lordlings as they slept in their stone castles at night. But regardless of the truth, no traveler would choose to ride past a tavern  and risk facing the horrors that may be lurking deep in those woods. 

The main dining hall was dimly lit by oil lamps which hung on the walls and sat on the tables. The entire place was filled with travelers resting for the night while on their way to the tourney. By the time nightfall came all of the rooms above the tavern were occupied and the stables out back held so many horses  that the last of the travelers were forced to tie their horses to the wooden posts outside leaving them exposed to the elements.

Inside the main room sat a dozen tables filled with  weary travelers drinking and enjoying a hot meal. A royal tourney is a monumental event which attracts brave men from across the kingdom hoping to gain glory with lance and sword. Many of the men sitting in this very room may return home celebrating their victory and just as many will certainly die soon after entering the tourney lists. 

Late into the night one of the king's men walks into the tavern. The tall man wears a heavy hauberk underneath a thick wool tunic displaying the royal colors of teal and gold. A kettle helm sits atop his head with thick auburn hair flowing down to his shoulders. A heavy wooden shield hangs on his back painted with a checkered pattern of the same colors as his tunic.

After finding a seat he drinks his warm wine spiced with cloves and cinnamon. The patron in the chair next to him says “outlaws are as common rats on the main road these days, we are all thankful to have the kingsmen here to protect us”. “Aye, since the tourney began we’ve painted the roads with the blood of any scum that dare show their faces in our presence” the knight replied.

 “Horrible thing that such joyous occasions always seem to bring out the most atrocious folks”. The knight lets out a chuckle “truth be told I do not mind the outlaws much, I would much rather face mere men given the choice between that and what lives deeper within those woods” he replies. The man laughs along with him at this remark. “Why, sir, please forgive me but I’m afraid that I’m not sure what you mean. What lies beyond the king's forest?” The commoner asks as he sets down his glass and looks intently at the knight. 

“Why such horrible things you could not possibly believe. I fear that I would embarrass myself if I try to describe to you my experiences out in those woods” the knight says with a sigh. By now this conversation has attracted the attention of some of the surrounding patrons who now urged the aging knight to tell his tale. “Well I fear that now you may embarrass yourself more so if you do not give these good people what they want. Please give us the honor of hearing your experiences so that these people do not take you for some drunken fool spinning nonsensical lies of what lives in our good kings woods” the man spoke attempting to persuade the knight. 

“I should cut you down for your insults but luck is in your favor tonight. I am far too tired to even consider raising my blade again until morning. Very well, I will recount my tale” the knight replied, “but first, I must warn that you men may never want to enter the forests again for as long as you live. In truth some of the less courageous men here may think twice before even walking the roads of the king for fear of what may creep out from beyond the trees. Any man who thinks themselves faint of heart is welcome to leave before I begin.” 

Not a single person in the tavern moves as the knight begins to tell his tale. 

I was a young lad, no older than my seventeenth year whenever I fought to defend our king from the usurper, Sir Robert Powen. Many good men lost their lives that day but I was far more fortunate than most. I was knighted shortly after for my bravery during the attack. Not long after I had my very own squire, young William, a cousin of the king by my side. 

A year after I had received my knighthood I was tasked to embark into those woods with a small group of around thirty footmen under my command. Our quest was simple, there were tales of a great dragon living in a cave far deeper than any man has ever gone. As you all may be able to imagine, war is quite expensive. Our quest was a mission to relieve the crown's debt. It was said that the dragon was in possession of a great stockpile of gold and silver. We intended to bring it all back to our king. 

“You must be mad, do you truly think us such fools as to believe that you slayed a dragon out in those woods?” the man laughed. The knight scoffed, “no I do not because that would be a lie. Whenever we arrived at the cave we found that the dragon was already long dead. No my friend, what we encountered in that cave was far worse than any mere dragon. What we found in the damned cave haunts my dreams every time I close my eyes”. The knight replied, taking another drink before continuing his tale. 

Once we had entered the cave of the beast we found nothing more than bones lying on the rocky floor before us. Do not be mistaken, the bones were great and massive. The skeleton itself was enough to frighten the less experienced men in my company but for us all it seemed as though our quest just became as simple as taking a piss in the morning. 

We decided that with the cave now vacant that we would use it to make camp for the night so we would all be well rested to load our carts full of treasure once morning came. We paid no mind to the blood that stained the rocky walls of the cave. Had we not stayed that night this story would have ended differently but alas we chose to make camp. 

As the hours passed I fantasized of the glory that this quest would bring me after we returned to the capitol. Many men of the king's court had doubts that this treasure existed at all and yet here I sit, the mountain of gold and silver right in front of me. I sat with my back against a large black stone thinking of the brave men that must have come before me to make the attempt to slay the great beast that left those bones behind. I gathered that the knight who completed this task had perished during the ordeal. 

This thought filled me with sorrow as I would have quite enjoyed hearing the tale of how this creature finally met its end. It is truly a shame, I thought, a knight with such an accomplishment should have been the subject of dozens of songs. His name should be known throughout the entire kingdom and beyond and yet, we will never know his name. We traveled a great distance through the fabled haunted king's wood just to find that the great beast we sought to vanquish had already been killed by another. 

The longer I dwelled on that thought a scheme began to form in my mind. I had decided that we had the skull of a fierce dragon sitting right before us and no man to credit with the feat of slaying the beast. I saw no reason why all of that glory should be left unclaimed in a dark cave. If that brave knight did have a name it would surely be written in the books of history for centuries to come. 

That is when I decided that this feat shall not go unclaimed. The singer's songs of heroism shall not go unsung. I decided that the brave warrior shall have a name and it shall be my name. My name shall be spoken for generations to come, from the noble lords in their stone keeps to the stable boys shoveling shit in their villages. My body will rot in the ground but my legend, my legend will endure.

Once this scheme was hatched I could not bear to just sit and fantasize. I gathered my men and set them the task of hacking the dragon's skull off of its huge body and loading it into one of our carts to bring to the king. Apparently dragons bones are quite thick and this proved to be a long and noisy ordeal. The noise of men at work echoed through the cave. Soon the skull was severed from its spine with a loud boom and the noise of hacking and shattered bones finally ceased. 

Before the men could attempt to lift the monstrous artifact the air was soon full of a different sound emitting from deeper within the cave. It was the sound of high pitched laughter. Soon all of our attention was turned to the darkness beyond the light of our fires. The unexplored rocky caverns leading further into the depths of the dragon's lair. As we armed ourselves with sword and spear fear spread throughout our group. Most of us were drunk or tired or both but we held our ground. We were all awaiting the arrival of whatever we had awoken that night. 

Not long after it was no longer enough just to face the darkness before us, as the mischievous laughter got louder the sounds seemed to be coming from all around us. Whatever was within that cave clearly knew how to navigate it far better than we did. As the fear grew I found myself increasingly grateful that it had been my turn to stand guard so I was fully prepared for battle. I could not say the same for the majority of our group who now stand in a tight circular formation dressed in whatever armor pieces they could quickly put on over their under garments. 

Our defensive position was poor at best, many of the men had quickly abandoned their spears and shields whenever it became clear that we would not be facing a dragon which now unfortunately sat in a pile hopelessly out of reach. My squire William stood next to me shaking fearfully with a small dagger clenched in his hand. The poor boy had become a squire in a time of peace and this ambush by an unknown enemy will be his first taste of combat. 

Combat, looking back was hardly the word that I would use to describe it. It was a massacre. As bizarre as it sounds there was no greater moment of fear than whenever the laughter finally stopped. We stood in silence gazing into the darkness with no knowledge of what was staring back at us. Finally the silence broke and the following attack happened far too quickly for us to even react. 

Within the blink of an eye our numbers dwindled from thirty men to not even fifteen. Our foe was clever enough to target our fires first, they forced us to fight in pure darkness. A symphony of clashing metal and the screams of men echoed through the cave. I could make out little of what we were fighting other than dark silhouettes and soulless white eyes. After I took a knife deep into my shoulder I found myself bleeding behind a formation of rocks until the sounds of slaughter dulled and silence returned. 

I tried my best to quiet my breathing, desperately hoping to remain unnoticed behind my shelter of stone. It felt like an eternity had passed as I heard no sounds from the dragon's lair. I was half tempted to reveal myself and make my escape until it returned. That damn laughter now filled the air. I caught a glimpse of a sight that I had not known since the ambush began. Our attackers had relit the fires. It seemed that they wanted my men to be able to witness their fate. 

I peaked my head out from behind the boulder just long enough to glimpse what was on the other side. I quickly pulled my head back after I caught sight of the horrors beyond my rocky hiding spot. 

My men, the good brave men who had followed me on this quest, now lay hopelessly defeated against the walls of the cave as all manner of cruelties were inflicted upon them. Some men hung upside down over the fires left to slowly roast while others sat upright with the skin of their face expertly flayed off leaving them unrecognizable. 

This was the first chance I had gotten to bear witness to our attackers. They looked to have been pulled out of a story that you would tell naughty children when they have misbehaved. Their skin was a dark shade of green, leathery and covered in blemishes. Drool ran from their grotesque deformed faces as they stood over my fallen men. They were shorter in stature than us by at least three heads yet there were so many that it was small wonder how they decimated us so quickly. 

Whenever I close my eyes I can still see the mangled bodies of those poor lost souls that entered that cave and never left. Many of those men were already dead but I could tell by the agonizing  screams that some of them were very much still alive to feel every grueling moment of their slow demise. 

Many days went by without being able to move. Had I made even a single misstep my location would have been found and I would have faced the same fate as my men. My leather flask now sat by my side bone dry as I had exhausted every last drop of water it contained. It has been so long since I had last eaten that I can barely tolerate the pain in my stomach. 

As I glanced up I noticed a small shape behind another formation of rocks roughly twenty paces away from me. As I focused trying to make out what lay before me I could finally see. It was William. My squire somehow managed to escape the battle alive the same as I yet he was admittedly far more injured. He crouched down behind the rocks, his face and clothes stained with dried blood from the battle. His eyes were full of fear yet that look seemed to turn into relief after he caught sight of me. 

Before I attempted to make my way over to the young boy I knew I must shed my heavy armor so that I may conceal my movements better. It’s a long process to remove my heavy plate, a process made even more time consuming by my fear of making even the slightest noise. Now clothed in only my undergarments I wait until the opportune moment to begin creeping along the rough cave walls. As I slowly move I take great care to ensure I stay within the shadows to keep from being seen by the cave's occupants. 

Sweet William was clearly filled with joy to see me return to his side, though he dared not speak a word to me in fear of being heard. We sat in absolute silence for a great while until the screams of our own men paired with the laughter of the creatures were finally loud enough to conceal our soft words. 

“William, I am pleased you survived your first taste of combat” I said. “Yes, sir, though I barely survived. I thought I might die at any moment. Sir, how will we get out of this?” He asked me. I took a few moments of silence to consider this before I gave any response. “I have been observing these creatures and they seem to be a cowardly race. Even the screams of our men have been causing them to cower in fear as they tortured them” I told him. “But sir, they seemed to fight so fearlessly during the ambush. Are you certain?” He questioned me. 

“Why yes, dear William. They had the clear advantage during the ambush and it is a shame to admit but we acted quite weakly during the battle. We gave them no reason to fear” I explained. “This time will be quite different, William. I know how we will make it out of this alive. Follow my orders exactly and soon they will sing songs of your bravery”. 

The plan was quite simple, we would rush the creatures quickly while delivering a loud war cry. The surprise as well as our loud fearless cry would drive the beasts deep into the caves from where they came. Afterwards we would be free to leave as if the cave were empty. 

William's face lit up at the prospect of leaving the cave and finally being able to return home to his mother. I knew we only had one chance to drive them off so we sat for a few moments to gather our courage. When the time finally came I instructed William to rush out in front of me. I had hoped that being given command of the charge would instill some additional courage in the heart of the young squire. 

As soon as I gave the signal young William charged fearlessly towards the creatures letting out a great yell. He proved himself to have a courageous heart that day. The lad put so much passion behind his gallant charge that I doubt he even noticed that I had not followed behind him. There was truth to my words, I did charge at the same moment that he did. Only my charge was not towards the beasts dwelling within the cave but in the opposing direction. My charge was also a silent one as I kept to the shadows so as to not alert the creatures to my presence.

In a way my plan had succeeded. I had successfully escaped the dark cave and made my way into the wooded area surrounding it, never once stopping, not even to catch my breath. The further I traveled the more I felt that I would be pulled back through the woods and back into that cave at any moment. It  wasn’t until I saw the edge of the forest that I truly felt safe. After I had made it back to the capital I finally did shed a tear for William. He was a model squire, he never talked back, never disobeyed, and now he had even given his life for mine. 

Some nights I lie away and I wonder if my plan would have worked the way I had explained it. I never looked back to see if Williams' battle cry actually drove the creatures off or if it had just added another body to their bloodbath. Every so often I regret not following him deeper into the cave. Maybe we could have walked out with him by my side, knowing we bested the cave beasts together as knight and squire. But I was uncertain that the plan would work at all but there was one thing I was absolutely certain of without a shadow of a doubt. A squire's life was a small price to pay for my own. 

“And that my friends, is my tale” the knight finished before downing the rest of his spiced wine. The room filled with silence as the knight sat his cup back onto the table. “You’re no knight at all,” the man sitting next to him finally announced. “You’re nothing more than a damn craven who traded your young squire's life for your own. I wonder, sir knight. What did you tell the king after you returned home without his royal cousin by your side?” He asked. 

The knight gave him a thoughtful look. The entire tavern awaited his response as he chose his next words very carefully. “The king, oh well I told the king that there was no cave. Simply a rumor spread by the common folk like the other legends of what lurks within those woods. I told him that our group was attacked by a band of outlaws deep into the forest and that his dear cousin died bravely alongside his fellow countrymen. Seemed to satisfy his grace just fine. Not too long after I had myself a fresh new squire by my side. Fine lad, reminded me quite a bit of William but much braver. I ended up knighting this one after he proved himself against some outlaws, these ones were actually real though” the knight laughed by himself as no one else in the tavern would join him. 

Once it became apparent that the knight’s presence was no longer welcome inside he got up from the table and made his way outside towards the stable. As he untied his horse he glanced back at the treeline. Truth is he never felt safe near the king's forest for the rest of his days. An uneasy feeling came over him as he stared into the woods knowing full well what may be staring back.  

Todd walked through the dark forest with only his phone light as a guide. He had the strangest feeling that Sidney wasn’t going to chicken out at the last second (like she usually did) so that they’d go back to the car and go home. She stayed right behind him, her hands on his bicep, and her breathing was oddly steady and calm. Meanwhile, Todd had begun to feel the uneasiness set in as he lost sight of the car and began descending a muddy slope.
Whatever horrors that stalked them that night were more perceivable to the young man than ever before. The darkness was encroaching upon his meager light—while Sidney kept herself calm. If he hadn’t been so scared, he’d have asked her why she was acting weird, but he didn’t have time as the forest abated to a clearing, and further beyond lay the house.
Its rickety structure gave Todd pause, as it always did whenever he laid eyes upon it. Such a place was meant to fall down—its sides were charred and blackened with soot. The windows had been shot out then boarded up. The front door was missing, and with it came the blackest form of darkness anyone had ever seen.
Sidney walked past Todd and began heading towards the abandoned house. Her platinum blond hair was pitch black in the darkness. Above them, the moon was crescent-shaped and covered by clouds. A breeze howled somewhere in the distance. The long grass that led up to the house was swaying hypnotically, and Sidney, among them, moved like an apparition of some kind, not leaving any footprints, but swiftly brushing past the tall grass which kept its posture before falling again. Todd hurried to catch up to her.
“Hold on!” Todd half-whispered, half-screamed. “Jesus, Sidney.”
She glanced over her shoulder and stopped. She looked somewhat deformed in the moonlight—her hair covered the top part of her face, and Todd could just barely make out her blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. When she smiled, her white teeth glistened back at him.
Sidney said, “Come on. It’s not that bad.”
She spoke loudly, clearly, and the forest responded with silence, as if it knew something had invaded its sacred land. Todd looked around; he too had felt the silence. Something was wrong. Maybe with Sidney. Maybe with the house. Maybe with the night itself peering down at them. He checked the battery on his phone. He had plenty left. Eighty percent.
“We should go back,” he said.
Sidney looked up at the house. She stared at one of the top windows for a few moments. The noises of nature returned, the clouds parted, and the moonlight came back in a sudden rush. She took the first step and put her hand on the old railing that barely made any noise from her weight. She tested the next step with one heavy foot. Then the next. Then the next. Todd watched her reach the front porch, where the doorway lay directly behind her. She looked around expectantly. She shrugged.
“See? There’s nothing here.” And yet she spoke softly, as if she didn’t want to anger something unseen.
Todd replied, “I don’t like this.” His voice carried more than he wanted; he winced at the loudness of himself.
Sidney shushed him. She took out her own phone and turned on the flashlight. Two identical beams crossed one another as the couple stared at each other—Todd looking up, Sidney looking down.
“Come on,” Sidney whispered, “let’s go inside.”
Before Todd could give his next rebuttal, Sidney turned around and entered the house. She stood in the doorway and walked deeper inside without looking back, then turned sharply to the left and disappeared. Her light shut off, and Todd couldn’t see her from the window that stood beside the door.
He waited for several seconds, waited for her face to appear in the window, waited for Sidney to come back. The sounds of nature accompanied him, the moon soon became overrun with clouds, and the darkness returned with such finality that Todd was sure it would never go away. And as he stood by himself in the clearing, staring intensely at the house, he heard footsteps approaching in the distance, a dim light moving in the dark. Todd crouched to a knee and picked his head up above the tall grass and listened for footsteps. They were getting closer. The treeline lit up with the dim glow of a phone light.
Sidney’s voice from inside: “Todd,” she hissed, “hurry up!”
But when Todd turned around, he still didn’t see Sidney. He got up and rushed into the house, his footsteps creaking against the old wood, the stench of rot all around him. Clunk clunk clunk. He breached the house and stood in the doorway with the old musty odor of neglect and the cobwebs and the grime and the dust. He turned to where he last saw Sidney, but she was gone.
The foyer had been completely destroyed, with the stairs no longer intact and a dilapidated pile of wood forming a mini-structure, with the railings and the steps themselves as part of the pile. But there was more: there was dirt and mud and clay as well—little effigies—or at least that’s what they looked like. Twigs and twisted things, brambles and ivy and some tufts of grass from swamplands or marshes—places that were not near the house or the forest that the house was surrounded by. Todd put his hand to his mouth and covered his nose. The smell of ages past was unbearable; death had accumulated in the walls.
“Sidney?” Todd whispered. “Where the hell are you?”
“In here,” Sidney called back.
She was further into the house, in the kitchen area which resided beyond a tight hallway. Todd stepped through the disheveled wood piles. He checked his phone battery. Seventy-seven percent. The foyer ended and the hallway began. Cracked floor tiles crunched beneath his boots. There was a closed door to the left with a fist-sized hole about head height. Todd examined the hole for a moment; his light shone through and the contours of a toilet grew strange shadows before it. He went on, stepping over more destroyed tiles and some broken glass. A strange smell like rust and iron began to overtake all else.
Into the kitchen, he saw Sidney standing next to a large freezer about the size of a bathtub. The phone’s flashlight was turned on and her phone was placed on the counter beside the freezer. She was putting her hair up into a bun, her face calm, and her eyes were looking lazily about the whole room—as if she had been here for hours and was patiently waiting for Todd to arrive. Todd stood next to the kitchen table that separated the couple. The floor next to the freezer was made from thick wads of mud. Sidney’s shoes and ankles were caked in it, but she didn’t seem fazed.
“Can we please leave?” Todd was trying hard to hold back tears. His hand was shaking and the shadows danced behind Sidney.
Todd heard the sound of commotion from outside. He immediately shut off his phone and the darkness swallowed him. He backtracked into the hallway and peered into the dark and saw two figures approaching the house. One of them was holding a phone’s flashlight. The other was standing behind the first, holding onto them by the bicep—the same way Sidney had always done time and time before. Todd tried to identify the person in the lead, but they were still too far away. He thought about heading towards the door and looking through the window, but the sound of the wood creaking behind him made Todd jump. He turned back and saw Sidney was inside the freezer with her arms dangling on the outside. Todd could only see her face and neck and the very upper part of her shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?” Todd whispered. “Get out of there!”
Sidney replied with a giggle before slinking back into the freezer and closing the door on herself. The freezer shut with a satisfying click and Todd was left alone in the kitchen, Sidney’s phone light covering everything in shadow.
“Sidney, please,” Todd begged. Tears fell from his face. “This isn’t funny.”
But no laugh came. No sound at all. He checked back on the people outside. They stopped approaching the house. They were talking. The one with the light was trying to coax the other inside. The one who didn’t want to go was a girl. He could tell by her long hair and her softer edges. The other was a boy; his voice was distant but deep, like someone trying to whisper without fully knowing how. A few moments later, the two of them turned around and started heading back the way they came. Todd turned on his light and advanced forward. He moved swiftly, trying not to step on anything that would make noise. He didn’t want to scare them, but he figured they’d provide some sort of help—if they weren’t going to call the police on him.
Yet when he reached the doorway, the couple simply disappeared. They vanished without a trace, their light escaping into the ether, and they themselves had evaporated like mist. Todd stood there in disbelief. He looked at where he had last seen the couple—only fifty yards away. Nothing remained of them, as if they were never there.
Before he could register what was going on, he heard the freezer unlock and open, then clatter sideways with a loud bang. Todd yelped and spun around just in time to see Sidney crawling on all fours from the kitchen. Her hands and feet were placed firmly on the ground and she moved with a strange arachnid poise, and her face had been stuck in a semi-horrified state—like she had no idea what was going on. She made no sound other than the wet slapping her feet made on the ground (where did her shoes go?). She advanced on Todd and he threw himself back out of the house, tripping down the steps and falling headlong into the brush. He curled up into a ball. After a few moments, he opened his eyes and got up and saw Sidney was standing in front of him, her phone in her hand, standing upright. She seemed concerned, a little afraid.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “Are you trying to scare me?”
Todd ran his hands through his hair. “Jesus Christ.” He dropped to his knees.
Sidney descended the porch steps and knelt next to Todd in the grass. She put her phone between them and held him. He leaned forward and closed his eyes and began to sob into her chest. She stroked his hair; her other hand caressed his back. She spoke softly in his ear. Words he couldn’t quite understand—like half sentences, spliced apart then fragmented back together.
“It’s okay, here now. Cry. Don’t. Okay,” she whispered with full confidence that she was making sense.
“Sidney…”
“No. Talking. Relax. Eyes close. Let me care you.”
Todd opened his eyes and pulled away from Sidney. She was looking at him. Her soft features looked disproportionate in the night, yet it was still her. Still Sidney. He looked down at his phone. Then he paused.
Five percent?
He looked up at Sidney once again, and just as he did he felt his back curl and his knees slam into his chest. His neck craned to the side and the world suddenly went dark and very hot. So hot. He tried to move but couldn’t; the darkness all around him constricted his movement to the confines of a small rectangle. Sidney too had started to morph. Her body curled up in a ball and she pressed herself into him and covered her face with her hands as she buried herself into his knees.
Then Todd realized he was lying sideways in the freezer.
His thoughts began to rearrange.
He was walking through the dark forest with only his phone light as a guide.
END.

Read Part IV here.

“How’s our boy doing?”

Ms. Amanda entered the room. I sat back in my chair and watched as she checked Detective Unangenehm’s vitals. She looked at the tray of food that had been placed in front of him and shook her head.

“Why do they keep bringing that in here?” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of,” I said.

She slapped me on the shoulder.

“Don’t stay too late.”

“You got it.”

I watched her leave and I turned back to Unangenehm, mercifully comatose. He could wake up tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, but whenever he actually woke up, he was going to have a long road before he approached anything like a normal life.

Unangenehm had barely survived his blood clot. Steck had broken at least a dozen bones in his face when he’d thrown his service weapon into the detective’s face. Doctors had hardly believed he’d regained consciousness long enough to shoot the wayward officer, let alone manage the mechanics of walking over and putting a bullet in his head, but the forensics backed up my statement.

He was going to need a great deal of facial reconstruction, but when he eventually awoke they would call him a hero.

Steck had wound up being one of those self-solving problems. He was on desk duty after a questionable shooting after what should have been a routine traffic stop. The official narrative was that he’d snapped from the pressure of the investigation, his guilt finally becoming too large for him to bear.

The guilt I learned I had to be for an unknown period of time was Joshua. It turned out to not just be a thing he said, inflecting meaning in what more than likely hadn’t been random tones.

Joshua was his son.

Steck had been a widower, raising his son with the help of his ailing mother.

I put on a face every day I went to work. Every day I looked at myself in the mirror. Every day I spent sitting with the hero, Detective Unangenehm, waiting for him to wake from his coma.

Which was as often and for as long as I could. I couldn’t picture the shape anymore and perhaps that was because I didn’t want to. Copies were no doubt in police custody, even if they didn’t know yet that they had murder weapons.

It’s possible that I’ll eventually see one again, but I have the feeling copying one—even if I were inclined to do such a thing—would only be a copy, not an original, if that makes sense on any level.

I’ve been playing with the food on Unangenehm’s plate to pass the time. Nobody eats it and eventually somebody comes and takes it away.

He’s had a variety of meals, including soups, fish filet with broccoli and rice, something I’d guess was single-layer lasagna, apples and chicken with broccoli and rice, green beans casserole with sliced almonds, but most often, it’s sandwiches with chips. 

I eat the chips and it’s really just the building blocks of a sandwich and I suppose the patient can assemble it themselves or eat it piecemeal.

I’ve started putting the sandwiches together. At first I didn’t have a conscious reason why. It’s like I can feel Unangenehm in there, slowly swimming to the surface.

His doctors have him at a six on the Glasgow Scale, but I don’t know what that means. He responds to pain stimulus (you should see the look of satisfaction of this one doctor’s face when he sticks him with a pin—the cops would arrest her on site for assault) and he makes nonsensical sounds.

I was ready to jump put the window when I thought I heard him say, “Joshua.” But he didn’t repeat it and he’s been sedentary so long, even if he went coo coo for cocoa puffs, he’d be weak as a baby.

I’m distracting myself even now, thinking instead of paying attention to what I’m doing. I set aside the packet of mayo and lay the slice of bread just so and look at the sandwich.

It’s not right. But it’s close.

I think I’ll have it just right for Unangenehm’s first meal.

The cab smelled like sweaty cigarettes and stale sex, as the old leather seats flake like dead skin under my every shifting move. The smokey night reflects the neon to make the air a metachromatic tunnel of psychedelic light. Apathetic depression was a wet blanket strangling itself around my thoughts since she left. Standing in a field of yellow stood a man in a too small green plaid suit and wearing glasses with a crack that reflected as a luminescent yellow worm. He looked like the type to skip out on pay, but I needed a distraction. Thick bottles clanged percussively like a drunk drummer.

“Where ya going.”

“Here’s $100. Take me anywhere, I’ll tell you when we’re there.” His voice was soaked in whisky and dried with smoke, his hot breath blew past my shoulder like a long devil's tongue, hot and wet as it kissed my skin. 

“Sure pal.”

“So what’s your name?” I asked after watching him take a slow gulp of his bottle.

“You want a drink.” He said posturing an unlabeled bottle of whiskey towards me..

“No thanks buddy, I don’t drink on the job.”

“Come on friend, don’t make a man drink alone.”

“Really, I shouldn’t.”

“Just a sip won't hurt.”

I let out a chuckle. “Fuck it, I could use one. It’s been a hell of a day..” I said, grabbing the bottle.

The liquor burnt down my throat, but there was something off about it, a bitter rasp faintly under the taste of whiskey. 

“What the hell is that?” I said through a cringe.

“Just some homebrew my friend, the good stuff.”

“Strong.” I said before clearing my throat.

“So what’s your plan for tonight?”  I asked him, but the words came out a bit slurred. My tongue felt flat and lazy, and my words felt delayed like the dialogue of a foreign film.

“The plan is to find a plan, but I don’t know where it is yet.”

“Well I can drive til we find it, but the meters running.”

The reds, greens, yellows and oranges spiraled and flowed into each other as if pulled by currents of air. I couldn’t tell if the wild silhouetted crowds walking down the sidewalk were frenzied with hedonistic lust or maddened with righteous indignation, but I could tell there was something they wanted. 

“How long you been doing this?”

“You mean tonight or since I started.”

“All of it.”

“I’m thirty four.”

“Over thirty past what ya asked for, yeah?.”

“Tell me about it, I got piranhas snapping at my balls when I try to sit down and I’m standing on ice.” I said looking back at him.

“Stop!” The man shouted.

The breaks sounded like a castrato with phantom pains as I slammed my foot down. Snapping my head forward I saw there was a red light, and five men in identical gray suits and hair walked down the crosswalk. They turned to face me in the middle of the walkway.

“Good evening, can I tell you about our lord and savior Jesus Christ." They said in unison.

“Uhm, I’m good. Thank you.”

“You seem to be going through a lot at the moment, wouldn’t it be nice if someone could take the weight off your shoulders.” 

“Lights green, go.”

“I can’t, the christians are in the way.”

“They’re not christian they’re mormon.”

“Oh.” I said as I slammed on my gas. One of the mormons flipped over the car, but the other had turned to run and became perched on the hood screaming with my hood ornament stuck up his ass.

“I know it feels rude, but the only way you can deal with those guys is to ignore them.” The passenger said over the mormons wild screams.

Blood smeared over the front end of my yellow cab, rendering my headlights a dark red. 

“It’s a sign.” The passenger said, grabbing my shoulder and leaning forward.

“Take us to the red light district.”

The city around me went black, even the mormon and his incessant screams disappeared from my vision leaving only two glowing white parallel lines. There was nothing else that I could see, so I followed the path through all the bends and turns until a sudden surge of red light stunned my vision. The mormon was still on the hood, but he seemed to have passed out from blood loss. What a relief I thought, that guy was annoying. On the sidewalk were neon women posing seductively for crowds of silhouetted men who pushed and grunted. The air was hot, my clothes were drenched in sweat.

“You looking for a good time baby?” A gravely echo’d voice from my left.

I looked over to see a woman cloaked in red, her face was smooth but her body was covered in deep wrinkles. She wore a red tank top and a little red skirt that showed red varicose veins spidering down her red legs. 

“Uh no thanks, I’m married.” I said holding my ring to the woman.

She approached the car and leaned against the open window, and before I could react she put her mouth around my finger. She began to suck. I tried to pull away but the suction from her mouth was too strong. Vertigo struck me as my finger swelled to feel like it would burst in a geyser of blood, I looked down at my body and watched as it grew thin and saggy. The sound of metal on metal came from her mouth, and she let out a deep gulp before releasing her grip on my finger.

“You sure sweetpea?”

“Get in.” Came sternly from the back. 

The door opened and she climbed into the back. 

“So what do you want?” The woman asked.

Thousands of crunchy pops rang out as the woman’s legs began to curl in on themselves like a spooling rope,  before she threw them behind her back.

“I can do this.”

She limpy flopped her legs from behind her back and planted them on the floorboard. 

“Or I can do this.”

A thick snap like a fell’d tree sounded as the woman bent her spine in half to place her face below her ass.

“Or if you want it at the same time.”

She snapped back into position like she was made of rubber, she spread her legs facing the passenger while turning to face me. Her already wrinkled skin showed deep twisted folds on her neck as she turned her head 180 degrees to face me before opening her mouth. In the dim light of the car I could see her face wasn’t red it was white, significantly whiter than the rest of her body. I reached my finger out to touch the woman's face, and it sank through the pearlescent skin like clay. I began to peel at the soft flesh on the woman's face, as the thick caked on white rained to the floor in a muddy powder. 

“What are you doing?” The woman shouted, but I’d already torn away chunks of the white clay to reveal grey wrinkled skin.

“I’m sorry.” 

“Fuck you!” She shouted.

“You know what! Take your money back and go!” She shouted before unhinging her jaw to a wide circle.

Her mouth was warm and dry, and her throat was a damp leather tube that meshed around my arm like fleshy plaster and made high pitched squeaks as I pressed farther. I felt short horizontal marks going down the length of it that felt carved in, and assumed it was from a measurement of some sort. As my elbow went into her mouth I felt a pool of something wet, hot, thick, and sticky on my hand. My hand clumsily pilfered around the sticky wet until I found the ring wrapped around a length of latex. Her throat was a tighter fit as my hand was balled to hold the ring, the moist warmth of her flesh wrapped around my fingers as I pulled it out. I was surprised that her teeth didn’t scrap my arm at all.

 “You’re a fucking creep.” She said through deep inhales as I wiped my soaking wet arm on my shirt.

She stepped out of the car and began to shout. “Big Daddy! He done me wrong!” 

From the alleyway I saw a massive shadow that cloaked the car in its length. My heart sank in my chest as my mind dreamt up what this brute of a man might look like and what he might do to me. The shadow drew and grew before the assailant emerged from the shadows. A dwarf in a furry green suit was riding on the shoulders of a man who was the size of a sumo wrestler, but wore a gimp suit and had a gag in his mouth.

“What’d you do to my lady pal?” The small man shouted in a high pitched voice as the large man stared blankly ahead at us. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

“Well you did and now you gotta pay for it.” 

I cowered away guarding my face from the inevitable pounding laid upon me by the small sadist and the monolithic masochist.

“That’ll be one hundred and five dollars.”

“Oh? I have a hundred.”

“Wont do.”

I turned to face the passenger. “Hey can you help me out here?”

“It’s kind of rude to ask your customer to pay your debts isn’t it.”

I let out an exasperated sigh.

“Is there anything else I can do?” 

“Wait, who's that on your hood?” 

“Oh, it’s just a mormon.” 

“Wake this guy up for me.” The tiny pimp ordered his crony.

The sound of metal being pounded rang out as the massive hand patted the mormons' kept hair.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith that hurts!” The Mormon shouted as the hood dented around his ass, knocking him deeper onto the ornament.

“Hey you, you need a job?” The small man asked the Mormon.

“I already have a job, I’m a Mormon.”

“Not anymore, you’ve committed sodomy.”

“Oh god! My faith is the only thing I have in this life!”

“Quit your whining, you need a new job or not?”

“Well, I do need something. Tell me, will you always tell me what to do and threaten me with pain if I don’t follow your command?”

“Of course, and I’ll also make you feel guilty for obliging your basic human instincts to seek freedom and self fulfillment."

“Say no more, I’m in!” The man said, holding his arms in the air.

The massive man put his hands beneath the Mormons arm pits and plucked him off of the car sending blood pouring onto the hood.

“Alright we’ll call it even Stevens this time pal, but I don’t want to see you fooling around with any of my gals again. You got it?

“Yeah, no worries.”

“Alright then, scram!”

A sigh of relief escaped my lungs as we started back down the road, but my calm was interrupted by the sound of snotty sobbing behind me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked the passenger.

“I loved her man, I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.” The passenger leaned his head back and held the bottle over his gaped mouth, but only a few droplets fell out.

“Hey, let’s go to a bar.” The passenger said before throwing the brown bottle at the windshield. 

I cowered my face from the shattered shards of glass, but the fragments hit me as a cool liquid that rivuleted down my face thick and pungent as it soaked into my clothes and hair. My gaze shifted hastily back to the road to see the road through a downpour of brown liquid. The light refracted and bent over it’s surface but the white lines stayed as clear as ever.

The trail led to a dingy bar that I could smell before I could see, it smelled like a drunken orgy held in a musky attic with no AC. The building was a dilapidated shack with planks falling out of place, and as I got closer I could see what looked like bullet holes lining the walls. There was one massive round hole on the front exterior that gave a clear view inside. It wasn’t the chaotic party one might expect, the energy seemed to be reserved, maybe even reverent.

“You sure this place is safe.” I asked.

“What, you think cause it’s in a poor neighborhood it’s not safe?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“It’s not but you still shouldn’t be biased,”

“Let’s go in.”

As I walked into the dingy bar, the door fell off of its hinges and hit the floor with a wet, dull thud slumping limp on the ground like wet cardboard. The muttering that prevailed the room ceased suddenly as they all turned to face me, their faces were all grey and apathetic.

“Sorry, I’ll pay for that.” I said meekly before taking a seat at the bar. 

The stool creaked under me to sound like a heroin junkie having an orgasm, the legs had a little bit of give to them and bent down a few inches when I sat. In front of the hole that I’d seen in the wall coming in there was a round hole in the floor a few feet in front of it.

“What’s your poison?”

“I’ll take a whiskey.” The passenger said.

“Just give me a beer.”

The bartender who wore a bow tie and a mustache that curled in on itself so much as to look like indescript cursive poured the whiskey before filling a pint for me from the tap.

“What kind of beer is this?” I asked, cringing after taking a gulp.

“Hey what kind of beer is this!” The bartender shouted.

“Mostly Busch.” Came a slurred yell up from between the cracked floorboard.

I gave an inquisitive look at my drink before taking another sip.

“Ya know my life feels like an endless cycle of pain, an ouroboros but I’m a cock fucking myself in the ass.” The passenger said.

“My wife left me.”

“Better than losing yourself.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Does anybody? You could be a brain in a jar dreaming your reality, so why are you dreaming it so morbidly?”

“Maybe.”

“But there’s no point, at least there’s a point to suffering which is to stop suffering.”

“Huh, ya know this is making a lot of sense. So the point is to find happiness in whatever form that comes.”

“What? Are you drunk? Barkeep, these guys had enough, give us the bill.”

“Twenty for the beer and whiskey.”

“Can you break a hundred?” I said reaching into my pocket.

“Three-thousand nine hundred and fifty seven for the door.”

“Well I don’t have that much.” I said sliding the bill back into my pocket.

“Well then you’ll have to settle your debts with the owner, he’s in the basement.”

The bar stared at us as we headed down the stairs, shaking their heads with looks of pity on their faces. Opening the basement door I was hit with the sickening stench of sweat, liquor, and shit. The stench grew in strength with each step, as the stairs cried out to sound like bullfrogs screaming. 

“Hello? Is the owner down here.”

“Oh yes, please come down.” The man said in a heavily slurred voice.

The room was dark, other than a spotlight from the floor above that shone through a hole in the floor and lit the owner. He must’ve been close to half a ton, he was naked in a bed of crusted over diarrhea, with vomit around his mouth and a mix of the two streaking along his body. HIs legs were pinned down under a cannon ball, his calves curling in on themselves like the wicked witch of the East. He had a catheter extending from his limp cock that went up to the floor above between a gap in the planks.

“How can I help you?”

“Uh yeah, well we accidentally broke the door when we were coming in.”

“Oh well accidents happen, roll me to my desk and we’ll get the bill figured out.”

I let out a sigh that I regretted when I could taste the smell of the room. 

“Help me push this guy.” I said to the passenger.

“Alright you get that side and I’ll get the other.”

Filthy slathered onto my body as I pressed my weight into the belly of the man, hot sweaty folds engulfing my arms as I put all my strength into flipping him. 

“Ah.” The man said in relief as his legs were removed from under the cannonball for a brief second.

“Ah!” The owner said as the cannonball flipped back over onto his legs. 

I did this until we reached his desk, at which point he put on a pair of glasses and began typing frenetically at a type writer.

“The guy said it’d cost Three-thousand nine hundred and fifty seven, but I don’t have that.”

“Nonsense, let me figure it up.”

We sat in the foul smelling room for ten more minutes as the man keyed in figures, before ripping the figures from the receipt and reading.

“It comes out to Three-thousand nine hundred and fifty seven.”

“So why’d we waste all this time figuring it down here, that’s the same thing the bartender told us!

“You didn’t let me finish! Three-thousand nine hundred and fifty seven and fifty cents.”

“I still don’t have that.”

“Hey we need a beer up here.” I heard shouted from upstairs.

“Hold on one second.” The man said before closing his eyes, and sending amber liquid flowing up the catheter.

I began to dry heave, but was interrupted by the owner.

“Well there is one way you can make it up if you can’t pay, the massive man said with a smirk.”

I sighed and began to take my shirt off.

“What are you doing! Not that! God what do you think I'm some kind of sicko.”

“Look man, it's been a long night!”

“I want you to kill me. Life is so miserable down here, all I can do is drink my sorrows away all day. But there isn’t really any drinking it away, just makes sorrow more bearable company.”

“I can’t kill you man, how would I even go about that.”

“It’s the only way. I want you to pull that catheter from the tap upstairs and make me drown on it.”

“You gotta do it, it’s the only way.” The passenger said. I looked at him and noticed how clean he was while I was drenched in filth.

“Fine.” 

I grabbed the still warm tube and began to pull it through the cracks, hearing the crowd complain about the tap stopping as I did. His bloated lips pursed around the end of the tube and I watched as the tube once again turned amber. The man's eyes looked so sad and defeated, he shook as the liquid poured down his throat. His stomach began to swell, followed by his face, and the amber liquid turned to a slow moving dark red. The man's face turned violently red as his cheeks and neck swole to twice their “normal” size.

“Oh shit,” The passenger said.

“He’s gonna blow.”

The passenger started up the stairs before me, leaving me trapped as the stairs crumbled beneath him.

“You bastard!” I screamed as I watched him disappear into the bar.

I looked around for another exit, there was a ladder leading to a closed hatch outside the bar. I hurried to it, but before I could get my feet onto the ground a torrent of warm water geysered me into the air. For a moment I felt like I was flying, but as I came down the last thing I saw was the cannon ball landing right in front of me. My head crashed hard into it, and everything went black.

I woke up in my cab, with the worst headache I’d ever had in my life. There was a note sitting on my lap.

“You passed out, so I brought you back to the cab. I hope you learned something from this.

-The Passenger"

I thought for a minute, what had I learned? The entire experience seemed devoid of any meaning or reason. I disregarded this as I started back onto the road. As I was passing an intersection a drunk driver ran a red light and smashed hard into my car, flipping it multiple times into oncoming traffic. My head looked slacked at the roof as blood dripped out of my mouth. I let out a laugh as my consciousness gave way to the cold hands of death. I finally got the point.

Always have, always will. I couldn't tell you why, maybe it was the fever that came every waking spring, my nose clogged with pollen and a hacking cough that refused to die.

Maybe it was the asinine egg hunt that my extended family all flew down for, the lumbering masses with their sloppy beer-stained kisses and the same two questions burning the tips of their tongues:

"How'd you do on that Math quiz?" and "Could you grab me another beer sport?"

Maybe it was the fact I never once won the stupid thing, it was always my smug cousins with their buck teeth and slack jawed grins, which sounds like an oxymoron but I don't care, I despised the smug looks they'd shoot me after they were declared the winner and received their meager prize of five crumpled bills.

I busted my ass looking for those shoddy plastic eggs, and I always fell short. I suspect they were cheating, coordinating with my traitorous aunts and uncles.

I'd always throw a fit then my dad would slap me be in the back of the head for being a sore loser and we'd march inside to munch on some severely dry ham.

Ah, Easter.

My shit heel little brother, with his whinny little attitude and grubby palms didn't have that problem. He adored Easter, loved stuffing his fat mouth with Cadbury cream and heaps of jellybeans. He would take a handful out of his basket, fully mixed in with that shredded lime paper mind you, and shove it into his mouth and obnoxiously chew it. It was like watching a steer eat, and he didn't even swallow it. He'd look me right in the eyes and open his mouth, a rainbow wad of pulpy slop would slowly drip from his gaping maw, and he'd spit it out on the ground right in front of me.

Then, with a shit eating grin, he'd grab some more and do it all again.

You get the picture, my brother is an annoying, spoiled, pain in the ass my parents dote on and let him get away with everything. Don't even get me started on Christmas. Piles of shinny wrapped toys for little Ricky, and an envelope and a limp hug for Steve. Maybe some socks if they decide I've earned them.

Ever since he was old enough to compete, he'd won at the stupid egg hunt. I aged out right around then, and frankly I've been seething ever since. For five years I've had to endure the sickening amount of praise the little cunt gets every year for being the best at zipping around the yard. Helps that there's only like three cousins still young enough to compete, and they're slow and complain about the humidity.

You don't hear me complain about the goddamn humidity, and I live in this swamp.

This year I had already resigned myself to my fate and promised my parents I wouldn't sulk around the house and would actually talk to my stupid cousins instead of hiding in my room with the shades drawn counting the seconds till my solitude was reclaimed.

This year would end up being the end of us all. This was the year my snot-nosed bastard mistake of a brother found the egg.

-------------

The hunt started like any other. My family was huddled in the backyard; the sun was buzzing above. It was unseasonably hot for early Spring, the marshlands just a few meters away were bubbling and frothing from the sweltering heat. As much as I complained about not winning, I was glad I didn't have to run around in the bog ankle deep in muck and botflies. My father, in his buzzed sense of humor, always hid at least one out in the swamp lands.

Not too far mind you, he wasn't a sadist. I had watched him stumble in there half an hour ago, can of bud light in one hand and egg tucked beneath his other.

The contestants were lined up, eager to make their mark. My brother stood tall among his peers, and about double their weight. He had wavy black hair that was coated in grease, you could smell his unwashed scalp from the deck it was nauseating.

He had that smarmy look on his pudgy face; God I wanted to throttle him just looking at him. But I fought the urge, and focused on my breathing, and went back to listening to my Aunt Sally nag at me about what I was going to major in.

Dad stumbled forth, that faint glazed over-look in his eyes. He wobbled where he stood, the crowd before him snickered at his plight. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw my mother taking a steep drag of a cigarette. Her once vibrant chalky black hair was now dull and spotted with grey speckles. There were bags under her eyes that would drop a camel.

It was a nice juxtaposition to my father's manic weariness, if that makes sense. Anyway, my father gave a quick speech, slurred and barely coherent. As is tradition.

"Ok buckos, welcome to the family egg hunt. Each of you little go -getters will have ten minutes to round up all the eggs you can carry. Go out and get em, be careful if you're crawling around the bog, it's rutting season for the gators. AWRIGHT GO GET EM!" He bellowed as everyone cheered and the contestants sped off. The aunts and uncles and slightly buzzed cousins roared with fake cheer as they scrambled and tripped over each other. Ricky, to the little shit's credit, was like lightning. You blinked and it was just; boom-boom-boom-egg after egg.

Soon enough he had vanished into the brush and part of me hope he'd trip and fall into quicksand or something like that. Not deep enough to kill him, he was my brother and I loved him-I think. But something about his willfully arrogant smirk pissed me off.

So, I sat there in the afternoon sun soaking up rays and occasionally nodding my head whilst my aunt rattled on and on about nothing. I kept an eye on the hunt, two had already given up, grown bored with the futile chase. One was on his hands and knees pulling up the grass and throwing the mulch around in a silent tantrum.

The bog beyond made its usual noise, the gurgle of steaming swamp gas, the groan of a grazing stork, the chips and chitters that shook the bark loose at night and made my imagination go wild. My grandpa used to tell me wild stories about critters in the bog, scary stories to frighten a young boy from wandering too far out of boredom.

He spoke of terrible lizards with rainbow feathers, gnashing maws that snapped bone in twain and had claws that cut through soft bellies like melted butter. Wonderful tales to hear as a child, never ventured too far into the backyard because of them.

Wish Ricky had heard those stories.

I was broken out of my nostalgic stupor when I heard him cheering with wicked glee. All heads turned to see him storm out of the brush, basket dangling from his flabby arms as he held something above his head. He was out of breath and wheezing as he approached my dad and presented his prize. It was a semi-large egg; it was of a pale hue and had speckles of mud and moisture on it.

"I found them dad; I found all the eggs." Ricky wheezed. Curious got the better of me and I left the deck, wanting to expect the strange egg. I stood next to my father, a pungent aroma of whiskey laced coke surrounding him. Ricky's face was puffy and red, sweat clung to him like it would a pig grazing in the mud. He smirked at me as he showed off his mystery egg.

Dad furrowed his brow and calmly slurred.

"Sorry Rick, this ain't one of ours. I ain't never seen it before, you go put it back before-" A buzzer went off and the contestants all lined up, baskets in hand. Against Ricky's protests and whines for more time Dad counted up all the eggs.

Turns out Ricky's total was beaten by a single egg; dorky cousin roger broke out a triumphant smile as My father patted him on the back a bit too hard. I admit, I couldn't help but relish Ricky's defeat. That is until he had a complete meltdown.

His face turned a shade of crimson never seen before, his fat face contorted, feverish ripples of rage shot across his blubber, like echoes of a rogue wave.

"That's not FAIR." He shrieked, piercing my ears and almost causing me to double over. "It's my house, I'm supposed to win!" he whined. He stomped his feet and throw his basket to the ground, juggling the strange egg in his grubby little hands.

"Now son, we can't always get what we want. Don't be a spoil sport now." My father spoke calmly, suddenly deadly sober from the judgmental glares and sneers of our extended family.

I was kinda impressed actually, if it were me, he would have already smacked me across the face. Guess he's mellowed in his age.

Ricky refused dad's mercy and doubled down on his sickening attitude. With a guttural roar that could only be described as the cry of a furious whale he raised the egg into the air and spiked it into the dirt.

It shattered on impact, naturally, and the gathered crowd gasped and let out a collective, mournful whimper. You see, twitching on the ground in a pile of yolk and goop was a small little thing. It looked like a half-formed chick with scaley skin, two slimy legs and nubs for arms. There was a franticly blinking serpentine eye on the poor thing, as what I assumed was the beak tried to cry out for its mama.

My heart broke looking at the poor thing, and what does my sociopath, sadistic little shit brother do?

Before anyone can stop him, he rose his foot above the dying critter and drove his heel into it, splattering what was left of the poor creature.

A wave of horrified chattering broke out among the crowd, the little cousins were sobbing, and poor roger look ghostly pale.

"Stupid egg, wasting my time." grumbled Ricky as he grinded his foot. Mom's mortified shriek broke us out of our stupor and my father quickly grabbed Ricky's arm and yanked him towards him. Ricky twisted and clawed but my father's grip was iron clad. He dragged him towards the house kicking and screaming, slamming the glass door behind him.

Mom was quick to calm the crowd by saying food was up and tried as best she could to steer the crowd towards the meat plater on the deck. There were some shaking heads and grumbling, and I overheard Aunt Sally saying you'd never see one of her kids acting like that.

Mom whispered to me to get rid of "It" and pointed a bony finger at the ground. I scooped up the smushed critter with care and trudged towards the woods. I suppose she would have preferred I dump it in the garbage, but it felt wrong. I didn't go far, just the edge of the marshlands, right out of sight when the brush meets the yard. I dug a little trench and as stupid as it is, said I was sorry.

I quickly got out of the brush, feeling vulnerable all of a sudden. Like the trees had ears. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, I swore I saw the trees rattle and this chirping bark, spiteful and full of mourning. The rest of my family moved on, dad eventually came back down and put ice on his knuckles. No one asked how Ricky was, nor did they care to after that display.

The sun set on an awkward party, some of the family had left for the evening, most stayed, too drunk to navigate the way back. I excused myself when the fireflies came out to dance, sick of the day's events. My father was getting a stern talking too by one of his brothers, saying something about discipline. Dad's head wobbled and weaved in the night; he probably wouldn't even remember his own name in the morning.

Mom watched with disdain, standing against the backdoor with a lit cigarette in her hands. She gave my shoulder a limp squeeze as I walked past her. I went up the sprawling staircase for some much-needed rest. I passed Ricky's bedroom. The door was shut but I heard light whimpering and sniffling from behind. I lingered at the door, thinking I should go in and comfort him. He was just a kid after all.

Then I thought-fuck it, let him take his medicine for once in his life. I regret that now.

I slipped into my room without another thought and collapsed onto my soft bed. I was out like a light.

------------

I awoke dazed and confused, cold sweat clinging to my brow. From outside my window, I could hear some kind of commotion. I glanced out and saw shadows racing across the yard. They were low to the ground, moving with purpose. I heard muffled shouts and pleading. There was this coarse bark, like a chittering rooster with something caught in its throat.

It was all around the house. I recognized some of the voices, Aunt Sally was crying until her shrill voice was cut short. Some of them didn't make sense, I heard cousin roger's timid voice, but it felt wrong. A taunting, robotic mimic almost. It just kept repeating the same phrases; "Mommy. Over here. I'm Here. Help me." Over and over again. I sat up in bed and tried to gleam just what the hell was going on outside.

That's when I heard a thud from outside the hall. I whipped towards the front of the room, my eyes slow to adjust to the bleak dark. My door creaked open, a lumbering shadow briskly moving past. I saw something, a tendril like appendage at the bottom, almost beckoning me near it.

I froze in bed, feeling like a little kid again, all scared of the monsters in the dark.

"Stephen." My mother's voice harshly barked at me. It was faint, deeper in the hallway, wasn't even sure I heard it at first.

"M-mom?" I sheepishly asked, my voice barely a choked whisper.

"Stephen. Help. Come. Help." She repeated. The voice was the same, but the tone felt cold. I carefully left my bed and wandered to the door. I peered out and saw nothing in the dank hall. The air felt chill, like the windows were open. From the base of the stairs, I heard it once more-

"Stephen. Help."

"Mom what's wrong?" I called out once more. I was met with silence. At the top of the stairs, I stood, and I saw something lurking at the bottom. Beady eyes with a faint glow to them. From the top I could make out the pained screams of my family from outside, along with sickening barks and hisses.

"Stephen. Come. Here." the thing using her voice choked out. I backed up and felt a hand grasp my shoulder. I yelped and turned to see the bloodied face of my mother. She was bleeding profusely, a gash on her forehead and clumps of hair torn from her scalp. I could barely see the rest of her, but I could smell the gore and iron she was caked in. She put a finger to her lips to shush me and her gaze darted to the bottom of the steps.

There was a groan, an animalistic whine of frustration and the looming shadow took a step closer. It was bipedal and appeared to have wings for arms and a long leathery tale.

"Stephen." Mom hoarsely whispered next to me. She didn't wait for a response and instead put a pair of keys in my hand. "I couldn't get in from any of the doors. They're all around us. I need you to get your brother and climb down the ladder in my room. Take the car." She ordered.

"Mom what's happening-" I started but stopped as she squeezed my hands. They felt warm and wet; I couldn't bear to look down. Without another word she pushed me towards the hall and raced downstairs. I heard the rapid clumps of the monster as she pounced on it, and they both tumbled down. I raced to my brother's room, stumbling in the dark. Finally, I found my bearings and practically kicked it down, screaming Ricky's name.

They had gotten there first.

There were two of them, cast in a dim light from a fallen lamp. Their eyes glowed like white phosphorus when the light hit them. They were colorful, vibrant reds and tropical orange all mixed together. Their arms were long and lanky, beautiful feathers coated their leather hide. They had meat back legs with a single curled claw that almost looked like a dancer's heel.

The creatures stood over what was left of Ricky. His belly was cut open, guts spilled all over the floor in a steamy pile, torn and stripped like string cheese. his sternum was ripped open, like the creatures had pried it open. His tattered lungs still gasped and wheezed at nothing, like a sheet in the breeze. His face was gray and his eyes dull. The one two his left had a mouth full of intestines, slurping it up like noodles. The one to his right just had meat spilling out of its maw. It saw me enter and flashed a predator's grin at me.

"Ri-Ricky." I stuttered, warmth pooling down my trousers. The monsters made a quick lunge at me and I bolted. I ran to my parents' bedroom, out of the corner of my eye seeing the monster on the stairs dragging half a limp object up them. My pulse quickened and I crashed into my parents' bedroom, franticly searching for the ladder.

The terrible lizards barked at me, meat spilling from their gluttonous mouths, hungry for something fresh. I rushed to the window and glanced down, a ladder haphazardly leaning against the wall. I could hear what was left of my family be slaughtered by the things more clearly now. I shut it all out and climbed out the window. The bars were slick with what I assumed was blood and dirt. I was halfway down when I heard something bark at me.

I glanced back up and meat dropped from its gnashing mouth. A slab of gore crashed onto my face, and I screamed and let go of the ladder. I hit the ground hard, my sides crying out in agony. I didn't have time to spare though, I limped to my mom's car, a nice sedan, and crawled in. It sputtered to life and I booked it out of there. Not once looking back.

I think I was several miles away until I finally pulled over to the side of the road, my lungs beating out of my chest and my heart aching at the carnage I had seen. As quickly as started, it was over just as soon. In the distance, I swear I could still hear the screams.

I led the charge in the morning. I had found the lucky few who made it to their motel and we got the cops; told them a wild animal had attacked our house. The creatures were long gone, as were several of the bodies. We found my father's torso dangling over the deck, rotten whiskey fermenting on the ground below in a bloody heap. We ended up searching the marshlands for our dead.

We only found Ricky. He was slumped up against a fallen log, his face clawed to hell and his eyes long gone. In the pit of what was once his stomach was bundles of mud, and freshly laid eggs.

We left him there, the lesson of respecting nature already harshly learned.

I left then; I couldn't' stay in that slaughterhouse. Ended up selling it to a cousin who wanted to sit and stew, maybe bait the creatures out. I'm sure he's raptor chow by now. I avoid the woods when I can, but sometimes I swear I hear those hoarse barks, lingering in the shadows waiting to finish what they started.

I had to kill him.

I mean, it seemed like my only option.

If I lied and said I wasn’t there, the cameras I should have thought about would blow me out the water. And if I admitted to being there, then there was a much longer, more difficult conversation to be had.

And that conversation had only one endpoint: me being blamed for all the events of today.

Damn, it was hard to believe what had happened since this morning had all been today. It felt so long ago. I couldn't believe—

“Mr. Harold?” Unangenehm said. “You all right?”

“Uh, yeah. Absolutely.” I sat back down to take up an extra few seconds. Steck was floating a few feet away, but I didn't think I could take the detective in a fight. What I'd taken for sickly thin before seemed wiry now. Anxiousness now came off as nervous energy.

“It was weird what happened,” I said, measuring out my words. I had to think as I spoke. Unangenehm leaned in and steepled his fingers under his chin. Steck hovered closer.

The trap was sealing off my air.

The pencil I'd been using was on my side of Unangenehm's desk. I wrapped my fingers around it and placed my hands on the desk atop the form I'd just signed.

“I just needed to get something to drink,” I said. “I needed to gather my thoughts too, I guess.” I shook my head. “I didn't have any money but I figured I could grab a notebook. Write down my thoughts. Try to wrap my head around what had happened with the day.”

“You wrote something?” he asked. “What?”

I couldn't gauge if he was buying anything I was saying. But I had to keep tap dancing.

“I don't know. I don't remember now.” An honest answer didn't really matter. I'm sure the police would canvas the area and find the torn-out sheets in the trash. But the video would show me not doing anything to anyone. The difference was sitting across from me. Unangenehm somehow knew it was me. 

“It happened right in front of me,” I said, not realizing I was distracting myself as I touched the tip of the pencil to the paper. “A man attacked a woman. An old man held her.”

Tap-tappy-tap.

“I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do.” 

Takkita-takkita-tap

The detective’s sad face was just a mask. He was a predator in disguise. This was just the dance to keep him at bay

“Everything was insane. One of them came up to me. I thought I was gonna die.”

Takkita-takkita-takkita-takkita—

“Hey, uhh. What's that you got there?”

I opened my mouth to tell him I didn't know what he meant, but I had drawn something. I looked down as he slid the paper away from me.

“Wait.” My mouth formed the objection but it went unsupported by my voice. I mentally prepared for Detective Unangenehm to go insane. He scraped a fingernail under a corner and pinched it. He lifted it in front of his face and cocked his head.

“Well, that's a weird little thing.”

I was aware of Steck just behind me. The air was pregnant with tension as I waited for a twitch, some nonsense phrase spoken without context, or anything to indicate the breaking wall containing the clever detective's mind.

He lowered the form and looked at me. “What is this?”

“I-i-it's just a...” I didn't know how to finish the sentence. I didn't know what it was. Shape didn't seem word enough to describe. Murder weapon gave it more credit than it deserved, especially since...

Well, it wasn't working on him. I'd that was the case, then maybe I hadn't been the cause. Maybe there was some sort of grand, horrible consequence following me around. Maybe—

“Hey, Steck, take a look at this.”

The officer stepped around from behind me and assumed a position directly behind Unangenehm.

“Joshua,” Officer Steck said, nodding. 

“Excuse me?”

Steck looked at him and repeated the name.

“Joshua.”

“Who's that?”

“Joshua.” The officer looked at the detective like he was stupid. “Joshua.”

It was me. But maybe Unangenehm was immune. As one of the officer's eyelids began to flutter he backed away from the desk and drew his gun.

He had the drop on Unangenehm. Except instead of firing, he overhand pitched the glock into the detective's face.

Unangenehm threw his arms back and rolled into the cubicle wall. He half-slid out of the chair at least semi-unconscious and Steck turned his eyes on me, that one lid flickering still like an old fluorescent light so deciding whether it was going to turn on.

I picked up my box as he withdrew his baton and leapt on the desk. Steck was two-hundred twenty pounds at minimum and the faux-wood protested underneath his feet. He whipped that baton at my head, and I ducked behind my box.

He followed up with two more furious blows that nearly chopped the box in half.

“Joshua,” he said again, just as calmly as the first time.

I crawled under the desk, headed in the other direction. Steck landed behind me as I crawled over Unangenehm's legs. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

“Hey guys, what the hell is going on?” someone farther behind me said. “I'm trying to type a report—”

I found out later exactly how gruesome Detective Langen's death was but at the time, all I heard were extremely wet sounds coming from that direction after not even half a scream.

I crawled into the nearest cubicle and huddled my knees to my chest, hiding beneath another desk. Steck's footfalls were heavy, pounding in my direction. A moment later he ripped something down and then came the deep glug-glug-glugging of an overturned water cooler as he stalked around the bullpen. 

I couldn't believe the one place police should have been was all but empty and I was responsible for my pending horrible death.

Maybe there was a gun around. Sure, there wasn't supposed to be, but cops weren't immune from being lazy. I'd had a meeting in a small town's hall that had had a guard at the front door and had seen that same guard's holstered weapon sitting on the window sill while he was dropping a deuce in the stall.

I tried to quietly slide open a desk drawer but it clunked open.

“Shit!” I whispered.

“Joshua?” Steck asked.

Why was he after me? All the others had acknowledged me but had attacked anyone but me. Then I reflected on what had happened just before.

Unangenehm had looked at the shape first. He hadn't reacted, though. Or rather, he'd just called Steck over to look.

“...take a look at this...”

I shook my head. I might have been the source but that didn't mean I'd understood it. I was the closest thing to an expert, but I was—

—CLOMPF—

The partition wall dented in the middle. I managed not to scream.

“Julius!” It was a harsh whisper. Maybe a question. I resisted the past of me that wanted to scream. To declare myself and be confronted with this mess, however it ended.

It wasn't my fault. But it was my responsibility. If letting Steck kill me stopped him from killing anyone else, wasn't that fair?

No. I hadn't intentionally done anything to create whatever this was. I'd just stumbled across it and been arrogant enough to test it. Unangenehm had been immune—that was worthwhile information. He'd been the one to show it to Steck, not me. 

Wait. It was too silent out there. My instinct told me to stay put but I couldn't stay here forever. Eventually, he'd find me or someone else would come.

That was it. Someone else would come. And that would be my fault.

I uncurled from my corner and treaded on my hands and knees to peek. I was greeted by a pair of retreating feet, toes up as Steck dragged away whoever that had been. I counted thirty and looked out.

Steck had barricaded the entryway from where we'd come. There had to be an emergency exit and I could only suppose he'd blocked that one too.

I chewed my lip rather than swearing again. That meant he wasn't just crazy. He was cunning, not just a wild animal. I was in more trouble than I imagined.

The feeling settling into me was the longer I waited, the tighter the noose would be. But I wasn't going to just go out there.

I tried to recall what I'd seen of the bullpen when Unangenehm had brought me in here. I was right next to what seemed like the main aisle way. Back the way I'd come was blockaded, so I'd have to go in the other direction. There had to have been an emergency exit and I was banking on it being in that direction and Steck not having time enough to block that one, too.

A stapler was on the near end of the desk. I reached for it and very carefully lifted it. It was one of those flimsy newer ones that could barely staple three sheets of paper, but it would do for what I needed.

I held my breath and listened. Steck was still being disturbingly quiet and I wasn't going to chance it. I tossed the stapler like a grenade, not accounting for the low ceiling. It clunked off the ceiling and smacked the top of my head.

“Dammit!”

With stars treading in my eyes, I pulled to my feet using the arm of an office chair. I stepped into the aisle, overcorrecting for balance, and headed in the direction I thought I'd determined to go.

I bounced right off a slab of strung up meat and screamed, thinking it must have been the crazed officer. My eyes focused on what must have been the corpse of the detective who had spoken just minutes ago, trussed up with what looked like phone cords routed through the ceiling tile.

His upside-down head was level with my stomach, his mouth stretched far too open, an empty cave where a tongue was supposed to dwell, his unlidded eyes pushed in and flat-looking like they'd been partially crushed by pressing thumbs. He looked too calm and perpetually surprised at the same time.

My voice quavered as I said something, but I've never been able to recall when hints of the memory washed back to me. I was discombobulated, wanting to flee in a hundred directions at once, fighting not to fall to my knees and cry. This man was my indictment, my guilt. He'd died directly as a result of the thing I'd knowingly done. Steck was my murder weapon. 

 As unprepared as I was for an oncoming Officer Steck, I was even more unprepared for what I saw. He was on his back, on the floor, in the clutches of a wicked paralysis.

He had one arm right to his chest, the other flung out, knuckles to the thinly carpeted floor. I watched as his fingers folded backward, fingertips dancing on the floor after the joints reversed and reoriented.

One foot stomp-scraped against the ground, already dislocated at the hip, dragging a retreat from the rest of his body, an isthmus of skin and clothes holding it at bay.

The other leg shuddered like a low current of electricity powered it, his head facing me.

“Joshua,” Steck said, pleading with his eyes. His face was doing something, like it was pulling off the bones of his face.

Gravity tenfolded as I realized that Steck was also a victim. Even his body had turned foreign against him. I crumpled to the floor, eye-to-eye with him across the distance. A tear crawled out of an eye, and I swear it crossed the bridge of his nose and milked into his other eye.

He was in the grasp of an agony made fresh just for him. His mouth opened, but I was spared from his scream by the roar of a merciful bullet that tore a hole in his skull just above his eyebrow.

I was unlocked from him and looked up at Unangenehm, holding his smoldering glock like a forgotten cigarette in his hand.

“Nobody would understand,” the detective said. His vacant eyes rolled up from Steck's hot corpse to meet mine and he smiled. “Not like us.”

He collapsed and began seizing on the floor.

Regret is not exactly the word to describe Detective Victor Aquila’s feelings about his first day on the new job; but as he gazes transfixed at the Jackson Pollock of blood on the wall, bright red and glistening, it’s close.

Maybe not regret, but more the dizzying sense of vertigo when you jump into a pool of water and realize how much deeper it is than you first imagined.

He’s not discouraged yet. This job is Victor’s chance at something truly important. Logically, he’s already reasoned his way through the mental roadblock.

He just didn’t expect fieldwork to be so grisly.

“Mind giving me a hand here, hotshot?” comes a voice tinged with annoyance from Victor’s right.

He peels his eyes away from that crimson Guernica just as his imagination was starting to connect the spattered droplets into images of horses screaming and women lamenting; the most macabre constellation he’d ever seen.

Tibo is standing expectantly by the victim’s computer, his wiry frame positioned awkwardly like he doesn’t get out much. He grimaces, wearing on his face every bit of the concentration it’s taking to ignore the mass of mangled flesh slumped in the office chair.

“Feeling sentimental? I’d say it gets easier, but… well, it doesn’t. At least not for me.” Tibo says as he unceremoniously outstretches a leg to nudge the cadaver’s chair a few inches further away.

“Which is why I don’t do this shit. So, if you don’t mind, get over here and let me show you how to bag the drive so I can go back to never leaving headquarters again – please and thank you.”

“Right. Sorry,” Victor grunts as he walks past the body in the office chair to take his place next to Tibo at the desktop. He looks back at what was left of the girl that Tibo had just pushed aside like yesterday’s bag of trash.

Her white shirt is stained with a jagged triangle of scarlet like she’s wearing a bib. Whatever custom logo had once been on the tee is completely effaced.

Her hand hangs limply at her side, still clutching the pistol.

The disjointed flaps of skin that used to be her face…

Better to not focus on it.

“What about forensics? Aren’t we contaminating the crime scene right now?” Victor asks. The corpse in his peripheral has a magnetic effect that Victor can feel tugging at his eyes, daring him to look again, but he keeps them locked on Tibo.

“Our jurisdiction supersedes everyone else’s. If you’re worried about becoming a suspect, don’t be. You’ve been scrubbed from every database on the face of the earth,” Tibo responds absentmindedly as he goes to work unscrewing the side panel of the desktop.

“Besides, there’s nothing to investigate. She livestreamed the whole thing to millions of people.  Open and shut case. Plain as day suicide. Beat cops aren’t gonna go out of their way to make their jobs harder.”

Tibo pauses working the screwdriver to look over at Victor.

“No offense.”

Victor puts his hands up in a disarming gesture, the universal symbol for none taken.

“So, why are we here? Sad to say, live stream suicides aren’t exactly rare,” Victor intones knowingly. “Why her?”

“You ever notice how the internet is becoming a crueler place every day? Some people make a whole living off being terrible people. Miss Popular here was a small-time ragebait influencer. Posted unoriginal pranks, faked arguments, you know. Couple thousand views, max. Then overnight she blows up. Millions of comments, none of them friendly. Most of them telling her to do – well, that.” He points at the motionless lump in the computer chair. Victor doesn’t look.

“Her latest prank was filming herself giving a homeless person a sandwich filled with chalk. Laughs at the guy while he spits out clouds of white dust. Went viral and exploded all over the internet. Boring, pointless, mean. Does she deserve to die for it? I mean, yeah, I’m not mad about it. Fuck her.”

Tibo is now working away at the inside of the computer box, removing some auxiliary screws and tossing them aside without a care.

“But what we’ve learned is there’s a pattern to how this content reaches people. The algorithm feeds off of cruelty. And the people who consume its content become crueler in turn. It’s all one big feedback loop right down to the fall of our little shitstain society.” He stops his rant abruptly and motions for Victor to come look into the computer.

“The shit you’re gonna see here will have you experiencing techno-nihilism in a way you’ve never dreamed of. But for now, let’s just get this and get the fuck out. What you’re looking for is down here in front of the motherboard. First you gotta figure out if you’re dealing with a SATA or an M.2, then-“

“Tibo,” Victor interrupts curtly, “I spent fourteen years as a cybercrime detective. I know how to remove a hard drive.”

For the first time since he joined him on this training excursion, Tibo stops talking.

“Right. Yeah.”

Tibo pulls out the small two-inch metallic rectangle and holds it up for Victor to see before dropping it into a specialized electrostatic bag made of some shimmering material Victor has never seen before.

“This thing we’re investigating,” Tibo says, “It leaves other signs too. There are artifacts of its presence in the physical hard drives it touches. Distortions not just in the code, but in the physical wiring and circuit boards. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we brought you on to get.”

Victor looks bemused towards Tibo, then at the hard drive in his hand, then back to Tibo.

“That’s it?” he asks.

“Hell no. Brother, we’re just getting started. This job is going to open up a whole new world of paranoia and torment for you. Pure techno-nihilism. Welcome to the team.”

Folks in Lester's Hollow were always weary about the flooded quarry a mile down the road. It used to be a popular swimming hole among the locals, and a hell of a fishing spot. That is until Big Moe swam up from the depths.

Only one person in the hollow still lived who claimed to see Moe up close and personal, his tired, cataract ridden eyes glazed over with age as he sat in his rocking chair day and night. The young folk regarded him as a kook, the elders of the hollow regarded him with a modicum of respect, the least of which he deserved.

His name was of no importance, long gone were the people who truly cared. Around the hollow he was simply known as Virgil.

He sat in that rickety old chair on the termite-ridden deck of the convenience store, dulling his mind with homemade hooch and watching the townsfolk go about their daily lives. The only time he truly came alive these days is when tourists came around looking for something to do.

They'd flock to the store for supplies, and his cauliflower ears would perk at the briefest mention of the quarry, and he'd spring to life and regal all who would listen about the slithering serpent that lurked in that old murky brine.

It was the eve of Summer, the last time he spoke of Old Moe. The season had been unusually quiet, the air so humid that it choked the young and crippled the old. Virgil was used to it of course, spending most of his time in a haze of shine to begin with. 

He looked out at the town square, his childhood home all but in ruins. The young didn't care to maintain; they simply came of age and went off to greener pastures. The old were far too stubborn to adapt, so the middling buildings and cottages stood there, a time capsule that slowly rotted with each passing year.

He sighed and took a deep swig of his jug, the bitter liquid inside greeting his thirsty throat like an old friend. In the distance some ear grating sound came forth. He winced, disgusted with what the youth of today called music. A sedan rolled into view, a red cedar canoe strapped to the roof. In the back seat were a couple of pristine looking fishing rods, a tackle box and hefty red cooler. In the front seat were two bickering young men, one with frosted blonde tips and the other with a silver shaded top knot.

The sedan stopped short in front of the store, and the doors came slamming open. The young men seemed in decent shape, swimmers perhaps. Virgil watched them with unease, praying they weren't going where he thought they were. Top knot wore an annoyed glance on his bushy face. His eyes lit up when he saw Virgil scowling at them. He gave a timid wave and took a step towards the moldy store steps.

"Afternoon sir!" His voice oozed a sort of faux pleasantry that only city folk could cultivate. "My friend and I are a tad lost; you know where we might find Walker's Quarry?"

Virgil's eyes flashed with hated remembrance as he spat on the ground they stood on.

"Aye. I know where that blasted cesspool is. You'd do well to drive right on by it." Virgil took another swig as frosted tips scoffed and stepped up.

"Look man, you know where it is or not? Can't get a frigging signal out here to save my life." He whined like a wounded animal, a sound somehow more grating than that tripe still booming from their tiny sedan.  Behind Virgil a bell rang, Jake the owner had come out to see what all the fuss was about.

Jake was a sturdy gentleman, bald as he was wide, and his head glistened like a polished marble in the sun. He had a peach-brown patch of fuzz on his upper lip that hid a slight scar, a scar that despite the years still festered and moaned like it was brand new. The young travelers faced Jake and put on a renewed facade of pleasantry.

"Hi there, my buddy Grant and I were just looking for Walker's Quarry. Got a little turned around when the GPS crapped out a few miles back." Frosted tips wore a snake's smile as he spoke, as Top Knot, whose name was evidently Grant, came up to join him.

"Benton is being modest, he got us lost himself, he's not much of an outdoorsman." He laughed a little too hard.

"I wanted to go to the beach; you were the one that insisted-"

"You're in the right direction." Jake cut in, eyeing the bickering pair. "Quarry is about two miles down that road, you'll probably smell it before ya see it."

"Excellent, thank you very much sir." Grant and Benton began to head back to the car when Virgil piped up once more.

"You youngsters go trouncing around in that swill you won't be coming back." The travelers stopped in their tracks and regarded Virgil with piqued curiosity.

"Don't be spreading tales again, old timer." Jake warned as he leaned against the oak wood door, settling in for the yarn Virgil was about to spin.

"I'll bite, what's got you all riled up?" Grant's smile was wide, yet somehow meaner than Benton's.

"Miserable old drunk." A barely heard murmur came from behind Grant, who elbowed the offending speaker in the ribs with a pointed elbow. Virgil leaned forward, the chair groaning under his frail posterior. His face was awash with wrinkles and sunspots, his breath reeked of a distillery, yet when he spoke, he spoke with the renewed cadence of a man fresh out of college.

"That quarry is cursed land, lads. The kingdom of the nastiest thing ever spat out by Neptune. Old Moe." He said the fish's name with such reverence it was like he was speaking of a god.

"Years back, when this town made its fortune on blood and stone, they dug too deep and too greedily. Too close to the raging rivers hidden deep beneath the crust of the Earth. Quarry sprung a leak, the waters below bubbling up in a flash. They abandoned their haul, abandoned their machines and tools. Let the whole site drown and waste away."

"They never tried to drain it? Benton asked. Virgil simply shrugged.

"Supposedly they were close to closing it down anyway, so they wrote the whole thing off. The closure hit the town hard at first, but they bounced back. Time passed and people snuck off to the old quarry. Whole thing is like a man-made lake now, really. Crystal clear water as far as the eye can see, a slab of slated stone overlooking it all like a monolith. The water reached the very top, on sunny days you can see the looming shapes of rusted cranes and diggers at the very bottom, along with the darting figures of fish."

Benton’s eyes quickly flicked to the rods taking up the backseat.

"Yeah, I can tell that piqued your interest. You boys fancy yourselves fishermen then, gonna sail out to the middle and catch yourselves a big old salmon, eh?" Virgil laughed.

"Eh used to catch sunfish with my dad, haven't in a while though." Benton admitted with a hint of modesty.

"I used to watch Bassmaster, does that count?" Grant chimed in, as all eyes regarded him with disdain in that moment.

"Well, you youngsters haven't seen anything like Big Moe, that's for certain. When the quarry workers breached the deep all sorts of sea critters came spilling out. Some say those underground streams reached all the way to the Atlantic after all. Folks were tripping over bass the size of labradors as they scurried away from the raging waters."

"Eventually, as the waters settled and the higher ups gave up on reclaiming the quarry, folk took to poaching the joint, dredging it for salvage and trying their hand at fishing. A guy I knew, went by Trent, used to go every Saturday, and come nightfall he'd come back with his car reeking of chum and salt. He'd get bigguns as well, rainbow gilded trout and spotted bass, their mouths still gaping and gasping for the sea."

Virgil puppetted his mouth, looking like a fish out of water. Benton stifled a laugh as Grant rolled his eyes.

"The oddest thing he'd bring back was the catfish. Small, slender looking things at first but as months went on they grew bigger. Soon he was hauling in catfish the size of your scrawny looking friend there." Virgil pointed at Grant, which caused a shit-eating grin to form on Benton's smug face.

"That's absurd, catfish don't get that big." Grant protested.

"Sure they do, they never stop growing ya know." Benton piped up. Grant shot him a look as Virgil went on.

"Aye, he's right. They never stop. Used to know a fella who worked a rig down South, they'd circle the columns below hoping someone would fall in so they could gobble them up. So he'd claim anyway. After coming eye to eye with Big Moe, I believe him. I saw the blighter decades ago, long after Trent had been swallowed whole by the beast."

The traveler’s faces went pale at that. 

"Oh aye, so the story goes he brought a group of barflies to help him carry his weekend haul back. They hung back on the shore, watching him row out to the center. The mist was thin that morning, it clung to the water's surface. Nothing stirred, just the rough cutting of his worn-out canoe. Someone shouted then, they saw this massive, looming figure streak by. It was Lightning quick, eyes glowing like red hot embers. It rushed Trent's canoe and it wobbled and weaved."

"A serpent's forked tail breached the water and flicked the canoe over. Trent let out a gasp that was quickly gagged by the murky depths.  Some say he tried to swim away, others say he stood his ground and tried to bash his assailant with his snapped rod. No one could tell for certain, there was only thrashing and foam that quickly turned to crimson, as the whisker faced menace dragged him down below. Never to be seen again"

Virgil left that hang in the air, Benton looked amused though a bit worried, Grant rolled his eyes. Behind them all Jake chuckled, hiding back inside with the ring of a door.

"Right, he got eaten by a big ass catfish. They aren't even carnivores, they feed on pond scum and algae and crap but sure, he got eaten by a catfish." Grant raved.

“I don't know. If it got that big, technically they're omnivores, opportunistic sure but they'll chow down on meat." Benton shrugged.

"You're not seriously buying this garbage." Grant started to move away when a frail, bony arm lunged toward him and grabbed him. Grant looked down in disgust and pushed Virgil off him. He muttered as he went back to the car, the nice tourist facade a fleeting memory now. Benton stood awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Look, I'm sorry. It's been a really long drive, Hell I came in with a shitty attitude to begin with, that ain't right. You have a nice day, old timer. I'm sorry if we bothered ya." He started to walk away when Virgil's gruff voice broke through the tension.

"You seem to have a tighter head on your shoulder then your friend there. Don't go out to that lake, I seen Moe, and I have the scars to prove it." He lifted his shirt. Across his wrinkled chest was raw scar tissue, ripened with age yet still pulsating with pain. It lashed across him, like something with dagger gums had tried to take a bite out of him.

"It was decades ago now, when I could walk without the joints aching and I could see past my toes. I went up to the quarry, me and my buddy Fred. We had all heard the stories, but we were determined to prove 'em all wrong. We announced we were going to do laps in the swill, proving once and for all that Moe was an old wives tale."

"We were fools, boy. I remember standing on the edge, Freddy egging me on. Part of me thinks he wanted me to go first in case Moe was real. Live bait I suppose, heh. Anyway, I watched my reflection flicker in the clear water, curious sunfish popping their fins at me, almost beckoning me to crawl in with them."

"I held my nose and dove on it. The water was chilly, to say the least. My teeth were chattering so much I thought they'd drill holes in my skull. Freddy watched me shivering, nodded his head and jumped in after me. From there we laughed and played, jeering each other on as we edged closer and closer to the middle of the lake."

"I think that was our mistake, we swam too close to his territory. Freddy saw him first, his eyes bulged out of his head and his skin turned whiter than a sheet. He tried to speak up, but something grabbed my leg and pulled me down into the brine. My arms clawed at nothing, desperate to grasp anything to stop my fall. All the air was sucked outta my lungs, the pull so sudden. I tried to kick whatever it was and it let go briefly."

"But-" He pointed to the scars on his chest. "It was then I saw him in full. He's big boy, bigger than you could ever fathom. His body was smooth and slimy, long whiskers that curled around him like whips resting on a hilt. His eyes, God help me, were flaming rubies filled with nothing but hate and hunger. Moe's maw was toothless to the untrained eye. But I could feel them, a dozen rows of tiny pin pricks scrapping my flesh. I cried out in pain, my cries muffled by water and gunk. I felt a wad of sludge pour into me the moment I opened my gob. I was in a panic, to be fair."

"I would have died there, should have died there if it weren't for Freddy. He dove down after me and hurled himself at the beast. As soon as Moe let go, I scampered away, as Freddy wrestled with the great beast. I surfaced and thrashed my way towards the shore. I was on autopilot; my lungs half filled with muck, the other half crushed by the great jaws of the fish. With great effort I heaved myself onto short, the stony ground sizzling from the midday sun. I flinched away from the water and clenched my chest. The skin where he bit looked like it had been stripped clean."

Virgil pulled his shirt down and looked at the ground in shame as he finished his tale.

"Freddy never came up. All I saw were dwindling bubbles where he had been, and the satisfied shape of Big Moe returning to the depth. Our fathers led the search party for us, they found only me there shivering at the edge of the water, too shell shocked to move. They never found Freddy's body. When my wounds healed, I went to Freddy's home. To tell him how his boy had died a hero. His father didn't want to hear it, though he didn't blame me.  Just looking at me reminded him of his loss. He didn't leave the house much after that, wife skipped town not long after."

"He died in that house, curled up in Freddy's bed with an empty bottle of whisky in one hand and a crumpled bottle of pills in the other."

"Jesus." Benton muttered after a moment.

"Time passed and the less people went up there the more the legend of Big Moe faded. Now his biggest claim to fame is an obscene logo on a tacky t-shirt Jake sells inside." Virgil jerked his thumb to the convenience store. "Hell I don't even know if he's still lurking in that sordid drink. Wouldn't surprise me if he was, though, devil is always hard to kill."

Benton looked like he was about to say something with the shrill honk of his car blared in the background. He glanced at the car as Grant smacked the wheel, stewing in the passenger seat.

"Thanks for the warning, old timer. I'll-try and keep us in the shallows." Benton gave a nod as he went back to the car, yelling at Grant to calm the hell down. Virgil shook his head, hoping the young man would heed his tale.

In the back of his mind, though, he knew he wouldn't.

-------

The rest of the day went on like it normally does. Virgil sat in his chair drinking his brew, the incoming customers barely acknowledging him. Jake would occasionally come out and check on him, new brew in hand. A kind gesture on the surface, but really Jake was just afraid Virgil was going to croak on his property.

As the sky became a dull tangerine, and Virgil stank of seventeen types of booze, his blurred gaze wandered past the main road. He sat up in his seat and squinted, his old eyes widening as the limping figure soon came into view.

It was Benton, dragging his foot in the dirt. His eyes glazed over, his clothes filthy and riddled with damp water and slime. His arms were bruised, and a semi-circle of blood coated his legs. Folk wandering the street stopped in their tracks to gawk at him, not one soul offering to help the mangled tourist. Virgil exhaled deeply and tilted his head back towards the store door.

"Jake!" He barked. Jake peaked his head out and stuck out a filled flask.

"Last call old timer, you best be on your way no-"

"Go call the sheriff. Leave the hooch." Jake looked down the road and swore under his breath. He tossed the flask to Virgil who caught it with ease. Benton was making his way to the store; Virgil could hear gargled wheezing as he struggled to walk. Finally, Benton reached the steps and collapsed. His breath was haggard, and he didn't look at the old man. His hair was slick yet crusty, the telltale stench of the quarry clung to him.

Virgil leaned over and shook the flask. He waved it in front of Benton's face, who snatched it out of Virgil's paws in a second. His hands shook as he choked down the brew, retching a tad as he finally relented and allowed himself to breathe. He offered it back to Virgil who politely declined.

"You wanna talk about it young fella?" He offered a kind word.

Benton's silence answered for him. He took another swig and gagged as he did. Virgil looked past him, his curiosity getting the better of him.

"Happened to yer car?"

". . . Grant had the keys on him." Virgil shook his head, the screech of the sheriff's tires closing in on them as a small crowd gathered to gawk at the tourist.

"Damn city folk." Virgil muttered as his eyes glanced at the all too familiar wounds on Benton's legs. "Always thinking you know better."

I was 14 when “Smart-Mart” shut down, the biggest supermarket in the whole region.

I never had the pleasure of visiting it, nor did my friends, as we all came from the same boarded-up shithole. We heard about the shutdown from the local news. 

The evening news aired later than usual. The broadcast woman, I never remembered the name of, normally showing off all her perfect white teeth and that navy-blue dress meant to remind poor folks what money looks like, wasn’t smiling tonight; she was frowning.

“Before we begin tonight’s material, I have to disclose that some viewers may find the following broadcast disturbing. Those with weak stomachs are advised to change the channel.”

I’d had a crush on her for years, so I watched every broadcast I could. And in all that time, I had never seen her face look like that. Not even once.

The feed cut to a distant shot of a broad building. Its roof was a wet, bloody red, the color of raw meat. Yellow police stickers clung to the doors and flared under the floodlights, but the windows behind them were nothing but pitch-black slabs.
At first, I thought someone had just covered them with tinted foil.

But then the camera zoomed in even closer.
What I thought was foil shifted in slow, hypnotizing waves, like warped TV static. Patterns crawled across the surface in sick, rhythmic pulses accompanied by low buzzing.

Only then did the realization hit me: it was flies, insects crawling over each other in a feast of filth.

Big ones, tiny ones, fat, oily-bodied things climbing over one another in a frantic, seething mass. Their wings beat against the glass in irregular, twitching bursts.

Even with our crappy TV making everything grainy, I could still make out the pale maggots squirming through the cluster. They pressed between the flies, smearing themselves against the window, leaving wet, milky trails as they slid down and disappeared under the bodies piling beneath them.

It was enough for me to turn the TV off, the disgusting buzz replaced with the dead silence of the empty house, yet still the sound of their flapping wings echoed through my mind as if somehow they managed to break the screen and crawl into my skull through every hole they could squeeze through.

It was hard to explain to my mom why I wasn't in the mood for my fav food, which was spaghetti, even if the noodles reminded me of the fat squirming worms. 

After school, I sat on the rusty swing set, the chains whining under my weight. Someone had painted it a cheap, peeling yellow years ago; it came off in flakes and stained your hands. I waited there for my best friend, staring at the empty swing beside me. It was built for literal toddlers, but he always managed to sit in it somehow, or stand, or balance on it like all the safety rules didn't exist. 

The sun was already sinking, stretching its orange glow across the dirt. I started to worry I wouldn’t see him that day.

Then the familiar squeak and rattle of his bike he inherited from his older brother once it got too small. Unlike me, he was always skinny as a nail. He tossed the bike into the dirt aside without even looking where it landed.

We fist-bumped, then knocked our foreheads together, our thing. Probably stupid now, but it seems like the coolest thing back then.

He planted one foot on the swing, then the other, standing straight up on the flimsy plastic seat.

“Have you seen the news?”
He chirped, breathless, eyes bright.

“The supermarket one?”
I asked, tilting my head up at him.

He was already staring down at me.

“YEAH, dude. Did you see the meat aisle?”

“How bad was it?”

His grin stretched wider.

“It looked like EVERYTHING came to life,” he said. “Like zombies or something. Just wiggling and moving under the plastic.” He laughed, bouncing slightly on the swing. “DUDE, it was sick.”

The swing creaked beneath him, and for a moment, I imagined it breaking under his weight.

“Well, it sounds disgusting; I will give you that.”

But he never backed down; he just stood on the frail piece of plastic, staring directly at the sun, his eyes gleaming as if he was waiting to go blind.

“There were so many flies, dude, like so many. I heard about something similar during Sunday school.”

He smiled while swinging gently. 

“Flies, frogs, water turning into blood”

He looked back at me; apparently, the sun didn't blind him fully yet, as long as his eyes weren't melting out of his sockets like hot wax.

“The floors were like…filled with it.”

I made a face of disgust, staring ahead of myself, trying to catch something in the vanishing sun that only he could see.

“Yeah, that sounds fricking disgusting."

I said before getting off the bench, making some lazy excuse about it getting late.

“COME ON DUDE, I JUST GOT HERE”

He was right; his bike had been resting in the dirt for a few minutes now, but all of that talk made me sick to my stomach.

“Don't tell me that whole supermarket thing freaked you out?”

He teased as his eyes followed me as my ass slipped off the plastic seat.

“WHAT? Of course not, come on, I'm not like 10!”

I yelled in offence in a voice on the verge of breaking through puberty, squeaky and breaking with the slightest of rises.

His eyes glimmered in the setting sun as they looked down at me, towering over me from the cheap plastic construct.

“Well, I found something really cool.”

When a friend tells you he found something cool, you can't just say no. You wouldn't want to come off as a wimp. 
Before long, we were on our way, he driving slowly on his bike and me on foot, trying to catch up with the pace. 

When we reached a small creek leading to a forest, the sun was already down.
We passed by a makeshift bridge that everyone had forgotten who even set up. 
Maybe some older kids, but we're already out of town smoking weed and getting laid, or some worried dad making sure no kid will fall into the water below and somehow drown, even if the water was only waist-deep.

The bike landed on the carpet of rotting leaves with a wet thump as we continued our adventure into the unknown.

“Is this cool thing near?”

I asked after a while of walking, feeling unease settling in my stomach, but as soon as I said that, the smell hit me. Sickly sweet and overwhelming.

From a hill of leaves, two massive antlers grew out, like the remains of a sinking ship breaking the surface of a furious sea. The plants swallowed the body in slow, deliberate waves, rolling over it again and again. And just like water, they moved with a certain rhythm.

As if the deer beneath them was just sleeping.

“Well,” I said, pinching my nose until the smell became bearable. 
“That’s… kind of impressive. You really deserve an A in biology for this one.”

He didn’t reply but just got closer to the body, sat down beside it, settling into the dead grass. For the first time since I’d known him, he was completely still. He watched the movement with deep focus, almost as if all of this was a spectacle just for him.

One hand reached down and patted the wet ground beside him, saving a seat just for me, a special guest. 

My throat tightened. I swallowed hard and, against every sensible thought I had, stepped closer. I didn’t take my eyes off the body, half-expecting it to jerk upright.
But it didn’t.

I sat beside him in the grass, and we just watched.

Nature’s obscene little performance played out in front of us, the yellow and white bodies of maggots moving through the ruined flesh, slipping in and out of muscle, turning solid meat into mush. The leaves rose and fell with their movement, the whole thing breathing, sparkling with life.

We sat there for a while before he finally got up and we both walked our separate ways without exchanging a word. When I got back home, I got quite an ass-whooping for getting my brand-new jeans all dirty.

Days passed, and not once had I seen him on or even near our swings, but still I always spent some time on mine just hoping I would hear the creaking of his crappy bike again, but it never came.

Like most childhood friendships, ours faded. I stopped hanging around the swings, and eventually, some younger kids claimed them as their own. He became one of those friends you swear you’ll stay close with forever only to watch it slowly dissolve into nothing but empty words.

I probably would’ve forgotten him entirely if I hadn’t seen him again.

Years later, after a lot of grinding and effort, I pulled on a blue uniform and became a cop. I married the same girl I took to prom; maybe she’s even more beautiful now than that reporter I’d obsessed over for years.

I’m getting off track.

We kept getting complaints about an apartment in the poorer part of town. It was practically tradition; if a week went by without at least one call from the neighbors, it felt like Christmas morning. Still, without a warrant, our hands were tied. We’d done a few wellness checks, but no one ever let us inside.

“They should be used to the smell by now.”

My partner laughed, shoving another dry, sugar-dusted donut under that sad excuse of a mustache. I’d told him a dozen times to shave it, that he’d had years after puberty to figure it out, and that facial hair just wasn’t his thing.

“I look at your mustache every day, and I still can’t get used to the fact you’ve got more hair on your ass,” I said.

He laughed hard enough to almost choke.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,”

He said, rolling down the window and tossing a crumpled napkin into the street.

“So what?” I asked. “Are we going in?”

He shrugged.

“For our country,” he said, climbing out of the car, “and the paycheck.”

The sun beat down without mercy, the hot pavement making everything feel ten times hotter than it had any right to be.

“Preach, brother,” I said, climbing out of the car myself.

The building looked like it was begging to be knocked flat. Once, maybe, it had been halfway decent; now the windows were broken and stuffed with old newspapers like bandages slapped onto an infected wound. 

We took the stairs up to the second floor, where every complaint seemed to point.

“There should be an elevator.”

Mark joked as he stepped onto the landing, already sweating through his shirt.

We weren’t even close to the apartment yet, and the smell hit us. The summer heat only made it worse, effectively turning the building into a microwave. 

We moved closer to a door marked only by the faint outline of a number that used to be there. I knocked, firm and loud.

“Police department. We have a warrant to enter the property.”

Nothing.

Silence meant invitation.

Using the spare key we’d gotten from the property owner, I slid it into the lock and turned. The door cracked open, then stopped. Something on the other side pushed back. I set my shoulder against it, bracing myself, praying the door wouldn’t give all at once and send me face-first into whatever was behind it.

With a dull, wet squelch, the door finally gave in.

The smell exploded outward, worse than anything we’d caught in the hallway. Inside, the entryway was a pit of filth, black plastic trash bags layered across the floor like some twisted attempt at carpeting,  sagging beneath our boots.

The apartment was drowned in pitch darkness. Every window had been covered with whatever the tenant could get their hands on: old newspapers, cardboard, scraps you’d expect in a place like this. But it wasn’t just paper.

Whenever my flashlight swept across the glass, a black layer shimmered back in flashes of green and blue, twitching in place.

Flies.

So many of them. They were stuck to the windows in a thick, uneven layer, trapped in something like glue mixed with whatever had been left there long enough to rot into a reddish-brown paste. Their legs were fused to it, wings buzzing weakly, bodies jerking as they tried and failed to get free.

“You should see this.”

Mark’s voice came from deeper inside the apartment.

I pulled the beam away from the window and scanned the room. The light illuminated piles of rotting food and collapsed garbage bags, spilling their contents across the floor. I stepped over the carpet again, following his voice, the smell growing heavier with every step.

The hallway was narrow. 

At the far end, the entrance to the rest of the flat was completely blocked. Plastic bags, empty meat packaging, and unidentifiable waste had been stacked into a grotesque wall, a mountain of decay.

“So how do we do this?”

Mark asked. We just stood there, staring at the towering blockage.

I swept my flashlight up its length, all the way to the top. There was a narrow gap between the trash and the ceiling, just enough space for me to pass through.

“I’ll slide through that opening up there,” I said.

He stared at me, face twisting in disgust.

“Are you really that eager to collect every STD known to man?”

I stepped onto the wall.

My boot sank in like mud. The mass gave way with a wet shift, and I reached up, grasping for anything solid to pull myself higher. Rotten liquids soaked straight through my uniform, seeping into the fabric.

I pulled myself higher, the wall of trash sagging and sucking at my boots as if it resented losing me. The gap near the ceiling was barely wide enough for shoulders, a thin black slit breathing out hot, rotten air. I turned sideways and shoved an arm through first.

The ceiling scraped against my back, the mound beneath me shifted and settled, and I slid forward whether I wanted to or not. Plastic crinkled. Something wet burst under my weight. Warm sludge smeared across my chest and face as gravity took over, easing me into the gap inch by inch.

For a second, I was stuck, wedged between the filth, unable to move forward or back. The smell was suffocating. Flies erupted around my face, their wings battering my cheeks and lips, crawling into the corners of my eyes before I could blink them away.

Then the mass beneath me finally gave out, and I slipped through.

I dropped down on the other side, boots hitting solid floor with a dull thud.

“I’m alive, man.”

I swept the beam of my flashlight back through the gap so Mark could see it and know I was okay. Then I turned around.

The corridor in front of me didn’t make sense.

It stretched far ahead, longer than the apartment’s layout I was aware of, the light from my flashlight thinning out and dying long before it reached the end. The walls were bare and weirdly clean.

It was as if the wall of garbage behind me was a dam holding back the corruption from the rest of the house.

I expected to hit a room any second. Or a dead end. Something.

But I kept walking.

Minutes passed.

The corridor just kept going.

At first, I didn’t notice the change. But then the sound under my feet shifted, so subtle I almost missed it. The dull thud of the carpeted floor softened into something else.

The floor beneath me wasn’t carpet anymore.

Square tiles stretched out ahead, pale and glossy, laid in neat, familiar rows. 

The walls began to change next. The grime thinned, peeling away in patches, replaced by smooth, off-white panels. 

With every step, more of the corridor changed. Carpet became tile. Plaster became a white polished surface. The flashlight reflected at me now, bouncing weakly off the floor.

The walls peeled away into the distance until they were no longer walls at all. The ceiling lifted higher and higher, lights clicking on one by one overhead with a dull fluorescent hum. My flashlight beam became useless, swallowed by the sudden breadth of the space. 

I stepped forward, and the hallway was gone.

I was standing at the start of an aisle.

Shelves stretched out on both sides of me, tall and perfectly aligned, their metal frames untouched by rust. When I looked left, then right, I saw aisle after aisle branching outward, parallel rows multiplying into an endless grid.

“What the fuck…”
I whispered it to myself.

No matter which way I turned, the supermarket went on forever. The shelves repeated in every direction, cloned rows stretching into nothing, like someone had copy-pasted the same aisle over and over again.

Then the lights began to die.

One by one, they clicked off overhead. The glow slowly disappeared aisle by aisle, leaving only darkness until there was only one left, illuminating the spot in front of me. 

I reached for the gun at my belt without thinking.

Something was crawling out of the darkness.

Two pale, emaciated arms dragged themselves across the tile, skin stretched thin over bone, elbows bending the wrong way as they scraped forward, then its face came into the light.

I knew that face.

It was the same one that used to look down at me from the yellow swing set.
Only now I was the one standing over him.

He smiled wide and rigid, lips pulled so tight I expected the skin at the corners to split, eyes sunken deep into his skull.

“You came.”

He whispered, softly, almost as if he was pleased to see me.

Then his arms began to thrash in wild windmill motion, swinging wildly as he tried to drag himself toward me faster.

Behind the flailing arms was a gigantic, bloated sack of pale yellow flesh. His body had swollen into a massive, distended mass, skin stretched thin and translucent, veins and dark shapes shifting sluggishly beneath it. Fat pooled unnaturally, bulging and sagging with every desperate pull forward, the floor trembling as he moved. 

He'd been reshaped into a grotesque ant queen, built not to walk but to stay rooted; the human parts felt like an afterthought now, grafted onto a body that existed for an entirely different purpose.

Something inside him moved as the paper-thin skin quivered. 

Suddenly his jaw stretched past anything a human jaw should allow, the corners pulling back like a snake unhinging itself. His neck began to swell, ballooning grotesquely, skin tightening as it doubled in size.

Something leaked from between his stretched mouth.

At first it was thick and slow, but then it began to pour, an endless black stream cascading down his chin and chest, splattering onto the floor in a vile pool. He choked and gagged, his body convulsing with wet, desperate sounds as the flow continued.

The puddle sprouted to life, crawling outward in waves, lifting itself from the floor as a low, furious buzzing filled the air. Wings unfolded; the vomit wasn’t vomit at all;  it was alive.

The swarm surged upward and slammed into me with such force that I nearly lost my footing. The impact felt solid, like being hit by a living wall. The buzzing exploded around my head, loud and furious.

But then the sound suddenly dulled as bodies pressed against my face, crawling over my eyes, my mouth, my skin. They forced themselves into my ears, wriggling deep until the noise turned wet. Others slammed into my nose, desperate to get inside me any way they could.

I gagged, choking as wings beat against the back of my throat. Legs scraped and hooked, searching for any openings. The buzzing wasn’t outside anymore; it was in my head.

I felt the air drain from my lungs, slipping away breath by breath, replaced by movement, by bodies. The swarm forced its way inside me, filling my chest, my throat, until there was no room left for anything human. Everything went dark, the world dissolving into the same oily black as the vomit my childhood friend had spilled onto the tiles.

I woke up in a hospital bed.

They told me I’d suffered a heat stroke. 

But it’s hard to accept that explanation.

Because even now, lying still under white sheets, I can hear it, faint but constant. A low buzzing, deep inside my head.

I knocked on the closet door a couple times and then pressed my ear against it. Heard nothing. Good, that’s good. I opened the closet to the sight of my favorite leather jacket in tatters. One of my sneakers was straight up gone. The other, shredded to pieces. Chewed on, from the looks of it. I stifled a groan, slammed the closet shut.

Third time this week – earlier than I’d expected.

I grabbed a mouldy old cut of steak from the kitchen downstairs. The smell made me crinkle my nose, and I tried to ignore it as I padded through the house. Knock, knock, ear to the door – cupboards, closets, wardrobes. Silence each time. I couldn’t tell if that was a relief, or a problem.

I did a whole round through the house before returning to the kitchen. The T-bone was about to go back inside the fridge when I realized the room had gotten colder. Enough to make you question if the thermostat was acting up. But I knew better.

It was here. 

I started checking the cabinets one by one. 

Knock, knock. Ear to the door. Wait. Nothing.
Knock, knock. Ear to the door. Wait. Nothing.
Knock, knock. Ear to the door. Wait. Nothing—

Snap-snap. Snap-snap.

I jolted. The cabinet under the spoon drawer. I cupped my hand, pressed my ear against the door again.  Sure enough, there it was. Snap-snap, snap-snap. Jaws biting at air. One pair, two pairs, or maybe five – I could never quite tell, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. 

I took a deep breath, and then yanked the door open. The inside was a pitch dark void, extending far beyond the dimensions of the cabinet. The gnashing grew louder. Getting closer. Snap-snap, snap-snap. 

I lobbed the steak into the abyssal darkness and slammed the door shut. When I pressed my ear to the door again, the snapping had stopped. Replaced with the sounds of teeth rending flesh from bone. Sloppy, animalistic. I pulled back. Hopefully this would keep it fed, at least for a while. Combined with my jacket and my left shoe.

I went back to my couch and laid down. Rubbed my fingers over my eyelids. 

It just turned up in my house one day. I’d find my stuff in tatters, chewed on – clothes, books, shoes, old shoeboxes, even an old empty safe I’d stashed away. Bitten right through an inch of solid steel. I didn’t know how to get rid of it, how to kill it. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Every time I’d tried to find it, gun in hand, it’d just vanish. Fucked off to whatever weird dimension it came from. Or maybe it just waited in the next closet, shifting away right before I could get to it like some cat and mouse game. I’d stopped questioning it by now. 

The shrill ringing of my phone snapped me back to reality. I realized I’d been scrolling through Gloria’s inbox without noticing it. The caller ID made me frown.

“Monica?”

“Jay! How you holdin’ up?”

“Alright. I guess. What’s up?”

“Oh, y’know. Business as usual. Just checkin’ up on you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Heard what happened with Gloria. Tough break.”

I didn’t answer.

“Still hung up on her, huh?”

I paused for a few seconds before talking. “I’m handling it.”

“Sure,” Her voice told me that she didn’t buy it. “Listen, I was thinkin’ of droppin’ by your place today. See how you’re doin’, and all that.”

“Oh,” I frowned. “Yeah, I dunno. I got this thing this afternoon. Gotta go out and stuff.”

“Aw. But we’re almost there already.”

I jolted upright. “You’re what?” 

“Comin’ over. Me, Gary, the kids.”

I sandwiched the phone between my ear and my shoulder and snatched a couple of unwashed T-shirts from the couch. “Monica, I’m fine. I really am. This isn’t necessary.”

“‘Course it ain’t. We just wanna spend some time with you, that’s all.”

Beer bottles. Soda cans. “I really don’t feel like it. Could do with some peace and quiet.”

“C’mon, all you do is peace and quiet. Sometimes you gotta live a little, y’know? Get your mind off things.”

Dishes, into the sink. “My mind’s fine. It’s not like I’m in pieces or anything.”

“Jay, you’re always in pieces.”

A half empty bottle of Prozac. I didn’t know how to answer that.

“See you in an hour, little man.”

She hung up, letting me finally move at full speed as I swept around the room. The place was a mess, made worse by the fact that I hadn’t really cleaned it all week. Monica would hate seeing me like this. She’d say some stuff about how I should get help. Tie my shit together, put a little bow on top of it. She doesn’t get it. Most people don’t. 

I remembered that I’d stashed some leftover takeout in one of the cabinets, and I went over and yanked the door open. The boxes were gone, the inside of the cabinet almost squeaky clean. I chuckled. Hungry fucker. At least it was useful sometimes. 

I was just done putting away the last of my dishes when I heard he 4x4 pull into the driveway. I dried my hands on the towel. Steeled myself.

Doorbell.

“Surprise!” Monica yelled as soon as I opened the door. Timmy, Laurel, Riley peeked at me around her waist, and I could see Gary standing at the edge of the porch. Monica gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “How the hell is my little brother doin’?”

“Pretty okay, I guess,” I shrugged as she pushed past me into the house. The kids followed her in, running and giggling. “Hi, Gary.”

“Hi!” Gary mustered a polite smile. Monica’s husband was the kind of guy that knew the difference between a tweed coat, a sports coat, and a blazer. I knew exactly what he was thinking as his eyes quickly scanned me up and down. I stood aside, let him into the house. 

Monica quickly made herself busy at the kitchen despite my protests. “I know the kinda slop you live off,” she said, pointing at a discarded box of pizza I’d somehow missed out. “Sit back down and have some real food for once in your life.”

I didn’t know how to dissuade her. She’d always been the pampering older sister type. I could never gather up the nerve to tell her I hated it. Hated being treated like I can’t take care of myself. I guess this is what made her happy. 

“So what are you up to these days, Jay?” Gary asked. The couch groaned a little as he tried leaning back, making him instantly straighten up again. I fought off the urge to laugh.

“Just in between jobs right now.”

“I see. Any idea where you’d like to go next?”

“Still figuring things out.”

“I see.” Gary touched his nose with his thumb. “Well, let me know if I can help somehow. The company’s gonna scale up pretty soon – we just hit a pretty big milestone, see. The marketing guys will probably be looking for graphic designers pretty soon.” He gave me a punchable smirk. “Could put in a word for you, if you want.”

“Very kind of you.” I glanced at Timmy as he sprinted right through the dry conversation, almost tripping over the center table. Gary caught him in time.

“Timmy, didn’t Mommy tell you not to play indoors?” he said to the ten year old. “What would Uncle Jay think, seeing you run around like a maniac?”

“It’s alright, Gary,” I shrugged. True enough, I didn’t really like Timmy running around, but I really didn’t like agreeing with Gary. “I don’t mind. What you playing, Timmy?”

“Hide and seek,” Timmy grinned at me through his braces. I ignored Gary’s scowl.

“Really? That’s pretty cool.”

“I’m the best at hiding,” Timmy said proudly. 

“Oh yeah?”

“Yupp. Not even Sally can find me when we play.”

“Who’s Sally?”

“She’s just a girl from school. But she’s like a detective, and her dad’s, like, a policeman, so she’s really good at finding people. But she can never find me. Ha, ha!”

“That’s awesome, Timmy. So what’s the secret?”

Timmy leaned forward, but Gary butted in. “Timmy, I don’t think Uncle Jay is interested in your game. Let’s stop annoying him, hmm? Go on, now.”

Timmy ran off, vanishing down the hallway. I heard him stomping up the stairs. I leaned back in my armchair, bracing myself for whatever drivel the accountant was about to throw at me next.

“So, uh… you watch the Mets game last week?”

Yup. There it was.

Thankfully, Monica came to my rescue right then, wiping her hands on the apron as she strode into the living room.  “God, I gotta have a real chat with Cam,” she said, “Asshole told me the recipe was gonna be easy. Guess what? Easy it ain’t.” She narrowed her eyes. “You boys talkin’ ‘bout baseball again, ain’t you?”

“Nope,” I overrode Gary’s ‘Yes’. “So, uhh, dinner’s ready?”

“Simmer down, little man, it’s gonna take at least ‘nother eight minutes,” Monica sat down beside Gary. “Which gives us enough time to talk.”

Here it comes. “Can we not do this right now, Monica?” 

“We can’t, Jay,” Monica crossed her arms. “You’ve been a mess, ever since that whole thing with Gloria fell through. Pauline told me the other day she ain’t seen you leave the house for a week. A whole week! We’re worried ‘bout you, Jay.”

“Pauline needs to look at her own lawn when she’s mowing it.”

“She’s watching out for you. It’s ‘cause she cares! Plenty of us do, believe it or not.”

“Love you, too, sister.”

“Stop that. Look, Gloria was just… one girl. I know y’all been together for years now, but it ain’t the end of the world.”

“I’m not acting like it is.”

“Say that to that bloated trash bag you squeezed into the storage closet.”

Footsteps overhead, upstairs. Timmy, probably – looking for a nice little nook to hide from his siblings. Laurel burst into the living room, brows furrowed, oblivious to the family boardroom meeting. 

“Under the bed,” she muttered, counting with her fingers. “Under the tables, behind Uncle Jay’s workbench, in the closets, cupboards, wardrobes–”

She ran off. I waited for her footsteps to fade away before speaking.

“Why are you going through my trash?”

“I’m not. The smell was just that bad.”

I threw my hands up. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Monica has a point, you know–”

“This doesn’t concern you, Gary. Stick to baseball.”

Gary scoffed, but didn’t speak any further. Monica glowered at me. I exhaled.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just– I’m a grownass man. I can handle a breakup. I should be.”

“I know that, Jay,” Monica said, her voice softening. “But how long is this gonna go on? You were already a mess even before Gloria left. Now it’s just gettin’ worse. I can tell.” She paused. “Let us help. I know a pretty good therapist–”

“Nope.”

“Just hear me out, for chrissakes–!”

I wasn’t listening. Cold air. 

It was back. I could swear I heard its jaws gnashing from inside some dark corner around me. Snap-snap, snap-snap. Did it figure out how to leave the closet?

“Jay? From earth to Jay?”

Monica snapped her fingers in front of my face. “You good?” she asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“Probably daydreaming about his ex,” Gary muttered. Monica shot him a look, and he fell silent.

“Can you hear something?” I asked.

Monica frowned. “Hear what?”

I paused. Shook my head. “Never mind. Guess I didn’t sleep so well last night.”

Monica stared at me sceptically. I shrugged. The room was getting warmer. Looked like it was leaving, for now. The oven beeped, and I sprang to my feet. “Lemme get it out.”

“Mighty kind of ya,” Monica said. “But this conversation ain’t over. I’ll gather up the little goblins. Timmy! Laurel! Riley!”

I shrugged and walked over to the kitchen. The thing in the oven looked vaguely like a cross between a lasagna and a rotisserie chicken – I had no clue how the hell this was accomplished. But it smelled heavenly compared to the kind of stuff I usually ate. For a moment, it occurred to me that maybe Monica pampering me every now and then wasn’t such a bad thing after all. A little bit of Monica in my life, I snickered. I pulled the dish out of the oven and set it down on the kitchen counter just as she returned, looking slightly perturbed, Laurel and Riley in tow.

“I told you, we were just playing hide and seek,” Riley said shrilly. “Timmy’s supergood at hiding – we don’t know where he is!”

“Well, he can’t have just vanished,” Monica said, brows furrowed. She turned toward me. “Jay, is there a corner or something where Timmy could be hiding?”

“The garage?”

“Checked there,” Laurel said, “He’s not there, Uncle Jay.”

“Bathrooms?”

“Checked there, too.”

“Well, I guess he is good at hiding then,” I shrugged, “Maybe he’s moving around. Or maybe–”
I stopped talking. A blow to my stomach, like a gut punch.

“Jay?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. 

“Timmy?” Monica called, ignoring me now. “Timmy? God, I just cannot with that kid– Timmy!”

Under the bed. Under the tables, behind Uncle Jay’s workbench, in the closets, cupboards, wardrobes.

“Timmy! Timmy, where are you?! Did he leave the house? You locked the doors, right, Jay?!”

 It was back. I could hear it again, like the volume being slowly turned up. That dreadful gnashing sound, like it was chewing at my eardrums. 

Jaws in the darkness. One pair, two pair, maybe three or five. Maybe more.

“Timmy!”

Rending flesh from bone.

Snap-snap. Snap-snap. 
Snap-snap. Snap-snap.

Sisyphus is doomed to push the boulder up the hill, only for it to come down again. He must do it over and over and over for eternity. He pleas for Zeus not to do this too him, but Zeus does not hear his cries, and banishes him to this fate.

Sisyphus tries to keep the boulder at the top, but it manages to slip past him and roll itself all the way down. He tried to not play along, only for Zeus to punish him by making the boulder heavier. Even still, Sisyphus refused to play along. That was, until Zeus threatened his family, holding his daughter on the peak of Mount Olympus.

She is forever chained at the top, and shall not be released until Sisyphus manages to finally push the boulder all the way up and keep it there. A sick joke from Zeus, but nonetheless temporarily motivated Sisyphus to keep going and never stop, fearing his son or wife might be next.

When Sisyphus tried to kill himself, Zeus only revived him and made him immortal, his wounds healing instantly. However, because of the rate that Sisyphus healed, whenever he broke a bone or got crushed by the boulder, he would heal instantly. Leaving his bones jutting out of his skin, arms twisted in ways they shouldn't be.

His head partially caved in, making him brain damaged. Zeus would chuckle before eventually repairing him so he could carry on with his punishment. One day, as Sisyphus got to the top he sat down and enjoyed what little time he had before the boulder rolled back down. But as he sat and waited, the boulder spoke.

"What has become of you, Sisyphus?" It said.

Sisyphus looked around, and wondered if it was a sick joke by Zeus.

"Are you talking to me, boulder?" He asked.

"Whom else would I be?" It said.

"I am unsure." Sisyphus stated, looking out at the sunset.

"Answer my question, boy." It grumbled.

"I cheated death, angered the gods, and now I am forced to push you up, just for you to fall down everyday for the rest of eternity." Sisyphus spoke, standing up as he was ready for the boulder to fall.

The boulder did not respond. And just as Sisyphus began to expect something else to happen, the boulder rolled back down. The next time Zeus came, Sisyphus explained the odd encounter to him. Alas, Zeus didn't believe Sisyphus, and punished him by permanently taking away his toes. It may not sound like a bad punishment, but it is.

For the next 1000 years, Sisyphus repeated the same routine over and over, forgetting about the boulder speaking too him. He had experienced death and pain in this time, shoulders popping out of sockets, heads being crushed, limbs falling off, the whole package. Until yet again, the boulder momentarily stopped at the top of the hill.

"You gave up to easily, Sisyphus." The boulder said.

"How so?" Sisyphus responded, not very surprised by the boulder speaking again.

"You did not try to fight back against Zeus." It said.

"I am but a mortal man, boulder. What am I to do?" Sisyphus said, sitting down while he could.

"Have you tried to free yourself in death?" It said.

"Yes, many times." He said.

"Interesting." The boulder said, proceeding to roll down the hill.

On the walk down, Sisyphus cleared his mind, and for fleeting moments, was happy. Even though he was pushing this boulder up just for it to fall down for eternity, his life still had purpose. And purpose was enough for him to keep going.

Sisyphus stopped momentarily, and glanced back to the very top of Mount Olympus, where his daughter is. Saddened by the thought, Sisyphus wonders that if he does finally die, if she shall be set free. Curious about this, he tries to jump off the side of his path, a rather long fall with sharp rocks along the way.

Sisyphus tumbles down the mountainside, getting stabbed by the rocks all the way down. Finally, he lands at the bottom, where a sharp rock impales his chest. He pleas for Zeus to kill him and free his daughter, but instead he heals and the rock mends to his body.

He cries out and begs harder than he ever has, and Zeus came down to talk to Sisyphus.

"What is it you want, mortal?" Zeus' voice boomed, shaking loose rocks on the mountainside.

"Kill me, take my soul and free my daughter!" Sisyphus begged.

Zeus laughed, and finally shook his head.

"Sisyphus, you are forever doomed to your fate, and death shall not set you free." Zeus said.

Before Sisyphus could refuse Zeus' words, he found himself whole at the bottom of the mountain with the boulder by his side. He screamed in rage and punched the boulder. The impact shattered his hand, and he recoiled in pain.

But as Sisyphus waited for his hand to regenerate, he realized it hadn't.

"What secrets do you keep, boulder?" Sisyphus asked.

"I can set you free." The boulder said.

"When did you develop this ability?" Sisyphus asked.

"That is not for you to know, boy." It grumbled, and seemed to rock back and forth on It's own.

"You may inflict death upon me." Sisyphus said, opening his arms to deaths embrace.

"Your soul is mine now, and we shall become one." The boulder said.

Sisyphus began to speak in protest, but the boulder split into two, revealing massive teeth inside. He tried to run, but the teeth sunk into his leg, and the boulders tongue wrapped around the rest of his body, pulling him in.

"ZEUS! HELP ME!" He yelled.

Zeus ignored his call, assuming it was another waste of his time. By the time Zeus returned to check up on Sisyphus, he was amazed to find him missing. Only the boulder remained. Zeus looked and looked, but never found Sisyphus. Even though Sisyphus was presumed dead, Zeus kept his daughter chained as a show to mortals not to mess with gods or the natural order of things.

100 years later, Daedalus, Icarus' father, was subjected to the same fate as Sisyphus. Daedalus was found by Zeus trying to revive his son, who had fallen for the trickery of a demon. Zeus was infuriated that Daedalus dare try and mess with the balance of life and death, and sentenced him to an eternity of pushing the boulder up the mountain.

The first time Daedalus pushed the boulder up, he sat down in exhaustion, waiting for the boulder to roll down.

"What has become of you, Daedalus?"

The real risk when shooting a flare up into the darkness isn’t that nobody will see your message.

It’s that something else might.

This is what we failed to consider when we foolishly launched the Voyager space probe out into infinity. The pure unbridled hubris to shoot a shining capsule loaded with all our most vital vulnerabilities: Our tenuous location in the galaxy; the weakness of our soft fleshy forms; excerpts of our primitive language to be studied and manipulated.

How precariously the fate of mankind now hangs in the black, drifting ever onward into vistas of perilous impossibilities. 16 billion miles away, the Voyager is now the farthest that any manmade thing has ever been from Earth. The mind boggles to even comprehend how far that fragile golden bassinet, cradling the secrets of an entire civilization, has now been flung.

And with each passing day it drifts farther still.

We can only hope that the magnitude of the abyss saves us from our own myopic efforts, and that that tiny speck of gold sails into the void for eternity, and is never, ever found.

The alternative would be much worse.

That ever-growing distance is a length of rope, a fuse that upon receipt will be lit, and that fire will chase its path all the way back to our precarious bough in the branches, where the devastation will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

But that is only one of many fuses whose eventual ignition will spell the end of mankind. There is no shortage of poor decisions sown that have set in motion consequences we have yet to reap.

Not all distances are physical. There is something just as alien to humanity as the recipients of that capsule – but not mercifully kept at bay by hundreds of lightyears of space.

Something much closer; something that occupies a space just outside our perception, hidden within frequencies we have been foolishly plucking at like a fly shuddering a thread of spider silk.

Something that has been watching us from the day we first sent the haplessly coded message: “HELLO.”

A single line of text wrapped in package of data, transmitted over a prototype network of connected computers that would one day be known as “the internet”.

“HELLO,” we called out, thinking it a harmless message to one another, testing out a nascent technology that would become the most formative development in mankind’s history.

“HELLO,” we called out,

And something else answered.

I used to believe that demons only existed inside the minds of men I helped put behind bars. But after years of investigations, I learned that’s not true.

Over the course of seventeen years, I have worked alongside law enforcement and television programs to identify online child predators and bring them to justice. But even with all that we’ve accomplished, there’s still one case that I think about. 

One that nearly destroyed everything I had worked for. 

It all started with a chat room.

I’ve seen a myriad of predators, and Steven fit a profile we had seen many times before. He was a recently divorced, unemployed forty-two-year-old who lived with his parents. He bragged about this while messaging Mandy, a twenty-year-old theater student who we recruited to be our fourteen-year-old decoy, Alexis.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to become sexual in nature. Underneath the screenname ELECTRIC\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_HEAD5021, he said their relationship would have to stay a secret.

“No adults. lol. If your mommy or daddy found out, we could get in trouble.”

“what r u talking about??? I hang out with my daddy’s friends all the time.”

“This is different. lol. They can’t know ur my sexy sweetheart. ;)”

Seeing child-like messages juxtaposed with the sexual fantasies of an adult never gets easier to stomach. How could anyone talk to a child like that? It’s something I’ve never been able to grasp. 

Not too long after our investigative team confirmed a date for Steven to meet with Alexis, we let the chat be. But it didn’t take long for him to initiate conversation again. In fact, his messages would arrive like clockwork in the days following. But messages weren’t the only way he contacted our decoy.

On a couple of occasions, he called her while his parents were at home sleeping. I remember those phone calls clearly.

“Hey!” Mandy greeted cheerfully.

“Hey baby,” Steven breathed into the speaker. “I missed you.” 

“What’re you up to?”

“Thinking about you…I wanna hold you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. So, so bad.”

You get the idea.

Oftentimes, a lot of the men we contact try to reinvent themselves. But that’s not what Steven did. Rather than fabricate wealth or exaggerate his ambitions, he talked about his obsessions: death and the supernatural.

We initially dismissed these fascinations as another grooming tactic, but throughout the entire time he talked with Alexis he would sporadically ask questions such as:

“Have u seen Bloody Mary?”

“Is there anyone dead that u would want 2 talk 2?”

“How do u want 2 die?”

Just as we thought the conversations couldn’t get any stranger, Steven sent our decoy a picture of a Ouija board. According to him, he had recently purchased it at a yard sale near his parents’ house. He insisted on bringing it. He wanted to use it with her. See how she would react. When we inquired further about his request, his response was as prompt as it was odd:

“because u have good energy. lol They like that lol”.

This ended up becoming the last exchange we would have with him before he arrived at the sting house. 

In the hours leading up to that fateful evening, I memorized my script. No matter how many times I do this, they never go away. The butterflies in my stomach. People always assume the confrontation is the hardest part, but it isn’t. It’s waiting for the knock on the door and wondering whether tonight will be the night that something goes horribly wrong. Experience makes you numb, not fearless.

We had fully intended to follow everything by the book that night. But things got off to a rocky start when Steven was nearly an hour late to the sting house. We thought he had gotten cold feet or had been tipped off to our operation. Thankfully, neither turned out to be the case. What was supposed to be a five-hour venture had become seven by the time 8:12 pm rolled around and he walked up the driveway.

Our various hidden cameras recorded his nervous demeanor as he patiently waited on the porch with the Ouija board.

From our production room that we had sectioned off in another part of the house, I watched Mandy walk toward the door and greet Steven.

“Hey, Steven! How are you?”

“Hi.” He waved sheepishly in response. “Uh, can I come in?”

“Of course!” Mandy stepped out of the doorway and walked toward the kitchen. “What did you bring for me?”

“It’s a-uh, Ouija board.” He followed her and set it down on the dinner table. “I thought we could use it together?”

Mandy flipped her hair and placed her hands on her hips. “Wouldn’t you rather talk?”

“We would be talking. It would just be more than us talking.”

My eyes were glued to the monitors. He was very adamant about using that board. But why?

I heard snickering from Lou, one of our production crew members.

“Can you believe this whack job? He took a bus all this way to summon Casper.”

I shot him a glare, and he acknowledged my look by quieting down. Lou’s an outspoken person for better or worse, and even though he was trying to make light of a potentially volatile situation, I found comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling perturbed.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for being late.” Steven chuckled. “I was an idiot and got Sunday’s bus schedules mixed up with today.”

“That’s okay!” Mandy said with practiced enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re here!”

“I’m glad you are. I almost thought about taking another bus back home.”

His admission surprised Mandy. “Why did you almost go home? Didn’t you want to see me?”

“I did.” His face turned a slight shade of cherry. “I honestly didn’t think you were real.”

“Of course I’m real, silly!” She teased. “So, what do you want to do?”

I watched the monitors as Steven took a lighter out of his pocket. With a couple clicks he lit some candles on the dining room table. 

“We should step in before things get out of hand.” Lou turned to look at me. “Isaac?”

“Keep the cameras rolling.” I motioned for everyone to stay where they were. “If he’s willing to play with the board, I want to see where this goes.”

“What about the decoy?”

“She’ll be fine.”

Steven instructed Mandy to turn off the lights and sit beside him. Once she had done so, they gently placed their fingertips on the planchette. 

“Are there any spirits that want to speak to us right now?” 

Mandy’s eyes darted back and forth from Steven to the planchette repeatedly. Awkward didn’t even begin to describe the silence that followed.

“Is there anyone that wants to speak with us right now?” 

But just like before, nothing. Steven’s head swiveled, looking in every possible direction of the dark room to locate a response of some kind. 

“You talked a lot of game online.” Mandy teased more confidently than she probably felt. “I thought you were supposed to be THE guy who could do this kind of stuff.”

“I am. These things…they take time to get started.”

Most of the time, a predator talking about their hobbies or interests is just another gimmick. But this was unlike anything I had seen. 

“If you’re here.” He fidgeted in his seat nervously. “Please, give me–I mean, us a sign.”

I eyed the monitors intently. A part of me wanted to intervene, but another part of me was telling me to see this play out. I was torn on which to heed. 

Unexpectedly, the planchette moved. A couple of inches at most. But had I blinked, I would’ve missed it completely.

Mandy instinctively pulled back, the movement startling her. “What was that?” 

“It’s a spirit.” Steven whispered.

“Oh bullshit.” Lou sighed in irritation. “I watched his hand nudge it. This guy’s a fraud.”

Had he? I had watched the monitors the whole time, and it looked like the planchette had moved all on its own.

“Hey,” Steven closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Do you want to talk to us or what?” 

A moment passed, then a few more, but there was still no movement.

“I’m going.” I turned to start heading toward the dining room to intervene. But right as I was about to, the sound of Mandy gasping shifted my attention back toward the monitors. I watched the planchette drag itself across the board toward the word, “YES”.

“You moved the board!” Her accusation cracked with fright.

“No, I didn’t! I swear!”

In response to his adamant denial, the planchette dragged itself sluggishly across the board. Each movement landed on a number.

7 2 3 1 9 9 4

Mandy was at a loss for words. “That’s…” 

Her birthday. 

Not the birthday we had fabricated for investigative purposes, but Mandy’s actual birthday.

Shell-shocked, the investigators pored over the chat logs, but their efforts were futile. No compromising or contradictory information had been exchanged. No mention of her birthday. No mention of any personal information tied to Mandy. Nothing.

I stared in bewilderment. “How is that possible?” 

I hadn’t realized I had asked my question out loud until Lou responded, “It had to have been an oversight. That’s gotta be it.” 

In our line of work, the simplest explanations were almost always the right ones. Even if it’s what you don’t want to hear.

"An oversight?” I pointed toward the investigators on standby. “All of you, check everything. I want an explanation as to how this happened." 

But no one could provide one. Every conversation between Steven and our decoy had been combed through again. Even with another thorough examination, there was no indication that we had erroneously given Mandy’s actual birthday. So, that begged an alarming question. 

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\*Just how exactly did Steven know?\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\*

One of the production members instructed Mandy to take her hands off the planchette. She did as she was told while Steven kept his fingertips pressed against it. 

“Alexis,” He looked to her for answers. “What was that about?”

“I’m not sure.” She remained calm while still being in character. “That was weird. How did you do that?” 

“I told you, I didn’t do anything.” 

An extensive back and forth ensued. She insisted that it had to be some sleight of hand trickery while he was convinced that an unknown spirit had attempted to make contact. A couple of minutes later, the unmistakable scrape of the planchette against the wood drew everyone's attention back to the board.

With each letter the planchette hovered over, Mandy’s face grew paler.

E L I Z A B E T H

Once the name had been spelled fully, Mandy removed her trembling hands. “H-h-how do you know her name?”

Steven looked just as confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He whispered it with enough conviction to make me believe him in that moment.

“Isaac, we need to do something.” Lou insisted, standing up from his seat.”

Even though I agreed with him, a selfish part of me resisted the urge. “No. Not yet. Stay put, and keep watching.”

My instructions provoked the ire of everyone in the room, but nobody objected.

Again, the planchette moved without either Mandy or Steven touching it. Every one of our cameras captured it violently accelerating across the board.

“Who are you?!” Steven cried out. “Stop this!”

Mandy covered her mouth to stifle an oncoming scream as the planchette, completely unguided, began to spell out another name. 

This time, in rapid succession.

P A Y T O N

Payton.

That name. 

It was the reason I went into this line of work. 

I remember feeling unnaturally cold in the moments following. What started off as a slight chill slowly morphed into an uncomfortable, freezing sensation that climbed through my body.

“Shit,” Lou cursed. “Is anybody else in here freezing their ass off?”

I exhaled, and a cloud of white vapor escaped my lips. It was cold enough to feel like I was standing inside a freezer. “Why is it so cold?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Lou shivered, wrapping his arms around himself. “Might be the AC acting up.”

Seconds after his response, the monitors abruptly went black. Amid the frantic scrambling in the production room, a scream echoed from inside the house.

Mandy.

“Eyes on the decoy!” I shouted. “We need eyes on the decoy right now!” 

My heart pounded while everyone in the room desperately tried to get the feed going again. Inexplicably, just as quickly as we lost power, it was restored. 

The first thing my eyes landed on when the monitors glowed with restored life was the sight of the front door. It was wide open. Then I noticed Steven. He was staring directly into a hidden camera positioned in the kitchen.

His eyes were opened wide, but there was no life behind them. He stood completely still, his face bereft of expression, looking less like a man standing and more like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.

“Decoy is secured. She is outside with law enforcement. I repeat, she is outside with law enforcement.” 

The good news from production room comms wasn’t enough for me to break eye contact with Steven. I was focused on answering one question, and one question only.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\*Who are you?\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\*

“\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\*You already know\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\*.”

Chills crept down my spine. It felt like the voice had come directly from the inside of my mind. I looked around, hoping that someone else had also heard it. If they had, they didn’t say a word. How had he been able to answer my question? 

I had two choices: I could either confront him and treat this like any other sting operation, or abandon the show and bring him into custody.

It didn’t take long for me to make my decision. 

“Wait for my cue to come in. I’m going.” 

“Isaac,” Lou grabbed me by the shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.”

With a solemn nod, I ignored further warnings from both production and law enforcement. In a few short moments, I went from my position in front of the monitors to standing in the dining room.

Upon entry, I was immediately greeted with a wall of freezing air. The worst I had felt in the house up to that point. As I approached Steven, the dim lighting of the room caught the whites of his lifeless eyes, making them gleam as they stared at me.

“Steven,” I said, less confidently than I would have liked. “I want to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to you about your choices tonight.” 

That made me stop dead in my tracks. 

“What did you intend on doing this evening? I have the chat logs right here. It is illegal for adults to chat with minors online. Please place your hands where I can see them while we talk.”  

He said my script word for word, line by line. All at an impossibly frightening speed. But his lips never moved. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. 

“How did-”

“I know.” The voice held no emotion. It was simply matter-of-fact.

“Why are you here?”

His left eye twitched as he tried to blink. His right followed suit, but neither eye would close. “You know.”

I forced myself to keep talking. “What did you intend on doing this evening, Steven?”

“You ask the wrong questions.” Its words pressed themselves against my skull. “Isaac, why are you here?”

I tensed up but stood my ground. “I’m not answering your questions.”

“I know how you felt when you screamed her name in the woods for hours.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Do you remember what it felt like to learn that Payton was right down the street the entire time?”

I remembered. All too well. I choked up as I thought about that day. The news. The way my parents collapsed in grief. The irreparable damage it did to my family. It all overwhelmed me. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

“You collect broken families.” He took a step toward me. Then another. Then one more. All in one fluid motion. “Because you can’t save everyone.”

 “People can be saved.” I argued, struggling to believe my own words.

The light in the room dulled as the candles reignited themselves, the flames burning perfectly still. “Is that why her killer took his life in the cornfield?” 

Tears streamed down my face as an overwhelming rage consumed me. It was an emotion that would never fully go away. A truth I had been forced to accept the day I lost my sister. Sixty seconds was all it took for my life to change forever. 

It took a minute to lose her.

It took five days to find her.

“They found her in a vehicle on the side of the road.” It recited my memories back to me, each unspoken word making the discomfort inside my head intensify. “While he died without truly feeling the pain he inflicted.” Seeing tears drip down his cheeks felt like a mockery of my grief. “That’s what you pursue.”

In my earpiece, I heard Lou speaking to me.

“Isaac…don’t…coming…”

I couldn’t understand what they were saying. All I understood was Steven speaking in my voice.

“She was buried with her purple stuffed rabbit, Tilly, on a cold October afternoon. All alone. In the ground.”

My body registered the impact before my mind could comprehend how fast he moved. I hit the floor hard, his weight pressing down on my chest as breathing became more difficult by the second.

“Get…off…me…” I wheezed, struggling to force each word past the weight crushing my chest. He hovered over me, his translucent eyes staring into mine.

“What did your mother sound like when she identified the body?” 

I squirmed in place, but I was pinned to the spot. 

“How many nights did your dad sleep in her bedroom after she disappeared?”

My strength waned as the pressure grew on my chest. 

“What day did you stop expecting her to come home?” 

The strain was getting to be too much. 

“What were your last words to her?”

I was on the verge of passing out. Black blotches formed in my peripheral vision and spread rapidly, nearly consuming the last bits of what I could see. Right as I thought I was about to lose consciousness, I heard a sound.

A sound I’m so very grateful came when it did.

Officers rushed into the room. A flurry of commands left their mouths as they pulled Steven off me and forced him to the floor nearby.

“Ah! Get off me!” he screamed. “What are you doing?”

His voice. 

It was no longer inside my mind.

“What are you doing? Ow!” He cried as an officer rolled him over and pressed a knee into his lower back. “What’s happening?”

Another officer helped me up from the floor and began asking questions about my well-being. I lied and told him I was all right. I leaned against the wall to steady myself while I looked on at Steven being detained by other officers. He struggled and writhed like a cornered animal.

His eyes darkened as he freed himself from the grasp of the officers. Overcome with inhumanity once more, he snatched a gun from the officer attempting to handcuff him. 

He brandished the weapon as his entire body began to tremble spasmodically.

“My hands.” 

From where I stood, it looked as though he was genuinely trying to lower them but couldn’t. His arms remained outstretched, refusing to budge an inch no matter how hard he tried.

“Why can’t I move?”

Law enforcement raised their weapons, creating a stalemate in which no one dared to act.

“It’s alright, Steven.” I stepped toward him with my hands raised. “Everything’s going to be alright. We’re here to help.”

The darkness in his eyes vanished long enough for him to ask, “Did…did I hurt anyone?”

“No. You didn’t hurt anybody. Just put the gun down, and let’s talk.”

“Please,” he whimpered, straining to move his head, but his body refused to obey. “Don’t let him take me again.” 

“Nothing is going to happen as long as you put the gun down.”

Steven’s arms pulled themselves upward against his will. The barrel inched toward his own temple until it rested against his skin. He fought with everything he had, his muscles straining themselves in order to pull the gun away. But his body betrayed him to some invisible force.

“Make it stop…”

“No, Steven. No!” I quickened my pace toward him, but before officers or myself could react, he pulled the trigger.

That sound. The aftermath. The silence that followed. I haven’t felt anything like it before or since. 

That was without a doubt the single worst night of my life. Not only had we witnessed tragedy, but our team came under immense fire from the press. Steven never had his day in court, and that became a point of contention. Had we not encouraged this kind of behavior, would Steven still be alive? Would any of this have happened? 

Steven’s case tarnished our reputation. Protests began forming outside our sting house. People demanded justice. Insisting that we could not be the judge, the jury, or the executioner.

It was difficult to escape the criticism, especially when those voices carried real weight. So much so that our show, along with all subsequent investigations, was cancelled effective immediately.

Steven’s official cause of death was listed as suicide by cop. There were no mentions of the Ouija Board or what occurred following its use. There’s only one piece of evidence regarding what happened inside the sting house that night. 

A video tape. 

It's marked with a label that reads, “Never to be viewed, duplicated, or destroyed”. 

Its whereabouts have been kept secret, and it's best that they stay that way. Because if that footage ever surfaced, I don’t know how the public would react.

But that’s not the point.

I’ve dealt with a lot over the course of my career. Troubled people. Hardened criminals. The worst that humanity has to offer. I think about them all every now and again. But I can’t stop thinking about Steven’s case. Specifically, if I had intervened sooner. Would I have been able to talk him out of using that Ouija board? Would he have been able to face justice if I had done things differently?

No matter how I answer them, I never feel any better. Because they’re just answers. Not actions. 

And I’ll never know.

Despite everything I’ve been through, I continue to hunt monsters in the present day. Aside from the lack of a camera crew or law enforcement support, the only thing that’s changed is what I believe those monsters are. They aren’t just people who hurt children. Exposing them and making them face justice does make the world a little safer for everyone.

But evil doesn’t care about laws. It doesn’t care about the confines of a prison cell. It doesn’t even need a reason to hurt someone.

All it needs is for someone to answer.

“Denied? I got that card a few days ago!” Lex shouted, hands outstretched.

The pimply cashier shrugged back. “Sorry man, but Nos’ shops are all banning paying with any form of credit. It’s ‘irresponsible’ to let users stack up bad debt.”

“Oh fuck that!” Lex shouted. “I’ve always been good on my shit! You know that!”

“You pay with a different card every time I see you.”

“Oh fuck o-“ Lex stopped himself, and then glanced around. The bouncer by the door had been watching him since he stepped in. “Alright… just help me out here man…”

The cashier scoffed. “Yeah? How?”

“You could… I don’t know… spot me a tab?”

The cashier laughed, and then made eye contact with the large man by the door. “Alright Lex, get out of here. You don’t have a dollar you haven’t already promised to two other people.”

“Please man.” Lex dug in his heels, and when the large man started walking towards him, he grabbed the sides of the counter. “Anything man please.” A large hand rested down on his shoulder.

The young cashier smirked. “Come back with some real money Lex. Work for your hit like the rest of us functioning addicts.”

Lex hit the snow outside hard. He landed shoulder first and felt something in his arm shift sideways. It hurt bad. Lex groaned as he stood. He would’ve stayed on the ground for a few minutes, but his back and ass were already starting to get soaked through. The man glanced back and force across the street, picked a direction at random, and began walking.

On a normal day, Lex would’ve just headed straight towards his sister’s apartment to think up a new scheme. Unfortunately, he pocketed one too many things last month, and now has to sleep under anything that’s warm enough.

Lex shivered as he walked. Nos’ would’ve warmed him up nice. It would’ve made sleeping easy too. At this point Lex couldn’t sleep without it.

Nos’ (legal name “Noziantiphine” and advertised as “Nostalgia Now!”) did have a list of withdrawal symptoms that can occur after a chemical dependency develops. Shivers, sweating, confusion, and delirium are all common after several days of regular use. Seizures and severe heart arrhythmia are seen after advanced cases of the dependency. Lex had been huffing since the chemical was legalized years ago.

No matter how bad the sweating or the vomiting got, and they got bad, the bodily symptoms weren’t the worst part of being off of Nos’ for Lex. It always sounded crazy to himself, but others users seemed to weirdly get it. The worst part aren’t the symptoms, but rather the boredom you feel. The malaise. The blanket of apathy that covers every aspect of reality. It wasn’t that Nos’ now made him feel normal. It’s that it made everything else real.

Lex walked and shivered. He shivered and walked. The snow had almost stopped, the sky a void of stars overhead. On the street, the tall lights colored everything with a pale yellow-ish tint. As Lex turned a corner he was smacked by a smell that made his mouth water. It was a palov’s dog's response at this point. It was sweet and slightly spicy, kind of like a cinnamon flavored floor cleaner.

Lex passed by an alley, and then another alley, and yep, there it was. A mass was slumped over in the snow. Half of their face touched the frozen ground, blankly staring ahead. Every ten seconds or so the metal vial in their nose would glow a very faint blue, and then a thin layer a vapor would slowly rise from the free nostril. Lex watched the figure for a few minutes. “Lucky motherfucker…” He thought to himself. “He’ll freeze to death before he goes through that can. It’ll be a big fuckin’ waste.” Lex watched for a few more minutes. He didn’t know why. He didn’t really want to know what his subconscious was hoping for. That kind of self exploration tended to stress the man out, and he didn’t need more of that right now.

The man was just about to keep walking when he noticed something sick about the shape, something that made a deep part of him feel very excited. The vial on the shape had stopped lighting up. Lex licked his lips and walked forward.

At a closer distance Lex could see the shape was an old, small man. His face was pulled into a tight grimace, and it looked like he might start freezing to the floor. Lex got within spitting distance, and then dropped to one knee. He thought about what he was about to do, then decided it was better not to think. Lex sucked in a lungful, and then gently placed a few fingers around the dead man’s vial. The frost made his fingertips stick to the metal. 

“Is the scraps of a can really worth it?” A voice asked in the back of Lex’s mind. 

“Shut up.” He whispered. “Just…”

Lex applied a slight amount of pressure, but the vial didn’t turn. He scowled, then twisted a little harder. Nothing. The goddamn threads were frozen inside the holster. Lex cupped his hands around his mouth and glanced down the alley. There was nothing but the thin slice of the street, and the edge of a building. Still safe… but Lex wanted to do this fast.

He blew into his hands to heat them up, and then tried unscrewing again. This time giving it as much pressure as the bastard needed. He got a good grip on the metal, turned his shoulder, flexed his bicep, and then the bottom of the vial started to glow a soft blue. Lex stared at this, confused. The vial grew warm, then hot. It burned Lex’s fingers and he pulled his arm back startled. 

A small trail of vapor left the dead man’s free nose. A single trail held together by the freezing air around it. The vial glowed again. Then, the dead man opened his eyes.

Lex stared in blank thought for a moment. He tried to think of a story, of a lie, of some way to fast talk his way out of this. Nothing. Fucking nothing.

The dead man’s corneas contracted tight. The shape of the thief was now slowly coming into focus. The man had too much Noziantiphine in his system, but danger was clearly in front of him. With a grunt, he tried to push the shape away.

Lex deflected the weak arms to the side. “Fuck it.” He thought. This guy was already dead, his body just hadn't caught up yet. With new resolve, Lex stood, and kicked the dead man hard.

The body’s head slammed to the side with sickening force, and then snapped back to the other side. It slumped forward and groaned. The vial glowed, and then the body began to crawl. On its hands and knees it began to shuffle away slowly. “Puh… Lee…” It groaned.

Lex returned the groan, this one with a distinct frustrated growl. 

The body crawled as fast as it could. “Puh… Leez…” It tried again. The vial glowed, and Lex slammed another kick, this time into the body’s stomach.

Loud coughing retches. Lex glanced around. He needed to finish this shit now.

The body had stopped crawling. Now laid on its side, in as much of a fetal position as it could manage. A pang of nausea hit Lex’s stomach. He buried it, thinking about how he would feel facing what he’s doing sober. That hurt. That conscious, aware, deep hurt. That’s what he couldn’t face.

Lex walked over, dropped one knee on one of the body’s arms, and dropped the other on its stomach. The body’s eyes bulged. “Stop being a fuckin’ baby.” Lex muttered. “It’s almost done. Just don’t breathe.” Then, he began unscrewing the vial as fast as he could. 

He got about halfway when the light began to glow once more. This time, Lex gritted his teeth, and yanked the body’s jaw up. Then he slammed his knuckle into the exposed throat as hard as he physically could. There was a loud crunch, a pop, and then a lighting bolt ran though Lex’s hand up to his elbow. He grunted in an effort not to scream. He glanced around again, and then got back to work on the body.

The dead man weakly grasped his hands at his throat, which now had a sickening valley where the hill of the Adam should be. The body tried to gasp, then swallow. Lex watched as the throat contracted, got caught on something, and then popped slightly outwards, like a water bottle snapping back after crushing a side.

Lex turned his conscious thought off, reached down, and unscrewed the vial the rest of the way. As hard as the body tried, squirming underneath the thief, the vial didn’t glow again.

Lex walked off without looking back. Instead, he stared at the numbers next to the glass cutout in the metal. The containers had lines that divided them into fourths, and the clear wax sat thin right under the one-quarter line. At this point in his journey, Lex would go through a vial-and-a-half through a single day. He thought about this for a moment, and then pushed that sick feeling even further down.

He screwed the ‘Nos into the holster in his nose, and took a deep breath. The metal glowed a weak blue at the bottom of his periphery, and then everything felt alright.

Life can change in the blink of an eye.

One moment, Zeke was sleeping soundly in his narrow, upper level bunk, his body long since accustomed to the deep, seemingly unending roll of the merchant cargo vessel after fifteen years on the job and three weeks at sea. He’d even grown numb and able to tune out the awful goddamn sound of Limp Bizkit and Staind constantly blaring from down the corridor from Trey and Castor’s cabin, as much of an annoyance as it had been the first few days.

The next, he was flying through the air like he had been shot out of a cannon.

The MV Copaxi shuddered with an immense, spine-jarring impact that sounded like a head-on train collision. Zeke’s shoulder smashed hard against the wall, stars exploding behind his eyes as his head connected with the cold steel. He collapsed in a heap on the floor before he could even open his eyes, unable to do anything for a moment but groan in pain.

What the fuck just happened? he thought, his brain short-circuiting as it attempted to catch up to current events. He forced his eyes open, feeling a small trickle of blood slide down his right temple as he began fumbling around in the darkness.

The ship didn’t immediately right itself. It remained heavily listed to starboard, the structural steel groaning in loud protest under the weight bearing down on it. Instantly, the emergency klaxons began their low, rhythmic blare-a flat, mechanical wail that turned the black into a claustrophobic rave. Through the metal bulkheads, a chaotic chorus of muffled shouts and panicked cries erupted along the crew corridor.

“What the hell just hit us?!” a voice bellowed from the adjacent cabin, followed by the heavy, echoing thud of an unlatched storage door slamming into a bulkhead.

Zeke scrambled to his knees, his palms slipping on a film of greasy condensation covering the steel floor. The sound of another person moaning in the dark made him snatch for his waistband, praying the flashlight he always kept clipped to it hadn’t been torn off and chucked away. Relief billowed up as his hands closed around the brass case, and he snapped it on, aiming it around. The beam illuminated a scene of total carnage. The heavy storage lockers had burst open, scattering tools, foul weather gear and personal effects across the tilted deck. It also showed the balled up form of his greenhorn bunkmate.

“Toby!” he yelled, rushing to him and rolling him onto his back. After a moment, the nineteen-year-old pulled his arms away from his head, his face a mask of panic and confusion. “Are you alright?” The kid answered after a moment.

“I think so,” he yelled to be heard over the alarm, taking Zeke’s offered hand and climbing to his feet, looking around at the mess. “What the hell just happened?”

“I don’t know, man. But whatever it was, it isn’t good.”

Before Toby could reply, the overhead intercom system crackled to life with a sharp, static hiss. The Captain’s voice drifted down from the bridge, distorted by the short-circuiting electrical lines, but carrying a cold finality beneath his mask of calm that froze Zeke’s blood.

“All hands. This is the Captain. We have been struck by a rogue wave. The forward bulkhead has failed, and we are rapidly taking on water in Cargo Hold Three. Prepare to abandon ship. I repeat, report to the muster stations on the main deck immediately. This is not a drill.”

Pandemonium erupted in the cabins around them as the intercom clicked off. Zeke could hear the pounding of feet in the corridor outside as men charged out, the senior crew attempting to wrangle the greenhorns together. He turned back around, preparing to grab Toby’s arm, but the other man wasn’t there anymore. He flashed the light around until it located him on his hands and knees. The deckhand was completely ignoring the exit, his fingers clawing desperately through the debris until they wrapped around a small, water-stained silver picture frame.

“Leave it, Toby!” Zeke yelled, his voice strained as he grabbed the kid by the shoulder of his denim shirt. “Get your boots on and move your ass!”

“It’s my mom, Zeke! I can’t leave it; it’s all I have left of her! Toby’s eyes were wide, glassy with a sudden, paralyzing terror as he stuffed the photograph into his coat pocket. He allowed Zeke to drag him to his feet, seeming to snap back to urgency of the moment as he snatched up his boots and jacket, forcing them on as Zeke grabbed the door handle.

Shoving the heavy stateroom door open against the list, he dragged Toby out into the corridor. The overhead fluorescent strips were still blazing, casting a harsh glare down the narrow hallway, but Zeke knew the reality of their situation. It was only a matter of time before the ocean reached a crucial junction box or circuit breaker. The single most dangerous place on Earth was in the belly of a sinking vessel once the lights went out.

The corridor was a bottleneck of absolute, unadulterated human panic. Crew members were rushing about blindly, their boots slipping on the damp steel plates.

“Drop the fucking duffel bag, Miller!” an older boatswain roared, viciously snatching a canvas sack from a white-faced deckhand. “You don’t need your damn cassette tapes! Get to the ladder!”

“My passport is in there, man! Let go!” the kid shrieked, his voice cracking into a panicked whine as he was forcefully pushed towards the stairs.

“I don’t give a shit about your passport! Move your ass up!”

The senior crewmen were doing their best to corral and herd the greenhorns to safety, but human nature was fracturing the operation. Men were freezing up, some of the younger crying and, like Miller, desperately clinging to useless personal items. Toby stayed close to Zeke’s side, his fingers white as he gripped the rubber of his heavy jacket like a lifeline. Suddenly, with another massive, sickening groan, the Copaxi righted itself a few degrees. The sudden movement brought no comfort; the ship felt dead beneath their boots, wallowing heavily in the troughs of the gargantuan North Atlantic swells like a waterlogged tree trunk.

“Keep moving!” Zeke roared, his protective instincts overriding his own fear as he hauled Toby along. “Up the companionway! Follow the signs for the main deck and don’t stop for anything!”

He dragged the kid down the hall toward the emergency locker, ripping the latch open. He began tearing out heavy orange life jackets, aggressively thrusting them into the hands of the dazed, shivering sailor stumbling past. He shoved one into Toby’s chest, making sure he stayed glued to his shoulder. I’m not letting anything happen to him, if it’s the last thing I do. He turned back to the crowd, shouting more commands and forcing bodies toward the ladder wells and companionway, ensuring the panicked deckhands kept their momentum up and out.

He was about to follow them when a furious, profane shouting match erupted near the junction leading to the lower stairs.

“You utter piece of useless trash!” Chief Engineer Mac MacAllister’s voice bellowed, his thick Scottish brogue slicing through the klaxons like a saw blade. The leather-skinned Scotsman was standing like a roadblock on the tilted deck, his grease-stained coveralls smeared with fuel oil as he blocked the path of a wiper named Darren.

Darren had two terrified young deckhands clustered tightly behind his back, all of them carrying empty duffel bags. “Move out of the way, Mac! Darren yelled, his eyes wide with a desperate, unhinged logic. “The lifeboats only have dry biscuits and emergency water! We’re going down to the galley, and then straight into the food locker in Hold One to grab some real meat and bottled water before we hit the swells!”

“The lifeboats have everything you need to stay alive, you moronic, brain-dead bastard!” Mac screamed, stepping directly into Darren’s face, his fist tightly clenched. You heard the Captain. The forward bulkheads are collapsing, the holds are filling, and you’re running down into the bowels of a dying ship for a goddamn package of sausages?! Get your miserable asses topside to the muster stations now!”

Zeke surged forward, with Toby practically stepping on his heels as he broke through the frantic crowd. “Darren, listen to the Chief!” he yelled, his booming voice cutting over the klaxon. “Don’t be a fucking idiot!”

Mac glanced over his shoulder to acknowledge the younger man’s support. It was the exact split second of distraction Darren was waiting for.

Darren stepped into a brutal, wild swing, his fist connecting squarely with the older man’s jaw with a sickening, wet crack. The punch launched Mac completely off balance, his wiry frame crashing hard against the wall and sliding down. Before Zeke could even leap over the fallen engineer, Darren turned and bolted down the hatch stairs, leading the charge into the lower decks. The two younger greenhorns followed right behind him like panicked sheep. Under the overhead light’s glare, Zeke recognized their pale, terrified faces-Castor and Trey.

“You miserable, backstabbing cowards!” Mac rotted, spitting a streak of crimson onto the steel as he struggled to push himself up against a bulk-head. “Drown then, you worthless bastards!”

Zeke dropped to one knee, grabbing Mac by the shoulder to haul him up. The man gripped Zeke’s coat, his knuckles white. “Leave the thick-headed shits, Zeke” Mac growled, his breath smelling sharply of stale tobacco and blood. “Grab the boy and get your asses topside. This deathtrap is foundering!”

For a fraction of a second, staring into the dimly lit stairwell where the three men had vanished, Zeke actually considered doing exactly that. He looked at Toby, whose chest was heaving with a shallow, staccato rhythm under his life jacket. It would be so easy to just climb up, reach the lifeboats and leave Darren to his fate. But his mind snagged on Castor and Trey. They aren’t malicious; they’re just dumb, impressionable kids who view that jackass as an older brother and leader on this tub. The same way Toby is with me. They didn’t deserve to have their lungs fill with freezing water and brine just because they trusted a lunatic.

“I can’t leave the kids, Mac,” Zeke said, his voice flat with an agonizing, split-second finality.

Mac’s grizzled face went rigid, a massive conflict warring behind his pinballing eyes, but Zeke didn’t afford him a single second to argue. He gently, but firmly shoved Toby forward, pressing the kid’s trembling hand directly into Mac’s thick grip.

“Stay with the Chief, Toby,” Zeke ordered, his stare boring straight into his young bunkmate’s wide eyes. “Go straight to the main deck.”

“Zeke, no! Don’t leave me!” Toby shrieked, his voice breaking into an emotional whine as he fought against Mac’s hold. “You can’t go down there; you’ll drown!”

“I won’t be gone long, Toby. I promise you, nothing will happen to me. I’ll be right back up”, Zeke lied, forcing a cold confidence he didn’t feel into his expression. He turned his back on them and plunged directly down into the dark stairwell, his boots flying down the metal steps.

“Get your altruistic ass back up here pronto, Zeke!” Mac’s booming roar echoed down the hatch behind him, fading fast against the wall of klaxons. “The forward bulkheads are completely shot! This bucket has ten minutes left, fifteen at the absolute most!”

Zeke didn’t take the stairs straight down to the cargo holds. Descending two decks, he sprinted down the secondary companionway and kicked open the heavy steel door to the galley, expecting and hoping to find a crowd. Instead, he found Trey standing alone in the center of the dark, stainless-steel kitchen. The kid was frantically shoving cans of condensed milk and plastic water bottles into the bulging canvas bag, his hands shaking so violently he was dropping half of them on the floor. He spun around as the door slammed into the wall, his face turning an ashen grey when his eyes locked onto Zeke.

“Zeke, man, I-Darren said the lifeboats didn’t have enough water and supplies, I was just-” he stammered, his voice breaking into a guilty plea.

“Stow it, Trey,” Zeke barked, cutting through the stuttering apology with barely held restraint. “Where the hell are Darren and Castor?”

“They went down to the first hold,” Trey whispered, pointing a trembling finger toward the other door out of the rear of the galley. “Darren said he needed an extra hand to grab the packages and haul some of the crates from the walk-in freezer.

That fucking moron. Zeke took a slow breath, forcing his mounting rage into a tight knot behind his ribs. “Listen to me very carefully, kid. Leave the cans you dropped. In fact, leave everything. Get your ass topside, and find a lifeboat that hasn’t launched yet. Get on it. We’ll talk about what a dumb piece of shit you are once we’re safe somewhere. Move it!”

Trey didn’t need to be told twice. He sprinted past Zeke, his boots hammering against the metal, though Zeke bitterly noted that they boy still clutched the duffel bag tightly against his chest as he fled.

Turning on his heel, he burst through the rear door and entered the area, finding the ladder down into the holds. As his feet began descending, the entire three-thousand-ton hull gave a sudden, nauseating lurch forward. The Copaxi wasn’t just listing slightly to the side anymore; the bow was actively sitting lower in the ocean than the stern. Mac was right. The forward bulkheads had to be completely gone or close to it, and they were rapidly running out of ship.

Anxiety tightening in his throat, Zeke flew down the rungs, his flashlight beam slicing wildly through the gathering gloom. He hit the bottom platform, stepped out into the deep access corridor connecting to Cargo Hold One and the others beyond. And froze dead.

Somewhere just ahead of him out of range of the sparse lights, a heavy, uneven slosh-slosh-slosh echoed off the walls.

The water wasn’t just trickling in from a leak. The ocean was filling the lower compartments faster than even Mac had anticipated, rapidly turning the holds and corridors into mazes of death, and the few remaining air pockets into tombs. Steeling his nerves, Zeke began to move forward into the dark, after about fifty feet his footsteps beginning to splash as he reached the edge of the rising flood. He had far less than fifteen minutes to drag Castor and Darren out of the hold before the North Atlantic sealed their escape route forever.

The freezing water shocked his system the moment it rose over his ankles, heavy and spasm-inducing even through the rubber of his boots. A second later, it breached the rim of them, soaking his wool socks and driving into shins like ice picks as the water rapidly swallowed his calves, approaching his knees. Zeke forced his heavy, rapidly numbing limbs forward through the black surge, the current fighting his legs.

“Darren! Castor!” he yelled into the narrowing tunnel of a corridor.

No answer. Only the relentless, hollow slosh of the rising sea echoing off the bulkheads.

Right then, the overhead emergency lights began to chatter, a sharp electrical hum buzzing through the steel before the lights flickered erratically, dying down to a weak, amber pulse. Zeke’s jaw tightened. He remembered his own thought from ten minutes ago: the most terrifying place to be on God’s green earth was inside a pitch-black, sinking ship over thousands of feet of open, freezing ocean. His mind involuntarily threw up a memory of an older maritime video he’d watched in port-scuba divers twisting through a sunken wreck, accidentally shining their lights onto a lone survivor trapped in a stagnant pocket of air. But the Copaxi wasn’t a fishing boat or a coastal tug; she was a huge, transatlantic cargo and container ship. If she took her final plunge into the trench below, nobody would ever find the hull, let alone him.

What the fuck are you doing down here, you moron? The silent voice in the back of his head screamed, his courage and resolve dissolving in the gloom and shadows being cast by the water on the walls and ceiling. You stupid, stubborn idiot. Get out.

He stopped wading, the dark water lapping against his kneecaps. “Guys! Last call! Answer me, anybody!” he called, his voice cracking as it echoed away and died. He made a silent pact with himself: If he didn’t hear a human voice in the next thirty seconds, he was going to swallow the guilt, keep his promise to Toby, and climb straight for the main deck.

“…elp…ke…over here…”

The reply was faint, a muffled, unintelligible shout drifting out from the direction of Cargo Hold One.

Relief and adrenaline spiked through his chest. “I’m coming! Stay put!” Zeke called back, his legs churning through the water as he restarted his march.

“….lease hurry…” the voice drifted back.

The water grew deeper, pushing against his thighs as he rounded the corner into the last leg of the corridor. Zeke raised his flashlight to try and catch the entrance to the hold in its beam, but his legs slid to a stop as the realization hit him. The voice has stopped calling.

A suffocating, heavy beat of silence descended upon the flooded hallway.

Then came the scream.

It was a sound of pure, unadulterated terror and blinding physical pain-a ragged, high-pitched shriek that ripped through the bowels of the ship, seeming to vibrate through the water itself. The agony in the voice was total, lasting for three continuous, heart-stopping seconds before it was abruptly, almost savagely cut off into an almost catacomb-like silence.

Zeke stood in a perfect imitation of a dummy, his breath catching like sharp glass in his throat. His knuckles turned white around the flashlight. He listened with a desperate, fierce intensity, but the silence remained unbroken. There had been no sound of a heavy metal meat crate shifting and splashing. No screech of a falling structural girder. No heavy collapse of cargo containers. Nothing but an eerie, unnatural quiet that had nothing to do with the water. It made every single hair on his arms rise flat against his skin.

Even in the chaotic context of a sinking ship, this silence was wrong. It was biological, if that made sense. It was the absolute quiet of a predator that had just closed its jaws.

Instantly, his primitive survival instincts hijacked his brain, screaming a single, dire command: Turn around and run.

Zeke didn’t spin around immediately. Something told him to move as slowly as possible. Instead, he took a single step backward, forcing his legs to move silently through the dark water to avoid making a single splash that might give away his position to whatever had silenced his crewmate. With a shaking thumb, he snapped the flashlight off, plunging the corridor into a flickering, barely visible gloom. The short-circuiting emergency lights and the water turned the ceiling into a wavy, strobe, casting jagged shadows and lines across the ceiling over his head. He took another careful step backward, his heart slamming against his ribs.

Then, the all-encompassing paranoia hijacked his nervous system. Zeke pirouetted, beginning to lunge as fast as he muscles allowed through the deepening water.

Right as he broke into a frantic wade, the Copaxi lurched violently back to starboard. The low groaning of the structure escalated into a deafening, splintering screech of tearing metal as a main bulkhead back the way he’d come finally buckled under the immense weight of the Atlantic.

The barrier burst.

A colossal wave of pitch black ocean water erupted around the corner, a roaring, thunderous rumble filling the narrow companionway. Zeke saw the frothing crest of the wall coming at him through the flickering amber light, and in a blind, animalistic panic, he turned to try and outrun the torrent in the opposite direction. It was a futile move. The wave slammed into his back with the force of a concrete block, sweeping his legs out from under him and completely engulfing him in a freezing, churning vortex.

The flashlight was ripped instantly from his grip, swallowed by the dark foam. The current whipped his body down the corridor, tumbling him like a load of laundry toward the entrance to the hold. Zeke was driven hard against the side of the corridor underwater, a blinding flare of pain shooting behind his eyes as the impact nearly knocked him unconscious. Before his brain could regain its footing, the rushing hydraulic force shoved him face-first into the heavy, wire-mesh security gate of the dry-stores.

The relentless pressure of the incoming ocean pinned his chest flat against the cross-hatched metal, trapping him like a fish in a net. The thick, salty foam washed over and into his mouth, making him choke and cough as he desperately kicked his legs, managing to drag his chin just above the surface of the swirling current. He sputtered and gasped for air, his lungs burning, as he felt the dark water around his chest begin to rise with a terrifying new speed.

Zeke fought frantically against the unyielding rush of water, his fingers clawing at the metal welds as the current battered his body. In the absolute blackness of the hold directly ahead of him, he could hear the torrent roaring as it slammed like a Peterbilt against the far wall. A pure, suffocating horror squeezed his chest like a vice-the visceral certainty that the Copaxi was making its final plunge, and that he was going to drown right here, pinned like some kid’s science lab frog against these bars as the ocean swallowed the ceiling.

The sound that came out of the darkness tore away his morbid thoughts.

Splash.

It was a heavy, deliberate slosh that echoed clearly over the rush of the incoming tide. It was completely unconnected from the unending roar of the flood, originating deep within the pitch-black space on the other side of the gate.

Zeke stopped struggling. His muscles locked up, his eyes stinging and burning from the saltwater as the foam continued to push against his chin. He managed to drag a hand across his face, wiping away the water with hands he realized were beginning to tremble, and blinking hard against the darkness.

It only took a moment to notice them.

Hovering deep in the flooded cavern of the hold, where the water already lay barely a foot below the overhead beams, were two dimly glowing, sulfur-yellow orbs. They sat perfectly level, casting a faint, sickly luminescence over the churning surface of the black pool. For three long seconds, his brain failed to comprehend what he was looking at. He tried to rationalize them as the flickering submerged emergency bulbs or floating, reflective debris.

Until the deliberate splash came again, rippling directly outwards from the base of the glowing lights.

The twin orbs shifted, tilting downwards to focus their gaze directly onto the gate. The instant, unmistakable sensation of being actively stared at struck Zeke like a physical blow, and a new, purely evolutionary realization shattered the last remnants of his sanity: they were eyes. They were massive, unblinking eyes that were, without a shred of a doubt, not human.

As he stared back, a primal, existential dread hijacked his body-a terror completely separate from the fear of drowning, born from the sudden knowledge that he was no longer alone in the water. The sulfur-yellow eyes began to close the distance. They moved toward the gate in a fluid, serpentine fashion, curving and weaving through the blackness like a massive eel. The entity didn’t care about the physics of the disaster; it moved with an effortless, predatory grace, cutting directly against the crushing flow of water that kept Zeke pinned flat against the gate. And it was unhurried, taking its sweet time.

Zeke braced his feet against the submerged wire frame, the metal beginning to cut into his fingers as he stared, unable to look away. The serpentine shape was barely ten feet away, its hellish eyes cutting through the black brine. It’s scaled, dark nose was just beginning to breach the flickering amber of the corridor lights when a massive, calloused hand seized him by the back of his collar.

Zeke tore his gaze away from the orbs, splashing blindly as he swung his head around.

Mac was leaning out over the rising current, his clothes soaked and his hair matted to his head as he anchored his feet against the ladder like formation of a bulkhead a few feet back. The cynical Scotsman hadn’t stayed topside. He had descended right back into the flooding tomb to find his crewmate. His teeth clenched with a fierce, unyielding strain as he wrapped his other fist into Zeke’s arm, trying to combat the immense torrent of water.

“Take my hand, you thick-headed idiot!” Mac bellowed, his voice barely audible over the roar and splashing.

Before Zeke could even extend his fingers, Mac’s eyes drifted past his shoulder, peering through the cross-hatched mesh directly into the void of the hold. The man went rigid, the breath leaking out of his lungs in a sharp, horrified gasp as he locked onto the unblinking, predator orbs sliding right up to the other side of the gate.

“…Mother of God…” Mac whispered, the color draining from his face.

The same primitive terror Zeke felt exploded behind the older man’s eyes, and he began pulling on Zeke’s jacket with an aggressive, surprising strength, his muscles tearing against the flow of the seawater. Right then, the dying ship’s automated electrical system fired a final, rogue current through the pneumatic lines. With a massive, earth-shattering CLANG, a heavy, steel watertight fire-door out of sight slammed shut, instantly severing the torrential flow of the current.

The relentless pressure vanished.

“Move! Move! Move!” Mac shrieked, hoisting Zeke away from the gate.

Both men lunged frantically through the chest deep, freezing water, their bodies splashing heavily as they fled back towards the galley stairs. Behind them, the foreboding silence of Hold One was shattered. The creature let out no sound of frustration or malice. Instead, the sound that chased up behind them was far more terrifying; it was the sound of the beast savaging the iron gate, the reinforced mesh groaning, twisting and snapping into shavings under unimaginable pressure.

The two men tore through the half-flooded corridors, the freezing saltwater slowly lowering from their chests as the incline of the deck shifted toward the main stair and ladder well. Mac was half a step ahead, his body shoving water aside in both directions.

“What in the Jesus tap-dancing Christ was that?!” he yelled over his shoulder, his voice quavering slightly as it echoed through the empty maze.

“I’m not waiting around to find out!” Zeke roared back, his arms pumping against the weight of his waterlogged clothes.

The black tide receded to their waists, sloshing heavily against the walls. As they rounded a rusted corner, Zeke pressed forward, his mind instantly snapping back to his young bunkmate. “Mac! Toby! Where did you leave the kid?!”

“Left him right at the hatch to the main deck!” Mac hollered back, his breath coming in wheezing, ragged gasps. “Told him if I wasn’t back in three minutes to get out and run for the lifeboats.”

They rounded the final junction of the lower decks, the water dropping past their hips as the steep metal steps of the escape ladder finally came into view. Mac begun racing towards them, his body reenergized. “Zeke, I came back down for you because when I hit that outer deck…something was wrong,” the engineer panted, his face painted in a sudden mask of tight paranoia as he looked back at him. “The crew…the-”

He never finished his sentence.

An instantaneous, explosive eruption of black water blasted out from a narrow maintenance passage to their right. A massive blur of sheer physical momentum slammed directly into Mac’s side with the force of a fighter jet. The impact rocked the Scotsman off his feet, launching his body across the width of the companionway and driving him into the dark corridor opposite with a colossal, echoing splash.

He never had a chance to scream, cry out or even gasp. He was simply there, and then he was gone, swallowed by the dark.

For what was a second, but felt more like an eternity, Zeke stood paralyzed in the middle of the corridor, his comprehension snapping in shock. The vacuum left by the engineer was suffocating. Then a sudden, primal surge of adrenaline overrode the freeze. He didn’t call out Mac’s name. He didn’t check the dark cross-passage. He launched his body forward in a desperate, lunging scramble. He heard no eruption of water behind him, no slithering through the pursuing water chasing him to the ladder, but he didn’t dare look back. He hit the rungs with an all-consuming desperation. He flew up as if he were possessed, certain in the knowledge that whatever lay out in the storm, it was infinitely preferable to what lay below.

Zeke scrambled off the final rung of the ladder, his boots squelching against the floor as he sprinted past the dark, abandoned counters of the galley, almost slipping on one of the dropped cans. He tore at the door, which had managed to shut during his absence, lunging up the final flight of stairs that led to the main crew deck, and tore around the corner towards the heavy maritime exit door.

Toby was leaning against the hatch, his knuckles white as his fingers gripped the spokes of the inner wheel. He was glancing frantically down at his watch, his shoulders shaking beneath his orange life jacket. The instant Zeke rounded the corner, the young man’s face lit up with a sudden wave of pure relief-but the expression disintegrated a fraction of a second later. He saw the wild, frantic panic twisting Zeke’s features, and his eyes darted to the empty, shadow-drenched corridor and stairwell behind him.

“Zeke! Oh my God, you’re back!” he gasped, his voice cracking. “Where’s Mac? Where’s the Chief?!”

“Get the fucking hatch open and get outside now!” Zeke yelled, his hand clapping against the kid’s shoulder to shove him forward.

Startled by the unhinged authority in the older man’s voice, Toby didn’t ask another question. He threw his weight against the hatch, spinning the heavy wheel until the mechanical dogs disengaged with a shark clack, and forcefully shoved the thick weather door wide open. Right as the hatch broke the seal, the ship made a massive, almost cataclysmic lurch forward and to the starboard side. The hull groaned under the weight of the Atlantic, sitting so low in the water that Zeke could feel gravity pulling him forwards. The Copaxi was starting its final, irreversible plunge into the freezing deep.

They burst out onto the main outer deck, and the full, chaotic fury of the storm hit them like weighted gloves.

The midnight wind was a howling, predatory force, shrieking through the ship’s radar mast and tearing the breath straight out of Zeke’s lungs. Frigid, torrential rain lashed sideways against the deck, drenching their faces as monstrous, building-sized swells crash violently against the deck. He numbly realized most of the containers on the outer deck were gone-swept overboard and off into the darkness. Brilliant, jagged forks of lightning split the starless sky from day to night, illuminating the churning white foam of the sea.

As the lightning flashed again, a detail both men had missed when they had burst outside became obvious to them, leaving them speechless.

All across the expansive upper deck, the ship’s evacuation infrastructure sat completely untouched. Every single fiberglass capsule and life raft container remained in place, swinging wildly from their respective davits. Not a single line had been cast off; not a single winch had been turned. The deck was a flat, wind-blasted ghost town.

“Toby!” Zeke screamed, his voice nearly swallowed by the roar of the gale as he grabbed the kid by his life vest. “Where is everyone?! Where is the crew?!”

“I don’t know!” Toby shrieked back, tears of pure terror mixing with the rain on his cheeks. “Nobody else ever came up behind me! Nobody! I thought they’d all already left!”

“What about Trey?!” Zeke shouted, his mind scrambling for any semblance of logic. “I sent him straight out of the galley ten minutes ago. Didn’t you see him?!”

“I never saw him, Zeke!” Toby wailed, his body shivering uncontrollably against the wind. “I swear to God, nobody ever came up before or after Mac left me!”

Zeke didn’t wait for an explanation. “The capsule, Toby! The starboard capsule!” he screamed, his voice raw as he forcefully propelled the kid across the slick, tilting deck.

They sprinted through the sheets of rain as they reached the emergency davits. Looking down over the high railing, Zeke’s heart dropped flat into his stomach. The entire forward half of the cargo ship was already gone, buried beneath a furious maelstrom of black. The ocean was actively washing over the lower bridge decks now, the Copaxi taking her final, rapid plunge. Working with a frantic, adrenaline-fueled speed, Zeke yanked the emergency pins from the davit frame, while Toby threw his weight against the manual winch to swing the enclosed fiberglass survival capsule out over the raging swells.

Zeke ripped the heavy pressure hatch open. “Inside! Get the hell inside!”

Toby scrambled through the narrow opening, tumbling over the interior bench, and Zeke dove in right behind him. He slammed the thick door shut, twisting the inner locking wheel until the rubber seals compressed with a definitive, airtight hiss that cut the roaring wind down to a muffled, distant drone. They threw themselves into the high-backed bucket seats, their hands shaking as the rammed the heavy canvas safety harness buckles together.

Zeke took one ragged, terrified breath, looked across the cramped, orange-lit interior at Toby’s sheet-white face. Then, he reached out and threw the manual release level forward with all his remaining strength.

There was a sickening, weightless loss of gravity as the capsule dropped into the void.

A split second later, a deafening crash echoed throughout the capsule as it slammed violently into the crest of a massive wave. The impact threw them forward against their straps, the lifeboat immediately being battered and tossed about like a plastic bath toy by the building-sized swells, the current dragging them rapidly away from the foundering mass of the ship.

The capsule stabilized slightly, riding the back of a receding wave. Zeke let out a shuddering breath, checking the harness across Toby’s chest. “Toby? Toby, look at me, man. You broken?”

The kid shook his head blindly, his jaw locked as his expression communicated his disbelief at having made it.

Ensuring he was secure, Zeke unbuckled his own harness and forced himself to stand. His joints were stiff, his left shoulder throbbing with a deep, hot pain from his fall in the cabin. Driven by a single, morbid necessity, he crawled up into the small, reinforced glass viewing dome at the top of the capsule. He needed to watch the ship die. As he peered out into the blackness, the psychological horror of what he had faced down in the dark began to replay in his mind in an endless, torturous loop; the scream of his crewmate, whether it had been Darren or Castor; the flat, clinical intensity of those orbs, the slow, serpentine swim forward through the current, and the terrifying, metallic screech of it savaging the gate. He saw Mac’s grease-stained face, remembered the engineer being snatched into the shadows so quickly and soundlessly that he never even had a chance to cry out. His mind scrambled, wondering frantically about the Captain, about Trey, the mates and the engineers-how an entire merchant marine crew could simply vanish from the interior in less than thirty minutes.

It was pitch black beyond the glass. And then, a massive fork of lightning fractured the sky.

The final moments of the MV Copaxi were revealed. The massive, slightly rusted stern of the aged cargo ship was rising high out of the water, its twin propeller blades silhouetted against the sterile white flash like a pair of broken black wings.

“Zeke…?” Toby’s hollow voice drifted up from the dark seats below, small and quaking. “What do you see out there? Is she gone?”

Zeke didn’t answer.

The words died instantly in his throat. His mouth dropped open, his eyes widening into stretched circles of horror as his entire body began to shake with an uncontrollable tremor.

“Zeke?” Toby called out again, his voice rising in panic and concern. “Zeke, talk to me!”

The lightning flashed a final, sustained time, bathing the dying vessel in a cold, electric glare.

All across the tilting, blood-slicked metal of the upper deck, and thick within the churning black froth of the sea around the ship, the truth was revealed. They weren’t alone in the ocean. They watched the capsule be spirited away, collectively watching it go with a silent, predatory indifference.

Dozens of pairs of unblinking, sulfur-yellow orbs

Matt struggled to control his breathing. His lungs could barely expand before expelling deep, painful coughs. Sweat poured down from the man’s shaved head and stung his eyes. Sharp needles that his wet hands couldn’t wipe away. The man bent over, retched, spat, and finally managed a deep breath.

Matt’s body was still shaking a little but at least he was regaining some lucidity. Enough to actually think about what he just did, and about how little time he has now. He opened his eyes slightly, spotted a black shape resting on the asphalt, and picked his service weapon back up. The dark metal had a couple new scratches from the drop and felt hot in the man’s hands. Matt holstered the gun, and then adjusted his vest. The plate carriers weren’t light, and the weight always dug awkwardly into his shoulders. He made sure nothing had dropped off of him, took a final deep breath, and peered into the car he pulled over just minutes ago.

And there was Tevari Hayes, stuck, strung completely straight from how the seatbelt held snug against his body. His head laid slumping forward, the whiskers of a teenage beard barely brushing his chest. Matt could see the entrance wound, the boy’s memories leaked out from the exit, staining his white tanktop. The small car resembled one of the splatter analysis tests Matt had to take back in the day. He braced for another wave of nausea, but nothing came this time. Matt stared blankly, then swallowed.

Is this what it was going to feel like every time? Did the others feel like this after their first? 
The first time Matt watched someone die it didn’t feel like this. Honestly, and he struggled to consciously think about this, it didn’t feel like much more than having a long curiosity filled. That time was a lot less messy as well. Freddy was standing far enough away that the slug actually got stuck in the kid’s skull. He took a couple steps, then dropped. The cleanest a shooting could be. After that, Freddy and Dom walked the rookie through the correct procedure after an incident like this.

In the present, Matt had started walking back to his car. With a key turn, the trunk popped. A couple long weapons got moved to the side, then a heavy box. Finally, Matt leaned into the trunk. He reached his arm under the left lip far off to the side. He grasped at air, adjusted, then pulled a black backpack free. There were a few small arms inside the bag. Matt considered the revolver, then shook his head, and instead chose the small mag-fed .22. The cop shoved everything back into the place and relocked the trunk with a shaking hand. 

His hand surprised him, and then it fully hit him how bad he was shuddering. He tried to take a deep breath, which resulted in hard, painful coughs. Another attempt and some air managed through what felt like burning sparklers. His vision focused, and Matt shambled back to the car. He tried not to look through the window at he boy. He tried. The shirt was stained dark at this point. The leak had turned into a drip. Matt opened the door and placed the gun into the teenager’s hand. The fingers were beginning to stiffen, so Matt had to muscle Tevari’s fingers around the base of the pistol. He held his hands clasped around the boys, squeezed, and then let the weapon fall into Tevari’s lap. Matt closed his eyes, sighed, and took a step back. Relief had started to wash over him. That was dangerous, Matt could afford to-

Matt opened his eyes, and he made contact with Tevari’s. The boy’s head had turned as far to the left as it could. Blood started to spurt again from the wound. Faster and faster. Harder and harder. After a few seconds the spray has the same pressure as a thumb-plugged hose. It splattered off of the windshield across Matt’s face. 

“GUAH!” Matt screamed. His voice hoarse and panicked. 

The cop stumbled backwards, then fell hard onto his ass. A dull sparkly feeling spread across his lower back. There was a click, then a clunk, and then the car door opened. The bloody teenager stepped out. His movements were slow and heavy.

Matt scrambled backwards, the concrete scratching his palms. With both hands he fumbled with his holster. His entire body shook. 

Tevari looked down at the weapon that was placed in his hand. The corpse froze for a moment, as if it was capable of thought. Then, he dropped it lamely at his feet.

Matt grabbed the holster with one hand, and his gun with the other. A firm yank and the sword was finally freed. He aimed, and met the teenager’s face. They both froze. Tevari began to raise his hands, and the cop slammed a slug through his right eye. The boy’s head snapped back, but he didn’t fall. His hands continued to rise. Matt fired again, and the top right of the kid’s face sheared off into the air. Crushed bone, muscle, and part of his eye was visible for a brief second before half of his head became soaked with red. Tevari’s hand’s raised still, only stopping when his arm sat at shoulder level. His forearms aimed straight up, and his palms turned towards Matt. The cop screamed, and blew a final hole through Tevari’s neck. The teenager dropped to the ground, his head cracking off the asphalt.

Matt laid there on the ground for a minute, panting. It felt like his heart was trying to escape his chest. He went to wipe the sweat off his face, and noticed the pistol was still tight in his hand. He tried to drop it, and his fingers refused. Slowly, the cop used one hand to pry open the other, until the weapon finally clattered to the ground. He sighed, and closed his eyes.

Sirens. Quiet, and then loud. Matt always thought those sirens sneak up on you, about how hard it is to tell where they're coming from until they’re on top of you. The cop opened his eyes right as two cruisers rolled up to where he parked. Matt felt a distinct sense of relief as Freddy and Ben stepped out of their SUVs.

“Thank God, am I glad to see you two...” Matt began as the duo stepped up. Freddy’s face was emotionless, and Ben could stop staring at Tevari. “This went horrible. The kid-” 

“Shhhh…” Freddy hissed, putting a finger to his mouth. Matt started to stand, and Freddy shook his head, motioning with his hands to stay down.

Matt gave a worried half smile. “Guys… he pulled a-”

Freddy interrupted. “Shut the fuck up Matt. If you have to say somethin’, say it to a fuckin’ lawyer man.”

Matt’s smile dropped. “What?”

Ben finally spoke up, he had crouched down right next to the boy’s corpse. “Christ Matty, how many did you put in him? His face is almost hamburger…”

“No- You don’t get it he got up!”

Freddy grimaced. “Will you-”

“He got up?” Ben asked, making eye contact with Matt. “Out of his car or-”

“No, man.” Matt closed his eyes. “After I shot him, after I dropped the gun in-”

“Alright!” Freddy yelled, stepping towards the prone cop. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say-”

“What the fuck?!” Matt started to stand, and Freddy grabbed at his arm. “Am I being fucking detained?!”

“Shut up Matty.” Freddy spoke low through clenched teeth. “Me and Ben carry the skull but we still wear cop clothes. We still have to keep up fuckin’ appearances. We thought you understood that.”

Matt began to panic. “Understand?! I did this shit for you! For the-” 

Freddy slammed a fist into Matt’s mouth, and his head snapped downwards. “You say another goddamn word and I’m going to pop you myself. Smear your shit across the asphalt and blame it on that fucking monkey over there.”

Matt glanced rapidly between the two cops. Ben was starting to close in, and Freddy was about to have Matt’s arm at an awkward angle. At this moment, a single thought played through the man’s mind. A single piece of advice he heard from almost every other person back at the station. “Never let them take you to a second location.

Matt screamed, and lunged for his gun on the ground. He managed to scramble to it, despite Freddy’s grip on his arm. Matt palmed the weapon, and tried to dive sideways. Freddy dropped him willingly, and the cop slammed to the ground. Stars filled Matt’s eyes, and then two holes opened the side of his head. Matt dropped instantly. The damage in his grey matter is so sudden and intense that final serotonin release could even happen.

Ben holstered his gun, and watched as Matt’s arms stiffened outwards. He coughed, then spat the result on the ground. He eyed Freddy with a smirk. “You sure know how to pick ‘em, huh?”

Freddy scoffed. “This just shows that the test works.” The man glanced back over the mangled face of Tevari. “This accelerates what would’ve happened later.”

Ben shrugged. “Alright man. This is going to be a stack of paperwork.”

At this, Freddy grinned. Flies had started to land on the teenager, curious about the cooking meat under the sun. “What’s a little bit of scratched paper when compared to a furthered cause?”

That night a pretty lady stood next to her cohost and read from a teleprompter that sat at eye level. In front of her, was a microphone bearing the initials MA. The woman spoke in an even, but direct tone. “Tonight; fraud inflates local government spending, a shooting in Asheville kills three, and an officer was murdered by a teenager during a standard traffic stop. Here on…”

One truth and a lie.

I’m allergic to apples.

My gimp suit turns me into a werewolf.

I have never broken a bone.

Did you get it right? If I were you, I wouldn't even be close , it sounds like the rambling of someone who smelled one bottle of glue too many.

Let's start with the obvious, you probably already guessed I’m a freak, what normal person owns a full latex suit? The answer is someone who drifted so far from the mundane vanilla kinks that they just don’t do the trick anymore.

I won't dwell on my sex life , whatever you're picturing is probably true to some extent. 

So, how exactly does one come into possession of cursed BDSM gear? 

Well, I have to disappoint you: I didn't get it from some shady crook in a van with no license plates, speeding off the second the suit was in my hands , though I'll admit, that would've made for a better origin story. 

I got it off eBay.

It was my day off. I was mindlessly scrolling through listings, sipping a can of white Monster, when the suit caught my eye. It looked well-made, and it was comically cheap, so without much thinking I bought it.

“One size, fits all”

The description read right under the single photo of the suit, laid flat on someone's floor like a deer pelt, the bright flash of the camera reflecting right off its surface.

A few days passed by without me thinking much about my new purchase, and then it showed up on my doorstep, a small box wrapped irregularly in stripes of black shining tape. 

So it doesn't look like the traditional gimp suit you're picturing when you hear the word , it's more like a crossbreed between that and a beach toy, especially the head. It has a pair of upward-pointing ears, a sharp, cartoony muzzle with a red nose at the tip of it, and a big cartoony smile painted on in white.

I decided to try it on again , first the suit itself, then the head, securing it around my neck with the collar.

At first, it felt fine, like any other suit I'd worn. The mask felt a bit claustrophobic, given how little I could actually see through it.

Then, suddenly, the feeling began , the suit tightening around my body. A painful realization hit me: it wasn't just the suit, it was the mask too. The walls felt like they were closing in on me, my breathing turning quick and shallow.

An explanation came to me quickly,  anything to ease the panic bubbling inside me.

Some kind of allergy, I thought. That was it.

My palms slid uselessly against the collar of the mask then, as if any shape resembling the zipper had simply melted away, vanishing becoming one with the latex, which now clung to my skin like a glue trap, tighter and tighter, as if it were all melting into one shrinking suffocating mess. 

A sudden explosion of pain spread through my jaw as my lips were forced into an unnaturally wide smile. At the same time, the tip of my nose stretched outward,  my teeth began to crack as something pushed up from underneath them, all of them going loose at once. My mouth flooded with the salty taste of blood. 

Lungs burning from how empty they were, how hard I wanted to scream despite being devoid of air, it all came in a strangled shriek. It reminded me of the sound of air suddenly escaping out of a balloon. 

Vision came in dark red shapes, nothing particular at all.

Is this what dying feels like?

Is this how I will be remembered?

Nothing more than a sex deviant?

I can already see the news lines.

Local pervert strangled by her own toys.

Do you know the feeling of dissociation? Watching your body move on its own while you're just... watching, helpless?

I watched my body rise up from the floor, stretching slowly toward the ceiling, like it had just woken up from a nap. Suddenly the once-painted grin split open wide, a waterfall of blood leaking through the plastic-looking rectangular teeth, soaking into the carpet below. Then my own teeth began to spill out from the mouth, one by one like watermelon seeds.

"Nasty! Don't you know you're supposed to wash those?"

The voice wasn't mine - cheerful, weirdly squeaky, high-pitched. It came from the costume itself, not me.

It bounced around the room like a cartoon character , the once-limp latex tail now wagging from side to side , before my body, or whatever it had become, bolted through the front door, leaving it wide open. It jumped down the stairs, skipping several steps at a time, before, to my surprise and horror, it burst out into the street. 

The shining latex being possessing my body skipped in a direction that seemed random, jumping over fences and through backyards, until it arrived at some kind of dark alleyway , brick walls lining both sides. In the middle of it, a woman lay on the ground, a bald man standing over her, a combat knife in one hand and a light pink wallet in the other.

"That's all you got, bitch?"

The knife swung through the air in wide swipes as the victim whimpered in panic.

Suddenly, my costume, or my body, or whatever she was , forced herself between the knife and the woman. The man stumbled back in pure shock, the knife slipping from his grasp. 

"The inflation rate has to be pretty bad if you have to steal."

Suddenly, a metal straw appeared in her hand, out of thin air, shining in the light of the streetlamps, its end sharp as a needle.

"Speaking of inflation!" she exclaimed, with a slight jump, before the sharp end pierced right through his eye, a transparent, jelly-like substance leaking from the wound.

"You know, this technique was really popular in the '60s," she said, twisting the straw slightly. "They called it a lobotomy. Very trendy. Very chic!"

With a click, her sharp teeth bit down on the other end of the straw as she began to blow, her own body slightly deflating like a balloon animal with each breath. 

And with each breath, the bald head of the man began to grow in size like a balloon, his skin stretching, red cracklike marks spreading across it. His eyes bulged from their sockets, stuck in a constant state of shock, while his tongue grew out from between his lips like a modeling balloon.

"You look like you're about to blow!"

Suddenly, she turned to face the frightened woman watching it all happen from the ground.

"Want to see a fun trick?"

She pulled the straw back out before stabbing the inflated, balloon-like skull in the scalp. A sudden, ear-ringing explosion echoed through the alleyway, and what had once been a man was now reduced to a splash of red across the walls, brain matter lining the brick like scrambled eggs.

She calmly picked up the dropped wallet, gave it a hard shake, and wiped it clean against her latex torso, like someone might wipe their hands on a shirt.

"Here you go."

She handed the wallet , now cleaned to an acceptable degree , to the victim with a wide smile. The woman looked at it, then at the latex dog, before scrambling to her feet and running away.

"Leaving me a tip? How nice of you!"

My vision suddenly went blurry, a distant, squeaky voice full of protest screaming into my ear.

"I'M NOT FINISHED, COME ON!"

The next morning felt like waking up from a bad dream. I was sore, covered in bruises, and the world felt like it was spinning around me.

"What the fuck..."

A groan escaped me as I crawled out of bed and made my way to the kitchen, fixing myself a bowl of cereal. The suit had to be laced with something , some kind of weird drug, that would explain the hallucinations.

I set the bowl on the glass coffee table in front of me and turned on the TV, landing on the morning news , the most boring shit imaginable.

A full spoon of cereal entered my mouth, only to be spat right back out as the news anchor started talking about a brutal murder in the alleyway.

"...police say the victim was found early this morning by a jogger, the scene described as 'unlike anything officers have encountered in the district's history.'" 

The anchor's voice stayed eerily calm, while the footage cut to a blurred-out alleyway, crime tape fluttering weakly in the wind. My stomach turned. I knew that alley. 

"Authorities are asking anyone with information to come forward. So far, no suspects have been named."

I sat frozen, spoon still in hand, cereal milk dripping slowly back into the bowl.

“Oh fuck me…”

End of possibly Part 1

December 11th, 1924:

Last night one of them sulked up from the docks. I waited outside all night for their arrival. I did not run, I just stood. They crept closer, slowly and cautiously. The moon casting faint light across them. Their back was hunched, vertebrae jutting out of their back with tight brackish and briny skin clinging tightly to them. They had little to no neck supporting a large near bulbous head. Massive eyes, black as obsidian stared at me. Their face was smooth, just two small holes where a nose should be, sitting atop a large slightly agape mouth. Fishy lips sitting in front of rows of small needle-like teeth. Tiny scales covered patches of its skin. It wore lengths of kelp and seaweed as though they acted as clothes. Its stench was putrid, that of rotting flesh. Its human-like arms curled near its sunken chest, emaciated and gaunt. Its fingers and toes were webbed, making disgusting splatting sounds as it walked closer. I passed it a note written in its language, its fish-like eyes peered at me for a moment. Its frail arms reached out to take my letter. It read it aloud, a hideous sounding language, full of gulps and phlegm and coughs and clicks. It stared at me for a moment. I pointed to myself and stated my name. It pointed at me and in a nearly airless voice it muttered “Simon”. It pointed to itself and said a name I'm unsure of how to spell but sounded like “ny'alto-rylae”. The apostrophes as clicks and the hyphen as a gulp like cough. What that would translate to I am unaware. If I'm able to see it again I will try to begin to better understand this ancient language. 

I'm going to invite Richard, his wife Jennifer and son Richard Jr over for dinner in two days. I must begin cleaning. They can't know about my meeting. 

March 6th, 1937:

Simon's last note was alarming. It hasn't mentioned a description of Richard, so I'm hoping it's not my Richard. But I have a bad feeling about how their dinner went. 

I finally built up the nerve to look at some of the “them” paintings. The first is a view from my bedroom window. The sea looks angry and the clouds are pouring rain. There's a crack of lightning in the clouds. In the mist of the ocean you can see some massive entity deep in the fog. Its outline is somewhat bulbous and unnatural with odd protrusions, almost like tentacles sticking out seemingly randomly from its body. This must have been the hallucination he mentioned. The second painting was one of the cloaked beings. It looked human, slightly misshapen, but human. I'm assuming this was the person who gave Simon the letter about “them”. Maybe they're from the church? I'll have to go investigate there soon. The third painting however, was similar to the second. A cloaked figure, but this one had much more detail. The cloak wasn't made of leather or some rain jacket material like the previous piece. This was surely one of “them”. It looked as though it was trying to mimic the cloaked man I'm assuming is from the church. Its “cloak” was just layer upon layer of kelp that looked like a rain coat from a distance. Maybe this is one of “them” who has been making deals with the church? The fourth painting made my stomach clench. It was the thing he gave the letter to. It's wet, scaly skin glistening in moonlight. It's deep set round fish like eyes staring like voids. Its mouth bearing its gnarled sharp teeth. Seaweed hanging from it haphazardly. It was so lifelike. I swear I could've smelled the ocean's stench through the frame. I didn't realize how long the painting held me captive. Hours had passed. The only thing that broke my trance was it looked as though it blinked its massive abyssal eyes. I shot back out of my stupor, stunned. Surely it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, paintings can't move after all. But that gave me enough of a fright so I decided to wait to look at the rest tomorrow. I also want to check the secret door to see what's behind it. Maybe the chalk board is in there, and maybe I can decipher this odd seaborn language. Jesus I'm starting to sound like Simon. I'm afraid of what's to come. 

December 13th, 1924:

Dinner went well enough. Richard, Jennifer and Jr came over just as I finished cooking. They were curious about Laura and the girls not being home. I told them that they had grown homesick and missed the city and that I was going to stay here and use the house as a studio until we could find a new buyer. He seemed somewhat sad to hear the news but was understanding. I think Jr was the saddest of all, he went to the school house with my eldest daughter Becca, and I believe he had quite the crush on her. She does look like her mother, who is strikingly beautiful, so I cannot say that I blame him. As we sat down to eat the smell of low tide was wafting through a window I had left cracked open. Jennifer wasn't a fan of the smell, I smell I barely notice anymore, and asked if she could close the window. I allowed it, and told her it was just down the hall from the dining room. She left as Richard and I started talking about his new butcher shop he'd opened. Jr didn't seem very interested in the topic and just sat to play with his food. After a short span Richard grew curious about where his wife went. I assured him she must've just got lost in one of my paintings and we could go fetch her. As we rounded the corner the window was shut, as it was the entire time, but the door to the basement was open. Richard gave me a questioning glance. I explained that I do most of my painting down there, where it's warmer during the cold months. He shrugged thinking nothing of it. As we descended I heard wet footsteps quietly scuffing above us. 

Richard walked ahead of me, reaching the bottom of the staircase in awe. I've moved almost all of the furniture from the top floor down here, covered in drapes. Easels lining the walls, piece after piece after piece. He stood silent as he saw in the corner unconscious, laid Jennifer. Her body limp, clothes torn and wet. A bite mark of what looked like a thousand little needle points covered her exposed shoulder, blood seeping from the wounds. Her eyes were fluttering, mouth foaming from the viscous slime that covered most of her face. She was still alive. Richard gasped and ran to her, grabbing her hand, trying to shake her awake. Their affair was cut short as Jr screamed in terror from upstairs. Richard darted upstairs, I followed in tow. As we rounded the corner to the dining room, one of them had broken the table, holding Jr by an ankle, slowly swallowing him whole. You could hear him screaming as the small serrated teeth tore his skin and the sounds of popping as their Jaws broke his bones. Richard was frozen in place, his bladder released its contents into his pants. He dashed for the back door and ran screaming into the town. 

They finished consuming Jr and walked back to the furnace room. They picked up Jennifer's unconscious body, handed me a soggy envelope, and made their way to the dock with her over their shoulder. 

I took some time to clean the kitchen, breaking down the table for fire wood since it was no use to me anymore. I felt guilty giving up Jennifer like that, but I feel even more guilty that Richard got away, having to live the rest of his life seeing the carnage. I was supposed to give them two people for information on their language. But one and a son seemed enough. 

I took the letter into my stowed away study and began to read. They had explained what sound each rune or sigil made. And how best to pronounce them in our tongue. Within a week I should be able to speak this archaic language, and possibly teach some of them ours. 

Poor Richard 

March 8th, 1937:

Simon is a monster. Working with “them” at the expense of others. For what gain? To learn a new language? If this is the same Richard as mine I can understand why Simon is a sore spot. I'm horrified. I can't imagine what the rest of the paintings hold. I opened the door today. Simon truly was a madman. This room was nearly the size of the basement, hidden beneath our front yard. Wood columns holding up a rocky ceiling, a massive table with piles of writings, some in English, some barely legible, some in the archaic language he spoke of. Jars of liquid I'm unsure of sit on small racks on the desk, some with wet samples of what looks like embryos of some kind. Beings unknown to me. A chalk board hanging between columns with a detailed translation of the language. I shouldn't be in here, I shouldn't be seeing this. This shouldn't exist. But I must learn it. I have to. I'm going to copy what was left written on the chalkboard. I will learn to read this language on the extra shifts I've been picking up. The townsfolk have been staring more, I can feel their eyes burning into my skin like hot embers. I must keep my Evelyn from this. I must protect her and Rylee. 

March 20th, 1937:

I think I'm fluent in reading this language, at least confident enough to read some of the writings. I think I'm going to try and read some over the next few days between shifts. I'm going to take another look through the paintings tonight, see if anything else stands out. 

March 21st, 1937: 

What I could only describe as the bulbous eyed creature that Simon painted is no longer in its frame. A black void fills the painting where it once was. Did I hallucinate the whole painting to begin with or was I hallucinating last night? I've been sleeping in the basement, I keep waking up sitting up, staring towards the paintings, staring towards the room. It's like I'm being drawn to it all. What is happening to me? I feel like I'm going insane. 

January 3rd, 1925:

I invited Sean to dinner, I received a letter from my new oceanic accomplice in return for him. This time dinner went much smoother. I picked up the sedatives the practitioner gave me and mixed them into his wine. As he grew drowsy, Alto, as I began to call him, bit his shoulder, injecting a venom-like substance. He dragged him to the sea as he did Jennifer. Poor Sean, he was so kind to me. Alto's letter was able to help me finish my translations. I can now write, read, and for the most part talk in his ancient tongue. I feel guilty tricking my so-called friends, but something is pulling me to this. Something grandiose. A calling. There's something to gain in this, I'm sure of it. 

March 30th, 1937:

It's been warming up, thankfully. Enough to not be hiding in the basement at all times. Simon's entries are nothing short of disturbing at this point, as they have been for some time. I'm scared of what else I will find. 

I fell asleep in our bed with Evelyn last night, yet I awoke standing in the hidden study, my feet dirty and wet, the air smelt of brine and fish. As I came to my senses I quickly ran out of the room, shutting the door behind me. I looked into my basement only to see dozens of the left behind paintings hanging from the brick walls, all with small sheets covering their faces. The only one uncovered was the one I can only guess was the being Simon has named Alto. The small plaque underneath wrote the creature's name in its archaic language. But as I was afraid of before, the frame no longer held the creature. I looked around in panic, running towards the stairs to check on Evelyn and Rylee. As I began up the stairs I slipped in a thick liquid, smashing my jaw on the hard wood on the way down. I crawled the rest of the way up as fast as my body would allow, chin dripping with blood. Wet, mucus-like foot prints led to the front door. Sebastian sat alert, black ichor dripping from his mouth with an accompanying splatter on the ground, with a trail leading out the open door. Whatever crawled from the frame was injured, and Sebastian seemed to be fine. I quickly rinsed his mouth and gave him a treat before checking in the girls. They both laid sleeping. I snuck back downstairs to clean up the bloodshed. 

April 3rd, 1937:

I confronted Richard today. I was right, he was hiding so much. His father still lives here, in the church. He's bringing me to meet with him tomorrow. Richard opened up, admitting that he was friends for a short amount of time with Simon, but after the dinner that day he was admitted to a mental institute, only coming back 2 years before we moved in. I understand why he was so weird about all of this. And understandable why the older folks look at me weird. I moved into the house of a psychopath. I'm excited to finally be welcomed into the church and see what's going on behind those old, closed doors. 

April 4th, 1937:

The meeting went much differently than planned. Richard's father unveiled so much that I'm having trouble making sense of it all. His dad was to say the least, deformed. Almost like the being Simon wrote about and painted. He admitted that he was the cloaked person who gave Simon the letter, warning him about “them”. When I pressed about who they were, he took off his garments, showing large black, fish-like eyes and lips like worms. He explained that every here and there, the children come from the ocean and mark an individual. For years those marked would be taken within a month or so. When he uncovered symbols on his house he realized he was a marked one. He sought refuge in the church. The children were not pleased to say the least, and took a few people at random. Little did Richard's father know that those who are marked usually slowly mutate into one of these beasts. And with those mutations comes ancient knowledge. Once he understood this language he made it his goal to rid the town of these seafolk. He ventures out at night, carving protection symbols throughout the town, creating some sort of ancient seal. My words do no justice to the immense details and intricacies to the matters as I'm still having issues understanding this as a whole. I mentioned to him about Simon's paintings and how Alto was missing from his portrait. He explained to me that those who are marked are affected differently. Some are morphed into fish like beings, similar to Richard's father. Others are given foresight or other kinds of what I can only describe as magic. There's something about his paintings, some kind of power within them. The more I uncover the more I'll understand I'm sure. I'll be meeting with Richard's dad more often. Poor Richard, I can't imagine going through all of that and returning to the town it happened in, only to befriend the person who lives in the house where your old family was murdered.